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.