Джеймс Паттерсон - Private Rogue

“I’ll go with you,” I said, but Justine shook her head and pulled me to one side.

“You’re going to rest, Jack. You and Captain Floyd must be running on fumes, and you’re no good to us exhausted.”

I looked at Sci, who smiled knowingly as he headed for the lab. Mo-bot and Jessie had already gone.

“You either trust your people to do right or you don’t,” Floyd observed. “Personally I could do with some shut eye.”

“We’ll get you set up somewhere,” Justine told him. “And the same goes for you, Jack Morgan.”

I was back in the mountains of Afghanistan, struggling for breath as I followed Joshua Floyd through the trees. He was running too fast for me to keep up, and seemed not to be bothered by the thin air. I was going to get left behind. I heard a furious sound behind me, the roar of some ancient, fearsome creature, and glanced over my shoulder to see two rockets tearing through the sky, propelled by hellfire. When I turned to look ahead, Floyd had gone, but how would I escape without him? I didn’t know where the cave was. I made it to the cliff face and pawed frantically at the rock, searching for the entrance, but I wasn’t going to make it. The rockets detonated and I was caught in the blast. I was tossed into the air and felt myself being consumed by the flames...

“Jack.” Justine’s voice cut through the nightmare. “Jack!”

I woke to find myself lying on her lap in the meeting room. I remembered she’d put me on the couch. She’d set my head in her lap and stroked my hair until I fell asleep.

“How long have I been out? I asked.

“Little over two hours,” she replied.

“How are your legs?” I said, sitting up.

“They’ve been better.” She stood and stretched them out. “What’s a little lost circulation? You’ve got a visitor.”

I glanced round to see Mo-bot at the door.

“We’ve got something you should see.”

I stood up and walked off the stiffness in my muscles. I could have done with another twenty-four hours’ sleep, but that was a luxury I wasn’t going to have for a while.

Justine and I followed Mo-bot through the quiet office. The lights were on energy save and most of the place was lost to shadows, which was just as well because my eyes were raw and struggled to adjust to the light.

We went through a security door into the corridor that led to the computer room. Another door and then we joined Jessie in a climate-controlled room full of servers and terminals.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

“I probably needed the rest,” I replied. “I do feel a little better for it.”

Mo-bot slid into the seat beside Jessie. Justine and I stood at her shoulder.

She opened an image file to reveal a photograph of a pale man with the puffy face of an alcoholic crowned by a mop of thick black hair. If he’d ever had a soul, it wasn’t on evidence in this photo. His eyes were windows to a cruel void.

“Konstantin Roslov,” Mo-bot said. “Colonel in the Russian Army before an honorable discharge. He went into commodities. Similar profile to Andreyev. Made a fortune buying up mining businesses that specialized in precious and heavy metals.”

Mo-bot opened a file window to show the website of the Roslov Fund, a venture capital firm.

“He used money from his industrial empire to start a venture fund that invested in businesses all over the world. Same as Andreyev. It’s a pattern. I think they figured out the way to beat capitalism is to get inside it. According to the CIA, the Roslov Fund is a front used to launder money to Russian-backed interests all over the world.”

“Where is he now?” I asked. “Still in Belarus?”

Mo-bot shook her head. “He’s dead, Jack.”

She opened a Russian newspaper article and ran it through Google Translate. It featured a long-distance photograph of a corpse under a sheet, surrounded by police officers. It looked as though they were in a scrap yard.

“His body was found in a recycling facility outside Minsk,” Mo-bot revealed. “The day after the raid on his house.”

“Punishment for carelessness?” I suggested.

“Whoever killed him removed his limbs. The Belarusian police believe they were amputated while he was alive,” Jessie said. “So it was either a punishment or a warning.”

“Or maybe both,” I remarked.

“Has Sci found anything?” I asked.

Mo-bot shook her head. “Not last time I checked.”

“Someone killed an entire unit of Green Berets and tore up Afghanistan looking for this thing,” I remarked. “Roslov was dismembered, likely as punishment for losing it. What’s so special about that figure?”

I studied Roslov’s photo, wondering why so much horror had been perpetrated in pursuit of such a mundane object.

“Keep digging,” I suggested. “We must be missing something.”

I left Jessie and Mo-bot and headed for the door. Justine followed me and we walked the short distance down the corridor to the forensic science lab. Justine swiped a key card and we stepped inside a laboratory that would have been the envy of any forensics specialist. I’d always invested in cutting-edge technology, and the spacious lab contained everything from a scanning electron microscope to flow cytometers to an X-ray machine. We could conduct most forensic scientific experiments within the confines of the room, and it looked as though Sci had made use of many of the machines. There were discarded consumables all over the workbenches. He stood on the other side of a protective screen, near the X-ray machine, busy studying an image on a monitor. Floyd was standing beside him. Both men turned when we entered.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Floyd said. “Didn’t seem right with Beth and the kids...” his voice trailed off. “Anyway, I wanted to see if I could help.”

“Anything?” I asked.

Sci shook his head. “I’ve treated it with chemicals, put it under the microscope, X-rayed the thing. It’s a perfectly normal bronze statue. And I’ve never hated a thing more.”

“Any chance the X-ray missed something?” Justine asked.

“It’s solid metal all the way through,” Sci replied. “No secret chamber. No concealed surfaces. Nothing abnormal in any of the reactions. It’s a copper — tin alloy with traces of other metals. There are no hidden markers...”

He stopped, clearly taken by an idea.

Sci grabbed the bull from the X-ray plate and hurried over to a bench at the back of the lab. “An optical microscope can enlarge the physical structure. We already checked for engravings or concealed codes carved into the bull...”

He went to a white box a little larger than a microwave and opened a door at the front of the device. “We didn’t find anything, but maybe we didn’t go deep enough.”

Sci put the bull inside the device, closed the door and activated a series of switches. The box was connected to a couple of monitors by a thick tube that looked a little like a high-tech drainpipe.

“This scanning electron microscope can see down to the atomic level. With it we can view each and every one of the copper and tin atoms that make up the surface of this thing.” Sci switched on the monitors and operated a rollerball mouse that seemed to control the resolution of the image onscreen.

An image of a tiny section of the bull filled the monitor. Sci adjusted it to a pin-sharp resolution. “I was on a flight once,” he said absently while he made fine tweaks to the machine settings. “I got to talking to the guy sitting next to me, and it turned out we were both due to be speaking at the same conference in Denver. Anyway, this guy was a physicist. He’d trained under Heinrich Kuhn, one of the guys on the Manhattan Project, and he told me how Kuhn had solved the problem of calculating the weight of uranium atoms. ‘You use light, my dear boy,’ was how he’d put it. Anyway, this physicist was gassing away about how light could be used to read and store data and...”