Origin (33 page)

Shameless
, she thought, knowing these warnings were not sensitive network precautions but rather clever teasers to ensure that nobody changed the channel.

Martín took another pull on her cigarette, scanning the various networks, most of which were milking the growing conspiracy theories with “Breaking News” headlines and ticker-tape crawls.

You’re supposed to report the news
, she grumbled.
Not spread vicious rumors in the form of questions.

Martín had always believed in the importance of responsible journalism as a cornerstone of freedom and democracy, and so she was routinely disappointed by journalists who incited controversy by broadcasting ideas that were patently absurd—all the while avoiding legal repercussions by simply turning every ludicrous statement into a leading question.

Even respected science channels were doing it, asking their viewers: “Is It Possible That This Temple in Peru Was Built by Ancient Aliens?”

No!
Martín wanted to shout at the television.
It’s
not
freaking possible! Stop asking moronic questions!

On one of the television screens, she could see that CNN seemed to be doing its best to be respectful.

Martín picked up the remote and turned up the volume.

“… a man who loved art, technology, and innovation,” said the news anchor sadly. “A man whose almost mystical ability to predict the future made him a household name. According to his colleagues, every single prediction made by Edmond Kirsch in the field of computer science has become a reality.”

“That’s right, David,” interjected his female cohost. “I just wish we could say the same for his
personal
predictions.”

They now played archival footage of a robust, tanned Edmond Kirsch giving a press conference on the sidewalk outside 30 Rockefeller Center in New York City. “Today I am thirty years old,” Edmond said, “and my life expectancy is only sixty-eight. However, with future advances in medicine, longevity technology, and telomere regeneration, I predict I will live to see my hundred-and-tenth birthday. In fact, I am so confident of this fact that I just reserved the Rainbow Room for my hundred-and-tenth-birthday party.” Kirsch smiled and gazed up to the top of the building. “I just now paid my entire bill—
eighty
years in advance—including provisions for inflation.”

The female anchor returned, sighing somberly. “As the old adage goes: ‘Men plan, and God laughs.’”

“So true,” the male host chimed. “And on top of the intrigue surrounding Kirsch’s death, there is also an explosion of speculation over the nature of his discovery.” He stared earnestly at the camera. “Where do we come from? Where are we going? Two fascinating questions.”

“And to answer these questions,” the female host added excitedly, “we are joined by two very accomplished women—an Episcopal minister from Vermont and an evolutionary biologist from UCLA. We’ll be back after the break with their thoughts.”

Martín already knew their thoughts—
polar opposites, or they would not be on your show.
No doubt the minister would say something like: “We come from God and we’re going to God,” and the biologist would respond, “We evolved from apes and we’re going extinct.”

They will prove nothing except that we viewers will watch anything if it’s sufficiently hyped.

“Mónica!” Suresh shouted nearby.

Martín turned to see the director of electronic security rounding the corner, practically at a jog.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Bishop Valdespino just called me,” he said breathlessly.

She muted the TV. “The bishop called …
you
? Did he tell you what the hell he’s doing?!”

Suresh shook his head. “I didn’t ask, and he didn’t offer. He was calling to see if I could check something on our phone servers.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You know how ConspiracyNet is now reporting that someone inside this palace placed a call to the Guggenheim shortly before tonight’s event—a request for Ambra Vidal to add Ávila’s name to the guest list?”

“Yes. And I asked you to look into it.”

“Well, Valdespino seconded your request. He called to ask if I would log into the palace’s switchboard and find the record of that call to see if I could figure out
where
in the palace it had originated, in hopes of getting a better idea of who here might have placed it.”

Martín felt confused, having imagined that Valdespino himself was the most likely suspect.

“According to the Guggenheim,” Suresh continued, “their front desk received a call from Madrid Royal Palace’s primary number tonight, shortly before the event. It’s in their phone logs. But here’s the problem. I looked into our switchboard logs to check our outbound calls with the same time stamp.” He shook his head. “Nothing. Not a single call. Someone
deleted
the record of the palace’s call to the Guggenheim.”

Martín studied her colleague a long moment. “Who has
access
to do that?”

“That’s exactly what Valdespino asked me. And so I told him the truth. I told him that I, as head of electronic security, could have deleted the record, but that I had not done so. And that the only other person with clearance and access to those records is Commander Garza.”

Martín stared. “You think
Garza
tampered with our phone records?”

“It makes sense,” Suresh said. “Garza’s job, after all, is to protect the palace, and now, if there’s any investigation, as far as the palace is concerned, that call never happened. Technically speaking, we have plausible deniability. Deleting the record goes a long way to taking the palace off the hook.”

“Off the hook?” Martín demanded. “There’s no doubt that that call was made! Ambra put Ávila on the guest list! And the Guggenheim front desk will verify—”

“True, but now it’s the word of a young front-desk person at a museum against the entire Royal Palace. As far as our records are concerned, that call simply didn’t occur.”

Suresh’s cut-and-dried assessment seemed overly optimistic to Martín. “And you told Valdespino all of this?”

“It’s just the truth. I told him that whether or not Garza actually
placed
the call, Garza appears to have deleted it in an effort to protect the palace.” Suresh paused. “But after I hung up with the bishop, I realized something else.”

“That being?”

“Technically, there’s a
third
person with access to the server.” Suresh glanced nervously around the room and moved closer. “Prince Julián’s log-in codes give him full access to all systems.”

Martín stared. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I know it sounds crazy,” he said, “but the prince was in the palace, alone in his apartment, at the time that call was made. He could easily have placed it and then logged onto the server and deleted it. The software is simple to use and the prince is a lot more tech-savvy than people think.”

“Suresh,” Martín snapped, “do you really think Prince Julián—the future king of Spain—
personally
sent an assassin into the Guggenheim Museum to kill Edmond Kirsch?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “All I’m saying is that it’s possible.”

“Why would Prince Julián do such a thing?!”

“You, of all people, shouldn’t have to ask. Remember all the bad press you had to deal with about Ambra and Edmond Kirsch spending time together? The story about how he flew her to his apartment in Barcelona?”

“They were working! It was business!”

“Politics is all appearances,” Suresh said. “You taught me that. And you and I know the prince’s marriage proposal has not worked out for him publicly the way he imagined.”

Suresh’s phone pinged and he read the incoming message, his face clouding with disbelief.

“What is it?” Martín demanded.

Without a word, Suresh turned and ran back toward the security center.

“Suresh!” Martín stubbed out her cigarette and ran after him, joining him at one of his team’s security workstations, where his tech was playing a grainy surveillance tape.

“What are we looking at?” Martín demanded.

“Rear exit of the cathedral,” the techie said. “Five minutes ago.”

Martín and Suresh leaned in and watched the video feed as a young acolyte exited the rear of the cathedral, hurried along the relatively quiet Calle Mayor, unlocked an old beat-up Opel sedan, and climbed in.

Okay
, Martín thought,
he’s going home after mass. So what?

On-screen, the Opel pulled out, drove a short distance, and then pulled up unusually close to the cathedral’s rear gate—the same gate through which the acolyte had just exited. Almost instantly, two dark figures slipped out through the gate, crouching low, and jumped into the backseat of the acolyte’s car. The two passengers were—without a doubt—Bishop Valdespino and Prince Julián.

Moments later, the Opel sped off, disappearing around the corner and out of frame.

STANDING LIKE A
rough-hewn mountain on the corner of Carrer de Provença and Passeig de Gràcia, the 1906 Gaudí masterpiece known as Casa Milà is half apartment building and half timeless work of art.

Conceived by Gaudí as a perpetual curve, the nine-story structure is immediately recognizable by its billowing limestone facade. Its swerving balconies and uneven geometry give the building an organic aura, as if millennia of buffeting winds had carved out hollows and bends like those in a desert canyon.

Although Gaudí’s shocking modernist design was shunned at first by the neighborhood, Casa Milà was universally lauded by art critics and quickly became one of Barcelona’s brightest architectural jewels. For three decades, Pere Milà, the businessman who commissioned the building, had resided with his wife in the sprawling main apartment while renting out the building’s twenty remaining flats. To this day, Casa Milà—at Passeig de Gràcia 92—is considered one of the most exclusive and coveted addresses in all of Spain.

As Robert Langdon navigated Kirsch’s Tesla through sparse traffic on the elegant tree-lined avenue, he sensed they were getting close. Passeig de Gràcia was Barcelona’s version of the Champs-Élysées in Paris—the widest and grandest of avenues, impeccably landscaped and lined with designer boutiques.

Chanel … Gucci … Cartier … Longchamp …

Finally, Langdon saw it, two hundred meters away.

Softly lit from below, Casa Milà’s pale, pitted limestone and oblong balconies set it instantly apart from its rectilinear neighbors—as if a beautiful piece of ocean coral had washed into shore and come to rest on a beach made of cinder blocks.

“I was afraid of this,” Ambra said, pointing urgently down the elegant avenue. “Look.”

Langdon lowered his gaze to the wide sidewalk in front of Casa Milà. It looked like there were a half-dozen media trucks parked in front, and
a host of reporters were giving live updates using Kirsch’s residence as a backdrop. Several security agents were positioned to keep the crowds away from the entrance. Edmond’s death, it seemed, had transformed anything Kirsch-related into a news story.

Langdon scanned Passeig de Gràcia for a place to pull over, but he saw nothing, and traffic was moving steadily.

“Get down,” he urged Ambra, realizing he had no choice now but to drive directly past the corner where all the press were assembled.

Ambra slid down in her seat, crouching on the floor, entirely out of view. Langdon turned his head away as they drove past the crowded corner.

“It looks like they’re surrounding the main entrance,” he said. “We’ll never get in.”

“Take a right,” Winston interjected with a note of cheerful confidence. “I imagined this might happen.”

Blogger Héctor Marcano gazed up mournfully at the top floor of Casa Milà, still trying to accept that Edmond Kirsch was truly gone.

For three years, Héctor had been reporting on technology for Barcinno.com—a popular collaborative platform for Barcelona’s entrepreneurs and cutting-edge start-ups. Having the great Edmond Kirsch living here in Barcelona had felt almost like working at the feet of Zeus himself.

Héctor had first met Kirsch more than a year ago when the legendary futurist graciously agreed to speak at Barcinno’s flagship monthly event—FuckUp Night—a seminar in which a wildly successful entrepreneur spoke openly about his or her biggest failures. Kirsch sheepishly admitted to the crowd that he had spent more than $400 million over six months chasing his dream of building what he called E-Wave—a quantum computer with processing speeds so fast they would facilitate unprecedented advances across all the sciences, especially in complex systems modeling.

“I’m afraid,” Edmond had admitted, “so far, my quantum leap in quantum computing is a quantum dud.”

Tonight, when Héctor heard that Kirsch planned to announce an earth-shattering discovery, he was thrilled at the thought that it might be related to E-Wave.
Did he discover the key to making it work?
But after Kirsch’s philosophical preamble, Héctor realized his discovery was something else entirely.

I wonder if we’ll ever know what he found
, Héctor thought, his heart so heavy that he had come to Kirsch’s home not to blog, but to pay reverent homage.

“E-Wave!” someone shouted nearby. “E-Wave!”

All around Héctor, the assembled crowd began pointing and aiming their cameras at a sleek black Tesla that was now easing slowly onto the plaza and inching toward the crowd with its halogen headlights glaring.

Héctor stared at the familiar vehicle in astonishment.

Kirsch’s Tesla Model X with its E-Wave license plate was as famous in Barcelona as the pope-mobile was in Rome. Kirsch would often make a show of double-parking on Carrer de Provença outside the DANiEL ViOR jewelry shop, getting out to sign autographs and then thrilling the crowd by letting his car’s self-park feature drive the empty vehicle on a preprogrammed route up the street and across the wide sidewalk—its sensors detecting any pedestrians or obstacles—until it reached the garage gate, which it would then open, and slowly wind down the spiral ramp into the private garage beneath Casa Milà.