“What the hell did he get himself into now?” Hawker asked.
“Don’t know,” Keegan said. “Loose grip on reality, that one. But he looked bad when I saw him. Halfway to dead. Swore there were devils after him. And that he’d done something …” Keegan seemed to struggle. “He used the word unforgivable.”
“He say where I could find him?”
“He said to make your way to Paris. Check in to the Trianon Palace Hotel. He’d find you there.” As he finished, Keegan reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a flash drive.
“He gave me this,” Keegan said, handing the drive over. “Said you’d understand.”
Understand. Right now Hawker didn’t understand anything. He had the sickening feeling of a moment spinning out of control.
In many ways, Keegan couldn’t have picked a worse time or place to find him, or worse news to tell him. But even with a hundred questions racing around in his head, Hawker knew the bell was about to ring. Time to go.
He stood. “Was she with him?”
“No, mate. I’m thinking she left his crazy little circus the first chance she got.”
The situation had always been odd. All families had secrets, but whatever drove Ranga and Sonia both pulled them together and drove them apart
Good for her if she did leave, Hawker thought. And yet, if Ranga was in such deep trouble, she might still be in danger. What better way was there to pressure a father than by threatening his daughter.
“Do you know where she is?”
Keegan shook his head.
“She might be in danger. And she might be in hiding,” Hawker said. “Think you can you find her?”
Keegan pursed his lips as if the question was ludicrous. “Sure. And what do I get for it?”
“You get even.”
Keegan smiled and then he laughed lightly. “There’s no such thing as even, Hawk. You should know that.”
“Just find her,” Hawker said.
Keegan nodded, which Hawker took as acknowledgment that he would try. “Give me your number.”
Keegan handed him a business card.
“You have cards?”
“Don’t you?”
Hawker shook his head, typed the number into his phone, and then hit Send. A ringing came from Keegan’s pocket.
Hawker hung up.
“Find her and call me,” he said. And then he turned to go.
As Hawker strode away Keegan raised his hands, palms outstretched like a man who’d been left with nothing.
“Is that it then!” he shouted, a false look of shock plastered all over his face. “No goodbye kiss or nothing?” He was laughing deliriously by now, probably reveling in the attention of the few people left on the balcony.
As Hawker passed the host’s stand and took the stairway down, he could hear Keegan laughing even as he yelled after Hawker.
“And after all we’ve meant to each other!”
As he left Keegan behind, Hawker regretted threatening him, but sometimes that was the only way to know who was a friend and who wasn’t.
He reached the bottom of the stairs, left the hotel, and caught a cab into town. Once there, he cut diagonally across a few city blocks, entered a large office building, and came out the back side. There he grabbed another taxi that took him to the Stradun, Dubrovnik’s busiest street.
Feeling certain he’d lost anyone who might have been following, and mixing with a throng of people who didn’t speak much English, he found a quiet corner and dialed a number on his cellphone. The scrambled signal went to a satellite, bounced its way to Washington, and was routed to the person he was looking for.
A female voice came on the line, a soothing voice that he recognized: Danielle Laidlaw, his liaison to the National Research Institute, the organization he now worked for.
The NRI was a strange hybrid of a government agency. It had a large aboveboard department that worked with universities and corporations on cutting-edge research, and it had a smaller, less well known department that functioned like the CIA but in the world of industrial secrets.
Hawker and Danielle worked for the operations department. However, because of his particular background, Hawker had been “loaned out” to the CIA to set up La Bruzca.
“I need extraction,” he said.
“You’re three days early,” she said. “Is something wrong?”
He knew she was referring to the deal with La Bruzca, but his thoughts had left that behind. He couldn’t imagine what Ranga had gotten himself into but he knew for the man to reach out, it had to be substantial. He pulled the flash drive out of his pocket, wondering what might be contained inside.
“I’m not sure,” Hawker said, eyeing the memory stick. “But I have a feeling something may be very wrong.”
CHAPTER 5
Ranga Milan stood at the base of the Eiffel Tower, staring upward. The Iron Lady of France soared above him, a thousand feet of steel bent into a shape that was both structure and art.
Somewhere up on the observation deck, a man waited for him carrying an object with a dual nature of its own: a carved tablet more than seven thousand years old. It was considered a priceless artifact, a remnant of history to most, but Ranga knew better. It contained a secret, hidden since the beginning of recorded time, a secret that could change the future of the world for good or for evil.
Surrounded by the crowd, Ranga felt terribly alone. He’d sent for help but none had come. He’d waited too late, he knew that. But now he was taking a risk that he feared might be too great. He’d come out of hiding and into the open; he was a target.
Dizzy from gazing upward, Ranga lowered his eyes and moved toward the elevator. He edged into a crowd of tourists, fighting every urge to hurry. Rushing would only draw attention. The wrong kind of attention.
From the outside looking in, Ranga had little need to worry. Nearly sixty, of average height and build, he had nondescript features and short dark hair. He was a common-looking everyman. No one ever looked twice.
His background was more impressive. A genetics expert, a former fellow at the prestigious Advanced Genetics Lab of Johns Hopkins University and a onetime Nobel Prize candidate, Ranga had once been a pillar of the community.
Now he was a fugitive.
Listed on Interpol’s high-priority register, this nondescript everyman was considered one of the most dangerous people in the world. Not for anything he’d done, for he had committed no crime greater than fraud and theft, but for what they knew he was capable of doing.
In his prior life, Ranga had done research for all the top labs, as well as the U.S. government. His success in manipulating genetic codes and creating new forms of life was legendary, and he had intimate firsthand knowledge regarding the creation of biological weapons.
Beyond that, it was well-known that Ranga Milan needed money. What it was for remained a mystery, but Interpol, the CIA, and other Western security services had long feared he would trade his vast knowledge for the wealth he sought.
So far, Ranga told himself, I have done no such thing. It was a partial truth, one he’d risked his life to maintain. But a partial truth was also a partial lie.
He shook the thought away, focusing on the meeting. By holding it here, in the most public space in France, he hoped he would be safe from the people he’d once worked for. He’d believed in them once, believed they had similar desires, but as he discovered the truth he had no choice but to run. Otherwise they would take what he wanted to create and turn it into a weapon like no other that had ever been built.
Ranga shuddered at how close they’d come before he broke away. He cringed in fear that they might find a way to finish what he had already given them. He could have destroyed the research, should have destroyed it perhaps, but it was his life’s work.