No One Lives Twice (A Lexi Carmichael Mystery) (5 page)

“It’s on the blink,” I lied.

“The Miata?”

“The one and only.”

“How did you get here?”

I pointed to my feet. “It’s only a few miles and a good cardiovascular workout.”

He looked at me as if I were crazy. Maybe I was. “Jesus, Lexi, why didn’t you call me? It’s the middle of the night. I could have come and got you. There could be all kinds of unsavory characters out and about at this time of the night.”

Yeah, if he only knew. “I didn’t want to trouble you too much,” I said. “But, how about that ride now?”

He sighed. He seemed to do that a lot with me. “All right. Let me put some clothes on.”

He disappeared back into the bedroom and returned wearing a pair of faded jeans, a white T-shirt and sandals. A set of car keys was in his hand. I gathered the papers and my bag. He locked up and we walked out to the parking lot. He had a nice car, a black BMW that he’d somehow managed to keep in the divorce settlement. I rode in it on our one and only date. It happened to be the most exciting thing about him.

Paul opened the door for me like a gentleman, which I liked, and I settled back against the soft leather cushions. He got in and started the car.

“If it’s not too much trouble, could you take me to Guilford Street instead of my place?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long time and then turned off the engine. “Guilford Street? At this time of the night?”

“I’ve got to see some friends,” I said.

“At one in the morning?”

“They’re expecting me,” I lied.

He raised an eyebrow at that. “They?”

“The Zimmerman twins,” I explained. “I’ve got a computer problem.”

Everyone at the NSA knew the Zimmerman twins. They were extremely odd people, identical twins marching to the beat of a completely different drummer. They were also incredible math and physics geniuses and had been the stars of the InfoSec department until they were lured away by a huge computer security firm in Baltimore for boatloads of money. Although they could have afforded a mansion the size of New Jersey, they still lived in the dinky town of Jessup in the same two-story house off Guilford that they had purchased a few years earlier when working for the NSA.

I had bonded with the twins at first because I was the one person they knew who could whip them both at Quake. We also liked hanging out together, eating greasy pizza with anchovies, talking code and playing pinball. In fact, other than Basia, the twins are my closest friends.

Paul looked doubtful, but remembering we were talking about the wacky Zimmerman twins, he probably figured it was possible I wasn’t lying. He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel, thinking.

“It will cost you,” he finally said.

“Cost me?” I exclaimed. “More? For God’s sake, Paul, I already agreed to dine and dance with you. What else could you possibly want?”

He smiled, his lips parting slowly. “A kiss.”

I rolled my eyes, leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. “There. Can we go?”

He sighed. “No, Lexi. A
real
kiss. A good one. Friday night after dinner.”

I shook my head. “Dinner, dancing and now a kiss? You’ve got to be kidding.”

He took the keys out of the ignition and dangled them in front of my face. “Nope. No kidding. That’s how much it costs for a one-way ride to the Zimmermans’ house at one o’clock in the morning.”

He had me good and he knew it. “Okay.” I was really, really desperate. “One kiss, no tongue.”

“No deal. I said a
good
kiss.”

“All right, all right. A little tongue. But that’s it!”

He smiled, put the keys back in the ignition and started the car. “I can work with that.”

It was my turn to sigh. I was going to kill Basia the moment I saw her. She had no idea what she was putting me through.

Paul drove us in silence to the Zimmermans’ house. I was relieved to see a light on in one of the windows. The twins had nocturnal tendencies, not unlike many computer geeks I knew, including myself. I got out of the car, smiled at Paul and told him I’d call tomorrow.

“I’m looking forward to Friday,” he said, leaning across the passenger seat. “Wear something sexy.”

Yeah, fat chance I’d do that. I pretended I didn’t hear and waved as he backed out of the driveway and sped away.

I walked up the gravel driveway and rang the doorbell. After a minute, Xavier answered the door. I knew it was Xavier because he had a small scar over his right eyebrow where his brother had clocked him with a keyboard when they were arguing over the answer to a monalphabetic code. They were only four at the time.

“Hi, Xavier,” I said. “Can I come in?”

He didn’t seem surprised in the least to see me and held the door open. “Hey, Lexi,” he said as I stepped across the threshold. “What’s up?”

“I’m having the worst day of my life, and I need your help with something.”

Xavier’s twin, Elvis, walked into the room. I never ceased to be amazed that their mother had actually chosen the names Elvis and Xavier for her two boys.

Tonight the two brothers were dressed identically, which is really a miracle because they were two of the most absent-minded people I knew. I was surprised that they even remembered to dress, let alone coordinate what they wore. But it was just another mystery about the two of them that had already spawned a legend of mega proportions.

“Hey, Elvis,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“You here to play Quake?” Elvis asked as if it were normal to get visitors at one o’clock in the morning who wanted to play computer games. Maybe they did.

“Not tonight, thanks,” I said. “What I need is a favor.”

“Okay,” Elvis said. “What’s up?”

I slid the bag off my shoulder and took out the documents from Basia. “Could you scan these and keep a copy on your drive?”

Elvis took the FedEx mailer. “Sure. But why can’t you do it yourself?”

“Long story,” I said, following Xavier and Elvis into the command room.

They called it the command room because they had transformed the living room/dining room into a high-tech operating center. They worked out of their home, going in to the firm in Baltimore only on rare occasions when the CEO required it. It worked well for everyone since the twins preferred their privacy and the big shots at ComQuest would do anything to keep their star employees happy.

No matter how many times I’d been here, I still marveled at the setup. Large tables crowded with dozens of computers ringed the room. There were three or four spectacular flat panel displays per computer that permitted them to do several operations at once without switching windows. In the left-hand corner was the Linux cluster of thirty-two computers that Elvis and Xavier used to break encryption and do serious number crunching. To the left of those was an area with laptops, all running different systems in order to simulate and test a variety of software. The rest of the room was taken up by single computer units with multiple monitor displays of various sizes, boxes containing firewalls, and a huge number of routers, switches and cables. There were wires everywhere—snaking across the floor, lying atop the tables and even hanging from the ceiling.

The room was arctic cold with a specially ordered air-conditioning unit running twenty-four hours a day. I was frozen within the first two seconds in the room, but Elvis and Xavier wore short sleeves and didn’t even have goose bumps. The room was filled with the comforting sounds of humming, blinking, whirring and clicking. In terms of their work, Elvis and Xavier complemented each other quite well. They were the legendary co-architects of computer security at most of the government’s top-secret organizations. They were also stellar cryptologists, although neither had officially pursued that particular field. Yet.

Elvis was the network guru and Xavier the system’s expert. Separate they were formidable. Together they were impregnable. Sheer and unadulterated computer geniuses. Even now I felt a twitch of envy.

“Want a beer?” Xavier asked me as I started to shiver.

“Yeah, and a blanket,” I said. Actually I could have used a shot of alcohol a lot stronger than beer, but didn’t think it was a good idea to suggest it at this point. Just in case I was accosted again at gunpoint for the third time today, I didn’t want to be half-tossed.

Elvis brought me a beer and draped a blanket over my shoulder. He propelled me to an empty swivel chair and I sat down, extracting the papers from the mailer. I handed them to Elvis, who stacked them up on a nearby scanner and pressed a button. The soft whir of the machine started, pulling the paper through. I took a swig of the beer and watched as the material came up on the monitor.

“Polish,” Elvis commented.

“Yeah,” I said, surprised. “I didn’t know you speak Polish.”

“I don’t. I just recognize the alphabet.”

“Oh.” I took another swig of the beer as my teeth started to chatter.

“What is it?” Xavier asked curiously, looking at the monitor over Elvis’s shoulder.

“A contract of some kind,” I said. “I think.”

“You get them from Basia?” he asked.

Xavier had a major crush on Basia, but she never paid him the time of day. Granted he was a bit odd—okay,
really
odd—but by no means unattractive. Both he and Elvis were in their early twenties, tall and slender with brown hair and piercing blue eyes. Contrary to the unfair computer-geek stereotype, neither wore glasses repaired with tape or funky, oversized clothes. Okay, so they often dressed alike and weren’t great conversationalists. Those things weren’t my strong points either.

On the up side, they were filthy rich and could afford to keep any woman in the style of her choosing.

The problem was they didn’t suffer fools easily. They were also strange in that intense, genius sort of way where they could talk about something for an hour and you wouldn’t understand a single sentence of what they said. I guess it was a turn-off for some women. Since I sort of share their profession, I mostly understood what they said, but a lot of the time they left me in the dust, too. I suppose it would be a bit demoralizing day after day to realize the clear confines of your intellect in comparison to theirs.

“Yeah, Basia sent them to me,” I said dejectedly. “Now, if I could only find out why.”

“So what’s with all the secrecy?” Elvis asked. “Is this something work-related?”

“No, I think Basia got mixed up in something real bad and I’m trying to help her out.”

“Basia? What could Basia get mixed up in?” Xavier asked in surprise as if she were a virginal angel from heaven.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “But she sent me these papers for safekeeping. I’ve been…ah, approached by some people who want them. I’d like to keep at least one copy safe. And, in my opinion, there is no place safer in the world than your computer.”

Of that I was absolutely certain. No one could possibly hack into their computer. It was better protected than the president’s. I knew this for a fact because they were pretty much the sole architects of the president’s computer security, among other things.

Then I pulled the piece of paper with the numbers Basia had jotted on the contract out of my jeans pocket and handed it to Elvis.

“What do you think this means?” I asked him.

“Is it code?”

“I think so.”

“Who wrote it?”

“Basia, I think.”

He eyed the numbers. “Acheron,” he said and handed me back the paper.

“How do you do that so fast?” I asked, impressed.

He shrugged. “Practice.”

Watching these guys work always floored me. “Well, do either of you know what Acheron means?”

“There is an Acheron in ancient Greek mythology,” Xavier offered.

“Greek mythology,” I said. “I thought it sounded vaguely familiar. What was his story again?”

“Acheron is not a person,” Xavier replied. “It was one of the rivers of the Underworld. At the confluence of the rivers of Acheron and Styx, it is said that the hero Odysseus dug a pit and poured sacrificial blood into it to summon the ghosts of the dead.”

“Ghosts of the dead,” I murmured. “Weird.”

“Acheron is also the name of a river in modern Greece, still reputed to give access to Hades,” Elvis said.

Sheesh, how did they find room in their brains to store this kind of stuff? Who needed a Google search when they were around?

“I should add that Acheron is also a Belgian heavy metal band, famous for its violent sounds of apocalyptic rage,” Xavier added. “Pretty dark stuff. Not for the faint of heart.”

I made a mental note not to buy one of their albums. I had obtained more information than I bargained for and none of it particularly helpful.

“Do you think it could be something else in another code?” I asked.

Xavier took the paper from me. “I’ll give it a thorough run-through in a bit.”

“Thanks.”

Elvis finished the scan, encrypted the file and handed me the papers in the mailer. I stuffed it in my bag.

“Could I get one of you to give me a lift home?” I asked, setting my empty beer bottle on a table and standing.

Elvis nodded and walked over to the table, picking up a pair of car keys. He didn’t once ask how I had arrived at his house without a car in the middle of the night. Details like those didn’t faze these guys. Which was one reason why I liked them so much—no extraneous conversation.

I asked Elvis to drop me off about a half mile from my apartment complex. He didn’t raise an eyebrow, simply pulled the truck over to the side of the road and let me out. He gave me a cheery wave, did a U-turn and sped out of sight.

I crept up to my apartment complex, entered the side door using my key and dragged my tired body up three flights of stairs. I opened my apartment door, keeping the keys in my hand to use as a weapon. Thankfully no one tried to grab me or assault me with a gun.

Yet.

I flipped the lock, set the chain, turned the deadbolt and wedged a chair beneath the doorknob. I wasn’t taking any chances. I made my way back to the bedroom and turned on the light in the bathroom. If anyone was watching, it would seem as if I’d just awakened to go pee. The same mess was there as when I left, but at least I didn’t see any strange men with guns in my shower.