“Good enough!”
Gray hauled one end outside and tied it to the balcony’s top rail. He tossed the rest of its length over the edge.
“What are you doing?” Kowalski asked.
Gray pointed to the open balconies of the building across the narrow street.
“You are stupid mad,” Kowalski said.
No one argued.
Looking down, Gray again wondered how the cement trucks had made it through such a tight squeeze of alleys to reach here. But at the moment, he silently thanked the Hong Kong city planners who allowed such dense construction in Kowloon.
Gray mounted the balcony rail and grabbed their makeshift rope. Holding his breath, he lowered himself down hand by hand. A few slips made his heart pound harder, but as he climbed, he silently eyeballed the distance to the neighboring building, judging the length of free rope he would need.
Once satisfied, he began to shift his weight, setting the rope to swinging. He ran his boots along the caged balconies, passing through thick smoke, burning his eyes. Within a few passes back and forth, his arc began to swing clear of the building, stretching toward its neighbor.
Not far enough.
Needing more distance, he ran faster across the balconies, extending the arc of each swing wider and wider. Smoke continued to choke his throat, growing ever thicker, making it harder to catch his breath.
But he dared not stop.
Finally, sweeping out over the street, the tips of his toes struck the far balcony. It was not enough to gain purchase, but the contact fired his determination. Swinging back again into the smoke, his feet sped across the rain-slick balconies.
C’mon . . .
“Pierce!” Kowalski yelled from the balcony. “Look below you!”
Gray searched under his legs as he ran. The end of his rope must have brushed through a hot patch at some point and caught fire. Flames chased up the rope toward him, trailing fiery cinders of cloth.
Oh, no . . .
This time, when he felt his momentum ebbing, he kicked hard off the last rail he could touch, trying to eke out a few more yards of swing, knowing this was his last chance.
Then back he fell.
Gravity dragged him across the surface of the fiery tower and out over the street. Bending at the waist, he kicked his legs up and stared through them. The balcony swooped toward him. Timing it as well as he could, he lifted his feet to clear the rail—then clamped his knees down and successfully hooked the top bar.
Relief swept through him.
In that moment of inattentiveness, he slipped and lost his hold. His legs slid along the bar until only his heels remained hooked to the rail. He hung there, knowing it couldn’t last.
Under him, flames swept up the rope.
Then hands suddenly grabbed his ankles.
He stared past his toes to see a man and woman, husband and wife, the owners of the apartment, gripping him, coming to his aid. They pulled him over the balcony’s rail to safety. Back on his feet, he stamped and slapped out the flames from the rope and tied its end to the top bar. All the while, the pair chattered to him in Cantonese, clearly scolding him at such a rash action, as if he had done it on some lark.
Once the rope bridge was secure—or as secure as he could make it—he called over to the others.
“One at a time! Hands and legs! Climb over!”
Guan-yin came first, moving swiftly like a gymnast, barely disturbing the bridge. She bowed her thanks to the couple, as Zhuang came next, his sword slung over his chest and hanging under him.
Kowalski followed last, fueled by a string of curses.
Apparently the gods were not happy with his profanity. Halfway across, the far end of the bridge frayed away and snapped, sending him plummeting toward the street.
Gray gulped, his belly pressed hard against the rail, not knowing what to do.
Luckily, Kowalski kept his massive meat hooks on the rope. As the slack ran out, the rope flung his bulk toward the façade below. He crashed headlong into a balcony three stories down, bowling into a group of onlookers gathered there.
Cries of shock echoed up.
“Are you okay?” Gray hollered, bending over the rail.
“Next time, you go last!” Kowalski bellowed back.
Gray turned to find Zhuang gently wrapping his mistress’s face in a crimson silk scarf, hiding her again from the world.
Once covered, she turned to Gray. “I owe you my life.”
“But many others lost theirs.”
She nodded at this, and they both soberly observed the aftermath of the attack. Across the way, the rusted mountain slowly succumbed to the fires, crumbling and crashing to ruin.
Behind them, Zhuang conversed rapidly on his phone, likely assessing the damage.
After a minute, he returned to his mistress’s side. They spoke with their heads bowed. Once her lieutenant stepped back, Guan-yin faced Gray.
“Zhuang has heard news from Macau,” she said.
Gray tensed for the worst.
“My daughter still lives.”
Thank God.
“But Ju-long has whisked her off the peninsula, out of China.”
“Where—?”
Her scarf failed to muffle the dread in her voice. “To North Korea.”
Gray pictured that reclusive country, an isolated no-man’s-land of macabre desolation and dictatorial madness, a place of strict control and impenetrable borders.
“It’ll take an army to get her out,” he mumbled to the smoke and fire.
Guan-yin clearly heard him, but instead said, “You never answered my earlier question.”
He faced her, finding only a terrified mother staring back.
“Do you love my daughter?”
Gray could not lie, but fear choked him silent. Still, she read the answer in his eyes and turned away.
“Then I will give you that army.”
SECOND
SAINTS & SINNERS
Σ
7
November 18, 1:34 P.M. ORAT
Aktau, Kazakhstan
“It looks like the ocean.”
Monsignor Vigor Verona stirred at the words of his niece. He lifted his nose from a DNA report. He kept returning to the papers over and over again, sensing he was missing something important. The results had been faxed from the genetics lab just before the early-morning flight to this westernmost port city of Kazakhstan.
He took a deep breath and pulled himself back to the present, needing a break anyway. Maybe if I clear my head, I’ll figure out what is nagging me.
He and Rachel were seated at a small restaurant overlooking the Caspian Sea. Beyond the windows, its wintry waters crashed against the neighboring white cliffs for which the small town of Aktau had been named. The team from Sigma was scheduled to meet them here in less than an hour. Together, they’d take a chartered helicopter from here to the coordinates Father Josip had hidden inside the inscribed skull.
“Once upon a time, the Caspian was indeed an ocean,” Vigor said. “That was five million years ago. It’s why the Caspian still has salt in it, though only about a third of the salinity of today’s oceans. Then that ancient ocean became landlocked, eventually drying out to become the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea . . . and where we’re headed next, the Aral Sea.”
“Not that there’s much sea left in the Aral Sea,” Rachel said with a smile. She had traded her Carabinieri uniform for a red turtleneck sweater, jeans, and hiking boots.
“Ah, but that’s not the fault of geology, but the hand of man. The Aral Sea used to be the fourth-largest lake in the world, about the size of Ireland. But then the Soviets diverted its two main rivers for irrigation back in the sixties, and the sea dried up, losing ninety percent of its water, becoming a salty, toxic wasteland, dotted by the rusting hulks of old fishing boats.”
“You’re not selling this upcoming tour very well.”
“But Father Josip must believe the place is important. Why else summon us there???
?
“Besides the fact that he might be crazy? He’s vanished for almost a decade.”
“Perhaps, but Director Crowe has enough confidence in this venture to supply us with field support.”
She leaned back and crossed her arms, scowling her dissatisfaction. After the attack at the university, she had been against this venture entirely, even threatening to lock him up in order to keep him in Rome. He knew the only reason they were seated at the edge of the Caspian Sea was because of Sigma’s conditional support.
Yet Director Crowe hadn’t explained why he had agreed to supply this help—not to Vigor or Rachel—which was troubling to both of them. The director had only expressed that he might need their help afterward as a cover story for a mission in a restricted area of Mongolia.
Mongolia . . .
That fact intrigued him.
His eyes drifted again to the DNA report concerning the relics—the skull and the book—but Rachel reached across and shifted the papers to the side.
“Not this time, Uncle. You’ve been looking at those for hours, and only growing more frustrated. I need you to focus on what’s ahead.”
“Fine, but then let me talk it out. I’m sensing I’m missing something critical to all this.”
She shrugged, conceding.
“According to the initial report compiled by the lab, the DNA is consistent with an East Asian ethnicity.”
“You mentioned that already. The skin and the skull came from the same guy, someone from out in the Far East.”
“Right, but from the autosomal study that was faxed overnight, the lab compared our sample to various known ethnicities. From that, they were able to compile a rank of the top possibilities of race.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Han Chinese, Buryats, Daur, Kazakhs—”
Rachel interrupted, “As in the people of Kazakhstan.”
“Right. But at the top of the ranking was Mongolian.”
She sat straighter. “Where Painter’s team wants us to go.”
“That’s what has got me so obsessed. I know there’s a connection I’m missing.”
“Then let’s start there,” she said. “Did Director Crowe say exactly where his team was planning to head in Mongolia?”
“Somewhere in the mountains northeast of their capital . . . the Khan Khentii Mountains.”
“And that’s a restricted area.”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“It’s both a nature preserve and historically significant.”
“Why historically?”
Vigor opened his mouth to answer—then went cold as a frightening possibility struck him. For a moment, the insight blinded him to his surroundings, so filling his brain he could not see.
“Uncle . . .”
His vision snapped back, as he recognized the mistake he’d made. “I’ve been looking at the trees and missed the forest . . .”
He reached into his pocket and took out his phone. He dialed the DNA lab and demanded to speak to Dr. Conti. Once the researcher came on the line, he told him what he needed done to confirm his fear. It took some convincing, but Conti finally relented.
“Check those Y chromosome markers,” Vigor finished. “And get back to me as soon as you can at this number.”
“What’s wrong?” Rachel asked as he hung up.
“The Khan Khentii Mountains. They are sacred to the Mongolian people because those peaks are said to hide the lost tomb of their greatest hero.”
Rachel was versed enough to guess the identity of that hero. “Genghis Khan?”
Vigor nodded. “The Mongolian warlord who forged an empire under the might of sword and will . . . an empire that extended from the Pacific Ocean to the waters outside this window.”
Rachel glanced out and back. “You don’t think the skull is—?”
“That’s what I’ve asked Dr. Conti to confirm.”
“But how can he even do that?”
“A few years back, a well-documented genetics study showed that one out of two hundred men in the world carry the same unique Y chromosome, a chromosome with a set of distinct markers that trace their roots to Mongolia. That number climbed to one out of ten in regions that were once part of the ancient Mongol Empire. The report concluded that this Super-Y chromosome came down from one individual, someone who lived approximately a thousand years ago in Mongolia.”
“Genghis Khan?”
Vigor nodded. “Who else? Genghis and his close male relatives took multiple wives, had even more offspring through rape and conquest. They conquered half the known world.”
“And spread their genetic stamp.”
“A stamp we can verify. Those Y-chromosome markers are well known to geneticists and easy enough to compare to our sample.”
“That’s what Dr. Conti is doing right now?”
“He said he could have the results almost immediately, as the DNA sequencing on our samples had already been completed.”
“But if you’re right and the markers match, what does that tell us? Like you said, many men carry this Y-chromosome.”
“Yes, but Genghis died in 1227.”
“The thirteenth century . . .” Her brows knit together. “The same age as the skull.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “How many men back then carried that specific chromosome?”
Rachel did not look convinced.
Vigor pressed his case. “After Genghis died, his followers slaughtered his entire funeral procession. Those who constructed his tomb were also killed. So were the soldiers who oversaw its construction. And apparently such bloody efforts were effective in keeping it secret. Despite centuries of searching, the location of his tomb remains a mystery to this day. A tomb said to hold all the riches from his conquered lands.”
“The discovery of which might be worth killing someone over,” Rachel said, plainly referring to the grenade attack.
“We’re talking about a treasure that would put Tutankhamen to shame. The world’s greatest treasures flowed into Mongolia and were never seen again, the vast spoils of war from China, India, Persia, Russia. The royal tomb was even said to hold the crowns of the seventy-eight rulers he conquered. Not to mention the priceless religious artifacts pillaged from countless churches, mostly those of the Russian Orthodox.”
“And nothing was ever found?”
“More important to us, his body was never found.”
Before Rachel could respond, Vigor’s phone rang. He snatched it up to find Dr. Conti on the line.
“I did as you asked, Monsignor Verona. We compared the twenty-five genetic markers that make up the Genghis Khan haplotype to your sample.”
“And how many match?”
“All twenty-five.”
Blood drained from Vigor’s face. He stared down at the rolling case at his feet, realizing what it might hold. He understood now why someone might kill to possess what it contained, how the contents inside might hold clues to the world’s greatest treasure. Inside his suitcase, he perhaps held the skull and skin of the world’s greatest warlord, a man revered as a semigod by his people.
The relics of Genghis Khan.
2:10 P.M.
“You were right,” Duncan said. “Our Italian friends picked up a tail.”
He stood with Monk Kokkalis at a beachside barbecue stand. Cold sunlight shone off the neighboring sea. The day was chilly, but the wood and charcoal grill—where skewers of meat, fat, and vegetables sizzled—cast off enough heat to make even Duncan’s light jacket feel too warm. The burn of Persian spices and oils also wafted over him, stinging his eyes with every gust off the sea.
After landing at the Aktau International Airport, they had shuttled Dr. Jada Shaw to their chartered helicopter at a neighboring private airfield. Once she was secure, Monk and Duncan had headed to the central district of the small port town to retrieve the final additions to their team. Duncan had been informed about the attack on the pair, and Monk had suggested caution in approaching them, to make sure the two weren’t
being tracked from Rome.
If they’re dragging a tail, Monk had said, let’s cut it off now.
It proved to be a smart precaution.
Duncan recognized that he could learn a thing or two from this more seasoned Sigma operative.
“How do you want to play this?” he asked.
During their twenty-minute vigil on the restaurant, they spotted a pair of people showing an inordinate amount of interest in the couple seated at the window. The restaurant bordered the beach’s pedestrian thoroughfare, where joggers and bikers vied for space on the narrow strip of asphalt. Though it was November and the off-season, this central district of the town still bustled with activity. So it was easy to spot anyone suspiciously lingering by the restaurant.
A dark-haired man, clearly Asian, had settled onto a bench on the far side of the restaurant, at the edge of the beach. He wore a knee-length coat, his hands stuffed deep in his pockets, his back to the view, seldom taking his eyes off the restaurant.
Not exactly sophisticated.
The other, a woman, matched her partner’s hair and features. She wore a black woolen cap, and a shorter version of the man’s brown coat. She was slim and not unattractive with high cheekbones and smoldering eyes. She leaned against a light pole on this side of the restaurant.
“I’ll go along the beach,” Monk said. “Approach the man from behind. You get close to the woman. Wait until I’m in position. Upon my signal, we’ll grab them both.”
“Got it.”
“And keep your weapon hidden, march them over to our SUV. Be discreet. We’ll secure them there and question them en route back to the airfield. I want to know who the hell they are and why they tried to blow up my friends.”
“Why do you think they’re watching now versus attacking?”
Monk shook his head. “Might be too public to act in broad daylight. Or maybe they’ve been ordered to follow them, to discover why the pair traveled from Rome to Kazakhstan? Either way, it ends here for them.”
Monk set off, moving onto the sand and casually strolling down the beach. He never looked once toward the seated man. Once his partner was halfway toward his target, Duncan pushed away from the counter and headed toward the woman. He did his best to match Monk’s pace, to time his approach so that they’d reach their respective targets at the same time.