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 pinchedthe 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 intruderhadbeen 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 thethoughtof 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 alotof 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 isSt. 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.”
