“Just myself,” she said.
He glanced up at her.
“A lovely city, one of my favorites,” he said amiably. “Have you traveled there before?”
“Only for a brief stopover,” she said. “But I’ll be joining someone who is very well acquainted with it.”
“Ahh,” he said. “Business or pleasure?”
She looked at the clerk and mused that his entire bleating existence was not worth the most transitory and unremembered of her many disposable aliases.
“Pleasure,” she said and smiled back at him. “Strictly pleasure.”
“Carmichael.” Ricci leaned into the room in the crypto section. “How’s it going?”
“The same as it was when you asked fifteen minutes ago,” Carmichael said. He turned toward him in his swivel chair. “And when Megan Breen and Vince Scull stopped in ten minutes ago. And when Pete Nimec buzzed me just bef—”
Ricci held up his hand.
“Don’t uncork.” he said. “I just asked a question.”
“Listen, I’m not the one who needs to stay cool,” Carmichael said and gestured toward the computer he’d carried out of Palardy’s office, now on his gray steel desk. “I’ve already told you I’d report any progress. I’ve made multiple copies of the hard drive, and my team’s sifting through it all, sector by sector, file by file. That’s at the same time we’re trying to determine whether the message might precisely conform to some classic model of encipherment. We’re hitting the books. Researching the Freemasons, Vigenere, Arthur Conan Doyle for God’s sake…”
He let the sentence fade, blew air out of his mouth.
Ricci looked at him.
“Okay, I read you,” he said. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Keep the distractions away. This came at us damn fast. I know everybody’s stressed, but you’ve got to give us a chance. Let us do our work.” He paused, settled. “I’ve got a few hunches to check out. If they amount to anything, you’ll be the first to know about it.”
Ricci nodded. He stood quietly looking into the room a moment. Carmichael had connected Palardy’s CPU to a large, wide, flat panel display mounted on the wall above his desk, and clocks were winging across it. With the screen saver’s teal blue background, the effect was more than a little surreal, as if they were flocking in the air outside a window.
“There they go again,” he said. “Up and away.”
Carmichael at first looked as if he hadn’t understood Ricci’s meaning, then he realized where his eyes had gone and swiveled halfway around in his chair.
“I have to get rid of that,” he said, glancing at the panel. “Pops into my face every five minutes.
Ricci remembered the antique dugout clock in Palardy’s bedroom, then the eerily musical call of the cuckoo in the death-house silence of his living room.
“A thing for clocks,” he snorted.
Carmichael turned to him.
“What did you say?”
Ricci noted the cryptographer’s sudden look of interest.
“Clocks,” he said. He heard himself take a breath. “Palardy had some kind of goddamned thing for clocks.”
At her desk, Megan Breen had been thinking constantly about the boss, and she told everyone that her eyes were red because of allergies. Some visitors to her office even fell for it.
She heard her private line buzz now and picked up, tossing a crumpled Kleenex into the trash.
The caller was Ashley Gordian.
“Ashley, hello. How is—?”
She stopped. Waited for Ashley to say something at the other end of the line. How to balance the need to tackle reality against her fear of what it might be?
“Gord’s condition hasn’t changed in the past couple of hours,” Ashley said. Megan almost sighed with relief; at least he wasn’t worse. It was strange how the definition of good news became relative once the ground started to slide. “He did open his eyes for a little while around lunchtime. The nurse couldn’t be sure how alert he was, and I wasn’t in the room. I can’t… they won’t let me stay with him. But I’ve already told you that, haven’t I?”
“I think so, yes,” Megan said. In fact, Ashley had told her, and more than once. She sounded lost. “Are you at the hospital right now? There’s nothing pressing at the office, and it would do me some good to get away. We could have coffee—”
“That’s why I was calling,” Ashley said. “I think you should come down here. And that you’d better bring along Pete or one of the others. I’ve heard from Eric Oh, the epidemiologist. There’s been some word about Gord’s illness, and I don’t know exactly what to make of it. Except that it’s important.” She paused. “I’m sorry I’m being disjointed…”
“Don’t worry about that, Ashley. My guidebook’s open in front of me, and it says it’s allowed under the circumstances.”
Megan heard Ashley move the receiver from her mouth and clear her throat.
“Thank you,” she said after a moment.
“Thank the writer.”
Another brief silence. When Ashley spoke again, her voice was a bit steadier. “Eric’s heading over to meet me,” she said. “And Elliot Lieberman, Gord’s regular doctor. Eli has an office at the hospital…”
“Yes.”
“Someone from Richard Sobel’s genetics lab is also coming. The tests are still inconclusive, and I’m sure they wouldn’t be willing to disclose anything if they didn’t trust us to be discreet. Not yet. Not until they had more proof. People would jump all over them. Attack their reputations, lump them with flying saucer theorists—”
“Ashley… what is it they’ve found?”
Ashley took an audible breath. The words weren’t coming to her lips easily. “They think that the virus was manufactured,” she said at last. “That someone may have specifically designed it to kill… to
Megan held the phone a moment, stunned. “I’ll be right over,” she said.
Ten minutes after ousting Ricci from his office, Carmichael sat at his desk with the door locked behind him, his telephone unplugged, and his intercom and corporate cellular turned off. Before severing these contacts with the outside world, he had instructed the group of analysts working on Palardy’s secret communication to call him on his personal cell phone if they shook anything loose.
He needed to be alone. To think. And puzzle out what appeared to be a simple — even primitive — cryptogram that he was sure Palardy must have known would be decipherable to UpLink’s specialists, experienced pros who were used to making and breaking messages generated with the most sophisticated methods of algorithmic encryption.
There was something about the bigrams and poly-grams… something that kept tickling Carmichael’s mind right below the uppermost level of consciousness, trying to burrow up to the surface like an insect through a thin layer of soil. It had been about to emerge before the flurry of interruptions from Ricci and company startled it away. Now, absent distractions, he hoped to coax it back out of its hidey-hole.
To help him focus, Carmichael had added a clip-art icon from his word processor to the string of ciphertext transmitted by Palardy, and the image on his wall panel looked like this:
RHJAJA00BHJM00WHRH!JM00WHBHJA00
TJAJ00?!CAJBJTRH
GWRHMVGCRHUGBHAJ00RHJBAJ00.RHBH
CAJBJTRHGCBHGWJA00TJ: CARHJA00
CATJJA00UG?!BHJBJAMVGCRHJA00RHJB
