"I'll bet they are, " Ronnie said.
"What's an ACOG?" Selena asked.
"ACOG stands for Advanced Combat Optical Group," Nick answered. "There are a lot of variants. It's a computerized telescopic sight with built in goodies to determine range, compensate for bullet drop and wind factors, things like that. You haven't worked with it yet. It's not available on the civilian market. The M4A1 is strictly military and police use."
"Where was the shooter?" Ronnie asked.
"In the HVAC duct work over the convention floor," Harker answered. "He fired through a vent. That center is 300,000 square feet. The system runs all around the top and it's huge. Plenty of room for someone to crawl in there."
"They ID him yet?"
"A former Army Staff Sergeant named Hardin. Dishonorable discharge after an incident in Afghanistan. He was accused of rape."
"Winning hearts and minds," Nick said. "There's always a rotten apple somewhere to give the military a bad name. How come he didn't end up in Leavenworth?"
"It was political."
Nick shook his head.
Harker said, "The Bureau and the Secret Service are all over the assassination attempt. It's not our concern at the moment. We have something else. Stephanie broke the encryption on the laptop from Endgame. Steph, show us what you found."
The monitor on the wall lit. On screen was an email with directions to Nick's cabin and photos of Nick and Selena. Selena shivered. Someone had taken her picture and sent assassins to kill her.
"Son of a bitch," Nick said.
"The message was sent to a cyber café in Los Angeles," Stephanie said. "It's a dead end. I got prints from the laptop and sent them to Interpol. There were two hits, both former FSB. Russians."
"The Russians went after us?" Selena looked at Stephanie. "Why would they do that?"
"They wouldn't," Harker said. "It's not the government."
"That's an assumption," Selena said, "that it isn't the Russian government."
"You want to do the assumption thing?" Ronnie asked.
"Why not?"
"Okay." Harker looked at them. "Assumption number one is it isn't the Kremlin. What's two?"
"Those hoods were ex FSB," Nick said. "So assumption number two is that whoever is behind this has a Russian connection."
Lamont said. "Who has the contacts to hire guys like that?"
"The Russian Mafia, for one."
"Yeah, but the mob wouldn't have any interest in us. Don't forget the ones who went after us here and in California were American."
"Then assumption number three is that it's someone with widespread contacts here as well as in Russia. Who fits that profile?"
"Endgame is part of Foxworth's holdings," Selena said. "He runs AEON. He would have contacts here and in Russia."
Elizabeth said, "Ogorov is part of AEON. He could be the Russian connection. So we're back to them again."
Nick shifted in his chair, trying to ease the pain in his back.
Ronnie smoothed the front of his shirt, where hula dancers swayed under impossibly green palm trees.
"Look what's happened so far." Lamont counted out points on his fingers. "First they go after Nick and Selena. Then Ronnie and me. Nick and I go to New York, Russians try to kill us, and we find a computer with directions to Nick's place."
He'd run out of fingers. "That about it?"
"There's more," Stephanie said.
Lamont groaned. "What, more?"
"Several emails went between Brighton Beach and Prague."
Nick rubbed his forehead. He felt a headache beginning. "Prague? As in the Czech Republic?"
"Yes." Steph clicked her mouse. The screen filled with neat groups of numbers.
"These are messages in code."
Elizabeth drummed her fingers on her desk. "Can you break it?"
"I'm not promising anything. The groupings are typical of a book code. The Brighton people were Russian. Assuming this actually is a book code, then the book is probably Russian."
"How will you find out which one it is?"
"I'm running a scan of every Russian book in the world databases, combined with a decryption program. If the numbers refer to a page and a word, either the word comes first or the page. The program checks it both ways and looks for correlations. If they added an extra digit or a pre-planned substitution to get the right location of the word, we'll never crack it. If the book they used isn't in the data banks, same result. We're out of luck. "
"And if it works?"
"Then we'll know which book, which edition, which page and which word. Then we translate. The computer will do that. Then we read the message."
"Simple," Ronnie said. "Why didn't I think of that?"
"Because the government pays you a princely salary to blow up things," Stephanie said. "They don't pay you to think." They all laughed.
Harker said, "How long will it take?"
"It depends. When there's a match the computer will tell me."
"All right. Good work."
"What about Prague?" Nick asked Harker.
"I want you and Selena to check it out. Selena, you speak Czech, don't you?"
"Yes. I'm rusty, though."
"That doesn't matter." She slid a folder across her desk. "Once Steph told me what she'd found, I put this together. This has your legend and passports. You and Nick are Canadian for this trip. Married."
"Quicker than Vegas," Nick murmured.
Harker gave him one of her looks. "Nick, you're a sales rep. You're in Prague to try and drum up a little business. You brought your wife along for a real European vacation."
"Doing my bit for globalization." He said it as if it left a bad taste in his mouth.
"The address of the cafe where those emails originated is in there." She tapped the folder. "It's not much, but it's all we've got. Go there, see what you can find out. Try and identify the sender."
"How are we supposed to pick someone out? Assuming the sender is even there?"
Harker reached into a drawer and took out what looked like an ordinary digital camera. "You're a tourist. Tourists take a lot of pictures. Every picture you take with this will upload to a satellite. Steph and I will have them seconds later. Go to the cafe where the emails came from and take pictures. If the sender uses it on a regular basis and if he's in the databases, we might get lucky."
"That's a lot of ifs and not much to go on."
"Best I can do."
"I hear the beer is pretty good in Prague," Ronnie said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Nick and Selena landed at Ruzyně International Airport in the early evening. Nick had altered his appearance so the facial recognition scanners wouldn't pick him out and blow his cover. After the Jerusalem incident he couldn't travel in the open if operational security was in force.
He wore a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. Silicone pads and latex changed the shape of his face, giving him a puffy, slightly dissipated look, the face of a drinker. Skin-toned elastic pulled his ears tight against his head. The distinctive scar where a Chinese bullet had taken away the lobe on his left ear was gone. Contact lenses turned his gray eyes hazel. His short black hair was concealed under a brown wig indistinguishable from the real thing.
Nick's Canadian passport was genuine. It identified him as Richard Wilson, a business man from Vancouver. He wore a wedding ring. The customs form he'd filled out on the plane listed the purpose of his visit as business/vacation.
Selena was dressed in practical, plain clothes that made her look dull, an uninteresting woman in awkward brown shoes with a long skirt, excited about her once in a lifetime trip to Eastern Europe. She wore a wig of mousy brown. Her eyes were the same color behind large glasses with clear plastic frames. She wore a cheap diamond wedding set. Her passport listed her occupation as elementary school teacher and her name as Sylvia Wilson.