Like An Onion…

Ricardo’s not heading back home, is he? I ask.

No, Vidocq replies. Irene’s been tailing him, and he’s headed your way.

Ricardo hasn’t returned to his car, Irene writes. He keeps looking at me over his shoulder. He must know something’s up.

We’ve got him exactly where we’d like him to be, Vidocq writes. I’m blowing your cover, Irene, and telling him that you’re working with us. Your new cover is that we’ve sent you to check in on him and see if he has any new intel to share about Erin. Keep transmitting audio, and I’ll relay more instructions. We want to see if he’s willing to tell us about this new code.

Shit. I wasn’t expecting this. I copy and paste the messages over to my group chat with Erin, Genevieve, and Ricardo.

Is there a way to spin this in our favour? I ask.

About four dozen ways, comes Erin’s reply. But let’s keep it simple. Tell them the truth. Give them the first two layers.

Consider it done, Ricardo responds.

Won’t it be suspicious if they find the third? I ask. Then it’ll be obvious to them that Ricardo’s hiding something from them.

That’s only if they find the third layer, Genevieve writes. With the way they’ve been bumbling around? It’ll be a lifetime before they come close to figuring it out.

But then we can’t make progress with our plans, I write. Father’s search for Erin will go back to being stuck in a rut. If we give them the third layer, then at least there’s hope of playing on…

She’s confronting me, Ricardo writes.

You know what to do, Erin reassures him. Stick with the first two. Layer three is ready, but four is not. Neither is extraction. We can’t give them three.

I turn my audio to the lowest possible notch and hold the phone up to my ear, listening to the audio from Irene’s side of the broadcast. Ricardo, too, is streaming the audio to Erin and Genevieve, so I am spoiled for choice.

“How do you do, Ricardo?” I hear Irene saying. “Shall we take a seat on this bench?”

“Uh… yes, sure,” Ricardo’s voice sounds a bit tinny from Irene’s broadcast. “Emma, was it? That’s what Francois told me…”

“That’s me,” Irene says, and I can imagine the ghostly smile on her face as she speaks. “Let’s talk about what you were just doing.”

“Have you guys… have you been following me?” Ricardo asks. “I thought we were on the same side!”

“We keep both friends and enemies close,” Irene says in a husky voice. “You might go from one to the other, if you don’t prove cooperative.”

“But you need me!” Ricardo blurts out. “I’m giving you valuable information!”

“Evidently, not all of it,” Irene says.

Fuck. Ricardo’s supposed to be spilling the beans to her. What’s he doing?

“What were you just doing?” Irene asks, pressing Ricardo further.

I hear a shuffling sound. Ricardo shifting on the bench, I’d wager.

“It’s… well, it’s…. Fuck, I’m so embarrassed,” Ricardo mutters.

“I can keep it professional,” Irene says. She chuckles softly. “There’s hardly anything under the sun that I haven’t seen.”

“Well then, I was picking up a package,” Ricardo begins saying, and then he pauses. “It’s um… well, it’s actually right here.”

There’s another rustling sound, and I can imagine Ricardo pulling the small package out of his pocket and showing Irene.

“Oh!” Irene says, acting surprised. “Erin has been sending you packages?”

“You don’t need to act surprised,” Ricardo says flatly. “You’ve clearly been tailing me.”

Notably, he does not insinuate that she got to the package first. It’s important that Vidocq’s crew believes he knows only the bare minimum of their capabilities. It makes it easier for them to get sloppy.

“Sharp cookie,” Irene says. “So. The package. What’s in it?”

Another rustling noise: Ricardo unfolding the piece of paper.

“Just numbers?” she asks, sounding confused. “This is supposed to make sense to you?”

“It’s a code,” Ricardo says.

“Don’t mind me taking this photo, I’m just recording the evidence in case it turns out to matter,” Irene says. “What’s the code for?”

“It’s… it’s probably easier if I just show you,” Ricardo says.

A couple seconds pass in silence.

“Can you explain what you’re doing?” Irene asks, for us listener’s benefit as much as her own.

“I’m just using OCR to read the numbers from the picture, so that I don’t have to type it out myself,” Ricardo says. “And now that I have the numbers in digital form, there’s actually a trick here. This number is actually just an alternate way of encoding the information in a QR code. So as you can see, here’s the equivalent QR code from that set of digits… and now, if I follow it… well, um… this is the embarrassing part…”

“Follow the code,” Irene says.

There’s another brief pause.

“Oh.” Irene sounds taken aback. “That’s Erin. And Genevieve. This is how you share nudes. Just a really elaborate way to send nudes in secret to each other.”

“A man has his needs!” Ricardo says defensively.

“No, no, nothing wrong with that,” Irene says. “But I thought you had broken up with them.”

“Well, you told me to pretend like nothing was wrong,” Ricardo says. “And anyways, they’re hot, I wouldn’t want to stop receiving these pictures…”

“Of course, you’re doing well,” Irene says. “How long have you been receiving these packages for?”

“Since I first got to Stanford,” Ricardo says.

“We’re going to need all these files that Erin’s ever sent to you in this manner,” Irene says. “For our records. And don’t leave any out. We have our ways of knowing if you do.”

“They’re just nudes!” Ricardo protests. “What could you possibly want with those?”

“Unfortunately, they could be security risks,” Irene says. “Perhaps Erin or Genevieve’s planted a virus in these images. We will need to verify.”

“I’m a professor in this god-damned field,” Ricardo mutters. “But alright. You want all the pictures? I’ll send you all the pictures. I’ll need to go home and do that from my computer.”

“That’s just fine with us,” Irene smiles. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Ricardo. Someone will check in on you again, soon.”

“I’m looking forward to that,” Ricardo says sarcastically.

A moment later, the audio stream from Irene’s end shuts off.

Mission success, she writes. Sometimes, you don’t have to be a whiz-kid code-cracker to get the job done. Just some good old, face-to-face interaction.

Well done, Vidocq responds. But let’s hold off celebration until we comb through all those files.

Oh yes. I’m sure that dirty old bastard would love pouring over those nudes of Erin and Genevieve.

Mission success, Ricardo writes in our chat a second later. I think they bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Did you like the pics we took? Genevieve asks.

Some of your finest work, Ricardo replies.

Bet you they aren’t as good as the ones I’ve taken today, I write.

No fair, you get a studio-quality set-up, Genevieve writes.

But we’re excited to see what comes out of it! Erin adds.

Speaking of which, Sofia is still out there, waiting for her nudes to be taken…

“Sorry ladies,” I say, stepping out of the bathroom. “I had to get something out of my system there. Let’s wrap up photography, shall we?”