“No, we’re cool on this. Petra just needs help curbing her magnanimous impulses.” I headed on up the stairs and left Radke to follow Petra back to Mr. Contreras’s place.
Jake Thibaut was on his way out as I reached the third floor. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of days, and he was surprised by my painful progress upward.
“Your hand bothering you?” For a bass player, an injured hand was worrying enough to cause a limp.
“Not so much. I’m just tired. See you before you fly out?”
“Not if it means looking at something gruesome stuck into your body.”
To my surprise, I found myself fighting back tears. “I’ll wrap myself in gauze, head to foot, so that only my eyes and mouth show.”
“Hey, hey, just teasing, V.I., just teasing.” He brushed my wet eyes with a callused fingertip. “I’m a bass player, nothing grosses me out. Except blood. Can’t explain that one. We have one last rehearsal tonight, and I’m just on my way to buy food for the group. Are you free tomorrow, four-ish? They’re not picking me up until six.”
He pulled me to him and kissed me, and I tried to translate the pain in my abdomen into passion on my lips. As he held me, I heard the dog walker arrive, the dogs’ yelps of pleasure, and then my neighbor start up the stairs with Tim, Staff Sergeant Jepson, and Petra.
Jake murmured that he’d leave me to cope with my circus on my own and went on his way.
Inside my apartment, Tim opened up Karen’s computer. He showed me what happened when he logged on to her site. We got the message that the site was down. Then he typed commands onto the screen itself. Lines of equations began to scroll downward.
“Here’s the command to block content from the site,” he froze the screen and pointed to a line of text. I could see the words “respect,” “for,” “the,” and “dead” separated by strings of code.
“Now, watch this.” He typed another set of commands. Green text scrolled down the screen once more. He typed another command line, and suddenly the Body Artist’s website was on the computer in front of us.
I forgot my sore belly. “How’d you do that?”
“It’s a clone.” Tim tried not to grin, tried to be casual—Aramis Ramírez quickly doffing his hat after back-to-back homers. “That way, whoever is blocking the original site doesn’t know we can access it.”
“But who is blocking it?”
He shrugged. “Can’t tell you that. The server is in Olathe, Kansas. When I talked to one of their techies this afternoon, the best he could tell me is that the commands weren’t coming from this machine. They’re coming from Baghdad. But whether they start there or just are being bounced through there, whoever is doing it is pretty sophisticated.”
“Your old buddies?” Jepson asked.
“USAC-NOEW?” Radke grimaced. “They could, but why would they? I didn’t see anything pertaining to military ops in here.”
“USAC-NOEW?” I said. “Sounds like a cat in pain.”
Tim laughed.
“U.S. Army Computer Network Operations and Electronic Warfare,” he translated. “You know the Army. It’s all alphabet soup.”
“Of course, they’re not the only big outfit in Baghdad,” I said. “There’s also Tintrey.”
“Them and a hundred other jackals.” Marty Jepson was suddenly angry. “I’m so sick of those damned contractors, those private armies! I lost two good buddies who had to go out shotgun to protect one of their farking CEOs.”
“Yeah, man, they’re total scum,” Radke agreed. “But why would they care about this stripper’s website?”
“She’s not a stripper.” Petra started to protest, then looked doubtful. “Maybe I shouldn’t be sticking up for her if she really is, like, a drug dealer or something.”
I scrolled carefully through the images looking for Nadia’s paintings. “We know what the codes that Rodney was using mean, but what was Nadia trying to tell us about Alexandra?”
Petra and the other two men crowded around my shoulders as Tim enlarged various parts of Nadia’s drawings. The last one she’d painted had shown her sister with flames sprouting out of her head.
“She was killed by an IED,” I said. “I suppose the fire symbolizes that.”
“Could well be, ma’am,” Jepson said, his voice very dry. “Where was this incident?”
“On the way to the Baghdad airport, her boss told me. Tim, are there any other files in here that we can look at?”
“What are you looking for?”