The Loch Ness Legacy

ONE

A torrent of adrenaline coursed through Tyler Locke’s blood like it always did before an impending battle, forcing him to will a calm façade.

“They think we’re crazy, you know,” he said, using his vantage point on the Eiffel Tower to scan the Paris skyline for any sign of a threat. The city of lights sparkled peacefully in the last remaining glow of the setting sun, oblivious to menace.

Grant Westfield watched the glittering Seine almost directly below them. “Of course they do. Who the hell would have the guts to attack a party with this kind of security presence? It’s nuts.”

“And yet, here we are.”

Grant smiled, his bright white teeth visible in the window’s reflection. “Maybe we are crazy. For being here, I mean. If we’re right, this is going to get ugly real fast.”

“Then let’s hope we’re wrong.”

The Salle Gustave Eiffel bustled with the chatter of four hundred guests in attendance as Bizet’s Symphony in C played in the background. With a magnificent view one hundred eighty-seven feet above the ground, the recently renovated private room on the tower’s first floor was the setting for the post-dinner cocktail reception. The banquet at the 58 Tour Eiffel restaurant next door had been blissfully uneventful, but now that darkness was upon them, Tyler could feel his muscles tightening with anticipation. This would be the perfect time to attack.

The French government had offered to host the Muslim leadership summit to show the country’s commitment to peace in the Middle East and insisted the summit end on a literal high note by taking place in such a spectacular location. The security arrangements, however, had been a nightmare. The tower had been closed to the public for the entire day, unheard of for a sunny June Thursday, and tourists were kept at bay by a horde of policemen and soldiers. This concluding gala was attended by presidents, prime ministers, ambassadors, and sheiks from every Muslim country, which meant no security detail was too small to overlook. Even the floor-to-ceiling windows had been covered with a reflective film so that snipers couldn’t target specific attendees.

Still, Tyler felt uneasy and vulnerable, as if they were being displayed as bait.

“The French must not think we’re too insane,” Grant said, “or they wouldn’t have let us in here.”

“They wouldn’t have if the Turkish ambassador wasn’t the former culture minister. I used up my last Noah’s Ark chit with them to add us to their guest list.”

Grant tugged at the collar of his tuxedo shirt, which hugged his neck tightly. “I just wish it didn’t mean wearing this monkey suit.”

Finding a rental tux that fit Grant’s shoulders had been a challenge. The coat was stretched to the limit over the muscles of the 250-pound former pro wrestler who had bulked back up to his fighting weight since leaving the Army. Tyler didn’t have that problem. Although he’d retired from the Army years ago, he was still trim enough to fit into the same tuxedo size he’d worn since college.

“This way we don’t stand out,” Tyler said.

“I don’t think it’s working as well for you as it is for me,” Grant said, pointedly looking around at the Arabs, Africans, Persians, Pakistanis, and Asians. His mocha skin and shaved head fit right in. Tyler, however, was one of the few Caucasians in the place. In America, it was Grant who normally drew the stares, both for his fame and his broad build, but here he was just another of the many brown faces. Instead it was Tyler’s light tan and unruly brown hair getting the sideways glances, aided by the fact that he was six-two and towered over many of the guests.

Tyler shrugged. “They’ll assume I’m one of the French.”

“It would help if you spoke any.”

“Oui, oui, monsieur.”

“That’s the worst accent I’ve ever heard.”

“Hey,” Tyler said in mock defensiveness, “the only words you know how to say are all food-related.”

“What else do I need to know besides croissant, chateaubriand, and beignet?”

“We’ll get you some of each when we’re done here. Is the DeadEye still scanning?”

Grant checked his smartphone and nodded. “No unusual activity.”

“Good. Maybe this was all a false alarm.” Tyler spotted a slinky red cocktail dress flash by. “I’ll be right back.”

Grant followed his eyes. “I have to say, she does look good in that number.”

Tyler couldn’t agree more. “I’m going to check on her progress.”

“Sure. Oh, and grab me one of those little salmon things on your way back. Better yet, send the waiter over with the tray when you see him. I’m starving.”

“The tuxedo isn’t tight enough for you?”

Grant looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Just because you’re scrawny doesn’t mean you need to feel jealous.”

Tyler chuckled. At somewhere over two hundred pounds and a couple of inches taller than Grant, few people would call him scrawny. But compared to his friend, almost anyone would look puny.

“I’d better eat some myself, then,” Tyler said. “Give me a shout if you spot anything unusual.”

“Will do.”

Tyler navigated his way through the crowd toward the bar, which was understandably vacant since most of the attendees abstained from drinking alcohol because of their Muslim faith. The lone person getting a drink was Brielle Cohen, resplendent in a scarlet silk evening gown that demurely covered her top and draped to the floor, but clung to her shape like it was vacuum-sealed. Many of the guests stole glances at her curvaceous figure and long hair the color of burnt sienna, unused to such displays in their countries. Tyler followed suit, noticing that she’d been able to cover up the bruises that had speckled her arms that morning.

The two of them had met when Brielle requested his engineering expertise on an investigation. Her specialty as a private detective was hunting down items lost or stolen during the Holocaust, and her client was in search of a missing artifact. Tyler had been brought in to analyze the wreckage of a structure deliberately obliterated to disguise its original form, and their week together since then had shown him that she was a formidable woman.

As Brielle reached for a glass of wine, Tyler placed his hand on the small of her back and leaned in.

“Any luck?”

She drank half of the wine in three gulps and shook her head. “Why do you think I need this?” Her British lilt was tinged with exasperation.

“What did the minister of the interior say?”

“The French don’t think it’s a credible threat. He assured me that his forces have taken every precaution necessary. In his words, the outcome of this summit is too important to interrupt on the hunches of two US Army retirees and a private investigator.”

Tyler was amused at being called a “retiree.” Both he and Grant were still in their thirties.

Brielle took another drink. “He also said I shouldn’t even be here.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him one Jew wouldn’t wreck the bloody summit.”

Tyler smirked. “What did you really say?”

“I told him to take it up with the Turkish ambassador.”

At least they hadn’t been thrown out, but Minister Jacques Fournier had been their last hope of cancelling the event. With the little they had to go on, Tyler couldn’t blame the organizers for going forward with the party in spite of their warnings. In Brielle’s latest case, her investigative partner Wade Plymouth had sent her a cryptic message that the artifact might have fallen into the hands of a white supremacist group, leading her to a deserted compound outside Oslo, Norway. There she found the destroyed metal framework, at which time she brought in Tyler and Grant to analyze it. What they discovered was much more than they expected. The evidence suggested an impending terrorist event, but Plymouth subsequently went missing, leaving the three of them to follow gut feelings and a thin thread of clues to the Eiffel Tower.

One name from Plymouth, however, convinced Tyler that the threat was real. He had been stunned to learn that the leader of the supposed terrorist group was Carl Zim, a vicious white supremacist focusing his ire on Muslim immigrants. Tyler had testified at the trial that put his brother in prison for murder of a Pakistani five years before, perhaps stoking the flames of Zim’s hatred. With a background that engendered an intense fear and loathing toward the spread of Islam, Zim had great motive to kill as many Muslims as possible — the higher profile the better. The Eiffel Tower gathering was the perfect target, and because of his role in provoking Zim, Tyler felt some responsibility for preventing a tragedy. He just hadn’t been able to convince anyone in authority that the danger was imminent.

Brielle’s eyes locked onto his. “No matter how this ends up, I’ve had fun with you this past week.”

“Fun? We almost got killed twice already.” The week with her had entailed a shipyard firefight with Zim’s men in Copenhagen and a bar brawl in Amsterdam, during which Brielle had displayed her skill with a weapon. The training she’d received while serving as a Mahal foreign volunteer in the Israeli Defense Forces was something Tyler hadn’t shared with the Turkish ambassador.

She took a leisurely sip from her glass, then said, “Don’t you find that the ‘almost’ part is what makes it exhilarating?”

“It does make me think about taking a rest when this is over.”

“Where are you thinking of doing your resting?”

Tyler grinned and leaned closer. “Do you have any suggestions?”

“I know a nice hotel on Majorca.”

“I thought your parents wouldn’t approve, me not being one of the chosen people.”

“They only care about who I marry. I don’t share my flings with them.”

“So I’d be a fling?”

Brielle’s lips parted deliciously. “Would you mind?”

“I don’t mind being flung once in a while.”

Brielle looked as though she were going to get even naughtier when her gaze slipped past Tyler and the smile faded.

“What is it?” Tyler asked and turned to see what she was watching. Fournier was being escorted out of the party by a young man with a military bearing.

“He just whispered something to him,” Brielle said. “It didn’t look like good news.”

Tyler took her drink and set it on the bar. “Let’s find out what the hubbub is about.”

Tyler caught Grant’s eye and signed to him using the American Sign Language they both knew.

There might be trouble. Stay frosty.

Grant nodded, took the smartphone from his pocket, and turned back toward the window.

Brielle held his elbow and they walked toward the door as if they wanted to get some fresh air.

Once they were outside, they spotted Fournier speaking with five policemen in riot gear who were gesturing at the east leg of the tower.

He and Brielle wandered closer until they were in earshot. Brielle translated for him.

“There’s something wrong with this lift,” she said after listening for a moment. “A maintenance crew is on the way up to fix it.”

With only one passenger elevator to the first floor working that day, any malfunction would require the guests to make the long walk down the stairs at the end of the evening.

“That’s how they’re getting onto the tower,” Tyler said. “Come on.”

They raced over to the minister, who startled at their sudden appearance.

“You have to stop them,” Tyler said.

“Please go back inside,” the minister said in fluent, accented English. “This doesn’t concern you.”

“Those maintenance men are here as part of a ruse. There’s going to be an attack.”

The minister shook his head in annoyance. He already knew Tyler’s background — that he was a mechanical engineer with a Ph.D. from Stanford and a former US Army demolitions expert — but calling off the party would be a black eye for the French, so his credentials were overshadowed by more political concerns.

Fournier’s eyes narrowed at Brielle. “Did she put you up to this?”

“Minister,” Brielle said, “this is a matter of life and death. I suggest you search the maintenance men thoroughly. I think you’ll find they aren’t who they say they are.”

“You think? They’ve already been searched. Carefully. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have gotten on this tower.”

“They must have concealed their weapons.”

“C’est incroyable,” the minister said to the policemen, who shook their heads in disbelief.

“Do you want to take the chance that they aren’t who they say they are? Or that they might be carrying a bomb?”

Fournier frowned at the mention of explosives, but said nothing.

At that moment four men dressed in blue overalls appeared, coming out of the small maintenance lift in the south pillar.

“I’ll prove they’re not lift experts,” Tyler said.

“How?”

“If they are in fact maintenance workers, they’ll know details about how the elevator operates, right?”

Fournier looked at both of them for a moment and then must have decided caution was better than getting caught with his pants down.

He said something in French, and the squad of policemen raised their weapons and surrounded the maintenance workers. The four men immediately dropped their equipment bags and put their hands up with shocked looks on their faces.

“Can you interpret for me?” Tyler asked the minister. He took out his smartphone and tapped on the screen to bring up a web page with the Eiffel Tower’s schematics that he had researched the day before.

He nodded. “What do you want to ask them?”

“Just one question. What’s the capacity of the lift in kilograms?” It was a simple question that had a very specific and unguessable answer, but an elevator maintenance worker should have known the number without hesitation.

The minister translated, and the lead worker paused at hearing the odd question. Fingers tightened on triggers.

Then the man blurted out a response.

The minister turned to Tyler. “He wants to know which lift. There are nine throughout the tower.”

Tyler frowned. He was expecting bluster or even a made-up figure.

“The lift in the east pillar that they are supposedly fixing,” Tyler said.

The minister translated, and this time the response was immediate.

“He says it’s 9,240 kilograms.”

Tyler looked down at his phone and clenched his jaw when he saw the screen. That was the correct figure.

“Is that right?” the minister asked.

Tyler glanced at Brielle, who tilted her head in frustration. “You’re joking.”

“He’s correct,” Tyler said with surprise. He had been so confident this was part of the attack plan.

The minister stared at Tyler, then gestured to the maintenance men as he spoke. They picked up their bags and began to move toward the east pillar.

“Dr. Locke, Ms. Cohen,” Fournier said, “you are no longer welcome at this party. Please leave. Now.”

Tyler wheeled around. He couldn’t shake the intuition that something wasn’t right about this situation. Before he had time to complete that thought, he spotted movement inside the closed gift shop pavilion across from the Salle Gustave Eiffel and realized what was happening.

The maintenance workers had been sent up as a distraction. All of the police officers now had their backs to the gift shop.

“Down!” Tyler shouted, grabbing Brielle with one hand and tackling Fournier with the other arm.

Automatic weapon fire split the air, killing one of the policemen instantly. The minister was hit in the leg as they fell.

Brielle scrambled behind a metal girder and Tyler dragged the minister with him to join her.

Fournier’s eyes were wide with shock. “What’s happening?”

Rounds pinged off the iron around them. Another policeman went down, and the rest were pinned by the withering assault.

Now Tyler realized why the elevator had been disabled. It would take several minutes for the police at the base to climb the tower. By then the attack would be over.

The gunmen didn’t have enough manpower to wipe out the guests, but they could keep them inside the reception hall, which Tyler now believed was the real objective. That conclusion was reinforced when he heard the first explosion.

TWO

As Grant picked himself off the floor, shards of shattered glass tumbled down his tuxedo. If he hadn’t seen the shadowy shape careening toward the window two seconds before it exploded, he would have caught the glass full in the face.

Panicked party-goers, some of them bloodied, screamed past Grant as they searched for an escape, but between the gunfire on the tower’s deck and the explosion outside the window, there was nowhere to find safety. Grant was relieved to see no bodies lying on the floor. The blast must have been timed to blow out the window, leaving an open space for the next bomb to fly through.

Cool air streamed into the room through the gaping hole where the window used to be. Grant blinked and looked for the source of the airborne explosive, but there was no way to see where the attack had been launched from. A rocket-propelled grenade would have left a telltale streak of flame as it rocketed toward its target, but the attackers were using stealthier quadcopters for the assault. The sophisticated flying bombs weren’t much bigger than a large garbage can lid and were painted black, making them incredibly difficult to see in the night sky. The quadcopters’ bare bones design consisted of nothing more than a central pod carrying the control mechanism and high explosive, with a propeller on each of its four articulated arms.

The only reason Grant had gotten a warning at all that a bomb had been on its way was because of the preventive measures he and Tyler set up in the hotel room they had rented near the Eiffel Tower. They’d left the multi-paned window open so that their proprietary motion-tracking system would have a clear view of the tower.

The portable DeadEye targeting system was a product of Gordian Engineering, the firm the two of them worked for and that Tyler had founded. DeadEye had been developed for the military to help infantry units spot snipers. It took a snapshot image of a scene and then constantly checked that image against new high-definition video coming into the unit. If anything changed, it would alert the soldier monitoring it. Although it was constrained to stationary use due to the limitations of the computer’s processing power, it was a powerful tool that could be used even at night.

The DeadEye in the hotel room, a prototype Grant had borrowed from the Gordian labs, was now pointed directly at the Eiffel Tower. When it detected movement in the air around the tower, it would send an alert to Grant’s smartphone, and he’d see a visual of the target on his screen.

Two previous warnings had come in, but they were only birds, and Grant had to decrease the sensitivity of the unit. The third warning came eight seconds before he spotted the quadcopter directly, leaving him just moments to duck.

Now that Grant knew the attack was underway, it was time to fight back. He tapped his phone and launched his own quadcopter, this one built by Gordian for a civilian project called Mayfly. It was an unmanned aerial vehicle developed for hazardous search and rescue missions, like the inspection of the Fukushima nuclear plant that melted down after being flooded by the Japan tsunami. The view on his smartphone was from the camera mounted on the front of the Mayfly drone they’d set up in the hotel room in case of emergency. Grant figured the blown-out window and gunshots outside counted as an emergency.

Normally the camera was the only accessory on the UAV, but Tyler and Grant had spent the past two days weaponizing the Mayfly. They’d given it a stinger. Now Grant would put the jury-rigged contraption to its first test in a combat scenario.

Using the simplified onscreen controls on his smartphone, Grant directed the Mayfly to take off. The screen showed the hotel room as it rose above the bed and threaded its way through the open window. Once it was outside, Grant dialed up the speed to full throttle. The electric motors whisked the UAV up and the Eiffel Tower filled the screen’s view.

The DeadEye targeting system was linked to the camera on the Mayfly, superimposing the two images. A new white crosshair appeared on his smartphone screen, which meant another bomb was on the way. Grant directed the Mayfly to intercept.

He sat with his back to the exterior wall. There was no need to try to get a visual on the quadcopter from here. Standing would only reduce his level of control.

The approaching copter was moving so quickly he’d only have one pass to try to disable it. The Mayfly homed in on the target. Grant’s finger hovered over the FIRE button. When the target crosshair filled the screen, the Mayfly would be close enough to attack.

This was going to be close. The first floor of the Eiffel Tower, the very spot where he sat, was getting awfully big in the background.

The dot grew larger. Larger. Only seconds now until it reached the Salle Gustave Eiffel and flew right through the shattered window to explode amongst the panicked crowd.

Grant couldn’t wait any longer. The target engulfed the screen.

He fired.

Two prongs of a Taser mounted on the Mayfly lanced forward. The prongs latched onto the enemy quadcopter and sent fifty thousand volts through it.

As he’d hoped, the shock from the Taser short-circuited the copter’s control mechanism. The quadcopter plummeted to the ground, automatically pulling the leads free from the Mayfly.

They didn’t know how many quadcopters were coming, but if the number exceeded three more, they were in real trouble because the Mayfly had only three Taser shots left.

Another crosshair bloomed on Grant’s smartphone. He angled the Mayfly toward it. The two copters converged at high speed.

This time the crosshair grew exponentially. Grant timed it to when he thought the quadcopter would be in range. The crosshair filled the screen and he fired.

Nothing. The Taser prongs missed, and the enemy quadcopter zoomed by. It would be there in seconds.

Grant looked up and saw a red dot playing across the ceiling directly overhead. That was how the quadcopters were being aimed at their target. Someone on the ground had a laser, like the Army used for guiding smart bombs.

And this bomb was going to hit right above where he was sitting.

There were a few other people prone on the floor. He bellowed for them to move, and his deep voice was enough to get them to scramble whether they understood him or not.

Grant sprinted across the room and dived behind the bar.

For a moment he heard the whine of the quadcopter’s rotor blades, and then the bomb exploded as it hit the ceiling.

Shrapnel flew across the room, taking three people down with the blast. Casualties wailed like banshees. Shielded by the bar, Grant had escaped injury.

The explosion didn’t start any fires, but the smoke was enough to activate the sprinkler system, which doused the entire room.

Grant left the bar’s cozy confines to see if he could spot the laser again, shielding his smartphone from the water with his coat as he walked.

The bright red dot was still dancing across the ceiling. There was at least one more bomb to intercept.

THREE

Tyler reloaded the MP-5 submachine gun he’d commandeered from one of the dead security officers.

“Last mag!” he yelled to Brielle.

“Mine too!” she shouted back, unloading another three-round burst at the attackers, who were well-covered inside the gift shop pavilion. “I think I’ve hit one, but we’re sitting ducks here. We need a better position.”

“The stairs. If we can get to high ground, we can end this.”

There was no reason for the gunmen to leave their positions. Tyler knew their purpose was to keep the guests inside the reception hall so that the explosives could finish the job. They also had a superior position over anyone ascending the stairs. The police would be cut to pieces if they tried storming their way up.

But something about the situation wasn’t making sense to him. Tyler’s company, Gordian, was well-known for disaster analysis — airplane crashes, oil-rig explosions, building collapses — so he had been Brielle’s first choice for reconstructing the steel framework from Oslo. Gordian’s advanced computer analysis tools indicated that the structure could be a section of the Eiffel Tower. Small pieces of quadcopter remains had been found amongst the wreckage, so Tyler and Grant had theorized that it could have been some kind of attack preparation against Paris’s most famous landmark, the summit event being the most likely target.

But the terrorists couldn’t be planning to bring down the entire tower. If that’s what they intended, the gunmen and the quadcopters would be superfluous. In addition, collapsing the tower would require a huge quantity of explosives placed in just the right locations, and it would have been noticed by the advance security teams.

Tyler knew he was missing something, but what?

He fired another round and ducked again, turning his head as he did so and catching a glimpse of the maintenance men cowering behind him.

There were only three of them.

“Where’s the other one?” he asked Brielle.

“The other what?”

“The fourth maintenance worker.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” she said, firing another round. “I’ve been a tad busy.”

“Ask them where he went.”

After she spoke, the three men pointed in the direction of the east pillar.

“They say he went downstairs.”

“Why?”

“They thought he ran off because he was scared.”

Tyler looked where they were pointing. To make it over there, the maintenance worker would have had to cover open space, exposing himself to a bullet storm. Staying where he was would have been far safer.

Unless he knew no one would be firing at him.

Tyler suddenly realized what the actual target could be.

The elevator.

“Brielle,” Tyler said, “ask these guys if they know what was wrong with the lift.”

She gave him a questioning look and then translated. The three of them shook their heads.

If the workmen could fix the elevator easily, the guests would certainly use it to go back down once this was over. A bomb set next to it might be what the attackers were planning all along. No one would think to look during the chaos of an evacuation. Whoever was sending the quadcopters could watch the elevator windows with a telescope to see who got on and then blow up the bomb as the lift passed.

“How long has the missing man been working with them?” Tyler asked Brielle.

The answer came back, “Two weeks. They don’t know much about him, though they mentioned that his accent sounds odd.”

“He must be an impostor. Did you recognize him?”

Brielle shook her head. “I couldn’t see his face very well under the hardhat, but he had glasses, a mustache, and beard.”

A disguise. Tyler was so focused on the lead worker that he hadn’t paid much attention to the others.

“We need to lay down suppressing fire so I can make it to the stairway.”

“But I—”

“No time to argue. One. Two. Three!”

Tyler sprinted for the stairs, unloading his entire magazine in the direction of the pavilion as he ran. Brielle did the same with her weapon. Bullets zinged off the metal around him. His luck held out until he was within a few feet of the stairwell.

That’s when the bullet hit him in the left arm. Whether it was a direct hit or a ricochet he couldn’t tell, but the jolt of pain caused him to drop the submachine gun.

Tyler stumbled against the safety grating and tumbled down the first flight of stairs. He shook his head and held his arm. Given the blood streaming from both sides of his bicep, it seemed like the bullet had passed through his muscle, missing the bone. The only saving grace was that they had been firing relatively small 9mm rounds. His arm wasn’t useless, but every time he moved it, agony radiated from the wound like a beacon.

He picked himself up and staggered down the stairs. As he walked he looked for any sign of movement. When he’d gone down five flights and cleared the bottom of the first level, he saw someone crouched on a catwalk directly underneath the Salle Gustave Eiffel. The shadowy figure would have been invisible to anyone not actively searching for him.

The man hadn’t spotted him yet, so Tyler had a chance at sneaking up on him. Without the MP-5, surprise would be his only weapon.

He thought he could make the climb over the safety grating encapsulating the stairs. The gunfire and screams would cover any noise he made. But he realized his chance of success was still small. He needed a backup plan.

He took out his phone and tapped quickly, starting a text to Grant.

I’m going to need your help.

FOUR

Tyler’s tuxedo was a mess. Ripping his cuff as he climbed over the safety fence was just the latest indignity. The left sleeve of his jacket was saturated with blood. Stains mottled the fabric as if it were black and brown tie-dye. The knees on his pants were torn from crawling around on the deck of the tower while he was under fire. He wondered if James Bond’s tuxes had been made of Teflon.

The only reason he was even thinking about the state of his clothes was to keep his mind off his throbbing arm. Several times he had to bite his lip from crying out as he lowered himself gently to the catwalk, careful to minimize both noise and vibration.

He settled into a crouch, putting pressure on his arm to stanch some of the blood flow. In addition to the pain, he was beginning to feel woozy, either from shock or blood loss.

Tyler crept forward, more afraid of losing his balance and falling over the side than he was of the man in front of him. His quarry was still hunched over, intent on some unseen task, wearing black now instead of the gray overalls he’d had on earlier.

Tyler considered what to do, but he didn’t have much of a choice. His injury meant a fight wouldn’t last long and might end up with him splattered on the pavement below. At this point his best option was simply to get close enough to charge the guy and push him over the side while he wasn’t looking. Not a sporting plan, but the one likeliest to keep himself alive.

Although the tower was illuminated by so many lights it could practically be seen from space, shadows from the ironwork played across the catwalk. Every time he took a step, Tyler went from dark to light and then back again, which only added to the disorientation felt as the blood drained out of him. If the bullet had nicked an artery, he wouldn’t last much longer.

Tyler shook off the feeling and kept edging forward. He’d launch himself when he was within two body lengths. Any closer and the man might hear him.

He got within twice that distance when another explosion went off up above them. Grant must have intercepted another drone. Or missed. Tyler couldn’t tell. But the shockwave created enough of a tremor that the man in black leaned back to catch himself and turned slightly in the process so that Tyler was now in his peripheral vision.

The man froze. Then his head inched around until he was looking Tyler in the eye. He smiled.

Without the glasses, beard, and mustache, he was now recognizable as Carl Zim. Tyler had only seen a grainy photo of him, never in person. Zim’s wavy blond hair and angular nose lent the Aryan look he worshipped.

“Dr. Tyler Locke,” he said. “You’re late.”

“Actually, it looks like I’m right on time.”

Zim nodded at the bullet wound. “Did Gabrielle Cohen give you that? Jews are so unpredictable.”

“No, it was one of your friends. I see you managed to talk your way onto the maintenance crew even though you’re American.” Stalling was Tyler’s best tactical play at the moment.

“Mon français est excellent. One good thing about having a Parisian mother.”

Tyler rose and Zim did the same. The black he was wearing wasn’t a ninja outfit, but rather a tuxedo, stained and torn to make him look like one of the patrons escaping from the party. In the chaos below, he would be escorted to a safe position where he could slip away quietly before anyone realized who he was.

Zim was shorter than Tyler, but wiry and built for speed. Tyler could see cords of muscle flexing along his neck. Tyler’s gun was long gone, and Zim couldn’t have smuggled a weapon past the security screen. Fists and gravity were all they had to fight each other. Not good odds for Tyler.

“Grant will be here any second now,” Tyler said, “so you might as well—”

The words had the opposite effect from what he intended. Instead of hesitating or looking behind him, Zim threw himself at Tyler.

Without the ability to sidestep the attack, Tyler planted his feet and twisted his body so that his good arm would take the brunt of the impact. He planned to use Zim’s momentum against him and graze him enough to toss him off the catwalk.

Zim didn’t play along. He pulled up short and launched a roundhouse punch at Tyler’s injured bicep. Tyler ducked to protect his arm, but that put his ear in the path of Zim’s fist.

The jarring impact nearly ended the fight right then, but Tyler was able to grab Zim’s arm, throwing them both off-balance. They locked together, each of them grasping the other’s lapels to keep from going over the side.

Tyler used the only weapon he had left and head-butted Zim in the face, breaking the man’s nose. Blood gushed out, but Zim just grinned, the scarlet sheen coating his teeth. Tyler guessed it wasn’t his first broken nose.

Zim kneed Tyler in the gut and then loosened his right hand to sink his fingers into Tyler’s arm. Tyler let out a feral scream and nearly blacked out from the pain. He keeled over and fell to the grating of the catwalk. His head cracked into the metal and buzzed from the collision.

Zim spat a mouthful of blood. “Now you’re going to make yourself useful and cause an even bigger distraction when I get to ground level. See you down there.”

He placed a foot on Tyler’s chest and pushed. Tyler grabbed Zim’s ankle, but he had no leverage. He felt himself sliding over the side.

The buzz grew even louder. At first Tyler thought he was about to pass out, but he realized that the sound was not in his head. A shadow fell across his eye.

It was the Mayfly. Grant had gotten his text message and made the decision to pull it off protective duty.

Zim braced himself to beat back the quadcopter, which weighed only a few pounds. A hefty swat as it swooped toward him would be enough to send it careening into a girder.

But the Mayfly just hovered there. Zim looked at it in confusion, then shrugged and put his entire effort into one last shove.

Instead, his body went rigid as Tyler heard a new sound: the crackle of electricity. Two shiny metal leads protruded from Zim’s neck.

Zim’s face contorted in agony and disbelief. With all the strength he had left, Tyler pushed against Zim’s foot. Zim tilted back as if he were a mannequin and fell off the catwalk.

Tyler watched Zim’s descent. His head hit a girder as he tumbled, sending his body spinning to the ground. A thump was followed by shrieks from an unseen woman. The blood pooling under Zim’s head suggested that the impact was lethal.

Tyler lay flat for a few moments while he caught his breath. Then he remembered about Zim’s mission. Something he’d been hunched over. Tyler had to check it out and assess whether it presented any danger.

With supreme effort, he pushed himself up. He lurched to his feet and steadied himself before trying to walk forward along the narrow catwalk.

A bright light flashed directly in front of him. Before his brain could even process the sound of the explosion, he was thrown backward.

Tyler’s last thought before his mind went blank was that, just like Zim, he was falling.

FIVE

Brielle stretched as she stepped out of the shower, the sudden burst of steam fogging the mirrors in the suite’s bathroom. She toweled off, not bothering to wipe the glass. She didn’t want to see the bruises that were just starting to fade. She took a sip from the flute resting on the counter. The hot soaks and fine champagne were doing wonders in helping her sore muscles recover.

She’d never stayed in such an expensive hotel room before. Not that she had anything against it; she simply never had been able to afford it. The sumptuous accommodations at L’Hotel in the chic Saint-Germain-des-Prés section of Paris were a thanks from the French government for her part in averting disaster at the Eiffel Tower, and she hadn’t protested at all when the gesture was made. She didn’t mind a bit of luxury while she planned her next move.

Nearly a week after the assault, the investigation was still ongoing. Only minutes after Tyler went searching for the missing maintenance man, snipers in a French Air Force helicopter took out the gunmen inside the gift shop pavilion, ending the attack. Five security officers had been killed, but Fournier survived, as did all of the guests at the party, though some of those who were caught in the blasts were still recuperating in hospital.

There were strange aspects of the event that continued to puzzle Brielle. Grant Westfield, an explosives expert in his own right, reported that none of the bombs would have been powerful enough to kill more than a few of the guests. Even if they’d all gone off inside the reception hall, at best the attackers would have killed several dozen partygoers, with no hope of targeting a specific guest. The person who had been controlling the quadcopters from the ground was still at large.

Another unsolved mystery was the segment of the operation on the catwalk under the Salle Gustave Eiffel, where Tyler had fought with Carl Zim. The bomb that had gone off there was just powerful enough to destroy a portion of the tower’s utilities, nothing more. The preliminary assessment was that the attack had been meant to disrupt the summit, but that it made little sense as all of the meetings had been concluded before that evening.

No group had yet claimed responsibility, but fingers had started to point. As they’d suspected, Zim had been the leader of the attack, but they weren’t going to get much vital info from him since his body lay in the Paris morgue. The rest of the gunmen were identified as members of a French right-wing extremist group who had sympathies with the neo-Nazi movement. It seemed like a clear case of fanatics attacking their new sworn enemies: representatives of the Muslim world that was encroaching on Europe and America.

And then they found out how the gunmen had lain in wait inside the pavilion.

A special exhibit showing rare photographs of the tower’s construction had been set up inside the second story of the pavilion, above the gift shop. Three hidden walls had been built into the design. The day before the attack, the five gunmen hid themselves and their weapons inside the display, going as far as using plastic bottles to collect their urine while they waited to emerge after the gift shop closed. Then at the prearranged signal, most likely the appearance of the maintenance men, they opened fire.

Of course, the investigators’ first priority was to discover who was responsible for the tower’s clever infiltration, and that’s where the situation got sticky. Following the money, they discovered that the display had been paid for and the photos supplied by a company based in Tel Aviv. The authorities were trying to sift through the documentation to find out who actually owned the company, information obscured by a series of shell corporations.

With the discovery of a potential Israeli connection, the recriminations in the Middle East were fast approaching a fever pitch. The Muslim nations claimed it was a conspiracy dreamed up by the Mossad as a means of punishing them for attacks against Israel. Tensions had escalated quickly, and armies on both sides were now poised on the brink of war, with planes, tanks, and soldiers massing along the Israeli borders. It would take only a spark to ignite a full-scale attack in either direction, and with rumors of nuclear weapons on both sides, the Western nations, Russia, and China could be drawn into a conflict that would result in the start of World War III.

That’s why Brielle drained her glass. No sense in letting it go to waste if nobody would be left to enjoy it next week.

She put on the silver Star of David necklace her grandfather had given her, dropped the towel on the floor, and tiptoed into the suite’s bedroom. She slipped under the covers and rested her head on Tyler’s chest.

He stroked her damp hair. “I ordered breakfast for us while you were showering.”

“Croissants?”

“And marmalade, although I never have understood the Brits’ fondness for orange jelly.”

“And I never understood how you Americans can eat cold pizza in the morning. It’s disgusting.”

“What else can you find to eat in a college dorm at six a.m.?”

“At the University of Edinburgh we had what is called a dining hall. Didn’t you have those at MIT?”

“Sure. But they frowned on going down to meals in your underwear.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

Brielle inadvertently ran her hand across the stitches in his arm. Tyler didn’t flinch, but she could feel him tense.

“Sorry. Does it still hurt?”

“I’m only glad it wasn’t my pitching arm. As it is, the doctors say I won’t be taking the Mariner’s mound for a few weeks.”

She supposed that was some American baseball metaphor. Just like a man to play down a gunshot wound and concussion requiring a hospital stay. The blast that Zim set off had thrown Tyler backwards, but through sheer luck he landed on the catwalk instead of going over the side. Three days of nursing in the suite made him feel well enough for more strenuous activities. He recovered quickly and thanked her well for the pampering.

“Grant made it home all right, I expect,” Brielle said as she ran her fingers along the channels between each of Tyler’s abdominal muscles. “He seemed reluctant to leave you until I told him I’d take care of you.”

“Yeah, he got the message after that. He’s back in Seattle now. I’m going there myself in a couple of days. When my sister heard I’d been shot, she insisted on meeting me there to make sure my recuperation goes smoothly.”

“Do you see her much?”

“No. Most of the time she’s traveling the world doing research into endangered species. She’s a zoologist. In fact, we don’t get to see each other that often because of our schedules, so it’ll be nice to spend time with her. Why don’t you come back and meet her?”

Brielle withdrew her hand abruptly, and Tyler stopped stroking her hair.

“We’ve talked about this,” she said. “I may not be a strict orthodox Jew, but this isn’t something that can be long-term. My parents wouldn’t understand. Family is very important to me.”

“It is to me, too.”

“So is my religion. Unless you plan to convert, let’s just enjoy our time here together.”

Tyler let out a tiny sigh, but he went back to caressing her hair. “Absolutely.”

Brielle didn’t mention that she would soon be near enough to Seattle to drive there. Wade Plymouth, who had called with the tip that led them to Zim, was the only other employee at Brielle’s boutique investigation firm. Her latest information revealed that his last known location was at a bar in a small town south of the Canadian border in Washington state. If she were going to track down her missing friend and colleague, that was the best place to start, and it wasn’t Tyler’s job to help her. She could tell that spending any more time with him would make it that much harder to tear herself away. A visit to his home would be a bad idea. Better to bask in one last day with him and leave it at that.

Tyler’s phone rang. “Grant,” he said with a smile when he saw the number. He took the call without moving. “I’m in bed with a beautiful woman, so this better be good.”

After a few moments, his smile disappeared and he sat up. “You’re sure?” He said “uh-huh” a few times, and then said, “Okay. Tell them I’ll be there tomorrow morning.” He hung up.

“What was that about?” Brielle asked.

“It looks like I’m going to California instead. Grant’s already booked me on Air France.”

“How soon?”

Tyler kissed her deeply, sending a shiver down her spine. After a long while, he pulled away and said, “We have some time left. Grant said the flight isn’t for another six hours.”

“What’s in California?”

“Pleasant Valley State Prison. The FBI is meeting me there so we can talk to an inmate. He said he’d only speak to the Feds if I was there as well.”

Brielle could see that the thought of the impending meeting troubled Tyler. “Why you?”

“Because I helped put him there. The prisoner is Victor Zim, Carl Zim’s older brother.”

SIX

When the wind blew in their direction, the stench was overpowering. Tyler made sure to close the Suburban’s exterior vents as they approached Coalinga on Interstate-5. Located halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the section of freeway was well-known to travelers as the site of Harris Ranch, the largest cattle processing facility on the west coast. Tyler was amused to see that despite the aroma, the ranch had its own inn and restaurant in addition to a small runway. He wondered how well the building’s air conditioning filtered out the smell from a hundred thousand cattle. Tyler imagined that Brielle wouldn’t appreciate the ranch’s nickname. It was dubbed “Cowschwitz” by animal rights activists because of the two hundred million pounds of beef processed in its slaughterhouse every year.

The central valley of California is among the most productive agricultural regions on Earth, and Tyler had seen nothing but fields and orchards on the three-hour drive from the Bay Area. Special Agent Melanie Harris had filled the time with the region’s history as she drove. She joked that the owners of the ranch were no relation, but that she wouldn’t mind being adopted.

It would be just the two of them visiting Victor Zim. Zim hadn’t provided any hint of what he would reveal, but Harris thought he might be willing to make a deal to shorten his sentence. Tyler wasn’t as hopeful. Zim was serving twenty-five to life for premeditated murder, having rejected an offer to plea down before he was convicted. He could have had a change of heart about bargaining now that his brother was dead, but Tyler thought that the word of a man who’d killed six innocent people was worthless.

They turned off the highway at Jayne Road just beyond Harris Ranch and drove past stands of almond and orange groves toward the ironically named Pleasant Valley State Prison. Tyler would bet not a single person at the penitentiary — neither inmate nor guard — would describe the twenty-year-old prison as pleasant.

A mile from I-5, groves gave way to fallow fields, and the sprawling prison came into view. Adjacent to the prison was a mental hospital. The combined units housed more than five thousand inmates, including Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin.

Harris drove past the entrance of the hospital and turned left at the next road to take them into the vast prison parking lot. After they passed through the security gate and parked, Tyler opened the door to heat that he rarely experienced in his home town of Seattle, particularly in mid June. The sun blazed through a cloudless sky, baking the asphalt. Thermal waves billowed so thickly that it caused mini-mirages.

A thin but fit blonde, Harris put on her jacket despite the heat. It was her effort to project the FBI’s sense of professionalism, a trait Tyler admired. He had specifically requested that she be assigned to this interrogation because he’d saved her life on a Miami cruise ship a few years back, and they’d kept in touch ever since.

“You ready for this?” she asked as they walked toward the visitor’s building.

“Sure,” Tyler said with a shrug to give the impression that he wasn’t as stressed as he really was. “Why not?”

“Well, you did send the guy to prison and kill his brother. Any new ideas about why Carl was up on the Eiffel Tower in the first place?”

Tyler had thought about it for the last week and couldn’t come up with any valid reason. The bomb he’d planted was too small to do any significant structural damage.

“We don’t know yet,” he said. “Gordian’s French unit is analyzing the pieces of wreckage to see if they can find anything revealing. I understand the French authorities will release Carl’s autopsy results soon, but I can’t see how that will help. What I’d like to know is how Victor Zim found out I was the one who killed his brother. That has to be the reason he would meet with the FBI only if I agreed to come. How did word get to him all the way out here?”

Harris shook her head. “We’re checking into that. Probably through some French journalist. Carl must have a few men still scattered out there to feed info to Victor.”

“Like the one who was controlling the quadcopter bombs from somewhere off the tower? If he had a telescope, he could have seen me fighting with Carl.”

“We’ll get him soon. Once we track down André Laroche and bring him into custody, we’ll have no trouble finding the rest of Carl’s gang.”

Laroche was a Jewish immigrant from France now living in the Seattle area. The shell corporation that funded the Eiffel Tower display above the gift shop was traced back to him, so he was now the prime suspect for funding the attack. The fact that Laroche had gone missing just a few days after the assault enhanced the suspicion.

Tyler had never met the man and was only familiar with the name because his sister, Alexa, had been working for him on an unrelated project. Tyler didn’t like the coincidence, but he couldn’t fathom a reason why the attack on the Eiffel Tower and Alexa working for Laroche would be related. He was still trying to figure out how to break the news to Alexa that her patron was the mastermind behind the attack.

“It’s hard to believe he’s involved. You still haven’t found him?”

“We have agents searching his house in Seattle right now. We’ll find him.”

“He has a lot of money,” Tyler said. “It could be a long time before you hunt him down.”

Harris’s tight lips told him that she wasn’t as confident as she sounded. She stopped and glanced at the prison entrance. “You clear on how this is going to go?”

Tyler nodded. “I just sit there and respond only if you tell me to.” He didn’t have to say that it would be uncomfortable staring into the face of the criminal he’d testified against, who also happened to be the brother of the man he’d killed.

“Good,” Harris said. “Interrogations can be tricky, so let me steer the direction of the conversation.”

They passed through more security inside, and Harris handed over her weapon. They were escorted to a private interrogation cell and took their seats to wait for Victor Zim. The room met Tyler’s expectations. Gray bars supplementing the cinder-block walls, a metal table topped with a welded steel loop and bolted to the concrete floor, and three aluminum chairs were the extent of the spartan furnishings.

The squeal of unoiled hinges heralded the approach of Zim. Tyler recalled the trial that brought Victor here.

Victor was a gifted chemical engineer working at a plastics plant in Oakland, and Carl was a construction foreman at a different firm. Their baby brother, David, died in the World Trade Center collapse on 9/11. That day he had been waiting tables at the Windows on the World restaurant to put himself through college at NYU. The two surviving brothers tried to join the army in the aftermath but were turned away because both failed psychological exams in which they displayed tendencies toward extremist behavior. The two of them became heavily involved in militia activities on weekends, traveling to private compounds in the forests of the Sierra Nevada where they received training in weapons and tactical situations. Their constant paramilitary drills for a hypothetical Muslim terrorist attack drove them into the embrace of white supremacist groups.

Victor’s pent-up rage and need for revenge reached a peak when he assaulted a Pakistani executive one day at the plant and was summarily fired.

Three months later Victor sneaked back into the plant to sabotage the facility, using his extensive expertise and knowledge of its layout to overheat one of the processing tanks. Six people, including the Pakistani executive, were killed in the subsequent blast. Initially, the police thought it was an industrial accident, and had it not been for Tyler’s investigation, it would have been a perfect crime.

Gordian Engineering was one of the foremost forensic engineering and analysis firms in the world. As the former captain of an Army combat engineering company, Tyler had gained extensive experience with explosives. Although he had founded Gordian, Tyler left the day-to-day operations to his former professor, Miles Benson, who became CEO.

Tyler’s role was to take the lead in high-profile and unusual jobs as Gordian’s chief of special operations, and the chemical plant explosion had been his investigation. During the analysis of the destruction, Tyler determined that the supposedly malfunctioning temperature regulator was an almost exact duplicate that had been installed in place of the original. He was the only one who had noticed that it was the next year’s model, different from the previous year’s model only in the updated font of the brand’s logo.

When they tracked the purchase of the regulator to Victor Zim, Tyler’s testimony had been enough to get him convicted. They also suspected that Carl was an accomplice, but there wasn’t enough evidence to bring him to trial, and Victor wouldn’t testify against Carl to reduce his sentence.

Tyler recognized Victor’s combination of methodical planning and desire for violence in Carl’s attack. The brothers had the same qualities. The only difference was that Victor Zim didn’t look the part. Tyler remembered Victor at the defendant’s table as a pudgy man with receding hair, someone who ate a lot of donuts at his desk and spent his exercise time at the militia encampments by lying on his considerable stomach to fire guns.

The prison bars slammed shut and two hulking guards accompanied an even larger man between them. This was not the Victor Zim from the trial.

The face was a few years older and the pudginess was gone, replaced by angular creases that would be at home on a marble statue. Every trace of flab had been transformed into coils of ropey muscle that made his prison uniform ridiculously tight across the shoulders. This was a man who spent every minute in the yard at the weight sets, possibly as a way to defend himself from marauding gangs. Someone would have to be extremely confident in his fighting ability to take Zim on.

His hair was shorn to a buzz cut. Black tattoos of skulls and flame-girdled dragons snaked down his arms. Knowing he was going to be in prison for the rest of his life, Zim must have adapted quickly to a regimen that would keep him alive.

Zim strolled in as though he were the one in charge. He stared at Tyler, who returned the gaze with equal force. While Zim had a bemused grin on his face, Tyler kept a stony expression.

The guards shackled him to the table, and Tyler didn’t mind the safety precaution. Desperate men with nothing to lose were the most dangerous type. Though Tyler was a combat veteran and able to handle himself in a fight, his current condition meant he wasn’t at a hundred percent. No sense in taking chances with this man.

As he’d been instructed, Tyler let Harris do the talking.

“My name is Special Agent Melanie Harris from the FBI, and you know Tyler Locke.”

Zim glanced at Harris and then back at Tyler. “I didn’t know if you’d actually show.”

“We’re here because you said you have information pertaining to the Eiffel Tower attack,” Harris said. “We’re in a hurry, so get on with it.”

“No, you’re not. If this isn’t the most important thing you’re doing today, I’d be surprised.”

Tyler didn’t look at Harris, but he could feel the annoyance radiating from her. “Your brother, Carl, was killed seven days ago trying to attack a summit in Paris. Did you know anything about his plan?”

“I know that this guy here was the one who pushed him off the Eiffel Tower.”

“How do you know that?”

Zim shrugged. “Word gets around.”

“Why are we here, Mr. Zim?”

“I’ll only talk to Locke.”

Harris shook her head. “You’re talking to me.”

“Yeah, and that’s over with now. If you don’t like it, get the hell out of here. Or is he deaf and dumb now? Should I write it down for him?”

Harris paused, then turned to Tyler and nodded at him.

Zim laughed. “You need her permission to speak? What, is she your lawyer, too?”

Tyler leaned forward with an unflinching stare. “What do you want to tell me, Zim?”

“So you haven’t gone mute.”

“No, but looking at you makes me wish I’d gone blind.”

Zim laughed again, this time a full guffaw. “Wow. You weren’t this funny in court.”

“Why was your brother on the tower last week? We figured out his plan before he even got there. That’s why it didn’t succeed.”

Zim sat back in his chair with a self-satisfied smirk. “Huh. It didn’t? You sure about that?”

“What do you mean?”

“You just think you know what this is all about. And here I was under the impression you were a smart guy. MIT grad. Ph.D. in engineering from Stanford. Served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Started your own company when you were thirty. Those are some pretty impressive credentials. And yet, you don’t know squat.”

“Why don’t you enlighten us, Zim? Carl’s dead. No reason to hide it any more. Maybe Special Agent Harris here will even put in a good word for you. You could get out of here in twenty-three years instead of twenty-five.”

“I don’t want anything from her.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want to see the look on your face when I tell you that I’m going to return the favor.”

“What favor?”

“You took my brother from me, and I’m going to do the same for you. It’s Alexa, right?”

Tyler jumped up from his seat so quickly that his chair crashed into the bars behind him. He would have launched himself at Zim if Harris hadn’t grabbed his arm. Tyler winced as she dug her fingers into his healing wound, which only made him angrier.

Zim noticed the grimace. “Did Carl hurt you? Looks like he went down with a fight.”

“He went down screaming like a girl,” Tyler growled. “And I swear, if you have your friends do anything to my sister—”

“You’ll what? Send me to prison? Your threats sound a lot stupider than mine. Besides, I don’t need friends to kill her. I’ll make sure it happens personally.”

It was Tyler’s turn to laugh. He shook off Harris and straightened up. “Well, that actually makes me feel better. If you ever get out of here, which I seriously doubt, you’ll have to be released to a nursing home. Why don’t you think about that while you stare at the walls of your spacious eight-by-eight cell?”

“Boy, you really got me there, Locke,” Zim said with a smile. “Believe me, now that you’ve taken my second brother from me, there’s nothing you can do to scare me.”

“Zim, the minute I walk out of here, I won’t think about you another day in my life.”

“Even if I write you letters?”

Tyler didn’t answer. He was done with this guy. “Let’s go,” he said to Harris.

Harris nodded to the guards. Tyler turned his back on Zim and waited for the bars to open.

“I’ll be thinking about you, Locke,” Zim taunted. “Every hour of every day.”

Tyler ground his teeth waiting for the buzz to sound. When it did, he squeezed through and kept walking until he was outside.

When Harris caught up with him, he was already on his mobile phone. Tyler recognized a real threat when he heard it. Zim wasn’t bluffing. He had some kind of plan, and Alexa was the target.

SEVEN

Outside Tyler’s house overlooking downtown Seattle from the Magnolia bluff, Grant Westfield rummaged through the back of his Tahoe looking for anything he could change into. After a two-hour weightlifting session at the gym, his workout top and shorts were overly aromatic. Stinking to high heaven was not the most pleasant way to catch up with his best friend’s sister.

Grant thought he’d left an old T-shirt in the SUV after he’d washed it one day, but he came up empty. He slammed the hatch. There was nothing to do except hope Alexa could tolerate the smell.

Tyler had called from California to give him the quick rundown on his interrogation of Victor Zim. It would take Tyler at least four hours to get back to Seattle, and he was concerned that Zim’s militia colleagues would take the opportunity to go after Alexa, so he’d asked Grant to keep an eye on her until he returned and they could figure out how to proceed.

Of course, Grant agreed to the favor without hesitation. He ran his workout towel over his head to mop up the residual sweat, tossed it through the driver’s window, and headed for the front door.

Grant hadn’t seen Alexa in years, not since Karen’s funeral. Tyler’s wife had died in a car accident, and other than their father, his baby sister was the only family he had left. The week of Karen’s death had been a blur for all of them, and the somber circumstances meant Grant hadn’t spoken more than a few token platitudes to Alexa. Her boyfriend at the time seemed to keep her at arm’s length.

She’d been to Seattle only once since then, while Grant was traveling overseas. His vague memory of her was of a pretty, chubby blonde who shared Tyler’s square jaw, brace-straightened teeth, and sky-blue eyes.

Normally, Grant would walk right into Tyler’s house, but with his sister there, going in unannounced didn’t seem like a good idea, especially if the boyfriend were present. He rang the doorbell, an odd sensation.

A few moments later, bare feet padded across hardwood floors. The door opened, and when Grant saw the woman standing in the doorway, he nearly stepped back to make sure he was at the right house.

Instead of a chubby blonde, a svelte redhead smiled back at him. Dressed in a form-fitting V-neck shirt and body-hugging jeans, she bore little resemblance to the woman Grant recalled. Grant couldn’t help looking her up and down, and he caught her doing the same to him.

“Grant!” She threw her arms wide and lunged at him, wrapping Grant in an embrace before he could react. She had a surprisingly firm hold on him, and he returned the hug gently.

She pulled away and said, “Those muscles. Wow! You are even bigger than I remembered. What are you? Two forty? Two forty-five?”

He realized he was gaping and closed his mouth. “Two-fifty. I’m sorry, Alexa. For a second, I didn’t recognize you. You colored your hair.”

“Actually, the blonde was a dye job. This is my natural color. I like to change it up once in a while. I see you do, too. It looks good shaved.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ve also lost some weight since the last time you saw me. Bought one of those extreme workout DVDs. It got me to drop thirty pounds in three months, but the first week was hell. I see you’re still working out.”

“Yeah. Sorry about the stench.”

Alexa eyed his tank top. “It’s not too bad. Nothing that a good shower won’t fix. Come on in,” she said, and gestured for him to enter. “Tyler said you’d be dropping by. I told him I didn’t need a babysitter, but when he mentioned it was going to be you, I changed my mind.” She winked at him.

Her flirty behavior was definitely different than at the funeral. Grant smiled wanly and followed her inside.

“Want a beer?” Alexa asked, pulling a Fat Tire from the fridge.

“Sure.” She pulled a second bottle from the shelf and gave him one. They went to the living room and sat across from each other. He forced himself to keep from groaning as he settled into the couch, his joints and muscles aching from the tough workout. The soft cushions were more soothing than he’d ever admit.

Instead of taking in the beautiful view of the city through the huge windows as most visitors did, Alexa focused on Grant intently and smiled.

He took a long swig and looked around. “Is your boyfriend with you? Bart, wasn’t it?”

“Bert. No, he’s not around anymore.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be. He was nice, but kind of a stick-in-the-mud, as I’m sure you noticed when you met him. No, I decided to enjoy the single life for a while. You?”

Grant shook his head and took another drink. He could think of ten smart-aleck things to say — comebacks he wouldn’t normally hold back — but this was Tyler’s sister. His little sister. His attractive little sister.

“Yeah,” Alexa said, “Tyler told me you like to keep it fast and loose.”

Grant raised an eyebrow. “Did he?”

She put up her hands. “I think he meant it as a compliment.”

The farther the conversation went down this road, the closer Grant was to getting himself in trouble, in Tyler’s house no less. He changed the subject.

“What did Tyler tell you about why he asked me to come by?”

“Just that he wanted you to keep me company while he was on his way back. He should be here later this afternoon.”

“Mmmm,” was all Grant said. If Tyler hadn’t revealed the real danger just yet, then Grant wasn’t going to either. “How long have you been in town?”

“A couple of days. I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone.”

“How so?”

“Well, first of all I wanted to make sure Tyler was taking care of himself. You know him. Always ready to get back into action before he should. I was worried he was staying in France to head up Gordian’s part in the investigation.”

“Uh, no,” Grant said, “he thought it would be better to relax there before taking the long flight home.”

“Right,” Alexa said, her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “And then he flies straight to California?”

“Important business. But he promised to ease up for a couple of weeks once he gets back.” Grant took another swig. “So what’s the other bird?”

“I was supposed to meet with a man who lives here. André Laroche. Do you know him?”

Although Tyler had told him over the phone about Laroche’s potential involvement with the Eiffel Tower, it was another piece of info he’d let Tyler reveal to her. “The name’s familiar.”

Alexa leaned back and put her feet up on the coffee table. “He’s a timber millionaire. Owns a huge mansion on Mercer Island. You guys know some of the Microsoft and Amazon billionaires, so I thought you might have run across him. I had a meeting planned with him, but his assistant called to say he wasn’t available all of a sudden.”

“Did she say why?”

“No, and that’s unusual. Marlo is always a sweetie, but she was very curt about it.”

“What were you supposed to be meeting about?”

“He hired me about a year ago. I’m back because of a video I shot this past April.”

“What video?”

Alexa rolled her eyes. “Tyler hasn’t told you? What a shocker. He’s probably embarrassed.”

“He never mentioned it, but I doubt it’s because he’s embarrassed.”

“I’m the laughing stock of the scientific community. I’m embarrassed, why shouldn’t he be?”

“About what?”

“About the Loch Ness video. Surely you saw it online sometime in the last week.”

Grant shrugged. “I’d only consume the news if I could take it in pill form.”

“Too depressing?”

“Nothing I can do about it. I figure if it’s important, someone will tell me.”

“Well, I’ve got something to tell you. Better yet, I’ll show you.”

Alexa hopped up and scampered across the floor on her toes. She returned moments later carrying a laptop and plopped herself down next to him.

“Boy, you do smell. I’ll live, but we’ll have to get you into a shower soon.” She opened the laptop and clicked on the browser, bringing up a YouTube page titled, Loch Ness Monster Discovered?

Grant could see a few comments underneath. “Fake!” the first said. The second said, “Spielberg has nothing to worry about.” The one below that, “How do we even know that’s Loch Ness?” It already had over three hundred thousand views.

“The Loch Ness monster? You found the Loch Ness monster?”

“That’s what Laroche thinks.”

“And you posted this online?” he asked.

“Are you kidding? Without any other evidence? I have a Ph.D. in biology and I’m hoping to get a teaching position somewhere. Do you think it would really help my case to become known as a Nessie hunter?”

Grant understood. Even with a degree from a prestigious university like Northwestern, she would be hard-pressed to find a position if she had a reputation as a crank.

“Then how did the video get online?”

“I’m guessing my colleague posted it.”

“Who’s that?”

Alexa burbled out a breath between her lips. “Mike Dillman, a videographer who was with me at the loch that day. It was supposed to be a short-term gig. I didn’t really think anything would come of it, but it was a lot of money and would tide me over while I was writing grant proposals. I also piggybacked some research on freshwater ecosystems I was hoping to publish.”

“And Laroche was your patron?”

She nodded. “He’s seriously into cryptozoology. Says his interest in it started when he saw Bigfoot on a lumber scouting trip in the Cascades.”

Grant frowned. This millionaire was sounding like he was veering from eccentric into full nutcase status. “What’s cryptozoology?”

“It’s not a scientific discipline. Pseudo-science, really. The study of mysterious creatures. Bigfoot, the yeti, the chupacabra, the Loch Ness monster.” When she saw Grant’s doubtful expression, she continued. “Like I said, it was a lot of money, and I was just going through the motions. Then this happened.”

She pressed the PLAY icon, and Alexa appeared on screen wearing a wool sweater and cable-knit hat, standing on a small boat. The water visible behind her was choppy. It was obvious that someone else was holding the camera. That had to be Mike Dillman.

This is Dr. Alexa Locke, recording twelve, begun at 7:30 p.m., her on-screen self said. Grid twenty-three seven.

“I had to record that at the beginning of every video,” Alexa commented in Grant’s ear. “We went out every day in that little motor boat on a systematic search pattern. Laroche’s instructions. I didn’t argue. His money.”

The camera swung from her and faced the lake. Forested hills rose in the distant background. The gray sky made it difficult to judge distances. No other boats were in the frame. Grant took Alexa’s word for it that it was Loch Ness, but it could have been any one of a hundred coastlines for all he knew.

Then a thump came from off-camera, followed by a yelp from Alexa.

Oh, my God! she shouted.

The unseen cameraman’s hand came into frame as he was pointing at something. He yelled, What the hell is that?

Grant’s eyes flicked to Alexa sitting next to him.

“Keep watching,” she said.

The camera slewed around. It took a second to steady and then zoom in on what at first looked like a dark ripple of wave. A tighter frame revealed a hump breaking the surface. It went under again, and the camera tracked its motion. The glistening skin of the hump came up a second time, accompanied by the distinct outline of a flipper.

It was almost as if it were waving to the camera.

Then it disappeared. The camera came back to Alexa, who looked stunned by the sighting. The only thing Grant could hear from the video was Dillman’s labored breathing. Two seconds later, the video ended.

“I almost passed out from hyperventilating,” Alexa said. “We searched for six days after that and never saw it again.”

“That’s not computer graphics?” Grant asked.

Alexa shook her head solemnly. “I swear.”

“Maybe it was a seal or something.”

“I’m five foot eight, and I was standing when that was taken. I used a laser rangefinder to measure the distance to the sighting. By my calculations, that flipper was over four feet high. Whatever that creature was, it had to be thirty feet long.”

EIGHT

Victor Zim grinned as the prison yard melee started right on schedule. All it took were ten cartons of cigarettes and five bottles of smuggled whiskey that he had given to the Aryan Knights. Five minutes after he left the interrogation with Tyler Locke, Zim had been returned to the yard for the daily morning exercise hour. He’d nodded from his position at the edge of the yard and two members of the Knights threw punches at their counterparts in the Black Cobras and the Mexican Border Disciples. Within seconds, dozens of men were at each others’ throats, distracting the guards from the parachute floating to the ground.

Not wanting to give away the situation, Zim didn’t look up, but he had seen the plane high above as he strolled into the yard and knew exactly where and when the chute would land, controlled by remote adjustments to its cords. Hidden in his palm, Zim held the small laser pointer that had been smuggled in by a laundry supplier. While he waited, he relished the irony that it was Tyler Locke’s own sister who had unwittingly set into motion the events that would lead to his escape from prison.

As with any escape attempt, there were dozens of potential roadblocks and mistakes that could ruin the most carefully laid plans, any one of which would result in capture or death. Zim would get only one shot at this, but he was able to breathe easier knowing the first hurdle had been cleared. With a fall of several minutes from the plane’s fifteen-thousand-foot altitude, the drop had to commence before the fight even started. If that hadn’t occurred on time, the guards would have noticed the parachute long before it hit the ground.

Even so, Zim expected a quick response once it landed, so it was critical to open the package before anyone could stop him.

Between the rioting prisoners, the crowd egging them on, and the guards yelling at them to break it up, it was nearly impossible to hear the nearest tower guard shout a warning about the parachute. Zim was attuned to hear such an out-of-context word, so he caught it right away and knew he had little time left.

Zim raised two fingers and pointed, the signal for the second part of the plan to go into motion. Another Aryan Knight triggered a small explosive device made from a bottle and a small amount of smuggled chemicals. It wasn’t much more than a pop, but the sudden noise and puff of smoke were enough to draw the eyes of the guards away from the parachute.

In coming up with this idea, Zim had his financial benefactor research other prison escape methods, none of which ended up being adaptable for this enormous facility. Tunneling out would have taken years and could have been discovered many times over the course of the digging. One escapee from Everglades Maximum Security Prison got away when his mother and friends rammed a Mack truck through three fences and an iron gate, but he and his accomplices were caught soon after. And prisoners had escaped numerous times by helicopter, but it was a risky bet because choppers could be heard coming from a mile away, and some of the escapes had been foiled not by the guards but by other prisoners rushing the helicopter and overloading it, preventing it from taking off. For his plan, Zim had to raise the bar.

The silent parachute wasn’t seen until the last seconds. Zim was counting on the guards thinking it was a wayward skydiver from a local club before they discerned that the object hanging from the cords wasn’t a person. That’s all the confusion Zim needed before the true contents of the package were revealed.

The five-foot-tall pack landed with a thump next to Zim, exposing it for only a moment before the parachute covered it. Zim rushed over to the pack and dived under the parachute. He’d been expecting it to be kited while he snapped open the pack, but the windless day gave him a little bit of extra serendipity. The blue cloak would keep the guards in the tower from seeing what he was doing.

Zim unclasped the metal latches on either side, and the hard plastic covering fell away, revealing the pack’s contents: a stacked quartet of quadcopters identical to the ones used in the Eiffel Tower attack. All he had to do was hit the button to launch each copter and then tag its target with the laser pointer. The autonomous robotic copters would use the infrared sensors to mark the target, store the location in memory, and guide themselves there.

Zim threw the parachute clear. He could feel hundreds of pairs of eyes on him. The melee had stopped, the participants mesmerized by the sight of Zim emerging from underneath the billowing chute. A few of them looked up at the sound of the approaching helicopter, but most of them kept their eyes on Zim.

He pointed the laser and clicked twice, then tapped the pack’s GO button. With the target locked in, the top quadcopter whirred to life, its propellers reaching maximum speed even before Zim could take his finger off the button. It zipped away on its fatal mission. Zim repeated the process, and the copter that had been below it followed suit. Within a couple of seconds, all four copters were buzzing toward their victims, one each for the two nearest guard towers and two toward the site of the prison melee.

Even an expert marksman would find it almost impossible to hit such a swift target. But Zim didn’t have to worry. Not one guard got off a shot as they simply watched the danger whizzing toward them.

The first copter went straight through the window and blew up in the middle of the tower room. A guard’s body went flying across the yard, landing like a rag doll next to the fence.

The second copter turned its target guard tower into a smoking ruin.

With the guard towers no longer a threat, the helicopter shot over the external fence as the final pair of quadcopters plowed into the crowd of men in the yard and detonated. Their screams were drowned out by the sound of the explosion. Those who weren’t felled in the carnage scattered in all directions, prisoners and guards united in a frightened stampede toward a safe location.

Time to leave.

The Bell Jetranger set down in the yard next to Zim, who jumped aboard while ducking automatic weapon fire now coming from the more distant intact guard towers.

As the helicopter lifted off, smoke billowed from the back. Zim saw the choking black soot and thought there could be no other conclusion than that the engine had been hit by a stray bullet.

Tyler and Harris were just turning onto the I-5 entrance ramp when Harris’s phone rang.

“Harris,” she answered, followed by a short pause, then “What? How?” She dropped the phone into her lap and hit the brakes so hard that Tyler was thrown against his seatbelt. Harris turned in her seat and shifted into reverse to back down.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“There’s an escape in progress at the prison.”

Tyler felt his stomach clench. “Zim. How?”

“Helicopter landed in the yard. One of the guards thinks he hit it.”

“Did they see which way it went?”

“North. The sheriff’s office is scrambling their air assets.”

“Then why are you backing up?”

“The Coalinga airport is northwest of the prison. Zim will know that the state patrol will set up roadblocks for miles around the prison. His best chance of escape is by air, and the helicopter will be too identifiable, especially now that it’s smoking.”

Tyler thought about it and knew Zim would be more careful than that. “The Coalinga municipal airport is too obvious. He’s got to know that the police would hurry to lock it down.”

“Then where is he going?”

Tyler remembered passing Harris Ranch on the way down. “There’s a landing strip by the inn. He must be meeting someone there.”

Tyler unrolled his window and stuck his head out. Sure enough, a Cessna was on final approach.

“Go!” he yelled. “We might have time to intercept them.”

Harris put the Suburban back in drive and floored it, activating the vehicle’s lights and siren. The SUV screamed up the ramp and hit seventy by the time they were on the freeway.

The Cessna buzzed past. It was only a few miles to the runway. If they didn’t reach the rendezvous in time to stop Zim, the Cessna could fly below radar into the Sierras, where it would be impossible to track. It could then land on any flat piece of land, and Zim would drive to freedom at his leisure. Alexa would never be safe until he was caught or killed.

Tyler scanned the sky to his left to see if he could spot the helicopter. It would be coming in low over the orange groves. For a minute he saw nothing. But he heard it. A low throb grew from the west.

The whirring rotors of the chopper appeared above the trees, and Tyler could see smoke streaming from its rear.

As it approached the highway, the helicopter flew erratically, dipping and weaving as if the pilot were having difficulty controlling it.

The Suburban reached the exit for the inn and restaurant, and Harris yanked the wheel over, streaking down the ramp. The Cessna was already on the tarmac at the end of the runway, turning to face south. All Zim would need to do was land, hop off the chopper, and board the plane, leaving the helicopter behind.

The throb of the rotors pounded behind them. Harris squealed around a corner. She’d have to make three more turns to the runway entrance.

Next to the restaurant was a Shell station where a cattle truck was refueling. Tyler watched as the gyrating helicopter overshot the runway and headed straight for the gas station.

Harris stood on the brakes as the chopper struck the cattle truck dead center.

The Jetranger dissolved into a ball of fire. The truck driver, who had seen the chopper coming, sprinted across the road and dived into a ditch just before the truck’s own tanks went up.

“Get down!” Tyler shouted, and he and Harris flung themselves as low as they could get inside the car.

The gas station’s underground tank ignited, creating an enormous shock wave that blew out the Suburban’s windows, showering them with pellets of safety glass. Heat poured through the open space.

After a few seconds, the explosion dissipated, though chunks of charred and raw meat from the destroyed cattle truck rained down on the SUV, smacking into the roof and hood with wet splats.

Slowly, Tyler and Harris raised their heads and took in the abattoir that used to be the Shell station. The pumps were gone, and the store next to it was a smoldering hulk. Tyler knew it would take weeks to sort through the various body parts strewn around the area, cattle and human mixed together.

Harris picked up her phone and made a call. “Harris here,” she said, her voice quaking. “Send fire and ambulance units to Dorris Street and I-5. Forensic units, too. We need to search for Victor Zim’s body.”