Into the Crossfire (25 page)

software, maybe come up with a hit." Sam frowned. "Come to think of it, my

security cameras just outside the door fogged up around seven thirty and then a

few minutes before nine. I didn't think anything at the time, but he could have

been using a--"

"Laser light," Harry and Mike said at the same time.

The lieutenant grunted. "An operator."

"Oh yeah," Sam answered. "An operator. Got in and out real smooth."

The lieutenant rested his elbows on his knees and fixed Nicole with a weary

gaze. "So, we've got a pro breaking into your office, Ms. Pearce. What was he

looking for?"

Nicole shook her head. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. "I have no

idea, but he was definitely looking for something. He kept saying, 'Where is it?'"

She cleared her throat delicately. "Actually, he kept saying, 'Where the fuck is it?'

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I have no idea what he was talking about. I tried to say so, but he just ground the

gun more tightly against my head."

All the men looked at her temple. "It's okay," she said to the room. "Just

some torn skin, nothing serious."

Sam closed his eyes in pain.

"So, the intruder was looking for something. For what? He didn't come to

steal those pretty knickknacks you've got, he was looking for something specific.

What?" the lieutenant prodded.

Nicole shrugged her shoulders, baffled. "I can't imagine. I don't think he

was after the watercolors or the silver." It was true that she'd decorated the office

very nicely, with two or three good pieces of family furniture, a little collection of

solid sterling pen holders and an Art Deco leather desk set, all attractive pieces

without, however, any real resale value. The watercolors were lovely, but they

were by her mother, who'd been talented but had never exhibited. They had zero

value on the open market. Nothing in the room had any real value if fenced, except

maybe her desk. But who would enter an office and steal a desk?

"Has anything been taken?" the lieutenant asked.

Nicole looked around her office and shook her head.

"Do you feel like checking that?"

Would her legs support her? Yes, they would, she found as she rose. Sam

rose right along with her and shadowed her as she walked the perimeter of the

room, opening drawers, carefully scrutinizing every surface. Sam stayed so close

she could feel his body heat.

Finally, she made it back to the lieutenant.

"Okay. Everything's where it should be. It looks like he didn't have time..."

Nicole's voice died away as she looked at her computer, head tilted. She kept her

desktop on a separate table, where she worked, and kept only her laptop on the

desk, where she dealt with clients. She used a Knoll office chair on wheels when

at her desktop computer, and it was pulled away from the table. "That's not right."

All the men looked at her.

She walked over and touched the chair back, a foot from the table. "I am

absolutely positive I pushed the chair in under the desk before leaving. I always

do. I like leaving the office in order. Do you think the man was after something in

my computer?" Nicole looked up at Sam, then at the lieutenant.

Sam was already settling into the chair, reaching down to press the button

that would turn the processor on. He pressed it and waited, frowning. He turned

his head up to Nicole. Everyone had gathered around her computer. "I think he

trashed your computer, Nicole."

"No." She pulled her portable hard disk drive from her purse. "I use

portable hard disk drives and always take them home with me, together with my

laptop and backup files on a flash drive. I make my livelihood from my computer

and I never leave anything behind in the office. My computer has some valuable

software and can deal with a fairly broad range of alphabets, so I'd hate to lose

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that. Plus, most of our contracts contain a confidentiality clause, so I make sure

there's a minimal degree of security."

At the word confidential, the lieutenant, Sam, Mike, Harry, the fingerprint

tech and the medic pointed their faces at her monitor like hound dogs flushing

birds.

"Fire it up," Sam growled.

Nicole slid the portable hard disk drive into the designated slot and pressed

the button to turn on the processor. There was utter silence in the room as the

computer pinged and whirred its way to the home page of Wordsmith.

"Password," she said, and the men averted their eyes while she entered the

password to access her files. She had her files organized into clients, languages

and translators. The men stared at the screen as if it could render up the secrets of

the universe.

"What are we looking at here, ma'am?" the lieutenant finally asked.

Nicole gently nudged Sam with her hip and slid into the chair when he

stood. "Okay. What Wordsmith does is translate texts, from ten languages into ten

languages. We work from English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian,

Russian, Chinese, Polish and Hungarian into the same languages." She thought of

Aidan Berry, who'd been one of her best friends at the Geneva School of

Translation, had fallen in love with a painter in Reykjavik and used to work at an

Icelandic bank, which, like all the other Icelandic banks, had gone belly-up. "We

also would offer economic translations from Icelandic into English, if Iceland still

had an economy."

She sat back, pleased. Wordsmith, her baby. It was pretty special. "Well,

there you have it. It's a fairly straightforward business."

Six utterly blank male expressions. "What?"

The lieutenant pinched the bridge of his nose. "Could you sort of run that

by me again, ma'am?" He nodded his head at the screen. "Show us what we're

seeing? I can't make any sense out of what's on that screen, and we need to make

sense of it. Maybe a man was willing to commit murder for what's in your

computer."

He was right. If the intruder had been at her computer, he'd gone to a lot of

trouble to get something. And if he was after something...she drew in a shocked

breath, swiveling her chair around to face the men. "Oh my God. If he wanted

something from my computer, he didn't get it because the hard disk was in my

purse. That means--"

"He's coming back," Sam said harshly. Nicole looked at the grave faces

surrounding her. They'd come to this conclusion well before she had. She twisted

her hands in her lap, suddenly icy cold.

This was not over.

Sam laid large, warm hands on her shoulders. "He's not getting to you

again, though, honey. I can guarantee you that." She looked up at him. He wasn't

smiling at her reassuringly, trying to make her feel better. He looked grim. And

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deadly. Which actually did make her feel better. "You're coming home with me

and you're staying with me until this fu--asshole is caught. We straight on that?"

Sudden panic had slowed her thought processes, but one thing was clear. "I

can't leave my father, certainly not if he is in any danger. I simply can't do it."

Sam shifted until he could see her eyes. "Someone might be coming after

you. You don't want to take that danger to your father, do you? If this guy is

willing to hurt you, believe me, he won't balk at hurting your father."

Oh God, no, he wouldn't. Nicole remembered clearly the cold command in

her attacker's voice, the menace that emanated off him like vapor off ice, the utter

steadiness of his movements. He wasn't a petty thief, frightened and in over his

head. An operator, Sam had said. By that he meant a man used to violence. Nicole

was not going to lead him to her father, but...

"He'll need protection." Just the thought of someone hurting her father

made her stomach clench, cold sweat break out between her shoulder blades. "I

can't possibly leave him alone to face danger."

"Mike?" Sam pivoted slightly to look his friend in the face.

Mike turned to the lieutenant. "Lieutenant?"

The lieutenant sighed. "Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Okay, I'll post a couple of

men around Ms. Pearce's house. No one will get to her father."

"Triple shifts," Sam said.

The lieutenant winced. "Yeah. Christ, I don't know where I'll get six men

from, but okay, I'll try, at least. I can't guarantee more than a couple of days,

though. Couple days nothing happens, that's it, you're on your own." He shrugged.

"Sorry."

"I'll provide security after that," Sam said. "I know some good men."

Bodyguards, around the clock, indefinitely. Oh God, how could she afford

this? Nicole balanced possible danger against certain bankruptcy and turned to

Sam. Before she could open her mouth, though, Sam squeezed her shoulder. "I'll

take care of it," he said softly.

The lieutenant had been speaking quietly into his cell. He flipped it closed

and looked at Mike and Sam. "Six men, rotation of eight hours, for two days. Best

I can do. They'll be in place inside half an hour."

"I'll pick it up after that," Sam said.

Nicole started to object, out of principle, when the lieutenant interrupted.

"Now that we've got that out of the way, let's see what the guy could have been

looking for. So, show me how your system works, ma'am."

Nicole switched gears. Wordsmith, her baby. The best way to describe it

was to show it.

Nicole went to her files and clicked on the folders. "This is the way my

business operates. A client sends a text to be translated. The client would have

contacted me beforehand and we would have agreed on a quote. The price varies

in relation to the degree of technical difficulty, the rarity of the combination-Dutch into Chinese is going to cost you a lot of money, for instance--and the

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urgency. So when I receive the text, the client has already been given a quote and I

know exactly how much the file he sent me is worth. If it's from Spanish or French

into English, chances are I'll do it, though lately the workload has increased, so I

send what I can't handle to a friend of mine at the Monterey Institute of

Languages. Everything else is sent to one of the translators in my network. I

negotiate the price, receive the text, forward it to the appropriate translator, who

will have the requisite languages and field of expertise, I take care of the billing

and client relations. For that I take a fifteen percent commission. It's not a huge

business; it's only a year old, but it's growing."

The lieutenant grunted. "Show me some of the files. Starting from, say,

three days ago. We don't know where the guy came from, maybe he had to travel

to get here."

"He was American, though," Sam said quietly. "No doubt about that.

Probably ex-military."

"American." The lieutenant nodded. "So--let's go back three days. How

many files?"

Nicole had a chronology function and went back to June 26. She spoke with

her eyes glued to the monitor. "Okay, over the past three days I've received

twenty-two files. Two hundred fifty pages of a travel guide to St. Petersburg from

Russian into English." She clicked the file open and the men stared at the Cyrillic

text. "My Russian isn't very strong, but the title of this is St. Petersburg, Jewel of

the North. It was sent to a professor of Russian at the University of Chicago who

rounds out his salary by doing translations."

She clicked on another folder. "This is a hundred twenty pages of text that

is an analysis of the German bond market, to be translated into English. I sent that

off to the appropriate colleague. And here's a text from Chinese into English,

which costs a premium because good Chinese-into-English translators are rare. A

survey of the banking sector in China. This is the project for the enlargement of

the Port of Marseilles. I'll take that one myself, the Marseille Port Authority is an

old client of mine, I worked for them just out of school, before applying to the

UN." She did some calculating in her head. "In all, a total of almost four thousand

pages."

"What came in today?" Mike asked.

Nicole pointed. "Since this morning, eighty pages of a novel, Spanish into

English, the publisher is hoping for a sale to foreign markets at the Frankfurt Book

Fair in October. The publicity for a trade fair in Buenos Aires, a short treatise on

Napa wines to be translated into French, an Italian paper on microsurgery and a

treatise in Polish on the miracles of Pope John Paul the Second. Tomorrow I

should receive a technical manual on DVD recorders, Japanese to English--that's

going to cost them--which I will send to a student at MIT." Nicole sat back.

"That's it."

"Has anything else arrived since the last time you looked?"

She leaned forward, typing quickly. "I don't know...nope. The only thing

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that has arrived is a copy of a contract and an e-mail from a girlfriend in Geneva.

Who has probably broken up with her boyfriend again."

Silence. She could almost hear the men thinking.

"Do you have any military contracts for translation? Come to think of it, the

military has dealings all over the world. They might outsource some translation

stuff."

"No. I'd have to apply for a security clearance for myself and my

collaborators. I've thought about it, a lot, but have never gotten around to it. I will,