“Finding anything interesting?” he asked as he set a mug at her elbow.
“Tons of stuff! So far it all relates to missing works of art, like that Fabergé egg and a small Bernini bronze stolen from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I haven’t found information on the Canaletto painting yet. It’s got to be in one of these files, though.”
He nodded to the still-closed laptop. “You probably cross-indexed the paper files on your computer. Why don’t you check it?”
“I tried.” She blew out a frustrated breath. “The laptop’s password-protected.”
“And you can’t remember the password.”
“I tried a dozen different combinations, but none worked.”
“Do you want me to get into it?”
“How can you…? Oh. Another useful skill you picked up at Interpol, right?”
He merely smiled. “Do you have a USB cord in your briefcase? Good. Let me have it.”
He deposited the latte on the table beside the easy chair and settled in with the computer on his lap. It booted up to a smiley face and eight blinking question marks in the password box. Dom plugged one end of the USB cord into the laptop, the other into his cell phone. He tapped a series of numbers on the phone’s keypad and waited to connect via a secure remote link to a special program developed by Interpol’s Computer Crimes Division for use by agents in the field. The handy-dandy program whizzed through hundreds of thousands of letter/number/character combinations at the speed of light.
Scant minutes later, the password popped up letter by letter. Dom made a note of it and hit Return. The smiley face on Natalie’s laptop dissolved and the home screen came up. The icons were arranged with military precision, he saw with an inner smile. God forbid his fussy archivist should keep a messy electronic filing cabinet. He was about to tell Natalie that he was in when a message painted across the screen.
D—I see you’re online. Don’t know whose computer you’re using. Contact me. I have some info for you. A.
About time! Dom erased the message and de-linked before passing the laptop to Natalie. “You’re good to go.”
She took it eagerly and wedged it onto the desk between the stacks of paper files. Fingers flying, she conducted a quick search.
“Here’s the Canaletto folder!”
A click of the mouse opened the main file. When dozens of subfolders rippled down the screen, Natalie groaned.
“It’ll take all night to go through these.”
“You don’t have all night,” Dom warned, dropping a kiss on her nape. “Just till I get back.”
“Where are you going?”
“I need to let Katya and her father know we won’t be home tonight. I’ll get a stronger signal outside.”
It wasn’t a complete lie. He did need to call his downstairs neighbors. That bit about the stronger signal shaded the truth, but the habit of communicating privately with his contacts at headquarters went too deep to compromise.
He slipped on a jacket and went downstairs. The bar was still open. Lisel waved, inviting him in for another coffee or a beer, but he shook his head and held up his phone to signal his reason for going outside.
He’d forgotten how sharp and clean and cold the nights could be here in the foothills of the Alps. And how bright the stars were without a haze of smog and city lights to blur them. Hiking up the collar of his jacket, he contacted Andre.
“What have you got for me?”
“Some interesting information about your Natalie Elizabeth Clark.”
Dom’s stomach tightened. “Interesting” to Andre could mean anything from an unpaid speeding ticket to enrollment in a witness protection program.
“It took a while, but the facial recognition program finally matched to a mug shot.”
Hell! His gut had told him Natalie was hiding her real self. He almost didn’t want to hear the reason behind the disguise now but forced himself to ask.
“What were the charges?”
“Fraud and related activities in connection with computers.”
“When?” he bit out.
“Three years ago. But it looks like the charges were dropped and the arrest record expunged. Someone missed the mug shot, though, when they wiped the slate.”
Dom wanted to be fair. The fact that the charges had been dropped could mean the arrest was a mistake, that Natalie hadn’t done whatever the authorities thought she had. Unfortunately, he’d seen too many sleazy, high-priced lawyers spring their clients on technicalities.
“Do you want me to contact the feds in the US?” Andre asked. “See what they’ve got on this?”
Dom hesitated, his gaze going to the brightly illuminated window on the second floor of the gasthaus. Had he just made love to a hacker? Had she tracked him down, devised a ploy to show up at his loft dripping wet and helpless? Was this whole amnesia scene part of some elaborate sting?