“What?” Max called.
“The place is a mess.”
“Mr. Big, I mean Weller, must have been looking for the S&D stuff.”
Shane’s jaw firmed. “If I had to guess, I’d say Kinkead was here, too.”
Jack and Max nodded.
“But we know Weller didn’t find it,” Shane said as he disappeared inside. “Otherwise there would have been no point in having you meet him. And I’ll know in a few minutes if Kinkead managed to get it.”
Elena waited with heart pounding. It felt as if Shane had been gone for years, but it was probably only a few minutes before he reappeared with the SIM card in his hand.
“Where was it?” Max asked.
“I slipped it into a crack between one of the legs and the top of the workbench.”
His partner grinned. “Clever.”
“Let’s find out what’s on it,” he said.
Jack looked toward the former safe house. “But not here. We don’t know who is going to show up next.”
“Right,” Shane agreed.
They all got back in the car. As they drove back toward D.C., Elena loaded the card into a slot in the computer that Jack had brought along. But when she directed the machine to the card, all they got was gibberish.
Chapter 31
Beside Elena, Shane made an angry sound. “We went through a hell of a lot of grief to make sure this card was safe, and now…”
She put a hand on his arm. “It’s encrypted.”
His voice was hard. “Which means we can’t get into it unless we have the key?”
She nodded.
“That’s just great.”
“I think I may know how to get it.”
He gave her a questioning look.
“Remember I told you that Arnold sent me SIMon Sez puzzles. That was how I thought of the SIM card in the phone.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what if he also sent me the encryption key in one of his emails?”
“How do we get the emails?” Max asked from the front seat.
“They’re in my mail system. I can access them from here.”
“My guess is that Kinkead locked you out of your office mail.”
“Probably true. But I wanted to think about the puzzles, so I sent them to my home address.”
“Lucky for us,” Shane muttered.
As they drove through the darkness, Elena kept her eyes on the computer screen, downloading messages and collecting them into a folder.
When the car slowed, she looked up and saw that they were back at the Four Seasons Hotel in D.C.
“Might as well enjoy the luxury for a little while longer,” Max said.
The men unloaded their equipment, and they all returned to the suite they’d left six hours earlier. Or was it a lifetime ago?
Morgan was waiting for them. When they came in the door, she jumped up and embraced Jack. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes.”
She turned to Elena, taking in her appearance and the clothing she was wearing. “You made it.”
“Yes.”
“I knew you would.”
Elena gulped. “I wasn’t so sure.”
Shane gave Elena a considering look. “Why don’t you take a shower and change?”
She glanced down and grimaced as she realized she was still wearing the outfit Weller had supplied.
“While you’re gone, I’ll copy the messages from Blake onto the other laptops so we can get started.”
“Good idea.”
The shower helped revive her, and she was glad to put on slacks and a shirt she’d brought from the southern safe house. When she came back to the sitting room, she saw the men had ordered breakfast.
“Better?” Shane asked.
“A lot.” She looked around. “Where is everybody else?”
“While you were in the shower, we decided to split up. We did some research and figured out that Weller was a mob boss named Jerome Weller. We got the address of his estate. Jack and Max have gone over there, and Morgan had a meeting with a client.”
Her hands clamped on the mug of coffee with cream and sugar that he’d handed her.
“What will Jack and Max find?”
“Something helpful, I hope. Come eat.”
She saw a cart at the side of the room and found bacon and eggs and various pastries. As she sat down with a plate of food, she decided that her appetite had finally come back.
She ate with the computer on the coffee table in front of her, looking at the puzzles Arnold had sent her. Many of them were grids with letters in them, where you had to spell words going up, down, or diagonally across the grid. All of them had a theme, like names of movies or books, authors, sports terms, or even zoo animals.
Shane was looking at the same material.
“Something interesting,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Even when the theme is movies or something unrelated, other words show up.”
“Like what?”
“Well, he’s put his name into the puzzles, for example. And one particular word keeps appearing. Corruption.”
Elena went through the puzzles. Now that Shane mentioned it, she saw the word in various forms. Usually backwards or backwards and diagonally.
Going back to the SIM card, she typed in “corruption.”
She thought at first that she’d blown up the whole program when pictures of fireworks erupted on the screen, accompanied by loud blasts.
Then the graphics disappeared, and the screen said, “Congratulations, Elena.”
Her heart stopped, then started up again in double time as she gave Shane a quick glance. “It’s for me.”
When she saw that his expression had hardened, her mouth went dry. With this message, she was back where she’d started with Shane—in the middle of a conspiracy. “I know what this must look like.”
“I know what it looks like. And I know what it’s not.” He slung his arm around her and pulled her close. “Elena, I trust you. I know you weren’t working with Blake.”
Her mouth was so dry she could barely speak, but she managed to ask, “How do you know?”
“Because I know what kind of person you are.”
Leaning over, he gave her a quick kiss. “Let’s see the rest of the message.”
Praying that Blake hadn’t said something that would implicate her in his theft, she scrolled down and saw:
“When I was streamlining the S&D files, I accidentally got into a proprietary S&D program called Falcon’s Flight. The purpose is to analyze trends in the stock market and identify which stocks were going to have short-term gains of 15 to 20 percent. I didn’t know why Lincoln Kinkead was keeping it secret, so I started investigating further. I did some research and found out that the program was developed by Kinkead’s nephew, Josh Rosenbloom, his sister’s son.”
Elena glanced at Shane, then moved the cursor down so they could both read more.
“I’ve investigated this from a lot of angles. Kinkead took Josh’s original work and had a programmer in Romania improve it. It appears that Kinkead plans to market part of the improved program and share the profits with the Rosenblooms, but it also appears that he is planning to keep the most effective part of the program secret and use it for his own gains, thus depriving Josh’s family of enormous income.
“While I was trying to decide what to do about this, I was approached by a man who wanted me to steal a copy of the improved program. He’s offered me a lot of money to do this, and I am playing along with him while I decide how to handle the problem. I don’t know the man’s real name, and I don’t know how he found out about the program. And I am reluctant to go to the police because I want to persuade Kinkead to do the right thing by the Rosenbloom family.
“In case something happens to me, Elena, I’m counting on you to see this through. I’ve included a copy of the entire program on this SIM card.”