Origin (53 page)

Continuing down the hallway, they arrived at an unexpected obstacle—a ladder awkwardly propped across the corridor as if for a
painting job—making it impossible to advance without moving the ladder or passing beneath it.

“This ladder,” Langdon offered. “Shall I take it down?”

“No,” Winston said. “Edmond deliberately put it there a long time ago.”

“Why?” Ambra asked.

“As you may know, Edmond despised superstition in all forms. He made a point of walking under a ladder every day on his way into work—a way of thumbing his nose at the gods. Moreover, if any guest or technician
refused
to walk under this ladder, Edmond kicked them out of the building.”

Always so reasonable.
Langdon smiled, recalling how Edmond had once berated him in public for “knocking on wood” for luck.
Robert, unless you’re a closet Druid who still raps on trees to wake them up, please leave that ignorant superstition in the past where it belongs!

Ambra pressed on, ducking down and walking beneath the ladder. With an admittedly irrational twinge of trepidation, Langdon followed suit.

When they reached the other side, Winston guided them around a corner to a large security door that had two cameras and a biometric scan.

A handmade sign hung above the door:
ROOM 13
.

Langdon eyed the infamously unlucky number.
Edmond spurning the gods once again.

“This is the entrance to his lab,” Winston said. “Other than the hired technicians who helped Edmond build it, very few have been permitted access.”

With that, the security door buzzed loudly, and Ambra wasted no time grabbing the handle and heaving it open. She took one step over the threshold, stopped short, and raised her hand to her mouth with a startled gasp. When Langdon looked past her into the church’s sanctuary, he understood her reaction.

The chapel’s voluminous hall was dominated by the largest glass box Langdon had ever seen. The transparent enclosure spanned the entire floor and reached all the way up to the chapel’s two-story ceiling.

The box seemed to be divided into two floors.

On the first floor, Langdon could see hundreds of refrigerator-sized metal cabinets aligned in rows like church pews facing an altar. The cabinets had no doors, and their innards were on full display. Mind-bogglingly intricate
matrices of bright red wires dangled from dense grids of contact points, arching down toward the floor, where they were laced together into thick, ropelike harnesses that ran between the machines, creating what looked like a web of veins.

Ordered chaos
, Langdon thought.

“On the first floor,” Winston said, “you see the famous MareNostrum supercomputer—forty-eight thousand eight hundred and ninety-six Intel cores communicating over an InfiniBand FDR10 network—one of the fastest machines in the world. MareNostrum was here when Edmond moved in, and rather than removing it, he wanted to
incorporate
it, so he simply expanded … upward.”

Langdon could now see that all of MareNostrum’s wire harnesses merged at the center of the room, forming a single trunk that climbed vertically like a massive vine into the first floor’s ceiling.

As Langdon’s gaze rose to the second story of the huge glass rectangle, he saw a totally different picture. Here, in the center of the floor, on a raised platform, stood a massive metallic blue-gray cube—ten feet square—with no wires, no blinking lights, and nothing about it to suggest it could possibly be the cutting-edge computer that Winston was currently describing with barely decipherable terminology.

“… qubits replace binary digits … superpositions of states … quantum algorithms … entanglement and tunneling …”

Langdon now knew why he and Edmond talked art rather than computing.

“… resulting in quadrillions of floating-point calculations per second,” Winston concluded. “Making the fusion of these two very different machines the most powerful supercomputer in the world.”

“My God,” Ambra whispered.

“Actually,” Winston corrected, “
Edmond’s
God.”

AS PRINCE JULIÁN
passed through the iron doorway into the mountain, he had the uneasy feeling that he might never escape.

The Valley of the Fallen. What am I doing here?

The space beyond the threshold was cold and dark, barely illuminated by two electric torches. The air smelled of damp stone.

A uniformed man stood before them holding a loop of keys that jangled in his trembling hands. Julián was not surprised that this officer of the Patrimonio Nacional seemed anxious; a half-dozen Guardia Real agents were lined up right behind him in the darkness.
My father is here.
No doubt this poor officer had been summoned in the middle of the night to unlock Franco’s sacred mountain for the king.

One of the Guardia agents quickly stepped forward. “Prince Julián, Bishop Valdespino. We’ve been expecting you. This way, please.”

The Guardia agent led Julián and Valdespino to a massive wrought iron gate on which was carved an ominous Francoist symbol—a fierce double-headed eagle that echoed Nazi iconography.

“His Majesty is at the end of the tunnel,” the agent said, motioning them through the gate, which had been unlocked and stood partially ajar.

Julián and the bishop exchanged uncertain glances and walked through the gate, which was flanked by a pair of menacing metal sculptures—two angels of death, clutching swords shaped like crosses.

More Francoist religio-military imagery
, Julián thought as he and the bishop began their long walk into the mountain.

The tunnel that stretched out before them was as elegantly appointed as the ballroom of Madrid’s Royal Palace. With finely polished black marble floors and a soaring coffered ceiling, the sumptuous passageway was lit by a seemingly endless series of wall sconces shaped like torches.

Tonight, however, the source of light in the passageway was far more dramatic. Dozens upon dozens of fire basins—dazzling bowls of fire
arranged like runway lights—burned orange all the way down the tunnel. Traditionally, these fires were lit only for major events, but the late-night arrival of the king apparently ranked high enough to set them all aglow.

With reflections of firelight dancing on the burnished floor, the massive hallway took on an almost supernatural ambience. Julián could feel the ghostly presence of those sad souls who had carved this tunnel by hand, their pickaxes and shovels poised, toiling for years inside this cold mountain, hungry, frozen, many dying, all for the glorification of Franco, whose tomb lay deep within this mountain.

Look carefully, son
, his father had told him
.
One day you’ll tear this down.

As king, Julián knew he would probably not have the power to destroy this magnificent structure, and yet he had to admit he felt surprise that the people of Spain had permitted it to stand, especially considering the country’s eagerness to move past her dark past and into the new world. Then again, there were still those who longed for the old ways, and every year, on the anniversary of Franco’s death, hundreds of aging Francoists still flocked to this place to pay their respects.

“Don Julián,” the bishop said quietly, out of earshot of the others, as they walked deeper into the passageway. “Do you know why your father summoned us here?”

Julián shook his head. “I was hoping
you
would know.”

Valdespino let out an unusually heavy sigh. “I don’t have any idea.”

If the bishop doesn’t know my father’s motives
, Julián thought,
then nobody knows them.

“I just hope he’s all right,” the bishop said with surprising tenderness. “Some of his decisions lately …”

“You mean like convening a meeting inside a mountain when he should be in a hospital bed?”

Valdespino softly smiled. “For example, yes.”

Julián wondered why the king’s Guardia detail had not intervened and refused to bring the dying monarch out of the hospital to this foreboding location. Then again, Guardia agents were trained to obey without question, especially when the request came from their commander in chief.

“I have not prayed here in years,” Valdespino said, gazing down the firelit hallway.

The tunnel through which they were moving, Julián knew, was not solely the access corridor into the mountain; it was also the
nave
of an
officially sanctioned Catholic church. Up ahead, the prince could begin to see the rows of pews.

La basílica secreta
, Julián had called it as a child.

Hollowed out of the granite mountain, the gilded sanctuary at the end of this tunnel was a cavernous space, an astonishing subterranean basilica with a massive cupola. Rumored to have more total square footage than St. Peter’s in Rome, the underground mausoleum boasted six separate chapels surrounding its high altar, which was meticulously positioned directly beneath the cross atop the mountain.

As they neared the main sanctuary, Julián scanned the enormous space, looking for his father. The basilica, however, appeared totally deserted.

“Where is he?” the bishop demanded, sounding worried.

Julián now shared the bishop’s concern, fearing the Guardia had left the king alone in this desolate place. The prince quickly moved ahead, peering down one arm of the transept and then the other. No sign of anyone. He jogged deeper, circling around the side of the altar and into the apse.

It was here, in the deepest recesses of the mountain, that Julián finally spotted his father and came to an abrupt halt.

The king of Spain was completely alone, covered with heavy blankets, and slumped in a wheelchair.

INSIDE THE MAIN
sanctuary of the deserted chapel, Langdon and Ambra followed Winston’s voice around the perimeter of the two-story supercomputer. Through the heavy glass, they heard a deep vibrating thrum emanating from the colossal machine inside. Langdon had the eerie sense that he was peering into a cage at an incarcerated beast.

The noise, according to Winston, was generated not by the electronics but by the vast array of centrifugal fans, heat sinks, and liquid coolant pumps required to keep the machine from overheating.

“It’s deafening in there,” Winston said. “And freezing. Fortunately, Edmond’s lab is on the second floor.”

A freestanding spiral staircase rose ahead, affixed to the outer wall of the glass enclosure. On Winston’s command, Langdon and Ambra climbed the stairs and found themselves standing on a metal platform before a glass revolving door.

To Langdon’s amusement, this futuristic entrance to Edmond’s lab had been decorated as if it were a suburban home—complete with a welcome mat, a fake potted plant, and a little bench under which sat a pair of house slippers, which Langdon realized wistfully must have been Edmond’s.

Above the door hung a framed message.

“More Churchill,” Langdon said, pointing it out to Ambra.

“Edmond’s favorite quote,” Winston chimed. “He said it pinpoints the single greatest strength of computers.”

“Computers?” Ambra asked.

“Yes, computers are infinitely persistent. I can fail billions of times with no trace of frustration. I embark upon my billionth attempt at solving a problem with the same energy as my first. Humans cannot do that.”

“True,” Langdon admitted. “I usually give up after my millionth attempt.”

Ambra smiled and moved toward the door.

“The floor inside is glass,” Winston said as the revolving door began turning automatically. “So please remove your shoes.”

Within seconds, Ambra had kicked off her shoes and stepped barefoot through the rotating portal. As Langdon followed suit, he noticed that Edmond’s welcome mat bore an unusual message:

“Winston, this mat? I don’t under—”