“Sigma,” Gray whispered.
Leaving the symbol hanging there, Painter turned to Gray. “This footage was only discovered by Interpol eighteen hours ago. By a computer forensics expert who was searching Mara Silviera’s lab at the university. It seems the women from Bruxas had been attending a symposium in Coimbra and had come to the university library to witness a demonstration of Mara’s program when they were attacked.”
“Where’s the woman?”
“Vanished. Her work at the lab gone.”
“Do you think she was killed? Kidnapped?” Gray pictured the ruins of his home in Takoma Park.
“Unknown. But from her lab, she had a front-row seat to the attack, even placed a call to emergency services. By the time they reached her lab, it was empty. The current belief is that she’s scared and on the run.”
And took her work with her.
Painter pointed to the Greek letter still shining on the monitor. “Maybe it’s just me, but that looks like a call for help.”
“Like the bat signal,” Kowalski said.
Painter ignored him. “But I don’t believe it was a call from Mara. Like I said, the young woman had no knowledge of DARPA’s involvement. And even if she did, there was no way she could know about us.”
Kowalski scratched his head. “Who the hell sent it then?”
Gray answered, “Mara’s program. Her AI.”
Painter nodded. “Possibly. At some point, curious about its origin, it might have literally followed the money to DARPA, its indirect creator—and then to us, looking for help from DARPA’s emergency response team.”
In other words, calling out to one of its parents.
“Considering the processing power necessary to build a simple AGI,” Painter said, “it could have theoretically accomplished this in seconds. So I had Jason examine our systems. During the minute or so the program was running, something breached our firewalls, ghosting through them without raising an alarm. It lasted less than fifteen seconds.”
Mara’s AI program.
Gray realized another disturbing correlation. “The footage of the attack at the library. It was discovered eighteen hours ago . . . the same day we were attacked.”
“Again, all of this could still be a coincidence,” Painter warned. “I’m still in the midst of following leads.”
Gray did not need any further convincing.
“It’s not a coincidence,” he stated firmly. “Someone recognized that symbol and came after us before we could act.”
Kowalski backed him up. “Makes sense. The best defense is a good offense.”
Painter’s gaze settled heavily on Gray. “Still, only one person knows the truth.”
“Kat . . .”
And she was in a coma.
4
December 25, 2:18 A.M. EST
Washington, D.C.
Kat floated in darkness.
She could not say when she woke or if she had even been sleeping. She felt cold but could not shiver. Her throat ached, but she was unable to swallow. Voices reached her but were muffled.
She focused on the words and recognized the deep bass of her husband, Monk.
“Careful with her neck,” he scolded someone harshly.
“We need to shift her to seat the nasogastric tube.”
Pain exploded inside her head—but she could not even gasp. Something hard snaked through her left nostril. A sneeze worked up from deep inside, but never materialized.
She tried to force her eyes open.
It took all her effort.
As reward, light blazed into her skull. A watery world briefly appeared. Figures worked around her, but it was as if she were peering through a prism. The images were doubled and tripled, hard to make out.
Then her impossibly heavy eyelids drooped again, cutting off the sight.
No . . .
She tried again but failed.
“She’s scheduled for another CT,” someone said, the voice clearer now.
“I’m going with her,” Monk demanded.
She fought to move her arm, her hand, even a finger. To let him know, she was here.
Monk . . . what’s wrong with me?
She knew she must be in a hospital.
But why? What happened?
Then she remembered. It all came back, as explosively as the blaze of light a moment before. The attack, the masked figures, the fight.
The girls . . .
Sprawled on the kitchen floor, bleeding, barely conscious, she had watched helplessly as her daughters were dragged out, each carried in the arms of one of the assailants, their small bodies limp and boneless. A van idled in the driveway, parked at the garage in back, waiting to take the sleeping captives away.
Then another two figures manhandled Seichan past her, her slack form stretched between them.
Before vanishing into the night, the one carrying Seichan’s legs glanced back to Kat and called to someone in the backyard. “What about this bitch?”
Kat could barely see, as darkness closed in from all sides. A shape climbed the back steps to the kitchen door. Framed against the night, the masked figure studied Kat, then came closer, dropping to a knee for a closer look.
A long blade balanced in a gloved hand.
Kat waited for her throat to be cut.
Instead, the leader straightened, turned, and headed for the back door. “Leave her,” the muffled voice said. “We have what we need.”
“But if she lives—”
“It will already be too late.”
Panic at these words battered back the darkness for another breath. One arm stretched toward the door, but she could not stop them.
My girls . . .
As she sank away, one certainty had followed her into oblivion.
Now, locked in another prison, Kat tried to scream this knowledge to the world, to be heard, to warn the others—but she no longer had a voice.
She pictured the masked leader and despaired.
I know who you are.
2:22 A.M.
Seichan woke but didn’t open her eyes.
Still groggy, she feigned sleep. From years of training, she instinctively knew not to move. Not yet. Wary, she relied on her senses. Her mouth felt pasty, tasting of a metallic sourness. Her stomach churned queasily.
Drugged . . .
Memory flooded through her.
—front door bursting open without warning.
—dark masked figures rushing inside.
—another crash sounding from the back of the house.
Her heart pounded now in her throat, sharpening her focus.
When the attack occurred, she had been on the couch. Kat had gone to the kitchen to fetch a glass of wine and sparkling cider for her. They had just put the girls to bed upstairs and had planned to wrap the last of the presents. Seichan had also wanted to pick Kat’s brain, to learn more about what it meant to be a mother.
Over dinner, Kat had already done much to temper Seichan’s anxiety. While she had read What to Expect When You’re Expecting, dog-earing and highlighting her copy, Kat had offered practical insight not found in those pages: prefill diapers with ointment before bed to shorten overnight changes, flavor cold washcloths used for teething with sour pickles of all things.
But most of all, her advice boiled down to a two-word imperative: Don’t panic.
Kat promised to be there at every step of the way. In the delivery room, in recovery. I’ll even walk with you on his or her first day of kindergarten, she promised. That’s the worst. Letting them go.
Seichan had a hard time believing that. Even when Kat went to fetch the wine, she had fantasized about disappearing postdelivery, leaving the child with Gray and vanishing. What sort of mother could she be to the child?
After her own mother had been ripped from their home in Southeast Asia, she had lived wild on the streets, running the slums of Bangkok and the back alleys of Phnom Penh, half-feral, a creature of the street. Back then she had learned the rudimentary skills of her future profession. Survival required vigilance, cunning, and brutality. She was eventually recruited into a shadowy organization known as the Guild, where her crude street skills where honed, turning her into a soulless assassin. Only after betraying her employers and destroying the organization did she find a measure of peace, discovering someone who could love her, who wanted to make a life, a home with her.
I shouldn’t have believed it.
Paranoia and suspicion had always been a part of her DNA, but while pregnant, she had refused to let that toxicity seep into her child. Instead she had foolishly dropped her guard.
And look what happened.
As the door to her home had crashed open, she had leaped from the couch. She flashed daggers from a pair of wrist sheaths, whipping the blades through the air. She might be pregnant, but the hidden knives were an inseparable part of her. The first struck the lead attacker, impaling him in the chest, sending his body tumbling backward into the Christmas tree. As the decorated pine crashed to the floor, her second dagger flew toward a masked figure pounding up the stairs, pistol in hand.
Going for the girls . . .
Whether from panic or being off-balanced by her gravid belly, she missed her target. The blade impaled into the banister and the man vanished upstairs.