1

When she made the decision to go freelance, Alex knew it would not always be easy. Easy would have been to take one of the dozen prestigious job offers that came to her for graduating at the top of her class at Stanford. Prestige didn't interest her. Money did, and none of the available jobs came near to the amounts that got her attention.

But Alex had a plan, one she knew could catapult her into the seven- or eight-digit incomes she wanted. She made a very basic calculation, based on pure logic. People with the most money could pay the most. But people-not corporations; those had too many rules, too much oversight. There were plenty of people who had the money she wanted and didn't want the oversight. And many of these same people paid so well because they could not use ordinary sources when they had a tech problem.

Criminals. Drug lords, arms dealers, all the people who lived and worked in the shadows. And the ones who made it-the ones who lived-had the money. They also had a need, and Alex could fill it. Better, she could do it without the danger of getting killed at every step.

There were still big risks. That was inevitable. It went with the big paydays. But if it worked at all, the risks would be well worth it.

And it did; it worked. It took her a mere six months to make her reputation with the right people. Some of them were very scary people. But she made sure they understood that they needed her, and she learned to deal with them without fear. It was part of her job. It was a part she chose, because that was how she made her genius with computers pay exponentially better than anything her classmates at Stanford could earn. She worked the dark side, and she didn't regret it, either. The way money poured in made it worthwhile. And she always made the clients get the picture right away-they were much better off with Alex on their side. Harming her was actually harming themselves.

They got the idea, or Alex didn't work for them.

There was one client who still scared the hell out of her. Scared everybody, in fact. Alex knew that before first contact. Still, this particular client was pretty much the apex predator, and they paid twice what everybody else paid, so it was worth it.

Mostly. Alex still had to remind herself of the size of that payday before every job for this client. Even this one, which had been relatively simple. It had taken a long time, maybe longer than the client wanted, but Alex was pretty sure that nobody else in her business would have been able to do it all.

Still, that wasn't the hard part. It had been tedious, it took a lot of time, but it was mostly routine. No real skull sweat. The hard part came now. Delivering the results, which the client wanted in person, face-to-face. That made Alex's stomach churn. And it was a long trip, which didn't help. There was more time to worry, which she did. And now she was there, ready for the meeting, trying to brace herself for being in the same room with the scariest person she'd ever met. She swallowed hard, clutched her folder of results in suddenly sweaty hands, and opened the door.

"Sit."

Alex obeyed before she was even aware of doing so. There was just so much menace radiating from the head of the table that if she'd been told to strip naked and dance, she would have done it without thinking twice.

"Report."

Alex licked her very dry lips and opened her folder. "There's sort of a bulletin board on the dark web," she said. "I went through all the posts from three months ago and worked backward. It took some time, but I pulled seven posts that I thought might be something. Six didn't pan out." She lifted the top sheet of paper from the folder and slid it across the table. "This one did."

Those terrible eyes lit up with a cold fire. "The crown jewels."

"I believe so."

The eyes held her for a long and very uncomfortable moment. Then: "Go on."

"Right, so when I was sure, I traced that and found the guy who posted it?" She slid the second sheet across.

"And?"

Alex shrugged. "He's nobody, really. Just a business guy. But he had the money. And his family had strong ties to Ireland."

"Obviously. And on the other end?"

Alex swallowed. "We sort of knew who did it, like you said? And so I just confirmed it. He went into hiding after he delivered? And, uh-"

She could see her audience was impatient, so she jerked to a stop.

"Where is he?"

Alex nodded and tried to push away the raw fear that was clawing its way up her spine. "Right, so-I found him," she said.

"Not enough. I need to know him, too."

Alex found that she couldn't swallow. She took a ragged breath. "Yes, I- So that's why, uh- I hacked into the FBI and found his file." She tapped the manila file folder she'd carried in. "There were two profiles on him, which-that's really unusual?"

She took a printout from the folder and slid it down the table.

"That's really all anyone knows about him, because, you know . . . But there are no known photographs of his face, but-the file had his birth name? I used that and found a picture from his seventh-grade yearbook."

Alex took out the top photograph and pushed it down the table with the printout. No reaction. Those terrible cold eyes never blinked and never left hers.

Alex found that her hand was trembling. She took a deep breath, willed the hand to stop shaking, and went on. "I used an AI program I developed to age that picture. You know-project what he'd look like now?" She raised a hand half-heartedly to stop an objection that never came. She let the hand flop down into her lap. "I know, there are lots of programs that do that. Mine is better. Much better."

"Go on."

"Yes. I'm sorry. Yes. So . . . Using the new picture"-she slipped the next photo out of her folder-"I began an expanding search pattern with my AI facial recognition system. There were a number of hits, possibles, of course. But all relatively low probability-until finally, it picked up a probable in New York. Kennedy airport."

Alex placed the next photo on the table.

"AI gave it an eighty-three percent positive. That was the highest percentage I'd gotten, so I followed. Subject used an American passport and flew first class."

"Destination?"

"Yes, of course. Heathrow. In London." She tapped the photo. "This is him."

Dead silence for what seemed like a horrible long time. Finally: "You're certain?"

"I am," Alex said. "Subsequent surveillance photos improved the AI rating to ninety-five percent. I programmed it for a certain amount of caution, so . . . That's pretty much totally sure."

More silence. Alex felt her whole body bathed in cold sweat. "He seems to have settled in one location, indicating he will most likely be there for a while? So . . ."

She slid out a single piece of paper. "The address is here, with a floor plan."

"Good. The name on the passport?"

Alex took out another photo, a screenshot of a passport, and slid it across the table. "Harry Metzger," she said.

2

And there I was in London on a beautiful summer afternoon, one of those rare English days when you can actually see the sun, and even feel it on your face. But instead of frolicking on the green-and there really is a Green Park-I was slouched in a carrel at the library of the British Museum going through a stack of dusty intel reports from the last few months of WWII. I found stuff, of course-you can't help it. But nothing really important. Just lots of interesting factoids.

One of them snuck under my guard and turned into something I wanted to know more about. Maybe it was kind of a sidetrack, but I'd gotten interested in a treasure known as the Amber Room. It's a personal thing, but I totally love amber. It's very valuable, of course, but that's beside the point. It's beautiful. The good stuff seems to glow from inside, and it has a feeling to it that is pure sex. And this was a whole freaking room made of it.

If you've never heard of that, it's really an actual room-or anyway, it was. A whole room made mostly of amber. And if you're saying, Gosh, I thought you said amber was sort of expensive-then you are on the right page. At a guess, this room is worth a couple billion dollars. And nobody knows where it is.

You're way ahead of me now, right? Because wait a sec-it's a room. A room has to be in some kind of building, so . . . How did they lose it?

The first part is easy. The Nazis took the amber walls apart into neat sections and packed them into crates to protect them from bombs and wartime theft. Kind of ironic, because the biggest wartime thieves were the Nazis themselves. But anyway, they took the room apart, and then-this is where it gets kind of complicated. The story that is usually accepted is that the Nazis stuck all those crates into Konigsberg Castle in Germany. The Royal Air Force bombed the castle, and then that part of Germany turned into Soviet-controlled East Germany, which means nobody could go look for the crates. And then the Soviets knocked the rest of the castle down and said the Amber Room had been destroyed in the bombing.

Kind of hard to prove or disprove, right? A lot of people leave it right there and look for something else worth a few billion. And that's too bad, because if you keep chasing the Amber Room, the story gets even more interesting.

First, in 1945, as the war was ending, a bunch of people claimed they saw those exact crates loaded onto a German ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff. The Gustloff was a huge ship, and it had to be, because it was a big part of something the Nazis called Operation Hannibal. If that makes you wonder about elephants-it did for me-there weren't any. But there were lots and lots of Nazis. Because WWII was coming to a rapid conclusion, and not in a fun way for the Nazis. Operation Hannibal was their plan to evacuate their key people from the Baltic area as the Soviets came charging in. And the Nazis were absolutely on fire to get away. If you don't know this part of history, the Nazis would do pretty much anything to get away from the Russians, who were the most brutal, heartless, cruel, and crushing people anybody had ever seen. Except maybe for the Nazis. Kind of a pattern, huh? And since everybody knew by this time that the Reds were sort of peeved at the Nazis, they had a pretty good idea what was waiting for them if the Reds caught them. Because, you know-it was stuff that they'd been doing to Reds.

Anyway, there were a lot of anxious Nazis wanting to get out of the way. The Gustloff, huge as it was, couldn't take all of them, even though people were willing to sit on deck for the whole trip. Hell, some of them would have been glad to hold on to a rope and get towed behind the Gustloff.

So like I said, the Gustloff was packed full of important Nazis and left a lot of pals on the dock waving bye-bye. And one of these Nazis who didn't get on said they saw these crates.

It's the kind of story that's really hard to take seriously, unless you can back it up. So why didn't anybody check it with the people who went with the Gustloff? Great question!

The Gustloff, loaded with Nazis, and maybe a few crates of Amber Room, took off from Poland, managed to make a few good miles without tipping over-and ran into Soviet submarine S-13. The S-13 couldn't believe their luck, and I guess they got suspicious. They farted around for a few hours, circling the ship and looking for some kind of trap. But it really was a huge, fat, overloaded ship full of Nazis, and finally, S-13 fired four torpedoes. One of them stuck in the tube, but the other three did the job. A couple of the Gustloff's lifeboats got away, but most of them were frozen in their davits, because, you know, winter in the Baltic. And twenty minutes later, still with most of the passengers on board, the Gustloff rolled over. Half an hour later, it went down.

Poetic justice, right? Nobody is really sure how many people went down with it. Best guess is around ten thousand people died. An accurate count wasn't possible because first, they were stampeding on at the dock, and second, they had some "unofficial" passengers-the kind of evil-in-the-flesh people who didn't want to be seen or put on any list. But like I said, it was winter in the Baltic. Anybody who went into the water was dead pretty quickly.

And in any case, it's the end of our story. Or this version of it. Amber Room sleeps with the fishes. . . .

Except a soldier going through the wreckage of Konigsberg Castle said he found some pieces of the Amber Room. Which would imply it was never on the Gustloff at all, because why leave just a few pieces behind? So maybe it did get left behind in the castle.

Of course, if that's true, if it had been in the castle the whole time, they want you to believe that the bombing destroyed the entire Amber Room. Nothing to see here, folks-it's all gone, sorry. Nothing left.

Okay, sure. Except-if you think for a minute, does it really make sense that a couple of bombs would wipe out all traces of the room? And if this guy really found a piece-it was only a few pieces, and where's the rest of it? And it's worth a couple billion dollars. Is anybody really going to say, Oh, the castle is just a pile of rubble. Too bad about the Amber Room?

No, of course not. If it was in there when the bombs hit, it would almost certainly have been in the basement. Or if it makes you happier, the dungeon. And when the smoke cleared, somebody would try to dig down and find what was left. Since this area was now a part of the USSR, it would have to be somebody with government approval. And things being what they were in the Workers' Paradise, something that valuable would probably be snatched by somebody important-smart money on Stalin himself.

Excerpted from THE FOURTH RULE by Jeff Lindsay. Copyright © 2023 by Jeff Lindsay. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.