A bored voice answered. It was equally recognizable. The Dragon Lady. But now she had a name. Seichan.
“They must have gone out a window, Raoul,” she said, returning the favor and naming the leader. “Sigma is slippery. I warned you as much. We’ve secured the remaining bones. We should be gone before Sigma returns with reinforcements. The police may already be on the way.”
“But that bitch…”
“You can settle matters with her later.”
The footsteps departed. It sounded like the heavier of the two was limping. Still, the Dragon Lady’s words remained with Gray.
You can settle matters with her later.
Did that mean Rachel had escaped?
Gray was surprised at the depth of his relief.
A door slammed on the far side of the church. As the sound echoed away, Gray strained his ears. He heard no more footsteps, no tread of boots, no voices.
To be cautious, he waited a full minute longer.
With the church silent, he nudged Monk, who lay spooned next to him. Kat lay scrunched on Monk’s other side. They rolled with a sickening crunch of desiccated bone and reached overhead. Together they shifted the stone lid to the sepulcher.
Light spilled into the tomb, their makeshift bunker.
After spotting the Dragon Lady’s warning in blood, Gray had known they’d been ensnared. All exit doors would be guarded. And with Rachel and her uncle vanished into the sacristy, there was nothing he could do to help.
So Gray had led the others into the neighboring chapel, to where a massive marble sepulcher rested on twisted Gothic columns. They had shifted its lid enough to climb inside, then pulled the lid back over them just as doors crashed open all across the church.
With the search ended, Monk climbed out, shotgun in hand, and shook his body with a disgusted grumble. Bone dust shivered from his clothes. “Let’s not do that again.”
Gray kept his pistol ready.
He saw an object on the marble floor, a few steps away from where they had been hidden. A copper coin. Easy to miss. He picked it up. It was a Chinese fen, or penny.
“What is it?” Monk asked.
He closed his fingers over it and stood, pocketing it. “Nothing. Let’s go.”
He headed across the nave toward the sacristy, but he glanced back to the crypt. Seichan had known.
12:48 P.M.
RACHEL KEPT guard as Vigor helped the priest stand.
“They…they killed everyone,” the young man said. He needed Vigor’s arm to keep his feet. The man’s eyes avoided the bloody figure on the table. He covered his face with one hand and groaned. “Father Belcarro…”
“What happened?” Vigor asked.
“They came an hour ago. They had papal seals and papers, identification. But Father Belcarro had a faxed picture.” The priest’s eyes widened. “Of you. From the Vatican. Father Belcarro knew the lie immediately. But by that time, the monsters were already here. The phone lines were severed. We were locked inside, cut off. They wanted the combination to Father Belcarro’s safe.”
The man turned from the bloody form, guiltily. “They tortured him. He would not speak. But they did worse things then…so much worse. They made me watch.”
The young priest grabbed her uncle’s elbow. “I couldn’t let it continue. I…I told them.”
“And they took the bones from the safe?”
The priest nodded.
“Then all is lost,” Vigor said.
“Still, they wanted to be sure,” the priest continued, seemingly deaf, babbling on. He glanced to the tortured figure, knowing he had been destined to share the same fate. “Then you arrived. They stripped me, gagged me.”
Rachel pictured the fake priest who had worn the man’s cassock. The subterfuge must have been devised to lure Rachel and Kat off the street and into the church.
The priest stumbled to the body of Father Belcarro. He folded back the older man’s robe, covering the mutilated face as if hiding his own shame. Then the priest reached into a pocket of the bloody robe. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. It seemed the elderly father had not shed all his vices…nor had the young priest.
Fingers shaking, the man peeled back the top and shook out the contents. Six cigarettes—and a broken stub of chalk. The man dropped the cigarettes and held out the ochre bit.
Vigor took it.
Not chalk. Bone.
“Father Belcarro feared sending away all the holy relics,” the young priest explained. “In case something happened. So he kept a bit aside. For the church.”
Rachel wondered how much of this subterfuge was motivated by a selfless desire to preserve the relics and how much was due to pride, and the memory of the last time the bones had been stolen from Milan. Carted off to Cologne. Much of the basilica’s fame was centered on those few bones. But either way, Father Belcarro had died a martyr. Tortured while hiding the holy relic on his own body.
A loud blast made them all jump.
The priest fell back to the floor.
But Rachel recognized the gauge of the weapon.
“Monk’s shotgun…” she said, eyes widening with hope.
2:04 P.M.
GRAY REACHED through the smoking hole in the sacristy door.
Monk shouldered the shotgun. “I’m really going to owe the Catholic Church a month’s salary for carpentry repair.”
Gray shoved aside the pole blocking the way and opened the door. After the shotgun blast, there was no further need for subterfuge. “Rachel! Vigor!” he called as he entered the rectory hall.
A scuffle sounded from down the hall. A door opened. Rachel stepped out, pistol in hand. “Over here!” she urged.
Uncle Vigor led a half-naked man out into the hallway. The man looked pale and haunted, but he seemed to gain strength from their presence.
Or maybe it was the sound of the approaching sirens.
“Father Justin Mennelli,” Vigor said in introduction.
They quickly compared notes.
“So we have one of the bones,” Gray said, surprised.
“I suggest we get the relic back to Rome as soon as possible,” Vigor said. “They don’t know we have it, and I want to be behind the Leonine Walls of the Vatican before they do.”
Rachel nodded. “Father Mennelli will let the authorities know what happened here. He’ll leave out the details of our presence—and of course, about the relic we have.”
“There’s an ETR train leaving for Rome in ten minutes.” Vigor checked his watch. “We can be in Rome by six o’clock.”
Gray nodded. The more under-the-radar they operated, the better. “Let’s go.”
They headed out. Father Mennelli led them to a side exit not far from where they had parked. Rachel climbed into the driver’s seat as usual. They sped off as sirens converged.
As Gray settled back, he fingered the Chinese coin in his pocket. He sensed he had missed something.
Something important.
But what?
3:39 P.M.
AN HOUR later, Rachel crossed from the bathroom to the first-class compartment in the ETR 500 train. Kat accompanied her. It was decided no one would leave the group by themselves. Rachel had wet her face, combed her hair, and brushed her teeth while Kat waited outside the door.
After the horrors in Milan, she had needed a personal moment in the cubicle. For a full minute, she had simply stared at herself in the mirror, teetering between fury and a need to cry. Neither won out, so she had washed her face.
It was all she could do.
But it did make her feel better, a private absolution.
As she strode down the hall, she barely felt the tremble of the tracks under her heels. The Elettro Treno Rapido was Italy’s newest and fastest train, connecting a corridor from Milan to Naples. It traveled at a blistering three hundred kilometers per hour.
“So, what’s the story on your commander?” Rachel asked Kat, taking advantage of the time alone with the woman. Also, it felt good to talk
about a subject outside of murder and bones.
“What do you mean?” Kat did not even look over.
“Is he involved with anyone back home? A girlfriend maybe?”
This question earned a glance. “I don’t see how his personal life—”
“What about you and Monk?” Rachel said, cutting her off, realizing how her original question sounded. “With all your professions, do you have time for personal lives? What about the risks?”
Rachel was curious how these people balanced their regular lives with all the cloak-and-dagger. She had a hard enough time finding a man who could handle her position as a lieutenant in the Carabinieri Force.
Kat sighed. “It’s best not to get too involved,” she said. Her fingers had wandered to a tiny enameled frog pinned to her collar. Her voice grew stiffer, but it sounded more like bolstering than true strength. “You form friendships where you can, but you shouldn’t let it go any further. It’s easier that way.”
Easier for whom? Rachel wondered.
She let the matter drop as they reached their compartments. The team had booked two cabins. One was a sleeping compartment to allow them to take short catnaps in shifts. But no one was sleeping yet. Everyone had gathered in the other cabin, seated on either side of a table. The shades had been drawn across the windows.
Rachel slid in next to her uncle, Kat next to her teammates.
Gray had unboxed an assortment of compact analyzing equipment from his backpack and wired it to a laptop. Other tools were neatly aligned in front of him. In the center of the table, resting on a stainless steel sample tray, was the relic from one of the Magi.
“It was lucky that this bit of finger bone escaped their net,” Monk said.
“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Rachel bristled. “It cost good men their lives. If we hadn’t come when we did, I suspect we would’ve lost this bit of bone, too.”
“Luck or not,” Gray grumbled, “we have the artifact. Let’s see if it can solve any mysteries for us.”
He slipped on a pair of glasses outfitted with a jeweler’s magnifying loupe and donned a pair of latex gloves. With a tiny trepanning drill, he cored a thin sliver through the center of the bone, then used a mortar and pestle to grind the sample to a powder.
Rachel watched his meticulous work. Here was the scientist in the soldier. She studied the movements of his fingers, efficient, no wasted effort. His eyes focused fully on the task at hand. Two perfectly parallel lines furrowed his brow, never relaxing. He breathed through his nose.
She had never imagined this side of him, the man who leapt between fiery towers. Rachel had a sudden urge to tip his chin up, to have him look at her with that same intensity and focus. What would that be like? She pictured the depth of his blue-gray eyes. She remembered his touch, his hand in hers, both strength and tenderness, somehow at the same time.
Warmth swelled through her. She felt her cheeks flush and had to glance away.
Kat stared up at her, expressionless but still somehow making her feel guilty, her words too fresh. It’s best not to get too involved. It’s easier that way.
Maybe the woman was right….
“With this mass spectrometer,” Gray finally mumbled, drawing back her attention, “we can determine if any of the m-state metal is in the bones. Attempt to rule out, or in, the possibility that the Magi bones were the source of the powder found in the gold reliquary.”
Gray mixed the powder with distilled water, then sucked the silty liquid into a pipette and transferred it to a test tube. He inserted the sample tube into the compact spectrometer. He prepared a second test tube of pure distilled water and held it up.
“This is a standard to calibrate,” he explained, and placed the tube into another slot. He pressed a green button and turned the laptop screen toward the group so all could see. A graph appeared on the screen with a flat line across it. A few tiny barbs jittered the straight line. “This is water. The intermittent spikes are a few trace impurities. Even distilled water is not a hundred percent pure.”
Next, he switched a dial so it pointed to the slot with the silty sample. He pressed the green button. “Here is the breakdown of the pulverized bone.”
The graph on the screen cleared and refreshed with the new data.
It looked identical.
“It hasn’t changed,” Rachel said.
With his brow pinched, Gray repeated the test, even taking out the tube and shaking it up. The result was the same each time. A flat line.
“It’s still reading like distilled water,” Kat said.
“It shouldn’t,” Monk said. “Even if the old magi had osteoporosis, the calcium in the bone should be spiking through the roof. Not to mention carbon and a handful of other elements.”
Gray nodded, conceding. “Kat, do you have some of that cyanide solution?”
She swung to her pack, fished through it, and came up with a tiny vial.
Gray soaked a cotton-tipped swab, then pinched the bone between his gloved fingers. He rubbed the wet swab across the bone, pressing firmly, rubbing as if he were polishing silver.
But it was not silver.
Where he rubbed, the brownish-yellow bone turned a rich gold.
Gray glanced up at the group. “This isn’t bone.”
Rachel could not keep the awe and shock from her voice. “It’s solid gold.”
5:12 P.M.
GRAY SPENT half the train trip disproving Rachel’s statement. There was more than just gold in these bones. Also it wasn’t heavy metallic gold, but that strange gold glass again. He attempted to backward engineer the exact composition.
While he worked, he also grappled another problem. Milan. He went over and over again the events at the basilica. He had walked his team into a trap. He could forgive last night’s ambush up in Germany. They had been caught with their pants down. No one could have anticipated such a savage attack at the cathedral in Cologne.
But the close call in Milan could not be so easily dismissed. They had gone into the basilica prepared—but still came close to losing everything, including their lives.
So where did the fault lie?
Gray knew the answer. He had fucked up. He should never have stopped at Lake Como. He should not have listened to Kat’s words of caution and wasted so much time canvassing the basilica, exposing themselves, giving the Court time to spot them and prepare a trap.
Kat was not to blame. Caution was part and parcel of intelligence work. But fieldwork also required swift and certain action, not hesitation.
Especially in its leader.
Up until now, Gray had been going by the book, staying overly cautious, being the leader that was expected of him. But maybe that was the mistake. Hesitation and second-guessing were not Pierce family traits. Not in the father, not in the son. But where was the line between caution and foolhardiness? Could he ever achieve that balance?
Success on this mission—and possibly their lives—would depend on it.
Finished with his analysis, Gray leaned back. He had blistered his thumb, and the cabin reeked of methyl alcohol. “It’s not pure gold,” he concluded.
The others glanced to him. Two were working, two drowsing.
“The fake bone is a mixture of elements across the platinum group,” Gray explained. “Whoever crafted this, they mixed a powdery amalgam of various transitional metals and melted it down to glass. As it cooled, they molded the glass and roughed up the surfaces to a chalky complexion, making it appear like bone.”
Gray began putting away his tools. “It’s predominantly composed of gold, but there’s also a large percentage of platinum and smaller amounts of iridium and rhodium, even osmium and palladium.”
“A regular potpourri,” Monk said with a yawn.
“But a potpourri whose exact recipe may be forever unknown,” Gray said, frowning at the abused piece of bone. He had preserved three-quarters of the artifact untouched and put the remaining quarter through the battery of tests. “With the m-state powder
’s stubborn lack of reactivity, I don’t think any analyzing equipment could tell you the exact ratio of metals. Even testing alters the ratio in the sample.”
“Like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,” Kat said, feet up on the opposite bench, her laptop on her thighs. She tapped as she spoke. “Even the act of looking changes the reality of what’s being observed.”
“So if it can’t be completely tested—” Monk’s words were cut off by another jaw-popping yawn.
Gray patted Monk on the shoulder. “We’ll be in Rome in another hour. Why don’t you catch some sleep in the next room?”
“I’m fine,” he said, stifling another yawn.
“That’s an order.”
Monk stood with a long stretch. “Well, if it’s an order…” He rubbed his eyes and headed out the door.
But he paused in the doorway. “You know,” he said bleary-eyed, “maybe they had it all wrong. Maybe history misinterpreted the words the Magi’s bones. Rather than referring to the skeleton of those guys, maybe it meant the bones were made by the Magi. Like it was their property. The Magi’s bones.”
Everyone stared at him.
Under the combined scrutiny, Monk shrugged and half fell out the door. “Hell, what do I know? I can hardly think straight.” The door closed.
“Your teammate might not be so far off base,” Vigor said as silence settled around the cabin.
Rachel stirred. Gray glanced up. Until the recent exchange, Rachel had been leaning against her uncle and had napped for a short while. Gray had watched her breathing from the corner of his eye. In slumber, all hard edges softened in the woman. She seemed much younger.
She stretched one arm in the air. “What do you mean?”
Vigor worked on Monk’s laptop. Like Kat, he was connected to the DSL line built into the new train’s first-class cabins. They were searching for more information. Kat concentrated on the science behind the white gold, while Vigor searched for more history connecting the Magi to this amalgam.
The monsignor’s eyes remained on his screen. “Somebody forged those fake bones. Somebody with a skill barely reproducible today. But who did it? And why hide them in the heart of a Catholic cathedral?”
“Could it be someone connected to the Dragon Court?” Rachel asked. “Their group traces back to the Middle Ages.”