Crucible Read online

  It was a fear that had been nagging at him. The enemy didn’t need to be physically in Paris to employ the tech stolen from Mara. They could theoretically launch the cyberattack from anywhere in the world. The only hint that this might not be the case was that Bailey’s contacts with La Clave, the Key, had reported that a cell of the Crucible had been dispatched to Paris. Still, even this intel didn’t necessarily assure that the stolen tech was here in the city.

  Ultimately, there was one way to know for sure.

  Flanked by Monk and Jason, he headed into the computer lab. Mara typed furiously with one hand, the other shifted a mouse. Half the screen flowed with code and the other half showed a map of Paris, overlaid with a glowing web of crimson lines. As Gray stepped closer, several of those strands went dark.

  Carly stood with her arms crossed, staring over Mara’s shoulder. “It’s definitely Eve.” She unfolded an arm to point at the streaming data. Sections flashed in blue, only to vanish away, then more would flare. “Those blips are hits. Matches to Eve’s digital fingerprint.”

  “They . . . they’re everywhere,” Mara gasped out, her gaze sweeping back and forth between two halves of her screen. “But seven of the thirty-six microkernels are time-dependent.”

  “Which means they age as the program runs,” Jason explained. “For our purposes, we can use them like little digital timers.”

  Mara nodded as she worked. “The older they are, the further they are from the source. I’m using those time stamps to trace back to where they originated.”

  To her Xénese device.

  Gray watched more of the web collapse on the screen. He glanced out the office window to Father Bailey. The priest had Kowalski’s phone at his ear. “Can you tell yet if your device is in the city versus somewhere else?”

  “Yes . . . no . . . not for sure.” Mara was clearly flustered.

  Carly placed a calming hand on her friend’s shoulder. No words were spoken, but the message was clear. You can do this.

  Mara took a deep breath, then tried again. “I . . . I’m pretty certain from the pattern—from the lack of digital fingerprints in networks outside the city limits—that Eve was released here.” She cast a fast look back to Gray. “I think they’re even somehow restricting her reach.”

  Keeping the damage to the city itself—at least, for now.

  More of the crimson lines on the Paris map died away.

  A sudden bright flare—accompanied by a sonorous boom—drew all eyes to the city. A mile to the west, a column of flame spiraled out of the mist and licked the sky. Jason swore and looked about to speak, when another whirlwind of fire erupted, this time to the south. Then another and another. One exploded only blocks away. The blast rattled the building’s windows, causing everyone to duck.

  More explosions followed.

  By now, the breadth of the fog-shrouded city glowed with dozens of fiery pools.

  “Over here,” Simon said, drawing attention to his station. His screen glowed with a map of Paris, crisscrossed with lines of yellow, blue, and green. “Someone’s overloading transformers, blowing them systematically.”

  Eve.

  Simon tapped his screen, while casting glances to the city. “Look here, here, and here. The blowouts are happening where the yellow and blue lines cross. Specifically where gas mains are near transformers. It looks like someone overpressurized the gas lines, cracking several mains. Or even deliberately opened them.”

  “Either way,” Jason said, “exploding a transformer near one of those leaking mains would be like tossing a match into a gas tank.”

  Simon turned to Gray. “What could do this? The sophistication to pull off something like this . . . merde, no hacker could manage that.”

  Earlier, Gray had warned Simon and his team of a potential cyberattack on the city, but he had not fully disclosed the source of that threat. French intelligence had demanded his reticence. Details of Mara’s project were on a need-to-know basis, which was no surprise. National cybersecurity—both in the United States and abroad—remained shrouded in layers of secrecy. Especially as the world’s critical infrastructures grew ever more complicated, requiring greater dependence on computers and software to run them, making them vulnerable to cyberattacks.

  And even those attacks were growing more sophisticated, more automated, even self-governing. Like the Stuxnet virus that invaded Iranian uranium enrichment facilities and disabled their centrifuges. Or closer to home, the Blaster virus that contributed to a massive blackout in the United States and caused billions in losses.

  But that was nothing compared to what had invaded systems here.

  Gray answered Simon’s unspoken question, believing the man needed to know. “We’re dealing with a sophisticated AI. That’s what’s orchestrating this attack.”

  “An AI?” Simon looked around, trying to read their faces. “Vraiment?”

  Another rattling blast answered him.

  Gray stared out at the burning city. “We have to find out where—”

  “Here,” Mara blurted out. She swiveled her chair half around, then back again, then stood up. She excitedly pointed to the map on her screen. “Right there.”

  Mara had never stopped working during the explosions, the discussions. On her screen, the crimson web of her trace had dwindled to a small blinking circle. Everyone gathered around her. The site was not far, over in the neighboring district, the 14th arrondissement. The red circle sat in the middle of a green square among the patchwork of streets.

  “Is that a park?” Gray asked.

  Simon rolled his chair closer, his brow pinched. “No, it’s a cemetery.”

  Cemetery?

  “Montparnasse Cemetery. Our second largest. Lots of famous writers and artists are buried there. Baudelaire, Sartre, Beckett.”

  Gray didn’t care who was interred there. The location made no sense. “Mara, are you sure you’ve pinpointed the right spot? Even at night, it seems a strange place to launch a major cyberattack, out in the open like that.”

  Monk matched his frown. “Maybe they set up shop inside a crypt.”

  Gray shook his head, not buying that explanation. “They’d need power and—” He turned to Simon and rolled the man in his chair back to the other station. “Show me on your map where this spot is.”

  Simon used a mouse to scroll and zoom over to the cemetery. Gray compared his screen to Mara’s work. He reached and tapped the center of the cemetery. Two lines crossed the location—one yellow, the other green.

  “This yellow one is a power line,” Gray said. “What’s the green one?”

  Simon’s eyes got larger as he glanced up. “That’s a telecom trunk. One of ours.”

  “So, they are in the cemetery.” He nodded over to Mara, silently apologizing for doubting her.

  “No,” Simon said. “They’re not in the cemetery.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re under it. We ran our trunk through tunnels beneath the cemetery, through part of Paris’s catacomb system. Our city of the dead.”

  A graveyard under a graveyard.

  Of course, the Crucible would pick such a spot.

  “That’s where they are,” Gray said.

  “But how do we find them down there?” Monk asked.

  Simon lifted a hand. “I know the catacombs. I was once a Rat.”

  Monk lifted a brow at this odd admission. “You were a rat?”

  “The Rats were the name of a crew of cataphiles—urban explorers of the city of the dead. When I was running with them, I knew all of the catacombs’ secret entrances, including one near the cemetery.”

  Gray pulled him up by his arm. “Then you’re coming with us.”

  Simon looked like he suddenly regretted volunteering this information, but he glanced to the burning city and nodded.

  Gray turned. “Monk, you grab Kowalski. Jason, you stay here with Mara and Carly. Keep watch if anything changes. Let us know.”

  “Will do.”

&nbs
p; Gray got everyone moving, collecting Kowalski and his gear in the next room. He paused long enough to grab an extra set of night-vision goggles from Jason’s pack for Simon. Father Bailey looked ready to follow, but Gray stopped him and nodded to the satellite phone in the priest’s hand.

  “What did you learn from your people in Spain?”

  “Not much. My contacts with the Key hope to have more information within the hour.”

  “Then keep the phone. You and Sister Beatrice, stay here. We may need that intel. And where we’re headed there’ll be no signal.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Gray set off, herding his team toward the stairwell. “To the city of the dead.”

  Kowalski glanced sharply back. “What? You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  Monk shouldered the big guy toward the stairs. “Nope, he’s dead serious.”

  12:22 A.M.

  “Gratulor tibi de hac gloria,” the Inquisitor General intoned in Latin.

  Todor cupped a hand over his left ear to hear the Grand Inquisitor’s praise and congratulations. His earpiece ran to an e-tablet in his hand, which communicated wirelessly to a VoIP router patched into the nearby telecom trunk. The arrangement allowed him to communicate with the world at large and to view the damage he had wrought upon the decadent city.

  On the tablet, a satellite view of Paris glowed. Its outer suburbs still shone with lights, but within the city limits, darkness prevailed. It looked like a hole had been cut out of the landscape.

  Or better yet, a gateway to hell.

  Fires glowed throughout that black pit, more than a dozen, each slowly spreading larger. Before much longer, all of Paris would be burning, torched to ruin. Emergency services could never smother the cleansing flames. Not only was power out, but the demon released into its systems had shut off the city’s water supply, locking down pumping stations and opening emergency spillways to drop pressure throughout the system. With time, response teams could manually return function, but by then it would be too late for the city.

  He used a finger to swipe from the satellite image to a newsfeed out of London, which was just starting to report on the attack. The video was silent, but the reporter stood outside a Paris hospital. Emergency generators lit the building. It stood out starkly against the blacked-out city. In the distance, an inferno glowed, churning darkly with smoke and flaming ash. Closer at hand, an ambulance raced into view. It braked hard near the ER entrance, joining four others already there, all their lights blazing with urgency. Stretchers and gurneys crowded the sidewalk. Doctors and nurses rushed about.

  Todor swiped again, taking in other feeds.

  —a fire engine parked uselessly at the edge of a swirling conflagration.

  —people fleeing into view through a pall of smoke, faces covered in soot.

  —a woman on her knees, sobbing over a small form cradled on her lap.

  Still, he didn’t need the satellite images or newsfeed to know he had been successful. At the outset, he had heard the distant explosions. Eventually a hint of smoke cut through the dank must of the catacombs.

  Now only a heavy silence remained. Buried sixty meters under Montparnasse Cemetery, the ongoing chaos above failed to penetrate this deep. The catacombs had become a quiet cathedral. The weight and stillness added to the sense of holiness and righteousness.

  Todor knew his cause was just.

  The others of his team clearly felt the same. No one spoke or celebrated. Faces stared upward, as if trying to peer through the limestone to the ruin above.

  Only Mendoza kept his gaze down and focused elsewhere. The technician still labored at the laptop tied to the Crucible’s Xénese device. The screen showed that blasted garden under a black sun. A figure stood in the center, ablaze with fury, the serpent in Eden.

  Only this serpent—this demonic Eve—was bound in iron chains, struggling under their weight of authority and demand. Links burned brighter with fire, as the creature struggled.

  Todor enjoyed her torture.

  Especially as her work this night was not over.

  He returned his attention to his tablet, staring at a view of the Eiffel Tower, now cast in a hellish glow as Paris burned. He smiled, knowing the truth.

  All of this was just a distraction.

  The true ruin was yet to come.

  The Inquisitor General spoke again, purposeful and rapturous. “Phase duo procedure.”

  He lifted an arm toward Mendoza, passing on the order.

  Proceed with phase two.

  19

  December 26, 12:38 A.M. CET

  Paris, France

  “She’s gone,” Mara said.

  Carly turned from the window. She had been staring out at the countless fires across the city. From the fourteenth floor, she had a panoramic view. A pall of smoke smothered Paris, billowing thicker where flames burned. Helicopters buzzed across the hellish landscape, bright fireflies flitting through the dark smoke.

  As Carly maintained her vigil, the fires had continued to spread, creeping ever closer to their position. They all knew they couldn’t stay here much longer. Father Bailey had already used his satellite phone to reach out to local contacts. A car idled below, ready to whisk them all away.

  But so far, Mara refused to budge. “Look at the feed,” her friend said. “Nothing’s there. She’s vanished.”

  Carly headed over, joining Jason, who hovered at Mara’s shoulder.

  Mara waved a finger up and down the data scrolling across the screen. Earlier, snatches of that code would flare a bright blue, as one of the data points on Eve’s digital fingerprint was detected. Carly leaned closer. The feed ran uninterrupted now, a flow of white code against the black background. She spotted no flashes of blue.

  “What do you think that means?” Jason asked.

  “Whoever’s controlling Eve had been restricting her to the city limits of Paris. I’m guessing they’ve tethered her with some sort of GPS leash, using it to keep her code from breaching a set distance. And now they’ve reeled her back in.”

  “Like a fish on a line,” Carly said.

  Jason glanced to the burning city. “Only because their work here is done.”

  “But what they did, what they risked,” Mara said. “One slip up . . .”

  Jason nodded. “And Eve could’ve broken free of that leash.”

  Carly inwardly cringed. “Something tells me, she would’ve been pissed.”

  “No.” Mara looked over to them. “She’d be insane. Eve was in a fragile, brittle state when the device was stolen. With the wrong pressure, her psyche could shatter.”

  As if punctuating this statement, an explosion shook the building. A ball of flames rolled past the window, roaring in fury, trailing black smoke.

  Father Bailey popped his head into the room, his phone white-knuckled in his hand. “That’s it, boys and girls. We’re evacuating now.”

  With the exception of Sister Beatrice, the rest of the floor was deserted. The company’s CSIRT team had already evacuated the building, heading out to help elsewhere or going to the aid of family members.

  Carly didn’t need to be told twice. “C’mon.”

  Mara hesitated, still in her seat, staring at the screen.

  Jason gripped Mara’s arm, ready to tug her up. For once, Carly didn’t object to the guy touching her friend. Jason could manhandle Mara if it would get her to safety.

  “They’re right.” He nodded to the scrolling data. “With Eve gone, there’s no reason to stay here.”

  Mara lifted from the seat, acknowledging that her duty here was over—then froze. “Oh, no,” she moaned.

  Carly saw it, too. They all did.

  The steady flow of code now flashed with snatches of blue. In a breathless second, the pattern increased, flaring erratically, almost angrily.

  Eve was back.

  “Did she break free?” Carly asked.

  Mara sank back to her seat. “I don’t think so. Look at the map.”

  O
n the other half of the screen, a tangle of crimson lines again spread outward from the green patch of the cemetery. But rather than coursing into a web spanning the city, the tortuous lines twisted in a snarl in one direction.

  “That path is too purposeful,” Mara said. “Eve must still be under control, lashed to some plan.”

  “But what?” Jason asked. “What else could they be plotting?”

  “I don’t know. We could try—”

  The entire building rocked with a deafening blast. A row of windows shattered, cascading glass to the street below. Lights flickered, then went out. Smoke rolled into the lab.

  Father Bailey yelled for them to get moving. He waved Sister Beatrice toward the stairwell. The nun tapped with her cane. Without the use of an elevator, it was a long climb down.

  “We can’t stay,” Jason said.

  Mara shook free of Jason’s grip and remained seated before her glowing monitor. “We’ve got battery backup for another few minutes. We need to know what they’re planning.”

  Jason looked ready to haul her over his shoulder. “There’s not enough time.”

  Carly pushed him aside and dropped to a knee beside her friend. “Do what you have to do.”

  Mara swallowed and cast a grateful look her way.

  Carly was momentarily lost in the firelight reflected in those eyes, turning them to gold. The sight firmed the certainty inside her.

  If anyone could pull off a miracle, it’s you.

  12:42 A.M.

  Gray gave up and nosed the limo to the sidewalk. As a crow flew, it was only two miles from Orange’s telecom offices to Montparnasse Cemetery. But they’d barely crossed half that distance.

  The panicked populace, seeking to escape the fires, packed the narrow streets of central Paris. Cars sat bumper to bumper. Horns honked, competing with the ongoing chorus of sirens echoing over the dark city. Figures darted through the stalled vehicles, carrying what they could salvage. Then there were those taking advantage of the chaos and darkness. Several storefronts had been smashed open, but they looked empty, as even looters realized they were running out of time.