“How about that?” he exclaimed.
“Fantastic, except …” Mallery stared into Windward Actuarial.
Thornton looked around the office — carpet, bare walls, and nothing else. It made no sense. It was impossible that the Littlebird team had emptied the place during the brief periods when he or Mallery wasn’t watching from the hotel. The back alleyway was too narrow to allow a desk through. “Maybe they put everything somewhere else in the building,” he said.
“You overheard the security guard tell Lamont to try an actuarial firm that wasn’t as busy,” said Mallery. “Maybe Lamont had been using Windward as cover, really trying to access another business in this building, or maybe he’d just gotten it wrong. If you’re a transcriber, you would probably wonder what you were doing in an actuarial firm. But you wouldn’t think twice if the name of the place were SofTec, right?”
Ten seconds later, they were across the hall, at SofTec’s door, identical in appearance and size to Windward’s, meaning there was no need for Thornton to adjust the hook or the wire.
In less than a minute, he and Mallery were inside SofTec, mouths agape at the contents of the thirty-by-thirty-foot windowless space: three rows of three cubicles, each row bridged at head level by a steel rack crammed with hard drives, some as small as cell phones, others the size of briefcases. Perhaps 1,000 drives in all, they emitted a medley of processing sputters, fan-blade whirs, and all manner of electronic clicks and grunts and beeps. Several thousand tiny bulbs — orange, yellow, and red — and green LED panels combined to project an aura like that above Manhattan at nighttime. The office’s organizing principle seemed to be piling on hard drives into the overhead racks as needed. The racks sprouted a multicolored jungle of cables and cords that all but encased the three cubicle rows.
“It’s what we expected,” Mallery said as she wandered around. “The audio from the bugs is collected on the hard drives, then transcribed by people in each of the cubes. See the headphones?”
“Yes.” Dodging one of the bulky posts supporting the nearest rack, Thornton stepped over a series of power cords and entered a cubicle. He recognized the pair of foot pedals from his newspaper reporting days. They were used in transcription to keep the hands free to type — one pedal for pause and play, the other for rewind. He picked up one of the lightweight headsets. Plenty of padding on the headband. Holding one of its thick cups to his ear, he heard a voice. “This terminal is picking up a woman speaking a foreign language. Romanian, or maybe Hungarian,” he told Mallery.
“Could be a live transmission,” she said.
Setting the earphones back on the desk, he followed the cable from the terminal to the drive in the rack directly overhead, to which someone had taped a strip that read:
The hard drives on either side had labels with similar characters.
The same thing was on all the hard drives. “I should have figured they wouldn’t just spell out for us whose audio is whose,” said Thornton.
“We can read the labels,” Mallery said from the far side.
He stared at her. “What am I missing?”
“Ten years in computer labs with bad lighting and worse ventilation, during which time you would have had more than your fill of encryption.” She pointed from label to label.
“These all have between six and twelve characters, no spaces. Last names, right?”
“Probably.” Thornton didn’t see what difference it made.
“The longer ones, Eastern European, Spanish, maybe end in A or V, a lot with VA or OV. Plus As and Os and Es are mile markers. I think you were listening to someone named Cavanova. Davonova? Gavanova?”
Feeling like he’d witnessed a magic trick, Thornton exclaimed, “Galina Ivanova is Hungary’s new minister of finance.”
“You know what’s in her head and you can place some pretty good bets on the Budapest Stock Exchange domestic equity indices.”
“Interesting. Any idea how it fits into the puzzle?”
“It tells us they’re going with first initial and last name here, and now we have eight letters.” Mallery looked at the labels to either side of Galina Ivanova’s. “Also the drives are in alphabetical order.” She chuckled. “I don’t know why they even bothered with code.”
Thornton shook his head in wonder. He started to speak but was interrupted by an odd creak. He whirled around. The door was still closed.
Mallery looked at him, her shoulders raised.
“Building settling,” he said. And hoped. He cursed himself for neglecting to set up even a rudimentary tripwire to notify them of the arrival of another person.
On her clipboard, Mallery jotted out the alphabet on two grids.
“Each letter’s represented by the part of the grid surrounding it,” she said. “If it’s the second letter in the slot, then it gets a dot in the middle. For example, here’s A and B and …”
She wrote:
She tapped the three drives perched on the rack just above her head. “These three drives are for subjects named Johnson, the one before is Jemison — why is that name familiar?”
“There’s a Stanley Jemison on the board of ExxonMobil.”
She continued perusing the labels.
“A. Kellogg, S. Kirkendall,” she said. “Scott Kirkendall, secretary of defense?”
“Could be.”
“And X. Laibe,” she read. “Has to be Xavier Laibe, right?”
“How many X. Laibes can there be?” Thornton wandered toward the Ts, wondering if he’d see a hard drive labeled with his own name. “Who is he?”
“He heads up mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley, which took my company public. To be a fly on his office wall is to potentially have billions of dollars’ worth of insider information.”
“Maybe that’s the reason you initially were bugged.” Thornton took in a smaller, newer hard drive:
Something Sokolova. He recognized it as the female variant of the surname Sokolov. Leonid Sokolov’s wife — Bella? There was no shortage of Eastern Europeans represented here, and Sokolov was the fifth most common Russian surname, following Smirnov, Ivanov, Popov, and one that Thornton couldn’t immediately recall — but what were the odds? He hurried back to Mallery to double-check the symbol for B she’d written down.
“G-gee,” she stammered. “G. Langlind.”
Thornton couldn’t get the question out soon enough. “Can we find out what he’s been saying?”
“We would need to do heavy-duty hacking to get audio, but we should be able to bring up the transcriptions right now.” Without waiting for a reply, she pulled the USB cable down from the hard drive, climbed over a cluster of wires, slid into a chair in front of the computer, and plugged in the cable. A tap at the keyboard and she awoke the monitor. Nothing but white pixels and a trash can icon in the lower right corner.
She hit RETURN. Type flooded the screen. She read aloud from the top. “And can I get a half and half with that, please?” She moused up. “Apparently, this is him at 3:04 this afternoon, in the Senate Dining Room with someone named Selena.”
“Probably Seldridge,” Thornton said. “Selena Seldridge.”