James Becker - The Messiah Secret

He let his gaze rest for a few seconds on the bandage wound around Killian’s head, and the heavily padded area over the man’s left ear, then switched his attention back to the screen of his laptop.

‘You told anyone else about this?’ Killian demanded.

McLeod shook his head. ‘No, but a guy has to take precautions, if you know what I mean. So there’s more than one copy of what you got there — just in case that data gets lost or corrupted, that kind of thing.’ He leaned back in his chair, trying to look relaxed and in control. ‘So how does fifty grand sound for the data and all the copies?’ It was, he thought, a reasonable enough figure.

Killian’s smile didn’t get anywhere near his eyes. ‘Like about fifty grand too much, McLeod. I’ve got a much cheaper, and a whole lot more permanent, solution.’

He pulled a small semi-automatic pistol out of his jacket pocket, the weapon made ugly by the bulbous suppressor attached to the end of the barrel.

McLeod’s eyes bulged in terror, and he strained backwards in his seat. ‘Hey, man, don’t do this,’ he said, his voice shrill with panic. ‘I’ll deliver everything to you. You can have it all for free.’

‘You should have stuck to computers,’ Killian said, his eyes dark, his face expressionless. ‘You’d never make a blackmailer in a million years. You’re just an amateur, and not even a good one.’

‘But the other copies of the data — if I don’t make contact, my friends will-’

‘I’ll risk it, McLeod, and if your friends come knocking I’ll kill them too. This isn’t about the money. This is about security, about sealing loose ends. I have to make sure you won’t talk to anyone else about this.’

‘I won’t, I promise,’ McLeod said, standing up.

‘I know you won’t.’

The report of the pistol was little more than a cough, but McLeod’s body was flung backwards by the impact of the shot. His chair toppled over and he crashed to the floor, limbs splayed, his mouth opening and closing, his eyelids flickering.

Killian stood up and walked around the table to where his victim lay. The shot had taken McLeod almost in the centre of his chest, probably just missing his heart, but it was still a fatal wound.

Taking careful aim, he fired again. The bullet smashed into the left side of McLeod’s chest and bored straight through his heart. His body twitched once, then lay still.

Killian slipped the pistol back into his jacket pocket, and almost without thinking he touched his forehead lightly and then his chest three times, making the sign of the cross. He bent down and emptied the dead man’s pockets, then he turned away, picking up McLeod’s computer bag and the memory stick.

He had a lot to do, and now the clock was ticking.

‘Do you know this man?’

JJ Donovan shivered, and not just from the chill of the mortuary. Lying motionless on the table in front of him was a sheeted figure, only the head and face visible.

‘For the record, sir, can you please identify him?’

‘His name is. .’ Donovan paused and swallowed. ‘His name was Jesse McLeod. He worked for me. At NoJoGen.’

‘And that’s what, sir? Again for the record.’

‘NotJustGenetics Incorporated. It’s my company, here in Monterey. Why did you call me? He’s not a relative of mine. He just works — worked — for me.’

‘A business card bearing your company details was found in his possession. Calling you seemed a good place to start to try to get an ID on him.’

Donovan looked down at the face of the man he’d worked with for more than a decade.

‘How did it happen?’ he asked the police sergeant. ‘Where did you find him?’

‘A couple of guys in a patrol car spotted his body on a vacant corner lot in downtown Monterey. It looks as if he was mugged, because his wallet is missing.’

‘Did he have a bag with him? A computer bag, I mean?’

The sergeant shook his head. ‘No. Apart from a comb and a handkerchief, the only thing we found was the card. No bag, no wallet, no phone, no keys, even.’

‘But Jesse lived down near Carmel, and spent most of his spare time on the beach. If he went out in the evening, he normally stayed in Carmel because he didn’t much like Monterey. So what was he doing there?’ Donovan scratched his head. It was all too much to take in.

‘I can’t help you there, sir. What we seem to have is a mugging that went wrong, and the only unusual thing about it is the weapon used.’ The sergeant pointed down, at the sheeted corpse. ‘This body has two small-calibre bullet wounds in the chest. We won’t know for sure until the doc does the autopsy, but it looks like he was hit by a couple of point two-fives, maybe even twenty-twos. Most of the bad boys around here use thirty-eights or bigger. A twenty-two isn’t your usual mugger’s pistol of choice. It’s not a serious weapon.’

‘Maybe that’s all the criminal could find,’ Donovan suggested.

‘Maybe. Sometimes, a small-calibre gun could mean a professional hit, because with a suppressor fitted the weapon’s pretty near silent, but it doesn’t look like that was the case here.’

‘Why?’

‘Because a pro would go for a head shot every time. And this guy was shot in the chest.’

‘You said you didn’t find any keys on him either,’ Donovan said. ‘Could you do me a favour and send a car out to Carmel to check his apartment? He had a lot of expensive electronic equipment out there, and some of it belonged to my company. If the mugger took his keys, he might have burgled his home as well.’

‘We’ll do that today, sir, if you can give us the address. And do you know who his next of kin is?’

‘His parents live somewhere in Utah, I think,’ Donovan said, writing down the address of McLeod’s apartment in Carmel, together with his own mobile number. He passed them to the sergeant. ‘I’m going back to the office. Call me if you find anything.’

Donovan climbed back into his Porsche, started the engine — and just sat there, staring through the windscreen at the street ahead of him. So much had happened in such a short space of time. Two weeks earlier, McLeod had come to him with the first, tantalizing snippet of information. He’d found a report in a monthly magazine published in an English county called Suffolk about someone who was trying to raise money to fund an expedition to the Middle East to search for a lost treasure, a relic he’d referred to as the ‘treasure of the world’. The old man had been following some clues originally found by his father and, according to the magazine, he finally believed he had worked out where he should start his search.

That single expression — the ‘treasure of the world’ — had electrified Donovan, because he’d seen it before, in an entirely different context, and he believed he knew exactly what it referred to. That was why he’d turned to Jesse McLeod. If anyone could locate any other references to the man or his quest, he could.

And then there had been the report of the Englishman’s brutal death. Now McLeod was also dead; murdered in a way that didn’t seem to make sense. McLeod had clearly been murdered: Donovan was certain of that. This was no mugging.

Was there a connection here? That was one other thing that disturbed Donovan: he now knew he wasn’t the only person looking for the treasure. Suddenly, what had started out almost as an academic curiosity had turned into a dangerous race. But in spite of McLeod’s death, Donovan was determined to find the treasure first, no matter what it took — the potential rewards were simply too great to ignore.

He pulled out in to the busy morning traffic. The search had begun.