She heard footsteps approach. A hand shook her. She turned over to see Andreyev standing close by her. He held a cell phone that was connected to some kind of digital relay about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

  “We offered your husband a deal some time ago,” Andreyev said. “He did not take it. We believe he needs more convincing. You will talk to him and tell him to come to us. Or we will kill one of your children. We do not need you all.”

  Andreyev indicated the two masked men who stood over Danny and Maria. Both were aiming pistols at her sleeping children.

  “No blanks this time,” Andreyev assured her. “When I give the word, one of them dies.”

  CHAPTER 81

  WE WERE THIRTY minutes from Manhattan Heliport when the satellite phone rang. Floyd passed it to me. I removed my headset before I answered.

  “Mr. Morgan,” Andreyev said. “I hoped I would have heard back from you by now. Maybe Captain Floyd needs some encouragement to reach a decision. Please put him on the line.”

  I could tell from Andreyev’s tone what was coming next. The man was angry and he would take that anger out on Beth and the children. I had to try to buy some more time.

  “He escaped,” I replied. “I gave him your offer and I think he must have gotten suspicious that we were still working together. He took off around Denville. Just made a run for it. We tried to chase him down, but he shook us off. We’re out searching for him right now.”

  Floyd looked at me quizzically from the co-pilot’s seat. Justine tapped me on the shoulder. When I turned, she shrugged as if to say: What’s going on?

  I signaled them both to be quiet and waited for Andreyev to respond. I could tell I’d taken the wind out of his sails. I just had to pray he hadn’t heard about Rick Ferguson going missing yet.

  “Do you have any way of contacting him?” he asked.

  “No. He has no phone, no money. I don’t know where he’s going. We had a reported sighting outside a convenience store in Livingston. That’s where we’re going now.”

  “If I find out you’re playing games—”

  I cut him off. “What games? You think this is a game to me? I’ve already lost two agents in this. No more innocent people need to die. I made a promise to Beth to protect her and the kids. I want to take your deal and get them to safety. And I thought Floyd did too, but maybe he’s more of a coward than I gave him credit for.”

  I shook my head apologetically at Floyd.

  “You have twelve hours, Mr. Morgan,” Andreyev responded. “Find him and call me. Or I will be forced to punish the people I have at hand.”

  He hung up and I made sure the call had disconnected.

  “What the hell was that?” Floyd asked.

  “I just bought your wife and kids more time,” I replied. “We’ve got twelve hours to save them.”

  CHAPTER 82

  I SET US down at Manhattan Heliport, which was located at the southernmost tip of the island. By the time I’d settled the charter, Jessie had arrived to collect us. As Justine, Floyd, and I made our way through the parking lot to the Toyota, I thought back to my last time here—chasing the assassin who’d killed my friend. Far too many people had died as part of the twisted games of state played by enemies set on destroying everything we stood for. I was determined that Beth Singer and her children wouldn’t be added to the list of victims.

  Jessie caught sight of the Bull replica as I climbed into the front seat of the Toyota and she slid in beside me.

  “Souvenir?” she asked.

  “We think this is what they’re after,” I replied. “We need to get it into the lab.”

  She nodded, started the engine, and pulled out of the heliport, before heading north on FDR Drive.

  “Everyone OK?” she asked.

  I nodded, and Justine and Floyd did likewise. None of us said anything, though. I think we were all too aware of the ticking clock.

  It was approaching 3 a.m. and everywhere was eerily quiet. There were hardly any other vehicles on the road, and as we turned off FDR Drive and made our way through the city, there were hardly any people around either. It was as though New York had inhaled and was holding its breath for a moment, pausing before breathing life into a new day. The bright lights of electronic billboards shone over frozen sidewalks and the LED advertisements stuck to the handful of yellow cabs that navigated the deserted streets danced across the lanes like fireflies.

  Jessie drove us north to Madison and East 26th, where we parked in the subterranean garage before taking the elevator to Private’s offices. Sci and Mo-bot were waiting for us.

  “It’s good to see you, Jack,” Sci said warmly when we stepped out of the elevator. He clasped my hand and pulled me in for a hug.

  “This is Joshua Floyd,” I said. “Seymour Kloppenberg.”

  “Good to meet you. Congratulations on getting out of Afghanistan,” Sci said, shaking Floyd’s hand. “Call me Sci.”

  “Thanks, Sci,” Floyd replied.

  They all looked at me expectantly.

  “Sorry to keep you all up,” I told them. “But we think this is what they’re after.” I brandished the Wall Street Bull. “Taken off the desk of a Russian asset called Konstantin Roslov. We need a full analysis.”

  “We’ll find out what we can about Roslov,” Jessie said, and Mo-bot nodded.

  “And I’ll have a look at this thing,” Sci remarked, taking the Bull from me. “It’s heavy.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said, but Justine shook her head and pulled me to one side.

  “You’re going to rest, Jack. You and Captain Floyd must be running on fumes, and you’re no good to us exhausted.”

  I looked at Sci, who smiled knowingly as he headed for the lab. Mo-bot and Jessie had already gone.

  “You either trust your people to do right or you don’t,” Floyd observed. “Personally I could do with some shut-eye.”

  “We’ll get you set up somewhere,” Justine told him. “And the same goes for you, Jack Morgan.”

  CHAPTER 83

  I WAS BACK in the mountains of Afghanistan, struggling for breath as I followed Joshua Floyd through the trees. He was running too fast for me to keep up, and seemed not to be bothered by the thin air. I was going to get left behind. I heard a furious sound behind me, the roar of some ancient, fearsome creature, and glanced over my shoulder to see two rockets tearing through the sky, propelled by hellfire. When I turned to look ahead, Floyd had gone, but how would I escape without him? I didn’t know where the cave was. I made it to the cliff face and pawed frantically at the rock, searching for the entrance, but I wasn’t going to make it. The rockets detonated and I was caught in the blast. I was tossed into the air and felt myself being consumed by the flames…

  “Jack.” Justine’s voice cut through the nightmare. “Jack!”

  I woke to find myself lying on her lap in the meeting room. I remembered she’d put me on the couch. She’d set my head in her lap and stroked my hair until I fell asleep.

  “How long have I been out?” I asked.

  “Little over two hours,” she replied.

  “How are your legs?” I said, sitting up.

  “They’ve been better.” She stood and stretched them out. “What’s a little lost circulation? You’ve got a visitor.”

  I glanced around to see Mo-bot at the door.

  “We’ve got something you should see.”

  I stood up and walked off the stiffness in my muscles. I could have done with another twenty-four hours’ sleep, but that was a luxury I wasn’t going to have for a while.

  Justine and I followed Mo-bot through the quiet office. The lights were on energy save and most of the place was lost to shadows, which was just as well because my eyes were raw and struggled to adjust to the light.

  We went through a security door into the corridor that led to the computer room. Another door and then we joined Jessie in a climate-controlled room full of servers and terminals.

  “Feeling better?” she asked.

  “I probably needed the rest,” I replied. “I do feel a little better for it.”

  Mo-bot slid into the seat beside Jessie. Justine and I stood at her shoulder.

  She opened an image file to reveal a photograph of a pale man with the puffy face of an alcoholic crowned by a mop of thick black hair. If he’d ever had a soul, it wasn’t evident in this photo. His eyes were windows to a cruel void.

  “Konstantin Roslov,” Mo-bot said. “Colonel in the Russian Army before an honorable discharge. He went into commodities. Similar profile to Andreyev. Made a fortune buying up mining businesses that specialized in precious and heavy metals.”

  Mo-bot opened a file window to show the website of the Roslov Fund, a venture capital firm.

  “He used money from his industrial empire to start a venture fund that invested in businesses all over the world. Same as Andreyev. It’s a pattern. I think they figured out the way to beat capitalism is to get inside it. According to the CIA, the Roslov Fund is a front used to launder money to Russian-backed interests all over the world.”

  “Where is he now?” I asked. “Still in Belarus?”

  Mo-bot shook her head. “He’s dead, Jack.”

  She opened a Russian newspaper article and ran it through Google Translate. It featured a long-distance photograph of a corpse under a sheet, surrounded by police officers. It looked as though they were in a scrap yard.

  “His body was found in a recycling facility outside Minsk,” Mo-bot revealed. “The day after the raid on his house.”

  “Punishment for carelessness?” I suggested.

  “Whoever killed him removed his limbs. The Belarusian police believe they were amputated while he was alive,” Jessie said. “So it was either a punishment or a warning.”

  “Or maybe both,” I remarked.

  CHAPTER 84

  “HAS SCI FOUND anything?” I asked.

  Mo-bot shook her head. “Not last time I checked.”

  “Someone killed an entire unit of Green Berets and tore up Afghanistan looking for this thing,” I remarked. “Roslov was dismembered, likely as punishment for losing it. What’s so special about that figure?”

  I studied Roslov’s photo, wondering why so much horror had been perpetrated in pursuit of such a mundane object.

  “Keep digging,” I suggested. “We must be missing something.”

  I left Jessie and Mo-bot and headed for the door. Justine followed me and we walked the short distance down the corridor to the forensic science lab. Justine swiped a key card and we stepped inside a laboratory that would have been the envy of any forensics specialist. I’d always invested in cutting-edge technology, and the spacious lab contained everything from a scanning electron microscope to flow cytometers to an X-ray machine. We could conduct most forensic scientific experiments within the confines of the room, and it looked as though Sci had made use of many of the machines. There were discarded consumables all over the workbenches. He stood on the other side of a protective screen, near the X-ray machine, busy studying an image on a monitor. Floyd was standing beside him. Both men turned when we entered.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Floyd said. “Didn’t seem right with Beth and the kids…” His voice trailed off. “Anyway, I wanted to see if I could help.”

  “Anything?” I asked.

  Sci shook his head. “I’ve treated it with chemicals, put it under the microscope, X-rayed the thing. It’s a perfectly normal bronze statue. And I’ve never hated a thing more.”

  “Any chance the X-ray missed something?” Justine asked.

  “It’s solid metal all the way through,” Sci replied. “No secret chamber. No concealed surfaces. Nothing abnormal in any of the reactions. It’s a copper–tin alloy with traces of other metals. There are no hidden markers…”

  He stopped, clearly taken by an idea.

  Sci grabbed the bull from the X-ray plate and hurried over to a bench at the back of the lab. “An optical microscope can enlarge the physical structure. We already checked for engravings or concealed codes carved into the bull…”

  He went to a white box a little larger than a microwave and opened a door at the front of the device. “We didn’t find anything, but maybe we didn’t go deep enough.”

  Sci put the bull inside the device, closed the door, and activated a series of switches. The box was connected to a couple of monitors by a thick tube that looked a little like a high-tech drainpipe.

  “This scanning electron microscope can see down to the atomic level. With it we can view each and every one of the copper and tin atoms that make up the surface of this thing.” Sci switched on the monitors and operated a rollerball mouse that seemed to control the resolution of the image onscreen.

  An image of a tiny section of the bull filled the monitor. Sci adjusted it to a pin-sharp resolution. “I was on a flight once,” he said absently while he made fine tweaks to the machine settings. “I got to talking to the guy sitting next to me, and it turned out we were both due to be speaking at the same conference in Denver. Anyway, this guy was a physicist. He’d trained under Heinrich Kuhn, one of the guys on the Manhattan Project, and he told me how Kuhn had solved the problem of calculating the weight of uranium atoms. ‘You use light, my dear boy,’ was how he’d put it. Anyway, this physicist was gassing away about how light could be used to read and store data and…”

  Sci hesitated and took a deep breath. He gestured at the screen. I saw the tiny craters and formations of an atom. But, more importantly, inscribed around the atom was a series of stripes. Some were thick, others thin, but there appeared to be only two types of mark, and they ran across the atom in a seemingly random pattern.

  I gave Sci a puzzled look.

  “Is that a form of code?” Justine asked.

  “Looks like binary,” Sci replied, staring at the screen. “Well, this is quite a thing. Someone has figured out how to store vast quantities of data on real objects.”

  He shifted the microscope and moved to another atom, where a similar pattern could be seen.

  “I can’t believe it. This technology alone is worth billions,” Sci said excitedly. “But my guess is it’s the data they want back.”

  He turned to Floyd. “You may have unwittingly stolen the most valuable object on the planet.”

  “So someone has an atomic-scale engraving machine?” Justine asked.

  “My guess is they have a box in a lab, probably in SVR headquarters in Yasenevo, that can use beams of single photons to burn data onto the atoms, certainly of metal objects, but why not other substances too? Once the object has been encoded, it is placed into either the same box or another, which acts as a reader to decode the data. Maybe there is even a portable reader you use to scan the object? There might only be a handful of readers in the world, so you can store the most precious secrets and never have to worry about being discovered or losing your data. Unless the object is stolen, of course.”

  “Everyone just sees a bronze figure,” Floyd remarked.

  “Exactly, but in reality it’s a vast data repository. The ultimate USB drive. How many atoms form the surface of this bull? Billions? Maybe trillions? Effectively limitless storage capacity on just this one object. I’m just…” Sci trailed off. “I’m just blown away. This is revolutionary.”

  “Can you decode it?” I asked.

  “Unlikely without a reader,” he replied. “I can capture as many images as I like and try to decipher them, but we’re talking about a painstaking process. Imagine trying to reconstruct a photograph from binary. Who knows how this data is parsed?”

  “Do your best,” I said.

  “What are you thinking, Jack?” Justine asked.

  She knew me well enough to spot an idea forming.

  “I’m thinking it’s time to call Victor Andreyev and tell him we’ve found Captain Floyd.”

  CHAPTER 85

  I DROVE PAST the old factories, their broken windows framed by rusting steel. Towering chimneys reached toward the sky. No longer grand monuments to industry, instead they looked like the fingers of a dead and buried giant trying to claw its way out of the ground.

  Andreyev had insisted on meeting somewhere isolated and remote, which was my first red flag. His requirement that I come alone was the second. I knew he had every intention of killing me, but this meeting was the only way we’d have any chance of saving Beth, Maria, and Danny.

  I’d chosen the old Baekeland Chemical Plant in Jersey, about forty minutes’ drive from Manhattan, and had agreed a time of 11 a.m. Andreyev was told we’d found Floyd and discovered he’d gone to retrieve the bronze bull. That made the deal very simple: Beth and the children were to be exchanged for it.

  The Toyota Sequoia bounced along a neglected concrete service road. A thick covering of snow made it impossible to see the deep potholes, so I bumped and crunched my way toward three SUVs that were parked in the yard between three decaying chemical processing plants. The vehicles were surrounded by a complex network of pipes, tanks, gantries, and metal-and-concrete buildings. The dark gray clouds that brooded above the broken roofs and corroded pipes served to make the setting even more ominous.

  Justine had been dead against my plan, and had taken me aside to plead with me not to go. It was a trap, a suicide mission. Why did I have to do the exchange? Could Floyd not go instead? With tears in her eyes, she’d told me she couldn’t bear to lose me again. I’d tried to soothe her fears, but didn’t think I was successful. I couldn’t even convince myself. What I was about to do was dangerous, and the thought of all the things that could go wrong set my heart racing. It was pounding furiously as I parked twenty yards from the other vehicles.

  I reminded myself bravery wasn’t the absence of fear; it was action taken in the face of it. I grabbed my coat and stepped into the mid-morning chill. The rear doors of all three SUVs opened and two masked men stepped out of each vehicle. Victor Andreyev emerged from the front passenger seat of the center vehicle. He sauntered toward me with the confidence of a feudal king.

 

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