Read Online Shatterproof by Roland Smith - Free Book Online Page A

said.
    “Hey, Erasmus,” Hamilton said.
    Erasmus gave them a nod, then swung onto his motorcycle. “See you in a few hours.”
    Jonah and Hamilton watched after him long after he had disappeared into the throng of traffic.

    Erasmus did not drive to the safe house. In fact, he hadn’t been inside since he’d arrived with Hamilton and Jonah. Instead he drove to a cyber café. There were hundreds of them in Mumbai, and he never went to the same one twice.
    He walked in, paid his fee, and found a terminal away from the windows in the darkest corner. He logged on and opened his encrypted e-mail account. There were over five hundred unread e-mails. Cahills from all over the world were feeding information to Attleboro. In turn, Evan forwarded everything, no matter how trivial, to Erasmus. Somewhere in all of this data, Vesper One had left a trail, a single cyber fingerprint they could use to track him down. The Vespers usually operated in the dark, but by taking the hostages and killing McIntyre, they had scurried briefly into the light. This was the time to find them.
    Erasmus pored through all the e-mails, but only two items stood out. Thieves had broken into the Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses in Toulouse , France, and stolen all of their electromagnets. All of them. It had taken the entire weekend to get the equipment out of the laboratory. Unless the thieves were particle physicists, they would have absolutely no use for their loot.
    The other item was a brief mention that a replica of the Antikythera Mechanism had been stolen from the American Computer Museum in Bozeman, Montana. The original device had been recovered from a Mediterranean shipwreck by a Greek sponge diver in 1900, but was believed to have been constructed between 150 and 100 B.C. At first, it was thought to be one of the first forms of a mechanized clock. Now it was considered to be world’s oldest-known analog computer. No one knew exactly what the device had been used for, but scientists believed the mechanism could track the Metonic calendar, predict solar eclipses, and calculate the timing of the ancient Olympic Games.
    The replica was beautiful, but what interested Erasmus was the photograph of the original Antikythera fragment. It looked familiar to him, though he couldn’t quite recall where he had seen it before.

    He memorized every detail of the fragment before dragging it into the Vesper thumb drive. The fragment was just one of thousands of pieces. Eventually, the pieces would all click together to form a prison cell for the Vespers.
    His final task was to Google Jonah Wizard. Jonah had been very good about not being the world-famous Jonah Wizard the past few days, but Erasmus knew it couldn’t last. Jonah’s fans were on the lookout, with reports coming in that he’d been spotted in Alice Springs, Australia, rapping with aboriginal people, then in Churchill, Canada, getting down with polar bears. One particularly oddball rumor placed him in Manaus, Brazil, searching for El Dorado. And the next had him in — Mumbai, India. Erasmus hit the link, which led him to a YouTube video of Jonah Wizard dancing with a king cobra.
    This is going to complicate things
, Erasmus thought.
    When the video ended, he put in a second thumb drive, which completely wiped the computer’s hard drive. While it worked, he looked at his watch. He had just enough time to get something to eat and catch a movie. Perhaps a double feature. He loved Hindi-language films, and what better place to watch one than the birthplace of Bollywood?

    The computer’s alarm woke Vesper Three, which meant that data was streaming in. Erasmus was online again. It had been so easy to swap out his thumb drive with one Vesper Three had made. While Erasmus thought he was wiping the memory from the computers he used, he was actually transferring every bit of data and every keystroke to Vesper Three.
    Like taking candy from a baby. The Cahills have no idea who