Page 108 of The Secret of Secrets

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.

Chapter 69

Within seconds of the smoke alarm sounding, Lieutenant Pavel could hear the docent frantically unbolting the doors of the Baroque Library.

I gave you orders! Pavel fumed. Stay out!

But apparently the threat of fire in an ancient library overruled even ÚZSI orders, and the docent dashed in, wheeling wildly and looking for the source of the smoke.

Pavel was at the farthest end of the room, perched atop the display case, preparing to climb the ladder to the balcony. The docent never even noticed him, fixated instead on the pillar of smoke rising off the balcony. The docent ran to the hidden bookcase, trying in vain to open it.

I can still kill Langdon, Pavel knew, beginning his climb up the ladder. An eye for an eye.

Two other museum employees with fire extinguishers ran in behind the docent, shouting to one another and trying to open the concealed door without breaking it. No luck. But the smoke billowing through the trapdoor now seemed to be abating as quickly as it had begun.

Pavel was halfway up the ladder when another docent spotted him. The elderly man rushed over, looking horrified to see someone on a jerry-rigged ladder atop the library’s priceless exhibit. “Co to sakra děláš?!” the docent yelled, arriving beneath him. What the fuck are you doing?!

Pavel ignored him, still climbing.

As he neared the top, he could taste the smoke in his lungs. The murky cloud had coalesced just above him, along the peak of the arched ceiling, although loud ventilation fans had just been turned on and seemed to be clearing the air rapidly.

Pavel arrived at the top of the ladder and peered over the balcony railing toward the trapdoor at the far end. It was still wide open. The American’s smoke plan had been clever, but it was about to backfire. Langdon will never see me coming. Even if he unlocked the door and dashed out into the library, Pavel held the high ground—a perfect vantage point for the kill shot.

Patience, his captain had urged, and patience had paid off. Reaching out, he grabbed the iron railing of the balcony and prepared to pull himself over.

“Lieutenant Pavel!” a woman’s authoritative voice shouted from the library entrance. “Stop right there!”

Perched on the top rung, Pavel turned and scanned the library, blinking several times, trying to make sense of what he now saw. The mirage moving toward him was so unexpected and bizarre that he wondered if maybe the smoke and skull injury were triggering a hallucination.

The woman approaching was an elegant, dark-haired beauty—easily one of the most breathtaking women Pavel had ever seen in the flesh. She moved on slender legs that carried her with the intensity of a fashion model on the runway. She could have been one of Pavel’s Dream Zone fantasies…except for one small problem: she was flanked by two U.S. Marines in full embassy blues and carrying sidearms.

Inside the stairwell, on the landing of the spiral, Langdon stood over the smoldering pile of ash, wanting to ensure that every last ember was extinguished.

This fire made possible by Procter & Gamble, he mused, grateful for the tiny bottle of hand sanitizer he’d found in the bottom of Katherine’s bag.

Safeguard gel was 80 percent alcohol, and Langdon had smeared it liberally over the title page of Katherine’s manuscript before rolling the sheet into a tube to concentrate the fumes. After inserting the tube into the grate to hold it in a vertical position, Langdon used the Clutch to ignite the foil directly over the tube’s opening. As expected, the foil flamed out almost instantly, but the concentration of alcohol fumes combusted, and the gel-soaked tube went up in flames.

The rest happened quickly.

The light-bond Czech printer paper burned faster than Langdon had anticipated; for a moment, he feared he’d made a terrible mistake and put the entire library in danger. The fire was raging in a matter of seconds. While feeding more pages, Langdon also drained the remains of Katherine’s water and tossed the plastic bottle onto the manuscript pages, creating billowing clouds of black smoke as it melted.

It was rare that Langdon invoked Shakespeare, but this near disaster seemed Bard-worthy. All’s well that ends well, he assured himself, considering he could have burned down a priceless library or been shot dead.

Now, after confirming he had left nothing behind, Langdon hoisted Katherine’s bag, which was much lighter without her manuscript and water. She had already descended in silence, distraught over witnessing her manuscript pages being incinerated. Langdon felt confident that she would eventually come to understand that he had played their cards as best as he possibly could.

We’re alive.