Into the Crossfire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  “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 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 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 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 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, though. There’s a lot of work with the military, it’s a big field.”

  “State Department?”

  “The State Department has its own internal translators, a really good service. They don’t outsource anything.”

  “What about industrial espionage?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Do you get translations—texts—that someone could make money knowing? Some industrial secrets?”

  Nicole was shaking her head. “We’re too young a company for that. We do good work, but any corporation that had industrial secrets someone would be willing to steal at the point of a gun—well, they wouldn’t send them to us. I guarantee a certain degree of confidentiality, there’s a non-disclosure clause in the contract, and my firewalls are pretty good. But any corporation that entrusted me with truly valuable secrets, well, they’d be so foolish that presumably just about anyone could access them. Someday I’m going to set up the company to guarantee a maximum degree of confidentiality, including encryption, but that kind of software costs a lot of money and I’d have to up my price considerably. Now is not the time to do that.”

  Silence, male cogs whirring.

  Finally the lieutenant stirred. “All this banking stuff. Is any of it—” his cell rang and he held up a finger. He listened, grunted, closed the cell. He looked at Nicole. “My men are in place, your father’s protected.”

  Nicole slumped, letting out a long breath. “Thank you.”

  Sam’s warm hand on her shoulder reminded her that she was protected, too.

  “Hey.” The tech who’d been dusting for prints lifted something that looked like a thick plastic string. “Look what I found. Guy must have lost it off his utility belt.”

  The men turned to look. Sam’s hand tightened on her shoulder.

  “Jesus,” Harry breathed. It was the first word he’d spoken since coming into the room.

  “What?” Nicole looked around at the grim male faces. “What is it?”

  “A goddamned restraint,” Sam said, the words falling out of his mouth like stones.

  “A what?”

  “A restraint.” He turned, eyes burning into hers. “He was planning on handcuffing you.”

  “Why would he—” Nicole began, then stopped. There were all sorts of reasons an intruder would be willing to handcuff her, none of them good.

  Sam nodded. “Yeah. So let’s fucking figure out what the fucker wanted so fucking badly, so we can fucking go get him.”

  Nicole sat back, a little shocked at the idea that Sam had foiled a plan that not only included guns but also included handcuffs. And, if they included handcuffs, it probably also included pain.

  A part of her also noticed that Sam’s language deteriorated badly when he was stressed.

  “You seem to do a lot of banking stuff,” the lieutenant said again, breaking the silence.

  Nicole nodded. “Yes, we do have a great deal of economic expertise.”

  “Could there be anything someone would be willing to kill for in those bank reports? Sometimes a lot of money can be involved in these things. Maybe someone was looking at losing millions.”

  Nicole was shaking her head before he finished. “I can definitely rule that out. Most of the economic texts we translate are to fulfil legal requirements, for board meetings and such. In Europe, the record usually must be in the language of the meeting and English, so foreign shareholders can read it. No one would send us information that would involve a lot of money. We’re simply too small and too young for that kind of data. Our work is strictly routine.”

  Silence.

  “Okay. I think we might be done here.” The lieutenant was staring at her, face closed like a fist. He blew out a breath. “Can you send me a copy of everything you’ve received over the past three days? No, make that a week.”

  Nicole hid her wince. It was borderline unethical, her clients definitely would not want her to be sending out their documents. But this was the police, and they certainly wouldn’t be broadcasting them. “Yes, of course, though most are in foreign languages.”

  The lieutenant looked pained. “Yeah, that will be part of the fun.” He stood. “I think we’ve done everything we can here. Jansen—” he indicated the young fingerprint tech, “will be taking your prints for comparison purposes. Will we find anyone else’s?”

  Would he? Nicole thought about it. “I don’t know. I actually don’t think so. The last client in here was Maxwell Rubens, the software guy, to discuss an ongoing contract for translations of his programs into Chinese. But he was here ten days ago, and the cleaning service has been in here at least three times since then. So if you find prints that aren’t mine, they might be Mr. Rubens’s. And anyway, as Sam said, the intruder wore gloves.”

  “We’ll check anyway.” The lieutenant gave her his card. “If you remember anything, anything at all, call me. Day or night.”

  Nicole understood very well that she was getting special treatment because of Mike. No way would a botched burglary, where nothing was actually stolen, be getting all this attention. Not to mention a police lieutenant giving her his private cell phone number and authorization to call him day or night if she needed something.r />
  She put the card in her purse and held out her hand. “I cannot begin to thank you enough, Lieutenant.”

  His grasp was firm and dry. “No problem.” He nodded. “Sam, Harry. Mike, you’re with me.”

  A source of energy left the room with him, the medic, the young tech guy, and Mike. Nicole felt suddenly drained, exhausted beyond measure. She swayed slightly, then felt Sam’s strong arms go around her. She leaned into him, into his strength, leaning her forehead against his chest for just a second, inhaling the scent that had been imprinted on the primitive part of her brain all last night.

  Harry cleared his throat and she straightened, suddenly ashamed of her weakness, but Sam held her tightly before she could pull away.

  He spoke over her head to Harry. “I’m taking her home. You look after things here.”

  Harry nodded.

  “And check our security cameras, I’ll bet you anything we caught him as he was running away.”

  “Yeah. I’ll freeze a couple of frames and e-mail them to the SDPD. They’ve got facial recognition software, just like the FBI. If the guy’s in the system, we’ll get him. I’m on it.” Harry closed the door softly behind him. They were alone.

  Sam tightened his embrace and bent down to her ear. “Let’s go home, honey.” His voice was so low, she felt the vibration in his chest more than heard the words. His breath washed over her ear and she broke out in goosebumps.

  She pulled away and looked up at him. At that strong, unhandsome face. Of course she was going home with him. There was no question of that. He’d come for her in her hour of need, without hesitation. He’d saved her life. In some important, primordial way, a way that was blood and bone deep, she now belonged to him.

  Chapter 10

  Escaping hadn’t been hard. For someone who’d graduated SERE with only a busted shoulder to show for it, getting out of the fancy building with the pretty, pretend security had been a cakewalk.

  Up the fire escape, and up onto the roof. It was night and the satellites that passed weren’t equipped with infrared cameras. That was for war zones.