The Lost Key

by Catherine Coulter

  “I do believe we have Adam Pearce.”

  Adam had read about this man in Havelock’s files, but he hadn’t realized—his godfather moaned. März turned and casually shot him with a suppressed Beretta, the sound no louder than a polite cough.

  He turned back to Adam, his smile still in place, and gestured with his gun for him to come down the stairs.

  Adam snapped. He charged the man, kicking, punching, screaming. He wasn’t a fighter, but his fury was profound, fueled by his grief. He caught the men off guard, but still, it only took a couple of seconds for them to grab him and hold him. One of the men raised his knife, but März shouted, “No! We need him.” The man cursed but drew back. Still, they’d gotten in a couple of licks. Adam’s face hurt, and he knew his lip was split and bleeding.

  März said, “You’re a brave little cock, aren’t you? I wonder if you will be marked, like me.”

  Adam licked the blood from his lip. “You’ve killed my godfather! You’ve killed him,” and Adam tried to break away, but this time it was no use.

  “Enough!”

  “Did you send the man to kill my father? Or was it your boss, Havelock? Oh, yes, I know who you are.”

  Again, that awful smile that widened his mouth and made the scar push up and pleat. “What would you do if I had?”

  “I’ll kill you, you bastard.”

  März laughed. “Come along, little boy. We have things to do, a short trip to take, then we’ll have a nice long chat.” He nodded to Leyland’s body.

  Adam watched the two men carry his godfather up to the second landing, turn and simply toss him over the railing. März laughed. “There, that should ensure the old man is dead.”

  Adam couldn’t bear it, he yelled and charged März again.

  Adam felt a sharp sting in his neck. His heart speeded up, his breathing came fast, too fast. Then he couldn’t breathe, he was drowning. As everything went black, he heard März say, “You shouldn’t have done that, little boy.”

  He fell to his knees, dizzy, knowing he was going to die. The last thing he saw was the blood on the floor from his godfather’s body seeping toward him. Everything went dark.

  58

  Over the Atlantic

  Penderley answered Nicholas’s call immediately. “Drummond. Finally. Are you on the ground?”

  “No, sir, we’re still about an hour out. First, let me thank you for the official invite. Now let me fill you in on what we’ve learned. I may need some of the lads to help us out.” He told Penderley everything they’d discovered on the flight over.

  Penderley listened without interruption. When Nicholas was finished, he said, “You can have all the people you need. I will station a team at Oliver Leyland’s house straightaway, see if we can’t snatch young Adam before Havelock’s men get to him. Also, the inquest on Stanford confirms he was murdered—injected with a large dose of ketamine, enough to stop his heart very quickly. We’re trying to keep it quiet until we have this well in hand. So tell your pilot to hurry.”

  “I will. Thank you, and sir, we—”

  The plane jerked hard to the left, throwing Mike out of her seat, sending Nicholas’s laptop crashing to the floor. Pages flew through the air, their coffee cups, half full of liquid, sprayed across the windows. The plane pulled back left, banked hard, and they heard yells from the cockpit.

  Nicholas tried to get to his feet, tried to reach Mike, but the plane was jerking and twisting in the air like it had hit a patch of ice. It spun right, then started to nose down.

  Mike yelled, “What’s happening?”

  Nicholas stumbled up the short aisle to the cockpit, threw open the door. Dan Breaker was half out of his chair, unconscious. Copilot Tom Strauss had a hand over his eyes, moaning. Nicholas righted him and saw a slash of red across the man’s eyes. A burn.

  He shook Strauss. “What in bloody hell happened?”

  Strauss managed a strangled whisper, “Green. Flash,” and passed out.

  Nicholas pulled him out of the seat, took the copilot chair. He had to get the plane under control.

  He saw Mike was holding the edges of the cockpit doorway for dear life. “The pilots are injured, they’re both unconscious. I’m going to have to land the plane.”

  Nicholas was trying to get the plane stable on the horizon, but the navigation display was off. There were four large flat-panel displays across the front of the cockpit, and the HUD—the heads-up display—was blank.

  Something had destroyed the electronics in the plane.

  Nicholas hit the elevator too hard and the plane whipped to the right, throwing Mike into the cockpit and against the instrument panel.

  “Engage the autopilot,” she yelled.

  “I have. It seems to be damaged. I’ll have to fly it myself.”

  He saw her face was perfectly white, but she was there, with him, ready to act. She said, “Tell me you know how to fly a plane.”

  “I know enough. Best get your parachute on, just in case.”

  “Parachute?” She tried to sound calm, but her mind was screaming, Oh, please, no. I don’t want to jump out of this plane into the ocean.

  She felt the captain’s pulse. Thready, but he was alive. The skin across his face was horribly burned, red and blistered. She unbuckled his seat belt and began pulling him from the seat.

  “What happened? How did he get this burn?”

  Nicholas was adjusting instruments, turning knobs, one hand on the yoke. The plane seemed to soften. The mad shimmying and spinning lessened, and finally, finally, after a lifetime, the plane began to even out. Nicholas said, “The copilot said ‘green flash’ before he passed out. The only thing I can imagine is he was hit with a green laser. There’s nothing commercial grade that can cause this kind of burn. It has to be military. Or private sector.”

  “Are you saying another plane hit us with a laser, or were we hit from the ground?”

  “I don’t know.” He took a deep breath. “I think we’re okay now. I need to get in touch with the tower at London City Airport, let them know they have a guest flying the plane. And then—”

  There was a second loud boom, and the plane began to shake and shimmy, harder this time, like it was breaking apart. The instrument panel turned red. “Son of a bitch.”

  Mike watched the engine light begin to flash on the control panel.

  Nicholas shut the engine down and grabbed the radio. “Mayday. Mayday. This is FBI Gulfstream Five. We’ve been attacked, repeat, we’ve been hit. Our pilots are down and we’ve sustained damage to engine one. We need to land immediately.”

  Mike fought panic. All she could see ahead and to the left and right was blue. A wide expanse of blue. They were over water. There was no land in sight.

  “Parachutes, Mike. Now. If we have to jump, we can’t go out the door, we’ll be sucked into the engines or hit the wings, even at a low speed. We’ll have to go out the baggage hatch. So keep that in mind. When the time comes, don’t open the cabin door.”

  She stumbled to the back of the plane, above the galley, where she knew the chutes were stashed. She pulled out four. After fighting her way back to the cockpit, she managed to get both pilots into chutes.

  She’d done an emergency egress once before, during the Academy, out of a plain old Cessna with a jump instructor strapped to her. Not something she ever wanted to do again. She prayed harder than she ever had in her life—Get the plane on the ground, Nicholas, in one piece, you can do it.

  The plane was shuddering, flinging itself about, as if it was fighting the air itself.

  “What’s happening?”

  “We’ve been hit again. The laser is coming from the air, not the ground. There’s a plane up here shooting at us, but I haven’t a clue with what. It whipped past a few moments ago. It looks like a retrofitted private jet of some sort—it’s definitely not a military jet
. Whatever it hit us with damaged the fuselage.”

  She handed him a parachute, saw her hands were shaking. “You need one, too.”

  He looked up at her, gave her a smile and nodded toward the yoke. “Hold it steady. It’s going to take a bit of strength, since we have no instrument help.”

  She took the empty pilot’s seat, clutched the yoke in a death grip while Nicholas threw his arms through the pack, tightened it down.

  “Trade.” They switched seats. He did a quick check of the instruments. “All right. We’re hanging in, but the stress on the other engine is beginning to show. There’s a backup for the engines, so keep the faith, Mike. While you were getting the parachutes, I spoke to the nice gentlemen at the RAF base in Cardiff, Wales. That’s where we’re going to land, only about a hundred miles to go. Listen, if something goes wrong, and I say jump, we jump. They’re with us, they know we’re in distress. We’ll be rescued before the sharks nibble our legs.”

  “Happy thought. Nicholas, honestly, can we land? Can you get us to Cardiff?”

  “We’ll soon have an RAF escort, and they’ll see us into the air base. With any luck, they’ll identify the plane that’s shooting the lasers at us. I can fly us in a straight line, but I can’t run us through a dogfight.”

  She realized he hadn’t answered her question.

  59

  Nicholas wasn’t at all sure he could land the plane, but he wasn’t about to tell Mike that. He’d done flight simulators before, flown with instructors, but he’d never done a solo landing.

  The radio squawked in his ear, and the tinny voice of a British NATS air traffic controller spoke calmly. “We’re going to begin your talk down now, Mr. Drummond. Come round to heading two-four-zero.”

  “Coming about to two-four-zero.” As the plane turned, Nicholas squinted out the glass. Land ahead.

  Mike saw it, too. “Land ho, Nicholas,” and she gave him a shaky smile.

  “Very good, Mr. Drummond. Keep to this heading and slow your airspeed to three hundred knots.”

  He was throttling down when a flash of white burst into his field of vision. “It’s that bloody plane again.”

  It whipped past them, and he saw a bright green light begin to flash.

  “Mike, shut your eyes and duck!”

  They both ducked, hitting their heads together over the throttle with a sickening crunch. The plane began to shudder again, the fuselage beginning to give way under the pressure of the laser beam.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Trying to blind us and cut through the metal to create an even bigger problem. Stay down.” He keyed the mike to the radio. “We are under attack, repeat, we are under attack. The plane has a laser, that’s what incapacitated our pilots to begin with. Burned their skin, blinded them. The laser seems to be able to penetrate the fuselage of the plane.”

  The NATS controller said, “Hang tight, Gulfstream Five. Keep on this heading. Help is on the way.”

  Nicholas risked a look. The sky in front of him was clear. He sat up, and Mike followed. The plane came back into their sights, whipping around in the sky in front of them, trying to disrupt the second engine by making them fly through its jet wash. Nicholas saw the plane bank hard, coming around until it was aimed straight for them.

  The NATS controller said, “Stay the course, don’t move your flight path. Keep your speed. You’re going to see a Tornado on your port side. They will eliminate the threat. When they signal, you’ll need to bank hard. Make your heading four-four-seven, and hold on tight.”

  Sure enough, a moment later they saw the gray metal Tornado fly up beside them. The pilot gave them a salute. They watched an ASRAAM missile drop from the underside of the wing, a white tail streaming out behind it. Nicholas heard the Tornado pilot’s transmission, “Fox three away.”

  There was a large explosion that rocked the air around them. Nicholas twisted the knob to move the plane out of the blast radius and away from the falling debris.

  “Nicholas, look! They shot him down. Did you see that? They shot him down!”

  There were few things more deadly than a short-range air-to-air missile off a Tornado. Nicholas said, “Good. That plane was attacking federal agents in British airspace.”

  “But who? Who in the world would attack our plane? They tried to kill us.”

  He said grimly, “When they fish the pieces of the plane out of the Bristol Channel, we’ll find out. But I think we know who might want us dead and gone.”

  “Havelock.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You do know what you’re doing, right?”

  He gave her a cocky grin. “We’ll see, won’t we?”

  Nicholas kept his hands steady on the yoke, and the radio spoke to him again. “You’re clear, Gulfstream V. Follow the Tornadoes home, sir. Come to heading two-two-zero, drop your speed to one hundred fifty knots. I’m handing you off to Cardiff Tower, they’re going to talk you down. Good luck.”

  Mike had headphones on now, heard the exchange. “Where are we going, exactly?”

  “I would expect we’re heading to Ministry of Defense—MoD—Saint Athan. It’s a Royal Air Force base in southern Wales. It’s where the Tornadoes scrambled from.”

  “I wonder if Prince William will be there to greet us.”

  Nicholas laughed. “I’m glad you can still joke at a time like this.”

  She started to say it was better than hysterics, but she didn’t. She stared straight ahead and prayed for all she was worth.

  The tower at MoD St. Athan hailed them. “Hello, Special Agent Drummond. I’m Daniel Healy, the National Air Traffic Services general manager here at Cardiff Tower. We work both landing strips because of the proximity of the base to our airport. I understand you’re hand-flying the plane; you have no autopilot and your ILS has been knocked out?”

  The man’s voice was wonderfully calm and Mike felt some tension ease.

  “Correct. Our electronics are damaged. And engine one is out as well.”

  “That is vexing. Have flying experience, do you?”

  “Some. In a Tornado simulator. A few years ago.”

  Healy laughed a bit. “Roger that. You’ll be fine. Now, the airport should be at your ten o’clock. Do you see us?”

  “I do.”

  “Set your flaps to twenty, and make your speed one hundred twenty-five knots. Be prepared, we have some low-level wind shear, you’ll want to flare as you’re landing, then do an idle reverse to slow yourself down.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  They lined up, and the landing strip at MoD St. Athan appeared on their horizon a few moments later, a long snake running straightaway from them. The runway was lined with emergency vehicles, their lights flashing.

  “Looks like they’re throwing us quite the party, Nicholas. Champagne and caviar, I hope.”

  “I’ll take most anything you put in my hand at the moment. Okay, focus. This is the fun part.”

  Mike did what Nicholas told her, twisted the knobs to new headings, dropped the landing gear. Healy talked them down, making adjustments here and there. The ground rose up. The plane skidded as Nicholas reversed their single engine and applied the brakes, setting it into a sickening sideways spin, but finally it groaned to a stop half on and half off the runway.

  They were alive, on the ground safely. Mike jumped up from her seat and hugged Nicholas tight. She said against his cheek, “You did it! And we’re even in one piece. The plane is still in one piece, too.” She gave him a whopping big kiss on the mouth. “What’s best? No sharks. You’re not going to be a lamebrain for at least a month.” And she gave him another kiss.

  He said against her ear, “Twice? That’s good. I’ll take what I can get.”

  60

  MoD St. Athan

  Wales

  3:00 p.m.

 
The emergency personnel attended the pilots, both still unconscious, their burns deep and purpled. They’d both been staring at the laser when it had struck. Mike and Nicholas watched them carried away on stretchers to the waiting ambulances, and heard some cheers from the men below.

  It was a pity about the beautiful Gulfstream, Nicholas thought. The laser had bit directly through the metal, leaving deep gouges in its sides, and blackening the glossy white paint around the left engine. A few more hits and they’d have broken up midair.

  Mike came up to stand beside him. “The director’s not going to be too happy about what we did to his baby.” But she was grinning like mad. It felt great to be alive.

  He hugged her, this time kissed her. “We made it.”

  They were escorted into the RAF Headquarters, and given hot tea while they were debriefed. Once everyone was satisfied, the base commander told them the plane that attacked them, the one the Tornado shot down, was being recovered. They’d know soon enough who it belonged to, though Nicholas had no doubts as to who was behind the attempts on their lives. And he thought, So you’re really that scared of me, are you, Havelock? You’ve a good reason to be. I’m going to bury you, you sodding bastard.

  The commander told them the pilots were being treated for burns and flash blindness by the base medics and were both expected to recover fully, though both would be scarred.

  The commander also confirmed the laser wasn’t commercial grade, it was even beyond military grade. It was a very powerful weapon, and no one had ever seen one used in the civilian or military theaters. They would start a full-scale investigation immediately.

  The base commander’s XO told them they were to be choppered to London on the double, on orders of one very irritated man named Hamish Penderley.

  Nicholas pictured his former stiff-necked boss in his mind—this little kerfuffle was guaranteed to get the old buzzard’s blood pumping.

  Their gear was retrieved from the Gulfstream, and when they walked back out onto the tarmac, Nicholas saw Mike eying the green Chinook helicopter with something like dread.