Crucible

by James Rollins

  Still, as much as he wanted to believe it could be real, he could not. It all seemed impossible. With so much blood on his hands, how could he ever hope to live a normal life?

  “Something’s wrong,” Monk said.

  Distracted by his worries, Gray had failed to spot it. He and Seichan had decorated a Christmas tree, their first ever together. They had spent weeks picking out ornaments, settling on a Swarovski angel as a tree topper, paying a ridiculous price. Seichan said it was worth the cost, that it could become a family heirloom—another first together. They had placed the Christmas tree in the front bay window.

  It was gone.

  The front door was ajar. Even from the street, Gray noted the shattered door frame. He shoved forward to the cabbie. “Call nine-one-one.”

  Monk had already bolted out of the car and headed toward the front door.

  Gray chased after him, pausing only long enough to pull a SIG Sauer P365 from an ankle holster. As terror ratcheted through him, he knew he had been right all along.

  He could never have a normal life.

  10:18 P.M.

  Monk leaped over the steps to the porch. His heart pounded in his throat, making it hard to breathe. Panicked, he burst through the door, armed with nothing but his fists. His half decade in the Green Berets had trained him to immediately assess a situation. His senses stretched out, taking everything in with one breath.

  . . . toppled Christmas tree in the bay window.

  . . . shattered glass top of a coffee table.

  . . . antique Stickley coatrack cracked in half.

  . . . a steel dagger impaled in the banister of the stairs leading up.

  . . . area rug bunched up against a wall.

  Gray rushed in behind him, leading with a black pistol gripped in both hands. Monk’s ears, his skin, his entire being noted the heavy silence.

  No one’s here.

  He knew it in his bones.

  Still, Gray nodded to the stairs. Monk leaped up the steps three at a time, as Gray swept the first floor. The girls should have already been in bed. He pictured six-year-old Penelope, with her strawberry-blond hair in pigtails, her Christmas pajamas covered in dancing reindeers. And her auburn-haired sister, Harriet, younger by a year but ever an old soul, always serious, always with a question on her lips about the world.

  He ran first to the guestroom, where the girls should be dreaming of gaily wrapped presents and candy canes. Instead he found the beds made, untouched, the room empty. He called their names, checked the closets, swept through the other rooms, and discovered the same.

  Just as he feared.

  Gone . . . all gone.

  An overwhelming sickness narrowed his vision to a pinpoint as he stumbled down the stairs.

  “Gray . . .” It came out as a half sob.

  An answer rose from the back of the house, where the small kitchen faced the backyard. “Over here!”

  Monk hurried through the ransacked great room, past the dining table, which was bumped askew and in the way. Two chairs lay on their sides. He tried not to picture the fierce fight that must have broken out after the home invasion.

  He burst into the kitchen, evidence of the battle growing more intense. The refrigerator door stood open. Scattered knives, pans, and broken plates littered the floor and center island. A cupboard door hung by one hinge.

  At first, he failed to spot Gray, but as he stepped around the island, he found him kneeling on the hardwood floor. A body lay sprawled before him.

  Monk’s breath heaved in his chest.

  Kat . . .

  Gray straightened. “She’s alive . . . weak pulse, but she’s breathing.”

  Monk crashed to the floor. Instinctively, he reached his arms to cradle Kat to his chest.

  Gray blocked him. “Don’t move her.”

  He came close to punching his friend, wanting to hit something, but he knew Gray was right.

  Kat’s arms were lacerated in multiple places, weeping dark blood. Dark streams flowed from her nostrils and left ear. Her eyes were half-open, but the pupils rolled back. From the corner of his eye, he spotted a stainless-steel kitchen mallet. Blood-matted auburn hair—a match to Kat’s—was stuck to one corner of the heavy utensil.

  He gently took Kat’s wrist in both hands. The fingers of his prosthesis sought her pulse. The lab-grown skin was far more sensitive than his real flesh. He judged the beat of her heart, picturing each contraction of ventricle and atrium. He shifted his prosthetic hand to her index finger, grasping the tip between two of his own. He mentally activated a small infrared light in one digit and a photodetector in the other. The light radiated through her fingertip and allowed him to get a crude pulse-ox reading, a measurement of the oxygen saturation in her blood.

  Ninety-two percent.

  Not great, but okay for now. If it fell any further, she would need supplemental oxygen.

  Monk had been a medic with the Berets. Since then, he had enhanced his training further, his specialties in medicine and biotech. He and Gray—along with Kat and Seichan—all worked for Sigma Force, a covert group operating under the auspices of DARPA, the Defense Department’s research-and-development agency. With the exception of Gray’s girlfriend, they were all former Special Forces soldiers, recruited in secret by Sigma and retrained in various scientific disciplines to act as field agents for DARPA, protecting the United States and the globe from all manner of threats.

  Gray already had his scrambled sat phone in hand, dialing Sigma command.

  “Seichan?” Monk asked.

  He shook his head, his face a mask of fury and fear.

  Monk glanced to the kitchen door, which gaped open to the dark backyard. He knew his wife would have fought like a hellion to protect her daughters. “Could Seichan have fled with the girls, while Kat held the others off?”

  Gray glanced out into the night. “I thought the same. I yelled for Seichan after checking Kat.” He shook his head again. “If she had fled, she wouldn’t have gone far.”

  Meaning she would’ve heard him.

  “Maybe whoever did this chased her,” Monk said. “Forced her to flee farther from here.”

  “Maybe.” Gray didn’t sound hopeful.

  Meaning probably not.

  Monk understood. Seichan was a former assassin, as capable as Kat, if not more so. But eight months pregnant and hauling two panicked children, she could not have gotten far if pursued.

  They had to assume Seichan and the girls were taken.

  But by whom? And why?

  Gray’s gaze swept the wreckage of the kitchen. “The attack must have been swift and well coordinated, striking from front and back.”

  “So not some local crackheads looking to steal presents . . .”

  “No. I have guns stashed throughout the house. Seichan must have been subdued from the onset or feared a firefight with the girls present.”

  Monk nodded. He took similar precautions at his place, an unfortunate necessity in their line of work.

  Once connected with Sigma command, Gray tapped the speakerphone so Monk could overhear. In short order, Gray had Painter Crowe, the director of Sigma, on the line. In terse details, Gray filled him in on what had happened.

  In the distance, sirens echoed through the cold night, growing louder.

  “Get Kat to the hospital,” Painter instructed. “Get her safe—then, Gray, I need you over here immediately.”

  Gray shared a look with Monk. “Why?”

  “From the timing of this attack, it can’t be a coincidence.”

  Gray frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Monk leaned closer to the phone, wanting—needing answers. As he knelt at Kat’s side, he stared out to the great room, to the toppled Christmas tree. His gaze caught on a sparkle of crystal on the hardwood floor, reflecting the twinkle of the porch lights.

  It was an angel, broken-winged and shattered.

  His fingers tightened on Kat’s hand.

  Painter offered no solace, no reassura
nce. Instead, the director’s voice rang with worry.

  “Just get here.”

  2

  December 25, 5:17 A.M. WET

  Lisbon, Portugal

  I think, therefore I am.

  Mara Silviera frowned at this proposition by René Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher: Cogito, ergo sum.

  “If it were only that simple,” she mumbled.

  She hunched over her laptop on the hotel room desk and fumbled with a USB-C cord that ran to a black case on the floor.

  The cushioned box protected a dozen 2.5-inch, solid-state PM1633a hard drives, each capable of holding sixteen terabytes. She prayed they hadn’t been damaged or the data inside corrupted. She remembered her panic four nights ago. After the attack at the library, she had tried to secure her work. Shaking with sobs, her vision blurred by tears, she had frantically ripped the hard drives from the Milipeia Cluster at the University of Coimbra’s computer lab.

  Even now, the memory of gunfire rang in her ears. Her breathing started to rasp. She struggled to get her fingers to seat the USB-C cord into her laptop. Tears edged her eyelids. She pictured the death of the five women who had been her mentors, who had granted her a full scholarship through their group, Bruxas International. She had been only sixteen at the time, having seen little of the world beyond her home village of O Cebreiro. The tiny Galician hamlet, nestled high in the mountains of northwest Spain, dated back to Celtic times. Its streets were cobblestoned, and most of the homes were old thatched roundhouses, called pallozas.

  Still, the modern world had found its way into the ancient village via satellite feed and the Internet. It had offered a shy, lonely girl—someone who had lost her mother to cancer at the age of six and who was cared after by a grief-stricken father—a window upon the rest of the world. While growing up, she had an unfortunate lisp that kept her silent around her peers. She spent most of her time lost in books and only found her voice in chat rooms and Facebook. With the world open to her, she expanded her vocabulary to communicate with this broader landscape, first with the romance languages, then branching off into Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. Though at first glance they were all so different, she soon noted trends in speech patterns, diction, even words and phrases, a commonality hidden below all, that no one seemed to have realized but her.

  She tried to explain this to her friends on social media, then to prove it to them. To do so required learning yet another slew of languages: BASIC, Fortran, COBOL, JavaScript, Python. She devoured books, took online courses. For her, these computer languages were just another means of communication, tools to process her thoughts and output them in ways others could understand.

  To that end, she had created a translation application for the iPhone, naming it AllTongues. Her goal was not to engineer a utility for people to use—though it had served this function far better than most translation programs out there—but to prove her underlying thesis: that buried in the multitude of languages was a common thread that connected human thought to communication. So she used this new language, composed of zeros and ones, to show the world.

  And the world noticed.

  First Google offered her a job, not knowing she was only sixteen. Then Bruxas International offered to pay for her schooling. To help you reach your fullest potential, Dr. Charlotte Carson had told her, traveling to O Cebreiro to make this proposal in person.

  Mara pictured Dr. Carson standing, dusty and road-worn, on the doorstep of her family palloza. This was before the woman’s diagnosis of cancer, when she still had the strength to make such sojourns. Mara knew she wasn’t the only girl Charlotte had sought out. Dr. Carson was a gatherer of talent, a nurturer of scientific intellect. Even the woman’s two daughters—Laura and Carly—followed in their mother’s footsteps, pursuing careers in the sciences.

  Mara had become close friends with Carly, who was also twenty-one. Though continents apart, the two talked or texted nearly every day. While some of their chats were about science, teachers, and school, they spent most of their time trying to decipher matters of the heart, from the mysterious stupidity of young men to the insufferable banality of dating sites. Like human language, there seemed to be a universality to the horrors and humiliations of trying to make an honest love connection.

  Carly also shared a passion that was at first inexplicable to Mara, namely music. Before meeting Carly, Mara gave little thrift to the latest pop idol or musical trend. But over time—listening to countless songs sent over by Carly, discovering and falling down the rabbit hole that was Pandora and Spotify—Mara became entranced. She again noted a commonality, how even one of Beethoven’s concertos bore a mathematical and quantifiable connection with the latest rap song. That led her to study music theory and its direct link to the Theory of Mind—a concept fundamental to her own study of artificial intelligence.

  In fact, this unusual connection led to a breakthrough in her work.

  Still, as much as she owed Carly, she had yet to contact her friend since the attack.

  Mara closed her eyes, fighting against the rising tide of grief inside her, knowing if she let down her guard, it would drown her. She again heard gunshots, saw the blood and falling bodies. Saw her friends die. Afterward, she had fled blindly, fearful for her own life. She grabbed a train to Lisbon, hoping to lose herself in the crowded city. Once here, she changed hotels three times over the past four days, paying with cash, using a different fake name at each location.

  She didn’t know whom to trust.

  But fear of discovery hadn’t kept her from reaching out to Carly.

  It was guilt.

  They died because of me, because of my work.

  Bearing silent witness from the computer lab, Mara had heard the alarming words of the man who led the attack: Xénese must never be. It is an abomination, born of sorcery and filth.

  Breathing hard, she stared over to the second black case on the floor. It lay open, its inner padding cradling a sphere that Carly jokingly called the soccer ball. It was not a bad analogy. The device was indeed the size of a regulation ball. Similarly, hexagonal plates covered its surface. But rather than made up of stitched leather, the device consisted of alternating hexagonal plates of titanium and diamond-hard sapphire crystal.

  In a moment of hubris, she had named the device Xénese, the Galician word for Genesis.

  Still, the name fit, considering her goal.

  To bring forth life from the cold vacuum of nothingness.

  Was it any wonder such an ambition attracted the wrong attention?

  She again pictured the attackers’ robes and blindfolds, heard their justification for murder, ripped from the Bible: Suffer not a witch to live.

  Anger steadied her hand. Charlotte and the others died because of Mara’s work, but she would not let their deaths be in vain. Determination spread through her. Up until now, she had been running scared, overwhelmed by grief. But she was done running. Only now did she feel secure enough to check on the status of her work. Still, a final worry remained. In her panicked haste to extract Xénese and its hard drives from the university’s Milipeia Cluster, she worried she may have irreparably damaged the program.

  Please. It’s Christmas morning. Grant me this one gift.

  Over the next hour, she daisy-chained the drives encoded with her program modules into her laptop. She checked each one and sighed with relief when everything seemed intact. Next, she powered up what Carly called “the soccer ball.” As electricity flowed through a conditioner into the device, its tiny sapphire windows brightened with an azure glow, marking the successful ignition of the tiny lasers inside.

  “Let there be light,” she whispered with a sad smile, remembering how often Dr. Carson had used that line from the Book of Genesis—and her mentor’s warning the day before their test run.

  But not too much light. Don’t want you to blow up the lab.

  Mara’s smile firmed with the memory. No doubt, Carly had gotten her sense of humor from her mother.


  Mara spent the next hour calibrating the modules and the main device, all the while monitoring the progress on her laptop. She knew the fifteen-inch screen could never capture the breadth of the world slowly being reconstructed. It was like trying to appreciate the full expanse of the Milky Way by focusing a telescope on a handful of pale stars.

  In fact, much of her work was not only unseen but also nearly incomprehensible. It was what computer engineers called an algorithmic black box. While computer instructions—called algorithms—might be definable and understandable, the exact method that an advanced system used those tools to reach answers or outcomes was becoming ever more mysterious. In some sophisticated networks, the designers simply had no way of knowing what was truly going on inside those black boxes. They could input data into a computer and read the conclusion that came out the other end. But what happened in between—what was happening inside their machines—was becoming less and less knowable.

  Even their creators could not comprehend their reasoning. Famously, the IBM engineer who built Watson—the computer that beat a Jeopardy! champion on television—was once asked, Does Watson ever surprise you? His answer was simple, yet disturbing: Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely.

  Nor did the surprises stop with Watson. As these AI systems grew more sophisticated, their black boxes became even more impenetrable and unfathomable.

  Unfortunately, Xénese was no exception.

  On the night of the winter solstice—for less than sixty seconds, long enough for five women to be murdered—Xénese was fully realized and complete, operating at full capacity, bringing forth light out of darkness, life out of nothingness.

  Instead of celebrating the birth, Mara had been too shocked by the images of the ambush and attack. Fixated with horror, she hadn’t been able to turn away. She had fumbled and dialed 112, but by the time the connection to emergency services was made, Mara’s mentors were already dead. She had reported what had happened in halting gasps, her lisp returning. The police warned her to remain where she was, but she feared the same robed gunmen might be already coming for her. So she had fled with her work, refusing to risk it being destroyed.