Page 31 of The Dauntless (Spy Girl 5)
“Okay,” he says.
“And don’t make plans for tomorrow night. You and Viktor are taking me and Blair to dinner.”
“Are you trying to kill me?” he says, dramatically putting his hands over his heart.
“No, I’m trying to do you a favor. She’s not married yet, Peter.”
“That is a good point,” he says, grinning.
I quickly touch up my hair and makeup and then change into a demure dress for the knighting ceremony. Although I have been to the Montrovian palace many times and felt comfortable there, I’m a little nervous about tonight.
Not that I have time to think about it. When William Gallagher picks me up in a beautiful Aston Martin, he starts right in.
“We need to talk about the case.”
“Shouldn’t you thank me for accompanying you and comment on how lovely I look first?” I ask.
He glances at me, rolls his eyes, and gives me a little bow. “You look lovely as usual, Contessa. Now, about our case.”
“There is no our case. I quit.”
“Well, your team hasn’t.”
“I don’t have a team. I was trained to work alone,” I stubbornly disagree.
“Fine. Let’s call them our team. Come on, ask me what they’re working on.”
“You’re like a little kid in a candy store, which means the team has discovered something important. Do you know what starts in Montrovia?”
“No, but we think we know who the mole in our agency is.” He hands me a photo. “This guy was pawing around Dupree’s house when it wasn’t his job to be there.”
“Do you know why he was doing that?”
“We believe he was looking for something important. You didn’t happen to take anything of interest, did you? Something that might be in your possession?”
“I might have. But it’s no big deal. Your government is already in possession of a matching one.”
“Are you talking about a weapon?” he asks, looking confused as he stops for a red light.
“No, it’s a ring. The one we saw at the museum.”
“Dupree had one like that?”
“Yes. I believe there are ten rings, passed down through time to an elite group started by Lorenzo the Magnificent, the first king of Montrovia. The owners of the rings were sort of his knights of the round table. I’m going to figure out who has the rings and destroy their secret society.”
“Sounds like you haven’t really quit,” he teases.
“I haven’t given up. I just am not taking orders from some other secret group who has done nothing but lie to me at every turn.” I sigh. “Except I still don’t know their plan for Montrovia or have any actionable proof that there even is a plan.”
“If you had to guess?”
“They are going to poison our food supply, possibly at the Olympics, and somehow significantly reduce the population of the world.”
“How significantly are we talking?” he asks.
“Like ninety-three percent dead significantly.”
Intrepid lets out a whistle. “That’s a pretty lofty goal. Gotta be nuclear. Food wouldn’t work. As soon as we established what was killing people, everyone would stop eating it.”
“We’re back to square one then.” I throw up my hands in frustration. “As I said, it’s all purely theoretical at this point.”
“So, ten bad guys—”
“Not exactly. Dupree told me Ares had a ring that would be given to my brother. There is a ring at the Victoria and Albert Museum and one in the Royal Montrovian Vault, and I have Dupree’s in my possession.”
“That leaves just six.”
“Based on my mom’s clue, we can assume McClellan and Hillford had rings. Hillford is dead. His son, Jack Junior, was killed, and he only has granddaughters, so I assume they will give it to someone else.” I also have been wondering if Malcolm and Aleksandr have rings, but I’m not ready to suggest that—not yet anyway—mostly because I don’t want it to be true.
“That leaves four or five. How hard could it be to figure out? We can track the whereabouts of the men who fit the profile through hotel, travel, and credit cards. We’ll start with McClellan and Hillford before he died and try to pull some possible names together.”
“That’d be some good busy work for your team. I’m going to work alone. There’s more. A lot more actually,” I say as we pull through the gates of Buckingham Palace.
“When were you going to tell me all this?” Intrepid snarls at me.
“I wasn’t going to tell you any of it. I can’t trust anyone. Honestly, I shouldn’t have even told you about the ring.”
“You need to give me the ring, so we can research it,” he orders.
“Get yours out of the museum. I need mine.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to do something stupid like show up at a bloody meeting and flash the ring in the hopes that you can waltz in and get these powerful men to tell you all their secrets.”
“Not at all,” I say with a smile. “I doubt they are as well trained as I am.”
“You’ve gone mad.”
“No, I’ve gone rogue. Just like my mom. Only I’m not planning to end up dead.”
I will admit that I looked up English knighting ceremonies on the internet, so I’d know what to expect. I saw photos of many celebrities getting knighted by members of the royal family, but this is different.
Of course, he wasn’t named in the papers, and due to his position with British intelligence, this won’t be public record either. The queen herself does the knighting but also in attendance are the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Sir John Sampson; the British Defense Secretary, Richard Barnett; and the Prime Minister.
I’ve been trying to decide what to do about the flash drive I was given at the Sphere, wondering how I can keep the world safe as well as make the VA board happy. I come to realize, everyone who could make it happen is here tonight.
A plan quickly forms in my head.
When Intrepid introduces me to those four important people, I ask if I could have a private audience with them after dinner, only letting them know that it has to do with my father’s company and a national security risk.
“What are you doing?” Intrepid asks, sitting down at dinner next to me. “You can’t waste their time with theories. I’ll get knighted and fired, all in the same day.”
“There’s a lot I still haven’t told you. I was in Iraq at the Sphere. The CIA is worried about a piece of technology that my father’s company wants to sell on the open market. Your government should be concerned, too.”
A glass is clinked and a toast is made in Sir William Gallagher’s honor, ending our conversation.
After dinner, the six of us retire to what appears to be the queen’s office.
The Chief doesn’t mince words. “I hope you aren’t wasting our time, Miss Von Allister.”
“Considering that I was the one you should have knighted tonight, I think you owe me the courtesy,” I reply, completely blowing my cover with these people. But I don’t know what else to do.
The man all but laughs in my face. And I get it. I’m a dumb girl in a designer dress.
Maybe I need to show him.
Faster than he can probably blink, I grab a letter opener off the queen’s desk and do two consecutive handsprings, landing directly in front of him with the point of the op
ener at his throat. His eyes widen in surprise, but before he can react, I do a backflip while throwing the opener across the room, hitting the hunting trophy above the fireplace directly between the eyes.
“I’m even better with a gun,” I quip, smoothing out the front of my dress. “I don’t think we need to get into all the gory details of what transpired at Marquis Dupree’s home, but it is because of me that your government recovered the nuclear backpacks. I’m only telling you that, however, so you will take me seriously. And I expect that no one will speak of it outside of this room.”
The queen sits down behind her desk and motions for me to sit in front of her.
“My biological father was Ares Von Allister. As I’m sure you know, a lot of his inventions help our countries’ militaries. You might not know that he designed something he called The TerraSphere. It’s basically an environmentally friendly city that is powered by quantum computing.
“A Sphere will house the Olympic athletes in Montrovia this summer and showcase the design to the world. Although he designed a lot of cool stuff, this was Ares’s life work. He first developed the idea before I was born, and a test Sphere was built in the Iraqi desert about seven years ago.
“This project, like many of his, was paid for through exclusive contracts with the United States government. That contract is now up for renewal. I was told by Mike Burnes, the director of the CIA, that it was a matter of national security that I vote to renew. Of course, he didn’t tell me the real reason.
“When I was at the Sphere, I discovered the answer to that question. It’s because of the quantum computing. Not because it’s unstable, but what it could be used to do if that part of the design got into the wrong hands.”
“This is a concern of all governments of the world,” the Prime Minister says, taking the chair next to me. “It could be used to destroy all our data encryption—from banking to military. If your father did indeed create this, I would second Director Burnes’s assessment.”
“My father was worried about it as well. He created a weapon he deemed The Sword. Using it as the point to attack the Sphere’s encryption, he was able to create a code it couldn’t decrypt, which he called The Shield. We will sell Spheres to the world with The Shield technology, but what I’d like to offer the British and American governments in a dual-exclusive contract is the ability to hack into any secure network anywhere in the world as well as set up your own infrastructures in a way that can’t be hacked before quantum computing becomes mainstream. I honestly have no idea what it’s worth to keep this technology to yourselves.”
