“What?” Sam and Mike said in unison.
The cursor hovered over the Marseille Port Authority file.
“One of the files is much bigger than it should be. Clients ask for a quote before sending me the text, even old clients. Wordsmith charges by the word, sixteen cents a word, or forty dollars a page of fifteen hundred bytes. I remember clearly the quote for the Marseille job—twenty-six hundred dollars for about a hundred kilobytes. But it says here the size of the file is almost eight hundred KB. Normally, if there are illustrations or, say, part of the text is in PowerPoint, that will of course increase the bytes, but they told me it would be all text.”
“Open it. Run through it again,” Mike urged. They were in an inhabited area and he’d had to slow down for the speed bumps.
“Okay.” She opened the attachment and scrolled through the text slowly, the words and the concepts very familiar to her, so familiar she sometimes thought she could qualify for a harbormaster certificate. Suddenly, the font changed size for twenty pages. “Whoa.”
Nicole sat back. The file came from the Port administrative clerk, who usually sent her the work, Jean-Paul Simonet. She’d found out that he had lost his daughters in the Toulouse terrorist attack, and she had sent him condolences. After that, they often sent each other greetings. He was an odd man, with strange passions. Collecting Tintin comic books, trainspotting and…steganography!
“Oh my God,” she muttered. Was the vehicle wi-fi enabled? Yes, she discovered, logging on feverishly, trying to remember a long e-mail exchange with Simonet on his passion. He’d written at boring length about a program called…she stopped, fingers curved over the keyboard.
She suddenly had a huge sense of urgency, a prickling in her veins, a feeling that she had to movenow. Not tomorrow or the next day or even the next hour. Rightnow. Inexplicable, irresistible, almost painful in its intensity.
What was the name of the program? Mike was looking at her in the rearview mirror, frowning, Sam was watching her carefully. She probably looked insane, teeth clenched, eyes closed.
Think, Nicole!
They’d had their last lengthy exchange in December. He wrote that he missed his family a lot come Christmastime. He’d lost two daughters and then his wife. Her heart had gone out to him, spending a Christmas alone. It was cold in Marseille, he’d complained.
Why was she thinking all of this now? Cold…snow. The small app was called Snow!
She clenched her teeth. “I’m going to try something now.”
Nicole was good with computers. She bent down and a few minutes later, the blue bar had filled up, the app was down-loaded, and she clicked on the file.
“I have something,” Nicole said softly. Mike watched her in the mirror, Sam had turned completely in his seat to see her. “It was hidden in the file.”
She watched as a section of the Port Authority report dissolved, and new text was superimposed on the old. Steganography wasn’t encryption. Thank God. She’d never have been able to break a code. Steganography was hiding. Hiding one file inside another.
A message, from Simonet.
Mademoiselle Pearce—je vous envoie le manifeste d’un navire, destination New York, je crois qu’il rappresente un nouveau attentat—un attentat nucléaire—contre les Etats Unis, parce que?—
Nicole translated the text, trying to keep her voice level. “This is a message from a clerk in the Port Authority. The message reads: Ms. Pearce, I am sending you the manifest of a ship sailing to New York, I think they intend to carry out another attack against the United States.” She looked up and met Sam’s eyes. Her voice wobbled. “He says…he says anuclearattack. The message ends abruptly. As if he was…interrupted.”
“Or worse,” Sam growled, already punching his cell phone.
A nuclear attack on the United States.Nicole clicked her way through the pages, terror rising. “Here we are Sam, Mike. The ship flies a Liberian flag. TheMarie Claire. Next stop New York, slated to arrive day after tomorrow. The man who sent me the message is very alive to terrorist threats. He lost his family in the Toulouse bombing.” She met Sam’s sober eyes again. “There’s something on that ship, Sam. It’s got to be stopped.”
Sam was already talking quietly and earnestly into his cell. He turned back to her, holding the cell phone up. “Okay, sweet-heart, Harry’s patched me through to the FBI and they’ve got the Coast Guard listening too. Give us particulars about this ship.”
“Even better,” Nicole said. “Give me an e-mail address and I’ll send the file. The hidden information is now readable.”
“Great idea.” Sam gave her three e-mail addresses, all ending with .gov.
As she tapped ENTER the SUV swerved, driving up the well-lit ramp of the emergency entrance of a huge hospital complex.
She picked up her father’s limp hand and held it tight. “We might have saved the world. Now let’s save my dad.”
FIFTEEN
New York
Early morning
June 30
