The Last Second (A Brit in the FBI #6)(63)

Nicholas asked, “Could she be somewhere else on the campus?”

“She could, but all her work is here, in the headquarters building. No, the campus is shut down, and that includes our manufacturing buildings.”

They left the security center and walked into the grand lobby, its walls pristine white. Mike looked toward the winding upward ramps. She said, “I thought this was familiar. It’s like the Guggenheim museum in New York. Very nice, Jean-Pierre.”

He grinned at her. “Yes. Now look up.”

Mike stared at the huge model of the solar system hanging from the blackened ceiling, obviously representing the vastness of space. It was amazing.

“All of you, follow me. We must get to my office. With any luck, we’ll find out Nevaeh doesn’t have anything to do with this.” They rode a near-silent elevator to the top floor.

Loyalty, Nicholas thought, when you believed in the loyalty of a person, it was hard to let go, to accept betrayal.

Broussard said, “I haven’t been here in a few months. Like I said, I work from the boat—worked, that is. Nevaeh’s office is adjacent to this one. Feel free to look in, though don’t be surprised by her seeming chaos. To gain access to her computer, we will need an override from mine. The entire campus can be controlled from my system. I’ve never felt fully comfortable ceding control to an IT department. They run most things on campus, but the mainframe has a separate control from here.”

He swung open the office doors and gestured them inside. Lights immediately came on. The room fit with the rest of the building: white, anonymous, except for large color photographs of the various rockets and a number of shots of Earth from different angles in space.

Mike went to the adjoining office—Broussard wasn’t kidding, it was chaos. Books and papers stacked sky high, covering the desk, chairs, bookshelves. Broussard soon joined her.

“How does she find anything?”

He shrugged. “She knows where everything is, and gets very, very angry if anyone messes with her things.”

“Can you give us access to her computer now? Our people will search it remotely. Oh, yes, I’m going to need to set up a secure call.”

“Certainly. You can use my conference room. It’s right through there.”

He pointed to a door off his own office, across the expanse of clean white room. She felt better immediately being out of Nevaeh’s office. She couldn’t imagine existing in such a mess.

Mike saw a triptych of paintings showing the Grail legends on the far wall of the conference room. Compared to everything else in the room—no, the entire building—they were old-fashioned. She stopped to study them.

Broussard said, “We’re not sure who painted these. Even though they’re unsigned, I’m betting it was Arthur Hughes. He did paintings of Galahad. To me it stands to reason he would do some of Parzival, the Grail knight who features in Wolfram’s story of the Heaven Stone—the Holy Grail. Beautiful, aren’t they? I found them only two years ago. They’d been hidden away in a private collection.”

“Yes, they’re lovely.”

“They represent perfectly what I salvaged from the Flor de la Mar,” he said simply. They were golds and greens on parchment, the first showing a black sphere, large enough for a man to step inside, the second the sphere cracking open and heaven’s light escaping, and the third, a greenish-black stone, the size of a man’s hand, rising from the split in the black sphere, just out of the grasp of a man in a suit of armor.

The people in the painting watched in awe, their faces turned to the light. How could it be possible? Mike wondered. But the evidence was staring her in the face.

He said, “I’ve always thought the Heaven Stone—the Holy Grail—was made of moldavite, a rare substance created by meteor strikes. But oddly enough, when I held the stone in the palm of my hand, it was very light, weighed almost nothing. I’d given Devi a necklace made of moldavite stones the night she—” He broke off, quickly walked away.

One more thing Mike needed to learn about now—moldavite.

She heard Nicholas and Grant come into the conference room and start peppering Broussard with questions about Nevaeh. She tuned them out and put in her earbuds. She didn’t want Broussard listening to the other end of the call.

She opened her laptop, scrambled her phone, hooked into its encrypted secure signal. Adam’s face popped up on her screen, looking very serious indeed.

“Where are you?”

“At the Galactus headquarters, in Broussard’s conference room. What’s wrong? Gray said there was an issue.”

“We have an idea of what might be going on. Is Nicholas with you?”

“Yes, and Grant and Broussard. What’s happening?”

“We found two photos of Nevaeh Patel, Kiera Byrne, and a terrorist named Khaleed Al-Asaad. Both times they were in Corsica. You’ve heard of him, right?”

“Holy crap, you’re kidding me. That bloodthirsty, murdering terrorist Al-Asaad is still alive? He’s involved?”

“Yep.”

Gray’s face came onto the screen. Adam had looped him into the chat.

Gray said, “The photos were taken in Corsica in 2015 and 2016. Listen to this: We know Kiera Byrne flew to Boise in 2015. The Boise field office has contacted the local authorities and they’re looking again at the death of Dr. Linton, the scientist from the Idaho Research Facility. The original ruling was murder-suicide. Linton killed his wife then himself.