THE LULLABY KEY : THE FALL
CHAPTER 16: The Double Agent
The motel room was dark at 4:00 AM when Marcus knocked on Lena’s door. She was already awake, already dressed, already holding the laptop like a lifeline.
“Dr. Aris Thorne,” Lena said without preamble. “Your sister. Tell me everything.”
Marcus sat on the edge of the bed. He looked older in the dim light. Smaller. “Her name was Aris. She was two years younger than me. Brilliant. MIT at sixteen. PhD in cryptography at twenty-one. She was recruited by your father when she was twenty-three.”
“What did she do for him?”
“She was his shadow. The person who double-checked his work. The person who made sure the voting system was actually secure. But she found something he missed. A second backdoor. Not the Russian one. A different one. One that your father had built himself.”
Lena’s blood ran cold. “My father built a backdoor?”
“He called it a ‘safety valve.’ A way to override the system in case of a national emergency. But Aris realized that any backdoor could be exploited. By anyone. She told your father to remove it. He refused. She threatened to go public. And then she had a ‘car accident.’ Same as your mother.”
“She faked her death.”
“She faked her death because your father came to her in the hospital and said, ‘If you stay, they will kill you. Not me. The people I work for. The people who own me. Run, Aris. Run and never look back.’ She ran. And I’ve been looking for her for fifteen years.”
Lena stared at him. “You’ve been looking for your sister this whole time? While you were a hostage negotiator? While you were getting demoted?”
“Every spare moment. Every vacation day. Every favor I called in. I traced her to four different countries, seven different aliases. The last time I found her was three years ago, in Montreal. She was working as a librarian. I knocked on her door. She looked at me through the peephole and said, ‘Go away, Marcus. You’re going to get me killed.’ And I left.”
“Why?”
“Because she was right.” His voice cracked. “Because I’m a cop. And every cop leaves a trail. And the people hunting her are the same people who killed your mother. They don’t stop. They never stop.”
Lena reached out and took his hand. “We’re going to find her. And we’re going to stop them. Together.”
Marcus pulled his hand away. “You don’t understand. Aris isn’t just hiding. She’s working. She’s been building something. A counter-weapon. A way to disable the kill switch without shutting down the power grid. But she needs something to finish it.”
“What does she need?”
“The original source code. Your father’s code. The one that runs the kill switch.”
Lena opened the laptop. “It’s in the vault. Everything is in the vault.”
“No. Your father was paranoid. He kept the kill switch source code on a separate server. An air-gapped server. No internet connection. No wireless. The only way to get it is to physically go to the server.”
“Where is it?”
Marcus pulled out a folded piece of paper from his wallet. On it, an address written in pencil, faded and smudged.
“A library. In Montreal. The same library where I found Aris three years ago. She left this address with the librarian, told her to give it to me if anyone named Marcus ever came looking.”
Lena stood up. “Then we’re going to Montreal.”
“It’s a ten-hour drive. We cross the border at a small checkpoint, not a major one. We use fake IDs. We don’t speak to anyone. And we pray that Aris is still alive.”
They left the motel at 4:30 AM.
The kill switch counted down: 54:12:33.