The Final Cut

“Probably, without thinking about it,” Nicholas said.

“Mine are on file, as you know,” Mike said. She cocked a finger at him. “Fingerprint him, Paulie.”

Nicholas held out his hands, palms up. “This is easier than waking up a print tech in London to have my card sent over.”

Paulie was quick and thorough, and within five minutes, they were done and back in Bo’s office, Nicholas rubbing the ink off his fingers with an alcohol hand wipe.

“Ah, here’s a text message from Ben. They’ve arrived at Federal Plaza. Evidently Anatoly came quietly enough, outward goodwill, all cooperative. He already had his lawyer with him, since they were headed to the gala together. Ben will set us up to watch and communicate with him remotely.”

Nicholas would rather talk to the man in person, but there was too much happening here at the Met, a tense undercurrent he recognized from his many field assignments. His gut told him something was wrong, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what.

Mike dialed Ben’s number, and when he answered, Nicholas heard him say, “I’ll be sending you a remote link in a couple of minutes. Oh, yeah, Anatoly’s lawyer’s making noises about filing a writ of habeas corpus.”

“Let him. Take Anatoly apart, Ben,” Mike said, and punched off. She said to Nicholas, “Five more minutes and we’ll be all set up.”

Nicholas said, “I’m going to do some snooping.” He reached into his leather bag and pulled out his laptop.

“Into?”

He eyed her. “The truth? I know you’d rather wait for your people, but time’s ru

“You don’t need her computer?”

“Nope.”

“You can really break into her journal using this program?”

“Yes. Elaine’s data will be under a basic encryption. Won’t take me but a minute.”

Nicholas didn’t bother mentioning he’d been a competent hacker since he was nine, and this would hardly pose a problem.

Mike inclined her head. Sometimes the camel’s nose under the tent was useful. “Then have at it. We need all the information we can get.”

He hesitated for a moment over the keyboard. Elaine. He’d been forcing her from his mind all day, but now she came back, smiling, teasing, arguing in that clipped Oxford accent. His friend. His colleague. Now he would invade her private thoughts. He didn’t like it, but Elaine was dead. She had no more privacy, and he couldn’t afford to give her any, especially if it meant finding her killer and exonerating her.

With three keystrokes, he launched his program and remotely hacked into her system.

Elaine was fastidiously organized, so he had no trouble finding her journal. It was her habit to write in the morning, stream of consciousness, whatever came to mind.

He browsed straight to the end, saw the entries ended nearly a week before her murder, which was strange, considering how religious she was about recording her thoughts.

He started tracking backward in time.

“You’re frowning. What’s wrong?”

He glanced up. “Some of her posts seem to have words and sentences blacked out, or missing entirely. Sentences drop off mid-thought.” And that made no sense. Why would Elaine black anything out? Or delete sentences? He flipped through entries going back a couple of months and saw the same strange blackouts. She wouldn’t have done this. No, someone else had already hacked in, someone who knew exactly what to erase from Elaine’s journal, and how to cover his tracks.

Someone very, very good, and that someone had also probably killed her and taken her laptop.

But Nicholas was better. He might be able to reconstruct the pages. And the entire journal would be cached on Elaine’s laptop, if they ever found it.

He felt his adrenaline spike. He hit three keys together and took a screen shot of the journal displayed and copied it to his laptop, then did it twice more, collecting all the information he could for the month leading up to her death.

He flipped back to the screen with her journal to capture another week. It was gone.

“Oh, bugger.”

“What’s wrong? What did you find, Nicholas?”

He couldn’t believe his eyes. The entries were disappearing, one by one. He tried everything, but his actions only made the words delete faster.

“I didn’t realize there was a self-destruct built into the system. I thought there were blackouts, but it was the virus deleting the entries. They’re all gone.”

Mike said, “Why would Elaine have a self-destruct program on her journal?”

“I don’t know.”

But they both knew that was a lie. Obviously there was something important in Elaine’s journals she didn’t want strangers to see. He couldn’t stand it.

“I captured a bit of it before it deleted itself. Let me see what’s here.”

His fingers flew over the keyboard. “Here’s a fragment from a week ago. Brought VK on board. And the day before that, Vlad, then two blank words, 1:00 p.m.”

“A meeting? And there was nothing more?”

“Victoria said she saw Vladimir Kochen with Elaine at the museum café at lunchtime. It must have been a scheduled meeting.”

Mike leaned over his shoulder, reading his screen. “Brought VK on board. After a meeting with him the day before? Does it sound to you like she hired him?”

He hated it, hated it. There it was, in black and white. Proof, in her own words, that Elaine was directly involved with Anatoly’s soldier.

Mike’s phone buzzed. “It’s Ben. He’s run into a couple of snags, but it won’t be long now before he’ll have the remote feed up and ru

Nicholas sca

He tried a program he’d written to reconstruct coded messages received from assets in the field during his time with the Foreign Office. He fed the copied screenshots into it and watched the words reassemble themselves on the screen in the correct order. He slammed back in the chair, his eyes never leaving the screen.

“Bloody hell. Look at this, Mike.”

23

Mike looked at the screen, but it made no sense, and she said so.

Nicholas pointed at the screen. “It’s garbled, but there are several key phrases, fragments of thoughts. Scared something is going to happen. I need to keep myself safe. She clearly knew something was up.”

Mike said, “And you’re thinking she hired Kochen to keep her safe?”

“It looks like it. See here, Vlad escorting me to work. Feel safer already.”

“But that doesn’t make sense, Nicholas. I mean, if she felt like she was in danger, why wouldn’t she tell Bo? She was a cop, tough and smart—no, I don’t understand this at all. And why, of all things, hire one of Anatoly’s men?”

Nicholas was very afraid he did understand. The murdered Russian hadn’t only been her bodyguard, he’d also been her accomplice. He said, “She would have told Bo unless she was involved and Kochen was part of it.” Saying the words aloud somehow made them more than simply possible, it made them true. But why were they murdered? He knew to his gut there was something else going on here just as he knew time was ru

Mike said, “Here’s a text from Ben. It’s starting. We can talk about it after the interview.”