The Lost Secret Read online

  Mary paddled firmly, heading even farther out to sea. She was already well beyond the surfers. There was one other paddleboarder up, but he wasn’t close to her, but nearer shore between the surfers and bathers.

  Maddox frowned. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint—

  He saw it, then—them, rather. It was a school, no, a pod of killer whales, or orcas. They were big, black and white, and cavorting with each other out beyond a line of sailing and private fishing boats.

  The killer whales usually weren’t dangerous to the boaters. In fact, people lined the boats’ farther gunwales, watching the sporting orcas, recording the play on their phones. Would the lack of danger hold true for an older lady paddleboarding among the killers?

  “Damn it,” Maddox whispered.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Without looking, Maddox handed Meta the binoculars. He stood, and asked the seeming air, “Galyan. Can you hear me?”

  The little Adok holoimage that haunted Victory didn’t respond. It was possible the starship presently orbited the other side of the planet.

  “Galyan,” Maddox said, “this is an emergency. Please respond.”

  Meta lowered the binoculars. “It isn’t really an emergency,” she said.

  “Wrong. Look again, more closely this time.”

  Once more, Meta raised the binoculars.

  “One of the orcas is heading toward her,” Maddox said.

  “…Oh,” Meta said a moment later. “Yes. You’re right. I hadn’t noticed before.”

  Maddox’s gut seethed. He didn’t even have a communicator. He had a knife in the bag, but no communicator or gun.

  “Maddox,” his wife said, sounding relieved. “Someone on a boat sees her.”

  Without asking, he grabbed the binoculars. Concern for his grandmother overrode his normal politeness toward his wife.

  Meta must have understood, for she watched him with concern.

  Maddox trained the binoculars on Mary, on the orca and then on the motorized sailboat swinging around toward her. He saw a muscular man in an open yellow shirt and shorts at the wheel, and two others with rifles. Something about them—

  They’re professionals, he realized, Intelligence agents or military men.

  Maddox lowered the binoculars, thinking. Could this be a setup? Would Intelligence agents wait for killer whales to appear near a beach and hope one headed for the ex-Iron Lady out paddleboarding? Did that mean his grandmother had been hearing voices again?

  Maddox raised the binoculars a second later, studying the boat heading for his grandmother and then focusing on the lone orca.

  “No,” he whispered, slowly lowering the binoculars.

  Meta stared at him as she bit her lower lip.

  Maddox blinked several times before facing his wife. “There’s a receiving unit embedded in the whale’s upper blubber.” He’d just seen that through the binoculars.

  Meta frowned, shaking her head, perhaps not understanding the significance of what he said.

  “Someone is guiding the orca,” Maddox said, “guiding it straight at my grandmother.”

  -2-

  Maddox’s mind clicked into high gear. This was a setup, most likely to kidnap his grandmother, or possibly to kill her. He could swim out there with his knife, but that would take far too long. No. He’d never make a difference that way, only effectively take himself out of play.

  There was nothing he could do if the orca was supposed to eat his grandmother. He would therefore operate on the assumption this was a kidnapping or that the agent at the wheel was part of this. That meant—

  Maddox swore as he pivoted and broke into a sprint. Galyan was out of reach. He lacked a rifle—

  Meta’s voice drifted from behind him. She must have shouted at him.

  Maddox looked back over a shoulder. Meta remained on the beach, with the binoculars raised as she watched Mary O’Hara.

  Good girl, Maddox thought. Then he used all his concentration for sprinting. He raced up the beach, onto the grassy area of the condominiums and toward the parking lot in back, his bare feet scarcely registering the hot pavement. He ran faster than an Olympic sprinter, blowing past people.

  Some of them turned to stare at him in amazement.

  Maddox lowered his head, gnashing his teeth in frustration as he saw a moving car enter the parking lot. Good. That was just what he needed. The car—a sports model—eased into a parking spot, stopped and shut down. It was an electric vehicle. The driver’s side door opened—

  Maddox reached the car, ripped the door out of the rising man’s hand, grabbed the man by the shirt and threw him out, snatching the keys as a hand flew past.

  “Hey!” the man shouted from the blacktop.

  A woman shrieked, still sitting in the passenger-side seat, frozen in shock as she stared at Maddox.

  Maddox slid into the car—

  “No you don’t,” the man said. He jumped up and fast-drew and aimed a small-caliber pistol at Maddox’s head.

  “No,” Maddox muttered, glancing at the gun. It had a ridiculously snub barrel. He concentrated and moved with lightning speed, ripping the gun from the man before the other could fire. He shoved the man back down and dropped the pistol onto his lap, turning to the mouth-gaping woman. “Get out!” he roared.

  The woman screamed again, beginning to cry as she opened her door and practically fell onto blacktop.

  Maddox inserted the key, turning on the power. He slammed the driver-side door closed, grabbed the wheel and with a bare foot pressed the accelerator to the floorboard. The tires squealed as the car jerked and swerved out of the parking spot.

  All the while, the captain kept thinking about the orca approaching his grandmother, and the three armed men closing in with the powered sailboat.

  Gritting his teeth, with his hands tight around the wheel, Maddox swerved and raced for the street.

  ***

  Twenty-nine and a half agonizing minutes later, Maddox’s car squealed to a stop before a lowered gate, the closed entrance to a Star Watch defense facility. He turned to the guard in the booth, a young marine who nevertheless recognized him.

  “Captain Maddox,” the marine said.

  “It’s an emergency.”

  The marine pressed a button, and the gate began to rise.

  “Call ahead!” Maddox shouted. “Tell them I’m taking my flitter.”

  “I will, sir.”

  The gate rose high enough and Maddox sped onto the local defense facility. Its primary feature was a surface defense gun, a big domed emplacement three hundred meters back. When the dome opened like an astronomy observatory, a heavy fusion cannon would poke out. It was in case of a massed fleet invasion. In front and around the huge dome was a tarmac.

  Maddox’s electric sports car already raced across it.

  A siren began to blare. A battlesuited marine clomped into sight, waving an armored arm at someone unseen.

  Seconds later, Maddox skidded to a stop, jumped out of the car and dashed to a parked flitter. It was a small two-seater, with a clear plastic dome cover. Meta and he had arrived in Maui aboard it.

  Maddox pressed his right-hand thumb against a small square on the driver’s side door. The lock clicked open. He tore open the door, ducked under the clear dome and slid into the driver’s seat. With the combined touch of his foot on the floorboard and his thumb on the ignition switch, the thing purred into life.

  As the flitter warmed up, with its anti-gravity pods clicking into life, Maddox reached over the seat to a hidden compartment in back. He flipped open the compartment and stared in horror at the empty slot. His Hi-Powered Khislack .370 was missing.

  With a snarl, he faced forward and ripped out the little pistol he’d tucked against the band of his swimming trunks, the one he’d taken from the man. It was a pathetic weapon, a civilian piece firing .32-caliber bullets. He counted a measly four of them.

  Are you kidding me? Four damn shots.

  He jammed the t
oy pistol back under the waistband and slammed his door shut. Then, hearing the anti-grav pods purring, he launched into the air.

  ***

  He tried the dash comm in order to alert Star Watch what was happening. He heard a growling sound from it, which meant that someone was jamming communications. That confirmed his worst suspicions. He should have taken an extra ten seconds to speak to the guard. Well, he hadn’t—

  Because I’m not thinking, he realized. This was his grandmother, his only blood relation in the Commonwealth. She meant everything to him. Maddox gripped the flight controls with manic force. If they harmed his grandmother…if she was already dead…

  A moment of intensity threatened his vision. He snarled, shook his head and forced himself to act logically and professionally as he always did—usually did.

  The flitter sped a bare fifty meters over residential streets and buildings. That was against regulations, but Maddox couldn’t have cared less about that. He saw ocean blue as he flashed over the condominium complexes.

  Luckily, he had excellent spatial awareness, turning in his mind what he normally saw from ground level into something he could use from the air. He couldn’t do it as well as Lieutenant Keith Maker might—

  “Boats,” he spat, seeing the general line of them out to sea. He looked down and was sure he spied Meta, a tanned woman in a bikini waving at him and pointing out to sea. Yes. That was Meta. She—

  Maddox followed the line of her pointing finger. Something—

  “No killer whales,” Maddox whispered. “They’re gone.”

  The realization went through him with a cold and then warm shock. Had the one orca eaten the Iron Lady, and had the three armed men shot the beast? That might have spooked the rest of the pod.

  Maddox took the flitter lower, scanning the sea… Meta had pointed farther, as in something—

  Maddox’s head snapped up as he scanned—there it was. He spied the motorized sailboat he’d seen earlier. Had Meta seen the men kidnap his grandmother?

  The flitter sped across the sea, zooming in on the watercraft. It had a tall main mast, with the sail secure against it. A large outboard motor drove the vessel as it picked up speed. The bow cut through the sea, but it was beginning to rise and fall with the growing swells. He saw one of the muscular men, but there was no sign of Mary O’Hara.

  At that point, his dash comm activated.

  “Captain Maddox,” a deep rich voice said.

  Maddox had to concentrate to understand. “Lord High Admiral?” he asked, stunned.

  “Yes,” Cook said.

  “Admiral,” Maddox said excitedly, perhaps the most excitedly that he’d ever spoken to the commanding officer of Star Watch. “Kidnappers have the Iron Lady—Mary O’Hara.”

  “I’m quite aware of that, Captain.”

  Maddox judged the approaching boat as he pressed a switch that caused the plastic canopy to open. He pulled out the toy pistol and gathered himself in his seat.

  “Are you listening to me?” Cook asked.

  Maddox heard the Lord High Admiral, but he couldn’t really say that he was listening to Cook. The captain was judging speeds, distances and possibilities.

  “Captain,” Cook said. “I know all about your grandmother.”

  The last barely penetrated the captain’s consciousness. He understood, but he was too involved and caught up in the moment.

  “You’ve been pestering my office for weeks,” Cook said. “You’ve been asking why I don’t reinstate the Iron Lady—”

  Maddox clicked off the dash comm as rage washed through his mind. Yes. He’d been agitating for his grandmother’s reinstatement as the head of Star Watch Intelligence. He had possibly gone too far in several of his conversations with the Lord High Admiral. If that meant Cook had arranged this little affair to give him an object lesson as to his grandmother’s diminishing abilities—

  “No,” Maddox told himself. Someone attempted to trick him. Whoever had originally jammed his comm had activated Plan B, which was to sound like Admiral Cook and order him away.

  “Not going to work,” Maddox said.

  The flitter neared the fleeing boat. Maddox took his two-seater even lower so it kicked up droplets of seawater as it passed. He throttled back speed at the last moment and saw a second man appear from the lower quarters of the boat. The man carried a rifle as he’d seen earlier.

  “An object lesson, my ass,” Maddox said, referring to the Cook-sounding individual.

  The flitter reached the boat. Maddox sprang like a jungle cat. It was an athletically graceful move. He cleared the flitter, sailed over the boat’s railing and landed upon the deck. He had forward momentum, and there was no way he could contain it. So, Maddox didn’t bother to try. Instead, he redirected, catapulting against the man with the rifle, crashing against him and sending the man flying.

  The man disappeared down steps, no doubt crashing into the galley. Maddox climbed to his feet, bruised but far from out. With the pistol in his hand, he dashed upon the cabin and raced at the man steering the boat.

  The man was young, with red crew-cut hair and a scar across his upper nose. He wore an open yellow shirt and shorts that showed off six-pack abs and muscled limbs. The man’s brown eyes widened as he watched Maddox ascend.

  The man spoke fast and smoothly: “Listen carefully if you want to see your grandmother alive—”

  Maddox was beyond listening to threats and blandishments, reaching the man, jamming the pistol against the man’s mouth, breaking teeth to shove the stubby barrel as far as it would go as he grabbed the back of the man’s head.

  “Where is she?” Maddox snarled.

  The man’s shocked eyes showed pain, although he managed to shake his head.

  Maddox fired so a single .32 caliber bullet ejected in a spray of blood and bone out of the back of the man’s head. The captain whirled around, letting the dead body collapse behind him.

  Despite the sound of gunfire ringing in his ears, Maddox spied a rifle barrel poking up through the open area over the stairs. He leapt for the opening, firing again, down this time.

  The second opponent ducked even as he fired the rifle. Ducking caused him to miss the captain. Before he could fire the rifle a second time, a plunging Maddox connected against his chest feet-first. They both careened down the stairs, thumping against the narrow walls and steep steps. Maddox kept the other under him, sledding the last part until they thudded to a halt on the narrow, carpeted aisle.

  The man groaned in agony.

  Maddox stared at him—rage erupting like a volcano—and shot the man in the face. As Maddox rose, a side panel slid open, and his grandmother stumbled into the narrow aisle, thudding against the opposite wall.

  Obviously, someone had just shoved her.

  “I’m aiming at her head,” a man shouted from the side room.

  Maddox noted a long needle hanging point-first from his grandmother’s left arm. Some of the solution was still in the syringe. Something about that ignited the wolf in Maddox, turning the already raving beast into something even darker and more sinister.

  “Do you hear me?” the unseen man shouted.

  Maddox winked at his grandmother, hoping to calm her.

  She seemed confused, with her pupils dilated. Her mouth opened as if she would speak, but it seemed as if she didn’t know what to say. Earlier this morning, when she’d started on the paddleboard, she’d been fully lucid.

  “I’m not going to warn you again,” the unseen man shouted.

  “What did you inject into her?” Maddox asked in a voice he hardly recognized.

  “Hey, calm down, Captain. No one harmed her permanently. You and I, and your grandmother, we can all get out of this in one piece.”

  Maddox crept forward, straining to see where exactly the bastard stood.

  “Brigadier Stokes is running the operation,” the man said. “I answer to him.”

  Stokes ran Star Watch Intelligence, had been ever since Mary stepped down. Stokes a
nd Maddox hadn’t always gotten along, but not for a moment did Maddox believe that Brigadier Stokes had anything to do with this.

  “Do you need to call the Brigadier?” the man asked.

  “Yes,” Maddox said.

  “Go ahead. I’ll wait.

  “I don’t have a communicator.”

  “Captain, let’s be reasonable, I’m not going to let you trick me into giving you—”

  Maddox took two swift steps, seeing the machine-pistol-wielding man pointing his weapon at Mary. Maddox proved considerably faster, firing his last bullet before the man touched his trigger.

  He slumped to the floor, shot in the head but still getting off several rounds at the end. One slammed into Mary, who also slumped, her neck spurting with blood as she began to twitch and shake on the floor.

  -3-

  Maddox rode in the back of a medical air-van with his grandmother. Medics had strapped her to a gurney and supplied her with blood. She’d lost quite a bit while waiting in the sailboat. Maddox had stanched some of the bleeding, his first-aid job unable to stop the wound from soaking the bandages.

  The captain knelt beside her, holding her right hand and stroking her sweaty forehead. He looked up at the nearest medic.

  The woman nodded with encouragement.

  “You’re going to be fine,” Maddox whispered to his grandmother. “The bullet only creased your skin.”

  Mary’s eyes opened as she stared into his eyes. “Don’t lie to me. I felt it go into flesh and exit.”

  “A scratch,” he said. “You’ll be back paddleboarding tomorrow.”

  She smiled sadly. Her eyes had more awareness than earlier. The medics had checked the syringe. It had held traces of the concoction the last man had injected into her. The mix would have made Mary open to suggestions, unable to think for herself.