Borderless Deceit Read Online Free PDF

had said. She was wearing plenty of metal – on her fingers, around her wrists, from her earlobes – but fascinating him most were three eyebrow rings pierced in a neat row.
    With a long inhalation through his nose, the Czar began. “We are here to make…shall we say…a mid-course correction. Let’s take stock first. What more do we know?” The voice was gravelly and deep. “Ernest, what’s your take?”
    Ernest Cousineau was still in denial. He was savaging a toothpick, rolling it from one side of his mouth to the other. “A sucker, eh,
la bête
. And the firewall…
Chalice
… like fluff.” He made a hacking motion as if he held a cleaver and waved aside what he had just chopped up. “
Et puis
, the sack. Attila the Hun. I thought he was dead. No? So nothing left,
là
. Nothing.
Rien
.”
    The Czar frowned. “Nothing? What about the back-up tapes?”
    This was Ranjit Singh’s department and he broke in. “Back-up tapes? Yes, yes,” he sang, his turban gently rocking sideways. “But in principle only, Mr. Irving. I am saying only in principle.” The melody took on force. “I am also saying the tapes, there are very many, and on them each file had a unique code, I am saying, each file had a code linked to the work station it came from. The codes, you appreciate, they were kept on a server for people with special passwords. So, I am saying, that server, it has also been incapacitated and the codes, they are gone. We are not now in the clear which back-up tape may have stored them. I mean the codes.”
    Heywood growled. “Are you telling me the combination to the vault got locked away inside the vault?”
    Jaime’s impertinent stare went from Heywood to Ranjit and backagain. She could have been following a ping-pong game.
    â€œThat analogy is pretty excellent, Mr. Irving,” cried Ranjit. “Spot on. You see the problem most clearly.”
    â€œAnd so?” the Czar asked.
    â€œAnd so!” confirmed Ranjit. “What I am saying is that the codes, without them, we are not able to get into the back-up tapes. So, an e-mail, I am saying as an example…pardon my language, yes please…any shitty e-mail, it will require two weeks maybe of decryption to read it. So, what we decrypt, what it is decided will be the focus of our attention, I am suggesting, we may not know until after, at the end of two weeks, what it is.”
    â€œSo what you are saying,” interjected Heywood, “is that it could take weeks to know whether we’ve been deciphering something important or a piece of crap.”
    â€œOh yes. It is just so. And I am also stating very humbly,” continued Ranjit, nodding vigorously, “that there are maybe two billion filed items on the tapes. At two weeks for each item, I am concluding that eighty million years of decryption will be necessary.”
    Once upon a time Ranjit Singh fled the Punjab, but he hadn’t quite escaped its cultural grip. Eighty million years wasn’t an outlandish concept for him. It represented timelessness, part of the view that past millennia are like a day and today is merely the advancing edge between them and all the millennia to come. Eighty million years, one minute – to Ranjit it was the same. With charming optimism he added, “If the lady of good fortune smiles down upon our persons and if per item it takes only one week, the time in total would be half. Not eighty million years, I am calculating, but forty.” Ranjit’s palms came together at the level of his chest and from the sitting position he brought his turban forward in an elegant slight bow.
    â€œGood math, Ranjit,” Heywood said, crudely copying the graceful gesture. “Forty million more years of Service history makes me feel good.”
    â€œBut actually it is only twelve years lost, sir,” Ranjit consoled. “Let us not forget, before