Lady Liberty (24 page)

“You missed me.” He sounded dazed.

She liked that. “Yes.”

“So do you want me to stay with you, or not?”

Leave it to him to cut through the bone and dive right into the marrow. “I want you to do what makes you happy”

“Stay or go, Sybil?” He pinned her with an unrelenting gaze. “Choose.”

“Stay.” The word rushed out of her mouth, and she was furious that he’d forced her to admit it out loud. “I want you to stay.”

“Why? And don’t tell me because I need you. That’s been established.”

How could she tell him how she felt when she didn’t understand it herself? She knew what he needed, but she couldn’t give it to him. She didn’t have it to give. She couldn’t survive another mistake or take those kinds of risks again. Dear God, not again.

“I ran from you once, Sybil. I won’t run again. And I won’t let you run from me.” He let his hand drift over her hair, down her jaw to her chin. “I understand the fears. But I have to know why you want me here. That’s important to me, too.”

He was as torn as she was, and just as confused. “I want you with me because… because I need you.” She sniffed and inhaled a cleansing breath. “But I can’t have you—not even if you were willing and wanted me. I know that, and I guess asking you to stay anyway makes me a selfish bitch.” She blinked hard. “I am selfish, Jonathan. I need you in my life.”

Something hard in his chest softened, and the truth settled over him like a shroud and then turned to stone. Once again he had crossed the line and fallen in love. And once again she was out of his reach. He couldn’t have her because she couldn’t have him. He had no idea what that meant, but apparently he didn’t fit into her professional world or her plans. He’d always known that could be a point of contention, but he’d thought they could overcome it. Now, for reasons of her own, Sybil didn’t even want to try. That left him with limited options. Actually, with one option: to fight against loving her with the same tenacity he had fought Austin Stone.

By the time Austin entered the sleek building traditionalists described as the bane of Georgetown, Secure Environet was humming. The level of activity was notably higher than usual. People rushed back and forth through wide corridors leading to private offices, conference rooms, and Austin’s favorite place: the lab. The air virtually crackled with intensity, proving Plan B was unfolding as designed.

His adrenaline pumping, he cleared the security checkpoints, keyed and entered his private elevator, and then rode up to the seventh floor. When the door squeaked open, his personal assistant, Patrice, a very sharp black American mother of two, looked over from her computer screen. She was wearing a conservative green suit. Patrice seldom wore a suit—unless she intended to hit him up for a raise or a special perk. Which, he wondered, would it be?

“Morning, Dr. Stone.” She gathered a stack of message slips from a slotted sorter on her desk.

“Good morning.” Austin kept walking. “Have maintenance do something about that elevator door. It sounds ancient.” He entered the hallway to his private office, glanced at a portrait of Einstein on the wall, and then at his pride and joy—an original Dali. “Any notable messages?”

“Plenty of them.” In his office, she poured him a cup of coffee at the oak bar and then followed him over to his desk. “It’s been wild around here this morning.”

Austin settled into his seat. “What’s going on?”

“Several dozen condolence calls on the former Mrs. Stone, sir.”

Well trained, Patrice knew better than to refer to Sybil as the vice president. At Secure Environet, he was God, and Sybil was merely his powerless former wife.

“The other messages are business related.” Patrice set the cup on his blotter. “We have a security-system failure on a classified DoD site. Engineering needs you down in the lab ASAP”

Excellent. Austin nodded. Events were unfolding on cue.

“You’ve also got a message from the White House. Mildred. There’s been no further word on the former Mrs. Stone. I’m having the media monitored in case they turn up anything.” Sympathy tinged Patrice’s voice. “President Lance would appreciate a personal briefing on the system failure. Evidently, the technical questions weren’t answered to his satisfaction.”

Nothing short of stepping in and halting the Peacekeeper launch would satisfy Lance. Austin held in a grunt. The man was in for a serious wake-up call, but he had been right to phone Austin. Raw power surged through him. His spine and the roof of his mouth tingled. In the next ten minutes, he would see to it that no one else
could
halt the launch.

Patrice opened the blinds at the window. Thin bars of light filtered into his office and streaked across his desktop, the ivory carpet, the photo of his mother on his desk. “There are a dozen other messages. Most are marked urgent. One was urgent and strange.”

He sipped from his cup, wishing he’d had one less scotch last night. “Strange?”

“The caller claimed to be a friend, but she refused to leave a name. She’s on sabbatical in China and would like to invite you to join her.”

PUSH. Welcoming him. Inwardly, Austin smiled. “Just leave it with the others.” He motioned to the desk. “I need a few minutes to get oriented.”

“Yes, sir.” She left the messages, then the office.

Austin locked the door, pulled out Cap’s key, walked to the oak bar, and then pushed a button hidden under its top ledge. The bar wall swung open, revealing a private and compact but well-equipped minilab.

He stepped inside and removed a blue velvet-lined case from a drawer under the lab table. Two keys rested inside
it, side by side. Pulling out the one on the left, he compared it to Cap’s. A perfect copy. Indisputable proof that Gregor Faust had broken their agreement and double-crossed him. And, of course, it was a copy, not Faust’s duplicate original. But fearing that Faust would betray him, Austin also had prepared.

He lifted the only copy of a second key. Anger surged through him, and he scratched a short, straight line on it, feeling totally justified in implementing Plan B. The chain of events it would unleash was regrettable—the impact would be significant—but now unavoidable. And once he had completely set it into motion, no one else could stop the process.

In roughly thirty-four hours, the United States would launch the first-strike missile, and the world would be at war.

Austin. Austin.
His mother’s voice sounded in his head.
How can you justify starting World War III?

He squeezed his eyes shut and leaned wearily against the lab table. Even dead, she challenged him. Always probing. Always asking questions he didn’t want to answer. Always robbing him of peace.

I’m not starting this war. They attacked me. Yes, I married Sybil for political advantage and money but I was fond of her, and she divorced me. Lance and his spying henchmen have constantly violated my privacy and issued me dictates. Sybil’s bastard protector, Westford, had the audacity to threaten to kill me. To kill me!
Agitated, Austin began to pace.
Gregor Faust attacked me, too. He’s gleaned an amazing amount of Intel on me through his Ballast contacts here, and he came to me to buy my secure-system devices and then with a proposal for a mutually beneficial joint venture. He came to me and then betrayed me. And Cap is no better. Even he violated me, Mother. Year after year, I gave him inside information to use against Sybil, and yet he elected not to play straight with me.

They were responsible for the war. No one had forced them to do what they had done. They had chosen their actions and taken them willingly. He had to defend himself. They had to know their actions against him were mistakes and that mistakes carry consequences.

But such steep consequences, Austin? Where is mercy and grace?

He stiffened against a prick of shame.
Where was their mercy and grace, Mother? What about their crimes against me? The penalty I inflict isn’t revenge, it’s justice. It should be substantial—and paid by them and those they have sworn to serve and protect.

Expecting his mother to rebel, he stiffened, but she held her silence. Obviously she agreed with him. Relieved, he shoved back from the lab table and stared down at the keys. Power had the tips of his fingers and toes prickling, his chest heaving. They had forced him into taking this action. All of them. Yes, he would gain financially and also where it most mattered to him: in power. But that was secondary. They’d betrayed him. He stuffed the scratched key into his pocket. World War III was justified.

He returned the other keys to the case, placed the case in the drawer, and then removed a smaller red case from beside it. Austin smiled. Inside was a third key. When he left this lab, the security systems at top-secret site A-267 would no longer require two keys: one for access to the classified site’s outer rim and inner hub and one to access the actual missile launch controls. It would require
three.
One for the outer rim, one for the inner hub, and one to halt the launch of the world’s deadliest missile.

And only Dr. Austin Stone had the third key.

He moved down to a desk opposite the lab table and sat down, then booted up a computer. Unlike the sixty-odd others in the building, this terminal was not tied in to the Secure Environet network. It was his private safe system and as secure as technology and innovative thinking could
make it. Only he knew it existed and that it was in the building. Only he knew the minilab existed. And only he could forward whatever he generated on this computer through a complex web of filters so that no one short of God could trace anything he disbursed back to Secure Environet.

After keying in the codes to access the system, he entered the data string that would make the White House a key player in Plan B. Scrolling down the list of Lance’s most-trusted advisors, he highlighted the chosen one’s name, clicked, then clicked again on his DNA report. Scrolling down, Austin stopped on line five, reversed it, and then uploaded the altered report into the system.

Upload complete appeared on the screen.

Successful, he added a second data string and then uploaded it. This command would make Gregor Faust’s launch key—his entire plan—obsolete. Should he also cut off Faust’s visual access to the A-267?

No, Austin decided. Let him watch events unfold there and experience the futility of being able to do nothing to stop them. He hit the “enter” key.

Again a response flashed onto the screen: Upload complete.

The wheels were now in motion, and only he could stop them.

Flushed with sheer joy at outmaneuvering Faust, Lance, and the president’s entire entourage, Austin also absorbed a flicker of regret that they had conspired and pushed him to do something of this magnitude when he had spent his entire life designing security devices to protect and defend. He shut down the system and then the minilab.

A tall stack of large brown envelopes stuffed full of inflammatory evidence against Sybil rested on the far wall counter. Each had been labeled individually. All were addressed to key people in the media at virtually every major
network in the nation. He collected the stack and returned to his office, placing them on the corner of his desk, then ran through a mental listing until he felt confident he hadn’t left any loose ends.

Satisfied, he sat down and leaned back. He once again held the helm. This time he intended to hold onto it. It was a shame Sybil wouldn’t be around to see this. But his life would be much more peaceful with her dead, and Plan B had just assured him that, if she wasn’t already dead, she soon would be.

He phoned the China number. PUSH was eager. He listened briefly, laid out his terms, they agreed, and then he hung up. It was going to be a profitable association.

After adjusting his jacket lapel, he checked his tie, then left his office. He had a lot to do before leaving D.C. Lance wouldn’t be the only one evacuating before the missile launched.

“Sir?” Patrice called out as he passed her desk. “Are you going to engineering now?”

“I’m on my way. Don’t mail the brown envelopes on my desk. I want them delivered by Ground Serve, but not just yet. I’ll call you when I’m ready”

“Yes, sir.”

If Patrice saw anything strange in his instructions, her expression didn’t reflect it. Grateful for that, Austin tapped the button for the elevator. He would listen to a recap of what engineering had been told through the chain of command and then get back to the president. Afterward, he would return the substituted inner hub key to Cap and tell him he had possession of a launch-code key to a Peacekeeper missile.

Lance would brief Cap on the security breach, and when he did, the senator would be compelled to reveal that he had held the key. How would he explain having it? He could pretend he never got it, but when that later proved untrue, Cap would be wide open for attack, and the man
never left himself open to attack. Hadn’t he always filtered leaks through Jean?

Regardless of what Cap said, the fallout against him would be immediate and incredible. Lance would insist that he resign.

Of greater interest and priority was Gregor Faust. How would he react to learning his double-cross had backfired?