a single line of text. The lines, however, were a jumble of letters and numbers that made no sense: EFDH3054383 gjvaf Nhthfg gjragl Gjragl Uhaqerq UEF uggc://ovg. yl/umfLZ3
Jack looked from the hash to Faisal. “I thought that program was supposed to translate all this stuff.”
“That was the second level of encryption,” Faisal said. “The difficult one. But not to worry, these all look like simple ROT-13 cyphers.”
Jack was clueless. “What’s that?”
“It’s a rudimentary form of code based on the old Caesar cypher. A lot of gamers use it to hide cheat codes and spoilers on Internet forums. They’re extremely easy to crack, which is why the sender used that second level of encryption.”
“So how does it work?” Jack asked.
“You replace each letter by the one located thirteen letters after it in the alphabet. For example, an A becomes an N. I have the lookup table here.”
He punched a key and a small window popped up, showing: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz NOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLM nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm
“Decryption is a fairly mindless task at this point,” he went on. “The numbers will remain the same. All we need do is transpose the letters and we’ll know what these messages say.”
Faisal had already gone to work, using another computer application to quickly translate the lines. When it was done, he stacked the decryptions on the screen: RSQU3054383 twins August twenty Twenty Hundred HRS http://bit.ly/hzsYM3
Nobody spoke for a long moment. Jack felt his heart begin to race. “I think we’ve just hit pay dirt,” he said to Sara. “You realize what this is, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure what the first two lines are all about,” Sara said, “but that last one’s an Internet address. So I’m guessing these are the date, time, and target of an attack.”
Jack nodded. “The first one looks like a serial number of some kind. Or maybe the ISO number for a shipping container.”
“Could be a shipment from Chilikov, if Haddad was successful.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Jack said. “But what about this ‘twins’ line? You think it’s a reference to the twin towers? A reminder of their last big hit?”
“The infidels will soon see destruction that will make 9/11 seem like child’s play.”
“It could be that,” Sara said. “It could also be two prongs of an attack, two cells, matching automobiles being used for smuggling-anything. But whatever it means, August twentieth is only three days from now. Saturday night.”
Jack gestured to Faisal. “Can you paste that URL into a browser? I want to see what they have in mind.” He added as an afterthought, “Please?”
Faisal did as he was asked. When he clicked the address, Google Maps came to life on screen, showing a satellite image of San Francisco. Flagged in the middle of it by a big letter A, was one of the city’s best-known landmarks.
The California Palace of the Legion of Honor.
Jack’s mind suddenly flashed on that afternoon at Pagliaci’s, when Danny Pescatori gave Tony a VIP invitation to the museum gala. He’d forgotten about it until now.
And it was scheduled for this Saturday night.
“My God,” he said, his heart kicking up a notch as the realization sank in like a depth charge to the brain. “They’re going after the President.”
PART THREE
30
San Francisco, California
Talia “Tally” Griffin was convinced that this time she’d struck gold.
After years of dating all the wrong guys, winding up in relationships that went absolutely nowhere, she was certain that she had finally found her Prince Charming.
His name was Victor Massri.
Tall. Handsome. With deep, dark eyes, smooth brown skin, and that exotic, wispy little black goatee.
Tally didn’t normally go for men with beards, but Victor was the exception to the rule, and from the right angle he reminded her of Johnny Depp.
He was Egyptian, he’d told her, born and raised in London, and ever since they’d started corresponding online-through the SF Singles Hotline dating service-she knew she’d found someone very special.
Until this moment, the only contact they’d had were e-mails and text messages, a few photos they’d exchanged, and several prolonged phone calls, but seeing him walk out of that airline terminal flashing those beautiful white teeth was everything she’d hoped for, and more.
He greeted her with a platonic hug. She wanted more but she also didn’t want to scare him. The man was not one of her local jerks, he was foreign. She didn’t know what his customs were.
“Just the one suitcase?” she asked.
“I always travel light,” he told her, tossing the bag into the backseat.
They stood there awkwardly for a moment until Tally said, “I can’t believe you’re finally here.”
“Nor can I,” he told her.
It wasn’t just Victor’s dark good looks, however, that got Tally’s engine running hot. The two had clicked the moment she answered his request for an online meet. He told her that he’d seen her photo and thought she was “lovely,” and was doubly pleased when he read her profile and discovered she was an urban explorer. Her exact words to him were, “I love all old buildings, especially ones that have all the original furniture and fixtures.”
Victor told her he was an architect who had a great love for history, and had done quite a bit of exploring himself. He said he’d been to many abandoned sites around the world, from the eerie, fortresslike apartments of Battleship Island, Japan, to the decrepit unused underground railway stations right in his own hometown.
“You’re even more lovely in person,” he told her, and Tally knew she had to get this guy alone, real soon. Whatever cultural reserve he might have, she was determined to bridge it.
They climbed into her Toyota and she took him straight to her apartment.
This was going to be a night to remember.
Hassan Haddad had never forgotten just how disturbingly aggressive American women could be. But if he were to judge by this one, he’d say they’d gotten even worse over the last decade.
The moment he set foot in her apartment and dropped his suitcase, this althletic blond, blue-eyed ex-hippie with the ridiculous name and the wild curly hair was already pulling his jacket away and, when he didn’t object- indeed, he forced himself to smile with encouragement-starting on the buttons on his shirt.
Before she had even finished that task, Tally was kissing his chest and somehow unbuckling his pants at the same time as the trail of her kisses moved down toward his abdomen. Then she was on her knees and had him in her mouth and, aggressive or not, Haddad found himself unable to resist.
He was suddenly swept back to those nights at Berkeley, when his two dorm mates would tend to him as if they were his personal sex slaves, their enthusiasm matched by their skills-which were considerable. He had a hard time now remembering their names. Sabrina… and Jennifer?
Yes, that was it.
They were wild women, almost as wild as this one, and they had been more than willing to share themselves
