The Last Second

by Catherine Coulter

  And when she told them the Heaven Stone would make the one who had it immortal, they rejoiced with her. The bomb’s EMP would create enough of a channel for them to collect both Nevaeh and the Heaven Stone. This was what they wanted, wasn’t it? They hummed, they were so happy. Nevaeh, with Kiera by her side, began to implement their plan.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  New York

  July 2015

  Dr. Claire Fontaine lived on West 69th. Nevaeh was pleased the large glass building backed to a quiet alley, dark even though it was still daylight, where no cameras pointed. She now waited in the alley, wearing black, blending into the shadows, listening to the squeal of tires and the footsteps. The heat was making sweat prickle on the back of her neck.

  You’re fine. Breathe. Relax. She will come.

  Fontaine kept to a schedule, Kiera assured her.

  Monday through Thursday, she came home at 4:30 every day, put on running gear, took a loop around Central Park, then returned home at 6 p.m. and disappeared into her apartment for the rest of the night.

  Fridays were different. Fontaine exchanged work clothes for dinner and dancing, went out in heels and a little black dress. Nevaeh had read Kiera’s dossier thoroughly—sometimes it was a date, sometimes it was a charity event, the symphony or a ballet, when the season was appropriate.

  For someone so smart, she is seriously stupid to keep to such a rigorous—predictable—schedule. When she had told this to the Numen, she would swear she heard laughter. And will you kill her, Nevaeh, like you’ve told us you would? Like she deserves, the traitorous bitch. Kill her, Nevaeh, you want to, that’s what you’ve told us over and over, just do it. Do it tonight.

  And here she came, ponytail bobbing. Nevaeh didn’t even bother looking at her watch, she knew it was 6 p.m., on the dot.

  When Fontaine went inside, Nevaeh followed. Amazing that such a supposedly intelligent, quite well-to-do woman would live alone in New York without a doorman.

  She’s reckless and stupid and deserves this, the Numen sang in her ear. Hadn’t she told them the same thing so many times?

  Nevaeh took the stairs, waited until she heard Fontaine’s door lock.

  She had a key—of course, Kiera had managed it, bless her. When Nevaeh had visited the first time, letting herself in, she’d spent half the afternoon in the apartment, gloves on, touching all of Dr. Fontaine’s lovely things. Books, china figurines, art.

  A lonely existence.

  You were lonely once. We found you.

  Yes, you did, and I found you and now you’re with me all the time.

  Nevaeh could hear the shower running.

  She crept on silent feet to the bathroom. She had a knife in her pocket but she didn’t want to have to use it. She’d discussed it with the Numen, worried she might get stuck herself, and they agreed. Fontaine was in shape, strong, could easily disarm Nevaeh if she wasn’t careful. No, she needed a surprise attack, and again, the Numen agreed.

  She flexed her fingers in the gloves, felt blood racing through her veins. She was excited, she was ready, more than ready. At last. She picked up the large, heavy ashtray on the console table by the bedroom door, settled it firmly in her hand, got a good grip on it. She’d seen the ashtray on her visit and had told the Numen she had to be careful to hit her on the side of the head, not her face. And they’d agreed.

  One deep breath, then she was through the door. The room was steamy. Fontaine was singing quietly to herself, some lame song Nevaeh remembered from the seventies.

  She ripped open the curtain, waited for Fontaine to turn to look at her, her face a rictus of terror. Nevaeh smiled and slammed the ashtray into the side of Dr. Claire Fontaine’s head. Water sprayed everywhere, and a stream of red began running down the side of her head, temple to chin, mixing with the water and face soap.

  Fontaine fell, her head resting on the edge of the tub. Nevaeh came down on her knees, watched the blood pour from the wound in her head.

  She leaned close. “Hello, you treacherous cow.”

  Fontaine’s eyes ran red with her blood, but Nevaeh knew she recognized her. She managed to whisper, “You? Why?”

  “You aren’t surprised, are you? Really? You knew you’d have to pay for your deceit, for your betrayal. Did you and Holloway have a good laugh together?”

  “No—no.” Her eyes rolled back in her head and she was gone.

  I did it, I did it.

  Yes, you did, she deserved it, but now you’ve won, and she’s dead.

  Fontaine rested exactly where she would have had she slipped and fallen in the shower and hit her head. An arm dangled and blood began to pool.

  Ten minutes after she’d let herself in, Nevaeh was walking down the stairs, her bag heavier, but her heart light. She’d killed one of her betrayers. The Numen had understood and approved.

  She ducked out the back entrance, walked four short blocks east into Central Park, and lost herself in the crowds. Fifteen minutes later, on the east side of the park, she hailed a cab. He dropped her at the W hotel in Midtown. After he pulled away, she walked to the Maxwell Hotel instead, went inside, changed clothes, disposed of the old clothes and the ashtray, then grabbed another cab for the ride to Teterboro for her flight to Boise.

  What a lovely week it was shaping up to be.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  T-MINUS 30 HOURS

  I named my company Galactus after the Marvel comic book character. That may seem silly to some of you, but Galactus is an ancient being, and is also known as the World Eater. What name could be more fitting for an aerospace company that will be changing the way the people of Earth move through the universe?

  —Jean-Pierre Broussard, founder and CEO, Galactus Space Industries, Annual Meeting, 2013

  Galactus Headquarters

  Lyon, France

  The plane landed hard on the Lyon airstrip, jarring everyone awake. Mike stretched and grabbed her phone immediately, grateful to Poppy for the gift, shocked there weren’t any calls. With a raised brow, she dialed into the office, to Adam’s number. Gray answered.

  “You’re safe on the ground, I take it?”

  “We are.”

  “We have things to tell you, but you’ll want to be on a secure line. Get to Galactus, set up an encrypted channel. We’ll fill you in then. Oh, and we have a trap set on Nevaeh Patel’s and Kiera Byrne’s phones, but neither one is turned on. The moment they go live, we will be able to track them. Both were last used in Lyon, so chances are they’re still there. Be careful, Mike. I don’t like this. More’s going on than we know.”

  “Will do, Gray. Thanks for being so cryptic.”

  “Anytime,” and he was gone. Nicholas handed her a cup of coffee. He was scruffy and needed to shave, just how she liked him. He smelled like salt from the ocean despite his attempts to clean up in the plane’s shower. She smoothed back his hair, touched his cheek.

  He said, “Another fifteen minutes won’t matter, but I would like to know what they’ve found out.”

  “Gray was very focused, operational. Whatever it is, it’s important.”

  Grant joined them, pouring down coffee and smiling. “You lot made quite an impression on my boss. Congratulations, that’s hard to do. Fentriss is by-the-book, very old-school.”

  Mike said, “Well, sure he is impressed. I mean, Grant, you did tell him we were ninjas, right?”

  “Oh yes, and maybe he thinks so now, too.”

  An SUV waited for them on the tarmac. Broussard said nothing, only nodded to them. They climbed in, and the SUV wound its way from the small airport to the outskirts of Lyon to the Galactus headquarters and campus. It was dark, the roads deserted, but the moon was high and nearly full, and Mike could see the French countryside.

  She said, “I bet it’s beautiful in the daylight and not at all industrial.”

  “Many do expect us to be in a more manufacturing area,” Broussard said, “but when I purchased this land I knew it was perfect for my company. I wanted a spot o
ut of the way, off the beaten path, as you like to say. Oh look, media. Even though it’s dark. I’m going to duck down now.”

  He did. They passed several media trucks from the major international news organizations, satellite dishes on top of the vehicles pointed at the sky. The vans were in front of a small café, all of them unmanned.

  Grant said, “There’s luck. Everyone’s on a nap break, it seems.”

  Their SUV slid past, no one the wiser.

  When they pulled up onto the lovely, lush Galactus campus, Broussard asked the driver to take them to the front gates. He proceeded to unlock it using a series of numbers on an electronic keypad, and the gates swung open.

  The grounds were deserted, not surprising for the middle of the night. No lights were on in the building.

  It wasn’t only that. Something felt wrong. Nicholas glanced at Mike, noticed Grant shifted in his seat, got the weapon Poppy had provided at the ready.

  Nicholas said, “Jean-Pierre, does the idea of sabotage ring true to you?”

  Broussard shrugged. “It’s possible, I guess. All right, I have to admit, shutting down the campus doesn’t seem like the logical thing for Nevaeh to do.”

  Hallelujah, maybe he was coming around, at last. Mike said, “It makes perfect sense if she had something to do—like set off a nuclear weapon—she’d want to do it in privacy. Be on guard, people. She could be in there, fortified. Go carefully.”

  Broussard, to her relief, kept his mouth shut.

  They all climbed out of the SUV at the Galactus entrance. Nicholas and Grant cleared the area. At their nod, Broussard walked to the front doors and unlocked them. The interior lights automatically came on. There was no night security, no one anywhere. Broussard went directly to a room just inside the doors. Nicholas knew the media would notice the sudden lights, but it couldn’t be helped. If Patel was here, if she had backup with her, they weren’t going to have the advantage of surprise much longer.

  He pointed. “These screens here? They feature our latest security—a laser-guided, heat-sensor motion tracker—it allows the guards to see any movement on all the floors and points the cameras in the direction needed. When it’s set to secure mode, as it is now, if a mouse moves across a hallway or stairwell, the software can home in on it instantly.” He waited. The cameras remained stationary, the screens empty. “No, there’s nothing. She’s not here. No one is.”

  Nicholas asked, “Could she be somewhere else on the campus?”

  “She could, but all her work is here, in the headquarters building. No, the campus is shut down, and that includes our manufacturing buildings.”

  They left the security center and walked into the grand lobby, with its pristine white walls. Mike looked toward the winding upward ramps. She said, “I thought this was familiar. It’s like the Guggenheim museum in New York. Very nice, Jean-Pierre.”

  He grinned at her. “Yes. Now look up.”

  Mike stared at the huge model of the solar system hanging from the blackened ceiling, obviously representing the vastness of space. It was amazing.

  “All of you, follow me. We must get to my office. With any luck, we’ll find out Nevaeh doesn’t have anything to do with this.” They rode a near-silent elevator to the top floor.

  Loyalty, Nicholas thought. When you believed in the loyalty of a person, it was hard to let go, to accept betrayal.

  Broussard said, “I haven’t been here in a few months. Like I said, I work from the boat—worked, that is. Nevaeh’s office is adjacent to this one. Feel free to look in, though don’t be surprised by her seeming chaos. To gain access to her computer, we will need an override from mine. The entire campus can be controlled from my system. I’ve never felt fully comfortable ceding control to an IT department. They run most things on campus, but the mainframe has a separate control from here.”

  He swung open the office doors and gestured them inside. Lights immediately came on. The room fit with the rest of the building: white, anonymous, except for large color photographs of the various rockets and a number of shots of Earth from different angles in space.

  Mike went to the adjoining office—Broussard wasn’t kidding, it was chaos. Books and papers stacked sky high, covering the desk, chairs, bookshelves. Broussard soon joined her.

  “How does she find anything?”

  He shrugged. “She knows where everything is, and gets very, very angry if anyone messes with her things.”

  “Can you give us access to her computer now? Our people will search it remotely. Oh, yes, I’m going to need to set up a secure call.”

  “Certainly. You can use my conference room. It’s right through there.”

  He pointed to a door off his own office, across the expanse of clean white room. She felt better immediately being out of Nevaeh’s office. She couldn’t imagine existing in such a mess.

  Mike saw a triptych of paintings showing the Grail legends on the far wall of the conference room. Compared to everything else in the room—no, the entire building—they were old-fashioned. She stopped to study them.

  Broussard said, “We’re not sure who painted these. Even though they’re unsigned, I’m betting it was Arthur Hughes. He did paintings of Galahad. To me it stands to reason he would do some of Parzival, the Grail knight who features in Wolfram’s story of the Heaven Stone—the Holy Grail. Beautiful, aren’t they? I found them only two years ago. They’d been hidden away in a private collection.”

  “Yes, they’re lovely.”

  “They represent perfectly what I salvaged from the Flor de la Mar,” he said simply. They were golds and greens on parchment, the first showing a black sphere, large enough for a man to step inside, the second the sphere cracking open and heaven’s light escaping, and the third, a greenish-black stone, the size of a man’s hand, rising from the split in the black sphere, just out of the grasp of a man in a suit of armor.

  The people in the painting watched in awe, their faces turned to the light. How could it be possible? Mike wondered. But the evidence was staring her in the face.

  He said, “I’ve always thought the Heaven Stone—the Holy Grail—was made of moldavite, a rare substance created by meteor strikes. But oddly enough, when I held the stone in the palm of my hand, it was very light, weighed almost nothing. I’d given Devi a necklace made of moldavite stones the night she—” He broke off, quickly walked away.

  One more thing Mike needed to learn about now—moldavite.

  She heard Nicholas and Grant come into the conference room and start peppering Broussard with questions about Nevaeh. She tuned them out and put in her earbuds. She didn’t want Broussard listening to the other end of the call.

  She opened her laptop, scrambled her phone, hooked into its encrypted secure signal. Adam’s face popped up on her screen, looking very serious indeed.

  “Where are you?”

  “At the Galactus headquarters, in Broussard’s conference room. What’s wrong? Gray said there was an issue.”

  “We have an idea of what might be going on. Is Nicholas with you?”

  “Yes, and Grant and Broussard. What’s happening?”

  “We found two photos of Nevaeh Patel, Kiera Byrne, and a terrorist named Khaleed Al-Asaad. Both times they were in Corsica. You’ve heard of him, right?”

  “Holy crap, you’re kidding me. That bloodthirsty, murdering terrorist Al-Asaad is still alive? He’s involved?”

  “Yep.”

  Gray’s face came onto the screen. Adam had looped him into the chat.

  Gray said, “The photos were taken in Corsica in 2015 and 2016. Listen to this: We know Kiera Byrne flew to Boise in 2015. The Boise field office has contacted the local authorities and they’re looking again at the death of Dr. Linton, the scientist from the Idaho Research Facility. The original ruling was murder-suicide. Linton killed his wife then himself.

  “We believe Byrne stole or paid off Dr. Linton to give her the plutonium, killed both him and his wife, and then Byrne and Patel handed it off to Al-Asaad to m
ake the nuke. Which means at their cozy get-togethers on Corsica, they made a deal. Get Al-Asaad the plutonium and he’d arrange for scientists on his payroll to make the nuke. We believe Al-Asaad paid Patel millions for the plutonium with the promise she’d use one of Broussard’s rockets to hijack a satellite and send the bomb to space, with the intention of setting it off to cause an EMP. Bring down the West, bring down the world, it doesn’t seem to matter much to terrorist organizations. And they can afford it, what with all the oil money funneled into their pockets in the Middle East.

  “Adam’s been using the NGI database hooked into CCTV from all possible locations, searching everywhere for Al-Asaad, and we think we’ve spotted him.”

  Mike’s heart began to pound, shooting adrenaline into her system. She couldn’t believe he was alive. “Where? Where is he?”

  “Khaleed Al-Asaad is in Lyon.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Mike was starting to shout out to Nicholas when Gray continued. “So why is he in Lyon? A final meet with Patel? Or maybe Al-Asaad found out Broussard is alive and came to kill him, on Patel’s orders. Or on his own? We simply don’t know. So be careful, Mike. We don’t know how many people Al-Asaad might have with him. My own feeling is he knows Broussard’s alive and will do whatever it takes to kill him. Why? Now, that’s uncertain, sorry, I can’t be more definitive.”

  “Thank you, Gray. We’re safe right now. We’re inside Galactus, and it’s all been cordoned off since there’s plenty of media in the surrounding area. Surely he wouldn’t make a run at us here. But if you locate him, holler, and we’ll do our best to bring him in. Or take him down.”

  She hoped she sounded more certain than she felt. Al-Asaad here? His reputation, before his supposed termination by the CIA, was terrifying. Suicide bombers in Jerusalem, bombs blowing up buses in London, bombs ripping trains off the tracks in France. Everyone had been relieved when word came he was dead. But he wasn’t. It was all a ruse. He was alive and he’d managed to have his scientists make a nuclear bomb to go off in space above the Earth, with the plutonium Kiera Byrne had stolen from the Idaho Research Facility in 2015. Or was it both Patel and Byrne?