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