“As you can see, Gabriel is fine,” she said, and held up the sedan’s electronic fob. “And here is the key to his freedom.”
Claude reached for it—but she pulled her hand away.
Not so fast.
She tugged down her jacket’s collar and exposed the steel one beneath it.
“What about this?” She also nodded over to Renny, who still had his scarf in place. “An exchange of keys. Your son’s freedom for ours.”
“Oui. That was the deal. I am a man of my word.” He reached into a pocket and removed a hotel keycard. He placed it on the top of the trunk. “Inside your hotel room, you will find what you need to free yourselves.”
He must have read the suspicion on her face and smiled sadly.
“Fear not. Your deaths will not serve me. In fact, I plan to pin Vennard’s loss upon your traitorous shoulders. With the Guild hunting you, no suspicions will be cast my way. And the faster you run, ma chére amie, the better it is for all of us. But, as an additional sign of good faith, I believe I promised you a reward.”
He swung the briefcase onto the trunk and ran a hand over the rich leather surface. “Vuitton’s finest. The Président Classeur case. It is yours to keep.” He smiled over at her with amusement and French pride. “But I suspect what is inside is the true price for my son’s freedom. A clue to the shadowy leaders of the Guild.”
He snapped open the case to reveal a stack of files. On the top folder, imprinted onto the cover, was the image of an eagle with outstretched wings, holding an olive branch in one talon and a bundle of arrows in the other. It was the Great Seal of the United States.
But what does this have to do with the Guild?
He snapped the briefcase closed and slid it toward her.
“What you do with this information—where it will lead—will be very dangerous territory to tread,” he warned. “It might serve you better to simply walk away.”
Not a chance.
She took the case and the hotel keycard. With the prizes in hand, she placed the sedan’s fob on the trunk and backed to the curb, well out of the reach of Claude’s guards.
The historian didn’t make a move to take the sedan’s key. Instead, he placed a palm tenderly on the trunk’s lid. His eyes closed in relief as the tension drained from his shoulders. He was no longer a Guild associate, merely a father relieved at the safe return of his prodigal son. Claude took a long breath, then motioned for one of his men to retrieve the key and take the wheel. As his guards climbed into the front seats, Claude ducked into the back, perhaps to be that much closer to his son.
Seichan waited for the sedan to pull away from the curb and head down the street.
As the car vanished out of the square, Renny crossed over to join her. “Did ye get what ye wanted?”
She nodded, picturing the relief Claude must be feeling. For the sake of his son, the historian couldn’t risk that Seichan might have searched the papers first. They had to be authentic.
“Do ye think he can be trusted?” Renny asked, reaching to his scarf.
“That remains to be seen.”
As they both stared across the plaza, Renny took off his cashmere neckpiece and revealed a close-guarded secret, a secret that Seichan had kept from Claude.
Renny’s throat was bare.
He rubbed at the red burn from his earlier shock. “It was good to get that bloody thing off.”
Seichan agreed. She reached to her throat and unsnapped her own collar. She stared down at the green LED light. After Vennard’s death, she’d found herself with an extra hour before the noon deadline. Taking advantage of the additional time in the catacombs, Seichan had reached out to Renny’s network of resources. He’d claimed that his fellow cataphiles came from all around the world and from every walk of life.
Upon her instructions, Renny had sent out a clarion call for help. One of the cataphile brothers responded, an expert in electrical engineering and microdesign. He was able to get the collars off and removed the shocking mechanism from Seichan’s. This was all done underground, where Claude was unlikely to be able to receive any warning signals from the collars.
Once free, Seichan risked making a play for the briefcase.
As she stared at her collar now, Renny’s early question played in her head: Could Claude still be trusted?
The answer came a moment later.
The green light on her collar flashed to red as it received a transmitted signal, but with the shocking mechanism neutralized, there was no danger.
At least, not for her.
Distantly, a tremendous blast echoed across the city. She searched in the direction of the departed sedan and watched an oily tendril of smoke curl into the bright blue sky.
In the end, it seemed that Claude could not be trusted. Apparently, despite his claims otherwise, it was too dangerous to let her live, and he had transmitted the kill order to the collars.
A bad move.
She had given Claude the chance to do the right thing.
He hadn’t taken it.
She pictured the scarf securing Gabriel’s ball gag. Hidden beneath the cashmere and snapped snugly around the young man’s mouth and head was Renny’s missing electronic collar. The ball gag was formed out of a molded wad of C4, retrieved from one of the explosive charges in the catacombs. The collar had been wired into a detonator. If and when the electronic collar was jolted, it would set off the C-4. She had calculated the quantity and shaped the explosive to take out the sedan and its occupants with little collateral damage.
She sighed, feeling a twinge of regret.
It was a nice car.
Renny gaped at the smoke signal in the sky, stunned, one hand clutching his throat. He finally tore his eyes away and faced her. “What now?”
She dumped the collar into a curbside trash bin and hefted up the briefcase. She remembered Claude Beaupré’s last words to her. What you do with this information—where it will lead—will be very dangerous territory to tread.
As she turned away, she answered Renny’s question.
What now?
“Now comes the hard part.”
Author’s Note
What’s True, What’s Not
At the end of my full-length novels, I love to spell out what’s real and what’s fiction in my stories. I thought I’d do the same here.
The Ritz Paris. I’ve never been there, but the details are as accurate as I could make them: from the Hemingway Bar (where the Bloody Mary was invented) to the gold-plated swan faucets in the bathroom.
The Order of the Solar Temple. This is a real apocalyptic cult started in 1984 by Luc Jouret and Joseph Di Mambro. It was originally titled l’Ordre International Chevaleresque de Tradition Solaire and eventually simplified to l’Ordre du Temple Solaire. The group was notorious for its mass suicides and human sacrifice, including the murder of a founder’s infant son in Quebec.
The Paris Catacombs. Every detail about the place is true. They spread for 180 miles in a network of tunnels and rooms beneath the City of Lights, mostly throughout the southern arrondissements (districts) that make up the Left Bank of the city. The history of collapses and instability is all real, as are the details of the cat-and-mouse game waged between the cataphiles and cataflics. And, yes, the catacombs are full of disarticulated skeletons that date back a thousand years. And lots of strange things happen down there: from mushroom-growing to chambers full of elaborate wall art. New entrances, tunnels, and rooms to this subterranean world are continually being discovered by explorers. Even the story of the mysterious movie theater found underground is true.
The Peugeot 508. Yes, that is how you open the trunk: by pressing the zero in the 508 emblem. I hated to blow it up.
So that ends this adventure, but a large one is looming ahead as this story continues in The Devil Colony. The papers found in that hard-won briefcase will set off a chain of events that will change Sigma forever—and even alter how you view the very founding of America.
The M
idnight Watch
A ∑ Sigma Force Short Story
James Rollins
April 25, 12:21 a.m. EDT
Washington, D.C.
We’re under attack.
Jacketless, with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, Painter Crowe paced the length of the communication nest at the heart of Sigma Force’s central command. Data streamed across the monitors that covered the curved walls as a single warrior waged a battle against a faceless enemy.
Jason Carter sat at a station, typing with one hand, clutching a Starbucks cup in the other, while studying the screen before him. “It looks like they built their own back door into the Smithsonian Institution’s network using a high-level system administrator access. At this point, they literally have the keys to the kingdom.”
“But who are they?” Painter stopped to stare over Jason’s shoulder. The twenty-three-year-old was Sigma’s chief intelligence analyst. He had been recruited by Painter after getting kicked out of the navy for hacking into Defense Department servers with nothing more than a BlackBerry and a jury-rigged iPad.
“Could be the Russians, the North Koreans, but I’d place money on the Chinese. This has their fingerprints all over it. A few months back, they hacked into the Office of Personnel Management, stealing information on millions of federal employees. They used a similar back door, giving them administrator privileges to the OPM servers.”
Painter nodded. He knew the Chinese government employed an army of hackers, numbering over a hundred thousand, dedicated solely to breaking into US computers. Rumor had it that they had successfully hacked into every major American corporation over the past several years, absconding with blueprints to nuclear plants, appropriating technology from steel factories, even cracking into Lockheed Martin’s servers to copy the top-secret schematics for the US military’s F-35 fighter jet. If there was any doubt about the latter, one only had to view the new Chinese FC-31. It was almost an exact copy of the American jet.
“If it is Chinese, what are they after?” Painter asked. “Why hack into the Smithsonian servers?”
Jason shrugged his shoulders. “Either data theft or sabotage. That’s the end goal of most hacks. But from the code, it looks like they’re just blindly grabbing files. I’m not seeing any attempt to install malware into the systems.”
“So data theft,” Painter said. “Can you stop them?”
In the reflection of a neighboring dark monitor, Painter caught the young man’s crooked grin. “Did that a full minute ago,” Jason said, “and slammed the door behind them as I kicked them out. They won’t be coming in that way again. I’m now attempting to identify which files were taken from which servers.”
Painter glanced to the clock.
00:22
The attack had started exactly at midnight, most likely timed to strike when the hack was less liable to be detected. Still, twenty-two minutes was twenty-two minutes too long for an enemy to have unfettered access to the Smithsonian servers. The Institution was home to nine different research centers, encompassing a multitude of programs that spanned the globe.
Still, they were lucky. The only reason this attack had been caught so promptly was that Sigma Force’s servers were linked to the Smithsonian’s systems—though Sigma’s operations were heavily guarded behind multiple firewalls to keep their presence hidden. Painter imagined those towering digital walls. It was a fitting metaphor. Sigma’s central command had been covertly established beneath the Smithsonian Castle. He glanced up, picturing the turrets and towers of red sandstone above his head, a true Norman castle perched at the edge of the National Mall.
A fortress that someone had attempted to breach.
Or at least that was Painter’s greatest fear: The Smithsonian servers were not the primary target of this attack but, instead, the hackers were sniffing at the walls of Sigma’s own digital fortress. Sigma was a covert wing of DARPA, the Defense Department’s research-and-development division. The unit recruited former Special Forces soldiers and retrained them in various scientific disciplines to act as field agents for DARPA. It was one of the reasons the Castle had been chosen for Sigma’s central command. It was ideally situated within the heart of the political landscape, while allowing Sigma and its operatives to have easy access to the Smithsonian’s resources and global reach.
If Sigma was ever compromised, its agents exposed . . .
A small huff drew Painter’s attention back to the tangible world.
Jason scooted his chair back from his station, stood up, and stared across the banks of monitors, all still flowing with cryptic data. The young man studied the screens, running fingers through his blond hair, plainly concerned.
Painter stepped to his side. “What is it?”
“The pattern of theft is not random, despite how much they’re trying to make it look like it.” He pointed to one monitor. “This is no blind smash and grab. There is intent here, masked by all the rest of this noise.”
“What intent?”
Jason returned to his station and began typing again, this time with both hands, his nose inches from the screen. “A majority of the files were stolen from one specific research center.”
“Which one?”
Jason’s voice tightened with plain confusion. “The Smithsonian’s Conservation Biology Institute.”
Painter understood his consternation. It was a strange target for such a sophisticated and elaborate cyberattack by a foreign enemy.
Jason continued as he typed. “The Smithsonian CBI has labs and facilities both in Virginia and here in D.C., at the National Zoo in Rock Creek Park. In this case, it’s the campus at the zoo that was being targeted.”
“Is there any rhyme or reason to the specific files that were being stolen?”
“Not that it makes any more sense, but a majority of the research material being drained comes from one specific program.” Jason looked over his shoulder, displaying a deep frown. “A program titled Ancient DNA.”
“Ancient DNA?”
Jason shrugged, just as lost. “The hacked files all belong to a single researcher, a postdoctoral fellow named Dr. Sara Gutierrez.”
The young man leaned back from the monitor, revealing a staff identification badge on the screen. The woman on the badge looked no older than Jason, her black hair cut in a short bob, her eyes intent, with a shy grin fixed to her face.
“It looks like they cleaned out half of her files before I slammed the door on them.”
“So they failed to get everything . . .” Painter felt a flicker of unease. “What was she working on?”
Jason shook his head. “All I have are the file names, which doesn’t tell me much. But if I could access her computer, I might be able to trace the hackers’ location. When I cut the connection, some pieces of code might have been left on her terminal, a digital fingerprint that might give us some clue as to who was behind this attack.”
“You can do that?”
“I can try, but admittedly it’s a long shot. Still, the odds would be better if I can get to that computer before anyone else uses it and accidentally wipes away that digital fingerprint.”
“Understood. I’ll see about arranging that. We’ll also want to interview Dr. Gutierrez as soon as possible. Preferably tonight.” He glanced to the wall clock. “Let’s hope she’s a night owl.”
“I have her cell number from her records.” Jason slipped out his own phone, lifting one eyebrow.
“Call it. Let her know what happened and that we need her help. We should arrange to meet at her office.”
As Jason dialed, Painter considered whom to send at this late hour. His usual go-to operative, Commander Gray Pierce, was on a transatlantic flight to Europe to meet Seichan in Paris. Monk and Kat were on their way back from a road trip to Boston with their two young daughters. In his head, he ran through the remaining list of field agents best suited for this investigation.
Jason’s voice caught his attention as Dr. Gutierrez answered the call. After some back and
forth, the young man sat straighter and placed his cell on speakerphone mode. “And who called you?” Jason asked her.
A small voice whispered from his phone, but the confusion was plain. “They said they were with Zoological Park Police. Claimed someone had broken into my office. They were sending someone over to collect me. But . . .”
Her voice trailed off.
“But what?” Jason asked.
“It’s just . . . I don’t want to sound racist, but the caller was hard to understand. He had a thick accent. Asian, I think. It’s probably nothing, but I got a bad feeling after I hung up.”
Jason glanced worriedly in Painter’s direction. “Did you tell him your location?” he asked the woman.
“I . . . I did.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m at the National Museum of Natural History. I was collecting DNA samples from some of the exhibits as part of my program. It’s easier after hours. I told the caller I would wait for them outside the museum at the corner of Twelfth and Madison.”
“Stay put.” Jason looked to Painter for confirmation. “We’ll meet you inside the museum.”
Painter nodded.
From the small speaker on the phone, a new noise erupted: a sharp and strident ringing.
Alarm bells.
The researcher’s voice rose above the din. She sounded spooked. “What do I do?”
Jason eyed Painter while offering the young woman one hope. “Hide.”
Painter thought quickly. With an alarm being raised at the museum, he had no time to summon an outside field operative. He momentarily considered going himself, but he knew he was needed here to help hold local law enforcement at bay—at least long enough to safely extract the woman.
That left only one Sigma member to assist Jason—someone still on the premises at this late hour. He pictured the muscled bulk of the former navy seaman, with his shaved head, his crooked nose, and his thick Bronx accent.
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