“Finally bagged her, eh, Willy?”
“What’d it take, Will, tranq dart or a shot of tequila?”
“Make way for Prince Charming, boys!”
I endured the jabs without a care in the world. I deposited her in her bunk, pulled the covers up, and turned the small noisemaker on—they were good for helping folks stay asleep; the berths weren’t separated by shifts, and bunkmates were constantly coming and going. The hard surfaces throughout the vessel made for a noisy existence.
Reading people was part of my job. After a few weeks, I knew what Lin saw in genetics: the promise of a civilized human race. She believed that somewhere in the human genome lay the answer to why some people were evil. To her, the key to the Looking Glass was simply identifying the genetic basis for all the traits that ailed the world and getting rid of them.
Yuri, on the other hand, didn’t believe that the threat of nuclear war was humanity’s greatest enemy. Pandemics, he argued, had decimated the human population far more than any war. He believed that globalization and urbanization made an extinction-level pandemic inevitable.
It was then that I realized the truth: no one knew what the Looking Glass was—even the scientists working on the project. I would later learn that the entire project had begun as a mere hypothesis—a hypothesis that a device could be created that would secure the human race forever. The scientific experiments being conducted on the Beagle were simply gathering data to test that hypothesis, to figure out exactly what that device might be. To these scientists, the Looking Glass represented an abstract concept, like paradise. Something we all understood, but no one knew exactly where it was or precisely what it looked like. To some it was a sandy beach, to others a cabin in the woods or a penthouse in the city with unlimited wine and theater tickets. Paradise was the product of one’s life experiences and desires. In the same way, every scientist saw humanity’s greatest threat through the lens of their field of expertise; they imagined themselves and their work in the starring role in the device’s creation. If you put seven Citium members in a room and asked them to name the most likely extinction-level event in humanity’s future, you might get seven different answers: robotics, artificial intelligence, pandemics, climate change, solar events, asteroid impacts, or alien invasion.
Creating one device that shielded humanity from all these threats seemed impossible to me. I would later learn that it was in fact possible, but it came at an unimaginable price.
Peyton stood from the couch and paced away from the pages, which lay beside Desmond. He sprang up and joined her, seeming to read her feelings.
“Just because your mother was in the Citium back then doesn’t mean she’s involved with what’s happening now.”
She stared into his eyes. He still knows me so well.
“And what if she is?”
“Then we’ll deal with it.”
“I can’t—”
“We will. Together.”
He pulled her into his arms and held her, neither speaking for a long moment.
With her mouth pressed into his shoulder, she whispered, “What does it mean, Des? All the connections. My mother and father were both in the Citium. So was Yuri—the man who recruited you. Your uncle met my father in an orphanage in London. It’s like… we’re all entangled.”
“I don’t know. But I think you’re right: there’s a larger picture here. I just can’t figure out what it is.”
He released her and stepped to the corkboard, as if he were searching it for the answer. He reached out and pulled a piece of scrap paper from the pin that held it. It read, Invisible Sun — person, organization, or project?
Peyton thought he was going to reveal what he was thinking, but he merely slipped the note in his pocket and turned to her. “Let’s keep reading, see if we can figure out what’s going on.”
Chapter 81
The Beagle put ashore at ports all over the world. I got to use my knack for foreign languages, but I didn’t get to enjoy the scenery much. I was always on guard, planning for what might go wrong, and making contacts in case they did.
In Rio de Janeiro in 1967, I was glad I had made contingency plans, and that I had the contacts to execute them. I was at the hotel on a Wednesday night when one of the researchers, a female biologist in her early thirties named Sylvia, threw open the lobby’s glass door and ran in. Blood covered her face and matted her brown hair. One of her eyes was swollen shut. She barreled past the bar and the people checking in, yelling my name. I was sitting in the lobby reading a book. I rose, caught her by the arm, guided her to a phone booth, and closed the folding door. I finally got her calmed down enough to speak.
“They took them!”
“Who?”
“Yuri and Lin.”
“Who took them?”
She was sobbing now. “I don’t know. They wore masks.” She shook her head as if she didn’t want to remember. “They said they’d kill them if I didn’t come back to the bus stop with twenty thousand dollars in two hours.”
I took her up to my room after that, questioned her more, then called for two of my intelligence operatives. I sent one of them to the Beagle to get forty thousand dollars just in case. We kept a lot of money on hand for scientific provisions as well as kidnap and ransom operations. I sent my other operative to make inquiries with a few of my old MI6 contacts, to find a man I knew only by reputation, but who I was confident would ensure my operation’s success.
When I was left alone with the trembling woman, I poured her a tall glass of brandy and sat her on the bed. She winced when the liquid hit her cut lip, but with a shaking hand, she finished it quickly.
“Listen to me, Sylvia.”
She looked up at me with her good eye, which still leaked tears.
“Everything is going to be okay. I’m going to get them back, and I’m going to make the person who did this very sorry.”