The Lost Key (A Brit in the FBI 2)

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.

41

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 entirel

y.

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.