The Black Orchid Protocol

The morning sun streamed through the three-story gothic skylight of the Grand Library of Zámek Vranov, illuminating an extraordinary fusion of fourteenth-century alchemy and twenty-first-century supercomputing. In the center of the vast chamber, the heavy oak refectory table had been transformed into an elite cryptographic war room. Surrounding the open vellum folios of the Wenceslas Codex were three liquid-cooled military terminals connected via secure satellite link to the Obsidian Consortium’s…