Spotting nothing suspicious, she unlocked the car and slid behind the wheel. It was a late-model silver Chrysler that her own mechanics had customized with a muscular turbocharged engine. Finding the laptop and the burner beneath the seat, she ripped off the burner‘s pristine plastic wrap.
Burners were disposable cell phones loaded with pre-paid minutes. As long as you didn‘t use them for too long, you were safe talking on them, and no one could use the SIM to triangulate your position as they could with a registered cell.
Fighting an urge to fire up the computer right there, she turned the key in the ignition, put the car in gear, and nosed out into traffic. She was no longer comfortable staying in one place too long; neither did she feel safe going back to the office or even her home.
Heading back across into Virginia, she drove aimlessly for close to an hour, after which time she could no longer control her curiosity. She had to find out what was on the thumb drive she‘d lifted off Jay‘s corpse. Did it hold the key to what was going on between NSA and Black River that, according to Stevenson, held all of the DoD in thrall? Why else would Noah and the NSA come after Jay and now her. She had to assume the DC motorcycle cop was bogus—that he was, in fact, either NSA or Black River. Stevenson had been terrified. The whole scenario chilled her to the marrow.
Passing through Rosslyn, she suddenly became aware that she was famished.
She couldn‘t remember the last time she‘d eaten, apart from whatever they‘d given her this morning in the hospital. Who could eat that stuff? More to the point, what kind of chef could concoct such tasteless, overcooked mush?
She turned onto Wilson Boulevard, drove past the Hyatt, and pulled over into a parking space several car-lengths from the entrance to the Shade Grown Café, a place she knew inside and out and thus felt safe in. Taking the laptop and the burner with her, she got out, locked the car, and hurried into the steamy interior. The smells of bacon and toast made her mouth water.
Slipping into a well-worn cherry-colored vinyl booth, she gave the plastic-wrapped menu a cursory once-over before ordering three eggs over easy, a double portion of bacon, and wheat toast. When the waitress asked if she wanted coffee, she said, ―Please. Cream on the side.‖
Alone at the Formica table, she opened the notebook so that the screen faced her and the wall behind her. While it was booting up, she bent down and extracted the thumb drive from the underwire section of her bra. The tiny electronic rectangle was warm and seemed to beat like a second heart. Using her thumb on the special reader, she logged in, then answered her three security questions. Finally on, she plugged the thumb drive into one of the USB ports on the left side of the computer. Switching to My Computer, she navigated to the portable drive that had appeared there, then double-clicked on it.
The screen went black, and for a moment she thought the drive had crashed the operating system. But then the screen started scrolling in lines of what looked like gibberish. There were no folders, no files, just this ever-scrolling series of letters, numbers, and symbols. The information was encrypted. That was just like the careful Jay.
At once she hit the ESCAPE key and was back at the My Computer screen.
Accessing the C drive, she opened the wireless access connections wizard.
Either the coffee shop was Wi-Fi–enabled or someplace close was because the wizard detected an open network. That was both good and bad. It meant she could get on the Web, but there were no network encryption safeguards.
Luckily, she‘d had all the Heartland lap-tops fitted with their own mobile encryption package among a host of other security measures, which in this case meant that even if someone hacked her ISP address they wouldn‘t be able to read the packets of information she sent and received; nor would they be able to locate her.
She pushed the laptop aside when her breakfast arrived. It would take some time for the proprietary Heartland deciphering software to analyze the data on the thumb drive. She uploaded the encrypted data and pressed the ENTER key, which started the program.
By the time she‘d mopped up the last of the third egg yolk with a wedge of buttered toast and the last of the bacon, she heard a soft chime. Almost choking on her final bite, she swigged down a mouthful of coffee and stacked her plates at the edge of the table.
Her forefinger hovered over the ENTER key for the tiniest of moments before depressing it. At once words began to flood across her screen, then marched down as the entire contents of the drive were revealed.
PINPRICKBARDEM, she read.
She couldn‘t believe it. Her eyes traveling over the scrolling lines read PINPRICKBARDEM over and over. The lines came to an end and she checked again.
The entire drive had been filled up with these fourteen letters. She broke down the letters into the most obvious words: Pin Prick Bar Dem. Then another: PinP Rick Bar Dem. She wrote down: Picture in Picture (on a digital TV?), Rick’s Bar (?), Democrat.
Online, she ran a quick Google check. There was a Rick‘s Bar in Chicago and one in San Francisco, an Andy & Rick‘s Bar in Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico, but there was no Rick‘s Bar anywhere in the district or the environs.
She scratched out what she had written. What on earth could those letters mean? she wondered. Were they yet another code? She was about to run them through the Heartland software program again when the sudden presence of a shadow at the periphery of her vision caused her to glance up.
Two NSA agents were staring at her through the window. As she slammed down the laptop‘s screen one of them opened the door to the coffee shop.
Benjamin Firth was riding his bottle of arakwith a vengeance when Willard strode into the surgery. Firth was up on the table, head bowed, swigging great mouthfuls of the fermented palm liquor with grim precision.
Willard stood looking at the doctor for a moment, remembering his father who drank himself into dementia and, finally, liver failure. It hadn‘t been pretty, and along the way there were serious bouts of the kind of lightning Jekyll-and-Hyde personality split that afflicted some alcoholics. After his father had bounced his head off a wall during one of these fits Willard, who was eight at the time, taught himself not to be afraid. He kept his baseball bat under his bed and the next time his father, stinking of booze, lunged at him, he swung the bat in a perfectly level arc and broke two of his ribs.
After that, his father never touched him again, neither in anger nor in affection. At the time, Willard thought he‘d gotten what he wanted, but later, after the old man died, he began to wonder whether he‘d injured himself along with his father.
With a grunt of disgust, he crossed the surgery, ripped the bottle out of Firth‘s hand, and shoved a small booklet into it. For a moment the doctor looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes as if he was trying to place Willard in his memory.
―Read it, Doc. Go ahead.‖
Firth glanced down and seemed surprised. ―Where‘s my arak?‖
―Gone,‖ Willard said. ―I brought you something better.‖