Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

“You haven’t heard anything from him?”

“Not a word. Tesla will fill you in.”

“You won’t be going with me?”

“I’m supposed to hold down the fort here.”

“Right. You’re not supposed to leave the lab, are you?”

“Hey,” he said, smiling expansively and waving his arms at the interior of the van. “I brought it with me.”

On the whole, Pierre Crane thought he had not done badly. He was alive. He was-if no closer to the secret of who had financed Sikari’s education or the riddle of the Scorpion-at least closer to the woman who was in some way entwined in the Scorpion’s life. Who wanted him dead or wanted to use him. The woman who was, quite possibly, his equal. He had acquitted himself well in bed. Casanova, he had heard, had been, if not an ugly man, a man of no particular physical distinction.

He assessed the danger at the moment and found it minimal. Their lovemaking had proven that. And besides he knew himself to be more than a match for Jana physically. He was an expert in several forms of unarmed combat, after all, and he was confident that it wouldn’t come down to a matter of firearms. Hadn’t he been with her when she’d disposed of her pistol before entering the terminal at Heathrow? Hadn’t he sat beside her on the long flight and accompanied her in the taxi directly to the hotel? And she was naked now…

He was wondering what she might shed on the story of the three young South Asians staked to an education and start-up capital, what he thought of as his “anomaly story.” The story of the Scorpion. As a journalist, he honored the maxim “follow the money.” The Scorpion raised money, had money, but it galled Crane that, after all these months, he was still no closer to knowing who exactly the man was. That he was a man of no particular allegiance was a given; such men operated across national borders. Money and the economy were global, so crime was global as well. Perhaps he should be paying less attention to figures of political intrigue, more to those of organized crime. Organized crime had the networks international terrorism needed, the smuggling routes, the purveyors of forged documents, the weapons and money-laundering connections. Money moved with lightning speed and money begat more money, the kind of wealth that could build palaces in the desert, entire cities like Dubai. Whose money was behind such rapid development? Oil money, yes, but he had heard tales of the wealth of powerful Russian oligarchs.

Crane heard the water running in the bathroom.

He thought again of Jana’s body.

And thoughts of the Scorpion slipped from his mind.

Wiki Chang flicked on an overhead light. Carson blinked, fluttering her eyelids until her irises adjusted to the bright fluorescence. The interior of the black van, that’s where she was-a van speeding toward a military airbase-and she was lying on a cot, not unlike the gurney on which she’d escaped from the hospital, except this one was bolted to the wall opposite the computer screens.

“Did I-?”

“You tried to take a nap standing up. I caught you before you fell and carried you here. I’m stronger than I look.” Chang’s face flamed scarlet. “Not that you’re heavy, that’s not what I meant, uh, I hope you don’t mind.”

Really, Carson thought, he was totally adorable.

“No, no, don’t get up,” he insisted when she tried to sit. “You should be lying down. I researched your post-op care, but having your chart really helps. In about twenty minutes, you’ll need your pain meds. I’ve got those ready. Your antibiotics will be-”

“I’m sure you’ve got it under control,” Carson said. “Please, go back to work. You said the disk was encrypted-”

“A real bear.”

“You haven’t been able to decode it?” Carson didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious, so she tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice. Everyone said Wiki Chang was the best, but if Langer, a hobbyist, and Tampa PD hadn’t been able to crack it, and his pal at Homeland Security, a pro, had already given it a whirl…

“No, I’ve got the disk decoded. See?” As if the other three monitors were only for show, Chang held up a slim laptop, tilting the screen until she nodded her approval.

“I’m not even sure what I’m looking at.”

“It’s a ZIP file, an archive containing a bunch of other files. I opened it using ‘fcrackzip,’ this terrific brute-force ZIP cracking program for Linux. I mean, it really didn’t have a terribly complicated password and even if it had been way more complex, there are tons of cryptanalysis tools I could have used. The encryption in ZIP files just isn’t all that good.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Carson said.

Chang hurried on, pointing at the screen with an index finger for emphasis. “Now the coded files are all picture files, see? They were taken by a Nikon. Except for this one. This one’s pretty cute. It’s not a photo-it’s a diagram, see, a blueprint of a hydroelectric dam. I matched it to the architectural drawings and schematics for the Baglihar dam project.”

“In Jammu and Kashmir.”

“Right. Good old J &K, but see this? The blueprints have been altered.”

“Altered?”

“Added to. These look like plans to set up a heavy-water reactor at the core of the dam. In a kind of subterranean chamber.”

Carson couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. “But that could be what we’ve been looking for, what Sindhu Power and Electric was shipping overseas, the parts for the heavy-water reactor. Does it say when the reactor will go online? Does it give a date? We’ve got to get in touch with Middleton.”

“Hold on, Connie. The plans-the alterations-to accommodate the heavy-water reactor… I’ve been looking at them, and excuse me, but they’re either bullshit or they’re incomplete. The way they are now, they’re like a high-class con, a way to justify some incredible expenditures, but they won’t actually do the trick. There’s a reason the patent for this stuff was applied for, but never granted. This whole ‘copper bracelet’ technology seems to be built around faulty assumptions.”

“Copper bracelet?”

“Yeah, because of the shape of the copper pipes,” he said.

“Okay, so the reactor won’t actually go online?” Light glinted off Chang’s oversized lenses and Carson shifted her head to get a clearer look at the screen.

“Doesn’t seem it will,” the young man said. “There could be a way to fix it, but nobody seems to have the technology to do that at this point. In any case, there’s no heavy-water generator at the dam… Connie, this whole thing doesn’t smell right.”

“You think the files are some kind of trap, like the one set in the office?”

“I think this disk is more than it seems.”

“What do you mean?”

“The picture files, take a look at them.” Chang flashed a series of images on the laptop screen.

Carson would have shrugged if her arm and shoulder had functioned. “It looks like an office, the office at Sindhu.” The image of the place was seared on her retinas, along with a picture of Jean-Marc, lying there, eyes staring blankly into space.

Chang said, “Do they look like anything you’d want to encrypt? A picture of a desk, a chair, a table?”

“Maybe they were just keeping them on the same disk.”

“Maybe. Or they might be something else. I mean, why put these innocent-looking photos in with a file that’s so complex? I decided there must be another layer, beneath the images.”

“But how would you find out if-”

“Steganography,” Chang said. “It can embed information into a file, but getting it back isn’t just a matter of running a simple cracking program-you have to figure out how it was done, because there are so many different ways. I tried a couple of approaches while you were out of it, and I finally got a handle on it with the Digital Invisible Ink Toolkit, and there’s definitely embedded information in this picture. So I’ve got it, but it’s encrypted, too.”