"Don't start telling me more about—"
"Michael, that was the last time anybody saw him. He just vanished. That night. There was even something in the paper. 'Mysterious disappearance.' The apartment where he lived had been dismantled. Top to bottom. Somebody must have thought he was holding out."
"And?"
"Well, it just so happened I still had it in computer memory, though that's a blatant violation of security procedures. Anyway, the next day I called Control and said what's with a certain file? Gave them the NSCID number. And they said, 'We have no record of that number.' Quote. They'd never heard of it. So it must have been a free-lance job for somebody outside. Whoever it was must have paid Jerry, or maybe blackmailed him, into getting me to take a crack at it. Which is why it was two weeks old. It wasn't NSA material at all. Somebody else wanted it, and I'm known far and wide as Ms. Give-Her-the-Tough-Ones."
"You always were the best."
"Right." She laughed, then reached into her purse and retrieved a three and a half inch gray computer disk. "And here it is. A complete copy. I've also got it stored on the eighty-meg hard drive of my Zenith Turbo 486 laptop back at the hotel." She tossed it to him. "Jerry's file. That's the good news. The bad news is, it's still encrypted."
He turned it in his fingers. Welcome to the new age, he thought, when thousands of pages can be packed onto a high-density disk the size of a casette tape.
She took out a compact from her purse and powdered her nose in the light of the candle, then turned and searched the stone for her crumpled dress. He thought he heard a sound from the hallway outside, but then decided it was just more thunder.
"So now what?" She finally found the dress and drew it loosely on, managing not to secure the bustline. "I've tried and tried to crack it, but nothing seems to click. After the preamble, there's nothing on there but a long string of numbers. Whatever it is, it's not any of the standard encryption systems." She reached to take it back. "Why am I telling you all this?"
"Because we've agreed, no more games."