"The operation was shut down months ago, before Sindhu Power and Electric cleared out. The Tampa cops say Sindhu seemed like an ordinary business."
"But if they had someone on the front desk, they must have noticed something."
"Better than that; they kept copies of everything, shipping manifests, stuff like that. They searched through the Dumpsters, you know, looking for stuff on the drug runners, but pretty much going through all the garbage. Folks at Sindhu were avid shredders, Langer told me, but one day the surveillance team found a disk. Musta fallen under a desk or something and the cleaning crew tossed it."
"And you've got it?"
The van sped toward 275. "Langer tried to read the thing, said it was encrypted all to hell and back, figured with a name like 'Sindhu' and them clearing out, somebody ought to check it. So he notified a pal in Homeland Security. Guy might have gotten back to him in four or five years."
"But you've got the disk?"
"I sure do. Yeah, you bet."
Her arm throbbed; she was thirsty and exhausted, but Carson had to smile at his enthusiasm. Then she remembered Jean-Marc and a lump rose in her throat. Chang was so young. Though she was only a few years older, she felt ancient by comparison.
She said, "Fill me in. What's our next move? Who's driving this rig?" "A friend. He's cool. He was an army medic, too, in case you--"
"You thought of everything."
His grin was infectious. "If you're up for it, we're heading to a military airbase."
"MacDill? Middleton's orders?"
The young man's face grew grave. "Not exactly . . . Connie, Colonel Middleton's gone missing."
"What?"
"No phone to trace, nothing. Headed to Russia and then vanished."
"You haven't heard anything from him?"
"Not a word. Tesla will fill you in."
"You won't be going with me?"
"I'm supposed to hold down the fort here."
"Right. You're not supposed to leave the lab, are you?"
"Hey," he said, smiling expansively and waving his arms at the interior of the van. "I brought it with me."
On the whole, Pierre Crane thought he had not done badly. He was alive. He was--if no closer to the secret of who had financed Sikari's education or the riddle of the Scorpion--at least closer to the woman who was in some way entwined in the Scorpion's life. Who wanted him dead or wanted to use him. The woman who was, quite possibly, his equal. He had acquitted himself well in bed. Casanova, he had heard, had been, if not an ugly man, a man of no particular physical distinction.
He assessed the danger at the moment and found it minimal. Their lovemaking had proven that. And besides he knew himself to be more than a match for Jana physically. He was an expert in several forms of unarmed combat, after all, and he was confident that it wouldn't come down to a matter of firearms. Hadn't he been with her when she'd disposed of her pistol before entering the terminal at Heathrow? Hadn't he sat beside her on the long flight and accompanied her in the taxi directly to the hotel? And she was naked now . . .
He was wondering what she might shed on the story of the three young South Asians staked to an education and start-up capital, what he thought of as his "anomaly story." The story of the Scorpion. As a journalist, he honored the maxim "follow the money." The Scorpion raised money, had money, but it galled Crane that, after all these months, he was still no closer to knowing who exactly the man was. That he was a man of no particular allegiance was a given; such men operated across national borders. Money and the economy were global, so crime was global as well. Perhaps he should be paying less attention to figures of political intrigue, more to those of organized crime. Organized crime had the networks international terrorism needed, the smuggling routes, the purveyors of forged documents, the weapons and money-laundering connections. Money moved with lightning speed and money begat more money, the kind of wealth that could build palaces in the desert, entire cities like Dubai. Whose money was behind such rapid development? Oil money, yes, but he had heard tales of the wealth of powerful Russian oligarchs.
Crane heard the water running in the bathroom.
He thought again of Jana's body.
And thoughts of the Scorpion slipped from his mind.
Wiki Chang flicked on an overhead light. Carson blinked, fluttering her eyelids until her irises adjusted to the bright fluorescence. The interior of the black van, that's where she was--a van speeding toward a military airbase--and she was lying on a cot, not unlike the gurney on which she'd escaped from the hospital, except this one was bolted to the wall opposite the computer screens.
"Did I--?"
"You tried to take a nap standing up. I caught you before you fell and carried you here. I'm stronger than I look." Chang's face flamed scarlet. "Not that you're heavy, that's not what I meant, uh, I hope you don't mind."
Really, Carson thought, he was totally adorable.
"No, no, don't get up," he insisted when she tried to sit. "You should be lying down. I researched your post-op care, but having your chart really helps. In about twenty minutes, you'll need your pain meds. I've got those ready. Your antibiotics will be--"
"I'm sure you've got it under control," Carson said. "Please, go back to work. You said the disk was encrypted--"
"A real bear."
"You haven't been able to decode it?" Carson didn't know how long she'd been unconscious, so she tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice. Everyone said Wiki Chang was the best, but if Langer, a hobbyist, and Tampa PD hadn't been able to crack it, and his pal at Homeland Security, a pro, had already given it a whirl . . .
"No, I've got the disk decoded. See?" As if the other three monitors were only for show, Chang held up a slim laptop, tilting the screen until she nodded her approval.
"I'm not even sure what I'm looking at."
"It's a ZIP file, an archive containing a bunch of other files. I opened it using 'fcrackzip,' this terrific brute-force ZIP cracking program for Linux. I mean, it really didn't have a terribly complicated password and even if it had been way more complex, there are tons of cryptanalysis tools I could have used. The encryption in ZIP files just isn't all that good."
"I'll take your word for it," Carson said.
Chang hurried on, pointing at the screen with an index finger for emphasis. "Now the coded files are all picture files, see? They were taken by a Nikon. Except for this one. This one's pretty cute. It's not a photo--it's a diagram, see, a blueprint of a hydroelectric dam. I matched it to the architectural drawings and schematics for the Baglihar dam project."
"In Jammu and Kashmir."
"Right. Good old J&K, but see this? The blueprints have been altered."
"Altered?"
"Added to. These look like plans to set up a heavy-water reactor at the core of the dam. In a kind of subterranean chamber."
Carson couldn't keep the excitement out of her voice. "But that could be what we've been looking for, what Sindhu Power and Electric was shipping overseas, the parts for the heavy-water reactor. Does it say when the reactor will go online? Does it give a date? We've got to get in touch with Middleton."
"Hold on, Connie. The plans--the alterations--to accommodate the heavy-water reactor . . . I've been looking at them, and excuse me, but they're either bullshit or they're incomplete. The way they are now, they're like a high-class con, a way to justify some incredible expenditures, but they won't actually do the trick. There's a reason the patent for this stuff was applied for, but never granted. This whole 'copper bracelet' technology seems to be built around faulty assumptions."
"Copper bracelet?"
"Yeah, because of the shape of the copper pipes," he said.
"Okay, so the reactor won't actually go online?" Light glinted off Chang's oversized lenses and Carson shifted her head to get a clearer look at the screen.
"Doesn't seem it will," the young man said. "There could be a way to fix it, but nobody seems to have the technology to do that at this point. In any case,
there's no heavy-water generator at the dam . . . Connie, this whole thing doesn't smell right."
"You think the files are some kind of trap, like the one set in the office?"
"I think this disk is more than it seems."
"What do you mean?"
"The picture files, take a look at them." Chang flashed a series of images on the laptop screen.
Carson would have shrugged if her arm and shoulder had functioned. "It looks like an office, the office at Sindhu." The image of the place was seared on her retinas, along with a picture of Jean-Marc, lying there, eyes staring blankly into space.
Chang said, "Do they look like anything you'd want to encrypt? A picture of a desk, a chair, a table?"
"Maybe they were just keeping them on the same disk."
"Maybe. Or they might be something else. I mean, why put these innocent-looking photos in with a file that's so complex? I decided there must be another layer, beneath the images."
"But how would you find out if--"
"Steganography," Chang said. "It can embed information into a file, but getting it back isn't just a matter of running a simple cracking program--you have to figure out how it was done, because there are so many different ways. I tried a couple of approaches while you were out of it, and I finally got a handle on it with the Digital Invisible Ink Toolkit, and there's definitely embedded information in this picture. So I've got it, but it's encrypted, too."
"And you don't have the encryption key." Wheels within wheels, Carson thought. How many layers would they have to penetrate?
"Not yet," Chang said. "This is an old-style pencil-and-paper cipher--you can tell because it's just letters--but, wait a minute, look at the letter frequencies! I haven't seen one of these in years, but I think this might be a Playfair cipher."
"Playfair?" Carson said. "Spies used it, a long time ago--in World War II, right? How do you find the encryption key?"
"If it's Playfair, it'll be a group of 10 to 15 unique letters. It could be a single word, but sometimes it's, say, a long phrase in a book, a song lyric--"
"A phrase all the members of the group would have to know."
Chang nodded. "Anyone who needs to decode messages."
"Wiki, you called the technology, for the heavy-water reactor, the 'copper bracelet.' Right?"
"Yeah."
"When we were in France, the 'copper bracelet' was an actual physical copper bracelet. Jewelry." As she spoke, Carson tried to circle her left wrist with her right hand. The effort made her gasp. "There were words engraved on it, in Hindi, or--"
"Sanskrit. Do you want your pain meds now? It's a little early, but . . . "
"I'll wait. You've seen it? The bracelet?"
"With the elephant and the moon? Sure. Middleton sent it to me at the lab. I've got it with me."
"You know what it says?"
"Yeah, sure. It's a quotation, from the Buddha. "Irrigators direct the waters; Fletchers fashion the shaft, Carpenters bend the wood. The wise control themselves."
"Where's it from, the quote?"
"A text called the Dhammapada. It's a compilation of the Buddha's words."
"Could that be the key word? Dhamma-whatever?"
Chang shook his head. "Too many repeating letters."
"Well, could the quote itself be the encryption key?"
"It's a long enough phrase," Wiki said. "Let's give it a whirl."
"I think I remember how to do this," Carson said. "You make a five-by-five grid, right?"
"Yeah. The most common way to do it is to take the first letter of each word in the phrase. So we'd start out 'I', 'D', 'W', 'F', then 'A', from the second letter of 'fashion', since we've already used the 'F', then 'H', 'S', and so on. You arrange the letters at the beginning of your grid, one to a square, followed by the rest of the letters in the alphabet, in order, with the Q, or sometimes the J, omitted. And if the first letter in each word doesn't work, you try the last letter, or--"
"So there are a lot of possibilities. This could take a while."
"Take me a few minutes to write a tiny Perl program. Really, it's way quicker than filling in the grid hit or miss."
"Perl?"
"Sorry. It's this really easy computer language--I'm boring the hell out of you, aren't I?"
"No, Wiki, I love puzzles." She stopped. The pain was waking in earnest now; fire blazed down the length of her arm. "Maybe you better give me a pill or two?"
"Hey, I'm sorry. I forgot."
Chang disappeared from Carson's view with a clatter, using the wheeled desk chair to scoot around the van's interior. He retrieved a vial of pills from a satchel, a paper cup and a bottle of water from the monitor shelf, before returning to the side of the cot. "You lie back and relax, okay? You're turning paler every second."
"But I--"
"Hey. Doctor's orders."
Obediently, Carson swallowed the pills. Chang scooted his chair back to the shelf, turned a gooseneck lamp to focus on his laptop keyboard, flexed his fingers and went to work.
"Not the first letter of every word," he said. "Not the last. Dammit."
Carson closed her eyes. It had felt right, basing the encryption key on the quote from the bracelet. "So much for hunches. Now what do we do?"
"Hey, come on. If they can code it I can crack it. Hey, wait a sec. I've got it! Just the thing, it's perfect, a little gem of a program I once wrote for a puzzle contest."
"A puzzle contest?"
"Yeah, it's kind of embarrassing, right? For the American Cryptogram Association. Bunch of retired crossword addicts and a few computer geeks too. I never thought this thing would come in handy but lemme see now . . . Yeah, this won't take longer than a minute or two. It'll run way faster on this baby than on the computer I used when I wrote it."
Chang's fingers flew across the laptop's keys.
"How're you doing, Connie? Pills working?"
"Yeah. I think so." The fire was subsiding; Carson welcomed the throbbing in its stead.
"Hey, hey, we nailed it. Whoa, look at this sucker, fourth letter in every word."
"What's it say?"
"Oh shit," Chang murmured under his breath. "Dammit to hell."
"It didn't work . . . " Carson felt utterly deflated by the letdown. She heard the chair wheels cross the floor.
Chang's dark eyes peered down at her from behind his spectacles. "No. It worked, all right," he said, "but here's the thing: they're not planning to go online with the heavy-water plant. There is no heavy-water reactor, never was a heavy-water reactor. Sindhu didn't send any 'copper bracelet'. The 'copper bracelet' is the organization, not some shortcut to a nuclear reactor."
"But what about those shipping manifests? Sindhu sent something."
"You know where the plant is, right?"
"On the Chenab River."
"It's an Indian-funded project, but the location is in disputed territory, between Pakistan and India."
"I know," Connie said impatiently. "Traditional enemies."
"With nukes," Chang added.
"Yeah. So?"
"So they didn't send copper piping and coils. They sent thermobaric explosives. They're going to blow the Baglihar dam sky high."
Just as the BlackBerry had been pre-planted in the drawer, the Browning Buck Mark .22 was taped inside the toilet tank. Jana appreciated the compliment. The .22 was a marksman's gun. A larger weapon would have been overkill.
The bathroom was easily as large as the room she had shared with her brothers growing up. White veined marble surrounded the tub and steam shower, aqua tile gleamed on the walls and floor.
She used the facilities quickly, flushed the toilet and turned on the hot water in the Jacuzzi, using the noise to cover the sound as she screwed the Gemtech Suppressor to the threaded end of the Trail-Lite barrel.
She jutted her head into the bedroom. Crane was naked on the bed, scanning the room service menu.
"Pierre," she said. "Come here."
Crane looked over the menu. "I was going t
o order us--"
"This is better," she said over the rushing water.
"In a moment," he replied as he reached for the telephone.
He ordered something.
She set the pistol down temporarily on the edge of the Jacuzzi, opened a jar of bath salts, the source of the jasmine aroma, and inhaled deeply. On the edge of the tub, white towels were folded into a thick stack.
She checked her appearance in the mirror over the twin sinks, rearranged her hair. "Please, Pierre."
Crane rolled from the bed and opened the door. He stood naked in the frame. "I've ordered us a bit of caviar--"
Jana stopped him just inside the doorway by aiming the silenced pistol at his knee. Not so close that he could move in and grab it away in one of his karate moves.
Shock registered in Crane's eyes.
"You're surprised, Pierre? This is what it's come down to. If you want to live, answer me. First, what do you know about Harold Middleton?"
A flash of recognition in his eyes. The man didn't try to bluff. "He's former U.S. military intelligence. Maybe a killer. I'm not sure. The implication is that he has some connection to the Scorpion. That's why I ended up in London. Look, I'm on your side."
"Where is he?"
"I don't know. I swear."
"What else do you know about him? Tell me."
"I didn't have much time to find out anything, if you recall. You stopped me at his flat."
"You're lying."
"I--"
"Tell me." She said it calmly, and that she didn't thrust the weapon forward theatrically seemed to scare him all the more.
"I did see something in his flat. A note. About his daughter."
"What about her?"
"Where she's staying in Paris. The Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Registered under her mother's maiden name."
Jana knew that the daughter sometimes worked for the Volunteers. She filed this new information away.
"The name?"
"Rosewald. I think."
"All right. Now tell me everything you know about the Scorpion. No games. No pillow talk. Facts."
His eyes were searching for his play. But he was naked and too far away to try marital arts. His look of betrayal was feigned; he hadn't trusted her to start with. And in any case, he knew deep down that she wasn't one to be moved by hurt looks or pleas for compassion.
"He bankrolled Sikari and a few others. Anonymously. But I'm not sure what he wanted from them. He's in it--whatever it is--for the money. If he's a he. I'm not even sure he is. He might even be a group. Think about that."