Sacred Stone

“What should I do then?” the man asked as he stared out the train window. The sign said Bedlington. He was thirty miles from his new stop.

“Make your way to this location in Maidenhead by rental car,” Hickman said, reading off an address, “and meet up with the rest of the team coming in from Calais.”

“Sounds great,” the man said.

“It will be,” Hickman agreed.

AT THE SAME time that Adams and Cabrillo were flying toward London, the Oregon was passing through the fifty-five-degree latitude, offshore of Newcastle upon Tyne. In his office, Michael Halpert was staring at a stack of documents he’d printed from the files Truitt had sent. Halpert was underlining sentences with a yellow highlighter when one of the computers in his office beeped and the printer started.

Halpert waited until the document was finished, then removed it and read.

The pictures Truitt had stolen had been matched on a U.S. military database. The face belonged to one Christopher Hunt of Beverly Hills, California. Hunt had been a captain in the U.S. Army until he had been killed in Afghanistan. Why did Halifax Hickman have a photograph of a dead soldier in his office? What possible tie could it have to the theft of the meteorite?

Halpert decided to dig deeper before contacting Hanley.

NEBILE LABABITI STARED at the bomb, bathed in the light from a flashlight, with glee. It was sitting on the floor in a ground-floor office/showroom on the Strand that was located below Lababiti’s apartment. The office had been vacant for the last few months, and Lababiti had jimmied the lock last week then changed it so he had the only key. As long as no one wanted to show the office in the next few days, he was home free.

The showroom had an overhead garage door for deliveries. The space was perfect for loading the bomb into a vehicle for the run down to the park. Out of sight, but with a fast exit. It was all coming together, he thought.

Turning off the flashlight, he slipped out the door and walked across the street to a pub near the Savoy Hotel. Then he ordered a pint and dreamed of death and destruction.

35

THE DATE WAS December 30, 2005. Bob Meadows and Eddie Seng were on the road to London. The traffic was thick and the roads were slick with rain. Seng adjusted the radio to receive a weather report, then listened as the announcer gave a detailed outlook. The dashboard of the Range Rover glowed in the dim light and the heater was blowing.

Seng clicked the radio off.

“Rain turning to sleet in the next hour,” he said. “How do people live here?”

“It’s dismal, that’s for sure,” Meadows said, staring out at the growing darkness, “but the people are surprisingly upbeat.”

Seng ignored the comment. “Friday-night traffic,” he said, “people must be going into London for the shows or something.”

“I’m surprised Mr. Hanley has not called back yet,” Meadows said.

After leaving the pub, Meadows had called in to report their findings.

“The Oregon’s probably in some rough seas right about now,” Seng said as he slid to a slow crawl behind a line of traffic that stretched for miles ahead.

IT WAS COLD on the North Sea, but not as rough as it could have been. The storm that was advancing from the north was laying down the seas and, other than a ten-degree decrease in temperature in the last hour, those on board the Oregon

had noticed little change.

Belowdecks in the Magic Shop, Kevin Nixon was actually warm. The last few days he had been working on Al-Khalifa’s recovered satellite phone. The unit had been immersed in seawater when his body had been thrown overboard. Since the thermal vents had bloated the body quickly and it had floated to the surface with the phone still in the pocket, the insides had not had a chance to corrode much.

Nixon had taken the unit apart and cleaned it thoroughly. But when he reassembled the phone it still did not work. He’d decided to bake the chip boards in a small toaster oven to make sure that all trace of moisture was gone. Removing the parts from the oven carefully with medical forceps, he reassembled the unit then added the freshly charged battery.

The unit lit up and the message icon flashed.

Nixon smiled and reached for the intercom.

HANLEY AND STONE had been working on Seng and Meadows’s information. They had managed to hack into the British Motor Vehicles Registry and match a name and address with the motorcycle license plate. Then they ran the information on Nebile Lababiti through a different database and located bank information and his visitor visa information. Stone was cross-checking everything now.

“His rent checks don’t match the address he gave passport control,” Stone noted. “I ran the name of the building his rent checks are made out to through a mapping program and found the location. He told passport control he lives in the Belgravia section of London. The building he pays rent to is a few miles away, near the Strand.”