“Here is your key, Admiral,” I said softly.
Arthur Sterling’s eyes flared with a sudden, violent, predatory hunger that stripped away fifty years of patrician composure.
His jaw tightened; his nostrils flared; his left hand reached across the table with that frantic, spastic palsy that strikes an educated thief when the vault door swings open to reveal four hundred tons of gold:
“Give it to me,” Arthur hissed between his teeth:
“Give it to me, you peasant.”
I laid the titanium key flat on the cherry-wood table, right beside his porcelain teacup:
CLINK.
Arthur snatched it with an animalistic snap of his wrist.
He did not inspect the casing.
He reached into his inside coat pocket, pulled out a military-grade, ruggedized cryptographic satellite field terminal—a six-inch titanium brick running an encrypted satellite link directly to the Zurich Banking Consortium in Switzerland:
He slotted the titanium key into the terminal’s primary data bay:
