Crucible

by James Rollins

  Monk glanced over to Mara.

  She still lay on the floor, clutching the e-tablet.

  This gambit was a Hail Mary pass, but one well worth the attempt.

  For Harriet, for Seichan, for Gray’s unborn child.

  In the end, Painter had given Monk the okay to run this con. For it to work, everyone had to believe Monk had caved under pressure and struck a private deal with Valya to save his daughter. Only Painter and Monk knew the truth. They couldn’t risk a word getting out. All the chatter had to be consistent.

  Monk had betrayed Sigma.

  His only communication with Painter had been on a quantum-encrypted line. Even the strike team outside didn’t know who they had come to rescue. Knowing the precious cargo in Monk’s possession, Painter had also been tracking him via the GPS built into his prosthetic, which helped the director coordinate this ambush. Back at the hotel, Monk had shared his plan with Mara—and Eve. Needing a distraction, he asked Eve to venture into the city’s power grid, leaning on her knowledge gained from her doppelganger, to overload a transformer, blowing it on his signal. Eve had also pinned down their location via his prosthetic’s GPS signal. For this to happen, Mara had secretly reopened Eve’s online access when setting up shop here.

  The only signal that everything was ready was a flickering of the lamp in here.

  “Monk,” Mara said, slowly sitting up, her gaze on his prisoner.

  His prosthesis was still locked onto Nikolaev’s neck. Even noting this now, he did not loosen his grip. He imagined his little girl as terrified as Nikolaev had been a moment ago. He wanted someone to pay, someone to be punished.

  Rather than loosen his hold, he tightened it.

  With both carotids crushed, cutting off circulation to the brain, death would come in two to three minutes. He pictured Kat, fighting furiously only to have her skull caved in by one of Valya’s crew. He still could not get the words brain dead out of his head. She deserved better, certainly better than the man in his grip.

  Fingers squeezed down to bone.

  Monk’s vision darkened with his intent.

  In the background, he heard Mara, her voice pleading. “Monk, no.”

  Then the word echoed in his head.

  No . . .

  It didn’t feel like his own thought, but of course, it was. Still, what did it matter if one more scumbag wasn’t taking up space on this planet, breathing its air? He held tight, the seconds ticking down. Nikolaev’s chest began to heave, his lips and face blue.

  No . . .

  Monk’s fingers snapped wide open. He watched it happen as if from a distance. He lifted his arm, discovering he no longer had control of his fingers. Its sensitive skin no longer registered the cold air. It was as if his prosthesis had gone dead, like a real hand fallen asleep. He shook his arm, believing he had damaged or loosened a circuit.

  As he did so, control returned.

  Fingers flexed.

  He rubbed his prosthetic palm on his leg, feeling the rough texture of his fatigues.

  “Monk . . .” Mara pressed.

  “I let him go,” he snapped at her. “He’s gonna be fine.”

  The Russian was already breathing better, his color improving. His neck still bore an angry red print of his hand and would likely be bruised for weeks.

  Monk felt no sympathy.

  “No,” Mara said. “Look.”

  He twisted around. Mara was on her knees and pointing up at the open laptop on the table. It was still connected to the idling Xénese device, which kept the laptop minimally powered. The screen had dimmed, but Eden was still visible, as was its sole occupant.

  Eve stood in the center of the screen, with a hand lifted high, her fingers fixed and splayed open. Recognizing the similarity to a moment ago, Monk looked down at his prosthesis.

  What the hell . . .

  Before he could ponder it further, someone rapped on the door, then opened it. A slim woman entered, wearing fatigues, her long black hair tied with a black bandana. She carried a sniper rifle over one shoulder. Her skin was the color of cinnamon-mocha, her dark amber eyes flecked with gold, shining with amusement.

  Monk imagined her handiwork lay dead on the floor.

  “Kokkalis, I should’ve known it was you. I’m always pulling your butt out of the fire.”

  He stood up and gave her a fast hug. “It’s great to see you, too, Rosauro.”

  Shay Rosauro was former air force, now part of Sigma. The two had shared missions in the past. She unclipped a sat phone from her belt and held it out.

  “Director wants you to call.”

  He took the phone.

  “Heard you shot Jason?” she said as he dialed the encrypted private line. Then shrugged. “Wise-ass probably had it coming. I’ve been tempted to do it a few times myself.”

  Monk winced. “I needed to make this ruse look real. To put some blood in the game to get that Russian witch to believe all of this, to keep this meeting.”

  She lifted one brow. “I’m not sure Jason would agree that was necessary.”

  As he waited for the line to connect, Monk pictured Jason falling to the catacomb floor. Using his medical background and the skilled precision of his prosthesis, Monk had aimed for a nonvital spot, a graze to the meat of his thigh. Lots of blood, no lasting damage. Still, the kid would be limping for a while.

  Monk glanced over to the e-tablet still in Mara’s hands.

  I hope it was worth it.

  The line connected, and Painter asked for a full debriefing. Monk told him all that happened, leaving out the odd detail about his prosthesis, about nearly choking the Russian to death.

  “I’ll have Shay get that tablet to our forensic team,” Painter said. “We’ll pick that apart, down to its atoms, if we need to. We’ll do everything we can to try to find out where Valya is holed up.”

  “You’d better hurry,” Monk said, knowing this action here would enrage the bitch. His only hope was that the sudden loss of communication might make her cautious. At least until she figured out what had truly happened out here. Still, that would buy them only so much time.

  “And Monk,” Painter said. “I’ve arranged a helicopter to take you and Mara north to the Pyrenees Mountains. Gray is following a lead, prepping an assault team to storm a compound up there. We may need Mara’s device nearby if the enemy tries to employ their stolen copy of Eve.”

  “What lead?” Monk asked.

  “You’d better let me speak to Mara. She deserves to know.”

  4:50 P.M.

  No, no, no, no . . .

  Mara clamped a palm over her mouth. Her other hand held the phone. She stared down at the image frozen on the tiny screen. The video then looped again, showing the same figure darting from under the eaves of a giant house, surrounded by a cadre of men.

  “This footage was taken from a security camera in San Sebastián,” Director Crowe told her. “Shortly before a raid on a Crucible stronghold.”

  The video froze again. The image was grainy and pixilated, but Mara knew that face. It was etched in her heart, nearly as indelibly as her own mother.

  It was Eliza Guerra, the head librarian at the University of Coimbra.

  Mara pictured the petite woman, the many long nights and dinners spent in her company, the debates, the lessons, even the trip here to Madrid. She knew the librarian was full of pride for her homeland, for this entire region. It shone in the excitement as she spoke, in her hurried steps as she led Mara through the library stacks to show her some rare tome or toured Mara through museums to point out suits of armor or invaluable historical artifacts.

  But Mara had assumed Eliza’s passion was born of intellectual curiosity. The woman, along with Carly’s mother, had founded Bruxas. Mara knew Eliza had also funded much of the group’s early efforts out of her own pocket, drawing from her family’s considerable wealth, a fortune accumulated over centuries. Eliza had said she was happy to do so, to use that money to search for the best and brightest versus letting it
molder away in some bank.

  But clearly she had an ulterior motive.

  Still, Mara struggled to understand. She felt dizzy. “But she’s dead. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “That’s what she wanted the world to believe, but as you can see, she’s very much alive. We’re reexamining the charred remains found at the library. The bodies were given cursory inspections before, just enough to determine which body belonged to which family.”

  Mara pictured Carly standing over her mother’s flag-draped coffin, a box full of ashes and bones, all that was left of her mother after the fires trapped in the stone basement turned the place into a crematorium.

  “We believe she staged her death,” Painter continued. “Either she was shot with blanks or purposefully only wounded. Once the camera was off, she was whisked away, leaving behind some body that matched her shape and size, enough to fool a hasty examination.”

  Mara barely heard his words. In a daze, she reviewed all her years at the university in this new light. Had Eliza been lying to her about wanting to stop the persecution of women? Or did she want Mara in some new world order, serving at her side? She sensed now that the librarian had been grooming her, testing her, seeing if she could be voluntarily swayed to her cause, to be lured into the Crucible.

  But when that failed . . .

  Mara spoke, each word growing stronger, fueled by fury. “She . . . she thought I was going to bring my Xénese device to the library, to show everyone both the program and the sphere’s shining design. It was Eliza who picked the winter solstice. Probably for its significance. She was like that, always looking for those momentous occasions, trying to force the hand of fate. But I was behind on my work. I didn’t have time to get over there, so at the last moment, I arranged that remote demonstration. If I had been there—”

  “—you would’ve been killed or taken,” Painter said. “And your device stolen, vanished with no one the wiser, leaving the Crucible with the access and time to do anything they pleased with your creation.”

  Mara looked over at the softly glowing sphere on the floor. Her fingers tightened on the phone as she pictured Carly’s mother, the other three women. “Now I’m going to use it to stop that bitch. What do we have to do?”

  Painter explained a few more details after she handed the phone back to Monk. She only half-listened. She returned her attention to Eve. On the weakly powered screen, her creation shone brightly in her evolving glory.

  I need you now more than ever.

  Behind her, Monk finished with Director Crowe. “I’ll go save the world. You save my girl.”

  “Hopefully with what you and Mara recovered, we’ll be able to narrow down our search,” Painter said. “In the meantime, we’re working another angle.”

  31

  December 26, 11:55 A.M. EST

  Plainsboro, New Jersey

  Lisa headed swiftly down the hospital corridor.

  She had just gotten off the phone with Painter, who had updated her on events in Europe, specifically how it impacted the situation in the States. She had been relieved to learn Monk had not betrayed Sigma, that it had all been a ploy to convince Valya to let her hostages go—which failed—or to acquire some physical hardware connected to her. That part of the scheme had panned out, and a team was already working on the device.

  She prayed that he hurried.

  She knew it offered their best chance to rescue Harriet and Seichan.

  Far better than what they were attempting here.

  Lisa passed between the pair of armed guards in the hallway. Access to Kat—to this entire floor of the hospital wing—had been cordoned off per Painter’s orders. She felt a flicker of guilt, now knowing Valya Mikhailov had come disguised at some point and captured her unprotected calls to reach out to Monk.

  She now gave every face a second look. With her fear for Kat distracting her, she had never suspected anything like this would happen. Then again, considering Kat’s state, her prognosis . . .

  What more could that monster do to her?

  She crossed into the private suite set up for Kat’s vigil. Her heart sank every time she came in here. Kat remained on her ventilator, draped in tubes and IV lines. It had been seventeen hours since Julian had rushed into Kat’s old room and stopped her organs from being harvested.

  The neurologist noted her entrance. “We should be ready to attempt this in another few minutes.”

  Julian sat at a computer station to one side of Kat’s bed. The monitor and CPU were connected to the neurologist’s stack of servers in the basement. She pictured that tall bank, glowing with green lights, housing Julian’s experimental deep neural net. They had used it yesterday to interpret Kat’s MRI scans and discern the images her brain conjured up: a dagger and a witch’s hat. Those clues had been enough to identify Valya Mikhailov.

  Now they were trying something even more experimental, a new investigational tool developed by the room’s other occupant, Dr. Susan Templeton, a molecular biologist with whom Julian had worked at Princeton for many years. He had sought out his colleague, recognizing he had exhausted what he could do. Or maybe it was also born out of guilt, knowing their last trial had likely pushed Kat over the edge.

  Lisa held out no hope that this procedure would be successful. It certainly wouldn’t save Kat. Her friend was already gone. What lay in the bed, her chest rising and falling rhythmically, her heart reflexively contracting and relaxing all on its own, was only an empty husk. What they were about to attempt—to get information out of the dead—felt ghoulish, bordering on abusive.

  Even Painter had questioned this decision. How can we be sure Kat even knows anything more? Maybe it’s best we let her go in peace. But he left the final decision to Lisa, trusting she’d make the right choice. So she went ahead and approved it. She knew Kat would not mind, not if it offered any chance to save her daughter, as fleeting as that might be.

  But there was another reason, too.

  Lisa crossed over and took Kat’s hand. She stared at her shaved head, covered in a net of electrodes, her skull hidden under a helmet full of ultrasonic emitters. Lisa had been bedside with Kat from the very beginning. She had sensed Kat struggling inside there. Her friend had proven herself to be a fighter, all the way to the end. And if given the opportunity, Kat would continue to fight even beyond that.

  She squeezed Kat’s hand.

  I intend to give you that chance.

  “I’m all set,” Dr. Templeton said.

  The molecular biologist sat on the other side of the bed from Julian. Her computer station was a twin to the neurologist’s, only her monitor showed a rotating 3-D gray schematic of a brain. The rendering had been compiled from several scans of Kat’s brain, mapping every detail. Throughout the image, thousands of tiny red dots covered the surface, coating every gyrus and sulcus, every wrinkle and fold of her cerebral cortex. They were peppered over her cerebellum and washed down her lower brainstem.

  The dots on the screen marked the locations of motes in Kat’s brain. As Lisa stared, she could see a few particles move, shifting to new positions by the beat of a tiny capillary or an eddy in Kat’s cerebrospinal fluid.

  Dr. Templeton called these molecularly engineered particles “neural dust.” Each mote was actually a fifty-cubic-micrometer device holding a nest of semiconducting sensors. Each one was encapsulated by polymer to make them bio-neutral, so they weren’t rejected. The load of them had been injected through a port at the base of her skull, directly into Kat’s cerebrospinal fluid. From there, the piezoelectrically charged particles settled across the surface of her brain, drawn to the weak current still coursing through her neurons.

  “Are you ready, Lisa?” Julian asked.

  She nodded. Her role from here was simple enough.

  Julian turned to the molecular biologist. “Let’s see if we can raise the dead.”

  Dr. Templeton tapped at her station and the helmet over Kat’s skull whirred to life, buzzing softly like a hive of bees. Lisa
pictured the emitters inside casting out ultrasonic waves, washing throughout Kat’s skull, plumbing for anything there.

  “The crystals are powering up,” Dr. Templeton reported.

  A glance over to the biologist’s station revealed all the red dots on her screen flashing to green. The ultrasonic vibrations were exciting the piezoelectric crystals, supercharging them to power the tiny transistors now bonded to Kat’s brain.

  “It seems to be working,” the molecular biologist reported, her voice full of amazement.

  This system had been developed at the University of California’s Center for Neural Engineering. Researchers there had success with rats, and now human studies were being conducted at other universities, including Princeton.

  Kat was one of the first guinea pigs.

  The purpose of neural dust was to absorb the readout mechanism of a nerve and transmit the information back to transducers built into the helmet. It allowed for a superfine scan of a brain, far superior than anything produced by an MRI.

  Lisa stared over to Julian. “Anything?”

  “I’m still waiting for the feed from Susan.”

  Dr. Templeton hunched closer to her station. “Transmitting now.”

  Lisa held her breath. Yesterday they had used Julian’s fMRI machine to scan Kat’s brain, which his DNN program then interpreted into images as Kat concentrated. The hope today was that the neural dust could perform an even greater miracle.

  “Okay,” Julian said. “Got it. I’m pairing and linking your incoming data streams into my DNN servers.”

  Over the past half day, Julian and Susan had calibrated their two systems to work in unison. The DNN network had amazingly taught itself how to convert the data from the molecular biologist’s dust into brain maps, the equivalent of the MRI scans it was familiar with interpreting. Only these maps were a million times more detailed and accurate.

  Julian turned to Susan. “Crank up the power.”

  The biologist twisted a dial at her station and the helmet’s buzzing grew louder.

  On the screen, the green glow of the motes brightened. The ultrasonic boost excited not only the piezoelectric crystals but even Kat’s brain.