More of the crimson lines on the Paris map died away.
A sudden bright flare—accompanied by a sonorous boom—drew all eyes to the city. A mile to the west, a column of flame spiraled out of the mist and licked the sky. Jason swore and looked about to speak, when another whirlwind of fire erupted, this time to the south. Then another and another. One exploded only blocks away. The blast rattled the building’s windows, causing everyone to duck.
More explosions followed.
By now, the breadth of the fog-shrouded city glowed with dozens of fiery pools.
“Over here,” Simon said, drawing attention to his station. His screen glowed with a map of Paris, crisscrossed with lines of yellow, blue, and green. “Someone’s overloading transformers, blowing them systematically.”
Eve.
Simon tapped his screen, while casting glances to the city. “Look here, here, and here. The blowouts are happening where the yellow and blue lines cross. Specifically where gas mains are near transformers. It looks like someone overpressurized the gas lines, cracking several mains. Or even deliberately opened them.”
“Either way,” Jason said, “exploding a transformer near one of those leaking mains would be like tossing a match into a gas tank.”
Simon turned to Gray. “What could do this? The sophistication to pull off something like this . . . merde, no hacker could manage that.”
Earlier, Gray had warned Simon and his team of a potential cyberattack on the city, but he had not fully disclosed the source of that threat. French intelligence had demanded his reticence. Details of Mara’s project were on a need-to-know basis, which was no surprise. National cybersecurity—both in the United States and abroad—remained shrouded in layers of secrecy. Especially as the world’s critical infrastructures grew ever more complicated, requiring greater dependence on computers and software to run them, making them vulnerable to cyberattacks.
And even those attacks were growing more sophisticated, more automated, even self-governing. Like the Stuxnet virus that invaded Iranian uranium enrichment facilities and disabled their centrifuges. Or closer to home, the Blaster virus that contributed to a massive blackout in the United States and caused billions in losses.
But that was nothing compared to what had invaded systems here.
Gray answered Simon’s unspoken question, believing the man needed to know. “We’re dealing with a sophisticated AI. That’s what’s orchestrating this attack.”
“An AI?” Simon looked around, trying to read their faces. “Vraiment?”
Another rattling blast answered him.
Gray stared out at the burning city. “We have to find out where—”
“Here,” Mara blurted out. She swiveled her chair half around, then back again, then stood up. She excitedly pointed to the map on her screen. “Right there.”
Mara had never stopped working during the explosions, the discussions. On her screen, the crimson web of her trace had dwindled to a small blinking circle. Everyone gathered around her. The site was not far, over in the neighboring district, the 14th arrondissement. The red circle sat in the middle of a green square among the patchwork of streets.
“Is that a park?” Gray asked.
Simon rolled his chair closer, his brow pinched. “No, it’s a cemetery.”
Cemetery?
“Montparnasse Cemetery. Our second largest. Lots of famous writers and artists are buried there. Baudelaire, Sartre, Beckett.”
Gray didn’t care who was interred there. The location made no sense. “Mara, are you sure you’ve pinpointed the right spot? Even at night, it seems a strange place to launch a major cyberattack, out in the open like that.”
Monk matched his frown. “Maybe they set up shop inside a crypt.”
Gray shook his head, not buying that explanation. “They’d need power and—” He turned to Simon and rolled the man in his chair back to the other station. “Show me on your map where this spot is.”
Simon used a mouse to scroll and zoom over to the cemetery. Gray compared his screen to Mara’s work. He reached and tapped the center of the cemetery. Two lines crossed the location—one yellow, the other green.
“This yellow one is a power line,” Gray said. “What’s the green one?”
Simon’s eyes got larger as he glanced up. “That’s a telecom trunk. One of ours.”
“So, they are in the cemetery.” He nodded over to Mara, silently apologizing for doubting her.
“No,” Simon said. “They’re not in the cemetery.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re under it. We ran our trunk through tunnels beneath the cemetery, through part of Paris’s catacomb system. Our city of the dead.”
A graveyard under a graveyard.
Of course, the Crucible would pick such a spot.
“That’s where they are,” Gray said.
“But how do we find them down there?” Monk asked.
Simon lifted a hand. “I know the catacombs. I was once a Rat.”
Monk lifted a brow at this odd admission. “You were a rat?”
“The Rats were the name of a crew of cataphiles—urban explorers of the city of the dead. When I was running with them, I knew all of the catacombs’ secret entrances, including one near the cemetery.”
Gray pulled him up by his arm. “Then you’re coming with us.”
Simon looked like he suddenly regretted volunteering this information, but he glanced to the burning city and nodded.
Gray turned. “Monk, you grab Kowalski. Jason, you stay here with Mara and Carly. Keep watch if anything changes. Let us know.”
“Will do.”
Gray got everyone moving, collecting Kowalski and his gear in the next room. He paused long enough to grab an extra set of night-vision goggles from Jason’s pack for Simon. Father Bailey looked ready to follow, but Gray stopped him and nodded to the satellite phone in the priest’s hand.
“What did you learn from your people in Spain?”
“Not much. My contacts with the Key hope to have more information within the hour.”
“Then keep the phone. You and Sister Beatrice, stay here. We may need that intel. And where we’re headed there’ll be no signal.”
“Where are you going?”
Gray set off, herding his team toward the stairwell. “To the city of the dead.”
Kowalski glanced sharply back. “What? You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
Monk shouldered the big guy toward the stairs. “Nope, he’s dead serious.”
12:22 A.M.
“Gratulor tibi de hac gloria,” the Inquisitor General intoned in Latin.
Todor cupped a hand over his left ear to hear the Grand Inquisitor’s praise and congratulations. His earpiece ran to an e-tablet in his hand, which communicated wirelessly to a VoIP router patched into the nearby telecom trunk. The arrangement allowed him to communicate with the world at large and to view the damage he had wrought upon the decadent city.
On the tablet, a satellite view of Paris glowed. Its outer suburbs still shone with lights, but within the city limits, darkness prevailed. It looked like a hole had been cut out of the landscape.
Or better yet, a gateway to hell.
Fires glowed throughout that black pit, more than a dozen, each slowly spreading larger. Before much longer, all of Paris would be burning, torched to ruin. Emergency services could never smother the cleansing flames. Not only was power out, but the demon released into its systems had shut off the city’s water supply, locking down pumping stations and opening emergency spillways to drop pressure throughout the system. With time, response teams could manually return function, but by then it would be too late for the city.
He used a finger to swipe from the satellite image to a newsfeed out of London, which was just starting to report on the attack. The video was silent, but the reporter stood outside a Paris hospital. Emergency generators lit the building. It stood out starkly against the blacked-out city. In the distance, an inferno glowed, churning darkly with smoke and flaming ash. Closer at hand, an ambulance raced into view. It braked hard near the ER entrance, joining four others already there, all their lights blazing with urgency. Stretchers and gurneys crowded the sidewalk. Doctors and nurses rushed about.
Todor swiped again, taking in other feeds.
—a fire engine parked uselessly at the edge of a swirling conflagration.
—people fleeing into view through a pall of smoke, faces covered in soot.
—a woman on her knees, sobbing over a small form cradled on her lap.
Still, he didn’t need the satellite images or newsfeed to know he had been successful. At the outset, he had heard the distant explosions. Eventually a hint of smoke cut through the dank must of the catacombs.
Now only a heavy silence remained. Buried sixty meters under Montparnasse Cemetery, the ongoing chaos above failed to penetrate this deep. The catacombs had become a quiet cathedral. The weight and stillness added to the sense of holiness and righteousness.
Todor knew his cause was just.