2 The Dante Connection (25 page)

“Oh, hey there. Come in, come in.” She got up with only a slight wince and stepped over a silver designer sandal, two different-coloured boots and too many cables to count. How was it possible that a woman as beautiful and always well-dressed as Francine could live in a room that was giving me heart palpitations? The wardrobe doors were open, clothes falling off hangers and pulled halfway out of shelves.

“I can’t.” I turned around to face Colin. “I can’t be here. Find out what she knows and come tell me. I’ll be home.”

To get to the front door I had to walk past the kitchen and the living areas. I was so focussed on getting into the neatly organised safety of my apartment that I didn’t see Vinnie in the kitchen until he spoke.

“Didn’t think you would last long in that pigsty.” He was gently stirring a pot on the stove. As soon as I noticed it, I also noticed the mouth-watering aroma. “I’m making a nice thick stew for dinner. It’s been cooking for hours, but just needed to be moved around a bit.”

He placed the wooden spoon on a holder and placed the lid on the pot. This kitchen was as clean as he always kept mine when he was cooking there. All the countertops were clear of clutter and without a spot. To the left of the stove was a tablet computer streaming a news programme. The tablet was angled for easy watching while Vinnie was cooking.

The sound was turned down low, but was audible enough for me to hear the interview with the president and his wife. She was laughing at an answer the president gave. He smiled warmly at her and continued talking. Vinnie wiped the already spotless stovetop. The stew bubbled gently on one plate. It didn’t make sense.

“How can you live with…” I pointed in the direction of Francine’s bedroom. “… that?”

Vinnie laughed. “I’ve known Francine for a long time. As long as she has her own space to mess up, she’ll keep everything else neat. We had a nice long discussion when she first moved in here. I don’t care about her room. As long as nothing breeds in there, I’m okay with it.”

“Oh God.” I put my hand over my mouth and spoke through my fingers. “How can you even think such a thing, let alone say it?”

“Aw, Jen-girl, you really are cute when you get all disgusted like that.” He hung the dishcloth on the oven handle and stepped closer. “Did you make any more progress today?”

“No.” I lowered my hand. “Do you know if Francine has found any useful information on Kubanov, the hacker and the university person?”

He looked at the clock on the microwave oven. “I checked with her twenty minutes ago and she was still working on something. She rudely chased me away.”

“Then I’m going home.” I had been hoping for more data, but at present Mozart might prove to be more helpful. With a small wave, I left Vinnie in the kitchen and walked to my apartment. I stepped in and felt the relief of being in my haven wash over me. My muscles lost some of its tension as I locked the five locks and went to the kitchen to make some camomile tea.

The normality of my routine settled me. By the time I sat down on the sofa facing the balcony doors, my breathing was deeper. I paged through the article I had printed out earlier, scanning the text. Mozart’s Violin Sonata No. 21 in E minor was filling my apartment, loud enough for me to focus on each note. I took a sip of my tea, put the mug on the coffee table and closed my eyes. In my mind’s eye I pulled up a sheet of music paper. As each note played on my sound system, it appeared on the staves, neatly written. I loved the concrete structures of Mozart’s music. The stability in it made me feel safe and corresponded with my neuro-patterns.

“Jenny?”

As a child, I had never responded well to anyone attempting to bring me out of my mind. If they had dared touch me, it usually ended up with many bruises to everyone involved and me being grounded for weeks. Therefore it was of analytical significance that I felt comfort and security rather than intrusion when I opened my eyes to Colin’s voice and saw his hand covering mine.

Was I unique in having found a person whom, for some reason, I allowed to touch me and in a sense manage me? Studies would show that this was by no means an anomaly. For me it was. My behaviour had always been predictable. And as an adult, controllable. It had been the last six months, since Colin and the others entered my life, that my status quo had changed. Nothing was the same any more. Not even my intense fear and hatred for change was the same. It had softened marginally.

“Hey, Jenny.” He rubbed my hands. “When you stare at me like that, I kinda feel naked.”

I stiffened. “I’m not thinking sexual thoughts.”

Vinnie’s laughter drew my attention to the reading area. He had settled in one of the wingback chairs, reading a book. Strange.

Colin was smiling. “I didn’t mean it like that. It just feels like you strip me psychologically and emotionally of everything and can see my soul.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologise. You just don’t often study me so deeply. Usually I can see that you only analyse my expressions. This is different.”

“Oh,” I said again. How else was I supposed to respond to that?

“Vinnie’s made some stew that we can heat up for you.”

“No, no.” I stopped him, emphatically shaking my head. “I need to speak to Francine.”

“I’m here,” she said from the dining room table. “And boy, do I have things to show you.”

I jumped up from the sofa and rushed to the table. A quick glance at my watch and I was pleased that I had only been in my head for three hours. It was seventeen minutes to nine. The night was still young. And my mind was racing with the connections the last three hours had brought to me. Francine’s new information might very well help to solidify the theories I had. Theories I was sure of.

“What have you got?” I asked.

“Um, do you think we could maybe turn the music down a bit?” Francine had once confessed that she had a time limit for enjoying classical music. I remembered being a bit disappointed in her then.

“Sure.” I turned to Colin who had followed me to the table. “Do you mind changing the music and turning it down?”

“I’ll do it.” Vinnie jumped up from the chair. Recently he had been favouring my world music selection, especially Lourdes Perez. I was not surprised when the rich sounds of her voice filled my apartment. Vinnie quickly turned the sound down until it was in the background.

My eyes were drawn to the book he had left on the chair. “Are you reading Dante?”

Vinnie’s back muscles tensed. He turned around slowly and I was amazed to see embarrassment colouring his cheeks. “You don’t have to sound so shocked, Jen-girl. I was just curious what this fuss was all about. That’s all. The book is actually not all that bad.”

“Vin is a poet at heart,” Colin said with a smile.

Vinnie lifted his middle finger at Colin and grumbled as he settled back in the chair with the book.

I smiled and sat down next to Francine. She had a laptop set up on the table and her tablet was at a viewing angle next to it, a wireless keyboard in front of the tablet. Her fingers were flying over the laptop’s keyboard, the windows changing too fast for me to get a good look at what was on it.

“Okay.” She pointed at the monitor. I was looking at something that looked like a professional presentation. “I put things together like this to make it easier to explain. So here on the first page you will see the information that I was able to get from Luc’s computers. It was all the hacking history, hacking into a few institutions, the security companies, things that didn’t give any new and helpful information. Most of this I already had access to when I hacked his system.

“On the next few pages you can see everything that I was able to dig up on his background.” She moved from page to page as she explained. “I’m not going to repeat the things we already know about him, even though it’s also here. But this is new. A list of his known associates. I got these names from his social media pages, his email contacts, his phone contacts and a few other places. So far none of those names triggered any red flags.

“His phone records also didn’t show anything criminal. I reckon that he had another phone, maybe given by Kubanov. But I’m guessing and I know you don’t like it.” She smiled at me. “What I don’t have to guess about is his financials. Definitely daddy’s poor little rich boy. Every month he received an unhealthy sum from his father. And every month he spent it all by the second week. Computers, games and hacking are very expensive hobbies and that was what most of his credit card expenses were for.

“About nine months ago, I think that was around the time that he dropped out of university, he started gambling online. He was not good at that. Not at all. He drained his accounts even faster than usual. I think that might be why Kubanov recruited him. He was behind in most of his bills and from the emails between him and his daddy’s accountant it looked like he was about to be cut off as well. Boring stuff.”

She clicked to the next page and straightened with excitement. “But this? This is pay dirt. This is what I found on his hidey-hole laptop. So, I told you yesterday that this was the computer he used to contact Jonas. This is also where he received all his instructions, all the information and source codes that Jonas sent him and where he had a few more secrets. I’ve been going through this and it just proves how amateurish Luc really is. Even at a cursory glance I saw that Jonas had given him more than just basic help. Jonas must have been in the security companies’ computers and those specific files long before he sent Luc there.”

Something was causing her distress. Her breathing had changed.

“What else, Francine?” I asked.

“Jonas sent Luc an email with instructions to organise a break-in at my place. They were to only insert a flash drive into my computer. Nothing else. Jonas must have really enjoyed putting one over me. Luc was to get the best thief he could, so there would be no evidence of a break-in.” She shuddered. “I never suspected anything.”

“But you now have proof that your previous theory was correct,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it’s cold comfort. I don’t particularly enjoy being outwitted by Jonas. Or robbed by a dumbass. Jonas instructed him in one of the first emails to delete every email after reading it and to clean out the trash box. Fortunately for us he didn’t listen to the very good advice. I don’t know if it was Jonas or Kubanov who manipulated Luc into thinking that he was the one doing all this super-hacking. They totally fed his ego with some of those emails.”

“Why would they do that?” Vinnie asked from the kitchen.

“Why would they feed his ego?”

“No,” Vinnie said. “Why would they do all the work and then send Luc in to do it again.”

“If ever there were to be an investigation, that would be what would be visible. Not Jonas’ initial and very covert snooping.”

“A patsy,” Vinnie said, nodding his head in understanding. “A real Kubanov trick.”

I knew there was more. “What else?”

“Digging through all his surprisingly well-encrypted files, I found that he had another email address.” Francine smiled widely. “He had a separate address to be in contact with only one person.”

“Who?” Vinnie asked from behind me. I hadn’t heard him move from the kitchen.

“I don’t know yet. I’m working on that. As email addresses go, this is one of the oddest I have seen. I’m also trying to decode the emails.”

“It’s written in a cipher?” I asked.

“Yes, but it is not cryptography used for emails. It’s more like your book cipher.”

“What the fuck is it with these people and their ciphers?” Vinnie stomped back to the kitchen. “It’s like it is 1950 in the US and thirteen-year-old boys form a little secret society in someone’s tree-house with code-words to enter and ciphers to communicate. Idiots!”

I smiled. “People who enjoy playing games are often emotionally immature. They think they’re superior to everyone else when in reality they’re not. Being part of something seemingly exclusive plays into their illusion.” I turned back to Francine. “Send me the emails and I’ll see if I can decipher it.”

“To be honest, I haven’t tried very hard to decipher it. I only got into that email account about two hours ago.”

“No problem. Just send it to me and I’ll look at it.” Something she had said was bothering me. “What was the strange email address?”

She looked at her computer. “alighieri@tormail.
tor.”

All the connections came together so hard and fast that I physically felt it. I gave in to my need to hug myself and rock gently. “It’s him. It is really him. It’s him. It’s him.”

Chapter TWENTY-TWO

It took me
an unfortunate fifteen minutes to calm down. In that time Vinnie had called Manny who was now also sitting at the table. Everyone was giving me time, but the glances I managed to grab of them showed their impatience and the tension in their bodies. It was only by a microscopic margin that I held onto my consciousness and stayed in the present. How could I have been so wrong?

Vinnie placed a cup of coffee on a coaster in front of me and sat down. Francine had moved her laptop and tablet to the other side of the table. She was flanked by Manny and Vinnie. Colin was sitting next to me, eating one of Vinnie’s oatmeal cookies. I rolled my head on my shoulders a few times. A few deep breaths readied me further to explain.

“It is Professor Claude Tremont. He is the owner of that email address. He is also Luc’s connection at the university.” My mouth was dry, the words coming out with difficulty.

“And you know this how, Doc?” Manny sat up from his slouched position and leaned towards me.

“He’s the one who got all uptight about an article I wrote.” I shook my head. “I just never thought that he had taken such offence at what I had written.”

“Okay, wait.” Manny held up one bandaged hand. “First tell me how you know that it is this professor.”

“A lot of clues. The last clue was the email address that Francine got off Luc’s computer. Tremont is a professor here in Strasbourg in the comparative literature faculty, his speciality is medieval and early modern literature up until the 1800s.”

“That explains the book,” Colin said.

“Doc, are you sure it’s this professor?” Manny asked.

“It is definitely him,” Francine said. The whole time we had been talking she had been busy on her computers. “I’ve been trying to trace the origin of the Alighieri emails, but have not gotten far. They are all over the place and I haven’t had enough time to find more detailed parameters. As soon as I had the professor’s name, I linked this email address to the university, his home, cafés in a five-mile radius of all his known locations. It’s him. Most of his emails were sent from the university campus or his home. A few were sent from cafés in his area. It is him.”

“Let’s get that bastard.” Manny got up from the table and fumbled in his pockets with his bandaged fingers. “Oh, for Pete’s sakes. Francine, get yourself over here and help me.”

Her mouth quivered as she moved gracefully to Manny. He had already awkwardly placed the earpiece in his ear and told her to dial Daniel. I smiled at his irritation about asking for help. Francine also found this highly amusing and laughed softly when she returned to the table.

“We should call him Grumpy.”

“Why?” I asked and immediately waved the silliness away. “Oh, never mind. Can you get more personal information on the professor?”

“Already on it.” She moved between her laptop and tablet for a minute before picking up the tablet. “Wow, this guy is educated. He even has a degree in philosophy. Okay, do you want to hear his whole background?”

“No.” I was more interested in his connection to Dante. There had to be something in his life that reflected Dante or his works. “Tell me about his family history. His wife and children, not his parents.”

“Okay.” She drew out the two syllables while she swiped and tapped. “He got married real young to his childhood sweetheart. Oh my God, it is just like in Dante’s book! They met when they were in primary school and got married while they were still students.”

“Which is different from Dante and Beatrice’s history. They never got married.”

“But he loved her so passionately,” Francine said. “I’m looking at an interview here that Professor Tremont gave to a literary magazine. He says that he felt the same love for her that he read in Dante’s work. Okay, reading on. Aha, here he says that they both graduated and he continued his studies while his wife, Sophie, worked. When he started teaching at the university, Sophie fell pregnant and gave birth to a little girl.”

Manny joined us again and put his phone on the table. “How long ago was this?”

“Um, they got married twenty-five years ago, had the baby when they were married for nine years, so that would be sixteen years ago.” She read for a few seconds in silence. “Oh shit. Their daughter was nine years old when she was diagnosed with some rare neurological disorder.”

I grabbed my computer. “This is the code that was on the gallery bomb. Here it is. ‘This sweet child mine, told her end is nigh, should not have had to face, her life in a run.’”

“Bloody hell.” Manny was not the only one taken aback by this. Everyone around the table had varying degrees of shock written all over them.

“What happened to his daughter?” I asked. This must have been the difficult time Tremont had gone through and people were still whispering about.

“Um.” Francine scanned more of the article. “Oh God, she died. She had undergone treatment, but nothing worked. Then Professor Tremont insisted on a procedure. It was not a very common procedure, but doctors had had success with it. The surgery was successful, but… she died a week later. Oh, wow. Against medical advice, he took her home only five days after the surgery. The moment she was off the machines, he and his wife signed her out. He blamed the hospital and the doctors who operated on his daughter for the death. Um, wait. Yeah, the magazine asked the hospital to comment and they referred to a press release after the girl’s death. The press release stated that they had numerous times warned the professor and his wife of the risks of taking her home, but he believed that they had made the right choice. They hadn’t.”

“That’s so sad,” Vinnie said softly. “I don’t care what kind of bastard this professor is. No little girl should suffer.”

“Where is his wife now?” I asked.

Francine took a moment to answer. “It’s not in this article, so I’m checking the… Shit, this guy really had a rough time of it. His wife died eight months ago.”

I winced. “That was around the same time my article was published. Together with his wife’s death, this must have been the catalyst for all of this.”

“Tell us about your article, Jenny,” Colin said.

Manny groaned.

“It was well-written and made for compelling reading, I’ll have you know.” I knew I sounded defensive, but Manny’s resistance to any and all of my explanations grated. “My article was regarding the inclusion of verbal communication and the understanding of nonverbal cues in the effective systemic treatment of non-neurotypical patients.”

“Huh?” Vinnie said as Manny groaned again.

I took a moment to simplify my thoughts. “People like me are called non-neurotypical. Our brains don’t work like most people’s. In order for us to receive effective psychological treatment, a few elements are needed. Firstly and most importantly is the inclusion of the family. This is where I mentioned narrative therapy. It is a type of therapy that heavily relies on storytelling, which in itself I have no problem with. The issues I pointed out
were that in therapy such as this, family members are not included and often do not know if any progress is being made.

“The next mention I made of narrative therapy was when I talked about the role of society as a whole in the treatment of non-neurotypicals. I said that narrative therapy holds a social constructionist belief that there are no absolute truths. I pointed out the positive and negative points in this, but ultimately criticised current society for marginalising non-neurotypicals and so excluding them in the construction of any social reality.”

“Huh?” Vinnie said again and chuckled. “No, I actually understood that. It sounded very clever, Jen-girl. So why is the prof so pissed off at you?”

“He had a paper published a few months prior that fully supported narrative therapy in its entirety.” I glanced at the sofa and saw the article on the coffee table next to my mug. “I read the article earlier for the first time. Now I understand his fury a bit better. In it he explained how even in Medieval times, people used storytelling to deal with their problems, understand life and communicate ideologies. He even used Dante Alighieri’s
La Vita Nuova
as an example. He lambasted critics of narrative therapy.” I winced. “I mentioned in my article that highly educated professionals should not write articles and declare irrefutable statements in a field they are not well-versed in. I wasn’t referring to him, nor to his article, since I didn’t even know he had written it, but there were enough details for him to perceive that those two sentences were aimed at him.”

“Let me get this straight,” Manny said, putting his bandaged hands on his hips. “In one article you lightly criticised a therapeutic method and in two sentences appeared to criticise Tremont.”

“That’s what I just said.” I was looking at Manny’s body language. He was not being territorial, so he was showing confidence and authority. For what reason?

He folded his arms across his chest and gave a strong nod. “That’s it. We’re throwing his crazy arse in jail and losing the key.”

“You’re being prejudiced and irrational.”

“Actually, Jen-girl, for once I agree with the old man.”

“It is obvious that he has some problems. Granted, his problems are bad enough that he’s building bombs and sending me coded messages.” I felt like we were missing something. “There is always so much more underneath the surface of any action.”

“No, Doc. Sometimes an atrocity is just an atrocity and a nut just a nut.”

I ignored that statement. I was not going to enter an argument when I knew that there was another piece of information, essential information that I needed to connect to this development. My elbows on the table, I rested my head in my hands, framing my face with my thumbs and forefingers. It wasn’t difficult to tune out the conversation around the table.

The music had changed and the voice of
Cesária Évora pulled me into the easy Cape Verdean sounds. It wasn’t as effective as Mozart, but there was something calming about the melodies and rhythm. After the fifth song, I had it. It was a possible connection that was there to grab and unravel. I lifted my head and waited for Francine to finish telling Manny about Professor Tremont’s financials. He had been living quite a modest life, it sounded.

“Who was the doctor?” I asked when she took a breath between two sentences.

“Which doctor?” She picked up her tablet and looked at me.

“The one who operated on Professor Tremont’s daughter.”

She swiped the tablet’s screen a few times. “This article doesn’t say. Give me a minute and I’ll find out.”

“Why do you want to know?” Manny asked.

“It’s a theory. I’d prefer to not say yet.”

“You and your bloody resistance to speculation.”

“It was a woman.” Francine tilted her head. “A Doctor Lescot.”

“Her first name?”

“Um, let me check. Lili. Lili Lescot. Why does her name sound so familiar?”

My eyes narrowed as I thought about this. I needed confirmation of my suspicion. “She operated on Professor Tremont’s daughter almost nine years ago, right?”

“Right.”

“Was she married then?”

“I will need a minute for this.” She turned to her laptop and for a few minutes the only sounds in my apartment were Cesária Évora and Francine’s typing. “Oh. Of course! Oh. Oh.”

Manny sat up. “Stop saying ‘oh’ like that. Speak.”

Francine looked up from her computer with eyes wider than I had ever seen them. “She’s the president’s wife.”

I dropped my head back and looked at the ceiling while the men responded with colourful expletives. Watching news programmes and documentaries was often pure escapism for me. I seldom attached any value to what I was watching. Not any more. If it weren’t for the documentary on the president’s wife I had watched three weeks ago, I would never have made this connection. My suspicion had been confirmed.

“She only took the president’s surname eight years ago when he became serious about politics. Since then she has been practicing as Doctor Godard. Also, we know her as Madame Isabelle Godard. She stopped using the shortened form of her name when her husband entered national politics.” I was becoming worried about Manny’s pallor. I leaned towards him. “Are you okay? You’re not looking so good.”

For nineteen seconds Manny swore. Strong words. Worse than Vinnie used when he burned something in the kitchen. “We need to be fucking sure about this, Doc. Already I have all kinds of arseholes pushing me to end this bombing madness. If I now add the president and his wife to the mix? It will be total bedlam.”

“Manny, look at the evidence.” I pointed at Francine’s computer. “Doctor Godard is even mentioned in Professor Tremont’s second code. He called her ‘those of false hope’. He called himself ‘the betrayed’ and that vengeance will visit upon Doctor Godard.”

“But that was for the bomb in the Modern Art Museum” Colin said. “And it exploded, but wasn’t big enough to even hurt Millard too badly. How would that be taking revenge on the president’s wife?”

“I don’t know. There must be an explanation though.” This sudden rush of connections offered even more questions. “How does Kubanov fit into all of this?”

“That motherf…” Manny shook his head once. “He must wait for now. First I need to do something about the president’s wife.”