The Final Cut (A Brit in the FBI 1)

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 running out. I’m going into Elaine’s journal. Like I said, she used an online diary, has for many years. With any luck, she’ll have recorded what she was doing in the days leading up to her death.”

“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 thou

ghts. 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.”