The Lost Key

His breath came in short gasps. He shook his head to clear his brain. Slowly, he rolled onto his hands and knees.

Mr. Olympic was long gone. Nicholas saw a small rectangular black box on the ground five feet away. It was a Taser. Frigging Mr. Olympic had Tasered him.

Then Mike was on the ground with him, hands ru

“I’m all right, really, I’m all right.”

“Then what happened? Where’s our guy?”

Nicholas pointed at the Taser.

Mike couldn’t believe it. She stared at the small black Taser, her heart still kettledrumming, pumping blood and fear through her. “I saw you go down. I thought he’d shot you, the way you were jerking around on the ground, but I didn’t hear a shot. Thank heaven it was only a Taser.”

“Yes, only a Taser,” he said as he ripped the Taser barbs out of his side. At least it was getting easier to think and put words together.

“Can you walk, or do I need to carry you?”

He wanted to laugh at that visual but couldn’t get any spit in his mouth. He slowly got to his feet.

Agent Ben Houston’s voice crackled from the walkie-talkie Mike carried in her jacket pocket.

“We’re here to back you up. We’ve spotted the suspect. He’s on foot heading north on Trinity Place. Mike, Nicholas, he’s parallel to your position. We’re moving to intercept. Cut across Rector and stop him.”

Nicholas was rolling his shoulders. “What? Did Mr. Olympic hang around to see what would happen next?”

“Come on, come on,” Mike shouted, pulled on Nicholas’s arm and took off again. “Can you do it?”

“I can. Bloody hell.” Nicholas shook off the last of the Taser effects, felt his adrenaline kick in, and triangulated the area in his head, grateful his brain was back in working order. If they cut up to Rector they could intercept, especially if Ben could drive the man toward the box. Then a phalanx of agents could converge on the target from four sides.

He rushed after Mike, slower than before, but found the more he moved, the better his body parts worked. One block gone, now two. Shouts from the walkie as they closed in on three sides.

They turned the corner onto Trinity and there he was. Nicholas wanted him badly and pushed to his limit, shoving people out of the way, ignoring shouts, cries, curses. Mr. Olympic ran into the street to get away from the hordes of people and took off, one fast disbelieving look at Nicholas. Nicholas followed, heard Mike shouting, “Push him south, push him south.” He glanced back, saw her coming fast, knew how determined she could be. He signaled for her to duck to the left and he’d turn Mr. Olympic right into her waiting arms. He hoped she’d deck him.

This time it went right. Mike flanked him, ignoring the shouts and screams, the honking cars and taxis, and Nicholas pushed on the last of his speed, launched himself and tackled the man hard.

They were locked together, pummeling each other, as they rolled into the street right in front of an oncoming NYPD patrol car. Nicholas saw the bumper coming and shoved Mr. Olympic to the curb. He rolled as the patrol car slammed on its brakes and came to a stop an inch from Nicholas’s leg.

5

Nicholas lay there for a heartbeat, not believing the car hadn’t hit him. He sat up slowly, sent a prayer of thanks heavenward. But there was no time to rejoice that he hadn’t been smeared across the street. He grabbed Mr. Olympic’s leg and landed on top of him. No way was he getting away again.

The idiot tried to twist around to hit him, but Nicholas clipped Mr. Olympic in the jaw with his elbow, stu

Mike grabbed his arms behind him while Nicholas frisked him. He found an H&K MK23 pistol, a mobile phone, and two long-bladed stilettos, one of them still stained with Mr. Pearce’s blood.

Nicholas jerked the man’s head back. “Listen to me, we’re federal agents. What in bloody hell are you up to, mate? Why did you kill Mr. Pearce?”

A sneer, nothing more.

Mike got in his face. “You assaulted a federal agent with your Taser, you idiot, and that means no one’s going to play with you anymore. Tell me your name, now. Tell us why you murdered Mr. Pearce. What were you arguing about with him?”

Mr. Olympic bared his teeth, meant to be a grin, but wasn’t.

Mike said, “No wallet, no ID, but you’ll be in the system. We’ll know who you are within the hour, so you might as well tell us now.”

“Come on, mate, don’t be daft. Who are you?”

The man opened his mouth, but no words came out. They saw a look of horror in his eyes, then panic, sharp, cold panic—Mr. Olympic’s eyes rolled back in his head. He seized, a bubbling white froth spewed out of his mouth, then he slumped against Nicholas.

Mike screamed into the walkie, “We need a medic, right now.” Nicholas let him slide down to the sidewalk. Mike felt for his pulse, started a CPR checklist, but Nicholas pulled her back.

“Let me go, we need him alive.”

“It’s too late,” he said. They looked at the man’s face, gone blue now, dark eyes staring blankly up at them. A few more muscle twitches and he stopped moving.

Bystanders were in a circle around them, excited and horrified, knowing death when they saw it. The NYPD officer who’d nearly hit Nicholas rushed to help. He saw the man lying on the sidewalk. “What happened? I didn’t think I hit you. What happened to him?”

“No, you didn’t hit me, it’s something else,” Nicholas said, and turned to Mike. “Stay with him.” He stood, raised his creds high, told the crowd he was FBI and they needed to move back, this was now a crime scene and there was nothing to see, it was all over. He heard Mike say to the officer, “I don’t know what happened. We were chasing him—he killed a man on Wall Street, but he went down; why, I don’t know. We were trying to help.”

Special Agent Ben Houston pulled up in a Crown Vic beside him, hopped out of the car. He took one look at the dead man and said, “What happened to him? What’d you do to him?”

Nicholas said to Ben, aware the crowd was pressing in again, “I didn’t do anything to him. I’d finally managed to bring him down. He started seizing and foaming at the mouth. Whatever happened, Mr. Olympic did it to himself.”

“Mr. Olympic? You mean, like he had cyanide in his tooth?”

“Maybe, not necessarily cyanide, but a bloody fast poison of sorts in his mouth.” He frowned at the blue face. “But why would he kill himself? What the devil is going on here?”

No answer to that. Mike said to Ben, “We need an ID on this guy, pronto. Nicholas is right, something’s not kosher here, and it’s possible the Devil does have something to do with it.”

Nicholas said, “I wonder why he stayed around.” He looked down at Mr. Olympic. “Why?”

6

Berlin, Germany

4:00 p.m.

The mission was shot to hell. März watched, tense, unable to do anything. He knew every single individual in this huge room was even more frightened of failure than he was and that was because, simply, they were scared to death of him. They were right to be; he was lethal and soulless and took pleasure in his work. No one dared to look at him standing quietly in the back of the large windowless room, watching, always watching. The nerve center, the workers called it, all of them focused on the single massive monitoring screen on the wall, covered in twenty blue and green quadrants. Fifteen analysts worked multiple computer angles. They were responsible for monitoring each agent’s heart rate, his breathing, his visuals, his audio. They saw everything the agent saw, heard what he said, heard what those around him said. It never ceased to amaze März, this invasion of another’s mind, but all the analysts were used to being inside a live human being and participating from afar.