Chris Kuzneski
The Einstein Pursuit
About the Author
Chris Kuzneski is the international bestselling author of numerous thrillers including SIGN OF THE CROSS and THE DEATH RELIC, featuring the series characters Payne and Jones. He is also the author of THE HUNTERS, the first in a new electrifying series. Chris’s thrillers have been translated into more than twenty languages and are sold in more than forty countries. Chris grew up in Pennsylvania but currently lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida. To learn more, please visit his website: www.chriskuzneski.com
Acknowledgements
It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a lot more than that to publish a book — especially when the person writing the book is the village idiot. (I figured I’d make the joke before Payne & Jones had a chance.)
Anyway, here are some of the people I’d like to thank:
Scott Miller, Claire Roberts, Robert Gottlieb, Stephanie Hoover, and the whole gang at Trident Media. They sold this project before it was even written.
Ian Harper, my longtime friend/editor/consigliere. He reads my words before anyone else — and then reads them again and again until they’re perfect.
Vicki Mellor, Emily Griffin, Jo Liddiard, Jane Morpeth, and everyone at Headline/Hachette UK. They took my story and turned it into a book. And then they printed, like, a million copies and shipped them all over the world.
All the fans, librarians, booksellers, and critics who have enjoyed my thrillers and have recommended them to others. If you keep reading them, I’ll keep writing them.
And last but not least, my loving family — because they are the ones who have put up with me the longest.
Map
1
The lab was packed with many of the brightest minds in their field, all focused on a secret project that would change mankind for ever.
In a matter of seconds, they would all be dead.
Of course, none of them knew why they had been called to the facility in the middle of the night. Most had assumed a major breakthrough had occurred, and they had been brought in for an historic announcement that simply could not wait until morning.
Instead, they had been summoned to their slaughter.
The assault had started hours earlier, long before the researchers were misled. Guards had been killed. Locks had been breached. Specimens had been located and stolen. All had been done with a surgical precision the scientists might have appreciated under different circumstances — circumstances that wouldn’t lead to their deaths.
Dr Stephanie Albright was the last to arrive at the sprawling warehouse. Not because she was running late, but because she had the furthest to drive and was on the verge of exhaustion. Over the past few months she had averaged less than four hours’ sleep per day, a figure that included the naps she took when she was on the verge of passing out in the lab. But she never complained. Neither did the others. They knew how important their project was, and they were willing to forgo food and sleep if it meant reaching their goal a little sooner.
Tonight, they would give up more than that.
They would sacrifice their lives.
Albright rushed into the lobby and took the elevator to the third floor. She was so lost in her thoughts, she failed to notice the vacant guard station. And the blank security monitors. And all the other things that weren’t quite right. Most importantly, she overlooked the man in the boat who had watched her every move from the calm waters of Riddarfjärden Bay.
He had waited nearly twenty minutes for her arrival.
It was time to finish the job.
His detonator included a state-of-the-art transmitter. It was capable of igniting multiple devices from up to a thousand meters away. Explosives had been placed throughout the warehouse near load-bearing walls and columns. His goal was to collapse the floors, one after another, with no time for escape. A smoldering coffin of steel and concrete for those trapped inside.
The assassin smiled at the thought.
He had killed many times before, but never so many at once.
This would be his masterpiece.
With the touch of a button, the charges erupted with so much force, he felt it in the bay. Chunks of stone and shards of glass filled the air before crashing to the earth like hail. Columns cracked and walls crumbled as the warehouse screamed in pain. Amplified by the water, the deafening roar forced him to cover his ears, but he refused to cover his eyes.
The show was just getting started.
Acetone is commonly used in laboratories around the world to clean scientific instruments. Most of the time it is stored in polyethylene plastic containers, but this particular lab was equipped with a customized delivery system that would pump the acetone throughout the building to a multitude of cleaning stations. This set-up required large drums of acetone to be housed in the upper floors of the building.
The assassin knew this and used it to his advantage.
To cover his tracks and to prevent survivors, he had rigged the barrels of acetone to rupture from the initial force of the blast. The flammable liquid rained down on the destruction below. Within seconds, the fumes ignited and a flash fire occurred. Flames swept through the warehouse like a blistering flood, killing everyone in its wake. The heat from the blaze was so intense that bodies and evidence literally melted.
Like a crime-scene crematorium.
On most jobs, he preferred to work alone. But that wasn’t the case tonight. This project was far too complex for a single cleaner, even someone with his experience. To pull it off, he needed the help of a local team — men to do the lifting, and the drilling, and the grunt work.
Men to do the things he didn’t have time to do.
Men who were expendable.
He had thanked them for their service with gunfire.
Then he had left them to burn with everyone else.
2
Nick Dial was miserable. Absolutely miserable.
He hated his office. And his desk. And the stacks of paperwork on his desk. He hated going to sleep after midnight and waking up before dawn. He hated the brown gruel the locals called coffee and the miniature mugs they served it in. Worst of all, he hated wasting his days in meetings instead of doing what he did best: finding clues and catching killers.
He was a cop at heart, not an executive.
Unfortunately, his business cards disagreed.
Dial was the director of the homicide division at Interpol, the largest international crime-fighting organization in the world. His job was to coordinate the flow of information between police departments any time a murder investigation crossed national boundaries. All told he was in charge of 190 member countries, filled with billions of people and hundreds of languages.
One of the biggest misconceptions about Interpol was their role in stopping crime. They seldom sent agents across borders to investigate a case. Instead they used local offices called National Central Bureaus in the member countries. The NCBs monitored their own territory and reported pertinent facts to Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon. From there, information was entered into a central database that could be accessed by agencies around the globe.
Interpol’s motto: Connecting Police for a Safer World.
Dial was fully committed to a ‘safer world’, and he was more than willing to do his part. That was why he had left his position at the FBI to work for the Europe-based organization. At the time, the decision to accept the job was a no-brainer. Not only was he the first American to be named as a department head at Interpol, but he had been asked to run the new homicide division.