Page 9 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)

The world’s largest book publisher, Penguin Random House, publishes nearly twenty thousand books a year and generates over five billion dollars in annual gross revenues.

Its American headquarters is located on Broadway in Midtown Manhattan and occupies twenty-four floors of a glittering gray-glass skyscraper known as Random House Tower.

Tonight, the offices were quiet. It was after midnight in the city, and even the cleaning crews had finished their rounds. Nonetheless, on the twenty-third floor, a single light burned in a corner office.

Editor Jonas Faukman was a night owl. At a youthful fifty-five, he still kept the hours of a teenager, ran daily in Central Park, and wore black jeans and sneakers to work.

His wavy black hair fortunately was still thick, but his beard was definitely showing signs of gray—reminiscent of Joseph Conrad, he liked to think.

Faukman loved the undisturbed silence of these late hours, savoring his solitude as he wrestled with complex storylines and knotted prose, writing detailed pages of notes for his authors.

Tonight, he had cleared his desk to spend the night doing what he enjoyed most in the world…

reading a freshly delivered manuscript from a brand-new author.

Potential yet unknown.

Most published books came and went without a trace, but a select few captured the minds of readers and became bestsellers.

Faukman had high hopes for the one he was about to read.

He had been anticipating its delivery for months.

The book was a bold exploration of the mysteries of human consciousness, penned by prominent noetic scientist Katherine Solomon.

A little over a year ago, Faukman’s close friend Robert Langdon had brought Katherine to New York to pitch her book idea over lunch.

The scientist’s presentation had been nothing short of mind-blowing—the most enthralling pitch for a nonfiction book Faukman could remember.

Within days, he had taken it off the market by offering Katherine a lucrative publishing contract.

She had toiled for the past year writing in complete secrecy, and just this afternoon, she had called from Prague to report that she had finished polishing the manuscript and was ready for Faukman to read it.

He suspected that Langdon might have had a hand in encouraging Katherine to stop tweaking and to seek her editor’s perspective.

No matter the catalyst, Faukman knew one thing for certain: if Katherine Solomon’s manuscript turned out to be half as riveting as her pitch had been, this book would be one of the most important projects of his career.

Illuminating…startling…universally relevant.

The quest to understand human consciousness was quickly becoming the new Holy Grail of science, and Faukman sensed Katherine Solomon was poised to become a trailblazing voice in the field.

If her theory proved correct, then the human mind was not at all as had been imagined; the truth would bring about a profound shift in our views of humanity, life, and even death.

Faukman wondered if he was about to edit a work that might one day stand alongside other paradigm-altering publications like On the Origin of Species and A Brief History of Time.

Slow down, Jonas… he reminded himself. You haven’t even read it yet.

A sharp knock at Faukman’s door snapped him back in the moment, and he wheeled around, startled to have a visitor in the dead of night.

“Mr. Faukman?” The young man standing in his doorway was a stranger.

“Yes? Who are you?”

“Sorry to frighten you, sir,” the young man said, holding up his laminated company badge. “I’m Alex Conan—in data security. I work mainly at nights while system traffic is low.”

The kid’s mop of blond hair and Pizzeria Papagayo T-shirt made him look more like a surfer than a technician. “How can I help you, Alex?”

“Oh, it’s probably a false alarm,” the tech replied, “but our system just threw a flag on some data that was accessed.”

Data that were accessed, Faukman thought, wondering when the world would finally accept that the word “data” was plural.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” the kid said. “I was worried because ‘unverified user’ is a rare alert for us, but now that I see that you are actually here in the building and logged in, I feel better. It’s probably just a glitch on your account.”

“But I’m not logged in,” Faukman said, motioning to his monitor. “My computer hasn’t been on all night.”

The kid’s eyes widened ever so slightly. “Oh…”

Faukman felt a trace of alarm. “Is someone logged into my account?”

“No, no,” the tech said. “Well, not anymore. Whoever it was, they’re gone.”

“Whoever it was? What does that mean?!”

The tech looked concerned now. “It just means that someone penetrated your personal partition, sir, without a password or authorized credentials. Whoever it was must have legit skills, because we’ve got a military-grade firewall protec—”

“Hold on, what exactly was accessed?” Faukman swiveled to his desk and powered up his computer. My entire professional life is on that goddamned server!

“Someone hacked one of your SVWs,” the kid said.

Faukman froze. That is not the answer I wanted.

SVWs—secure virtual workspaces—were a fairly new implementation at PRH.

Due to a rise in book piracy of stolen manuscripts, some PRH editors had begun encouraging top-selling authors to work exclusively on the Penguin Random House servers for an extra layer of security.

Many of PRH’s most valuable manuscripts were written, edited, and saved in a single secure location—the confines of the company’s encrypted, firewalled system in Random House Tower…

along with its redundant backup in Maryland.

I asked Katherine Solomon to use an SVW, Faukman thought uneasily.

Having sensed blockbuster potential in her proposal, Faukman had encouraged Katherine to adhere to strict security protocols while writing the manuscript.

She had happily agreed, saying she loved the thought of logging in remotely from anywhere in the world to work on her manuscript, knowing all her materials were in one place, secure and automatically backed up.

Most authors felt the same way, albeit with one concern.

Privacy. No author wanted an impatient editor monitoring the progress of a manuscript before they were ready to show it.

For this reason, every author using an SVW protected his or her virtual workspace with a password—an access code known only to the author—until the manuscript was ready to be delivered.

For Katherine, that day was today, Faukman thought.

When she had called earlier from Prague, she had nervously given Faukman her access code so he could start reading and editing.

Faukman immediately cleared his desk of other work so he could dive into her manuscript tonight and read it from start to finish over the weekend.

Now, however, his long-awaited night of reading had been interrupted by a T-shirted security tech with unsettling news.

“Which SVW was accessed?” Faukman demanded, his throat feeling dry. “Which book?”

The kid pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and began unfolding it. “I think it’s some kind of mathematical book?”

Faukman perked up, feeling a glimmer of hope.

“Here it is,” Alex said, reading the note. “The title is… SUM .”

The editor felt an immediate jolt of panic.

Breathe, Jonas. Breathe.

SUM was no math book. It was an acronym.

It stood for “Solomon—Untitled Manuscript.”