Page 131 of The Secret of Secrets

Finch held his breath and touched the return key to initiate the search. A full two seconds passed with no results, and Finch began to relax.

And then his computer pinged.

Shit…

The search had located a match near the very end of the manuscript. As the page popped up, Finch leaned in, his eyes racing across the text. Within moments, he realized this was a disastrous scenario. Whether wittingly or not, Katherine Solomon had stepped squarely into a hornet’s nest. Her book posed a severe problem.

As Finch weighed his limited options for managing the crisis, his phone pinged with more bad news—a notification that Solomon had just accessed the PRH server from the Four Seasons Business Center, where she currently was printing her manuscript.

She’s making hard copies at 6:45 a.m…. on a hotel printer?!

The action seemed anathema to the publisher’s security protocols, and Finch suddenly feared that Solomon had learned her manuscript had been hacked…and she was already taking actions to protect it.

Distressed, Finch made a final attempt to reach Brigita Gessner, though his call went straight to voicemail. Gessner had been missing all night…ever since she had met with Solomon and Langdon.

One thing he knew for sure. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Finch had prepared bold countermeasures in both Prague and New York, which could be deployed with the issuance of a single-word command.

Assessing the entire situation, he concluded it was time.

He sent simultaneous Signal messages to his operatives on the ground in both cities:

Execute.

Chapter 83

The Golěm knelt on the pink marble floor, deeply depleted after his struggle. Gathering his strength to move and hide the body, he was pleased to find his victim’s corpse far lighter than Harris’s had been. He dragged the woman with little effort, dumping her out of sight behind a couch that sat near the side wall. He considered stealing the woman’s handgun, but he had never had the opportunity to learn how to fire one, and he much preferred the simplicity and silence of the stun gun.

The Golěm now moved to the wall sculpture and slid the heavy piece of art aside, revealing the elevator he had ascended minutes ago to catch the woman by surprise. The elevator’s security keypad glowed before him, and he carefully typed in Gessner’s seven-character passcode, recalling her terror last night.

She told me everything…as anyone in her position would.

As the elevator descended one floor, The Golěm closed his eyes, recalling with satisfaction his interrogation method, which utilized a machine his victim herself had invented.

Gessner’s EPR pod was designed for fully anesthetized, unconscious patients in conjunction with intravenous fentanyl—the most powerful painkiller on earth—which would block the excruciating sensation of having your circulatory system flushed with ice-cold saline. The Golěm, however, had simply buckled her in, skipping anesthesia and securing her wrists and ankles with the pod’s heavy Velcro straps. The machine’s IVs were designed for femoral arteries and veins, but he inserted the catheters into her arms instead, which he imagined would provide just enough flow to keep her conscious to experience the agony.

The elevator opened automatically to Gessner’s lab, and The Golěm made his way through the dim light, his cloak billowing behind him, casting ghostly shadows on the stone walls. This time, he was alone in the bastion, and he would not be interrupted.

I will need only a minute to retrieve what I came for.

Then he would head for the secret facility known as Threshold.

The trauma of being abducted had not faded for Jonas Faukman, and having now learned that Robert and Katherine had been lured into the residence of a former CIA attorney, he could only hope they had taken his advice and gotten the hell out of there.

Call me, Robert. Let me know you’re okay…

Alex Conan had been pecking away at his laptop, performing a deep dive on In-Q-Tel. Faukman was fiercely interested in knowing why the investment firm would be so opposed to whatever was in Katherine’s manuscript.

“Have a look at this,” Alex finally said. “It’s a partial list of Q’s private investment holdings.”

Faukman darted over and looked at the screen over the tech’s shoulder, eyeing the firm’s catalog in disbelief. There were more than three hundred entries, mostly in language that was indecipherable to him.

MemSQL—synchronous analytics Boundless Spatial

Xanadu—photonic quantum solutions

Keyhole—geospatial visualization