The Lost Key

“Thank goodness Pearce was an organized bloke. His files are almost too easy to find.”

Mike punched the third blue file, got up and gestured to her chair. “Sit down and take a look. Tell me what you see.”

Nicholas sat with Mike perched on the chair’s arm. Her blond ponytail had grown in the past few months and it was right next to his face. He breathed in the jasmine scent, shifted himself away.

She leaned, pointed, her ponytail touching his face. “Look at that, Nicholas.”

He leaned away again, looked at the screen, whistled. “Good catch, Agent Caine. Alfie Stanford bought several books on military history from Mr. Pearce over the years. Mostly World War One titles, though there are a few from the Franco-Prussian War and some on the Russian oligarchs.”

“Weighty stuff.”

“Certainly. Stanford was a very bright man, very dedicated to study and scholarship. You don’t get to his position otherwise.” He clicked a few other folders. “I wonder who else we may recognize in Mr. Pearce’s clientele.”

She tapped her watch. “No time. We need to go, Nicholas. We can talk about it on the way up to the OCME.”

Ben Houston jogged around the corner. “Oh, good, you’re still here. I was about to call you. Before you go, you need to see this.” Ben’s red hair was mussed, his suit rumpled. Nicholas thought he looked like he’d had a rough morning of it, then thought to look down at his own bespoke trousers. There was a line of mud along the crease and a thin ash of dirt covering his knees, right above a small rip in the fine wool. He brushed at it, shaking his head. Nigel would have his head tonight when he realized he’d ruined his trousers. Six hours into his first day and he was already falling apart.

Ben handed Mike a brown file. She opened the brown folder and both of them stared at Kevin Brown’s photo.

Ben said, “Looks like Sophie Pearce wasn’t exactly telling you the whole truth.”

Nicholas laughed. “I thought he looked familiar. Remember that photo of the Pearce family? With the boy and the girl? There he is, all grown up.”

“Yep,” Ben said. “Adam Pearce, the nineteen-year-old son of the late Jonathan Pearce, alive and well and ru

Nicholas didn’t look up from Adam Pearce’s photo, simply said, “Careful, Red. I have not been knighted.”

Ben patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. I mean, you do have the right accent for it, after all.”

Mike ignored them and read the list. When Ben had said “broken into,” she’d expected stores and businesses. Instead, she was seeing major multinational corporations, military targets, the Pentagon. It hit her. “Whoa. I know about him. Talk about a hacker, he’s right at the top.”

“Yep, he’s become rather notorious around here, actually. We’ve tied him to Anonymous, WikiLeaks, several remote break-ins on some very high-level military sites, the whole shebang.”

“What’s his nom de guerre?” Nicholas asked, and Mike heard the excitement in his voice.

Ben said, “Eternal Patrol. He has friends in almost all the dissident and domestic protest groups. But he’s good, I mean really good. We’ve never been able to pin him down. And he’s been off the grid for a while, hasn’t been seen in the city for the past two years.”

Nicholas laughed, shook his head. “So now everything makes sense.”

24

Ben said, “EP is famous in the underground computer world, but what’s cool is that he isn’t a black-hat hacker—you know, the ones who take down governments and sell credit card information and the like. But he’s not purely a white hat, either, trying to improve the Internet. He’s walking a fine line, could go either way as he gets older.”

Nicholas said, “Eternal Patrol—EP, Adam Pearce—he’s a real talent. If you can catch them young, and turn them—well, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on him. He’d be brilliant at risk assessment.”

“Takes one to know one,” Mike said. “I’m glad you’re now working with us, legally.” Shortcuts were okay, she thought, as she glanced through more of Adam Pearce’s file. She saw echoes of Nicholas, no way around it.

She said, “Adam Pearce is a genius, no question, into computers from the time he could walk. He hacked into the Pentagon’s secure internal e-mail system at the tender age of twelve.”

“Oh, he was an old hand at it by then,” Nicholas said.

“So it appears. Here’s a list of transgressions, long and varied. So, does he do this only for social acceptance among his peers or just for fun?”

Nicholas shrugged. “Fun, credibility, secret stealing. Who knows the motivation?”

Ben said, “I’d say Eternal Patrol is more of a merry prankster than a truly malicious hacker.”

Nicholas said, “You know, hackers make the best employees.”

“Why’s that?” Mike asked.

“They’re always willing to think outside the box. I used to use some of the brighter international ones for my work in the Foreign Office. They are barely controllable unless you have something on them. Or they want something from you. Sometimes you even have a bit of luck and they’ll turn against their compatriots. They’ll bargain the information away. You must be the most careful with those, they’re unpredictable at best, moles at worst.”

“So how can you be sure they’re being honest and legitimate with your information?” Mike asked.

Nicholas said simply, “You need to have someone who’s just as talented to keep an eye on them. If you hire one to build you a back door, you need to be sure the code he’s using is clean. A clever hacker can build a trapdoor in his back door, and then you’re up a creek, as my uncle Bo likes to say. Would you look at this—he’s managed to stay off the radar for what—two years? He’s very good, considering he’s wanted all over the world. NSA, CIA, Interpol. Kid has a lot of powerful people very peeved at him.”

Mike said, “You were right, Ben, about Sophie Pearce. She flat-out lied to us, and, of course, so did Adam. Now, why is she hiding her relationship with him? And why did he show up out of the blue hours after his father was killed?”

Ben said, “Maybe he wanted to see his family, maybe he thought we’d be off his scent. I’ll admit, though, the timing is certainly coincidental.”

Mike said, “Is there a special meaning for Eternal Patrol?”

Nicholas said, “It’s an old naval term, actually. For a lost ship. There are hundreds of ships and submarines that have been lost in the various wars. Traditionally, when they go down and no one knows where, they call it being on eternal patrol.”

“Well, that makes sense, at least. His dad was a naval history buff. Ben, put out a BOLO for Adam Pearce, and we need to go talk to Sophie again. Find out if this was all she was keeping from us.”

Ben said, “Already did. We also need to look at what Adam Pearce has been into lately as EP. If he crossed the wrong people, perhaps his father was killed in retaliation, or to draw him out. If that’s the case, Sophie isn’t safe, either.”

“She’s safe enough,” Mike said. “We’ve got eyes on her. No one’s going to get close to her. Have them pick her up, Ben, we’ll see if she knows where her brother’s hiding. Nicholas, we’re outta here.”

When Mike had cleared the garage doors and turned the Crown Vic onto Worth Street, Nicholas said, “I have something to tell you.”

She knew that tone, he’d decided to tell her something that he’d thought to hold back. Good, it meant he trusted her, at least every once in a while.