by Jeff Abbott
The cold water revived me. I started to climb again. Fell again. Climbed again, but now I started to recognize the stones by feel. I used the same path and, after a half hour of agony, I felt the smooth lip of the top of the shaft.
I pulled myself up and lay, spent, my ribs afire with pain, the rest of me shivering and cold. I groped for the wall. I found it and searched, found the stone door.
It was bolted, locked into place, and over the lock was a smooth metal plate. It was engaged on the other side. I had no way to pick it, and no light to see by. Yasmin had taken my flashlight when she searched me.
I am in my grave.
The thought nearly paralyzed me. Someone would come. But how long? How many days? Maybe never? Did anyone else know this complex even existed?
I am going to kill your baby. Just because I can. And the kids on the computer. They were part of Edward’s sick plot.
I slid to the edge of the shaft. I could hear running water. The river would have to surface at some point. But I couldn’t know what turns or twists the stream might take.
How many minutes can you hold your breath? How long?
“Long enough,” I said to the empty blackness. “Long enough.”
I put my legs back over the shaft. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I didn’t want to drop back down into the awful inky darkness. It had taken so long to climb up. I could just wait. Sit and wait and hope that someone found me.
I thought of Daniel.
He needs me.
It was a strange thing to be needed. I hadn’t known it in a long while. The need that Lucy had for me was false, a need curled in the grass like a coiled snake. My parents didn’t need me after Danny died. They hated me for living. Daniel, though, he needed me, and he didn’t even know it.
With that, I dropped into the black.
89
I DOVE DOWN. Yasmin’s body was gone. I could feel the tug of the moving current beneath the relative quiet of the shaft.
She’d sunk and she’d been swept away.
I filled my body with oxygen, heaving in slow, deep, saturating breaths. I pushed my fear of the water deep back into my brain.
Then I went down. The dark water was cold and clutching. It felt like death grasping at me. I stayed close to the roof of the cave that met the end of the shaft; it was smooth stone, worn by the ceaseless knife of the water. The current shoved me forward. I brushed hard against the rocks that scraped my back and my head. Agony lanced my ribs.
Ten seconds in the deep.
No pain. No fear. I pressed on. Trying not to panic, trying to stay streamlined like a torpedo to move me along faster. The blackness was complete, like nothing I had ever experienced. I kicked, kept my hands out in front of me to try to protect myself from any hidden obstruction in the pitch black, told myself I had all the time in the world.
Fifty seconds. So I guessed. My lungs began to burn. Panic tugged at the edges of my mind. A little tug and then tearing.
I saw a blossom of dim light to my left and hurled myself toward it. The light grew brighter. I kicked, I swam, trying to cut through the current to the unexpected glow. I saw a stone circle, dimly outlined from the light above, just like the shaft I’d fled. I kicked upward, fighting the urge to let the stale air—precious gold—out of my lungs. The shaft here was narrower. I went up.
And exploded into air.
I took long, huffing breaths. A grate lay two feet above my head, brown with rust. I breathed like I’d never breathed before. I tried to push open the grate. It was locked into place, with heavy iron bolts. I couldn’t get up the shaft to the rest of the complex.
But the sound of the water was loud, and this must have been the rush of current I’d heard heading from the stables into the complex. I tried to pull the grate from the stone, and I realized I was getting nowhere and losing precious strength.
I wanted to remain in this pocket of light and air, but I couldn’t. My kid needed me. Mila needed me. Had Edward killed her? I thought not; he wanted to know who she worked for.
I had to go back into the darkness.
I took the long, low, heavy breaths, looking up through the stone shaft like a baby glimpsing a distant world at the end of the birth canal. I filled my body with air and kicked back into the blackness.
The cold river swept me away. I could feel a sudden shift downward in the angle of the ceiling. Going down, further from the ground, from the surface and the sacred air. Don’t panic. Whatever you do, do not panic.
I fought the urge to turn back to the last shaft. Then I felt the stone not only above me but below me. The tunnel had narrowed into a grave. I tried to turn back, panicking now, the bubbles exploding from me in a rush, and the water swept me forward between the stone jaws.
Narrow, black stone scraping both sides of me. My mother, my father. My brother, staring into a camera, silently pleading for his life. I would be with Danny again. My child. Lucy. I didn’t want my last thought to be of Lucy. I thought of my brother, imagined I felt his strong hand taking mine.
Then no stone pressed against me. Above me, no rock. Light, a thousand miles above me. I kicked. Weakly. My muscles trying their last. Then my head burst above the water into the sweetness. I gasped, wheezed, turned into the water and vomited. I was in the river, bright with sunlight, alive.
I heard a buzz. A plane. I remembered the private runway on the map. And lying in the cold, gray wash of the river I looked up and saw Zaid’s Learjet.
Edward was gone.
90
I LAY ON THE BANK until I found strength enough to get to my feet. I walked to the stables. The guards were gone, either to the hospital or to the main house, I guessed. I headed back into the complex.
I checked all the computers; all the hard drives were gone, all the backup drives, the strange drives for the chips. The chips were gone as well.
I checked my shoe. The chip I’d taken was still there.
Edward had put a chip in the gun before he’d shot Yasmin. So the chips somehow worked with the guns. The bizarre gun that shot Yasmin when it was directly aimed at me. The gun that shared a strange metal grid with the bomb that had killed the Money Czar back in Amsterdam.
I got into the delivery truck and drove to the empty plane hangar. No sign of Mila.
He’d taken Mila, because he wanted to know who was after him.
I drove down to the canal. I drove past where I’d climbed out from it and about another half mile I found Yasmin’s body. I waded into the water and I pulled her free from a thickness of rushes. I picked up Yasmin’s body and carried her to the truck. I wasn’t exactly crazy about the idea of driving back to London, with no license in my name, in a stolen delivery truck, with a corpse in the back. But I couldn’t leave her body.
The gun that had killed Yasmin had not been like anything I’d ever seen before. I wanted to see the bullets.
91
ADRENALINE THRUMMED WITH MUSIC, guitars battling under androgynous singing. Most of the crowd was in the building’s courtyard listening to an impossibly trendy band play. I parked the truck behind the bar in the reserved owner’s space and used the private back entrance, carrying Yasmin’s body on my shoulder, keying in the code Mila had given me to open the door. No one saw me. Lucy was still locked inside her windowless room. I left her there; right now if I looked at her I might kill her. I had to stay focused. I locked the doors behind me. The room had been soundproofed but I could still feel the distant beat of the music.
There was medical equipment in a closet, just as in Amsterdam. I found a scalpel. I spread plastic sheeting on the floor and carefully cut into Yasmin’s bullet wounds. I couldn’t shake either the image of the treasured daughter she had been in her father’s eyes, or that of the empty shell she’d become.
I found one of the bullets and carefully pulled it out. I wiped it clean and took it to the table.
The bullet was longer and slimmer than usual. Malformed slightly from the impact on entering Yasmin’s body, it carried
a grid on its nose that matched the grid I’d seen on the bomb shrapnel and the gun. I pulled apart the bullet. Inside lay a complex web of miniaturized technology.
I took photos of the dismantled bullet and loaded them onto the computer on the desk.
Then I took one of the phones from the shelf, checked it, and called a number in New York City.
It rang three times. “Howell.”
“It’s Sam Capra.”
“Sam.”
“I have my wife.”
“You what?”
“I have captured my wife.”
A long shocked silence.
“You were right, Howell. She betrayed me, the Company. I have proof.”
“Slow down.”
“Have you intercepted that cigarette shipment?”
“No. The customs people in Rotterdam haven’t tracked it.”
“Listen. Lucy’s connected to a group—your Novem Soles—that has stolen a prototype for some kind of high-tech gun. I want to send you photos of a bullet. I need it analyzed.”
“No, you need to come in, Sam. Do this right.”
“No. I will send you the photos. I think that maybe they’re targeting kids with these guns.”
“Kids?”
“I saw a list of fifty people that I think may be targeted. Mostly kids, a few men and women. Give me an e-mail to send this information to you.”
“Bring in the evidence. Now, Sam.” Howell lowered his voice. “All could be forgiven if you really have Lucy.”
But if I told him everything, I’d have to give him Mila as well. I wasn’t prepared to do that.
“Give me an e-mail. That’s the only way we’re doing this.”
Reluctantly he did. I hung up. I went to the computer and used an anonymizer program to access a series of servers, finally ending up on one in South Africa hosting a popular celebrity gossip site. It was a Company front. I used an inactive account there I’d once had as Peter Samson to send the photos I’d taken. I’d give Howell a couple of hours before I called back.
I changed into dry clothes I found in a closet, then unlocked the soundproofed room. Lucy sat on the floor, chained to the wall.
I looked at her as though she were a complete stranger.
92
LUCY DREW BACK AGAINST THE WALL. “You look like crap.”
“Edward has this weird gun. You aim at one person and it kills another. Tell me about it.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It uses a computer chip.”
“I don’t know, Sam.”
“He has a list of children to target. Children, Lucy.”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“He told me he was going to have our son killed. Just because he can.”
I could almost see the next I don’t know forming on her lips. Then her mouth went slack. I waited to see what she would say.
“He said that he sold our son, Lucy. Is that true?”
She tried to stand. “You have to listen to me, Sam, please…”
“Did you help him sell our child?” I screamed in her face.
She shook her head. Then she nodded. Then she shook her head again.
The number of people I have wanted to kill—not needed to kill, but wanted to kill—is very few. The men who killed my brother, who set me on my life’s course. Piet, for raping and selling those women into slavery and smiling about it. Edward. But now I wanted to kill Lucy. I felt my hands close around her throat and she didn’t fight me, she just looked up into my eyes.
My fingers began to tighten against her flesh. Then I shoved her away from me.
She closed her eyes. “Edward’s keeping Daniel so I cooperate with him.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. After he was born, they took him from me… I had only held him once. Just the once, and I’d kissed him and given him his name… I couldn’t stop them. The birth was hard, Sam. I wasn’t strong enough then.”
I knelt by her. “And?”
“And. He said he put Daniel with a trafficker. That he would sell Daniel to a couple back in the U.S. and I’d never find him if I didn’t obey him.”
She turned away from me. I turned her face back to me.
“I don’t believe for a second that you’re an innocent victim, Lucy. You might feel guilt for me, maybe even for our child. You let me live. But you have stayed with these people—”
“Because they had Daniel! Edward is very good at finding your one fear and capitalizing on it.”
“You put the bomb in the office,” I said. “You had money going through accounts that the Company thought were closed. You are not the innocent victim of a kidnapping here. They had no leverage over you then.”
“I didn’t know it was a bomb. I got in over my head. It was supposed to be a drive that just copied the hard drives. Edward wanted the files from the office. All of them.”
“Like the files on my investigations.”
She nodded. “I didn’t know it was a bomb until Edward told me. I was in the car. I knew you were inside. He got out of the car because the remote for the detonator wasn’t working and he had to get closer to the building. It had a twenty-second delay. He got it working and then he got back into the car and he realized I’d called you. Then everything exploded. I saved you, Sam.”
“And let everyone else die.”
“I had to make a hard choice, just like you do,” she said.
I took a steadying breath. “If you want to help me, you’ll tell me what I need to know. This weapon. It uses a chip. The chip I got was connected to a computer that had a DNA profile on it. You put the chip into the gun. It uses nanotechnology to somehow key a person’s DNA to the bullet.”
Slowly she nodded.
I sat across from her. “This is how I think it happened.”
She pulled her knees up to her chin.
“Edward is British but he’s working in eastern Europe. He works for one of these transnational crime rings our office was targeting. He finds out about these DNA-guided guns being developed in Hungary, maybe from the scientist informant that could have handed me the Money Czar. He kidnaps Yasmin to get leverage over her father. The ransom was these guns. But Zaid only delivers the guns, not the chips that make them work.”
Lucy looked up at me. “Yeah, he screwed over Edward.”
“And Edward realized he had items of huge value in these guns. So he wanted them for himself. I’m thinking this whole operation was funded by the Money Czar. Edward wanted him out of the picture, so he had Yasmin kill the guy to make her look like she’d willingly joined her captors and to assure silence from her dad.
“But no one in the Amsterdam gang knew the Money Czar. Only Edward did. Edward’s gang helped kill him and none of them knew that wasn’t a bombing to show possible buyers that the technology they were smuggling worked, that it was simply a murder. And when they were done being useful to him as a cover, he killed all of them.”
I raised Lucy’s jaw with my fingertip. “Novem Soles. Nine Suns. Who are they? Is it Edward alone?”
“They’re the ones who said I had to come work for them.”
“You didn’t have a baby to be used against you.”
“No. I had you.”
I shook my head. “Wrong. You didn’t do this to protect me.”
“Yet there’s that troublesome fact that I got you out of the building. No matter what I’ve done, Sam, I did that. You’re welcome.”
I turned my hand into a fist and put it back in my lap.
“The bomb in Amsterdam. The police couldn’t figure out how it was triggered. But it had some sort of scanning grid on it, the same as that gun, the same as the bullet. The bomb goes off if the person with the right DNA gets close enough.”
She nodded.
“Our office wasn’t bombed because of the Money Czar. The bigger threat was one of the guys who’d pointed us toward the Money Czar—the scientist who was working on
nanotech research. We were targeted because we were investigating that connection to a researcher in DNA technology, in nanotechnology. When he had to silence the scientist in Budapest, the next target who could help him use the technology was Yasmin. Did that scientist used to work with Yasmin?”
She nodded.
“These guns, these bullets, that bomb, it’s all using nanotechnology to tie the weapon to a person’s DNA, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“The Money Czar gives Edward money to bomb London, to wipe out my investigation. Then he uses the money to set up the group in Amsterdam. He pays off Piet and Nic to run a criminal smuggling operation for him so they could get the guns away from Zaid and to the United States.”
Lucy wiped at her face. “Yes. A bullet encoded with DNA won’t miss. Snipers can fire into crowds and know they will hit whoever they want to hit, unerringly.”
“So. Who are these fifty people they’re targeting? Who are these kids?”
“I honestly do not know. I don’t know what he’s doing. Edward tried to kill me. Did you forget that? I can help you, Sam—I can help you.”
Deal with the devil, I thought, part two.
93
MOONLIGHT BROKE THROUGH THE CLOUDS above Brooklyn, like a smile in the night.
Time was scarce. The burglar had to assume that there were hidden camera feeds in the empty apartment, scrolling data onto a hard drive. There might only be minutes for the burglar to find what was needed.
The burglar headed straight for the bathroom. A comb, a brush, and a toothbrush lay on the shelf under the mirror. The burglar held up the hairbrush and examined it. Sam Capra had a full head of brownish-blond hair. Several strands lay entwined in the stiff bristles of the brush.
The burglar hoped some held surviving follicles. The brush went into a plastic bag, to be joined by the comb and the toothbrush. A slide of the gloved fingers along the bag and the job was done.
Then out the door, down the stairs, back into the moonlight-dappled night. The burglar slid up the dark heavy balaclava that hid his face and walked off into the black. The key to dealing properly with Sam Capra lay rustling like a whisper in the plastic bag.
