Soon thereafter, Birmingham Bytes went out of business and its assets were sold to pay off their debts. Little did anyone know that MedusaNet would be sold to Molyneux, a terrorist at large who had stolen from everybody from MI-6 to the CIA and everyone in between.
The other shoe dropped when Kelvin learned that the network he had been hired to test and protect was none other than MedusaNet.
He had no choice but to do what Aspasia wanted. She threatened to kill his mother. Even though she was dying of cancer, Kelvin wanted to give her the best end-of-life care ever.
After Aspasia let him go home for his mother’s funeral, he sold the beach house, breaking even, and tried to return the money to Aspasia. She wouldn’t take it.
She simply wouldn’t take it back.
If he had…
If only…
Nah.
Hindsight could not save him now. “I reaped what I sowed.”
Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
Galatians 6:7 couldn’t help him now. The deed had been done.
In fact, Aspasia had threatened him with death if he went to the authorities.
There was no way Kelvin could go to the police at all. He would end up implicating himself. That company, Birmingham Bytes, no longer existed. It had served its purpose, and now was absorbed into the MedusaNet systems.
Too late.
“Everything is too late.” Kelvin sighed as rain fell on the roof.
He opened his eyes and jumped out of bed. He gathered up a few cups and a can, opened the window slightly and placed the chipped cups and dented cans on the window sill. Rainwater dripped into the cups.
“Thank you, God, for water.” Kelvin stuck his head out, and washed his hair in the rain.
The night was dark and he could not see beyond the dim moonlight. He prayed that nobody saw his face out here.
Outside his windows were rows of tiled roofs—red during the day—stretching all the way to the Vltava River, or at least the street in front of it.
The rain beat down noisily, and he could not hear the city tonight. The music festival had just started a day or two ago. Sometimes during the day, he could hear music and the crowd, though he could not see Charles Bridge from here, five blocks away.
There was music, festivities, food…
Kelvin’s stomach rumbled. He reached out for one of the dirty cups. There was already half an inch of water in there. He poured it into another cup. And did so with the other cups until he had one cup of water.
“Diet dinner.” He chuckled.
Chapter 2
Two days after she quit from the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service, Mossad assassin Yona Epstein found herself in Prague, gliding up a flight of stone stairs, hugging the shadows of darkness under cracked windows blaring a cacophony of classical and pop.
Every now and then voices—television?—interspersed with “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” that eighties song from the British pop band, Tears for Fears.
Yona’s gloved fingers tracked the uneven walls of a row of buildings, sweat forming on her palm. May wasn’t the time of year for her to wear kevlar under her black shirt and hooded denim jacket, but she had to blend in with the Mozart crowd at the music festival a block away while waiting for the locator software to work—although her kevlar-reinforced backpack would have given her away had anyone taken the time to study her movements.
It had taken over ninety minutes, but it worked. And just in time too, as the rain that fell heavily across Prague finally slowed down. When Yona received Kelvin Gallagher’s location, she was on the wrong side of Charles Bridge, but made a mad dash across the river from Malá Strana to Old Town.
If Mossad found out that she had paid some people to hack into the Metsada field network in Prague in order to track the USA Central Intelligence Agency operatives hunting down Kelvin, the unit commander would come looking for her. She’d have a lot to answer for, especially when she was no longer a katsa, the field agent she had dreamed of since high school and achieved before she was thirty.
And now all that went out the window because she had decided not to rest until she tracked down Kelvin, the hacker responsible for putting her mentor in the crosshairs of the terrorist, Molyneux.
Kelvin handed a veteran Mossad agent over to the terrorists, and the Mossad wasn’t going to do anything about it.
Or did he?
Yona hadn’t been a hundred percent sure that Kelvin was complicit in the situation until Reuel pointed all fingers at him.
Yona had no reason not to believe Reuel. Next to Issachar, Reuel was the only other person in the entire Mossad Yona trusted with his life.
Sure, Molyneux had been captured alive and was now standing trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague in the Netherlands, but she had left an anonymous successor who had rebuilt their international underground computer network—with huge help from a team that included Kelvin, her quarry tonight.
That was why Yona had to leave Mossad.
Why she had to do this alone.
A dark alley opened up at the top of the stairs just as the last drops of rain fell. Yona kept her hood on as she stepped carefully on the cobblestones, her black combat boots supporting her heel on the uneven surface.
The alley smelled of ammonia and sewage and rain. Yona held her breath half the time as she made her way through the alley.
Suddenly she pulled back, held her breath.
Splayed her palms against the wet wall behind her.
Shadows crossed the other end of the small alley. One, two, three shadows.
Probably nothing.
Yona drew a deep breath.
She inched forward.
The shadows ahead of her slowed down.
She did too.
They were going in the same direction as she was.
It could be a simple coincidence.
Yona tried not to worry. Prague was crowded today due to the music festival. Concertgoers were all over the place, walking about, eating, singing, dancing
