The Lost Key

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 looked 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 Céza

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.