Part 17 (1/2)
Chapter Twenty-seven.
”I think I have something that may help prove Kohl and Taylor's guilt.” Nicole made to stand, but her feet had become entangled with the strap of her shoulder bag. Frustrated, she wrestled it off, watching it land inches from the general's glossy black dress shoes. ”In the safe deposit box, there was an envelope with my name on it. Inside was a sheet of paper with a bunch of jumbled letters. It made no sense to me at the time.”
Kira's face was instantly alight with hope, her voice eager. ”My G.o.d, Nicole, please tell me you still have this paper?”
”I'll go get it!”
Kira pulled out her phone. ”Shevchenko, meet us in the debriefing room. Bring your laptop. Hurry!”
Nicole ran for the elevator, her heart pounding in her chest. She prayed housekeeping hadn't cleaned her room yet. The envelope had been inside her bra. She hadn't paid any attention to where it had fallen when she'd undressed this morning.
The elevators seemed to move in slow motion, but finally she was at her room ramming the keycard into the designated slot. When at last the little light above the handle glowed a bright lime green, she flung open the door and rushed inside. Her heart, which had been hammering wildly, slowed to a dull thud. All of her clothes had been picked up off the floor and were now folded neatly, stacked on the edge of the made bed in a nice square stack. Normally, she would have felt a moment's discomfort for having left her things for someone else to tidy, but she had one thing on her mind-finding that envelope.
Frantic, she tore through the clothes then peeked under the bed. Nothing. The wastebaskets were empty too. She cast an anxious glance back toward her clothing, which were now strewn around the room haphazardly. Maybe it had become stuck in the folds of one of her garments. Once more, this time slower and with more consideration, she carefully picked through her pants, her bra, her s.h.i.+rt, and her underwear. No luck.
Hands on her hips, she stood in the center of the hotel room scanning every inch of the recently vacuumed carpet but in her mind she knew exactly what had become of the envelope. She could see the crumpled paper clearly, wet with crud, stained and now most likely unreadable, sitting at the bottom of an industrial-sized garbage bag in the hotel's Dumpster.
Stuart said Colonel Taylor's appearance in court was sometime this afternoon. How long would it take to sift through all the morning's trash? She glanced to the digital clock on the nightstand. It was already a few minutes after ten. That left less than two hours to find the envelope. She did a double take. There, next to the pen and pad of paper with the Ritz-Carlton's fancy letterhead...a scrunched-up accordion of white paper. Could it be her father's envelope? It was. She closed her eyes and breathed a long sigh of relief. There was a strong temptation to shove the paper back into her bra for safekeeping, but instead she hugged it to her chest and raced back to the second floor, promising the universe she would reward the housekeeper with a few of the seven hundred bucks remaining in her bank account. When she got to the meeting room, breathless and winded, Stella was just powering her laptop. Everyone stopped and stared at her, identical looks of anxious expectation stamped across their faces.
”Found it!” she exclaimed excitedly, waving the envelope over her head. With a clumsy lack of finesse, she pulled the computer paper from the creased packet and handed it to Kira.
Kira spread the sheet of incoherent letters out on the table for everyone to view. The general was the only one who didn't get up. He did, however, finally lift his eyes from his BlackBerry for all of thirty seconds to determine if there was anything developing worthy of his consideration, but grew bored and returned to his e-mail.
”Looks like your father used a method called crypto source coding to encrypt his communication.” Stuart studied the letters for a long moment. ”It was quite a popular tool IGOs used out in the field during the eighties and nineties to communicate with one another. Simple but effective. They'd all agree on a series of numbers and use it to decode their messages. Change it up every week or so. But even if he used something more complex, Stella has every cryptography program ever created.”
”Mono-alphabetic subst.i.tution,” Stella concluded with the same scientific certainty a gemologist might identify a natural diamond amidst a pile of man-made clones. She grabbed the doc.u.ment from the table, sank her long, slinky body back into a chair, then slowly typed each letter into data entry fields that were similar to the squares on a crossword puzzle. When she was done, she turned to Nicole. ”What's the key, little one?”
”Key?” Nicole repeated, having difficulty keeping up with their job-related vernacular.
”The numbers to decipher your father's encryption. What are they?”
”Oh my G.o.d, are you serious?” Nicole looked to Kira, panic coming over her. ”I have no idea!”
”Yes, you do,” Kira insisted calmly, picking up the computer paper. ”Your father wrote your name on the envelope this was in. He intended for you to find it. No one else. So think, Nicole. What numbers would have been significant between the two of you?”
Nicole squeezed her eyes shut. She could feel everyone watching her, waiting for her to hurry up and figure it out. No pressure here, folks. The show will be over soon when my brain explodes. Get ready, because it's going to blow. You may want to back up. Three, two, one... She put her hands over her ears and leaned forward, supporting her head with her elbows on her knees.
”Concentrate!” she silently implored, squeezing her temples harder. What numbers were important to her dad? Their old phone number? Their address? But then she heard Stuart's voice coming from faraway as a visual of an old photograph of her and her father taken on her seventh birthday in front of their newly planted willow tree slowly appeared before her eyes: ”Coincidence can be fate working in mysterious ways.”
”It might be 423,” she mumbled hesitantly, lifting her head up. And then, recalling her recent encounters with the three digits-her flight number to Kenya, the safe deposit box, and the motel key-she said the number again, but more firmly and with confidence. ”Yes, try 423. It has to be!”
”April twenty-third, your birthday,” Kira breathed softly. ”That makes perfect sense.”
For one brief moment, it was as if it was just the two of them all alone in the room. Kira's blue eyes were bright with suppressed emotion, but there seemed to be a deeper significance to the visual interchange. It felt like an invisible current of energy was pa.s.sing back and forth between them, and if Nicole allowed it, the force could easily overtake her entire being and she'd happily shatter into a million fragments of pure white light.
”Okay, 423. I'll try every fourth letter, second and third,” Stella said, breaking the spell. ”Not sure if the algorithm will be based on letters across, down, or vertical, and in the order of 423, but I'll take a shot.”
As the morning aged, the sun had grown stronger and the small room even stuffier. When Stuart Lee wasn't tinkering with the thermostat's controls, he was pacing back and forth, occasionally hunching over Stella's shoulder, pus.h.i.+ng his gla.s.ses up and squinting at the laptop screen. After about five minutes, which felt more like sixty to Nicole, Stella pushed the computer away from her and shook her loose, dark hair side to side. ”No, that cannot be. It cannot.”
”What?” everyone demanded simultaneously.
”You're not going to believe this.” She turned the laptop around so that they could see the word that kept repeating itself across the screen: ”Home.”
”That's impossible.” Kira frowned, a divot forming between her eyebrows. ”That house has been searched more times than Scotland's Loch Ness, by us as well as Danielle Taylor.”
”I know where he hid it.” Nicole reached for her shoulder bag where it still lay strewn at the general's polished feet. After unzipping the inside pouch, she pulled the tiny Chinese fortune from it and placed it on the table. ”This was in the safe deposit box, on top of the envelope.”
Kira picked it up and read it out loud. ”Your best friend is often in the mirror.” She shrugged her shoulders. ”I don't get it. Chinese fortune cookie wisdom?”
”In my mother's house, at the end of the stairway, there's an old gold mirror. It's as ugly as sin-been there for as long as I can remember. It's heavy too. We tried to take it down once to paint the hallway. We ended up painting around it. I think we inherited it from my grandparents.”
The general spoke but his eyes remained glued to his BlackBerry. ”There's an extra mirror. The backing's a dummy. If you remove it, you'll find nothing. But between the two pieces of gla.s.s, if there's anything worth hiding, that's where it'll be.”
Stuart checked his watch. ”We need to move quickly. The judicial task force will want to look at whatever we find before court at three. Bethesda, right?” He asked Nicole. ”That's where your mother's house is?”
Nicole nodded. ”Yes!”
”We can send a few military cops over.” He was thinking out loud now, his actions pensive. ”Or call the locals.”
”h.e.l.l no!” the general barked, for the first time that morning becoming fully engaged in the proceedings. He shoved his phone into his trousers, jerked erect, and marched around the table, slamming the flat soles of his dress shoes against the carpet like they were boots and he'd just been given orders to attack. ”At this point, I don't trust anyone. I'll go there myself.”
”We don't have time,” Stuart complained, running meaty fingers through his black curls. ”With traffic, it'll take over an hour.”
”Who said anything about driving?” The general seemed almost merry. ”Kira, your brother's meeting with the Coast Guard this morning, showing them his latest bird, isn't that so?”
Kira looked suspicious. ”Yes, he's bidding for the new contract.”
”Give 'em a call and tell 'em I need a lift. p.r.o.nto.”
”I'll come too,” Stella said, closing her laptop. ”I know the kid's house better than anyone else.” With a sly wink aimed at Nicole, she explained, ”I'm the one who bugged it.”
Kira and the general moved back to the table to work out the details of the helicopter ride. They had Kira's brother Mike on speakerphone. Stuart was shouting into his cell phone too and the room became a noisy cacophony of voices talking over one another.
”Hey, kiddo. Sorry about yesterday. I didn't mean to knock you out.” Stella pulled Nicole into a corner furnished with a fake ficus tree. Her big black eyes were sheepish. ”Just so you know, I didn't give you anything illegal. Just half a dose of over-the-counter sleeping medication. Fifteen milligrams of diphenhydramine. Kira thinks it's my own proprietary sleeping potion and I let her think that. Makes me more valuable to her. But I only thought it would help you relax.”
”No worries, Stella. I really did need the sleep. I was running on dead batteries. Here,” she said, digging through her bag and handing her house keys to Stella. ”This way you don't have to kick my mother's door down. Do you want me to hold your laptop until you come back?”
”Oh no, little one. I never go anywhere without my baby.” She patted the hard black plastic fondly, then grew serious. ”Do you remember yesterday when you asked me about what I wrote down on your ticket before you left Kenya?”
”Remember the tin man. You said it was a clue to help me find the heart in the tree.”
As if to ensure no one else was listening to their conversation, Stella cast a quick glance around the room. They were standing so close to one another, Nicole could make out a thin vein through her thick, black bangs. Its slightly bulging length ran from her hairline down to her temple.
”Yeah, kid, and maybe now that you found your secret heart, you can help someone else find hers.” Her dark, heavy-lidded eyes strayed significantly from Nicole's brown ones over to where Kira was talking to the general and settled there. ”Sadly, it's been lost far too long. I probably shouldn't tell you this-no, I know I shouldn't.” She looked conflicted. ”I'm breaking Kira's trust, but I want her to be happy. I thought you might find it interesting to know that when we first put you under surveillance, I would find her spending an unwarranted amount of time watching you, listening to your conversations, tracking your movements. I'd often tease her, say that she had a crush on you. Of course, she denied this. But when I saw how she took care of you when you became ill, I never teased her again. And then, when I found her chained to the table yesterday morning, I was certain. Kira Anthony has never let her guard down. Ever.”