Midnight Kiss (Men of Midnight #7) - Lisa Marie Rice Page 0,69

unchanging. Do you see?”

“Yeah. Someone went to a lot of trouble to keep that sum unchanged. So?”

“So, it’s not a question of the money, per se. If it were, there’d only be one account. Splitting the money into two accounts makes no sense if it’s about the money. But it makes a lot of sense if the Immortals account is about the number, not the money.”

Something deep inside her started thrumming. The same something that happened when she solved a tricky software issue or saw a pattern in the data. Only more this time. Stronger. She could feel her heart beating in her chest but it also seemed like she could hear the earth breathing, some cosmic rhythm that reached out to the stars. This was what truth felt like.

She went to Tor and started digging deeper until she got to bedrock, then typed in the exact number of the Immortals account, including commas and the period.

A green link popped up on the dark screen. It glowed and seemed to throb. It looked dangerous.

“Wait.” Luke squeezed her shoulder gently and bent forward, until his face was next to hers. She could feel the heat of him. Glancing sideways she could see the blond fuzz that would soon be pale scruff over his tanned skin. The temptation to kiss him was so strong she had to mentally bolt herself to the chair.

He went into the bedroom and brought back his own laptop. Hope was an electronics snob and had to refrain from sniffing when she saw it.

“I heard that.” Luke was smiling as he set his laptop up next to hers. Hers looked like a different species.

“I didn’t say anything,” she protested.

“You didn’t have to. It’s clear what you think of it.”

The blood rushed to her cheeks. “I — um —”

He laughed. “It’s OK. I don’t have to perform magic on my computer like you do. And ASI is assigning me a new one, it’s ready at the office and Felicity has already given it her kiss of approval. This is my old one and I guess she’ll just have it taken out back and shot.”

Out of mercy. Hope thought it, but didn’t say it.

“You take us to the point on this computer where all I have to do is click,” he said. “I don’t think I can be trusted to do more than press a key. If it’s a destructive virus it will have killed an ancient broken-down steed instead of a thoroughbred. I know your laptop is surrounded by magic incantations and spells but why risk it?”

Hope switched to his laptop, entered Tor, drilled down down down again until all that was left was a dark screen and a small white field in the middle. She entered the number exactly without taking her eyes from the screen.

“Wow.” Out of the corner of her eye she could see Luke’s surprise. “You didn’t need to check. Huh.”

“It was only 9 digits, two commas and a period. When I was a kid I won a prize because I could recite pi to the two hundredth digit. I have a good head for numbers.”

“You surely do.” He nudged her a little out of the way and sat down in front of his laptop. “I’ll do the honors.”

He looked as intrigued as she did. She was going to feel foolish if the number led nowhere. But somehow she thought something would happen, though she had no idea what.

“Hit it,” she commanded, and his finger hovered.

“Wait.”

The screen dissolved and a man appeared. He was leaning on a cane and took a few halting steps forward.

Hope gasped. “I know who that is! That’s Frank Glass! He died over five years ago. This looks like it was late in his illness.” The man on the screen looked very ill, emaciated and bald. His expensive clothes hung on him.

Luke narrowed his eyes. “The Frank Glass?” He leaned forward a little. “Yeah, it is. Man, he looks awful.”

“He wouldn’t allow himself to be photographed the last six months of his life. You can see why. He died of a glioblastoma, a very aggressive brain tumor.”

Frank Glass was a living legend, the man who almost single-handedly made AI and quantum computing possible and possibly commercial. From nothing, he’d made over a hundred billion dollars, but more than that, he’d revolutionized computers, the way we understood intelligence. He’d expanded humanity’s boundaries. She’d cried the day she read his obituary in the newspapers, and had gone to a nearby church and lit