“Do your thing, Sam,” Mike said, holding out his arms.
Sam gently transferred her father to Mike’s strong arms and pulled something small out of a side pocket. Two seconds later, he’d picked the padlock and was pulling the chains out of the handles. He pulled out the big steel gates just enough for them to slip through.
“How’d you guys get in?” Nicole looked around for an alternative route they could have used, but couldn’t find one. “Rappelled,” Sam said succinctly, directing the flashlight for a moment over to the right. Two slender ropes hung down, swaying gently in the chill night air coming off the ocean.
They followed Mike out the big gate and around a corner. He was carefully laying her father down on the back seat of a big SUV. Nicole rounded the vehicle, gently lifted her father’s head, slid in, then placed his head on her lap. She stroked his face, carefully, because she didn’t want the deep slash to start bleeding again. Her heart squeezed with sorrow as she felt the loose skin over bone, the crepe-like texture of his skin. His eyes were sunken deep in their sockets. What was lying on her lap looked more like a skull than the head of a man.
Mike started up the vehicle and pulled out fast. She looked up to see Sam watching her, twisted in his seat, thick arm over the back.
She stroked around the ugly slash in her father’s cheek and met Sam’s eyes. “I hate that man so much,” she said, voice low. “I wish he were alive so I could kill him again. Blow his head apart. Cut his black heart right out with your knife.”
She meant every word and it surprised the hell out of her. If anyone had asked, she’d have assured them that she was tolerant and profoundly nonviolent. The feelings that coursed through her were utterly new, unwelcome, fierce.
She wished with all her heart that she’d been the one to kill the two men.
The men had been so brutal to her father, a helpless and sick man. They’d even tied him up, put his hands in restraints. Slashed his face open. It hurt her heart to think of it.
And they had been perfectly willing to kill both of them to keep a secret. “I need to try to find out what they were looking for,” she told Sam.
He nodded. “We’re vulnerable until we know.”
The back of the driver’s seat held a pull-down tray, like on airplanes. She placed the intruder’s laptop on it, powered it up, and inserted her hard disk.
In seconds, her email program was open. She blocked out everything from her mind. The shock of nearly dying, her father, Sam…In seconds she was in that place where she lived when doing translations, a place of no distractions and utter concentration.
She checked the files that had arrived between June 27 and June 29. Luckily, all in languages with a Latin alphabet. French, German, Spanish, Italian. She knew enough German and Italian to understand the topics of the texts. She went over every single file, one by one.
Nothing. They were perfectly innocuous. All of them.
“Anything?” Sam asked quietly.
Nicole met his eyes. She shook her head, frustrated, went back to staring at the screen. “Nothing.”
“Leave it,” Sam suggested. “Come back to it later, with a fresh mind. You’ve been traumatized, maybe you’re not seeing it.”
She’d been traumatized, that was for sure, but not enough that she’d miss something important. Sheknewthese files. Each file was from a customer she’d had for at least six months. One customer—the Port Authority of Marseilles—she’d had for years.
She knew the texts, too. They were iterations of the same texts she’d either translated herself or sent out for translation. The Banque de Luxembourg, for example. They’d sent the minutes of a board meeting, 80 percent of which would be exactly what had been said at the last board meeting. Or the Berlin Buchmesse, a smaller version of the Frankfurt Book Fair. They had sent a copy of their current “Manual for Exhibitors” to translate and it would be very much like the last manual.
She huffed out a frustrated breath.
“ETA fifteen minutes,” Mike said, voice low.
They’d be at the hospital in a quarter of an hour. Nicole looked down at her father, still unconscious, so fragile and precious. Sick and vulnerable.
They’d slashed him open and would have killed him without a second thought.
She ground her teeth together and turned back to the monitor. Why?Whywere they sent to do harm to her and her father? For what?
“Talk it through, out loud,” Mike suggested, meeting her eyes in the rearview mirror. “That sometimes helps.”
“Okay.” She stared into the monitor, as if she could get it to yield its secrets by sheer will power. “I’m looking at twenty files. All by old clients. Not one new one. They are all familiar texts, in that the subject matter is very similar to other texts from the same client.”
“Go over them from the opposite direction,” Sam suggested. “From the last to the first.”
Nicole shrugged. It wouldn’t change anything, but still. “Okay.” She ran the cursor over the files, one by one, from the bottom up. From the oldest to the newest.
She frowned. “That’s odd.”
