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The side door opened and closed. A car engine started outside the building, and Patrick could hear the vehicle pull away. Olga and Liu were gone. He was alone in the warehouse. It was time for action.
Patrick would call this episode, “Harry Potter and the Quest for the Rod of Steel.”
One end of the chain was fastened to a post. The other end coiled around his wrists and was secured behind his back with a padlock. His most comfortable position was seated with his back to the post, but the chain was long enough for him to lie flat on his back, if he could put up with the pain of a padlock pressed between his lower back andthe floor. He concentrated on making his spine as long as possible, taking up every millimeter of slack in the chain. With his body fully extended, he finally managed to brace the crown of his head against the post and plant his feet squarely on the front bumper of the nearest vehicle—the car on which the metal rod rested.
Patrick pushed with his legs and released. It was like doing leg presses at the Buck fitness center.Push. Release.He built a rhythm, and before long, the car was rocking like a baby carriage.
He heard the steel rod move. Liu had left it near the windshield. It had rolled forward, halfway down the hood, following the sloped design toward the front bumper. Patrick pushed harder, legs pumping and heart pounding. The worst-case scenario was that the rod would turn sideways and get caught in the slit between the hood and side panel. He couldn’t let that happen. He dug deep inside himself and pushed with all his leg strength. The rocking sensation built to a lurch, and Patrick heard the sweetpingof a steel rod hitting a concrete floor.
He stopped pumping, exhausted. The car was motionless. Patrick trapped the rod beneath the sole of his shoe and dragged it toward him. It required some contortion-like finagling, but he worked the prized rod all the way up along his leg and into his hands. He was almost giddy with excitement, until he realized that the hard part was still ahead of him.
Hard. But not impossible.
It had taken twenty minutes for a twelve-year-old Patrick to pick a lock with his bicycle spoke. Following the instructional video, he’d broken it into two pieces, one bent into the shape of an Allen wrench to apply tension to the wide base of the keyhole, like the flat edge of the key; the other bent at a forty-five-degree angle to “rake” the pins, like the jagged edge of the key.
This job would be no different, though it was his first attempt with his hands behind his back.
First time for everything.
Patrick snapped the rod in half and got to work.
Chapter 60
Christian Gamble spent the entire day on the Buck campus, exploring the depths of his own darkness.
The fact that certain Buck projects were dark to the CEO was not something Gamble talked about openly. The investment agreement with BJB Funding actually prohibited him from saying so publicly. But a twenty-year-old contract with the CIA’s venture capital arm was not the sole, or even most important, reason to keep quiet about the limitations on his security clearance. It was beyond embarrassing. His own daughter had found it shocking.
Willful blindness, Dad. It’s a corporate disease. Sometimes fatal.
His phone conversation with Noah had been short and to the point. “I need to know what I don’t know,” Gamble had told him. Noah balked and said he’d check with his supervisor. Gamble tired of waiting for a response. He showed up at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Judiciary Square to talk face-to-face, behind closed doors, just the two of them in Noah’s office.
“I’m sorry,” said Noah. “I can’t share any preliminary conclusions of my cybersecurity audit with you or anyone else outside the department.”
“I don’t want your ‘conclusions.’ I want to verify some facts with you. That’s your job, as auditor, correct? To base your decision on facts?”
“Of course.”
“Then stop squirming like the spineless wimp my daughter dumped and answer my questions.”
“You don’t have to make this personal.”
“My employee was kidnapped for ransom, and my daughter is risking her life, as we speak, to get him home. How is that not personal?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with my audit.”
“Can we just verify a few facts?Please?”
The “dumping” remark was harsh, but Gamble was in no mood to apologize. To his credit, Noah seemed willing to put it aside.
“Okay. I’m listening.”
“Buck has a project called Naïveté Two. It grew out of Project Naïveté.”
“I can’t talk to you about Naïveté Two. You don’t have clearance.”
“But I do have clearance to numerous operations that feed in to Naïveté Two.”
“How would you know what feeds in to Naïveté Two?”