Page 97 of The Secret of Secrets

“Any news on Langdon and Katherine?” Faukman pressed, still haunted by the tech’s words on the frantic call earlier: The hackers who deleted your manuscript…I think they might have killed one of your authors.

“I’ll explain everything,” Alex said, “but it’s good news. Nobody was killed. I was wrong.”

Faukman felt a visceral rush of relief, and he bent over, hands on his knees, taking several deep breaths. Thank God.

“Langdon is the one I thought was…dead,” Alex said as he ushered Faukman into the security center. “But I just spoke to the manager at the Four Seasons. The situation is complicated, but he confirmed Robert Langdon is very much alive…although it sounds like he may be in trouble with the local authorities.”

What kind of trouble? Faukman wondered, although his curiosity was eclipsed by the profound relief of knowing Langdon was all right.

Bolstered by the good news, he followed Alex through a maze of floor-to-ceiling computer racks, all humming loudly. They emerged into an open area with an expansive workstation housing multiple computer monitors, fanned out in a gentle semicircle. Several high-backed padded chairs sat before the monitors. Faukman felt like he had walked into a mini mission control.

On the wall over the workstation was a wide framed illustration depicting an ocean liner in distress…sinking into a sea of ones and zeros. The caption read: Loose Bits Sink Ships. The spoof on the famous World War II slogan was supposed to be a reminder to secure data at its root level.

A little late for that, Faukman thought. The manuscript’s gone.

Alex slid a second swivel chair next to his, and the two men sat down, rotating to face each other. “Okay…a lot happened,” the tech said, his expression dire. “Let me start at the beginning.”

Starting at the beginning, Faukman knew, was the worst way to narrate a story, but he held his tongue.

“I didn’t want to share all of this on the phone,” Alex began, “but after you disappeared, I was scared and felt I should warn Katherine Solomon immediately that her manuscript was under attack—and that she might be in personal danger.”

“Okay.”

“I pulled her employee file, called her cell, and I got no answer. Same thing for Robert Langdon. When I couldn’t reach any of the three of you, I panicked and decided to track your exact locations by hacking into your phones.”

“Wait…you can do that?”

“Not in your case,” the tech said, spinning toward his terminal and beginning to type. “And not for Dr. Solomon either, but Mr. Langdon was easy. I noticed he had an iCloud email address and also that he had chosen the same exact password for multiple credentials on the PRH server. I have to say, I’m surprised such a smart guy would use a single password, especially one as weak as ‘Dolphin123.’ ”

Langdon’s password is Dolphin123? Faukman hung his head. Why do we even have security protocols? Langdon’s nickname at Harvard was “The Dolphin” because he could still outswim half of the varsity water polo team. Unfortunately, Langdon was also a self-proclaimed Luddite—a classicist whose expertise in the ancient past made for a reluctant relationship with the future. He still has a Rolodex and wears a Mickey Mouse watch, for God’s sake.

“I was desperate to locate one of you,” Alex said, “and so I used Langdon’s password to hack into his FindMy app and pinpoint his location.”

The tech typed a few more keys, and a map of Prague materialized.

“According to iCloud,” he continued, “Langdon’s phone was completely offline, which is very unusual. And if we check his last known location…we get this disturbing image.” Conan refreshed the screen, zooming in. “This says Mr. Langdon’s last known location was this morning at 7:02 a.m. local time, and he was exactly…here.” He pointed at a tiny blue dot on the map. “And then nothing.”

Faukman squinted at the dot on the map. “I’m sorry? This says he was in the middle of the Vltava River?”

“Yes! Considering we had been attacked by military-level hackers,” Alex said, “and you had disappeared, and Langdon wasn’t answering…”

“You thought he was drowned? Langdon’s a world-class swimmer! Maybe he just threw his phone away.”

“I wanted to believe that, but if Langdon threw the phone, the phone’s location tracking would have been a straight line. But his track moves around and even doubles back on itself before it disappears! It looked like Langdon was taken out onto the river, dumped overboard, and then tried to swim back to shore, before he drowned and took the phone with him to the bottom.”

Faukman could see it was an alarming scenario, but Alex’s tenuous leap from a cell phone’s “last known location” to Langdon being murdered was missing a few steps in logic. Then again, it was probably no less logical than the surreal happenstance of both Langdon’s phone and Faukman’s lying on the bottom of rivers on different sides of the planet.

“I know you think I overreacted,” Alex said, “but considering who hacked us…I had a right to be worried. I still am.”

“So who hacked us?” Faukman demanded, leaning forward.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to Katherine—to find out if she could think of anyone who might be targeting her so I could build a proprietary algorithm and search for specific digital artifacts.”

My God, this kid needs an editor. Just tell me who the hell did it?!

“But before I could build the algorithm, my FTK scan returned a hit. One of the IoCs from this hack had a match on MISP associated with known—”

“Alex, I have no idea—”