Cara Black - AL05 - Murder in Clichy

He nodded and pressed a button under a window ledge. A door opened. “This leads to the old kitchen. And the back stairs.”

She put her hand out for the disk, sensed his reluctance to give it up, but he handed it over. She slid into the passage and the door clicked shut behind her. Darkness, dust, and the odor of old wood. She heard voices, indistinct, absorbed by the carpet, and what she took for a cell phone conversation near the door about the chauffeur’s return instructions. Her phone vibrated, and she answered, moving away from the panel so she couldn’t be heard.

“Mademoiselle, Monsieur Verlet wonders when you can discuss the project,” said the secretary from Olf.

She looked down at her jeans. She had to change.

“Say two p.m., would that work for him?” she asked.

“See you then,” the secretary said.

Once outside on boulevard Malesherbes she caught a taxi to Leduc Detective.

Inside the office, René’s desk sat undisturbed since last night. She opened the armoire, pushed aside a streetcleaner’s jumpsuit, Agent Provocateur silk underwear, Italian jeans, and retro boots. In the back she found the black suit, vintage Dior, discovered in a dépôt-vente consignment shop without a tear or slipped seam in it. A classic even to the skirt’s knee-length hem.

She stepped into black sling back heels threaded with bubblegum pink ribbon. Clattering down the stairs, she wondered where René was.

She’d try him later. She ran for the bus.

In the Olf foyer, she signed in at the security post and caught her breath.

Upstairs, Aimée smiled at the secretary, a middle-aged woman with a swollen cheek.

“Root canal,” the secretary explained. “Monsieur Verlet’s in conference but can spare a brief word.”

Or at least that’s what Aimée thought she said.

“But we had an appointment.”

“Some bigwigs appeared—you know how that goes!” she said. “Please, go into the conference room.”

A word? The man was vociferous. He hailed from Perigord and liked to talk.

“Monsieur Verlet . . .” she said, peeking in to the room. “Your secretary said to come in.”

Several men, sitting around a long walnut table, looked up.

“Aaah , Mademoiselle Leduc, glad you dropped by,” he said.

Dropped by? They had an appointment, she wanted to get his signature on a revised contract. And a check .

“Let me introduce you to the board, Mademoiselle Leduc.”

Thank God she’d worn the Dior.

Talk about a power enclave. Most of the men wore the uniform: pinstriped suits, blue shirts, red ties. They emitted a Grandes Ecoles air. Government and corporate types. Graphs and charts lined the wall and someone was giving a presentation. She looked closer: Holdings of PetroVietnam.

PetroVietnam? Might that connect to the Cao Dai?

“Tell us about your work,” Verlet said, “if you don’t mind. Just a quick summary of how your computer security could work for us. I was impressed with your new ideas for the project.”

Why hadn’t he prepared her?

“Mademoiselle Leduc, we’re ready when you are.”

She hesitated, wishing she could have planned a presentation in advance.

“I don’t mind telling you,” Verlet said, grinning, “I had to nudge our board’s thinking toward this new security project but as I told the gentlemen, safeguards and state-of-the art security are demanded today.”

He needed her to dazzle them. Sell them. Convince them they’d make a good choice picking Leduc Detective on his recommendation. When she’d spoken with him last week, he’d been cordial and reasonable. Maybe this had happened too fast for Verlet to warn her.

“Of course, Monsieur Verlet, delighted.” She smiled, figuring she’d throw technical jargon at them, get Verlet’s signature and then beg off on the ground of another appointment. “We’re always thrilled when clients want to understand how our system enhances and builds on their own security.”

She pulled out the proposal, noted the key points. She began, “Gentleman, the web offers unique advantages and security challenges—”

“Would you be so kind as to cut to the heart of why we need your firm, Mademoiselle?” said a white-haired man looking up through reading glasses perched on his nose. “Specifically regarding computer hackers who could explore our data and create a channel to download it?”

Great. One of the elite with a computer attitude, and a bit of knowledge. The type who took a course and knew it all.

“How technical do you want it, Monsieur . . .”

“ Monsieur le Ministre Langan,” he said. “When our eyes glaze over might be a good place to stop.”

Nice. Couldn’t Verlet have warned her?

“You posed an excellent question, Monsieur, but if I may backtrack and give some historical perspective, you might understand more of why we do what we do and its impact.”

A few looks of interest came from the men at the table. Langan sat back in his leather chair and crossed his arms.

“If someone tells you they can put an extra security guard on the server, well, they can’t,” she said, walking toward him and pouring herself a glass of water from the carafe. “I assume you’re referring to that when you mentioned exploring data?”

“Something like that,” he said.

A hard sell, this minister in the tailored double-breasted custom made jacket. The others sat and watched.

She smiled and prayed the run on her thigh hadn’t traveled further down her black pantyhose.

“Cyberthreats are really the vulnerabilities, potential open doors in software, that hackers trawl for. All a hacker needs in order to shut down your system is a single Web-connected computer without proper security software; a fourteen-year-old’s desktop Mac, a university’s e-mail server, or a government ministry’s laptop. We see it all the time. Using e-mail software or other applications on an unprotected computer, hackers can bog down your Internet operations with ‘distributed denial of service’ attacks that generate more traffic than the network can handle. Meanwhile, they hack into a vulnerable system undetected in the mass confusion.”

She paused, took a sip of water. Wondering if she’d scored any points yet. But she was telling the truth. And if they didn’t like it, they’d let her know.

Her eyes rested on the PetroVietnam graph of profit and earnings. The connection with the Cao Dai was probably a coincidence; she must be paranoid. Just because there was a Vietnamese connection didn’t mean. . . .

“We watch, warn and share information. Not to mention continual updating and monitoring. And your system has not only firewall protection in place but a backup in the event of a Web attack.”

“And if the firewall is breached, and the back-up?” Langan interrupted.

“Automatic alarms inform us of any attack, monsieur,” she said. “I doubt they’d breach our firewall before we discovered and patched or disarmed the attack.”

“ Bon, your firm guarantees this?”

“Of course, that’s what we do 24/7, Monsieur.”

Verlet stood and smiled. Was that relief on his face?

“Mademoiselle Leduc, we appreciate this and don’t want to inconvenience you any more,” he said. “ Merci. ”

She took her cue and left. Considering her sweaty palms, it was a good thing she didn’t have to shake anyone’s hand. She leaned against the wall in the video surveillance room and waited for her heart to slow to a normal beat.

A knock sounded on the door. Verlet with the verdict? So quick? She took a deep breath and opened it.

“Oui?”

One of the men from the conference room, all six feet plus of him, stood before her with a copy of Le Monde tucked under his arm. Early forties, brushed back black hair; his pinstriped suit didn’t disguise his muscular frame.