“It looks like code,” he said. “Some kind of code.”
“And we’re off into space.”
“What do you make of it?”
Ricci shrugged, staring at the screen in contemplative silence.
“Be straight with me,” Nimec said. “When Hernandez was in here with us, I heard you question him about Palardy maybe leaving a notebook computer around here. I saw you look for it in the drawer. And that made me pretty sure you noticed more at Palardy’s house than you’ve let on.”
Ricci turned to him. “How come you didn’t say anything to me?”
“Figured you had your reasons for being quiet, and you would talk when you were ready.”
Ricci nodded.
“I wasn’t trying to keep secrets,” he said. “I just like to have my thoughts in order before I lay them out. And I’m not sure that I do. That any of what’s on my mind makes sense.”
“You asked me to jump, and I did,” Nimec said. “Your turn.”
Ricci regarded Nimec another moment, then nodded again. He told him about the marks he’d seen on the door to Palardy’s condo, about the odd positioning of his body given the presumed cause of death, about the cables he’d noticed under Palardy’s desk.
“I looked everywhere for a computer before the cops showed, Pete. And I can tell you there wasn’t one in the place,” Ricci said. “No computer, not a single diskette, either. And that bothered me. Bothers me even more now that we know Palardy sent an E-mail from some machine at a time we can assume he was at home.” He paused. “Another peculiar thing caught my eye before I left. Palardy’d installed one of those floor bolts behind the front door. Lets you open the door to see who’s outside when there’s a knock, and not have to worry about a robber pushing his way through. You trigger it with your foot from inside. Know the kind I mean?”
“Sure.”
“Well, it wasn’t locked. You figure somebody goes to the trouble and expense of having something like that installed, he’s going to shoot the bolt while he’s home at night.”
“So you think somebody opened the door with a credit card, reached inside to disengage it, let himself in. That it?”
“Wouldn’t take a master thief,” Ricci said.
Nimec looked curious. “Okay, say it happened. What’s next? The intruder lifts Palardy’s computer and data storage media for some reason?”
“Yeah,” Ricci said. “Or maybe he kills Palardy first, then takes off with it—”
“Hold on. You’ve told me yourself that Palardy was obviously sick.”
“Sick isn’t dead, Pete. Sick can still talk.” He nodded at the screen. “Or send coded messages to his office.”
Nimec didn’t comment for a while. Then he said, “Give me your theory.”
“There are poisons that aren’t easy to detect or might be overlooked by a coroner if the vic’s already on his way out and somebody wants to speed along his exit. You used to be on the job same as me. How many times you respond to a sudden death call, take one look around, another at the DOA, and know on account of what you saw that it was a murder disguised as something else? An accident. A routine suicide. A heart attack. I’m telling you, Palardy’s body was arranged for viewing.”
“You got that from the appearance of the scene, okay. I’m not doubting your eye. But where’s the connection to Gord in this? They’ve found virus in his blood specimens, so we know he wasn’t poisoned.”
Ricci shot him a look. “We’re in thin air together, right? So just between us, Pete, what if the boss and Palardy were both infected with the virus? On purpose. If that’s the case, we don’t know what Palardy could have told us about it or who’d want to stop him from talking.”
Nimec took a deep breath.
“The cops and public health investigators are rushing Palardy’s autopsy. I’ll stay close to them. Make sure they conduct a toxicological exam for anything that could mimic or speed up the symptoms of the disease.”
“Sounds good.”
Nimec thought a minute. “Okay, then what? Let’s suppose they find Palardy and Gord were exposed to the same germ. Or turn up some forensics that would bear out your suspicions about the circumstances of Palardy’s death—”
Ricci interrupted him. “There’s no reason we should wait for them to get that far. Wait for any of their results to gain ourselves a head start. And we goddamn well
“That’s already occurred to me,” Nimec said. “I can have them on it right aw—”
He noticed the computer display unexpectedly go blank, and out of habit checked the power light to see whether it had lost current or gone into a sleep mode. Then cartoonish winged clocks and watches began floating across it in random patterns, satisfying his interest.
“Screen saver,” he said, voicing his minor realization aloud. “Time flies.”
Ricci glanced at the display. “Fits,” he muttered.
TWENTY
“Something like this, one look at it tells you almost as much as it doesn’t,” James Carmichael said without elaboration. He was seated behind Palardy’s computer, studying the enigmatic series of letters and punctuation marks in his E-mail.
Nimec and Ricci exchanged glances from where they stood, bookending him. His statement itself struck them as a bit mysterious, but that was almost expected. Before Roger Gordian lured him into his employ, Carmichael had been a third-generation National Security Agency analyst, his grandfather having worked for the crypto-logic intelligence organization from the time of its Cold War inception by secret presidential memorandum — back when the government was still mum about its existence, and Washington insiders cheekily referred to the NSA acronym as standing for No Such Agency.
“How about you walk us through,” Nimec said. “Starting with whether we’re all on the same page about it actually being a code, and not what happens when somebody’s out of his skull with fever and doesn’t know what he’s typing.”
A thirtyish man in shirtsleeves with sharp blue eyes and a bumper crop of wavy black hair, Carmichael looked over his shoulder at Nimec.
“Sorry,” he said. “The minute I start to sound condescending, permission’s granted to whump me across the back of the head.”
Nimec smiled a little. “We’ll allow you one free pass.”
“Deal.” Carmichael turned back to the screen. “Okay, first, I think we can rule out that it’s the product of an incoherent mind. It’s too systematic in its construction. I also think what we’ve got in front of us isn’t strictly speaking a code but a cipher. People use the terms as if they’re interchangeable, but there’s a distinction, and it’s important for more than semantic reasons. Codes substitute whole words with letters, numbers, symbols, phrases, or other words. Ciphers create substitutions for independent letters or syllables, and they allow for more complex communications. They’re the basis of modern electronic encryption. A good way to keep them straight might be to compare codes to ancient hieroglyphics or pictographs, ciphers to the alphabet. Imagine Shakespeare trying to write Hamlet using pictures on the wall, and it’ll be apparent why ciphertext is more refined and efficient.”
“You can tell the difference right off?” Ricci said.
“Usually, yeah.” Carmichael said. He indicated several spots on the lines of characters. “Frequent recurrences of letter groups are a fair giveaway that they’re replacing small linguistic units. See the letter pair, or bigram, ‘BH’? It appears ten, eleven times. You wouldn’t expect the same word to be repeated that often within a relatively short message… but a letter or syllable, sure. And then there’s the back-to-back use of the polygram ‘JM00’. That probably equals a double-letter combination in plaintext—”
“Plaintext being…”
