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  “They had sex in his crypt?”

  “In this crypt,” Jordan turned her monitor, showing her a photo of the stone edifice, “to be precise.”

  Catherine wrinkled her nose, “Eew...”

  Jordan snorted and pulled her monitor back, “Could you try looking for the zippuh, reference he was yelling about?”

  “I don’t think he was extolling the virtues of the modern day zipper…” Catherine’s fingers flew again over her keyboard, “Assuming he’s all about the Nazi’s… and Germanic paganism… Huh.” she seemed to nod and shrug at the same time, “Maybe it’s this, spelled; S-I-P-P-E.” She clicked on the pronunciation speaker icon and they listened as a mechanical male voice carefully enunciated:

  “Zippuh…”

  “Okay,” Jordan gestured, “and that is German for?”

  “Clan,” Catherine read from the screen, “kindred, extended family. It refers to a band or confederation bound by a treaty or oath, not primarily restricted to blood relations.”

  “He did carry on about the clan, didn’t he?” Jordan rolled her eyes, “I thought maybe he was referring to the Ku Klux Klan…”

  “Maybe he was.”

  “And the Ahnenerbe,” Jordan read from her screen, “was a Nazi institute whose sole purpose was researching their archeological and culturally superior Aryan history.” Her eyes scanned the Wikipedia page, “Founded by Himmler and other Nazi’s… It comes from an obscure German word meaning, something inherited from the forefathers.”

  “So Nancy was into this Nazi stuff too…”

  “And her boyfriend is a suspect in her murder…”

  “Herr Schmidt.”

  Jordan rubbed her forehead with the heels of her hands, “Oh yeah…”

  “She had fake boobs and since the carpet didn’t match the drapes…”

  “Oh,” Jordan quirked her eyebrows teasingly, “you caught that in spite of the icky straight sex, did you?”

  Catherine felt her face grow hot, “Well, I…”

  “I’m gonna’ remind you of that tonight… right before bed.”

  “Jordan!” she scolded. Jordan only wagged her eyebrows suggestively, making her laugh, “So…” she gestured pointedly at her monitor, “she was blond… Did it strike you she was trying too hard to be the Teutonic maid?”

  Jordan shrugged, “I don’t know what these people were into… but I think it’s safe to speculate, at this point, that this whole thing is some sort of effed-up fascist-fantasy gone fantastically wrong.”

  Catherine was about to agree when her desk phone rang. She saw Bea was calling and answered, “I’m here…” She fell silent for a moment and looked at Jordan, “Bea’s people finished a preliminary scan of the data on Nancy Ward’s hard drives…”

  “Good…” Jordan nodded, “go ahead… I have plenty to do here.”

  “I’m on my way…” she told Bea and hung up.

  She stood, “Can I poke around on her phone while you’re gone?”

  “Of course.” Catherine grabbed her tablet, phone, and left and Jordan took her place at her desk. “I think I still have an audio file of yours to review, Miz Ward…” she muttered aloud, closing the pornographic video file and clicked open the audio file with the mouse. She watched as the audio player opened and the progress bar began playing at zero seconds when she heard Nancy’s low voice,

  “Okay, here he comes…” A car door opened and slammed shut, “Guten Abend,” she purred silkily, “Herr Schmidt…”

  Jordan stared hard at the screen,

  “My Ostara… why do we meet this evening?”

  She thought she could hear clothes rustle,

  “Not for that.” The silky quality instantly faded from her voice, “Look, I’ve given it a lot of thought and I can’t do this anymore.”

  “You can’t do what anymore?”

  “It’s all been a fun lark, but really, Joe, you can’t expect me to jump down this rabbit hole with you. It’s one thing to spout all this stuff during sex… the Himmler pillow talk and the rest. But if you think I’m gonna’ end my career for you…”

  “Excuse me, your career?”

  “Wall Street was scary exciting fun, but this shit, forget it.” Nancy snorted, and to Jordan she sounded dismissive and condescending, “It’s beyond impractical not to mention crazy, reckless and stupid, Joe. I’m not going to prison for some…”

  “Prison?” She heard the man scoff, “We aren’t going to prison! We’re going to take all this over…”

  “Oh for chrissakes Joe!”

  Jordan heard anger creep into his voice, “Joseph…”

  “This has ventured into a ridiculous…”

  “I can’t believe this!” Jordan jumped when the man exploded, “You’re going to bail on me now… NOW? When we’re so close!”

  “No, I’m done…”

  Jordan strained to hear beyond the static silence that filled the speakers and long moments passed before Nancy Ward spoke again,

  “I mean we can still get together for… Joe?”

  “MY NAME ISN’T JOE!”

  Nancy suddenly emitted a muffled cry and Jordan’s eyes narrowed as she listened to the unmistakable sounds of a deadly scuffle,

  “I decide when you stop!” She heard the man hiss angrily as he strangled Nancy in her car, “You lying fucking whore!” He grunted, “You fucking cunt! I DECIDE when it’s fucking over!”

  Jordan pulled the speakers in front of her and resting her chin on her hands, stared hard at the screen. She could hear him grunt with effort and small desperate cries tearing from Nancy’s throat amid dull thuds and muffled sounds of movement, Probably Nancy kicking the dash…

  Gradually, the sounds of struggle ceased before he rasped, panting; “I DECIDE!”

  She listened for long minutes as Herr Schmidt opened and closed car doors, I think he stuffed her body in the trunk… She closed her eyes, concentrating on the progression of sounds until a car door slammed a third time and the recording fell deadly silent. When she opened them again she stared at the progress bar and listened to staticky silence, So he’s doing what now? She wondered, listening to the hiss of recorded silence; He’s going to put her in his car and drive her to Los Angeles so he can put his superiority on public display… his power. The Decider… She emitted a snort of contempt. At what point did he start having sex with her dead body? And how many times… Jordan’s nose wrinkled in disgust, He must have moved her to his car before going back to her apartment to take her hard drive and cell phone… the one with the monthly bill… her purse… or computer bag… He took everything that had data on it then left her keys on the counter, cleaned off his fingerprints… then began his long drive west.

  She sighed, still listening to the static hiss; I need to call around and see if I can find out who sold him the dry ice. If he waited until she started to smell and bought it on the road, then I’m screwed on that lead.

  The progress bar continued to creep across the screen; Herr Schmidt was fine with her recording their sex scene in the crypt, maybe he wanted to record the moment for posterity… But Nancy bought a prepaid cell that looked exactly like the phone she already had and recorded their private porno on it… Her brow furrowed, Something had to already be going sideways in their relationship prior to fucking Herr Schmidt on Mister Stephen’s sarcophagus if she recorded it with her secret clone phone she later used to record her own murder with. Why do that? Did she hope to use this conversation as blackmail? She shook her head in frustration, wondering what Nancy could have gotten Joseph Schmidt to admit to besides screwing with Wall Street before he killed her, and she completely implicated herself on that score. What could she have gotten him to admit to that was worse?

  The recording came to a silent end and Jordan rose from Catherine’s chair and stretched as she walked to her desk and searched her briefbag for the earbuds she used with her tablet. I need to make a transcript of this then start calling places that sell dry ice… she thought absently as she sat
back down at Catherine’s desk, plugging the buds into the right speaker jack, Thank god Catherine wasn’t here to hear this.

  Millburn, NJ

  “Bea’s tech’s are making good progress on what amounted to a ton of data, but a lot of what Nancy did is deep, addictive stuff…”

  “Addictive?” Jordan’s hand hesitated a moment before she flicked off the bathroom light.

  “She really was a leading cryptanalyst in the field, her work life revolved entirely around RSA…”

  “Oh lord,” Jordan mumbled as she followed her to their bed, “I have a feeling I’m going to have a very busy night filled with dreams I don’t understand...” Catherine snickered as she stepped out of her pajama bottoms and crawled under the covers and Jordan’s voice faded, reveling in the sight of the shapely bare backside.

  “RSA algorithm… It’s a beautiful piece of mathematics that changed, fundamentally, how we participate in our world.”

  Early on in their relationship, they came to an agreement that one of them should be at least half-dressed in case Cameron woke during the night, and Catherine preferred to leave her top on so she’d only have to struggle with her pajama bottoms, although she was aware Jordan really enjoyed it when she went bottomless. Jordan shed her pajama top and bottoms then checked the baby monitor before sliding in next to her.

  “Codes are the most addictively beautiful things a mathematician can wrestle with…”

  “You just used the word beautiful twice to describe math…” Jordan chuckled, “Spoken like a true nerdy genius.”

  Catherine swatted her playfully and turned off the light on the nightstand, “It’s true, everything we do on the internet is encrypted.” She settled in the circle of Jordan’s arms and sighed, “And all of that encryption is just one kind of number, a prime number.”

  Jordan’s brow knit in concentration, “Prime numbers… like three and five and seven…”

  “Yes, numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one.”

  “Like in Contact.”

  “Mmm hmm….” Catherine smiled in the darkened room, “like in one of your most favorite movies, Contact. What makes prime numbers so important to computer code is what happens when you combine two of them and get something called a semi-prime… When you buy something with your credit card, a big semi-prime is used, like a key, to scramble your secret credit card information. Only your credit card and your bank know the two original prime numbers used to make the big semi-prime number.”

  “And an algorithm is what?”

  “Well, I believe the original root of the word came from the Greek, meaning number, and when it comes to computer language, an algorithm is a set of rules, a process used in making calculations.”

  Jordan suppressed a yawn, “A semi-prime is an algorithm?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what’s the RSA part do?”

  Catherine pressed smiling lips against Jordan’s neck, “It’s just the initials of the three guys who created it. What they discovered is multiplying two prime numbers and getting the total was simple math; it’s easy to multiply two prime numbers like thirteen and seventeen to get two hundred twenty-one, but if someone tells you to find the two prime numbers that were used to get to two hundred twenty-one, that’s really hard. The common analogy used is frying an egg; it’s easy to fry an egg, but once you’ve fried it it’s really hard to un-fry it.”

  “Uh huh…” Jordan sighed sleepily.

  “And that is the key to internet codes…” She smiled, letting her hand trail down smooth skin. “Only your credit card and your bank know the two original big prime numbers that can unscramble the huge semi-prime…” She cupped the neatly trimmed mound between Jordan’s legs and grinned when she heard her sigh contentedly. “And those keys, those codes,” she squeezed the flesh and Jordan stiffened slightly in the bed, “Those big semi-prime numbers are private and secure because it would take longer than the age of the universe for any hacker to figure them out.”

  “Okay… I believe you,” Jordan breathed, pulling Catherine closer, “don’t stop.”

  “So that was Nancy’s job… codes like RSA are considered un-crackable… The biggest semi-prime number so far, I believe, is over seventeen million digits long and takes ten reams of paper to print it out.” Her fingertips stroked the crease between ripening folds and her voice suddenly became silky, “But…”

  “Uh oh…” Jordan rasped.

  “But while people like her are continuously creating ever larger semi-primes, hackers are building bigger computers so they can crack them.”

  “Okay…” Jordan husked, parting her legs and pushing Catherine’s questing fingers further between her folds, “Tell me more...”

  “As computers gain in power and new mathematical methods are discovered, cryptanalysts like Nancy know that no matter how powerful a computer is, it can only process one computation at a time…” The tip of her middle finger slipped into a wealth of slick heat and she smiled at Jordan’s soft groan, “So, for the past few years, scientists started designing new computers that can harness the complexity of physics…”

  “And uh…” Jordan drew a shuddering breath, “and our victim…”

  “Our victim was trying to help her company stay ahead of the hackers by pursuing a new form of code-cracking that uses quantum physics…”

  “Ho-oh… ohh…” Jordan rasped as Catherine slid a long, slender digit inside, “oh, my god…”

  “Classical computers use data in the form of bits,” Catherine purred, “as in ones and zeros… But quantum bits, called qubits,” Her voice deepened as she breathed in the heat radiating off Jordan’s chest, “use a feature of quantum physics that describes how things can be in two places at once,” She added a second finger to the first, smiling at Jordan’s low, answering moan. “A particle can be a zero” she stroked the digits in time with her words, “and a one and everything in between… all at the same time.”

  Jordan bit her lower lip, trying to concentrate on Catherine’s words, “And, uhn…” she rasped hoarsely, “that’s bad cuz’… because?”

  “It gives it the power…” She closed her eyes in concentration, determined to control her own rising ardor, “to do several things simultaneously; a quantum chip considers every possible solution, all at the same time. Instead of working sequentially, it collapses to one answer, boom,” She curled the fingers within and firmly stroked the pebbled patch, “Just like that.” Opening her eyes, she tilted her head back to watch when she felt Jordan stiffen, “All you need is more and more qubits… in a really big quantum computer…” Jordan began to shake rigidly and Catherine matched her thrusts with the waves as they rose in intensity, “That would be all that’s needed at this point…” She began to quake uncontrollably and Catherine finished, “to blow the doors off RSA encryption, and break the Internet.”

  Soft grunts and cries and quiet whimpers broke from Jordan as she climaxed and Catherine watched for a very long minute until she sagged boneless into the mattress, breathless. Smiling, she stayed where she was, content to wait until Jordan’s hand released hers, still buried between the strong, slender thighs.

  “So…” Jordan licked her lips and cleared her throat, “you’re saying…” she panted, “when that happens... we’re all basically screwed.”

  Chuckling, Catherine tilted her head for a kiss, “Well, quantum physics could provide the next level of protection too. Nancy was making significant headway into the field of quantum cryptography…”

  “Oh, Jesus…”

  She snickered, “From what I can tell so far, her job, her work was evolving. Had she not been murdered she likely would have been a part of what will probably be the eventual shift from using semi-primes as codes to employing the quantum Observer Effect, using photon’s of light as encryption codes.”

  “Well…” Jordan chuckled weakly and tilted her head for a languid kiss. “I had no idea geeky computer math could be so satisfying.”

  New York
City, NY

  She looked up from her tablet and drew a deep breath, “I still can’t read in a moving car…” She mumbled in self-disgust, “A plane? No problem, but a car? Nooo…”

  Catherine quickly glanced from the road to Jordan in the passenger seat, “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I used to be able to read in the car when I was a kid and my parents drove us around, but somewhere in my tween years I started getting carsick every time I got in the car… and I stayed that way till I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license.” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug, “Then I got over it except for the reading part.”

  “What were you reading?”

  “You said you and Bea are investigating some glitch on Wall Street?”

  “Trying to, but the bigwigs over there keep refusing her calls. They’re too busy to talk to her and keep sending pat reassurances though their assistants that these crazy market meltdowns that keep making the news are just fat finger errors…”

  Jordan turned to check on Cameron, playing with his toys in his car seat before turning back to her, murmuring in a low voice, “Compared to your fingers…” She wagged her eyebrows suggestively, “which are very skilled.”

  Catherine snorted in amusement but she still blushed, “Why thank you, Agent Hawkins.”

  “So when they said some trader mistakenly typed a B for billion instead of an M for million they meant he made a typo on some trade he was making and created mass chaos.”

  “Yes, so far Bea’s been unsuccessful getting a meeting with their IT people. She wants permission to poke around to make sure it was human error and not some illegal hacker shenanigans.”

  “And this was two weeks ago Thursday?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Nancy Ward had quite a stock portfolio, until two weeks ago when she personally, and not through some financial advisor, sold off more than fifty percent of it the day before that fat finger episode. She made a very nice pile of cash amounting to three hundred and fifty thousand dollars…”