“Stay back!” Alexander warned.
His command went unheeded. One of the group, a boy perhaps only a couple years older than Fiona, with long stringy blond hair and numerous facial piercings, wearing low hanging plaid shorts and a Tony Hawk T-shirt, fell in behind the shape. He moved slowly, poised to run at the first sign of trouble, but when it became evident that the shape was oblivious to his presence, he quickened his step, matching its pace and peering into the lightless mass for some clue about its nature.
A murmur of voices issued from the crowd, some echoing Alexander’s plea for caution, others-mostly from the teenager’s peer group-daring him to get closer. The boy raised a hand, testing the air, and sensing no peril, stepped around the moving shape and placed himself in its path.
Fiona gasped as the shape engulfed the curious boy. For just a moment it paused as if the encounter had forced it to make a decision, but the tendrils resumed reaching out, pulling the shadowy mass forward. As it moved, the boy was revealed, standing motionless exactly as he had a few seconds before. Fiona waited for his reaction, hoping to see him give some indication that the black mass was harmless, half-expecting him to crumple lifelessly to the ground…but he did not move. He did not even seem to breathe.
The dark shape cleared the courtyard and then abruptly shifted left, angling toward the open space separating the end of the Denon wing from the Jardin des Tuileries, and to all appearances, completely ignoring the shocked spectators.
Fiona felt Alexander’s hold on her loosen, and after setting her down, he moved slowly toward where the impulsive teenager still stood statue still. Her own curiosity aroused, Fiona caught up to Alexander, her gaze now riveted on the motionless figure. She knew that her desire to discover the youth’s fate was little different from the urge that had prompted the young man to approach the nightmarish entity, but she had to know.
Other museum patrons were closing on the spot, compelled by the same craving for answers and she heard one of them gasp. “My God. He’s been turned to stone.”
Fiona saw it too. The boy had been transformed utterly. His appearance was unchanged; the color and texture of his skin, hair and clothes were as distinct and individual as they had been in life. But where once there had been a living organism of flesh and blood and bone, wrapped in clothes woven of cotton and synthetic fibers, there was now only a lifeless mannequin made of what looked like polished stone.
Fiona shuddered and shrank into Alexander’s embrace. “That’s…horrible,” she said, choking back a sob. “A black hole can do that?”
For some reason, Alexander’s answer and the tone in which it was delivered was even more shocking to her than the curious youth’s fate. In a voice that verged on pure trepidation, the immortal Hercules answered simply: “I don’t know.”
31
King did not bother with the doorknob, much less signal his presence with a knock. Instead, he delivered a decisive kick that slammed the flimsy door aside. Then he propelled Brown through the opening, into the control room, following close behind with the Uzi leveled. Chesler remained in the hallway, guarding the approach, though his vigilance was probably unnecessary. None of the Alpha Dog mercenaries had given the slightest indication that their employer’s fate mattered one bit; if Chesler’s defection was any indication, they all seemed to sense that working for Brainstorm was a dead end.
Pradesh started at the intrusion, jolting upright in his chair, but otherwise made no move as King aimed the gun at him. The Indian hacker’s initial surprise quickly passed, his expression giving way to something that looked like satisfaction. “I didn’t expect to see you again,” he said with a chuckle.
King ignored the attempt at banter. “Brainstorm’s finished,” he declared. “Shut it down.”
Pradesh glanced at Brown, who had recovered from King’s shove and was now leaning against a bulkhead, glowering but saying nothing. Pradesh then looked back at King, smiling in a mockery of innocence. “Shut what down?” He gestured to the bank of monitor screens, all of which were dark. “There’s been some kind of blackout. I’m not connected to anything at the moment.”
“You know goddamn well what I’m talking about. The quantum computers. You built them, you control them. Now turn them off.”
Pradesh folded his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. “Why on Earth would I want to do that?”
King stabbed the Uzi’s barrel at him menacingly. “A lot of reasons come to mind. Saving your lousy ass is probably first on the list.”
Pradesh seemed unfazed, amused even. “You really have no idea what’s going on.”
The hacker’s demeanor bothered King. This wasn’t false bravado or posturing; Pradesh did not appear to be the least bit troubled by the threat of violence. King chose his next move carefully. “I know that Brown-or rather Brown pretending to be Brainstorm-hired you to attack the global power network.” He glanced at the gambler, who remained defiant, giving no hint as to whether King’s supposition was on the mark. “You built that quantum computer to control a virus that could break down any security firewalls and adapt to any defensive measures. Impressive stuff. I’m sure you’re worth every penny he paid you, but I don’t think that check is going to clear.”
“Money.” Pradesh scoffed. He glanced at Brown again, making no effort to hide his contempt. “Everybody in this world thinks that you can buy anything. That if you dangle enough money in front of someone, they’ll be your faithful dog.
“You are correct in one respect. That’s exactly what Mr. Brown, or rather his somewhat comical alter-ego Brainstorm, hired me to do.” He then leaned forward conspiratorially. “But that’s not what I did.”
King saw a look of surprise flash across Brown’s countenance, and barely managed to hide a similar reaction. He had misjudged Pradesh. Fortunately, the hacker appeared eager to boast about his accomplishments. King lowered the Uzi a notch and tried a different tack. “I thought that business about a quantum computer sounded like a lot of sci-fi horseshit. You conned, him right?”
Pradesh’s visage went dark with barely restrained rage. “I did no such thing,” he said, enunciating each word to underscore his ire.
King feigned a skeptical shrug to hide his satisfaction at how quickly Pradesh had taken the bait.
“The quantum computer is a masterpiece, and more valuable than Brainstorm-” The hacker again made no effort to disguise his contempt, “-could possibly have realized. I could have done what he wanted in my sleep, but he was too ignorant to realize that. Instead, he gave me what I wanted; the money and resources to build the quantum computer. He never even suspected.”
“You’re lying,” Brown said, his own anger rising. “The hardware was assembled at Jovian Technologies.”
“Based on my specifications.”
“I had your work checked independently. Every design, every line of code was reviewed. You did exactly what I hired you to do.”
Pradesh dismissed him with a wave. “Your so-called experts had no idea what I was doing. They saw only what I allowed them to see.”
King suddenly understood that, whatever Brown’s scheme had been-and he was now convinced that his earlier supposition about Brown’s plan to sabotage the power grid was correct-it had nothing at all to do with the phenomena he had earlier witnessed. The real threat was evidently something much worse.
“Talk is cheap,” he interjected, maintaining his facade of disinterest. “What did you do, write a program to steal credit card numbers or something?”
Pradesh’s seemed to choke on his rage, but then with an effort, mastered himself. “I’ll tell you what I did,” he said in a low voice. “You know who I am, right? What they call me?”
King cocked his head sideways. “Shiva, right?”
“Do you recall what Robert Oppenheimer said after the first atomic bomb test? ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ He was quoting from Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, in reference to the Hindu deity-Shiva, the destroyer.�
�� Pradesh snorted derisively. “Oppenheimer was arrogant. What did he do? Create a weapon that could destroy a city?”
King blinked at him. In drawing Pradesh out, he had unleashed the hacker’s inner madman. “But you can do better, right?”
“I have done better. I have let loose the true destroyer of worlds.”
“Do tell?”
“A primordial black hole,” Pradesh said, almost reverently. “Dormant for centuries, hidden in a statue of the Buddha. I discovered how to awaken it.”
King’s mind was racing to process what the Indian was saying. As much as he wanted to disbelieve, he knew better. The earthquake had followed Brown’s activation of the quantum phone by only a few minutes. That could not be a coincidence. As crazy as it sounded, Pradesh’s claim just might be true, yet he couldn’t let the hacker know that he believed every word. He turned to Brown and none-too-discreetly wiggled a finger beside his temple and mouthed the word: “Cuckoo.”
“That’s why I needed a quantum computer,” Pradesh continued. “Something that functions on the same principles as the black hole itself. And it worked. The QC isolated the frequency that would activate the dormant black hole. But that’s only part of it. You see, the QC and the black hole are now linked together-mind and body, as it were. I didn’t just wake the destroyer up, I gave it a brain.”
“You did all this yourself? Found a…what did you call it? A primordial black hole just laying around, and figured out how to turn it on? You’re a hacker.” He filled the word with disgust, as if describing something he might scrape off the sole of his shoe. “What do you know about black holes?”
“I had some help. There are others who share my vision.”
“And what exactly is your vision? What is it that you want? You said you don’t care about money? So what then?”
“You really haven’t heard a thing I’ve said. I want to destroy. Everything.”
King’s amazement at the boast momentarily overcame his ability to play act the skeptic. “For God’s sake, why?”
“Because I can.” Pradesh’s simple reply revealed just how truly unhinged he had become. Then he continued in the same reverential tone. “Do you know what happens when you enter a black hole? You experience infinity. It is like looking into…no, it’s like being one with the mind of God.”
King pondered what to do next. Pradesh had made no effort to deceive him or withhold information and he knew that with just a little more prompting, the man would volunteer the names of other members his suicide/doomsday cult, but if the hacker’s claims were true, that knowledge would be of little benefit. He was running out of time. “Fine,” he declared, lowering the Uzi and taking out one of the improvised claymores he’d scavenged from the dead Russian commando. “I’ll just blow up your quantum computer.”
Pradesh offered a coy smile. “The computer isn’t here. It doesn’t have a fixed location. That’s the beauty of it.”
King immediately grasped the significance of the answer and recalled what he had overheard in Brown’s office. The phones! He switched the IED to his left hand and dug out the quantum device. “And what happens if I smash this?”
A faint glimmer of anxiety rippled through Pradesh’s mask of confidence, and King pressed the point. “No, that wouldn’t be enough would it? I’d have to take out all of them, all ten.”
Pradesh’s increasing discomfort verified King’s supposition. He started for the door, but at that instant, a scream-not one, but dozens of terrified cries-echoed through the corridor. Chesler ducked his head into the room, his eyes wide with apprehension. “Hey, man. I think something bad is happening up there.”
Amid the sudden tumult, King heard laughter.
“Too late,” Pradesh chortled. “It’s already here.”
32
Suvorov slipped over the railing and dropped into a ready stance on the riverboat’s forward deck. Two more Spetsnaz commandos-all that remained of his original team-clambered over right behind him, their weapons at the ready. The boat was now eerily quiet; although the spacious deck at the aft end was crowded with passengers, the noise of the party that had masked the team’s previous entry was gone. Still, no one seemed to notice their arrival.
He had followed King’s journey back to the riverboat from a distance. At first, this was due to his inability to take any action, stranded as he was in a boat with a shattered outboard. He had managed to contact the members of the team in the lead boat-thank goodness they had bought waterproof two-way radios-and arranged for them to come and get him. One of the men from the trailing boat had also radioed for help, his need slightly more urgent since he had a broken arm and treading water with only one good hand was rapidly wearing him out. That man’s teammate had not made contact, and Suvorov feared the worst.
Two men dead-Ian, dead-and another man badly injured. And we don’t even have the man we came for.
Later, when he had rendezvoused with the surviving members of the team-the injured man had been left in the damaged boat-he held back because he was curious about his opponent’s movements. Brown’s rescuer had inexplicably turned back to the riverboat. That abrupt change of course had occurred right after the earthquake that had not only plunged the city into darkness, but also blanketed all the radio frequencies with impenetrable static. Suvorov didn’t know how the events were connected, but at least now his prey was in a fixed location and was evidently not going anywhere.
Suvorov signaled for his men to advance. He knew that this time, things were going to get ugly. With only the three of them, the mere threat of violence would not suffice to control the situation. They would have to take decisive action. They had removed the sound suppressors from the Uzis; there would be shooting, and this time, noise and chaos-not stealth-would be their greatest ally. Suvorov had made it clear that they weren’t to waste any ammunition on warning shots.
But before the team could make their presence known, all hell broke loose on the party deck. Suvorov halted the team as the silence was broken by a chorus of frantic screams, followed by noise of a rushing mob. An instant later, the deck leading along the side of the superstructure was filled with dozens of passengers, men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns, all running headlong from whatever had triggered the stampede. Suvorov’s team was completely exposed but none of the passengers seemed to give them even a second glance as they pushed past, seeking the forward section of the riverboat. Off to the side, splashes in the river’s surface indicated that some at the rear of the pack had chosen to simply jump overboard. Behind the frantic crowd, about fifty feet from where the Spetsnaz team stood frozen in place, the source of the panic came into view.
The thing defied description. It seemed at once both insubstantial, like a cloud of black smoke, and as solid as granite. Towering above the fleeing horde, at least ten feet high, its mass filled the narrow gap between the bulkheads of the superstructure and the deck railing. Long black tendrils squirmed out ahead of it, grasping the deck to draw it forward, yet the whole thing moved as smoothly as a bead of quicksilver.
What happened next left Suvorov almost paralyzed with disbelief. One of the tentacles abruptly shot forward, stretching out like a frog’s tongue snatching a fly out the air, and speared into the fleeing crowd. Several of the passengers-everyone in the path of the snaking protrusion-simply evaporated, vanishing from existence. Nothing remained; no shreds of clothing, no blood, not even ashes. It was as if every molecule of each person touched by the tentacle, had come apart in an instant.
But not all of them.
One man, who had almost reached the Spetsnaz team’s position, was caught by the tendril and instantly snatched back-alive and evidently unharmed-into the main body of the thing.
Then it happened a second time.
“Down!” Suvorov shouted, throwing himself flat.
A tentacle shot past, missing him by scant inches though he neither heard nor felt any disturbance. Two men and a woman, all of whom had already pushed past the commandos,
vanished in a puff, and then the snake-thing reached through the space those victims had occupied, gripped another man who was climbing the railing in preparation to leap overboard, and yanked him back. Suvorov felt something brush his back, the unlucky man’s thrashing feet, and then he was gone, enveloped completely by the dark mass.
The thing continued to move forward. Thirty feet away… Twenty… It towered above them like a tornado. The advancing tendrils that drew it onward, each one as thick as a tree trunk, were only inches away.
A crescendo of gunfire erupted beside Suvorov. One of his men was firing his Uzi into the thing.
There was no sign of damage. The bullets vanished into it without any visible effect, but remarkably, the shape halted.
The gun fell silent as the magazine ran out.
And the monster moved again.
33
Julia closed her eyes. This has to be a nightmare, she thought. When I open my eyes, I’ll be in my bed, and there will be an empty Haagen Dazs carton on the nightstand.
She knew better. Even in her wildest dreams, she never could have imagined miniature black holes coming to life, destroying the Louvre and turning people to stone. And when she opened her eyes again, nothing had changed.
Carutius was examining the petrified boy while Fiona and Sara stood a few steps away, hugging each other. The black shape was long gone, sliding noiselessly around the corner of the museum and headed to God only knew where.
“That thing…” Fiona shuddered. “It’s like a basilisk.”
Carutius glanced back quizzically, prompting her to add, “It’s from Harry Potter. A snake that can turn people into stone just by looking at them.”
“I’m familiar with the mythological creature,” he rumbled, with what almost sounded like approval. “In this case, our basilisk triggered a strange matter reaction. It changed the atomic mass of every particle in his body, and he was literally turned to stone. Mostly silicon if I’m not mistaken.”
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