Markay looked at me sharply. “It was way too close for comfort.” He shot Halluis a look of disgust.
“Hey,” Ace spoke up. “It’s not like I can read the hotspots’ minds. I told Christy they were exiting the elevator. She’s the one who chose to ignore them.” He winked at me.
“And it’s a good thing I did!” I shot back, blood rising to my cheeks. “Yes, they caught me, but did you guys hear what they said?”
“No, we only saw them for a few seconds before the feed went dead, and once you were in the ducting, we couldn’t hear a thing.”
“They were looking for the drive.”
Halluis raised an eyebrow at me. “Yes, and?”
“And that means they don’t have it.” I let that sink in for a moment. “They were the ones who killed Dufor, but they didn’t see the exchange—they didn’t see me. That means the pickpocket had no idea what he was stealing, and he wasn’t part of their team. We have a chance now—to get the information before they bury it forever. All we have to do is convince Siron to let us go after the pickpocket.”
“Easier said than done,” Halluis said, his pencil-thin mustache twitching as he scowled.
“It’s the only way, and you know it. These guys are desperate—they tore Dufor’s office to shreds searching for that drive. You think they’re just going to stop? They’re going to find out what happened to it, and then they’ll go after the pickpocket. We have to find him before they do.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“You said you found something?” Ace asked, finally.
I pulled the pad of paper out of my bodysuit after unzipping it. “Maybe.” I tapped the paper. “I hope so.” I truly hoped it was worth alerting the bad guys to our presence. “Does anyone have a pencil?”
Halluis fished around in his pockets and pulled out a stubby yellow pencil. He grinned.
“You’re just like a boy scout!”
His grin faded, “A what? Excuse me?”
I laughed and turned to the pad of paper in my lap. I gently rubbed the pencil over the page, hoping my hunch was correct. As I scribbled, the barely noticeable indentations became swirls, boxes, letters and then words. Dufor was definitely a doodler. I smiled, thinking it comical that a man so rigid, formal, and precise could be a doodler, until the words spread all over the page grabbed my attention: Liberté, égalité, fraternité – the national motto of France: liberty, equality, fraternity. Each word had been crossed through with an angry slash. Vertically along the side of the paper Dufor had scrawled, “Poverty is the mother of crime, and he is the father.” In one corner, he’d drawn a man with a dagger in his back. In the opposite corner, he’d written, “I am a dead man if they catch me.” There was a circle around this statement and under the circle, the phrase “So what?” was written three times. Ice seemed to chill my veins. The name Henri appeared in several places on the paper, sometimes by itself, but sometimes as part of other phrases—“For Henri, I must,” “Henri deserved better,” and “Henri, I will not let him.”
I frowned. Henri was Dufor’s first name—was the man a bit loony? Why was he referring to himself in the third person? What did it mean?
The largest phrase on the paper, the one that stood out the best, as though Dufor had gone over it several times, read, “This cannot go on.”
I held the page out for Halluis and Markay to study. Markay’s eyes darted all over it before he finally shook his head in frustration. “This makes no sense!”
“Just a moment,” Halluis murmured. He stared at the page, letting his gaze settle for a minute or two on each scribble before moving on. “This here,” he said, pointing to the vertical phrase about poverty. “This is a famous French quote, but altered. The original says ‘lack of good sense is the father.’”
“What do you think it means?” I asked.
“I have no idea.”
I bit my lip. “I think Dufor was conflicted. He was using this doodle to try to work something out.”
“Hmm. He was trying to convince himself to go through with it—informing us. That may be true.”
“Yes, but it still doesn’t tell us anything about what he had,” Markay insisted. “All this tells us is that the man was insane—and really bad at drawing.” He scowled.
“Perhaps,” Halluis shrugged. “I still think we ought to send it to our analysts. Maybe we are just missing something.”
I shook my head before lying back, sucking hard for air and rotating my shoulders, trying to ease the ache that swelled there. I’d hoped for more, some clue that would point us in the right direction. I stared at the paper a while longer, but all it told me was that Henri Dufor had decided the risk was worth it. This cannot go on.
***
The chill in the air at Division HQ sent an ominous shiver through me. Something was up. Instead of greeting us, like usually happened as we entered the main room, people avoided looking at us. All the screens around the room were focused on one thing, a protest at the Palais Bourbon, which housed the National Assembly of France, the lower house of government. Perhaps that was why everyone was on edge. The French people were mobilizing, and that usually meant trouble.
The information ribbon at the bottom of the screen gave a snippet of the story. The people apparently wanted to oust the President a year early for alleged corruption. It seemed the second the elections were called four years ago, and the President had put Prime Minister Alden in office, the people had been out to get him. I shook my head in disgust. Politics were nutso everywhere. It was nice to work for Division, which did
