Split Second Read Online Free PDF Page A

real thing. The caliber and power of modern weapons all but
disintegrated the target, something movies didn’t properly convey. Thankfully.
    Even though she needed to marshal
all of her concentration to keep from flying off the road for the second time
in under an hour, she still burst into tears several times before she reached
the bottom.
    Finally, using the last
remaining vestiges of a powerful will that had been tested beyond its breaking
point, she managed to push Nathan from her mind and find a way to begin to concentrate
on the problem at hand.
    Who were the men who had
ambushed the Hostess truck? Were they trying to rescue her and Nathan?
    On the surface, it would appear
that way. Simkin had not shot wildly, but with hideous purpose. Andy Cavnar, on
the other hand, had tried to protect her. Had paused in a gun battle to make
sure she ran to safety.
    So what now? Go to the police?
Homeland security? The press?
    All of these places?
    Maybe. But first things first.
She needed to return home. Because there was only one thing of which she was
certain. This all had been triggered by Nathan’s discovery. Simkin had
destroyed the data on Nathan’s computers rather than let someone else have it.
And then he had destroyed the creator of this data as well, just as completely.
    Prior to this they had sucked out
every file Nathan had stored in his cloud account, and then annihilated this account
as well.
    They had been
very thorough. But what they didn’t know was that Nathan would never store something
this important in the cloud. It was one of his quirks. He was a bit paranoid. He
was thought of as the up-and-coming whiz kid. A brash boy genius. And while, at
twenty-nine, he was hardly a boy, he was also far more accomplished than this
age would suggest, and there were many who resented his success. And most of
the scientists in his line of work were brilliant hackers. So he refused to
take any chances with the cloud. He did back up his most important files every
night—just not to cyberspace like most people.
    Jenna had
thought this precaution was just one of his quirks, but perhaps this behavior
was more prudent than she had realized.
    Any work Nathan thought was
original, and especially work he thought was groundbreaking, was stored locally
and password protected. He routinely saved a copy to the hard drive of his
desktop, and a backup to one other location, to a flash drive hidden inside the
house. An expensive model, capable of wireless downloads, so Nathan wouldn’t
have to shove it into a computer port. The flash drive served as a sort of
private cloud storage outside of the cloud. Convenient, but not requiring him
to dip even a toe into cyberspace.
    He had programmed
the drive so that if three incorrect passwords were entered in a row, all data
would be wiped clean. Even Jenna didn’t know the password. Unfortunately, she
suspected that someone with financial resources and determination could
eventually find a way to circumvent Nathan’s safeguards.
    She wasn’t
about to take this chance. Not given what had happened. So her first order of
business was to retrieve the drive. She could turn it over later to experts,
who could also find a way to get at the data, and she would discover what had
been so important—what had ended Nathan’s life and destroyed her own. She
wouldn’t rest until she knew.
    California was
still bathed in blackness when she arrived at her house— their house—the location of a joyous reunion just hours before, but
now a painful reminder of all she had lost.
    She entered the master bedroom,
fighting back tears once again. Resting on Nathan’s dresser was a toy commonly
called Newton's cradle. Named after the peerless physicist, this device
consisted of five gleaming silver balls, hanging down in a line between two
suspending bars. The device was a favorite of physicists, demonstrating
conservation of momentum and energy. When the ball at one end was lifted and
released, it would strike