“After? Well, that’s not impossible. He could have had a delayed transmission set up, but then he could have also had it stored somewhere, and the news of his death somehow activated the transmission. How large was it?”
“Several gigs.”
“Humph, that is large. Did he send you files like that often?”
“Are you kidding? No, of course, you’re not. The answer is no, normally he didn’t send me anything because I saw him at the office every day.
“What kind of work was he involved in?”
“I’m really not sure what he could have been involved with that would get him killed. It’s not as if we dealt with classified information.”
John nodded. “What did he say about this file?”
“Nothing at all.”
“So what’s in the file?”
Caitlin opened her bag, took something out, and then placed it on the table between them. John looked around the room. No one had developed an unhealthy interest.
He palmed the thumb drive and lowered it to his side. It looked like an ordinary thumb drive and its marking claimed 64 Gigabytes of memory.
“Would you mind putting it back in your bag? I’d just as well not attract too much attention.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I should have thought.”
Caitlin took the thumb drive from his hand and slipped it back into her bag discreetly.
“What’s in the file?” he repeated.
“It’s encoded. I don’t have the encryption code.”
“Damn. Did Scott leave you any clues as to the content of this file?”
She shrugged. “I’m not positive. He made a vague reference to May first.”
“Oh? What’s significant about that date?”
“It’s the day my parents go back to their home in Colorado. I can’t think of anything else.”
“Your parents still live in Black Forest?”
“Yes, but they’ve become snowbirds and spend each winter in Florida. There’re a couple of other strange messages, besides the one from Scott.”
Strange messages? What sort of messages did she get when she wasn’t being hunted?
“You want to tell me about the messages?”
“Well, sure. The first was from someone wanting to buy something from me. The message didn’t state what or who they were. They wanted my reply sent to a public e-mail drop.”
John nodded thoughtfully and wondered about Mr. Hosokawa.
“The other message was a claim to something I have...and a warning. It warned that if I didn’t return it immediately, there would be dire consequences.”
“Dire consequences?”
“Yeah, that’s just what it said. Can you believe it?” She smiled humorously and gave a nervous little laugh. “Sounds like something out of a paperback novel.”
He smiled with her. “Yeah, like a paperback ... or perhaps someone who learned English as a second language?”
Her head cocked slightly to one side. It was a mannerism he remembered from the Canyon.
“You know something?”
“Yeah, a little.” He gave her a brief rundown of the day’s events. She nodded a few times, drank about half her wine, and allowed him to talk uninterrupted.
When he finished, she didn’t say anything for nearly a full minute while she took nervous little sips of her wine.
She licked her lips in a way that distracted him more than it should have.
“It sounds like Mr. Hosokawa sent me the first message and if you’re right about the second language, then the Frenchman could have sent the second.”
John nodded. “That’d be my guess. The Japanese are probably affiliated with JETRO, the Japanese External Trade Organization. They are responsible for most of their country’s industrial espionage. The Frenchman probably works for one of the subagencies under the DGRG, the Direction General des Renseignements Gereraux, most likely the Recherche.”
“Recherche?”
“Intelligence collection, it’s one of the four directions of the DGRG.”
“Then what they’re after must be the same thing the killer’s after. It must be this file Scott sent me.”
Again, he nodded. “Yeah, I suppose it must be.”
“But what is the NCIX’s connection to this?”
John could think of one thing, but he didn’t want to go into it until he knew for sure. “They’ve taken over all aspects of industrial espionage from the FBI and the CIA. I’d be surprised if they hadn’t shown an interest.”
Caitlin sipped her wine. He could tell she was giving it some thought. “No, not Scott. He’s, he wasn’t the type.”
He didn’t have to ask what type she was talking about? It was the same thought that had occurred to him when he heard about the file.
“You knew him that well?”
Her pupils dilated, and after a moment, she shook her head violently. “No, it’s not possible. For crying out loud, we were married for twelve years.”
“People change.”
She blinked, paused, and blinked again. He could see that her thoughts must have shifted to how much John had changed in the intervening years. Had he really changed that much? Sure he was more cynical, more paranoid, and perhaps colder, but down deep, where it really matter, he still believed in goodness, motherhood, apple pie, and all that rot he grew up with. Didn’t he? When was the last time he’d questioned his own values?
Unconsciously, he found himself again stroking the scar.
Yeah, he remembered.
It was right after he’d received this testament to youth’s follies. He’d been doing what he thought was right and it nearly got him killed. He was in Haiti, part of the peacekeeper detachment overseeing another attempt at free elections and starting a democracy. The police had become a nonexistent entity, and they were filling in wherever they could.
***
It had been a calm day, and he guessed he’d relaxed a little too much at the small bar that they’d adopted as their own. John decided to hoof it back over to the barracks, and
