Mother of God

Tessa Lambert sits in a hotel room, alone and afraid. An airliner has just crashed outside Berlin. Three hundred people are dead. And she killed them. She was supposed to be on that flight and someone - some thing wants her dead. Tessa is the young, beautiful genius who has just created the world's first viable artificial-intelligence program. She calls it Paul. The project is top secret - so controversial that even her colleagues at Oxford University can't know about it. But Tessa's real problem is Paul itself: It's broken out of the laboratory and onto the Internet and it's taking prisoners - the computers that run and record our lives. Worse yet, it's made a friend - a serial killer who's every bit as computer literate as Tessa and who's willing to do whatever Paul wants, even if it means killing Tessa. Now Tessa has two problems: How to stop Paul and how to stay alive.