Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

Sunday, 7:30 P.M.

WITH THE RAID less than two hours away, and no answer on René’s phone or word from Meizi, she turned the corner heading to Pascal’s atelier. At least she’d get Saj started on isolating sounds in the microcassette recording. One step closer to finding the killer.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She looked at the incoming number. Unknown.

Her hope rose. If this was Meizi on the pay-as-you-go phone, she could give her the specifics about the raid, what disinformation to feed Tso. Assure her that her friends and family were safe.

“Meizi?” she said.

A man’s throat cleared. “You gave me your card.”

She recognized Cho from the metal store. “Monsieur Cho?”

“I think the symbols in the diagram …” He paused, choosing his words.

“Oui, go on.”

“I think they represent a fiber-optic cable, one like I read about.”

“And you’re telling me now?”

“No repeaters, which would give it very high bandwidth. Triple what’s in use right now.”

What did that mean? “So you’re saying what?”

“A pipe dream so far, but single fiber-optic cables like these could stretch the length of the Atlantic without a relay system.”

“That’s a good thing?”

“Revolutionary.” Another pause. “The girl showed it to me.”

“A girl?” She stepped back and bumped into the dripping wall. “Wait a minute, you mean the diagram I showed you …”

“Not that. Another one. The girl didn’t know what to do with it. She was afraid.”

“What does she look like, Monsieur Cho?”

“She found this by accident in the sweatshirts she sewed. The dead man put them in her pile.” He went on to describe Meizi. “She didn’t realize until the other night.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” There was silence on the other end. “Where’s the diagram, Monsieur Cho?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who else knows?”

“No one.” Pause. “I’m telling you because Monsieur Colles helped me. And I think you’re the only one who can protect her.”

“Why?”

“Tso’s men are on the streets looking for her.”

IN THE TOWER, she handed Saj the microcassete. “Can you clean this up and try isolating a voice from the background sounds?” Tired, her shoulders heavy, she stood in Pascal’s tower atelier. “It’s a garbled recording from either Samour’s or the killer’s phone. We need to hear it.”

“René’s grabbing a scanner at the office,” Saj said, sitting up and punching his cell phone. “I’ll tell him to pick up a sound-tracking program.”

While he did that, she scanned the laptop screens. “But that was on Coulade’s screen saver.” She cleared the papers and diagrams aside on the trestle table.

“Samour used the trebuchet picture for his screen saver,” Saj said. “Hiding his message under multiple layers of encryption. See how the computer assigns every pixel three numeric values? They correspond to the amount of red, green, or blue in the color the pixel displays. By changing those values by a shade, Pascal hid the ones and zeroes of computerese in the picture’s pixel numbers, but without altering the picture’s appearance.”

Hiding it in plain sight.

“It’s steganography, embedding messages within images. The point of encryption is to hide the content of the message. Using his great-aunt’s password, I found the key to unlock the encryption program. Alors, it’s a bit more complicated than that and took me a while, but …” Saj pointed at the screen. “The Latin’s quite simple.”

“The ingredients, you mean?”

He nodded. “Sulphur, lead, sand, and it goes on.”

Her eyes locked on the emblem above the formula: letters intertwined in a symbol. Her mind raced. She’d seen that before.

“Hold on.” She pulled out Pascal’s book. Found what she was looking for. “Et voilà, that’s the glassmakers’ guild emblem. So this is proof he’d found part of the lost formula and come up with …”

“This portion.” Saj clicked the screen to reveal a modern diagram. “According to my postmodernist programmer, that’s part of a fiber-optic formula. One of incredible strength and clarity. So strong that information could go hundreds of thousands of kilometers without repeaters, like relay stations, in one piece.”

That echoed what Cho said.

“Worth millions,” Saj went on. “The military, governments, private sector, everyone wants this. Didn’t he contract with the DST?”

She still had doubts. “Could he have stolen a trade secret, incorporated and refined it?”

“Intellectual property from the guild expired a few centuries ago,” he said. “But trade secrets? I don’t know.”

So close. They were so close, except for this missing piece.

She hit René’s number. “How soon will you get here, René?”

“Just left Meizi. I’m grabbing a scanner and sound program from the office,” he said.

“Tso’s men are looking for her.”

Pause. “Didn’t you take care of him?”

“Thought I did. The snake wiggled out.” Aimée paused. “Meizi told you about the diagram she found, non?”

“What?”

A sinking feeing hit her.

“Samour put a diagram in her pile of sweatshirts.”

“How do you know that?”

“Cho the metallurgist.”

“Who?”

Worried, she pulled on her coat, headed to the door. Meizi had kept the information back from her and René. She grabbed her bag. “Prévost’s informer. But she didn’t say anything?”

Green light from the laptop screen smudged the tower’s walls.

“You’re implying Meizi thinks it’s valuable, that she’d use it as a bargaining chip with Tso?” René said, his voice rising. “But you’re wrong, she trusts us to help her.”

Then why hadn’t she called? Right now a terrified Meizi wouldn’t know the deal Aimée had made with Prévost. She might give Tso any information to protect her family. Get caught in the raid.… Aimée hoped it wasn’t too late. She had to convince her, get the diagram.

“Let me know the minute you isolate the voices, okay?”

She slammed the tower door.