Thursday Morning
STREAKS OF THE MORNING’S first light filtered through the mist enveloping Pont Marie. Aimée slid Miles Davis’s tartan winter sweater over his hind legs, settled him in her bike’s wire basket, and cycled through the mist to Leduc Detective. Feeling guilty about being absent again, she’d arranged for Marcel, the one-armed Algerian war veteran who ran the kiosk on rue du Louvre, to dog-sit Miles for a few days.
In the office, she powered up their espresso machine and made a strong espresso double. She hoped for some responses from the three clubs where she’d left messages for Lucien Sarti. With any luck she’d find him and discover his link to Armata Corsa and why he’d left Conari’s party before being questioned. Her hunch was that he’d witnessed Jacques’s murder and had some connection to it or to the diagram Yann had found. Or worse.
In the meantime, she cranked open the window shutters to let in the damp gray air from rue du Louvre together with the smell of butter emanating from the nearby boulangerie. She put on a trance-techno tape she’d bought from a DJ last night. Moody, and with a steady beat. She booted up her computer and searched the Net for information on the data-encryption leaks that Bordereau had mentioned and to find out what she could about Big Ears.
She came up with Big Brother, the nickname for the U.S. and U.K.’s Echelon, the big ears of eavesdropping.
That sounded old-fashioned, dated by the Cold War, she thought, ancient history.
Au contraire, she discovered, as she dug deeper. Echelon, according to NSA, the National Security Agency based in the U.S., was responsible for the interception of international signals; all traffic from telephone links, to e-mails, to faxes, whether sent over land lines or by cell phones.
More than impressive.
Echelon, a network, operated on a filter system that utilized banks of powerful computers programmed to recognize key words in various languages and intercept messages containing those words for recording and subsequent analysis. All from a Helios-1A satellite beaming down to earth to wire and parabola-dish antennas.
She knew Helios-1A took high-definition photos for surveillance: spy stuff. How did that work? Searching further, she found a French military site. What she saw there made her sit up. France had its own version of Echelon: “Big Ears,” dubbed “Frenchelon.” She searched for twenty minutes until she discovered a short article in the left-leaning Le Nouvel Observateur indicating that Frenchelon had the capacity to process two million phone calls, faxes, and e-mails each month. Or more. It was even rumored to be capable of tracking individual bank accounts.
Her phone rang. “Leduc Detective,” she said.
“Bonjour, I’m calling from Varnet and we’re interested in your proposal. Can you answer some questions?”
She switched gears as she shuffled through the pile on her desk. “Of course. Your proposal’s right here and I’m delighted to help you.”
She spent the next half hour walking the Varnet manager through Leduc’s proposal, clarifying information as to the computer-security service they offered. And the next two hours run- ning the programs waiting in her laptop. By the time René appeared, she’d worked three hours and updated all the accounts on their database.
“We’re current, René,” she said. “Rent paid and twenty-three francs in the bank! How’s that for being in the black?”
“At least Saj will work for food,” René said, hanging up his camel wool coat on the rack.
Saj, from the Hacktaviste academy where René taught, hacked part-time for them.
“This should help,” he said, setting down a check from Cereus.
Wonderful. Thank God, it covered René’s paycheck. If their clients paid on time, they’d have six figures to join the twenty-three francs, but that would be a miracle.
“Varnet’s interested; I think we’ve got a new client.”
Instead of being relieved, he appeared worried.
“What’s the matter, René?”
“No sign of Paul or his mother at their apartment. I checked twice yesterday and last night.”
A bad feeling came over her.
“Did they do a runner?”
“Hard to say.”
“We need his statement. The autopsy found one bullet but your little friend Paul saw another flash. But for him to skip school—”
“Paul’s nine years old, he’s lonely, and his mother’s alcoholic!” he said. “Where would they go?”
“We look until we find them,” she said. “Dig up your Toulouse-Lautrec outfit.”
“He knows I’m not Toulouse-Lautrec, Aimée.”
“Don’t give up. We not only have to find them but we must convince his mother to let him talk to Maître Delambre.”
“I’ll need your help for that, Aimée,” he said.
“But our first priority is to review the lab findings on the gun residue found on Laure’s hands. Right now I have to corral Maître Delambre. Find out what’s holding up the lab report.”
René rolled his eyes.
“I need to do this for Laure. You with me, partner?”
“If we do it together,” he said.
Her eye fell on the underground Paris map tacked to the office wall. Orange and pink delineated the old quarries and limestone formations in the eighteenth and fourteenth arrondissements. She pulled out her cell phone. Affixed the broken antenna.
René’s mouth turned down. “That’s the third phone in—”
“I’ve got a mirror in it.”
“Always the fashionista!”
“Listen, last night I spoke to the prostitute on that beat. According to her, a Corsican goes into that building regularly.” She pointed to the diagram she’d made. “He’s crude and she doesn’t like him. She saw this Corsican talking with Jacques in Zette’s bar. There’s some connection.”
“Connection? Most likely she was telling you what she thought you wanted to hear.”
She shrugged. “And I think Sarti, the musician, who went to Conari’s party and left before being questioned, knows something.”
“Suspicions, ideas. That’s all you’ve got,” René said.
Aimée stared at the map of the wall, at the limestone formations of Montmartre, orange and kidney shaped, that spread over the area. “Sarti stood right here, I saw him.” She pointed, lost in thought, looking for a link. “Yet the diagram Yann Marant found—”
“Marant, the systems analyst from Conari’s party?” René interrupted.
Aimée nodded. “Good memory, René. He is the consultant to Conari’s construction firm. He found a diagram, like a floor plan, in a nearby Dumpster.”
“Since when do systems analysts work with contractors?” René took out a linen handkerchief with his initials, RF, embroidered on the edge, and blew his nose. “The sure way to catch a cold, coming out of the Metro to a hot office!” He blew his nose again. “Conari’s firm must have Ministry contracts.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Having a systems analyst is a government requirement. Look in the guidelines. We’d need one, too, if we did Ministry work.”
“René! You’re not suggesting we angle for Ministry work?”
Before he could answer, she pointed to the piles of paper on her desk. “Look, we have work, and will have more work from the proposals we’ve sent out. You know our problem’s with negligent clients who take forever to pay.” Corporations were notorious for delaying payment to independent contractors.
“It’s either collect or do a créance,” René said. “Which invites another kind of trouble.”
She knew all too well that the créance, a loan made by a bank against the borrower’s pledge of accounts receivable plus a ten percent commission, spelled trouble. When a bank collected, firms would notice and figure it reflected Leduc Detective’s financial difficulties.