Gabe walked into his office and found Sally asleep with her head on the table. Bart was nowhere to be seen.
“Good morning!”
“Huh?” The semi-comatose Sally was only twenty-six, but working for forty-eight hours straight had taken its toll.
“I said, ‘good morning’, Sally. Where’s your colleague?”
Sally shook her head and ran her fingers through her hair while struggling to focus on Gabe through hazy eyes.
“Colleague?”
“Bart.”
“No idea.”
A knocking sound came from the center of the table.
“Here I am.”
Sally looked down and saw Bart’s grinning face leering up between her knees. She snapped her legs together.
“BART! What are you doing?”
“Sleeping until you guys woke me up.” He started to crawl toward Sally causing her to push her chair away from the table.
“I brought you two some breakfast.” Gabe held out a couple of cups of Starbucks, bagels and containers of fruit.
“Thanks.” Sally reached for a cup of coffee.
“Yeah. I’m so hungry I could eat something healthy.” Bart stood beside Sally who glared as she opened one of the plastic boxes of mixed fruit.
“Gabe, thanks for not bringing granola.” Bart smeared cream cheese on a half of a bagel.
“What’s wrong with granola?”
“That stuff is ok if you like reconstituted cardboard.”
“It’s good and it’s good for you Bart.”
“No, Sally, it’s a conundrum. Why go out of your way to eat healthy so you can live longer and have less fun?”
“Define ‘fun’.”
“Steaks on a charcoal grille, chocolate croissants, In ‘n Out burgers.”
“If your scope is that limited then I guess you have a point.”
“Just sayin’. Nothing like a little In ‘n Out. Especially if Mr. Jack joins in.”
“Bart!”
The banter was interrupted by Gabe’s desk phone. He answered straight away and gave his super stars a stern look to quiet them.
He muted the call and said, “I need five minutes to take this in private and then I want an update from the two of you.”
Bart and Sally headed toward the coffee bar downstairs while Gabe returned to the caller from Virginia.
Five minutes later they returned and found Gabe scribbling furiously on a note pad. As they walked in he conspicuously flipped to a blank sheet.
“Let’s move through this quickly.” Gabe motioned toward the phone.
“Hello. Dr. Ramsay. Mr. Zeigler.”
Sally couldn’t contain herself. “Please call us Sally and Bart.”
“Fine. Please tell me what you know about the program?”
Bart jumped into the conversation. “We are almost certain it is the work of the Rusikov brothers.”
There was no response on the other end.
“We have a copy of the code and we are still struggling with the key.”
The anonymous caller wasn’t surprised to learn they had a copy.
“My compliments. I assume you retrieved your copy from Dr. Kovich’s computer.”
“Yes, we did.” But how did you know that?
Sally spoke up. “I can tell you the key works in three ways. It allows access to the program so you can change parameters and initiates the launch of the program and controls duration. Then, and most importantly, it directs the program to destroy itself. The key must be reset every time you run the program and it can’t be reset without a password.”
“We’re still working out how the brothers generated the passwords.” Bart seemed a bit too anxious to participate in the conversation.
Their caller, apparently privy to confidential information, said, “It was not ‘the brothers’. I am persuaded that this was primarily the work of Ilya. Ivan may have written some of the program itself and there may have been a little collaboration on the key, but Ilya was the only one who knew about the password and how to generate new ones.”
“That’s weird.” Sally wrinkled her nose but said nothing more.
“Not so weird, Dr. Ramsay. These people were working for a man who is known for mistrust and violence. A little insurance would have been a very wise thing to have.”
“So, it was a package deal? Both or nothing?”
“Perhaps, but it’s also possible Ilya could reproduce this entire program by himself.”
“Really?” Bart sat back and shook his head skeptically.
“Interesting.” There was a trace of skepticism in Sally’s voice. She got up and started to walk around while she thought that idea through. In her mind, Ilya just became the most wanted man on the planet. That’s not the way this should be working out.
“That’s great.” Bart said a bit sarcastically.
“Not really, Bart. It is imperative that we figure out how Ilya generates the password then links them to the program.” The sense of urgency in Gabe’s voice hadn’t been there earlier.
“A needle in a goddam haystack,” Sally said without blanching at her own language.
“No shit,” Bart blurted out. Sally glared hypocritically, but Gabe’s wagging finger and icy stare backed her down. “Yes, Bart. ‘Shit’ is a good summary.” The voice on the line sounded familiar to Sally, but she couldn’t place it.
Bart resumed with, “Of course we will continue to search for a solution.”
“We need your best effort and we need it quickly.” With that the line went dead and the three of them sat in Gabe’s office looking at one another.
“Who was that,” Sally demanded in a rare display of patrician entitlement.
Gabe said nothing.
“That wasn’t worth a whole hell of a lot.”
Sally started to speak again, but Gabe cut her off. “This is of the highest importance and I need both of you to focus. Get out of here at least until tomorrow morning. You’ve been going at this for two days straight so go get some sleep, pull yourselves together.
“Fine!” Sally put her shoes on, grabbed her laptop and headed out the door.
“Like I said, we didn’t learn a whole hell of a lot.” Bart followed Sally’s path out of the office.
Not necessarily. We just heard enough to sign a man’s death warrant. Gabe picked up the phone and dialed a number he had written on a scrap of paper. It connected with a throwaway cell phone.
In an elegant little country chateau in Burgundy a freshly bathed Anya Kovich put on clean clothes and prepared to sit down to the first decent meal she’d had in days. The fear had subsided and her host, Jean-Robert Trieste, was nothing if not polite and accommodating, and it was a welcome change from that slathering ogre, Serge Malroff.