Hot Ice

50

Judith had taken only two spoonfuls of her soup when her BlackBerry buzzed.

She placed it to her ear.

“Ignition,” Jason’s voice said, and the connection went dead.

She returned the device to her purse and continued to spoon the broth. It had a unique blend of coriander, garlic, and spices she could not quite identify. She leaned over her bowl, sampling the fragrance in hopes of recognizing more of the ingredients.

Concentration on matters culinary was interrupted by the sound of shouts and a banging door across the street. Two men and a woman stood coughing on the rain-slicked sidewalk as white smoke billowed from doors and windows. Judith had barely time to take this in when four or five people, the men in sleeveless undershirts, the women in old-fashioned slips, burst out of the house on the other side of Number 23 with a cloud of smoke following them into the street. They did not seem to notice they were instantly drenched by the rain.

Arms outstretched, one of the women was wailing in incoherent Spanish when Judith first heard sirens and the rumble of heavy engines. At the same time, four men stumbled out of Number 23, coughing into handkerchiefs. Judith noted one had a bandaged face. She was certain it was the man from in front of the El Convento who had tried to kill her.

She selected “Call Jason Mobile” on her BlackBerry. “Go!”

On the roof, Jason had already used his electrical lock pick, waiting for Judith’s signal that the house had been evacuated. There was no way to know for sure that no one was left inside, but fear of a fire was the best way to make that possibility as remote as it could be.

He pulled goggles over his eyes and tied a wet bandana over his nose and mouth. A small oxygen tank would have been far better, but there was a limit as to how much he could carry given the swiftness the job required. Glock in his right hand, penlight in his left, he moved down the stairs to the door at the bottom. The beam of his light was diffused by the smoke, forcing him to hold the light in his mouth while he groped for the lock. It, too, yielded to his pick.

Inside, Jason swept the room with the Glock. The smoke bomb had done its job: total evacuation. A metal file cabinet sat against the far wall next to a generator. Puzzled for a moment, he wondered at its purpose. What he guessed was a shortwave radio was on a desk to his left. A table on which rested two computer monitors and a pair of keyboards was next to the door.

All the electronics, of course. That was what made the generator necessary. Dependable power supplies in the Caribbean were rare at best and nonexistent more often than not. The generator he had heard buzzing last night from the other side of the door made certain there was no interruption of communications.

Also on the table was a printer with a sheaf of paper hanging from its mechanical lips. Jason snatched up the papers.

Russian.

His command of the language had been limited to a few standard phrases (“Surrender! Hands High!” “What is your name?”), and even this had faded with disuse, but he recalled enough to know at a glance that these pages alone justified the risk he was taking. He rolled the papers and stuffed them into a back pocket.

One of the computers had been left on, deserted in a smoke-induced panic. An incredible bit of luck. Then his heart sank. The monitor showed a picture of a waterfall in a rain forest, a screen saver. There would be little time to try to penetrate what he was certain would be sophisticated firewalls.

Screen saver? There were no icons for program selection. Jason looked closer. Pretty picture, but hard to believe GrünWelt was using computers to exchange innocuous photographs. What was the word he had read recently? Steganography, that was it. The use of perfectly innocent images to hide messages. Prying eyes would see only a waterfall, mist, and a few orchids dripping from the trees that hosted the plants. Special software could coax text from the images.

Jason touched the Shift key and the screen filled with Cyrillic letters, five to a group. Double encryption, the image and now code. Some contemporary electronic version of the Enigma, the World War II machine where randomly selected wheels made deciphering possible only by a comparable device? No matter. Software was available that could accomplish in minutes what last century’s code breakers had been unable to do in months.

Leaning over the keyboard, Jason made a few clicks that sent the screen’s contents to Sybil. He’d call later with an explanation.

Right now, he wanted to steal as much information as he could in the time he had left.

In the bodega, Judith wondered how the hook and ladder had navigated the old city’s narrow streets. But it had, as evidenced by the firemen hopping down from it. In the first moment, all seemed confusion as every firefighter was shouting at another. Order quickly emerged as a hose was connected to a nearby hydrant, a ladder slowly rose toward the roof of the first house, and two men dashed inside.

Judith keyed her BlackBerry. “Two on the roof, two inside.”

“Which house?” came the reply.

“The one closest to the intersection.”

Jason shoved the BlackBerry back in his pocket. Shit! The roof! When the fireman found what had been put into the air-conditioning housing …

No time to worry now. Just keep calling up files and forwarding them to Sybil.

Perhaps a minute later Judith watched a fireman scamper down the ladder. Her heart sank when she saw what he was carrying: A large flowerpot from which thick, white smoke poured. A part of the crowd drawn by all the excitement was already jostling for space at the bottom of the ladder before the man reached the last rung.

She noted the big man with the shaved scalp push his way to the front. The one with the bandaged face was close behind. Were there others? None she saw. With growing consternation, she saw each take a look at the smoking clay pot. She could imagine the cartoon lightbulbs above their heads.

The reaction was immediate. Shaved Head pointed to the roof of Number 23. Two men she had not noticed before broke from the spectators contained behind hastily erected barricades and shoved aside the fireman blocking the doorway of Number 23. The man with the shaved head and the one with the bandaged face also pushed firemen aside, this time to appropriate the ladder as they scrambled toward the roof, followed by Spanish invective from the firefighters. And orders in vain from the police.

Jason was somewhere between the two who had entered from the street and the pair on the ladder.

Judith threw a twenty onto the bodega’s table, slung the purse strap over a shoulder, and lurched into the street past the concerned owner, who tried to slow her down long enough to enquire about any problem with the food. She slid by him impatiently and was already running down Calle Luna as she speed-dialed Jason.