One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [38]
“You know what happened. A man died at the temple. I was not on a sanctioned expedition. The government would arrest me. I had to get rid of the data without losing it. I was afraid of getting arrested. I wanted to keep the location but didn’t want to have any evidence on me. You have to believe me!”
He was met by silence. The disembodied voice circled around behind him. “Professor, that story is so ridiculous it insults my intelligence. I’m a smuggler. I know every single way to get something into the United States. I know there is no FedEx office in Flores. Why on earth would you think I would believe that?”
The professor now believed he would die. The man had freely told him he was a criminal. Obviously, he had no intention of letting him go. In a panic, the professor began to expand on his story, making it more unlikely, grasping at straws.
“I gave it to an American who was leaving yesterday. We had become friends drinking at the bars, and I didn’t want any evidence on me if I was stopped at the airport. He promised to FedEx it as soon as he landed in the United States. You must believe me! I’m telling the truth!”
“All right. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. What was this man’s name?”
“His name? It was . . . Uhh . . .”
With that, the pain returned like a lightning bolt. The professor jumped out of the chair, his entire body bowed out in an attempt to get away from the agony, his ankles and wrists holding him in place. He let loose a keening wail, then collapsed back into the chair, his bowels releasing onto the floor.
“Why’d you shut it off?” Miguel asked.
Jake said, “I didn’t. He’s still got megavoltage going through him.”
“Wake him up,” said Miguel.
Jake shut off the juice and felt the professor’s pulse. “We can’t. He’s dead.”
“What the fuck do you mean, dead? We barely got started.”
“Maybe he had a bad heart. We usually do this to men and woman much younger than him. Whatever, it’s irrelevant. He’s stone-cold dead.”
“Shit. What do you suppose the odds are that he was telling the truth?”
Jake grinned. “As a matter of fact, probably pretty good. He didn’t say anything that we can contradict, and people who follow the law usually panic when they realize they might be caught doing something illegal. The story is so damn stupid it just might be true. If you want to continue with this, it wouldn’t hurt to simply check it out.”
“Perhaps. I suppose it’s worth following through. I’ll give our friends in the U.S. a call. They owe me a favor, and this won’t take much effort. In the meantime, I saw that our friends from overseas brought some computer equipment with them. Please go get them. Maybe they can take a look at his computer and find something we missed.”
Jake left the room to go to the guesthouse while Miguel dialed an unlisted number.
“Let me speak to Vincent.” He waited while the phone was handed off. “Yes, it’s your southern helper, and it’s time to repay the favor owed. I’d like you to get a package for me that’s been mailed. It’s coming by FedEx to a woman named Cahill in Charleston, South Carolina. She’s the niece of a professor at the College of Charleston under the same name and may very well be going to the school. You don’t need to be polite to her.”
23
Sayyidd stared at the laptop he had been asked to examine, wanting to shout in triumph. The thumb drive he had found among the belongings next to the computer had come to life, asking if he would like to use something called “cryptmaker” to extract data. He had been right. The computer was hiding a steganography program. He hit “yes” and waited for the work to be accomplished. Three of the twenty JPEG pictures he had cut and pasted from the laptop had dissolved, leaving behind a notepad file welcoming him to the cryptmaker family and giving him a troubleshooting guide. He realized that these were probably the example