Page 71 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)

Katherine was relieved to see Langdon descending from the balcony, his body silhouetted by the dim light from the trapdoor that he had opened above.

“We need fire,” he said urgently as he joined her on the landing. “Tell me you have a lighter or matches.”

“I’m sorry, what ?”

“ Smoke. We need smoke if we’re going to get out of here.” The urgency in Langdon’s eyes sent a very clear message: what he had seen from the balcony had alarmed him…and also perhaps offered a solution. “Katherine, we have about two minutes until a deranged gunman comes charging down these stairs.”

“I…I’m not sure what I might have. My bag is at the bottom of—”

“Let’s get it—now!”

With Langdon close on her heels, Katherine descended the stairs, having now deciphered Langdon’s logic. If the sound of gunfire hadn’t drawn in the museum staff, nothing else would…except, perhaps, the threat of fire in an ancient library.

Yesterday, when she had been here with Langdon, he had pointed out Jan Hiebl’s meticulous fresco on the ceiling, bemoaning the presence of the three ugly metallic disks that had been installed in the 1970s, interspersed throughout the painting.

Katherine suspected Langdon was now pleased these little disks had been installed, despite their being eyesores.

Smoke detectors.

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Katherine found her shoulder bag and hoisted it up onto the first step.

The bag was unusually heavy today, as it contained her manuscript—a stack of more than four hundred pages—along with a large bottle of water.

Reaching to the bottom of the bag, she began rummaging semi-blindly through the contents looking for some means to start a fire.

Katherine knew she had no matches or lighter in her bag, although as the plethora of “survival” shows on television had demonstrated, fire could be created using all kinds of everyday items—cell phones, magnifying glasses, batteries, steel wool.

But as she rooted through her bag, Katherine realized it was a dead end.

“I’ve got nothing,” she whispered to Langdon, who was just above her on the stairs. “No matches. No lighter. My cell phone is in a dumpster. I have gloves, lip balm, a brochure for the museum, a granola bar, a bottle of wat—”

“Granola bar? From the hotel?”

“Yes. The minibar.”

“That’ll work.”

Combustible granola?

“Batteries?” Langdon pressed. “Anything electronic? Penlight, key fob, earbuds, anything?”

“No, Robert, I’m sorry.” She paused. “Although…my bag came with a Clutch in the lining. I don’t know—”

“Clutch? What is that?”

“A phone charger for purses,” she said, opening the bag. She pulled aside her bulky manuscript and showed Langdon the nub of a phone charger cable sticking out of the interior lining. “Kind of a Cuyana gimmick, but it’s handy. I charged it before the trip, but I don’t know how much—”

“Stay right here,” Langdon said, taking the bag. “I’ll tell you what to do in a minute.”

Without another word, he rushed back up the spiral staircase.

I hope she forgives me for this, Langdon thought with trepidation.

Sixty seconds had passed since he’d left her downstairs, and he was now crouched on the landing halfway up the stairs.

He had located the granola bar and placed it with the stack of manuscript pages that he’d already set aside.

Now he was groping around the bag’s silk lining, finally feeling a hard rectangle in a Velcro pocket.

He extracted it. This is a charger? Katherine’s ultrathin Clutch looked more like a pink credit card with a tail. I hope it still has juice.

Raising the Clutch to his mouth, he placed its power cable between his teeth, yanked hard, and snapped off the connector plug. Then he pulled the two wires apart, stripped each with his teeth, and tapped the two bare wires briefly together.

A bright spark lit up the dark space momentarily.

He hoped it would be enough.

Langdon laid the charger flat on the manuscript pages and picked up the granola bar, which, as anticipated, had a thin foil wrapper.

He tore off the foil and peeled away a narrow strip, rolling it between his fingers to create a kind of foil thread.

Then he attached one end of the foil filament to one of the Clutch’s bare wires, leaving the other end dangling.

In theory, once he connected the loose end and completed the circuit, electricity would flow through the foil. Being a poor conductor, the foil would create resistance, resulting in a buildup of heat…that would ultimately ignite the foil.

Briefly.

Unfortunately, the ultrathin material would burn for only a moment—not nearly enough to ignite a laminated brochure or even a sheet of the thin manuscript paper. If Langdon was to have any chance of starting this fire, he would need something flammable.

Highly flammable.

At the bottom of the stairs, Katherine felt increasingly anxious as she waited in silence for further instructions from Langdon.

Stay right here…I’ll tell you what to do in a minute, he had told her.

He had been moving around on the stairs and finally positioned himself halfway up on the grated landing where they had been standing earlier.

In addition to the sounds of Langdon overhead, Katherine had been hearing noises from the library—a series of repetitive, loud, staccato screeches—which Langdon said were from the display case being relocated. That noise has now stopped, Katherine realized, sensing they were nearly out of time.

With rising fear, she looked up again toward the metal grate on which Langdon was working. To her surprise, the light now filtering through the grid looked different suddenly. It was no longer solely the pale rays from the trapdoor above them…it was a flickering glow.

Fire?

He did it?!

Stunned, she held her breath, waiting…

Within seconds, the glow began growing brighter, and Katherine finally exhaled with a rush of hope.

She had no idea what Boy Scout magic Langdon had invoked to start this fire, but as the flames swelled, she could see that the porous metal grid on which he’d set the fire was providing perfect ventilation from beneath.

Her amazement, however, quickly turned to concern.

That’s a lot of fire…

The flames were quickly expanding and now seemed to be covering a larger portion of the landing.

In the growing firelight, she could see that Langdon had moved off the platform and was now kneeling a couple of steps below, feeding the fire from the side.

As the flames spread, Katherine started to feel air drafting in under the bookcase door, rising up the stairwell like a chimney, feeding the fire further.

Katherine knew her first concern should have been: Is this safe?

But it was not. Her first concern was something else entirely.

What is he burning?! These flames had grown far too intense to be a museum brochure, a pack of Kleenex, or whatever else he had found in her bag. What is he using for fuel?!

Her answer appeared a moment later when a partially charred scrap of paper drifted down from above, landing on the stairs directly in front of her. The scorched shred of white paper was printed with black text, some still legible. Katherine needed only an instant to recognize the words.

Robert, no!

She launched herself up the stairs, calling for him to stop. As she spiraled up toward Langdon, she suddenly suspected he had told her to stay below because he knew she’d never agree to his plan. He’s burning my manuscript!

She could feel the heat as she arrived beneath the landing. Above her, through the metal grid, she saw the underside of a stack of manuscript pages that Langdon was feeding into the fire. The pages were burning fast and bright.

“Stop!” she gasped. “That’s our only copy! We can’t lose it!”

Langdon glanced down, his eyes intense in the firelight. “We’ve already lost it, Katherine—I’m so sorry. This hard copy will be confiscated the second we step outside this alcove. And then it’s over for us. We might as well use it to save our lives.”

“But there’s no other—”

“Please listen,” he said, still feeding pages into the fire. “There are things I haven’t told you yet, but people have been killed today on account of this book. As long as we’re holding this manuscript, we are targets. The first bullet barely missed us. The next one won’t.”

“My God, people were killed?!” she repeated. “Because of my manuscript?!”

“Katherine, professionals deleted your manuscript from a secure corporate server! The úZSI captain who interrogated me this morning accused us of orchestrating a terrorist publicity stunt for this book. Brigita Gessner asked for an advance copy, and she was tortured and killed last night. Jonas seems to have gone missing. úZSI has been hunting me sinc—”

“Brigita Gessner is dead ?!”

Langdon gave a grim nod. “I don’t claim to know what’s going on, but nothing is worth our lives. And each other. This is the right move. I need you to trust me.”

A little late for trust, she thought, seeing the meager stack of remaining pages. You’ve already burned most of it.

Lieutenant Pavel’s skull pounded from exertion.

He had finished manhandling the large display case across the library floor, finally succeeding in positioning it beneath the balcony. The transparent cube had been considerably heavier than it looked, much of its weight no doubt coming from the mammoth object inside.

Pavel had taken a minute to catch his breath, staring through the thick Plexiglas at the absurdly large book inside the cube. It was famous enough to draw a crowd, but the book was open to a page depicting a half-naked devil, squatting in a loincloth.

People pay money to see this?

Eager to get up to the balcony, Pavel retrieved the ladder and hoisted it onto the top of the display case, pleased to see that it now reached up to the balcony.

Before climbing onto the display case, Pavel turned for one last scan of the balcony to see if Langdon had come to his senses and revealed himself. As his eyes traced the upper perimeter of the room, moving along the balcony, his gaze stopped short.

Pavel hoped he was hallucinating.

In the far corner of the balcony, above the locked alcove, a column of black smoke seemed to be rising out of nowhere…drifting to the highest point of the arched ceiling…already gathering into a dark cloud that was now creeping outward across the priceless fresco.

No…

But it was too late.

A split second later, the fire alarms began to blare.