though I suppose his carelessness was to blame.”
“It wasn’t him. He hadn’t gotten to it yet.”
Hadn’t gotten to it?
Mussa took a moment to stifle his anger. He had asked — directed — that the bomb be disabled within a few hours of learning that Donohue had done his job in England. The delay was inexcusable, though of course there would be some nonsensical excuse.
Another sign of corruption and seduction, the weakness of the West corroding Islamic values. When Mussa was young, orders were carried out promptly. Now, underlings worked on their own schedule.
“It was to be dismantled in only a few hours,” said his caller, sensing his anger.
“These complications are unfortunate and unwelcome,” said Mussa.
“No one was killed,” said the caller. “The police are there. One of our friends made sure to get close enough for information.”
“The bomb did not go off by itself,” said Mussa, barely keeping his calm.
“No. We have additional information. Someone saw a friend of the chemist, a Monsieur LaFoote, at mass the other day. You had asked about him the other day.”
LaFoote?
But the Irishman Donohue had already killed him. Even if one of Mussa’s network had not verified the shooting, he would have been confident that it had been carried out. Another man might have missed or botched the job, but not the obnoxious Donohue.
“LaFoote set off the bomb?”
“It seems possible.”
“You are sure it was LaFoote?”
“Yes.”
“Have you watched his house?”
“Not since you said it was unnecessary.”
LaFoote had been poking around into the chemist’s disappearance, raising trouble with the DST. He had even gone so far as to try to get American intelligence interested. Mussa had enough sources within the French intelligence agency so that he did not have to worry about problems from that quarter, at least not for the time being, but the Americans were a different matter entirely. Fortunately, the fool had made a call from Vefoures’ phone two or three weeks ago. When Vefoures was first approached to work for them the phone was tapped with an automated device that worked only when the call was placed; it had been a surprise to find a call had been made, and Mussa’s people had had some difficulty figuring out what was going on. Mussa, of course, had concluded it must be this LaFoote, who until now had only been an annoying ant, if that. And Mussa might not have been concerned, except that a number of CD-ROMs containing data on the explosives had been taken, apparently by Vefoures before he was killed. The data on them was supposedly technical — but who knew?
Interestingly, the disks had not shown up in England.
LaFoote back at the house — perhaps the disks had been there all along? The house had been searched but must be searched again.
And this LaFoote — even an ant could be annoying.
“Prepare information on Mr. LaFoote for a friend. Precise information,” Mussa told his caller. “And this time, be sure that it includes photographs.”
“It will,” said the caller.
“Have Vefoures’ house searched again.”
“We have been over it twice. There are no CD-ROMs or anything that might—”
“Have the house searched again,” said Mussa. “And this time they may take whatever they find, including the money — but the search shall be thorough. And there will be an additional reward if you find the disks.”
“I will do it myself.”
31
Johnny Bibleria paced around the conference room, walking the perimeter at a rapid pace. Every so often he glanced up at the numbers on the white board at the front of the room.
“Nothing is related,” he repeated. “Nothing.”
They were missing something basic.
“What information would make a murder worthwhile?” Rubens had asked him. It was an excellent question, Johnny thought — but not the sort that a cryptologist should ask. It wasn’t even something for a mathematician to contemplate. The answer involved morality or at least judgments separate from numbers. A mathematician needed a sequence.
Johnny stopped his pacing. He thought he saw part of a Fibonacci sequence in the updates of the weather site.
No.
Johnny Bib took one of the pens from the table and stepped toward the board. The key must be the change out of sequence, but the numbers were merely a digit or two off. He made a grid based on the days of the week, ran the numbers in a line, put them backward…
Maybe it was like a pointer in a codebook. Use this page…
If it was a pointer, then they could see who had accessed the site and follow that person to the relevant Web page.
Except that they didn’t have a record of the visits to the sites.
Johnny went back to the board. They were watching for another change on the weather site, hoping to see who accessed it and where the computer went from there. But that meant they were reacting, waiting. And there was no guarantee that they would be able to find anything useful if it did change.
There had to be a pattern
32
It sounded absurdly easy when Rubens outlined it — walk into the restroom, remove the old package, put in a new one.
But in real life, the fifty feet down the hall to the steps that led to the lavatory were treacherously long. Lia’s legs trembled beneath her long, African-style skirt. The muscles in her thighs and calves felt weak and her mouth horri bly dry.
There were soldiers posted along the walls and at the steps. Each man had a French-made FAMAS assault rifle, a smallish, odd-looking weapon nicknamed the bugle (or
She started to slip on one of the steps as she descended. She grabbed the railing, just barely keeping herself from falling off the step.
Two more soldiers stood outside the women’s room near the bottom of the steps. She put her hands on her scarf, hooking her thumbs beneath the fabric — it wasn’t an attempt to feign modesty or even hide her identity but rather to keep her hands from jerking wildly out of control.
