The Lost Key

by Catherine Coulter

  “The key—”

  “The key what?”

  “The key is—in the lock.” Pearce’s head lolled against the man’s chest.

  “What? What the hell does that mean?” He shook him, but Pearce was gone. He pushed Pearce onto the pavement, and Mr. Olympic, clearly furious, pulled out Pearce’s cell and punched in numbers, but then looked wildly around at the shouts, saw two large men closing on him, and jumped to his feet. He tripped on Pearce, dropped the cell phone, and ran.

  The screen showed people running to the body, several people calling 911, then Louisa turned the computer back around. “That’s all I have for now. I’ll keep working on this, see if I can further enhance it. You say our suspect is already dead; at least Pearce got payback, right?”

  Nicholas said, “Mr. Pearce’s dying words: The key is in the lock. What does that mean? Louisa, play it again, please.”

  She did. He listened and watched, and when it was finished, nodded to himself. “We need an ID on this man, Louisa, as quickly as possible. Upload this video into the facial-recognition database. There’s a good still shot to be taken as he turns to run away. Put in a parameter to have it search the European databases through Interpol as well, and all the incoming flights from Germany to New York.”

  Mike asked, “German?”

  “I caught it the second time through. A moment before he stabs Pearce, he says, ‘Deinefruedemögevergehen und übelmögedichereilen.’”

  So he spoke German, did he? She said, “So that’s what he said exactly, is it? Excellent. Thanks for clearing that right up for me.”

  “A bit of sarcasm? Sorry, yeah, I speak a little German, enough to catch what he said. It’s a curse of sorts. It roughly translates to ‘May your joy vanish and evil be with you.’”

  “Lovely sentiment.”

  “It doesn’t sound all that dramatic in translation, but it’s powerful in German. I suppose in this context, it’s more of a way to ward off evil spirits following him, which turned out to be us.”

  “Too bad the curse didn’t work,” Mike said. “But, Nicholas, Mr. Olympic sounded American. He was fluent, colloquial.”

  He nodded. “I’m willing to bet, though, that German is his first language. I’ve often found it true that a person curses in his native tongue automatically.”

  “Good catch,” Mike said. “Louisa, I’d also like you to upload all the video onto the servers so it will be ready for us to look at again when we get back to the office. And please be sure you add in all the footage from the crime scene, throughout the morning. There might be more there, small details we’re missing right now. The two men were waiting for someone, someone Pearce was willing to die to protect.”

  “And still he told him when Mr. Olympic threatened his family, ‘The key is in the lock.’ Was he lying? Or was it true? And another question: Why did Mr. Olympic hang around? Did he think this EP would still show up?”

  “Maybe he did show up,” Mike said. “This EP is obviously someone close to Mr. Pearce, that’s all we know. Keep an eye out for someone you don’t think really fits, Louisa.”

  “Like anyone not wearing a suit, and hanging around,” Nicholas said. “Find out about Mr. Pearce’s family as fast as you can. That threat Mr. Olympic made, we’re taking that seriously. Call me as soon as you know.”

  “Got it.” Louisa smiled and disappeared into the mobile command unit. Nicholas watched the ME, half a block away, move Mr. Pearce’s body into a black bag for transport.

  He said slowly, “I don’t think murdering Mr. Pearce was part of the plan. At least he wasn’t meant to be killed before Mr. Olympic got what he came for. Whoever he was, he wanted information about what EP had found, and Mr. Pearce wasn’t about to tell him.”

  Mike shook her head. “We’ll back-trace the cell phone number. Speaking of which, dropping Mr. Pearce’s cell phone sure wasn’t part of the plan. Thank heavens he got rattled when people started coming at him and dropped it.”

  “Good luck for us. Clearly this was a trap, but we need more information. Mr. Pearce wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but we know he has a family. Let’s go to his home.”

  Mike nodded. “I hate this, but we have to do it. Hopefully, someone knows what this was all about. What Mr. Pearce said—The key is in the lock—don’t you wish just one time things would be straightforward?”

  “That wouldn’t be much fun, now, would it?”

  9

  Jonathan Pearce’s Apartment

  117 East 57th Street

  10:30 a.m.

  The doorman was too upset by Mr. Pearce’s murder to give more than a token protest about letting them in without a warrant. He took them in the lovely 1920s elevator to the twenty-third floor and unlocked Mr. Pearce’s apartment.

  Mike and Nicholas first saw the walls of windows on three sides overlooking Manhattan, the clear blue skies, the warm sun spilling through the glass.

  Mike whistled. “This is breathtaking.”

  Nicholas joined her, pointed. “You can see the George Washington Bridge.”

  She nodded, then turned to study the long, narrow living room. “It doesn’t seem to be disturbed—nothing seems out of place. I want to get it fingerprinted before we go poking around too much. But we can have a look.” She tossed him a pair of gloves.

  He snapped them on and cocked an eyebrow at her, hands raised like a freshly scrubbed surgeon. “Where’s my patient?”

  “Idiot.”

  The apartment was large, well furnished in a mix of modern and traditional, with neutral colors and exquisite paintings and sculptures. “This is the sanctuary of a Renaissance man,” Nicholas said.

  “And a very neat man who slept alone,” Mike said. “There are no female signs anywhere. Only a single toothbrush, shaving kit, and brush were in the bathroom. The five bedrooms have been redone so there was one large master with a huge walk-in closet with built-in cabinets, plus a private library, an office, and a massive theater room.”

  Nicholas stepped into the library. It was darker than the rest of the apartment because the windows were tinted, all the shelves behind locked glass. He saw books ranging from antiquity to what he bet was a first-edition Hemingway. His fingers itched to open the cabinet and touch the beautiful leather. The books were not only special, they were very valuable.

  He called to Mike, “What does Mr. Pearce do?”

  She stuck her head into the library, looked around for a second. “It looks like he’s in the rare-book business. Would you look at this, he has letterhead on his desk.”

  Made sense, for a Renaissance man. “What’s the name of the company?”

  “The letterhead says Ariston’s, Second Avenue, between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth. I wonder where he got that name, Ariston’s?”

  Nicholas said, “From whom sprang all rational thought. Ariston was Plato’s father, a fitting name, considering. The business must be successful. See all the books in here? They’re very old, very rare. And very valuable.”

  Mike looked around. “Maybe this explains the locks in the master bedroom closet, which is, I might add, bigger than my whole apartment.”

  “It seems like overkill. Let’s take a look. Was there a key in his desk?”

  “Better.” Mike reached into her pocket and pulled out the key chain Louisa had given her at the crime scene. “Let’s go see what he keeps under lock and key in his bedroom closet.” She looked first at the lock, then studied the keys, picked a small silver key on the ring. Sure enough, it went in, and the lock clicked free.

  “More books,” Nicholas said. “Old, very valuable. Let’s see what’s in this second locked cabinet.”

  She studied the lock for a moment, then found an even smaller key, this one gold, and it slid in perfectly.

  There were three shelves of books. Nicholas gently touched the spine of a small vellum book that lo
oked like it might crumble away into dust. “These must be the ones that can’t get exposed to light. Let’s lock them back up. The crime scene techs will have to inventory everything for us—they can take their time and do this properly. I don’t want to be the one responsible for devaluing a masterpiece.”

  Mike tried to shut the cabinet, but the hinge hung. She fiddled with it for a minute, then said, “This one doesn’t want to close and I don’t want to force it.”

  “Let me see.” Nicholas ran his hand along the edge of the door. He pulled it toward him, but the hinge stayed stuck open. “That’s strange. Maybe these haven’t been opened in a while. Let me try once more.” Instead of pulling again, he pushed, and the hinge suddenly popped free, the door coming away with it. They saw a small compartment, one that would have been impossible to see if Mike hadn’t overextended the hinge when she’d opened the door.

  “There’s something back here, Mike.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have no earthly idea. Best take a picture, then I’ll fish it out.” Mike snapped a shot with her cell, then he stuck his finger into the dark slot and pulled out a small clear plastic bag. He turned it over in his gloved hand. “Looks like a common everyday SD card, nothing at all special, like one you’d have in your digital camera to stick in your computer to upload your photos. It’s 256 gigabytes—this holds a lot of data. As much as some laptops.”

  “All on that tiny card. Amazing.”

  “Mike, let’s head to the computer in Mr. Pearce’s office. I saw an iMac on his desk.”

  “Trust you to stumble into something.”

  He waved the SD card at her. “It was all you. Let’s go see what Mr. Pearce was hiding away.”

  Of course it wasn’t that simple. Like Pearce’s phone, the iMac was password protected. Nicholas sat at the desk in the expensive high-end Aeron chair—Mr. Pearce’s business was clearly quite lucrative—and inserted a small thumb drive into the slot. The machine booted up with a system prompt. Nicholas launched a program he’d designed to crack pass codes, and a few minutes later the solution came up on the screen. He wrote it down on a sticky note, then ejected the thumb drive. There would be no trace of his program in the system. Elegant, and useful.

  Mike watched him carefully. “I certainly like you being able to do this kind of forensic accounting work legally, Special Agent Drummond. Keeps my blood pressure under control.”

  He smiled, inputted the newly acquired pass code into the machine. It whirred to life, bringing up the clean desktop with a face-on photo of a young dark-haired woman about Mike’s age. She was smiling, eyes shining at the camera. “Mike, come look. I think I found a photo of Mr. Pearce’s daughter.”

  Mike leaned over his shoulder. “She has something of the look of her father. I really hate this, Nicholas. Louisa should be calling us with a name and her information any minute and we’ll be able to contact her. I saw a photo in his bedroom of a boy maybe about eight years old, and the girl, she looked about fourteen or fifteen, their mother between them, hugging them close.” She sighed. “I pulled the photo out of the frame, but nothing was written on the back. But I do know that no woman lives here, so either they were divorced or Mr. Pearce was a widower.”

  “So his family now consists of a son and a daughter.” Yes, she did have the look of her father, he thought, and hated it as much as Mike. They’d be the ones to change her life. He kept working. “Okay, we’re in. Now let’s see what sort of skeletons Mr. Pearce was hiding in his closet, literally.”

  Nicholas inserted the SD card into the slot and opened it. Again, an encrypted password screen came up. He ran the program again, and like putting a key in a lock, the computer screen suddenly filled with a stream of extensive images and files.

  Mike leaned close to the computer screen. “Good grief, what is all that?”

  “I don’t know, but there’s a lot of it.”

  10

  11 Downing Street

  Office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer

  London

  4:00 p.m.

  The phone rang, a discreet buzzing, but Alfie Stanford ignored it, remained focused on the screen in front of him, which moments before had blinked to life unbidden and alighted with data. Horror filled him as he watched the pages streaming across his desktop: images, letters, some hundreds of years old, e-mails. Someone had accessed the Messenger’s private files. The Messenger had been compromised, and thus the Order itself. Decade upon decade of information, research, and secrets had been seen by the wrong eyes. By an outsider.

  Who could have found the SD card and accessed Jonathan’s files? All the Order members believed his death was a New York street mugging. But no longer. Stanford knew to his gut the murderer had also accessed his files. He couldn’t imagine what would happen now. His heart thudded hard. This was a nightmare of epic proportions.

  He had to warn the others. There was a protocol for this very situation, one he was supposed to have memorized. But he wasn’t a young man anymore, and he wanted to be sure the protocols were done correctly, all the proper steps followed in the correct order, the alerts given as quickly as possible.

  Stanford rushed across his office to the small Cézanne on the opposite wall, a favorite from his boyhood. It swung away to reveal an embedded safe he’d had built when he took office. A place for secure documents, far from the prying eyes of the rest of the British government. The only other person who knew of the safe’s existence was the man who’d built it, and he was one of them, so they needn’t be concerned with leaks.

  Stanford’s fingers fumbled on the dial and he cursed softly. His nerves were shot. He felt fear building up, as caustic and dark as a violent fever.

  Finally, the lock clicked, and the safe opened. He reached inside, felt for the package taped to the top of the safe. A small file with coded instructions, codes no one could crack unless given the codex, something only the members of the Order knew.

  He released the package from its hiding place and turned, slamming the safe shut with his right hand.

  He didn’t feel the pinch of the needle right away. It took a moment for the sensation to catch up to him, and then it was agony. His chest felt like it was on fire, and he dropped to his knees. He couldn’t catch his breath. The package fell to the carpet, and he saw a hand reach down to snatch it up. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t. He heard footsteps, running away, fading, and he knew the file was gone, but then he couldn’t seem to think properly. Had he been mugged? In his own office? No, that couldn’t be right. He remembered now the hand reaching into his back pocket, taking his wallet. Hadn’t he?

  He went into a seizure on the thick Aubusson carpet as the poison spread through his veins, and it was like his blood itself was on fire.

  With sudden clarity, he realized what had happened. He was the leader, Pearce was the Messenger. The Order was under attack. But who could get inside 11 Downing Street without being seen?

  The protocols. Dear God in heaven, the protocols.

  Stanford tried to roll, to heave himself up off the floor, to reach the phone, to warn them of what had happened. But his hands splayed feebly against the soft, thick carpet, unable to lift his weight.

  He began to fade, his heartbeat slower and louder in his head, like the bong of a massive internal clock, counting down.

  Five.

  A man’s voice, shouting, then he was touched, pulled hard, and he flopped onto his back. The pain was so intense, like a lightning bolt repeatedly striking him. He’d heard it said that death did not hurt; they lied. His chest was seared, he was choking, he couldn’t breathe. The room began to spin.

  Four.

  His assistant, Wetherby, a good sort, was on his knees, hands pressed hard against Stanford’s chest, his face white with shock.

  “Sir. Oh my God, sir. You’re having a heart attack. I’ll get help.”

 
Stanford knew in that moment who’d ordered him killed, the same man who’d ordered the rape of the Messenger’s computer. The man who wanted to be Stanford, who wanted all he had, wanted to know the secrets of the Order, wanted the Order itself. He tried to give his assistant the name of his enemy, the two syllables hard against his tongue—Have, lock—but the words came out more like “Ngam.”

  Three.

  Wetherby was back, shouting out, “Where’s the medic? The chancellor is having a heart attack!”

  Two.

  They need me. The Order needs me. I cannot die, not now, not when we’re so close. He tried to force the words out, praying that he could be understood.

  One.

  But the words wouldn’t come. He had failed them, failed them all.

  Oddly, he saw his mother’s face. Was she telling him he’d done his best? Yes.

  Peace flooded through him. And then all was dark.

  11

  Berlin

  5:00 p.m.

  Havelock watched Alfie Stanford die. He wanted to stay dispassionate, but the writhing and flopping about was so clearly painful, and the old fool was so helpless, he couldn’t help but become aroused. He was tempted by the thought of trying the smallest bit out on himself, not enough to kill, but no. That wasn’t a good idea. The dosage needed to bring on cardiac arrest was so nominal, he could miscalculate and end up killing himself all in the name of pleasure. He replayed the footage to watch again.

  He wondered, had it been this way for his own father, dropping to the floor in the middle of his gym, everyone gathering around to watch him die? The old man had been in the ground for less than a month now, and Havelock had done his part, looking all grave and somber, in black, finding an errant tear, and he’d thought, finally, I’ve cleared the path for my journey to begin. Had he really wanted his father to die? He didn’t want to think about that, only that his death had been a necessary evil.

  His mother, on the other hand—the wondrous terror in her eyes before he flung her into the sea was something treasured and precious, brought out to be examined at his leisure like his favorite painting, Goya’s The Colossus. He wallowed in the dark brute power of it. He was the colossus with his raised fist, the giant that men feared and worshipped.