He was surprised at how much the first-class ticket cost, not that it mattered, since the credit card was false, anyway. Besides, he needed the privacy of the seat on the overnight flight.
Once he had the ticket booked, he dug into his backpack—glasses, a baseball cap, and a blond wig, plus a set of cheek inserts altered the basic structure of his face. He was ready to go through security at JFK despite the FBI’s facial-recognition technology at the airports. He was completely safe since Thomas Wren didn’t exist, and wouldn’t be in their system.
Adam rarely flew, opting instead to drive, but there was no other way to get to Scotland, to the submarine, and the key. To stop this whole mess before it got out of hand entirely.
At ten thousand feet, he brought out his laptop. Normally, he never hooked into a plane’s wireless system—their networks were of the least secure he’d ever seen—but he had no choice. There was work to be done, work he hoped would keep Sophie safe, and allow him to stop whoever in the Order was working with Havelock. Havelock’s father, Wolfgang, had been a decent man, Adam’s father had always told him, smart and loyal to the Order, loyal to a fault. But his son had been raised by his mother, insane, Adam had heard, confined to an asylum for twenty years before she’d died. Though a brilliant scientist, Dr. Manfred Havelock was nothing like his father. He was very likely as mad as his mother, a fetishist, obsessed with the Order, even though he wasn’t a member.
Adam needed to see how far things had progressed in the past twenty-four hours, since he located the sub, a German U-boat Victoria, and told his father, so proud and happy, he’d done a little dance.
If Havelock was behind his father’s murder, and Adam was sure he was, well, he couldn’t, wouldn’t, let him get away with it. Would he kill him? The thought settled deep inside him, it felt right. It would be justice, it had to be right.
But before he planned how to kill Havelock, he had another plan to implement, a plan to make Havelock want to kill himself.
He hummed as he broke through Manheim Technologies’ sophisticated firewalls, not a problem, since he’d designed most of the codes that had gone into building the firewall systems in the first place. These legitimate jobs paid the rent and allowed him quite a bit of freedom. The companies he worked for had no idea he was the notorious hacker Eternal Patrol. Nor did any of them know he’d built separate back doors on all of his jobs, which allowed him unfettered access at any time. He didn’t abuse this privilege, it was more insurance than anything else. But it was time to see what was really happening.
He accepted a cup of coffee from the flight attendant, slipped on his headphones, and went to work. He’d see how Havelock liked having his world dismantled, file by file, before he killed the bastard.
—
WHAT ADAM LEARNED from Havelock’s private files chilled him to the bone. Havelock’s technological advances in nano-biotech were astounding, far beyond anything Adam had even heard of in a theoretical way.
One of the things Havelock had managed to develop was a brain implant that allowed for real-time observation and audio. It would change the face of stealth intelligence, and if it ever made it out into the private sector, there’d be no such thing as privacy left.
But by far the more serious and frightening files hinted at a miniaturized nuclear weapon, a mini-nuke, so small as to be undetectable, which could be put in place by a remote human-controlled camera, and go anywhere, anytime, into any country, any stadium, any park, any government building. They could assassinate heads of state in the blink of an eye.
Incredible. Havelock was developing personally targeted nuclear weapons.
There was even research into theoretical DNA-driven bomb plans—ones that would only explode when in the hands of the target, utilizing an instant DNA check to ensure the recipient’s identity.
He’d never seen anything so scary in his life. Especially when he took into account the key to Marie’s weapon the Order wanted to find and destroy. To keep the world safe.
From all he’d seen, Havelock wasn’t only going after the weapon the Order had been trying to locate for the past hundred years, he was planning to overthrow the entire Order, planting his own people to coerce the other members to do what he ordered, until he could get rid of them. He’d killed his own father, why not Alfie Stanford? Yes, of course he had. His assault had begun and now all he needed were Adam’s coordinates to the lost U-boat.
The Order. No, the Highest Order, the group’s original formal name. Adam’s father had steeped him in its long, tortuous history, beginning with its inception at the end of Queen Anne’s reign. Powerful men in England did not want to see the Catholic Jacobites bring back bloody revolution to England. They formed the Highest Order to help quash the Jacobites, and succeeded. And once their initial goal of keeping the Catholics off England’s throne was accomplished, they moved on; their goal, to keep England safe. His father talked about one of their biggest failures in the nineteenth century, the needless bloody war in the Crimea—and one of their successes—their discovery that Jack the Ripper was one of Queen Victoria’s family—and they’d ensured he was confined since he couldn’t be arrested, all the proof still in the old files, kept under lock and key.
After World War I, the Order became a multinational group of fifteen high-powered men whose primary goal was to maintain the safety and security of the world by helping countries avoid wars and other destabilizing events. Adam knew if Havelock managed to take over the Order, he would pervert all the Order’s goals. He would also be in a position to take down all world powers—whether they were on his side or against him.
His father was gone. It was up to Adam to make sure Havelock’s plan didn’t happen. He must protect the Order, protect its legacy—his legacy. And now he, a nineteen-year-old hacker, was charged with being their hero. Him, Superman. He thought about himself in tights and laughed.
Adam didn’t leave cyberspace until the six-hour flight was nearly over. He’d drunk five cups of coffee, his fingers were jittery and sore, his body hopped up on caffeine and adrenaline and fury. He’d done some of the most beautiful work of his life, and Havelock’s world would never be the same. He’d actually amazed himself. He’d captured all the data from Havelock’s computers and encoded it, sending it back into the system with line after line of bugged code. Adam now owned everything Manheim Technologies had on their databases. Havelock would have to back off or Adam would sell it off to the highest bidder.
He sat back in the luxurious seat and shut his eyes for a moment, resting them from the glare of the screen. He was good, he knew that, better than good, but still, he needed a fail-safe. Something to insulate the data he’d assembled and destroyed. This was bigger than his concerns of going to jail, of never seeing the light of day again.
He opened his e-mail, and wrote a single line of code. He then created a false e-mail account, and filled out his father’s e-mail address. He knew the FBI were in control of his father’s accounts, and that Drummond character had close ties to the Order, no matter he didn’t realize it. Drummond would see this e-mail, if he was looking hard enough.
It was all Adam could think to do under the circumstances. He could not, would not, allow the Order to be compromised, nor, he realized, could he let the Order’s existence come to light, every media outlet in the world would tear them apart, blame them for everything that had gone wrong, not even realizing the Order had always endeavored to keep things in check. Without the members of today’s Order, scattered across the globe, the world would be in far worse shape than anyone could imagine.