Origin (15 page)

The water roared even louder now, and the mist felt wet on Langdon’s cheeks.

“Since man first discovered fire,” Edmond shouted, “this river has been gaining power. Every discovery became a tool with which we made new discoveries, each time adding a drop to this river. Today, we ride the crest of a tsunami, a deluge that rages forward with unstoppable force!”

The room trembled more violently still.

“
Where do we come from!
” Edmond yelled. “
Where are we going!
We have always been
destined
to find the answers! Our methods of inquiry have been evolving exponentially for millennia!”

The mist and wind whipped through the room now, and the thundering of the river reached an almost deafening pitch.

“Consider this!” Edmond declared. “It took early humans over a
million
years to progress from discovering fire to inventing the wheel. Then it took only a few
thousand
years to invent the printing press. Then it took only a couple
hundred
years to build a telescope. In the centuries that followed, in ever-shortening spans, we bounded from the steam engine, to gas-powered automobiles, to the Space Shuttle! And then, it took only two
decades
for us to start modifying our own DNA!

“We now measure scientific progress in
months
,” Kirsch shouted, “advancing at a mind-boggling pace. It will not take long before today’s fastest supercomputer will look like an abacus; today’s most advanced surgical methods will seem barbaric; and today’s energy sources will seem as quaint to us as using a candle to light a room!”

Edmond’s voice and the roar of pounding water continued in the thundering darkness.

“The early Greeks had to look back
centuries
to study ancient culture, but we need look back only a single
generation
to find those who lived without the technologies we take for granted today. The timeline of human development is compressing; the space that separates ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ is shrinking to nothing at all. And for this reason, I give you my word that the next few years in human development will be shocking, disruptive, and wholly unimaginable!”

Without warning, the thundering of the river stopped.

The sky of stars returned. So did the warm breeze and the crickets.

The guests in the room seemed to exhale in unison.

In the abrupt silence, Edmond’s voice returned at a whisper.

“My friends,” he said softly. “I know you are here because I promised you a discovery, and I thank you for indulging me in a bit of preamble. Now let us throw off the shackles of our past thinking. It is time for us to share in the thrill of discovery.”

With those words, a low creeping fog rolled in from all sides, and the sky overhead began to glow with a predawn light, faintly illuminating the audience below.

Suddenly a spotlight blazed to life and swung dramatically to the back of the hall. Within moments, nearly all the guests were sitting up, craning backward through the fog in anticipation of seeing their host appear in the flesh. After a few seconds, however, the spotlight swung back to the front of the room.

The audience turned with it.

There, at the front of the room, smiling in the blaze of the spotlight, stood Edmond Kirsch. His hands were resting confidently on the sides of a podium that seconds ago had not been there. “Good evening, friends,” the great showman said amiably as the fog began to lift.

Within seconds, people were on their feet, giving their host a wild standing ovation. Langdon joined them, unable to hold back his smile.

Leave it to Edmond to appear in a puff of smoke.

So far, tonight’s presentation, despite being antagonistic toward religious faith, had been a tour de force—bold and unflinching—like the man himself. Langdon now understood why the world’s growing population of freethinkers so idolized Edmond.

If nothing else, he speaks his mind in a way few others would dare.
When Edmond’s face appeared on the screen overhead, Langdon noticed he looked far less pale than before, clearly having been professionally made up. Even so, Langdon could tell his friend was exhausted.

The applause continued so loudly that Langdon barely felt the vibration in his breast pocket. Instinctively, he reached in to grab his phone but suddenly realized it was off. Strangely, the vibration was coming from the other device in his pocket—the bone conduction headset—through which Winston now seemed to be talking very loudly.

Lousy timing.

Langdon fished the transceiver from his jacket pocket and fumbled it into place on his head. The instant the node touched his jawbone, Winston’s accented voice materialized in Langdon’s head.

“—fessor Langdon? Are you there? The phones are disabled. You’re my only contact. Professor Langdon?!”

“Yes—Winston? I’m here,” Langdon replied over the sound of applause around him.

“Thank goodness,” Winston said. “Listen carefully. We may have a serious problem.”

AS A MAN
who had experienced countless moments of triumph on the world stage, Edmond Kirsch was eternally motivated by achievement, but he seldom felt total contentment. In this instant, however, standing at the podium receiving a wild ovation, Edmond permitted himself the thrilling joy of knowing he was about to change the world.

Sit down, my friends
, he willed them.
The best is yet to come.

As the fog dissipated, Edmond resisted the urge to glance skyward, where he knew a close-up of his own face was being projected across the ceiling and also to millions of people around the world.

This is a global moment
, he thought proudly.
It transcends borders, class, and creeds.

Edmond glanced to his left to give a nod of gratitude to Ambra Vidal, who was watching from the corner and had worked tirelessly with him to mount this spectacle. To his surprise, however, Ambra was not looking at him. Instead, she was staring into the crowd, her expression a mask of concern.

Something’s wrong
, Ambra thought, watching from the wings.

In the center of the room, a tall, elegantly dressed man was pushing his way through the crowd, waving his arms and heading in Ambra’s direction.

That’s Robert Langdon
, she realized, recognizing the American professor from Kirsch’s video.

Langdon was approaching fast, and both of Ambra’s Guardia agents immediately stepped away from the wall, positioning themselves to intercept him.

What does he want?!
Ambra sensed alarm in Langdon’s expression.

She spun toward Edmond at the podium, wondering if he had noticed
this commotion as well, but Edmond Kirsch was not looking at the audience. Eerily, he was staring directly at her.

Edmond! Something’s wrong!

In that instant, an earsplitting crack echoed inside the dome, and Edmond’s head jolted backward. Ambra watched in abject horror as a red crater blossomed in Edmond’s forehead. His eyes rolled slightly backward, but his hands held firmly to the podium as his entire body went rigid. He teetered for an instant, his face a mask of confusion, and then, like a falling tree, his body tipped to one side and plummeted toward the floor, his blood-spattered head bouncing hard on the artificial turf as he hit the ground.

Before Ambra could even comprehend what she had witnessed, she felt herself being tackled to the ground by one of the Guardia agents.

Time stood still.

Then … pandemonium.

Illuminated by the glowing projection of Edmond’s bloody corpse, a tidal wave of guests stampeded toward the back of the hall trying to escape any more gunfire.

As chaos broke out around him, Robert Langdon felt riveted in place, paralyzed by shock. Not far away, his friend lay crumpled on his side, still facing the audience, the bullet hole in his forehead gushing red. Cruelly, Edmond’s lifeless face was being illuminated in the stark glare of the spotlight on the television camera, which sat unattended on a tripod, apparently still broadcasting a live feed to the domed ceiling and also to the world.

As if moving through a dream, Langdon felt himself running to the TV camera and wrenching it skyward, pivoting the lens away from Edmond. Then he turned and looked through the tangle of fleeing guests toward the podium and his fallen friend, knowing for certain that Edmond was gone.

My God … I tried to alert you, Edmond, but Winston’s warning came too late.

Not far from Edmond’s body, on the floor, Langdon saw a Guardia agent crouched protectively over Ambra Vidal. Langdon hurried directly toward her, but the agent reacted on instinct—launching himself upward and outward, taking three long strides and driving his body into Langdon’s.

The guard’s shoulder crashed squarely into Langdon’s sternum, expelling every bit of air in Langdon’s lungs and sending a shock wave of pain through his body as he sailed backward through the air, landing hard on the artificial turf. Before he could even take a breath, powerful hands flipped him onto his stomach, twisted his left arm behind his back, and pressed an iron palm onto the back of his head, leaving Langdon totally immobilized with his left cheek squashed into the turf.

“You
knew
about this before it happened,” the guard shouted. “How are you involved!”

Twenty yards away, Guardia Real agent Rafa Díaz scrambled through throngs of fleeing guests and tried to reach the spot on the sidewall where he had seen the flash of a gunshot.

Ambra Vidal is safe
, he assured himself, having seen his partner pull her to the floor and cover her body with his own. In addition, Díaz felt certain there was nothing to be done for the victim.
Edmond Kirsch was dead before he hit the ground.

Eerily, Díaz noted, one of the guests appeared to have had advance warning of the attack, rushing the podium only an instant before the gunshot.

Whatever the reason, Díaz knew it could wait.

At the moment, he had only one task.

Apprehend the shooter.

As Díaz arrived at the site of the telltale flash, he found a slit in the fabric wall and plunged his hand through the opening, violently tearing the hole all the way down to the floor and clambering out of the dome into a maze of scaffolding.

To his left, the agent caught a glimpse of a figure—a tall man dressed in a white military uniform—sprinting toward the emergency exit at the far side of the enormous space. An instant later, the fleeing figure crashed through the door and disappeared.

Díaz gave pursuit, weaving through the electronics outside the dome and finally bursting through the door into a cement stairwell. He peered over the railing and saw the fugitive two floors below, spiraling downward at breakneck speed. Díaz raced after him, leaping five stairs at a time. Somewhere below, the exit door crashed open loudly and then slammed shut again.

He’s exited the building!

When Díaz reached the ground floor, he sprinted to the exit—a pair of double doors with horizontal push bars—and threw all of his weight into them. The doors, rather than flying open like those upstairs, moved only an inch and then jammed to a stop. Díaz’s body crashed into the wall of steel, and he landed in a heap, a searing pain erupting in his shoulder.

Shaken, he pulled himself up and tried the doors again.

They opened just far enough to allow him to glimpse the problem.

Strangely, the outer door handles had been bound shut by a loop of wire—a string of beads wrapped around the handles from the outside. Díaz’s confusion deepened when he realized the pattern of the beads was quite familiar to him, as it would be to any good Spanish Catholic.

Is that a rosary?

Using all of his force, Díaz heaved his aching body into the doors again, but the string of beads refused to break. He stared again through the narrow opening, baffled both by the presence of a rosary and also by his inability to break it.

“
¿Hola?
” he shouted through the doors. “
¡¿Hay alguien?!
”

Silence.

Through the slit in the doors, Díaz could make out a high concrete wall and a deserted service alley. Chances were slim that anyone would be coming by to remove the loop. Seeing no other option, he grabbed his handgun from the holster beneath his blazer. He cocked the weapon and extended the barrel through the doorway slit. He pressed the muzzle into the string of rosary beads.

I’m firing a bullet into a holy rosary? Qué Dios me perdone.

The remaining pieces of the crucifix bobbed up and down before Díaz’s eyes.

He pulled the trigger.

The gunshot thundered in the cement landing, and the doors flew open. The rosary shattered, and Díaz lurched forward, staggering out into the empty alley as rosary beads bounced across the pavement all around him.

The assassin in white was gone.

A hundred meters away, Admiral Luis Ávila sat in silence in the backseat of the black Renault that now accelerated away from the museum.

The tensile strength of the Vectran fiber on which Ávila had strung the rosary beads had done its job, delaying his pursuers just long enough.

And now I am gone.

As Ávila’s car sped northwest along the meandering Nervión River and disappeared among the fast-moving cars on the Avenida Abandoibarra, Admiral Ávila finally permitted himself to exhale.

His mission tonight could not have gone any more smoothly.

In his mind, he began to hear the joyful strains of the Oriamendi hymn—its age-old lyrics once sung in bloody battle right here in Bilbao.
¡Por Dios, por la Patria y el Rey!
Ávila sang in his mind.
For God, for Country, and King!

The battle cry had long since been forgotten … but the war had just begun.

MADRID’S PALACIO REAL
is Europe’s largest royal palace as well as one of its most stunning architectural fusions of Classical and Baroque styles. Built on the site of a ninth-century Moorish castle, the palace’s three-story facade of columns spans the entire five-hundred-foot width of the sprawling Plaza de la Armería on which it sits. The interior is a mind-boggling labyrinth of 3,418 rooms that wind through almost a million and a half square feet of floor space. The salons, bedrooms, and hallways are adorned with a collection of priceless religious art, including masterpieces by Velázquez, Goya, and Rubens.