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.