Page 31 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)
On the second floor of the U.S. embassy, Michael Harris felt off-balance as he stepped out of his private conversation with the ambassador.
Having just been partially “read in,” Harris was still trying to process the full implications of the classified information the ambassador had now shared with him.
She had not shared everything, he sensed, but one thing was crystal clear: Today is about much more than a bomb scare at the Four Seasons.
Harris gathered himself and quickly headed back downstairs to Dana’s office, wishing he had talked to the ambassador before involving Dana. He found her at her computer, engrossed in multiple video feeds of Charles Bridge. Shit.
Dana glanced up as he entered. “I located your woman with the spiked tiara, Michael. She’s very cute. You never told—”
“Turn it off, Dana,” he said, rushing over to her. “I made a mistake.”
“But you asked—”
“I know. I’m sorry. Turn it off, please. Now. ”
Dana eyed him warily and stood up. As a six-foot-tall former runway model, she was one of the few women who could look Michael Harris in the eye. Before she could say a word, however, Harris crouched down near the floor.
“Seriously?” she said. “Begging me on bended knee?”
Not exactly. Harris reached under her desk and pulled a plug, cutting power to her computer.
Dana saw her display go black. “What the hell are you doing?!”
“I need you to trust me,” he said, standing again.
“You have a lot of secrets lately.”
You have no idea, he thought. “Look…I’m just asking you to go back to work and forget I ever asked you about any of this.”
Dana’s glare was unflinching, and Harris sensed she had no intention of letting this go. Digging deep, he mustered a playful smile and lowered his voice to a whisper. “The walls here have ears. How about I tell you everything over dinner tonight?”
Dana’s eyes brightened, her full lips pouting with promise. “Takeout? Your place?”
Harris winked. “Food optional.”
She smiled. “I like the way you think, Mr. Harris.”
Harris blew her a kiss and headed out.
Minutes later, he was in one of the embassy’s black Audi A7s, zipping along Tr?i?tě Street. He had expected to be going directly to Crucifix Bastion, but the ambassador had ordered him to do something for her first.
“Mr. Langdon will be safe a bit longer,” the ambassador had told him. “Captain Janá?ek is well under control.”
An understatement, Harris knew, having just witnessed the brutal phone call between the ambassador and the captain. Janá?ek overplayed his hand…and lost. He would be licking his wounds and behaving perfectly until Harris arrived.
Despite the alarming nature of everything Harris had learned from the ambassador, he felt a veil had been lifted, revealing much more about the puzzle pieces on the table and how they were connected…
Harris’s off-book work for the ambassador…
Gessner’s lab at Crucifix Bastion…the woman on Charles Bridge…
and even the upcoming publication by Katherine Solomon.
Dana Daněk was fuming.
You have no authority over my actions, Michael Harris.
You’re my lover, not my boss.
The attaché’s condescending sweet talk of dinner had infuriated Dana. Moreover, his strange behavior had only served to increase her intrigue about the mysterious woman on Charles Bridge.
Conveniently, the famed bridge was monitored by more security cameras per square foot than anywhere else in Prague—including a pair of 360-degree arrays atop the bridge’s guard towers and thirteen eye-level cameras embedded in the gas lamps.
Choosing one of the aerial panoramas, Dana had rewound the feed to archived footage beginning at 6:40 a.m. To her surprise, the woman in a spiked halo was already there, lingering on the eastern end of the deserted bridge as if waiting for someone.
But waiting for whom?
Dana had called up an eye-level camera and zoomed in on the woman’s face, displeased to see that the costumed woman was young and pretty, with deep dimples and big doe eyes. Her body looked petite and fit beneath her tight black coat.
Is that why Michael is interested in you?
It seemed inconceivable that Michael would ask Dana to research a romantic interest, and yet perhaps he was playing a cruel game with her. For weeks, her intuition had been telling her that Michael was with someone else.
A woman always knows…
Confident that Harris was now gone, Dana crawled under the desk, plugged in the computer, and rebooted the surveillance portal.
She navigated back to the pretty woman and had every intention of finding out where the woman had gone…but first there was a far more pressing question.
Who the hell are you?
One of the duties Dana performed for the ambassador was to confirm the identities and backgrounds of any visitors who showed up at the embassy requesting service or asylum.
All she needed was a passport photo or a screen grab from the embassy’s security gate cameras, and an entire world opened up.
Nowadays, thanks to advanced facial recognition software, identifying any individual on the planet took only a matter of minutes.
Sorry, sweetheart, Dana thought, capturing several high-quality close-ups of the woman’s face. But you can’t hide from me.
She uploaded the photos into the embassy’s international facial recognition database.
If this woman had a criminal record anywhere in the world, she would be identified within thirty seconds.
If not, her photo would be sent through a massive international database of photos collected from passports, driver’s licenses, and major media.
And finally, if that didn’t work, the photo would be run through the newest and most complete database in the world—the billions of unsuspecting selfies posted on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and other platforms.
Social media, Dana thought. The biggest intelligence boon since the Catholic Church invented confession.