The Lost Key (17 page)

N
icholas hit the intercom. “Nigel, lock down the house!”

He pulled Mike into his lap, and offered up a prayer of thanks when her eyelids started to flutter.

“Nicholas?”

“It's me, Mike.”

She touched her hand to her jaw, jerked it back. “That jerk hit me with his fist.”

“Believe me, I saw. Let me check.” She yipped when he touched her jaw. “Not broken, but you're going to have a lovely bruise. Hey, can't you even take a bathroom break without getting into trouble?”

“Har, har. Did you get Grossman? Nicholas, the files—”

“No, no, stay put, would you? Don't worry about the files. Before I gave Grossman my laptop I blew both the thumb drive and the hard drive. He's out of luck. The files are destroyed. But that also means we don't have the files anymore.” He gently eased her onto the sofa and jumped up to fetch a pen. She saw him write something quickly.

“What?”

“I'm writing down the coordinates to the sub. Don't want to forget them.”

“And Gray still has the files. I've got to tell him.” She got to her feet only to have Nicholas pull her close, for a moment. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. That was twice today she'd had a gun pointed at her head. He pushed it away.

“Look at that bruise starting to grow on your jaw, I'm thinking maybe the shape of India. Who's the lamebrain now?” He lightly tapped her shoulder. “I mean, why on earth did you have to go to the loo?”

“Again, I say har, har.”

“You stay put, I'll get Nigel. He's a bang-up medic. Royal Army Medical Corps, he can make doubly sure your jaw's okay. When I went into the Foreign Service, he joined me as a medic in the field, believed it would be smart to know how to patch me up, should I ever get myself into trouble.” He walked quickly to the intercom, pressed the button, and called Nigel's name, then once more. But he knew, of course. “Grossman got to Nigel before he took you down.”

“Go find him. I'll be okay.”

He ran out of the library, down the stairs. There was a window open on the landing. Grossman's escape. It was a long drop down to the street. Nicholas looked out, didn't see anything, save for the large oak tree in the front yard. So he'd stuck the laptop inside his jacket, grabbed a branch, and swung himself to the ground.

Bastard.

Nicholas found Nigel crumpled on the floor by the kitchen door, out cold. His neck pulse was strong and steady, but Nicholas's fingers came away with a small smear of blood. An injection site, a small lump of fluid under the skin.

Drugged.

He shook Nigel's shoulder, but no good. He lifted the phone off the wall and called 911.

Nigel had fought him. There were dishes cracked on the floor, remains from their dinner, and a knife on the tiles about three feet from Nigel's outstretched hand. So, when Nigel saw Grossman, he'd reached for the knife, but Grossman was faster, had the element of surprise, and had managed to stick the needle in Nigel's neck.

Nicholas felt rage roil in his belly. Grossman had invaded his home, his sanctum, and hurt the two people Nicholas cared most about in this city. His anger mixed with the surge of adrenaline into a wicked cocktail. He straightened Nigel's bent arm and rose.

Grossman, Havelock, all of them, they'd made it personal. And now there would be hell to pay. Nicholas picked up the kitchen phone and called Zachery.

Hell to pay.

Over the Atlantic

British Airways Flight 176

Midnight

The wheels lifted off the tarmac. Adam allowed himself a nice deep breath. It seemed like the first time he'd breathed in hours.

Adam settled back in his big first-class seat. He couldn't believe he managed to get out of New York with the FBI searching for him. But he was better at hiding than they were at looking. After the disaster at his apartment, with Allie—
No, don't think of her, you'll fall apart again
—he'd fled blindly, caught the first cab he'd seen, and had it take him across the bridge into Brooklyn.

There he stopped at an Internet café, went to the British Airways database, and booked himself a ticket to Heathrow under the name Thomas Wren, a completely clean legend he'd built for himself. Wren was one of four new identities he'd created in the past month. Adam was paranoid to a fault, and constantly developed new safeguards to cover his back.

He was surprised at how much the first-class ticket cost, not that it mattered, since the credit card was false, anyway. Besides, he needed the privacy of the seat on the overnight flight.

Once he had the ticket booked, he dug into his backpack—
glasses, a baseball cap, and a blond wig, plus a set of cheek inserts altered the basic structure of his face. He was ready to go through security at JFK despite the FBI's facial-recognition technology at the airports. He was completely safe since Thomas Wren didn't exist, and wouldn't be in their system.

Adam rarely flew, opting instead to drive, but there was no other way to get to Scotland, to the submarine, and the key. To stop this whole mess before it got out of hand entirely.

At ten thousand feet, he brought out his laptop. Normally, he never hooked into a plane's wireless system—their networks were of the least secure he'd ever seen—but he had no choice. There was work to be done, work he hoped would keep Sophie safe, and allow him to stop whoever in the Order was working with Havelock. Havelock's father, Wolfgang, had been a decent man, Adam's father had always told him, smart and loyal to the Order, loyal to a fault. But his son had been raised by his mother, insane, Adam had heard, confined to an asylum for twenty years before she'd died. Though a brilliant scientist, Dr. Manfred Havelock was nothing like his father. He was very likely as mad as his mother, a fetishist, obsessed with the Order, even though he wasn't a member.

Adam needed to see how far things had progressed in the past twenty-four hours, since he located the sub, a German U-boat
Victoria,
and told his father, so proud and happy, he'd done a little dance.

If Havelock was behind his father's murder, and Adam was sure he was, well, he couldn't, wouldn't, let him get away with it. Would he kill him? The thought settled deep inside him, it felt right. It would be justice, it had to be right.

But before he planned how to kill Havelock, he had another plan to implement, a plan to make Havelock want to kill himself.

He hummed as he broke through Manheim Technologies' sophisticated firewalls, not a problem, since he'd designed most of the codes that had gone into building the firewall systems in the first place. These legitimate jobs paid the rent and allowed him quite a bit of freedom. The companies he worked for had no idea he was the notorious hacker Eternal Patrol. Nor did any of them know he'd built separate back doors on all of his jobs, which allowed him unfettered access at any time. He didn't abuse this privilege, it was more insurance than anything else. But it was time to see what was really happening.

He accepted a cup of coffee from the flight attendant, slipped on his headphones, and went to work. He'd see how Havelock liked having his world dismantled, file by file, before he killed the bastard.

—

WHAT ADAM LEARNED
from Havelock's private files chilled him to the bone. Havelock's technological advances in nano-biotech were astounding, far beyond anything Adam had even heard of in a theoretical way.

One of the things Havelock had managed to develop was a brain implant that allowed for real-time observation and audio. It would change the face of stealth intelligence, and if it ever made it out into the private sector, there'd be no such thing as privacy left.

But by far the more serious and frightening files hinted at a miniaturized nuclear weapon, a mini-nuke, so small as to be undetectable, which could be put in place by a remote human-controlled
camera, and go anywhere, anytime, into any country, any stadium, any park, any government building. They could assassinate heads of state in the blink of an eye.

Incredible. Havelock was developing personally targeted nuclear weapons.

There was even research into theoretical DNA-driven bomb plans—ones that would only explode when in the hands of the target, utilizing an instant DNA check to ensure the recipient's identity.

He'd never seen anything so scary in his life. Especially when he took into account the key to Marie's weapon the Order wanted to find and destroy. To keep the world safe.

From all he'd seen, Havelock wasn't only going after the weapon the Order had been trying to locate for the past hundred years, he was planning to overthrow the entire Order, planting his own people to coerce the other members to do what he ordered, until he could get rid of them. He'd killed his own father, why not Alfie Stanford? Yes, of course he had. His assault had begun and now all he needed were Adam's coordinates to the lost U-boat.

The Order. No, the Highest Order, the group's original formal name. Adam's father had steeped him in its long, tortuous history, beginning with its inception at the end of Queen Anne's reign. Powerful men in England did not want to see the Catholic Jacobites bring back bloody revolution to England. They formed the Highest Order to help quash the Jacobites, and succeeded. And once their initial goal of keeping the Catholics off England's throne was accomplished, they moved on; their goal, to keep England safe. His father talked about one of their biggest failures in the nineteenth century, the needless bloody war in the Crimea—
and one of their successes—their discovery that Jack the Ripper was one of Queen Victoria's family—and they'd ensured he was confined since he couldn't be arrested, all the proof still in the old files, kept under lock and key.

After World War I, the Order became a multinational group of fifteen high-powered men whose primary goal was to maintain the safety and security of the world by helping countries avoid wars and other destabilizing events. Adam knew if Havelock managed to take over the Order, he would pervert all the Order's goals. He would also be in a position to take down all world powers—whether they were on his side or against him.

His father was gone. It was up to Adam to make sure Havelock's plan didn't happen. He must protect the Order, protect its legacy—his legacy. And now he, a nineteen-year-old hacker, was charged with being their hero. Him, Superman. He thought about himself in tights and laughed.

Adam didn't leave cyberspace until the six-hour flight was nearly over. He'd drunk five cups of coffee, his fingers were jittery and sore, his body hopped up on caffeine and adrenaline and fury. He'd done some of the most beautiful work of his life, and Havelock's world would never be the same. He'd actually amazed himself. He'd captured all the data from Havelock's computers and encoded it, sending it back into the system with line after line of bugged code. Adam now owned everything Manheim Technologies had on their databases. Havelock would have to back off or Adam would sell it off to the highest bidder.

He sat back in the luxurious seat and shut his eyes for a moment, resting them from the glare of the screen. He was good, he knew that, better than good, but still, he needed a fail-safe.
Something to insulate the data he'd assembled and destroyed. This was bigger than his concerns of going to jail, of never seeing the light of day again.

He opened his e-mail, and wrote a single line of code. He then created a false e-mail account, and filled out his father's e-mail address. He knew the FBI were in control of his father's accounts, and that Drummond character had close ties to the Order, no matter he didn't realize it. Drummond would see this e-mail, if he was looking hard enough.

It was all Adam could think to do under the circumstances. He could not, would not, allow the Order to be compromised, nor, he realized, could he let the Order's existence come to light, every media outlet in the world would tear them apart, blame them for everything that had gone wrong, not even realizing the Order had always endeavored to keep things in check. Without the members of today's Order, scattered across the globe, the world would be in far worse shape than anyone could imagine.

But Drummond—he was the safest bet. Had he seen the coordinates to the sub Adam had sent his dad? If he had, well, there was nothing he could do about it now. At least if he had the coordinates, Adam wasn't alone. He didn't hesitate; he memorized the coordinates to the sub, and erased them from his hard drive.

Adam realized he'd taken on his father's role, the protector, the guardian of the Order's secrets. Adam knew them all, and now it was his job to protect the Order.

He reread the e-mail, the line of code. If Drummond was as much of a hotshot programmer as people said, he'd figure it out. This was the only thing to do. As much as he hated to even think it, Adam couldn't trust anyone in the Order, not now that Mr. Stanford was dead.

He hit send.

The e-mail scrambled through Adam's system, then shot off with a whoosh, bounced off fifty servers around the world, and was gone.

He started to close the lid of the laptop, but something caught his eye. The screen began to flash. As he watched, horrified, the corners of the screen shattered, like a piece of glass, and began to fold in on themselves, getting smaller and smaller and smaller, until all he could see was a tiny brown three-dimensional box superimposed on the black background, spinning and flashing, his name underneath.

Adam couldn't believe this, didn't have a clue how it could have happened—he himself had been hacked. Who could have done this? The FBI? No, there was no way. They were good, but not good enough to get into his system, not that quickly. And they wouldn't play games, either. They'd just shut the whole thing down and track him to his nearest location.

Reality hit him. He was too late. Dear God in heaven, he was too late. The Order was already compromised. Havelock was already in control. Had he really destroyed Havelock's assets? He didn't know.

With shaking hands, he clicked on the box.

The screen went black, then a message began scrolling across the empty screen and Adam felt all the blood leave his head.

We Have Your Sister. Come to London. Now.