Crucible

by James Rollins

Did pain have a color, a smell, a taste?

  His whole life he had craved some inkling of that experience, wondering what he was missing. It wasn’t as if he lacked any sensory experience. He could feel a touch, shiver when cold, sweat when he exerted, but he could flay open his palm with a knife and feel nothing.

  He had been taught pain was life’s cautionary tale, a body’s natural warning mechanism. Many of those afflicted like him died at a young age. From injuries that were overlooked or ignored, or more often, from simply taking stupid risks. Unrestricted by pain, they felt like they could do anything.

  He had been lucky the Crucible had accepted him as a boy. The rigorous training and restrictions placed upon him by the brotherhood had likely saved his life.

  Learning nothing more about pain from his captive, Todor waited for the clerk—some Nigerian immigrant with skin like polished coal—to stop screaming and settle into heaving sobs.

  When his team had first entered the hotel lobby, the spindle-limbed clerk had been on the phone, speaking rapidly in his native language, plainly arguing. Todor had come upon him easily. As Todor waited for the call to end, he eavesdropped upon this one’s heathen tongue, angered that such filth had never bothered to fully assimilate.

  Todor took his hand away and leaned closer, nose to nose with this cabrón. “Again,” he said calmly. “We know the woman is here. Tell us which room.”

  Behind the clerk’s shoulder, Mendoza held the iPad used to track their targets to this nondescript hotel along Pink Street in the Cais do Sodre district. The establishment was one in a row of such hostelries, all with peeling paint, broken stucco, and rickety ironwork balconies, all overlooking a slew of smoky bars and underground clubs, most closed for the holiday.

  Unfortunately, while the GPS tracker had identified this hotel, it had failed to pinpoint where in this building his targets had holed up. Thus it required some judicious questioning. His team had locked down the lobby, not that there was much traffic in the lobby or the street outside. He had dragged the clerk into the back office and showed him a photo of Mara Silviera.

  “I . . . I do not know her,” the clerk gasped out again, sticking to the same story. “I truly don’t. I just came on shift this morning.”

  Todor grabbed his next finger.

  “Please, please, no.”

  Before he could yank it, one of his men burst into the office. He dragged a terrified young maid with him, clutching her by the scruff of her neck, a pistol pressed into her side.

  “Familiares, she knows where the witch is hiding.”

  With a shake of her neck, the man forced her to repeat what she knew.

  Todor looked toward the ceiling.

  Four flights up.

  He returned his attention to the clerk and pulled a hunting knife from his boot.

  The man’s eyes got huge, showing white all around. “No, sir, no. I have a wife . . . children . . .”

  He slowly silenced those pleas with a slice across the clerk’s throat.

  A muffled gunshot sounded behind him. He heard a body fall.

  The Inquisitor General had been strict in his commands.

  No witnesses.

  Still, Todor never took his gaze from the clerk’s eyes. While Todor might not be able to appreciate the pain of that cut, he understood the agony in the man’s face, as life and all its promises died with one last rattled breath.

  Todor cleaned his knife on the clerk’s shirt, sheathed the blade, and turned to his men.

  “Maleficos non patieris vivere,” he intoned.

  Nods met him all around, the command well understood.

  Suffer not a witch to live.

  2:58 P.M.

  C’mon, Mara, hurry . . .

  Carly was down on one knee, wrapping cords and seating them into pockets in the black case on the floor. A dozen solid-state hard drives protruded from padded spaces inside it. While Carly unhooked and stored the cables, Mara had begun the process to shut down the Xénese device and send Eve into a slumbering state. Mara insisted that they had to wait for the completion of the music subroutine.

  If interrupted, Eve could be irreparably damaged.

  Carly knew the Xénese device held Mara’s only copy of her program. Nothing else had the capacity to house the unique consciousness seeded into the glowing sphere. If they were to ever discover what the first incarnation of Eve knew about the murder of her mother and the others, they needed this program intact.

  Still . . .

  “Speed it up, Mara.”

  “Subroutine’s done.”

  Her friend yanked the USB-C cable from her laptop and tossed it over. As Carly wound it up, Mara pressed her thumb to the fingerprint scanner on the laptop—then began typing furiously.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Abort code. To freeze Eve in place.” Mara suddenly swore, reverting to her native tongue. “Aborto de calamar . . .”

  Carly hid a smile as she closed the case of hard drives with a snap. She had studied Mara’s Galician dialect, as a way of getting closer to her friend. They sometimes spoke it in public to keep their conversations private. The phrase—a local curse—roughly translated as you’re an aborted squid. It seemed a weird way of telling someone off, but Carly was oddly charmed by the phrase—and even more by the wielder of that curse.

  “What’s wrong?” Carly asked.

  “You try typing a twenty-character alphanumeric password that’s case-sensitive when you’re panicking. I have to start over.”

  “Take a breath. You can—”

  The door crashed open behind Mara. The shattered frame showered splinters across the room. A huge shape barreled inside. His arms reached for Mara as her friend twisted around with a gasp.

  Carly lunged from the floor, swinging the titanium case up by its handle. She slammed the heavily loaded valise into the attacker’s elbows, knocking his arms wide and throwing him off-balance.

  As more men poured in behind the first, she grabbed Mara and retreated to the open window. A graffiti-scoured fire escape offered the only other way out. She shouldered Mara over the windowsill, sending them both crashing onto the iron balcony outside.

  A tiny white saucer shattered under her elbow. On the balcony above, a black cat hissed and spat at the sudden intrusion.

  Using the metal valise as a shield, she urged Mara down the rickety stairs. Arms shot out the window. Fingers snatched at Carly and latched on to the case’s handle. With her free hand, she grabbed and lashed out with a shard of the broken saucer, slicing across the attacker’s knuckles.

  A sharp cry, and she was free. She followed after Mara, skipping steps, leaping from balcony to balcony down the fire escape. The pair all but tumbled headlong toward the street.

  A gunshot rang out above. A round sparked from an iron balustrade near her ear. She ducked, heard someone shout angrily in Spanish, clearly scolding the shooter.

  Must want us alive . . .

  She stared at the back of her fleet-footed friend and revised this assumption.

  No, they wanted Mara alive.

  The two finally reached the bottommost balcony. Mara unlatched a ladder and sent it rattling down to a narrow alley behind the hotel.

  “Go, go, go . . .” Carly pressed, picturing men racing after them or circling around from the front.

  They slid down the ladder. Once in the alley, they fled around a corner and to the nearest street. Across the roadway, Christmas music echoed up the steps of a squalid underground bar, adding an absurd sound track to their escape.

  “Taxi . . .” Mara panted and pointed to the left where a cab was parked.

  They raced toward it, seeing no other cars on the street this holiday afternoon. A man was about to climb into the lone cab.

  Mara reached him, grabbing for the open door. “Senhor, por favor.”

  The man must have read the desperation on their faces and stepped back, allowing them to pile inside. “Feliz Natal,” he wished them as he pushed the door shut.
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br />   The taxi started down the street, heading away from the hotel.

  Relieved, Carly sagged in the seat, hugging the case on her lap. Next to her, Mara stared out the back window, her expression worried and scared. Carly felt the same, well aware of what they’d abandoned in the wake of their escape.

  “It couldn’t be helped,” Carly said, trying to console her.

  Mara murmured as she settled back around, “What have we done?”

  3:06 P.M.

  Todor sat on his haunches and admired the glass-and-metal sphere cradled in a cushioned box. It was only half the prize he had hoped to collect here, but it would have to do for now.

  Behind him, Mendoza was examining the laptop, judging how safe it was to move what they had secured. The rest of his team had spread out, trying to nab the two women before they escaped the district.

  While he waited for the others to report in, Todor returned his attention to the device on the floor. From its tiny windows, a bright azure glow emanated from within, as if a piece of the sky had been captured inside. He had to admit there was a certain beauty to its design, to its outward appearance.

  But he refused to be deceived.

  “Ipse enim Satanas transfigurat se in angelum lucis,” he whispered to the sphere, quoting from the Second Epistle to the Corinthians.

  Mendoza let out a small gasp of amazement.

  Todor rose and joined the team’s technician. “What is it?”

  The team’s tech stepped back from the laptop and ran a palm over his oiled black hair. “What’s been created is simply maravilloso. Just look.”

  Todor bent his tall frame to peer at the laptop screen. The sight revealed a verdant forest, its flowering bower carpeted by dewy ferns. Sunlight glistened off every leaf and petal. A gentle breeze stirred the thin branches of a berry-laden bush. It was so perfectly rendered, he could almost smell the perfume wafting from that garden.

  It’s like peeking into a corner of Eden.

  And this garden was not empty.

  A naked woman stirred in the center of it all. One palm rested on a mossy boulder as she bent down and gently plucked a blackberry from a bush. She held it up to the sunlight, before bringing it to her perfect lips. Her eyes drifted closed, as if to better savor the taste. As she did so, his gaze traveled over her sculpted form, her skin a shade of dark mocha, her breasts unabashedly bared.

  “From what I was able to discern,” Mendoza said, “they named her Eve.”

  Of course.

  He straightened. Such blasphemy tempered his admiration. “What of the witch who created all of this?”

  With clear reluctance, Mendoza glanced over to the iPad sitting next to the laptop. “According to the signal, the two women are moving quickly. They likely found a taxi.”

  “Keep tracking their route while you secure everything for transportation.”

  “Si, Familiares.”

  Todor studied the laptop screen one last time. He knew the Inquisitor General’s plans for Xénese and the abomination within. While acquiring the witch would have been a boon, she wasn’t an essential element for what was to come.

  As he stared, he was again captured by the splendor found on the screen. It was indeed maravilloso, as Mendoza had extolled. Still, Todor refused to be deceived. He stared at the woman in the garden. Her eyes were open again, seeming to stare straight at him. He knew what hid behind the glow of those eyes.

  Without breaking that unearthly gaze, he repeated the line from Second Corinthians, both to remind himself and as a warning to Mendoza to be cautious with his admiration.

  “Ipse enim Satanas transfigurat se in angelum lucis.”

  It was something they all had to keep in mind from here.

  He silently repeated the quote one more time, translating the Latin in his head.

  For Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.

  3:22 P.M.

  “Looks like they took the bait,” Carly said.

  Mara nodded, momentarily relieved. She and Carly hid in the smoky confines of a basement bar. The air reeked of tobacco and patchouli. As the tin chords of a Christmas carol rasped from an old jukebox, they stared out a grime-encrusted window.

  Earlier, Carly had lifted to her toes and used the elbow of her jacket to wipe clean a corner of the glass, enough for them to spy across the rosy-hued pavement of Pink Street to the front of her former hotel. After securing the taxi, Mara had the driver take them a couple of blocks, then stop. They abandoned the cab, but not before snugging the coin-sized GPS tracker into a seat cushion. As the taxi took off with the tracker, they had carefully circled back on foot, traversing narrow alleys to enter the bar via its back door.

  Through the smear in the window, Mara watched her life’s work being hauled into a van parked at the hotel’s front door. She could do nothing to stop the theft. Even if she could have convinced the bartender to allow her to use the establishment’s phone, the authorities would never have responded in time. And the two of them certainly dared not use their cell phones, knowing such an act might expose their earlier ruse and again put them on the enemy’s radar.

  Instead, Carly held a bar napkin against the stone wall and jotted down the van’s plate number. She elbowed Mara to move over and peered intently through their spyhole, then swore under her breath.

  “What?” Mara asked.

  “From this angle, I can’t make out the last three numbers.”

  Mara frowned. “Maybe what you already have is enough.”

  The plan was to wait until the others left, then alert the police and hide here until the authorities arrived. Only then would they come out of hiding. After that, hopefully the police could track the van by its plate and grab the men responsible for the murder of Carly’s mother and the other four women of Bruxas.

  Still, Mara knew that wasn’t the most important outcome of their plan.

  She pictured Eve in her garden.

  “They’re leaving,” Carly said. “C’mon. I need the rest of that plate number.”

  The two of them exited the bar but hovered near the open door. Six steps led up to the level of the street. As a precaution, they remained below, peering up just enough to spy the full plate of the van as it sped away.

  “Got it,” Carly said and waved Mara back.

  As her friend rechecked her scrawl of letters and numbers on the napkin, Mara retreated backward into the bar. Crossing the dark threshold, she felt a stir in the smoky air, sensed a shadow looming behind her.

  She tried to duck away. “Car—”

  A huge hand clamped over her mouth. A thick arm hooked her waist. Someone else pointed a pistol at Carly’s chest. Her friend’s eyes went huge and scared.

  “No te muevas,” they were warned.

  Don’t move.

  12

  December 25, 11:02 A.M. EST

  Plainsboro, New Jersey

  Exhausted and heartsick, Monk held Kat’s hand, in yet another hospital room. Her skin had turned pallid, her lips bled of color, even the single auburn curl peeking from under a hospital bonnet looked drab and flat, its hue no longer bright and sleek.

  He reached and freed the stray hair from where sweat had plastered it to her forehead. He wrapped its length around a finger, accentuating the whorl before laying it gently back.

  There you go, beautiful as always.

  He continued to keep one ear on the tick, thrum, and beep of her vitals. He tried his best to reconcile himself with both the diagnosis and prognosis. The team in the MRI lab had stabilized Kat after the seizure and rushed her to ICU. For an hour, he could only pace, waiting to find out if he’d lost the love of his life, the mother of his children.

  Lisa kept him company as best she could.

  Finally, Grant and a handful of other doctors delivered the verdict. Kat was stable for the moment. The brain hemorrhaging had slowed, enough that they thought operating on her would be more risk than benefit. They also reported the grim news that Kat was no longer breathing on her own
and was now totally dependent on the ventilator. Worst of all, the moments of wakefulness noted in the EEG had ceased, suggestive that Kat was no longer aware of her surroundings.

  Maybe that’s a blessing, the ICU doctor had intoned solemnly.

  Monk had wanted to sock the guy in the nose. As if sensing this, Lisa had taken Monk’s prosthetic hand, squeezing it tightly. Just as well. His hardware packed more than a simple punch. Beyond the array of advanced tech built into his hand, a small packet of plastic explosives had been wired under his palm as a failsafe, for those special occasions when a simple handshake wouldn’t do.

  Lisa kept hold of his hand, comforting him as much as restraining him, as the medical staff finished its report. The consensus was that Kat had deteriorated from the pseudocoma of a locked-in patient into a full coma.

  There’s nothing else we can do, Grant had concluded. From here, it’s a waiting game.

  Monk sensed the waiting he was referring to had less to do with Kat’s recovery and more with the expectation of her death.

  Or maybe they’re just waiting for me to accept the inevitable.

  He patted Kat’s hand. “But you know how stubborn I can be. When do I ever give up?”

  Monk’s phone rang and vibrated on the bedside table, indicating an urgent call. He grabbed it, saw it was Sigma, and quickly answered.

  As soon as Director Crowe came on the line, he blurted, “What have you learned?”

  Monk had already forwarded Kat’s intel—possibly the last she’d ever share, one that was mission critical. A single name, Valya Mikhailov. The former Guild assassin had kidnapped his children, taken Seichan.

  Painter answered, his voice worrisomely terse. “Monk, I need you to brace yourself.”

  His heart stuttered in his chest. A thousand scenarios—all brutal—filled his head. He could barely get enough breath to ask, “What is it?”

  “We received a video file ten minutes ago. The source untraceable. I’m sending it to your phone.”

  Monk clutched his device harder, his vision narrowing as he stared at the small screen. “Are they dead? Just tell me.”

  “No. Watch. You should have the file by now.”