Page 50 of The Secret of Secrets

When the call ended, she rushed back to the Charles Bridge, which was now dotted with pedestrians on their way to work. The woman hurried back the way she had come, exiting the bridge and turning left on Křižovnická Street. As she strode down the sidewalk, the playback slowed abruptly and began flashing “LIVE.” The woman’s speed-walking turned to a normal pace.

Real time. This is happening right now…

Dana had no authorization to use the sophisticated surveillance system in this way, but she couldn’t take her eyes off this shape-shifter. She watched as the woman strode down the sidewalk and turned left across an elegant parking courtyard toward the main entrance of one of Prague’s finest hotels.

She’s going to the Four Seasons?

As the woman disappeared through the hotel’s revolving door, something unexpected caught Dana’s eye—an Audi A7 parked in the reserved spaces in front of the hotel. Dana would have thought nothing of it, except that the unique red lettering on the sedan’s license plate indicated a diplomatic vehicle.

Is that one of our embassy cars?

A moment later, Dana had her answer when the elegant form of Michael Harris stepped out of the sedan and strode briskly into the hotel.

Dana stared in shock and her stomach turned.

You son of a bitch, Michael. I knew it!

The manager of the Four Seasons Hotel was still aglow from his recent personal call from the U.S. ambassador. After she thanked him for his discretion this morning regarding the unfortunate situation with Mr. Langdon, the ambassador had asked a favor of him.

A favor that just walked in, the manager thought, seeing the well-dressed gentleman now striding toward reception.

“Mr. Harris,” the manager said, extending a hand. “The ambassador just called.”

“Thank you,” the man replied, his handshake like a vise.

“I saw you earlier with Mr. Langdon,” the manager said. “And…ÚZSI.” He grimaced. “I hope all that is being sorted out?”

“Absolutely. It was an unfortunate misunderstanding, and we’re working through it. I’m here now, as you probably already know, because Mr. Langdon has asked the embassy to collect a few things from his suite while we sort this out. There’s some medication, which I gather is import—”

“Of course, I already have the room key printed for you, sir. I’ll just need to see some identification? I apologize for the formality, but this is just a bit unusual, and hotel policy—”

“No worries at all,” the man said, handing over his embassy ID. “I appreciate your care. The embassy has learned to expect only the best from the Four Seasons.”

Beaming, the manager handed back the ID. “Very kind of you. I trust you remember how to reach the Royal Suite? And when you’re finished, you can just leave the room key in the suite and pull the door shut behind you.”

The man from the embassy thanked him and headed upstairs.

The manager returned to his duties, too busy to notice the pretty woman in a red sweater following the man upstairs.

Chapter 32

Where am I? Sasha wondered.

She felt a familiar tingling rise up through her body, light and pleasant, like having champagne bubbles in her veins. When she emerged from an epileptic seizure, Sasha often felt like her brain was a computer rebooting, starting from scratch, loading software bit by bit.

Instinctively, she began her usual post-seizure ritual. “Postictal focus,” as Dr. Gessner called the strategy, was a way of reconnecting with the present reality by forcing the mind to conjure the most recent memory it could recall.

This morning I was making tea, Sasha remembered, conjuring the smell of the hibiscus, the morning light sifting through her kitchen windows, and the soft mewing of her two Siamese cats as they rubbed against her calves, eager for breakfast. Slowly, as her brain gained traction, she tried to remember what she had done after feeding her cats, but those memories were blank, refusing to surface.

Interictal memory impairment, as it was known, was quite common among epileptics and presented as periods of blackout memory loss, sometimes spanning many hours, as if the brain had simply forgotten to record whatever was happening.

For some epileptics, memory impairment was more debilitating than seizures, but Sasha had chosen simply to accept it. At times she wondered if it might even be a blessing.

There are parts of my past I’d rather not recall.

When Sasha was growing up in Russia, other schoolchildren mocked her seizures, giving her a lurid nickname—вибратор—which meant “vibrator.” Her parents took her to specialists, but the answers were always the same. “There is no cure. Sasha will die with seizures…but not of them.”

But I want to die, Sasha often thought.