Where the titanium transponder key was held between my fingers, its cryptographic LED beacon pulsing with a steady, rhythmic, blood-red sixty-cycle heartbeat against my knuckles.
Carter stopped breathing.
His pupils dilated until the pale blue of his irises vanished completely into black.
His jaw dropped open, a string of gray saliva hanging from his lip, his manicured hands beginning to shake with a violent, spastic palsy that rattled his platinum Patek Philippe against the mahogany table:
*tick-tick-tick-tick.
*
“The… the key…” Carter whispered.
The word was paper-thin.
It was the dry, whistling rasp of an ancient mechanical pump seizing from lack of hydraulic oil:
“The Sovereign Key… where did you get that key?!”
I walked into the center of the boardroom.
My boots left dark, wet tracks across the eighty-thousand-dollar Persian silk rug that Nick had purchased with our agency’s profit-sharing pool last December.
