by Cara Black
“Your mother did that, Mademoiselle,” Ludovic Jubert said without missing a beat. “She tainted his career prospects.”
Her American mother who had left them and joined a group of radicals in the seventies. “That’s your opinion.” She took a drag to cover the jolt Jubert’s words had given her.
“Jean-Claude paid for that many times over,” he said, looking out the window. “A good flic. He had a nose, as they say, for the odor of crime. No getting past that. And I see you do, too.” He sighed. “Georges Rousseau liked the odor. He didn’t mind running informers and giving them too much leeway.”
“Are you saying Georges Rousseau was the corrupt one? He died a decorated—”
“And valorous commissaire,” Ludovic Jubert interrupted.
“We had to cover for him. He’d compromised too much in Montmartre.”
Was that what Morbier was hiding? Why did Laure think it was Aimée’s father who was implicated?
“Some of Rousseau’s informers played by the rules,” Jubert continued. “Still do. We turn a blind eye to their little operations and they reciprocate with information on more serious matters. Matters affecting national security. All flics depend on informers; we wouldn’t get far without insider information.” He ground out his cigarette, impatient. “But you know this. You know how the system operates.”
She’d been raised on it. Her father hated it and left to join her grandfather at Leduc Detective. One doesn’t touch pitch, he’d said, without being blackened.
“Then you’re saying Georges Rousseau took bribes and became corrupt,” she said, “but was decorated and promoted because his network of informers was needed? Then why does Laure believe my father was corrupt and the proof’s in a report?”
“Use your imagination,” he said.
“You’re implying Laure’s father fingered mine, shifted his own guilt onto my father?”
“Close.”
“Where’s the police file?”
“The RG deep-froze most of them.”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”
“Mademoiselle, it’s in your interest to do so.” He stood. “Still the little firebrand, I see,” he said. “Daddy’s little girl. Your father wanted a boy, you know.”
Bastard! That stung. How would he know?
She clutched the edge of the chair, white knuckled. She wouldn’t let him see how his words had rocked her. She recalled Laure’s mumblings and Morbier’s comments scrawled on the newspaper.
“This all ties to the investigation of Corsican Separatists six years ago, doesn’t it? The question of where they were getting arms. That’s the secret report. My father worked on it, didn’t he? With you?”
Ludovic Jubert stabbed out his cigarette and nodded.
“Your father always said you were sharp,” he said.
“Did this involve the explosion in Place Vendôme that killed him?”
“Not at all. It is as I told you. Let’s move to the present, shall we?” He opened a drawer in the desk and took out a file.
“We believe this man’s running a Separatist network in Montmartre. We count on you to find him.”
He handed it to her. “Look inside. He’s a Corsican terrorist, a member of the Armata Corsa, responsible for bomb threats to the Mairie and for holdups using the arms that were stolen six years ago.”
“Eastern European arms—?”
“Taken from Croatia, stockpiled by our military in Solenzara, at least until they disappeared six years ago. This past year they’ve been turning up in Paris with disturbing regularity.”
“How do you know this?”
“We have big ears, Mademoiselle.”
Big Ears . . . Frenchelon?
She opened the file. Lucien Sarti’s image stared back at her.
Friday Morning
LAURE SAT UP IN the hospital bed, the computer keypad propped lecternlike on her hospital tray table. A hospital phone stood on the night table next to the violets Aimée had brought.
“Très bon, wonderful progress, the commissaire’s so pleased you can use this special equipment,” said the young therapist, beaming at her. “Each time you tap a key, I copy down a letter. So far, you’ve said, ‘I remember’ and what looks like a name and phone number, oui?”
Laure blinked. If only she would stop running off at the mouth and hurry up. Why didn’t this saccharine-voiced woman call Aimée?
“I’ll inform the officer on duty and we’ll take it from there.” She patted Laure’s arm. “He wants to hear right away about anything you know that may help with their investigation.” Laure blinked twice for no.
She slid her finger onto the letters n . . . o . . . w.
“Now?”
Laure blinked. Cold saliva drooled down her chin and she felt her shoulders sliding down the damn pillow.
“Excuse me, Laure,” the therapist said, “I must check with the officer first.”
The therapist stepped out of the ward. Laure slid further down, her head sinking into the pillow. And then she saw the pencil. She gripped it between her thumb and index finger. If only she could knock the telephone receiver off its cradle. With all her might, she swatted at it with the pencil. The smudged receiver wavered but held.
She tried again, this time wedging the pencil under it and levering it up. As the receiver fell she heard the dial tone. Quick, she had to do it fast, before the therapist returned or the recorded message came on and said, “If you’d like to make a call . . .”
She tapped Aimée’s eight numbers. Where was the connect button?
She heard footsteps, saw the blue uniform.
“What’s she doing?”
Friday Morning
AIMÉE HANDED THE FRANCS to Pascalou, her local butcher, who wiped his hands on the red-smeared apron straining around his rotund figure.
“I threw in a little treat,” he said and grinned. “Something Miles Davis likes.”
“You spoil him, Pascalou,” she said.
“Time for him to have a special friend, Aimée,” he said, wagging his finger.
And what about me? She just smiled.
“Merci.” She pocketed her change and hefted the white waxed-paper packet of Miles Davis’s lamb shanks. The bells tinkled on the butcher-shop door as she shut it.
Not thirty minutes ago, she’d listened to Jubert’s description of the terrorist cell concealing arms somewhere in Montmartre. She had kept quiet regarding Lucien Sarti. She couldn’t figure him out. Suspicion of Jubert still nagged her. Would he keep his end of the bargain concerning Laure?
She had to find Petru, more and more convinced was she that he, rather than Lucien, was the key. There was no reason to inform Jubert yet. She would deliver a terrorist to him, but it wouldn’t be whom he expected.
First, she had to work on Frenchelon to find out how they’d traced the terrorist network back to Lucien Sarti.
She called Saj, ordered Indian takeout from Passage Brady, and booted up her laptop at home. By the time Saj arrived, in a flowing Afghan embroidered shearling coat, the pakoras and vegetarian thali sat on the fireplace mantel, the steam escaping and fogging the tarnished mirror behind it. Cumin and the scent of coconut curry filled the salon that doubled as her home office.
“Smells wonderful,” he said.
“Ready for overtime?” she asked. “I think you’ll like this project.”
Saj eyed the laptop screen. “Frenchelon, hmmm. So we’re working on satellite netspionage?” he asked.
“Netspionage? I like that,” she said, her fingers clicking over the keys. “Digital dead-letter drop, heard of that?”
He nodded, hung his coat behind the chair, and kicked off his sandals. “Do it all the time. Where’s René?”
“At his place,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “Working.”
“So they’re watching your office like last time, eh?”
Saj was quick.
“Who is it this time?”
“Supposedly Cor
sican Separatists, or else the local mafia under the guise of the Armata Corsa. Charming mecs, either way.”
Saj paused, holding a garlic naan midair. “Talk about a bad-boy magnet! I don’t get it. You and René do computer security. How come you keep getting involved with thugs?”
“Nice segue,” she said. “It’s all related. And something smells way off. That’s why I called you.”
“I need to center, Aimée,” Saj said, wiping his hands and settling cross-legged on her threadbare Savonnerie carpet.
She groaned inside. Why couldn’t he center before he came?
“Why don’t you join me? It’s been a while for you, non?”
She’d made a stab at meditation at the Cao Dai temple in November and failed at mindful breaths. Her legs had cramped, her mind run rampant, yet she had experienced one brief shining moment when the world fell away and somehow she’d breathed with the universe.
“Right now I can use all the help I can get.”
She sat cross-legged beside him, touched her thumbs to her middle fingers. Tried to clear her mind.
“Deep asana,” Saj said. “Breathe in through the nostrils, hold it, good, now a long exhale.”
Conscious of the leafless tree branch slapping her window, the crackle of the logs in the fire, and the hardness of the wood floor, she waited. The other “state” remained elusive. Yet after ten minutes her mind had cleared.
Saj stood up and helped himself to the Indian food.
Bordereau of the DST had mentioned a data-encryption leak in the same sentence with Corsican Separatists. “Look at this,” she said. “Data-encryption leaks and one link relating to Frenchelon. What do you know about a connection to the satellite Helios-1A?”
“The satellite has a stowaway on board, the Eurocom, an interception cartridge that picks up Inmarsat and Intelsat signals so it can read microwave and mobile phone communications. My friend at Dassault Systèmes worked on the Eurocom’s manufacture.”
“Impressive,” she said. “A great tool with which to find terrorists.”
“They call it searching the Bitstream; it’s like sifting sand to find a coin most of the time.”
“Say that again,” she said, drumming her chipped nails on the space bar.
“Eh, searching the Bitstream . . . .”
“That’s it!” Hadn’t Zoe Tardou heard “searching the stream” from the men on the roof speaking in Corsican to cloak their meaning? She’d found the connection at last.
Saj grinned, pushed a dark blond dreadlock behind his shoulder. “All things to all people, I’d say. One juicy intercept was Brezhnev’s phone call to his mistress from his limo. Another, the Rainbow Warrior scandal with Greenpeace, via ARABSAT and Gadhafi’s conflict with Chad. But NATO’s the prime target for Echelon and a real sieve. Of course, it’s also used for rampant corporate espionage.”
Her ears perked up. She sat forward in her chair. “Can you crack it?”
“Now why would I do that?”
“To show you can,” she said. “How difficult would it be for you or anyone else?”
“Get real, Aimée. We’re talking big boys with big toys.”
“Say someone hired you to intercept a satellite feed.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “I’d need special equipment.”
“Like what?”
She could tell she’d sparked his interest by the way he’d already clicked on the Net and brought up some sites.
“Like a satellite,” he said. “And say I had a satellite, the Faraday cage poses a problem.”
“Like a cage for tigers?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” he said.
“Where’s this Faraday cage?”
Saj tied back his dreadlocks with an elastic band. “Far as I know, it’s at the same facility as the parabola satellite dishes. Would have to be to access the feed.” He pointed to his screen. “See, e-mails, land lines, cell-phone conversations, and faxes are beamed in a stream of data. Satellites in a geosynchronous and a polar orbit receive this data, then transmit it back in a continuous sequence of bits, downlinking the raw stream of data to a dish or to antennas on land. This data feed’s piped from the antenna into the Faraday cage for deciphering. Inside the cage, a program picks out key and sensitive words and encrypts them, then sends the encrypted info on, via fiber optics, a protected radio network, or a disc.”
“Why not by e-mail?”
“Not safe, unless you use a cipher and have a key at the other end.”
Plucking words out of the ether, then sorting them and making sense of them. She stood and paced in the room. A suffused weak winter light shrouded the pear tree below in the courtyard.
“Rumor has it Frenchelon processes two million phone calls, faxes, and e-mails worldwide each month,” she said. “Maybe more. It even tracks individual bank accounts. Or so they say.”
Saj nodded. “The genius lies in the Faraday cage’s banks of computers that are programmed to recognize key words.” He rolled his neck from side to side.
“Like addresses, phone numbers surveilled by the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure; embassies, foreign ministers, multinational corporations, and suspected agents?”
Saj nodded. “The system records and transmits them for analysis. La routine, they call it. What doesn’t turn out to be relevant is thrown into the information garbage can.”
“So Frenchelon transmits encrypted data of these e-mails, faxes, and phone conversations, filtered and sorted by key words, to where?”
He shrugged. “The analysis hub could exist anywhere.”
She leaned forward, deep in thought. His explanation made her determined to get an Inmarsat satellite phone, which would be harder to intercept since it used its own three satellites. She had known about the Central d’Écoute Téléphonique central listening center under Les Invalides where tapped phone lines were monitored by the judiciare and military. But only under authorization by the president at Matignon Palace. Or so the story went. This was far more all-encompassing.
“How would a criminal get into Big Ears?” she asked.
He paused. “Easiest thing would be to get the cipher key, depends how often they change it—once a day, once a week on Thursday, or whatever—tap into the microwaves, and—”
“Sell the feed and the key to the highest bidder,” she said, her eyes lighting up, “like a renegade terrorist group.”
What if Jacques had stumbled onto the cipher key involving the Corsican Separatists? But how would Jacques, a flic in the eighteenth, have access to a high-security agency leak?
Thoughts whirled through her head: Jacques gambled, he moonlighted for Zette—who operated illegal gambling machines in his bar—escorting “VIPs”. Maybe VIPs did slum in Montmartre at Zette’s. Maybe Zette had told her the truth and it was some security dweeb whom Jacques had squired around who had info to share. But why would he spill his guts to Jacques, a flic? Correction, a bent flic. But selling classified encrypted data to Corsican Separatists was another league altogether, a whole other division. The connection to Jacques remained muddled at best.
She opened the file on her laptop that she’d copied from STIC and combed through Jacques Gagnard’s data. Two minutes later she’d found it. Stupid. She should have checked before. He’d served in the military at Solenzara and been discharged for misconduct. Gambling? It had been six years ago. Selling the missing arms? But those infusions of cash to his bank account were recent.
“What’s going on in that spiky-haired head of yours?”
“Illegal thoughts.” She gave him a big smile. “Finish up the pakoras and show me the Frenchelon sites.”
“Look, I hack and crack, do encryption. What kind of job is this?”
“A big one. Can you highlight the possible hubs in France or, better still, refine the target to the Paris area?”
“Check this out,” Saj said. “Outside Paris, in the suburb of Alluets-le-Roi, the DGSE have a big inst
allation of parabolas and antennas,” Saj said, pulling up an e-mail. “But according to my friend, they handle intercepted communications right here in Paris, too.”
“Where?” Aimée stood up.
“La piscine,” he said.
“At a pool?”
“That’s what they call it. It’s on Boulevard Mortier, right behind the public pool.” He meant the military caserne in Belleville bordering the Périphérique ring road, a nineteenth-century barracks once, the home of the 104th corps of Le Mâns.
“So, in theory, a data-encryption leak would come from there?”
Saj gave a small smile. “Bound and determined to connect this, eh?”
They were getting closer, she sensed it. Smelled it. Not just smoke, but sparks she could fan into a fire.
“Put it this way,” she said. “What would you do, Saj, if you had skills and access to this encrypted data and a hidden agenda, say, selling military and ministerial documents, plans for Corsica? Or stolen arms?”
“The best plans, the ones that work, are real simple,” he said.
“Simple? So tell me simple.”
An idea formed in her mind as he spoke. Had Jacques known who was furnishing the arms? Or how?
“The ideal? A hardware guy, probably an outside consultant, since the military hasn’t trained enough of them yet. Or maybe he’s part of the team that set up the system, or installed a satellite communication fiber optic line, for example. He knows the hardware since he’s installed it or designed it. He knows the vulnerabilities. One day something fizzes and, doing repairs or system analysis, he realizes this whatever is a back-door access to valuable data. Maybe for only so many hours, or period of time, or maybe he can engineer an open door for an hour once a week. And he sells this stream.”
A genius, Saj was a genius!
“A back door, of course! What about the cipher key?”
“Good point. No one can read the data without the key. That’s the money part, reading it. Say he provides the cipher key for a price, but it’s only good once. They change them constantly.”
If Saj could think like this, chances were someone else had, too.
