Free The Loch Ness Legacy by Boyd Morrison

have someone bring you up to Miles’ office when you get here.” He hung up with a puzzled expression.
    “What’s she doing here?” Grant asked. “I thought she’d still be working on finding out who tried to bust Zim out of prison.”
    Tyler shook his head. “I don’t know. All she said is that it has something to do with the Eiffel Tower attack.”
    Grant felt a chill run down his spine. “I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with this thing.” He zoomed in on five pieces that had been laid out side-by-side. The edges were bent and ripped, but they clearly fit together because of the letters that were stenciled across it.
    Tyler sounded it out. “Alt waf fe.”
    “One word. Altwaffe.”
    “That’s German, right?”
    Grant nodded. “It means ‘old weapon.’ And before you ask, I have no idea why it’s called that. Our guys looked it up and couldn’t find a reference to it anywhere. Could be a code word.”
    “Maybe it means the weapon was considered obsolete.”
    “That could be why it didn’t go off. Carl might have been expecting a big bang, and it fizzled instead.”
    “So we don’t know what was in the tube?”
    “No. The heat from the explosion destroyed any residue. But you haven’t seen the best part.”
    Tyler raised an eyebrow. “Color me intrigued.”
    Grant clicked on another thumbnail to show another piece of the same metal.
    “This part was on the other side of the tube,” Grant said.
    Tyler’s eyes flicked from the screen to Grant, the muscles in his jaw tightening. “It can’t be.”
    Grant nodded. “It is. Our guys report that it’s the real deal.”
    Tyler turned back and shook his head at the screen in disbelief. Though the image on the metal showed faintly through the blackened surface, there was no doubt it was a Nazi swastika.

TEN
     
     
    There wasn’t much more to glean from the report about the Nazi relic. No clue about where it had come from or what its purpose was. Tyler wished he could look at it himself, but there was no way the French government was going to let it out of the country.
    Agent Harris texted that she was caught in the Friday morning traffic and was five minutes out. He sent someone down to wait for her while he and Grant headed to Miles’ corner office on the top floor.
    The door was open, so they walked in without knocking to the sight of Alexa shoving her shoulder with all her might against the back of their CEO’s iBOT wheelchair. Miles, a burly retired Marine officer who still sported a high and tight crew cut, smiled at them from his perch in the fully upright position that the gyroscopically stabilized chair made possible and grinned at the full mug of coffee in his hand.
    “You can push all you want,” Tyler said, “you’re not going to knock him over.”
    Alexa released her stance and smirked at him. “I wasn’t trying to knock him over, you dimwit. I have twenty bucks that says I can spill his coffee.”
    “You’ll lose that bet. The motors and gears have been modified by him personally. You couldn’t do it with anything less than a forklift.”
    She rolled her eyes, took a twenty from her pocket, and slapped it into Miles’ waiting hand. He tucked it in his shirt pocket and took a self-satisfied sip from his mug.
    “If I’d known your sister was such an easy mark,” he said, “I would have bet a hundred.”
    Alexa rushed over to Tyler and gave him a tight hug. Then she stepped back and inspected his arm. “I thought you were really injured, you dork.”
    “It wasn’t as bad as it sounded.”
    “It wasn’t? You mean getting shot and then almost blown up before nearly falling 150 feet to your death wasn’t that bad?”
    “See? When you put it that way, it sounds like I almost died.”
    “You better not,” she said and gave him another brief hug. “So am I a free woman now or do you want to continue with the nanny bit?” She stared pointedly at Grant and rolled her eyes.
    “I’d say you need someone