“Now?”
Laure blinked. Cold saliva drooled down her chin and she felt her shoulders sliding down the damn pillow.
“Excuse me, Laure,” the therapist said, “I must check with the officer first.”
The therapist stepped out of the ward. Laure slid further down, her head sinking into the pillow. And then she saw the pencil. She gripped it between her thumb and index finger. If only she could knock the telephone receiver off its cradle. With all her might, she swatted at it with the pencil. The smudged receiver wavered but held.
She tried again, this time wedging the pencil under it and levering it up. As the receiver fell she heard the dial tone. Quick, she had to do it fast, before the therapist returned or the recorded message came on and said, “If you’d like to make a call . . .”
She tapped Aimee’s eight numbers. Where was the connect button?
She heard footsteps, saw the blue uniform.
“What’s she doing?”
AIMEE HANDED THE FRANCS to Pascalou, her local butcher, who wiped his hands on the red-smeared apron straining around his rotund figure.
“I threw in a little treat,” he said and grinned. “Something Miles Davis likes.”
“You spoil him, Pascalou,” she said.
“Time for him to have a special friend, Aimee,” he said, wagging his finger.
And what about me? She just smiled.
“
Not thirty minutes ago, she’d listened to Jubert’s description of the terrorist cell concealing arms somewhere in Montmartre. She had kept quiet regarding Lucien Sarti. She couldn’t figure him out. Suspicion of Jubert still nagged her. Would he keep his end of the bargain concerning Laure?
She had to find Petru, more and more convinced was she that he, rather than Lucien, was the key. There was no reason to inform Jubert yet. She would deliver a terrorist to him, but it wouldn’t be whom he expected.
First, she had to work on Frenchelon to find out how they’d traced the terrorist network back to Lucien Sarti.
She called Saj, ordered Indian takeout from Passage Brady, and booted up her laptop at home. By the time Saj arrived, in a flowing Afghan embroidered shearling coat, the pakoras and vegetarian thali sat on the fireplace mantel, the steam escaping and fogging the tarnished mirror behind it. Cumin and the scent of coconut curry filled the salon that doubled as her home office.
“Smells wonderful,” he said.
“Ready for overtime?” she asked. “I think you’ll like this project.”
Saj eyed the laptop screen. “Frenchelon, hmmm. So we’re working on satellite netspionage?” he asked.
“Netspionage? I like that,” she said, her fingers clicking over the keys. “Digital dead-letter drop, heard of that?”
He nodded, hung his coat behind the chair, and kicked off his sandals. “Do it all the time. Where’s Rene?”
“At his place,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “Working.”
“So they’re watching your office like last time, eh?”
Saj was quick.
“Who is it this time?”
“Supposedly Corsican Separatists, or else the local mafia under the guise of the Armata Corsa. Charming
Saj paused, holding a garlic naan midair. “Talk about a bad-boy magnet! I don’t get it. You and Rene do computer security. How come you keep getting involved with thugs?”
“Nice segue,” she said. “It’s all related. And something smells way off. That’s why I called you.”
“I need to center, Aimee,” Saj said, wiping his hands and settling cross-legged on her threadbare Savonnerie carpet.
She groaned inside. Why couldn’t he center before he came?
“Why don’t you join me? It’s been a while for you,
She’d made a stab at meditation at the Cao Dai temple in November and failed at mindful breaths. Her legs had cramped, her mind run rampant, yet she had experienced one brief shining moment when the world fell away and somehow she’d breathed with the universe.
“Right now I can use all the help I can get.”
She sat cross-legged beside him, touched her thumbs to her middle fingers. Tried to clear her mind.
“Deep asana,” Saj said. “Breathe in through the nostrils, hold it, good, now a long exhale.”
Conscious of the leafless tree branch slapping her window, the crackle of the logs in the fire, and the hardness of the wood floor, she waited. The other “state” remained elusive. Yet after ten minutes her mind had cleared.
Saj stood up and helped himself to the Indian food.
Bordereau of the DST had mentioned a data-encryption leak in the same sentence with Corsican Separatists. “Look at this,” she said. “Data-encryption leaks and one link relating to Frenchelon. What do you know about a connection to the satellite Helios-1A?”
“The satellite has a stowaway on board, the Eurocom, an interception cartridge that picks up Inmarsat and Intelsat signals so it can read microwave and mobile phone communications. My friend at Dassault Systemes worked on the Eurocom’s manufacture.”
“Impressive,” she said. “A great tool with which to find terrorists.”
“They call it searching the Bitstream; it’s like sifting sand to find a coin most of the time.”
“Say that again,” she said, drumming her chipped nails on the space bar.
“Eh, searching the Bitstream . . . .”
“That’s it!” Hadn’t Zoe Tardou heard “searching the stream” from the men on the roof speaking in Corsican to cloak their meaning? She’d found the connection at last.
Saj grinned, pushed a dark blond dreadlock behind his shoulder. “All things to all people, I’d say. One juicy intercept was Brezhnev’s phone call to his mistress from his limo. Another, the
Her ears perked up. She sat forward in her chair. “Can you crack it?”
“Now why would I do that?”
“To show you can,” she said. “How difficult would it be for you or anyone else?”
“Get real, Aimee. We’re talking big boys with big toys.”
“Say someone hired you to intercept a satellite feed.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “I’d need special equipment.”
“Like what?”
She could tell she’d sparked his interest by the way he’d already clicked on the Net and brought up some sites.
“Like a satellite,” he said. “And say I had a satellite, the Faraday cage poses a problem.”
“Like a cage for tigers?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” he said.
“Where’s this Faraday cage?”
Saj tied back his dreadlocks with an elastic band. “Far as I know, it’s at the same facility as the parabola satellite dishes. Would have to be to access the feed.” He pointed to his screen. “See, e-mails, land lines, cell-phone conversations, and faxes are beamed in a stream of data. Satellites in a geosynchronous and a polar orbit receive this data, then transmit it back in a continuous sequence of bits, downlinking the raw stream of data to a dish or to antennas on land. This data feed’s piped from the antenna into the Faraday cage for deciphering. Inside the cage, a
