Murder in the Sentier

they had to nail it with safeguards for their security setup.

Security, like anything, had to be continually upgraded and maintained. Hackers, crackers, and script kiddies always found a way in … at least she and Rene did. That’s how they tested their security. But script kiddies, so called because they lacked the finesse of crackers, would manage, sooner or later, to break into a system and wreak havoc. Frugality, shortcuts, and untrained staff cost firms more in the long run. A lot more.

She’d seen it too often. Corporations who wouldn’t pay for a strong lock yet cried when the barn door opened and the horses escaped. She and Rene refused to do damage control and inserted nonculpability clauses in every contract.

After another hour, she’d written alternatives to the client’s questionable clauses, made Rene a copy, and faxed the revisions to Media 9.

On the wall she tacked up copies of the old WANTED posters. More than a million of them, printed and distributed in the summer of 1972. The equal numbers of men and women pictured, she imagined, stiffened the patriarchal backbones of Germany and France.

She tried the DST, asking for a status report as to her request for her father’s file. All she got was a recording saying that file series was sensitive and only available to those with high security clearance.

Courtesy of her high-level contract with Equifax, she pulled up a fairly granular, up-to-the-minute credit report. With the password she’d stolen last year on a bank consulting job, she got to work. After entering the number, she found the information she wanted.

She picked up the phone and punched in the number she’d stored in her memory. One she never wrote down. She’d avoided calling it until now. She’d never before had enough material with which to do a deal with the devil.

“Oui?”

“I want to find someone,” Aimee said.

“Then you have to pay,” Leo Frot said at the other end of the line. His nasal voice competed with an occasional metallic ting in the background.

“How much?”

“Price mounts when someone doesn’t want to be found.”

“How do you know that, Leo?”

“Why would you call me if you could find them?”

Leo hadn’t changed. He’d squeeze the venom from a viper and charge the snake for it.

Too bad he was right.

She couldn’t data mine the files at the police judiciare on Quaides Orfevres. None of them were computerized. Everything before the nineties was handwritten, stored in folders and police blotters. Dossiers. Face it, everything sensitive was done with pen and ink … probably quill pens.

“Someone do a walkabout, eh?” Leo asked.

“Walkabout?” she asked.

“We just came back from Australia,” he said. “That’s what they call an aborigine’s disappearance there.”

Typical Leo. Must be desperate to brag about his trip to someone, she thought. She’d known him for years. They’d gone to the lycee together. His father was her dentist.

“What if I do a systems security scan for you in return.”

Silence.

“Why do I feel that’s unfair?” Leo scraped something in the background.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “But that’s worth more than cash, believe me. You can’t imagine the stuff I find.”

“Like what?”

She knew he’d bite. His credit history lay before her on her screen. “Like the amount overdue on your Visa card. A gold one. And they’re about to pull it.”

“But they said …”

“Forget it,” she said. “The process started six hours ago…. I see bad credit in your future. Very bad.”

“Change it and I’ll help you,” he said.

She thought he caved in too fast.

“Files on Action-Reaction and the Haader-Rofmein gang,” she said. “From the seventies on.” She paused, hesitating. “And my father’s police review.”

A pause.

“Can’t you find them?” Leo asked.

“If they were in the system, I would,” she said. He knew that, too. “But I don’t feel inclined to break into the prefecture at Quaides Orfevres. Makes me squeamish.”

“So I have to?”

“Tiens, Leo,” she said, “it’s your department.”

There was a long pause.

“Only if you adjust my credit report.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

She hit several keys and his bank balance flashed in front of her. “You’re overdrawn, Leo!”

“Fix that”—he took a deep breath—“and you’ve got my fingers at your disposal.”

“My partner hasn’t broken Banque de France’s encryption algorithms yet,” she said.

But she lied. Rene had done it two years ago. Even amped up their security system to a faster, better-tested algorithm called Blowfish. As he often said, better to be paranoid than sorry.

“Everything’s automated,” she said. “Programmed for glitches … too late….”

She let that sink in.

“But if I shut down the billing department with a postage-meter problem, that gives you an extra day.”

Pause.

“One day?”

Greedy mec!

“Figure the weekend,” she said, struggling to sound patient. “On Monday you pay the Visa and prevent a lifetime of nasty credit ratings that could screw up your application to refinance your Neuilly house.”

“It’s Chantal,” he said, expelling air in disgust.

Aimee had met his wife, Chantal. Bubbleheaded but she seemed kind.

“Her heart’s set on a Corsican holiday bungalow,” Leo said. “With a hot tub!”

“I’m sure it’s difficult.” Aimee found it hard to feign sympathy for this couple. A vast majority of Parisian families struggled with two jobs even with subsidized day care, to buy necessities and pay the skyrocketing rents for their small apartments.

“But you have to come here to see the records; I’m so busy,” he said, his tone petulant. “When I find them, they go no farther than the lavatory.”

She’d met him in the Art Nouveau men’s lavatory in the Quaides Orfevres once before.

“Some files might have traveled to the DST,” she said. “Can you check?”

“DST!” Leo groaned. “The ninth-floor division on rue Nelaton?”

“Good place to start.”

“Talk about paranoia,” Leo said. “Everything one says or does there gets classified. Papers must be locked in office safes and even when you take a piss you have to lock your office.”

“I bet you know the combinations of some safes.”

She heard his slow chuckle.

“Or you know someone who does,” she said.

“What did you say you’d do about the Visa?” he asked.

“I’ll see what I can do.”