Chapter 1097
“Survival skill,” he said gruffly. “When you’re stuck in a safe house for weeks, you learn to make do with dry pasta and garlic.”
The domesticity of the moment — eating pasta while the world burned around them — was jarring, but it broke the spiral of panic.
Victoria’s phone rang. She answered it with a frown. “Yes? This is she.” She listened for a moment, her eyes widening. “Are you sure? When? All right. Don’t let anyone else into the room.”
She hung up and looked at them. “That was the private clinic. Parker just woke up.”
Parker. The young tech genius they had pulled from the wreckage of the island weeks ago. He had been in a coma ever since.
“The nurse said he was agitated,” Victoria continued. “He saw the gem theft report on the television in his room and told the nurse to call me immediately. He says Victor has a paperweight.”
“What?”
“Parker has been studying the Syndicate’s old encryption protocols since we found him,” Victoria relayed. “He discovered something Lucian missed — because Lucian only had access to the old schematics, not the founders’ original engineering notes. The gem was never the whole key.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a two-part system,” Victoria said. “The gem focuses the laser — it’s the optical lens. But the actual cipher, the part that unlocks the funds, is etched into the mounting. The metal setting. Without both, you have nothing but a very expensive paperweight.”
Skye looked at the blank screen where Julian had been, then back at Victoria.
“Conrad,” Victoria whispered, her eyes widening. “Conrad told me he popped the gem out of its setting because he wanted to sell the gold separately at a pawn shop. He’s cheap like that.”
Skye’s heart hammered against her ribs. “Where is the setting?”
“He kept it,” Victoria said. “He told me he hid it somewhere nobody would think to look.”
They didn’t go to the hospital. They ran to the holding room where Conrad was being kept.
They burst through the door. Conrad was lying on the cot, watching cartoons on a tablet and eating a bag of chips.
“Where is it?” Alistair demanded, hauling Conrad up by his lapels.
“The setting!” Skye shouted. “The gold ring the ruby was mounted in — where is it?”
Conrad choked on a chip. “I — I don’t know! I might have sold it!”
“Think, Conrad!” Victoria slapped him. Hard. “That piece of metal is worth more than your life right now!”
“Okay, okay!” Conrad whimpered. “I didn’t sell it! I kept it! I hid it!”
“Where?”
Conrad pointed at his feet.
“In my shoe,” he gasped. “My Italian loafers. The left one.”
Alistair dropped him. “Give it to me.”
Conrad scrambled to pull off his expensive leather shoe and went to work on the heel with a plastic spoon from his dinner tray. The heel cap popped open on a hidden hinge — a smuggler’s compartment.
Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, was the intricate gold filigree setting of the Eye of Dawn.