9
Briargate Subdivision, Colorado Springs, Colorado
“Hi, baby,” Joe said as Eileen opened her eyes. The good smell of coffee filled the air. He was standing in the doorway wearing sweatpants and a ragged T-shirt and he held a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. “The coffee is for you.”
“You’re calling me baby,” Eileen groaned. “I hate that.” She rolled over in bed and stretched.
“I’ve been up all night,” Joe said. He sat on the edge of the bed and carefully handed her the hot mug as she sat up. “By the way, have I told you that you are absolutely beautiful when you wake up?”
Eileen grimaced and took the coffee. A glorious mouthful lit a warm fire in her stomach and radiated in all directions. “Ahh. That’s good. Have I told you how gorgeous you are when you stay up all night?”
“That deserves a kiss,” Joe said, and leaned in to capture one. Eileen balanced the coffee mug and kissed him thoroughly, knowing that she wanted this man, this morning, forever. She almost said so, just like that, and then she couldn’t.
Joe hesitated, as though he were going to say something, then he didn’t. Eileen caught a sudden flash of Teddy Shaw, dead forever, and a sudden bleakness filled her soul. She had told Joe she loved him over a year ago, the first time they had slept together. He’d said he loved her too. That was the last time they’d said the words to each other, and Eileen couldn’t figure out why. She wanted to hear the words from him. Maybe he wanted to hear the words from her. But she was afraid, afraid that a cop wife wasn’t what any man wanted, particularly now that she was a cop who’d killed a man.
“Let me tell you about Jim Leetsdale,” Joe said, leaning back from her. His dark green eyes were grave, as though he’d been reading her thoughts.
“He’s my homicide,” Eileen said, taking a quick gulp of coffee and glad to be on safer ground.
“I figured. Well, the guy had an okay system as far as security goes. He used PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, as an encryption method.”
“Which is?”
“A public domain encryption scheme. The guy who created it put it out on the Net and the government went after him. Said that he was hurting national security, or whatever,” Joe snorted. “They don’t like it because it’s unbreakable.”
“Except to you?” Eileen asked.
“Oh, I can’t break it either,” Joe laughed. “Unbreakable in the classic sense, as in un-freaking-breakable.”
“So how’d you break it?”
“He wrote the encryption key down on one of his Zip disks,” Joe grinned. “He scratched it on the back.”
Eileen put the mug between her knees and clapped her hands, grinning.
“So next I looked at his files, then I looked at his Zip disks, and then I did some thinking, then I looked some more,” Joe continued, scratching his uncombed hair. He rubbed his eyes, which were tired and red. “Something made this guy get whacked by people who wanted him to look like a suicide. So maybe I found something.”
“I’m all ears,” Eileen said, finishing her coffee.
“I found some pictures,” Joe said. He scratched an armpit. His face flushed a little in embarrassment. “Girl pictures.”
“Oh,” Eileen said, frowning. “Like pornography?”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Like pornography. Not too bad, really, girlie pictures like you’d see in a magazine.”
“So what’s significant about girlie pictures?” Eileen asked.
“That’s what I wanted to know,” Joe said, brightening. “You can go on the Net and find any pictures you want, anytime day or night. Why bother storing data images away when you can look at them for free? Plus, storing girlie pictures is a good way to get fired. We had some people get fired that way out at Schriever Air Base. They were storing dirty pictures on government equipment.”
“A no-no,” Eileen murmured.
“A big firable no-no,” Joe said. “Plus this guy had these images stored three times, on two hard disks and one Zip disk.”
“Three times?”
“Three times, same images.”
“Can I see them?” Eileen asked, looking for her clothes.
“No,” Joe said. “You shouldn’t. Waste of time.” He flushed again. “Besides, they’re—well, they’re girlie pictures.”
Eileen put her mug down and swarmed out of the sheets. She thumped into Joe’s chest and knocked him backward on the bed. Kissing him, she smelled all the work of the night in his breath and on his body. He was sweaty and unwashed and his breath was stale, and she didn’t care.
“You are such a gentleman, Joe Tanner,” she said. “Thinking that I shouldn’t be seeing girlie pictures.” Joe grinned underneath her and began caressing her naked body.
“Stop this, because I’ll make love to you again and forget everything I want to tell you.”
Eileen put on a pout and flounced out of bed.
“Follow me to the shower, then,” she ordered, “and tell me why I shouldn’t see these pictures.”
“Okay,” Joe said amiably, following her to his bathroom, watching her with an unabashed smile of appreciation. “But I’ll have to explain what a digital picture is. You ready?”
“I’m ready,” Eileen said, turning on the shower.
“Good. Okay then, each picture that you see is composed of a grid of pixels. Each pixel, or point on the picture, is a color. The color is stored on the computer as a digital code—you know, ones and zeros that tell the computer what color to display on the screen. All the pixels make up a picture of colors and you have Wanda displaying all her charms. Right?”
“Right.”
“Okay, then, next interesting point. Color codes only take up part of a computer word. Colors are easy. Therefore in a picture map, each word is a color, which takes up only a part of the word, and a bunch of extra space.”
“He put stuff in that extra space,” Eileen said, cupping her hand to test the water. Still cold.
“Excellent! You’re so quick,” Joe said, clapping his hands. “This isn’t new, of course. People have been hiding data in pictures for a long time, ever since the Net made picture transmission possible. Once I realized these pictures were valuable to the dead guy, what’s his name—”
“Leetsdale,” Eileen said.
“Leetsdale. Once I realized he’d stored them multiple times, it was a matter of dumping the data hidden within the words.”
“How’d you do that?”
“I wrote a little program,” Joe said modestly. “Took me a few hours but I did it. Now comes the interesting part.” He paused and looked at her with a smile.
“The numbers look like simulation points.”
“Simulation points?”
“Yup. My field, simulations. Now I’m sure another programmer could have figured it out eventually, but I saw it immediately. Simulation points, each one time-marked and set for a geographic location. Looks to me like maybe a traffic simulation, or a weather simulation. I’ll know by tomorrow, maybe, or the day after.”
“Wow,” Eileen said slowly. “Why tomorrow? Not that I’m pushing, of course. You need to sleep today?” She put a hand on his arm, feeling like she’d just insulted him. Joe, to her relief, didn’t appear to be insulted at all. The shower, forgotten, began putting out a cloud of steam.
“No way, I just need to catch about three or four hours is all,” he said. “The reason I’ll know tomorrow is that I need to get out to Schriever with this data and put it through our big simulator.”
“Will they let you do that?” Eileen asked.
“They won’t know about it,” Joe laughed. “You know Nelson, he doesn’t really care what we do. Nobody else will be around. We’re in between war games right now, and I’m improving the simulation speed anyway.”
“Okay,” Eileen said. “Nothing else in the files? No confessions, love letters, anything?”
“Nothing,” Joe said. “Just some e-mail from his wife, over a year ago, which he saved. You going to g
et in? Can I get in too?”
“This is not efficient,” Eileen smiled, adjusting the water temperature. “We take twice as long this way.”
“But I always get that long, gorgeous back of yours completely clean,” Joe said innocently, stripping off his shirt. Eileen stepped into the shower and let the water cover her. In the few seconds before Joe crowded in next to her and coherent thought was lost, she thought about Leetsdale and the care he took to hide whatever it was he was working on. The next thread she had to follow was to find Krista Lewis, whoever she was.
Great Falls, Virginia
“Eileen!” Lucy Giometti said. “It’s so good to hear from you.”
“You too,” Eileen said. “And how is Hank? Sleeping okay?”
“Sure,” Lucy lied brightly. “Sleeping like an angel. And I’m in such good shape that Sports Illustrated is using me as a swimsuit model this year.”
“Well, of course,” Eileen said. “They called me first, though. I had to turn them down so they called you.”
“Why did you turn them down?”
“I hated that leopard thong bikini.”
“Oh, you kill me,” Lucy laughed. She rubbed Fancy’s ears and waved at Hank. He’d had a good night’s sleep last night, the first one in days. At dawn Lucy had found a new white tooth poking up through his pink gum. With the pressure and the pain over, Hank was a different baby. He sat in his playpen and examined brightly colored toys with the seriousness of a research scientist. After he’d looked one over minutely, he would toss it aside and look at the next one. Lucy wondered what he was looking for when he played this toddler game. She hoped he wouldn’t find it soon. When he was in this mood, he’d play until his morning nap.
“I do have a reason for calling,” Eileen confessed. Lucy raised her eyebrows. Eileen didn’t often ask for help.
“Whatever I can do,” Lucy said. A cup of decaffeinated coffee steamed next to her computer. She took a quick hot mouthful and sighed. If she pretended it had caffeine in it, she would almost feel like a human being again. Hank couldn’t tolerate caffeine in her breast milk. Yet another reason to wean the little fiend.
“Okay, then. We had a murder at Peterson Air Force Base; a guy named Jim Leetsdale. Major. He was working on a top-secret project that’s headed by a guy named Jacob Mitchell.”
“Congressman Mitchell?” Lucy asked, typing quick notes on her computer. “Ex-congressman, one of the crowd that ran for President last election?”
“That’s the guy, I guess,” Eileen said. “I don’t pay much attention to politics.”
“Well, I’ll see what I can find out,” Lucy said. “You caught me at a good time. I actually got four hours sleep last night.”
“I’d be dead,” Eileen said. “I can go without sleep for a couple days, but you haven’t been sleeping for a whole year.”
“You get used to it,” Lucy said. “When you nab Joe and marry him and start a baby, you can call me up and complain about morning sickness and not sleeping. I’ll be sympathetic.”
“Oh, now,” Eileen said nervously. Lucy teased Eileen every chance she got about Joe Tanner. She wanted to be the matron of honor in a Colorado wedding, she told Eileen. Mostly, she wanted another friend to call and talk to when motherhood got to be too much. She figured Eileen would be a great mom. Mostly, she wanted Eileen to be as happy as she was. The lack of sleep, the extra weight, the loss of freedom, were meaningless compared to the bliss of having a family. Lucy wanted Eileen to come in out of the bleak single life and into the warmth of marriage and home and children. She knew what she had wasn’t for everyone, but it was for mostly everyone. She thought Eileen needed Joe. Lucy had the matchmaker urge, and she had it bad.
“Any other names?”
“Oh, yeah, one. Krista Lewis. We don’t know anything about her, just her name. She might work for this project, she might not. Whatever you can find out would be great.”
“I’m the oracle,” Lucy said. “Ask and I shall find out.”
“Thanks,” Eileen said.
“So, how are you, anyway? Sleeping okay since the whole Teddy Shaw thing?” Lucy asked cautiously. Eileen had told her about Teddy but most of the details came from the police report Lucy grabbed off her secure computer link. Eileen wasn’t talking much about it yet. Lucy knew how she’d feel if she shot someone. She’d feel awful and she’d feel glad and she wouldn’t know how to feel, all at the same time. Her friend would cope, and Lucy wouldn’t pry. Eileen would talk in her own good time.
“Sleeping fine. They’re making me see a psychologist. That’s no fun.”
“Female?”
“Female. Gerri Matthews, you’d hate her like I do. Little, cute, not an ounce of fat on her body. Seriously, she’s okay.”
“Call me anytime,” Lucy said. “I’m always up with Hank. If you can’t sleep, call me.”
“I will, girlfriend,” Eileen said with a smile in her voice. “Thanks.”
Lucy turned to her computer and rubbed her hands briskly together. She was supposed to be researching a new religious cult that was springing up in northern Afghanistan but this was much more interesting. Time to find out about Jacob Mitchell and his secret project.
“Here we go, team,” she said to Hank and Fancy. Fancy panted and Hank gravely threw a Big Bird toy over the edge of the playpen. Lucy grinned and took a gulp of coffee and connected to the Internet.
Kim’s Place, San Luis Valley, Colorado
“I’ll sit at the bar, thank you,” Marcia told the waitress, a young girl with a tortured hairdo and the bored, sullen expression of someone who watched far too much television. Her young skin was covered with a heavy layer of makeup, and the curves of her eyelids were painted bright blue. Marcia gave an inward sigh, wishing the girl would listen to some advice. Advice about her skin and her hair and her pretty eyes, and how the center of the world is wherever you are, be it the San Luis Valley of Colorado or a cornfield in Iowa or the city of Los Angeles. But this girl, like so many of her former students, believed that there was some place just like the world seen through her television, a place she could reach. A place where boredom and unhappiness and acne would vanish, never to appear again.
“Okay,” the girl said. Her nametag read “Kay,” though Marcia was sure she’d rather be called Melindra or Tori or whatever movie stars in Hollywood called themselves nowadays.
Marcia picked a spot in the middle of the diner’s bar and Kay placed a menu, a clean glass of ice water, and a cup for coffee in front of her. Marcia gave the girl a grateful smile and a nod. There was competence behind the makeup.
“Are you a senior this year?” Marcia asked.
“No, I’ll be a freshman,” Kay said, breaking into a surprised smile. Marcia tried to look suitably astonished. Children wanted to look older, and grown-ups wanted to look younger.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll love high school,” Marcia said.
Kay walked a round of coffee to the tables in the restaurant. Marcia had picked her seat deliberately; there was a table full of locals right next to her. As she sipped her hot coffee and looked at the menu, she heard the four men at the table greeting a newcomer. He had just walked in. He was young, in his early thirties, and he held a bicycle helmet under his arm. He had the lean body and the overdeveloped calves of a serious bicyclist.
“Hey, it’s Grantham,” one of the men said.
“Sit with us, Daniel,” another one said. “We were just talking about the girl they found on the dunes yesterday. She wasn’t one of your students, was she?”
“I don’t think she was from around here,” Daniel said, stripping off bicycle gloves and taking a seat at the table.
“I’m not sure she was from this time, much less from around here,” the first man said solemnly. The teacher, Daniel, was frowning at the other diner, but in a way that suggested he was a friend of the other man.
“Now Tony,” he said.
“Now what?” Tony said. He was older than the teacher was but not as
old as Marcia. He looked like a rancher, or perhaps a local businessman, in for breakfast and some gossip. He had large hands, scrubbed pink, curled around his coffee cup, and a weathered face that had seen rough work in cold weather. “Like we all don’t know that this was going to happen someday.”
“What was going to happen someday?” the fry cook asked from behind the counter. He was tall and round—was that a law, that all fry cooks have to be fat, Marcia wondered—and he was red-faced from the heat of the grill or, perhaps, anger.
“That they were going to kill a person, and not just horses and cattle,” Tony said triumphantly. “You know, Hal. You’ve seen my cattle with their legs stripped to the bone and their eyes—”
“That’s enough of that, Tony,” Hal said calmly. “I’m serving breakfast.”
“I’ll have pancakes and eggs, scrambled, no bacon or sausage,” Marcia murmured to the waitress.
“Yes, ma’am,” the waitress said, and took the menu away.
“Just because you lost some cattle to our local vandals—”
“They’re not local, and they’re not vandals,” Tony said contemptuously. “You telling me those lights you saw six weeks ago were just jets from the Air Force? Jets that can cross the valley in four seconds, stop, turn around, and go the other way? What kind of jets can do that?”
“I heard that some people heard the Taos Hum,” another rancher said in a low voice.
“I heard it! I heard it!” Kay said in a near whisper, nearly sloshing coffee from her glass pot as she spoke. “Did you hear it?”
“Yes,” Tony said.
Earthquake Games Page 10