“I’d appreciate a favor,” Vavin said. “This involves accessing a colleague’s e-mail. It’s very confidential. Can you help me?”
As system administrators, she and Rene controlled the domain and e-mail server. Their clients often asked them for this kind of service: evidence of a colleague’s wasting time in chat rooms or visiting dodgy sites. But spying on his colleague’s e-mail wasn’t her kind of thing.
“Monsieur Vavin, we’re on a tight schedule,” she reminded him. “We run on deadlines, you know.”
“I appreciate that,” he said.
Stella would need a bottle soon; the little thing packed away more than Aimee had imagined.
“Newborns lose weight, then gain almost a kilo in the first few weeks,” Rene had quoted from the birth-to- one year book he’d bought. Thank God she could read up on breaks, try to get some handle on why babies spit up and what infant gas was all about and how to avoid it.
“It won’t take but a minute for you, I’m sure,” he said.
Her fingers typed at 120 strokes a minute; one didn’t get much faster than that. His request seemed to be made with the assumption that she had nothing better to do with her time than snoop. But it would be impossible to refuse him.
“This sounds odd,” he continued,“but certain negotiations . . . well, it’s difficult to go into right now.” He lowered his voice, she heard the sound of a door being closed. “I’ve heard some disturbing information. But I can’t say anything until I know what’s being concealed from the public.”
This sounded cryptic and not like anything she wanted to get involved in. Probably some promotion blackmail or a hatchet job he wanted the skinny on.
“The e-mails I’m concerned with could have been read by hackers who got past our firewalls. Please, take a look. I’ll hold on. The name’s de Laumain.”
She turned to her second laptop, which was already logged on. She hit some keys and entered a back door in systems administration mode.
In minutes she had accessed de Laumain’s e-mail.
“So, de Laumain’s a lacrosse aficionado?”
“How’d you know?”
“De Laumain subscribes to five lacrosse newsletters.”
The baby’s coos had turned into faint cries. She stretched her feet to touch the edge of the bed and began to bounce it. The cries escalated.
“You have a baby, Mademoiselle Leduc?” he asked.
She didn’t want to sound unprofessional. “My neighbor had to rush to the pharmacy. The baby’s got a fever, so I . . . I’m helping her out for ten minutes.”
There was a pause. She sensed there was something else he wanted to say. There were shuffling noises in the background.
“De Laumain’s the one,” he said. “Look for the word ‘Darwin’ on the subject line.”
She found two messages with “Darwin” as part of the subject.
“Copy them and send them to my e-mail account,” he ordered. “Can you make their status ‘unread’ and exit without any traces?”
“Not a problem, Monsieur Vavin,” she said.
“Of course you won’t . . . read them.”
“You said this was confidential, right? Is there anything else?”
“Let’s hope not. When my meeting’s over, I’ll call you. We should talk.”
He hung up before she could remind him of the system-design overhaul Rene ached to do.
“RENE?” AIMEE SHOULDERED her cell phone, left arm holding Stella, her right hand clicking away on the keyboard.
His voice mail answered.
Great. Firewalls were his
“Rene?”
“What have you found out, Leduc?” Morbier asked.
The last person she wanted to talk to. A click came over the line—someone was calling her . . . Rene? Vavin?
“I’ve got another call, Morbier, and I’m swamped,” she said, irritated. “Real work.”
“That can wait,” Morbier said. “I can’t. Have you run across Krzysztof Linski?”
Her fingers tightened. Stella moved and Aimee propped the baby on her hip.
“You there, Leduc?”
“Why?”
“He’s been taped on video carrying bottle bombs at the demonstration.”
She hadn’t caught that on Claude’s tapes. But she’d been too busy in his arms on the leather sofa to watch the video again.
“What’s that got to do with the student Orla Thiers?”
But she now knew—Krzysztof, Orla, and Nelie were radicals.
“He’s at it again. There’s another bomb scare at the l’Institut du Monde Arabe.”
“How do you know it’s him?”
“Nelie Landrou’s a suspect,” Morbier said, ignoring her question.“What aren’t you saying, Leduc? You owe me.”
She stared down at Stella. Was her mother a bomber?
“Too easy, Morbier. Simplistic. How can you fall for that?”
“Eh?”
“It’s a setup. Orla and Nelie were taking part in a roadblock of trucks at La Hague’s nuclear fuel processing site. . . . MondeFocus has disowned Krzysztof: they say he’s a loose cannon and a right-wing plant.”
Stella opened her mouth, her pink gums glistening. The key to understanding what was going on was Stella. Aimee had to find Nelie . . . make a deal, get the lowdown on Krzysztof, before doing anything else. Then she’d decide what to tell Morbier.
But to get Morbier off her back she’d have to tell him something more. “I checked Krzysztof’s room, a
“So?”
“Think outside the box, Morbier. Orla’s murder could—”
“I try. We get witness reports all the time.”
“Meaning?” What wasn’t he telling her?
“The good news: your local secondhand goods dealer claims a
“The
He grunted. She scribbled that on the back of a data report; she would check out this information later. Far- fetched . . . but who knew?
“Back to the point. Why would he set off bombs at a peace march and let himself be videoed carrying them? It doesn’t make sense.”
“I’ll make sure to ask him once he’s behind bars.”
He hung up.
She checked her voice mail and found a terse message from Vavin telling her to meet him at his office at once. She couldn’t bring the baby with her; she had to do something with Stella.
AIMEE HANDED THE taxi driver an extra twenty francs.“Mind waiting?”
He grinned. “Take your time.”
Her back ached as she climbed the red-carpeted stairs of the building, Stella in her arms, and baby bag
