One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [107]
“Are you all right? What’s wrong?”
I had no idea why my brain had made that connection. Heather looked nothing like Jennifer. It was just a ball cap—a stupid connection that passed quickly, like the jolt you feel when a car starts crossing into your lane on the freeway, then swerves back.
“Nothing. Let’s go. I did a recce of the north lobby and found the business center.”
Eight minutes later we were sitting in the The Link, a pseudo- business center, pseudocafé, with me on one computer and Jennifer on another. I logged on to the Embassy Suites Web site in Old Town Alexandria and proceeded to get us a couple of rooms.
I was finishing up the reservation, asking for adjoining rooms, when Jennifer whispered, “Pike. There’s another message. It’s in a different e-mail account. The first account’s empty. The message we printed in Belize is gone.”
I closed out my system. “Print it out.”
After she hit print I said, “Scoot over. Let me try something.”
I got behind the keyboard and typed www.whatismyipaddress.com.
“What’re you doing?”
“Well, we can’t read the message itself, but with a little luck, we can determine where it came from. All I have to do is get the full header of the e-mail and paste it into this Web site. It should have the originating IP address, which, if we’re lucky, is tied to an actual location. Sometimes it’s good to go, other times it doesn’t work, but it’s worth a shot.”
I clicked “get source” and waited for the computer to quit churning. The screen loaded with an analysis of the message.
Jennifer asked, “What’s that telling us? Do you understand any of that?”
“No. The normal human language is at the bottom.”
I scrolled down the screen until I saw “source.” I felt Jennifer leaning over my shoulder, reading the screen:
Country: Norway
City: Oslo
Lat: 59.54.45
Long: 10.44.19
“You’re a genius!” she exclaimed.
She got a stranglehold on my neck, giving it a hug. She pecked my cheek with a light kiss.
What the hell was that? I leaned away from her.
“I can’t believe you just did that! It’s like black magic or something. Why don’t you raise your hands and say, ‘Behave, and I’ll bring back the sun’?”
“Hold on. All this really says is that the message went through Norway as a first gate. It doesn’t mean it came from Norway. There’s a good chance of that, but it isn’t absolute proof. It’s easy to fool this type of thing.”
“All right, all right. It’s still pretty cool. You’re a walking library of cool stuff.”
I didn’t let it show, but I was secretly pleased with the attention. If I’d had a tail, I’d have been wagging it like a dog getting a pat from his owner. I’m pathetic.
“I’m going to delete this completely. If nothing else, it’ll slow down the terrorists.”
Making sure the message was gone from both the in-box and the trash file, I said, “I got a couple of rooms in D.C. Tomorrow, I’ll give a friend from my old unit a call. He’s an Arabic speaker and can decipher both this message and the one before. Sound like a plan?”
“Sounds like a good plan.”
We headed back to our rooms to rack out. Jennifer opened her door, then turned around.
“Hey, Pike?”
I stopped working my key. “Yeah?”
“I’m sorry for that thing in the business center. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
She couldn’t have made me more uncomfortable if she had asked to borrow a condom. Why bring it up?
“That’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just still a little touchy about that sort of thing, I guess. Not your fault.”
“That’s what I mean. I could tell I made you uncomfortable. I wasn’t trying to . . . to . . . make you think of your wife. Anyway, I just wanted to make sure we’re still on the same sheet of music. I shouldn’t have done that.” She broke into a smile. “But you do have some neat tricks.”
ABU BAKR AWOKE BEFORE ABU SAYYIDD. He could feel the endgame in his bones and was itching to bring it about. Quietly setting up the M4, he logged on