“The words you’re trying to conceal,” Carmichael said. “As opposed to ciphertext, which would be the characters you’re using to conceal them.”
Ricci was nodding his head. “That’s all there is to this nut, it should be easy to crack,” he said. “The regular… the
Carmichael looked at him. “Your logic makes sense as far as it goes, but leaves us with a couple of big problems,” he said. “One, let’s assume Palardy’s ciphertext groups correlate to letters in the English alphabet, and not some other with a greater or lesser number of characters. Figuring out that part might just be the first step toward getting to the clear — the hidden message — since we don’t know that there aren’t added levels of encryption. And two, any cipher worth the thought and effort needed to create it incorporates nulls. These could be letters, digits, symbols, maybe punctuation marks that don’t fit the system and can complicate things.”
“Wouldn’t your computers be able identify them for that very reason?” Nimec asked. “Exclude them because they don’t fall into the pattern?”
“With time,” Carmichael replied tersely, looking at him in a way that conveyed he was all too aware of its desperate shortage.
Silence hung a minute. Then, from Nimec: “It’s crazy. Palardy composes a secret message before he dies, E-mails it here. He must want us to be able to get at it. I can’t see why else he goes to the trouble.”
Carmichael nodded. “Agreed. Even if his purpose was to frustrate us, put us through our paces… and we don’t know it was… I still bet he’d provide a key. Either separately or hidden within the cryptogram.”
“You think you can do it?” Nimec asked Carmichael. “Find the key, whatever Palardy’s intentions might’ve been?”
“I’ll have my people go over every bit of data on this terminal’s hard drive. And any removable storage media he might have left behind. See what we learn from them.” A sigh. “I know we can do a successful cryptanalysis. Break the system without a key. But truthfully, I can’t estimate how long it would take. Could be hours, days, even weeks.”
“Goddamn it.” Ricci frowned. “If Palardy wasn’t playing games with us… wanted to tell us something… what the hell was he thinking? Why bother encrypting his message?”
“The only reason I can figure would be to keep it from whoever got into his apartment and carried away his notebook,” Nimec said.
“If that’s it, he could have sent the message in plain language and then wiped it from his notebook’s memory,” Ricci said. “Reformatted his hard drive to be positive it couldn’t be recovered.”
“Unless he was worried about somebody being able to pull it from our mainframe.”
“If our security’s been compromised to that extent, Pete, we’d both better turn in our resignations.”
Carmichael had been listening quietly, his eyes narrowed in contemplation as they spoke.
“Any objections if I toss a hypothesis of my own into the pot?” he said.
“None,” Nimec said.
Carmichael looked from one man to the other.
“Maybe Palardy wanted the person who got hold of the computer to know he’d sent us a message but have to sweat about what information it contained,” he said. “In other words, maybe he wasn’t playing with our heads, but
By Wednesday afternoon, Enrique Quiros’s eyes were so familiar with the message in the Sent column of Palardy’s E-mail program that it might have been burned into their retinas. He had spent hours trying to make sense of it. Long, futile hours.
Quiros switched off the notebook computer that had been brought to him from Palardy’s condominium, closed its lid, and reached for the tumbler of scotch on his desk. It was not his usual habit to drink before sundown, but his nerves badly needed steadying. One by one, his recent problems had compounded. Felix’s idiotic stunt, Felix’s murder, his forced hand in setting up tonight’s appointment with Salazar. And now everything he’d feared from the moment he had climbed aboard the carousel with that blonde had come about. She had sucked him into the conspiracy to kill Roger Gordian, made him an instrumental participant, and he had known that he would live to regret it.
Palardy had been cringing and manipulable, but Enrique had never thought he was stupid. He had felt all along that Palardy might be prepared for treachery, that once he realized he was a doomed man, he would want to expose the people he knew had used and discarded him. And he would find a way to do it before he could be stopped.
Quiros lifted the glass to his mouth and took a good, deep swallow. He didn’t know how to decode the message. Didn’t have the slightest clue. Perhaps the great and inviolable El Tio would possess the means, but Enrique was not anxious to commit suicide by sending it up the line to him. If its purpose was what Enrique believed it to be, no good could come of that. Not for him. Although El Tio’s whereabouts and identity were protected by blind upon blind, Palardy would have surely implicated Enrique, pointed the way to his door… and that was where El Tio would quickly cut the trail to his own.
Quiros tossed back the rest of his whiskey. It was out of his hands now. Completely out of his hands. The fucking heavens were about to rock.
He could only go about his plans for tonight, deal with Salazar, and wait to see whether there would be someplace to take cover when the sky came tumbling down in a million pieces.
Her hair golden in the California sunlight, she strode toward the airline ticket office with a shopping bag on her arm, drawing glances of uniform appreciation from the males she passed on the street. She was aware of each look — the discreet, the boorish, the passively speculative, the aggressively gaming. As a runway model in Paris and Milan not many years ago, she had learned that some women could trade upon beauty and sex as some men did on wealth and power. The terms of exchange, the boundaries, were what one chose to make them.
In Europe, at the parties in the clubs and aboard the yachts where she was invited after the shows, she had found it was often the truly dangerous men who had been able to provide the things she most desired. It was the oldest of understandings: Take of me, and I will take of you. She had accepted it without hesitation from a succession of lovers and been introduced to circles of hidden influence and inestimable fortune. The lifestyle attracted her, fascinated her, thrilled her.
Eventually she had come to do favors that went beyond the physical, although that was a constant part of the bargain. Sometimes enjoyable, sometimes less so. But no man had ever forced anything upon her. Made her do anything against her will. The assignments she ran across borders, moving from one country to the next under a variety of identities, gave her a wonderful feeling of value and importance, and it only heightened her excitement to know the international laws she had broken while using any one of those assumed names could have put her in prison forever. She had passed under the eyes of authorities, hiding in full view, and it exhilarated her.
Having lived among the dangerous, enjoyed the spoils of their illicit traffic, she in due time acquired a taste for the danger itself.
Siegfried Kuhl was by far the most dangerous man she had ever met. Once she had been with him, none of the rest had interested her, and she knew no other would again. He had satisfied her with a fullness she had never dreamed might be experienced. What sensual delights could be greater than those he lavished on her? What crimes more damnable than those she’d committed for him?
Now he had finally sent word. Although his affairs in Canada had not yet concluded, he would have the opportunity to leave for a few days and had made plans for them to be together. Where he had promised. In the place that was special to him and would become special to her.
She turned into the ticket office, waited on a short line, then walked over to an available clerk.
“Hello,” he said, smiling at her from behind the counter. He looked like a sheep, soft and penned. “How may I help you?”
“I would like a reservation for a flight to Madrid,” she said and gave him the date she wished to leave.
He nodded, tapped his keyboard with one finger.
“How many passengers will there be?”
