Map of Bones (18 page)

“Finestra confessionis,”
Vigor whispered, pointing to the window. “So one can observe the relics while kneeling.”

Gray approached. Monk stood guard. He still didn’t like this situation. He bent and peered through the small window. Behind glass, a white silk-lined chamber opened.

The bones had been removed, just as the monsignor had described. The Vatican was taking no chances. And neither would he.

“The rectory is located off the church’s left side,” Vigor said, a bit too loudly. “That’s where the offices and apartments are. It’s connected through the sacristy.” He pointed across the church.

As if responding to his signal, a door smacked open across the nave. Gray dropped to a knee. Monk yanked the monsignor behind a pillar, swinging up his shotgun.

A single figure strode out, oblivious of the intruders.

It was a young man dressed in black with a clerical collar.

A priest.

He was alone. He crossed and began lighting a set of candles on the far side of the altar.

Gray waited until the man was only two yards away. Still, no others appeared. Slowly he gained his feet, coming into view.

The priest froze when he spotted Gray, his arm half-raised in lighting another candle. His expression turned to shock when he spotted the pistol in Gray’s hand.
“Chi sei?”

Still, Gray hesitated.

Vigor stepped out of hiding.
“Padre…”

The priest jumped, and his eyes flicked to the monsignor. He immediately noted the matching collar; confusion surpassed fear.

“I am Monsignor Verona,” Vigor introduced, stepping forward. “Do not be afraid.”

“Monsignor Verona?” Worry etched the man’s features. He backed a step.

“What’s wrong?” Gray asked in Italian.

The priest shook his head. “You can’t be Monsignor Verona.”

Vigor stepped forward and showed him his Vatican ID.

The man glanced from it back to Vigor.

“But a…a man came here early this morning, just after dawn. A tall man. Very tall. With identification as Monsignor Verona. He bore papers with proper seals from the Vatican. To take the bones.”

Gray exchanged a look with the monsignor. They had already been outmaneuvered. Instead of brute force, the Dragon Court had slipped in more slyly this time. By necessity. Because of the increased security. With the real Monsignor Verona believed dead, the Court had assumed his role. Like everything else, they must have known about Vigor’s side mission here to collect the relics. They had used the intelligence to slip the last bones through the intensified security here.

Gray shook his head. They continued to be a step behind.

“Damn it,” Monk said.

The priest frowned at him. Clearly he understood enough English to find affront at the man’s language in a house of God.

“Scusi,”
Monk responded.

Gray understood Monk’s frustration, doubly so as mission leader. He bit back his own curse. They had moved too slowly, played too cautiously.

His radio buzzed.

Kat came on the line. She must have overheard enough of the conversation. “Is it all clear, Commander?”

“Clear…and too late,” he answered back sourly.

Kat and Rachel joined them. Vigor introduced the others.

“So the bones are gone,” Rachel said.

The priest nodded. “Monsignor Verona, if you’d like to see the paperwork, we have it in the safe in the sacristy. Maybe that would help.”

“We could check it for fingerprints,” Rachel said tiredly, the exhaustion finally hitting her. “They may have been careless. Not expecting we’d be on their heels. It might flush out whoever betrayed us in the Vatican. It could be our only new lead.”

Gray nodded. “Bag it up. We’ll see what we can find here.”

Rachel and Monsignor Verona headed across the nave.

Gray turned away and strode over to the sarcophagus.

“Any ideas?” Monk asked.

“We still have the gray powder we collected from the golden reliquary,” he said. “We’ll regroup in the Vatican, alert everyone of what’s happened, and test the powder more thoroughly.”

As the sacristy door closed, Gray knelt down by the tiny window again, wondering if praying would help. “We should vacuum out the interior,” he said, struggling to remain clinical. “See if we can confirm the presence of the amalgam powder here, too.”

He leaned closely, cocking his head, not sure what he was looking for. But he found it anyway. A mark on the silk-lined roof of the reliquary chamber. A red seal pressed into the white silk. A tiny curled dragon. The ink looked fresh…too fresh.

But it was not ink….

Blood.

A warning left behind by the Dragon Lady.

Gray straightened, suddenly knowing the truth.

JULY 25, 12:38
P
.
M
.
MILAN, ITALY

O
NCE INSIDE,
the priest closed the door to the sacristy. It was the chamber where the clergy and altar boys robed themselves prior to Mass.

Rachel heard the lock click behind her.

She half turned and found a pistol leveled at her chest. Held in the hand of the priest. His eyes had gone as cold and hard as polished marble.

“Don’t move,” he said firmly.

Rachel backed a step. Vigor slowly raised his hands.

To either side were closets hung with clerical garments and vestments, used daily by the priests to say Mass. A table held a row of silver chalices, haphazardly arranged for the same. A large gilded silver crucifix, mounted on a wrought-iron pole, leaned against one corner, meant to lead a processional.

The door on the opposite end of the sacristy opened.

A familiar bull of a man entered, filling the doorway. It was the man who attacked her in Cologne. He carried a long knife in one hand, the blade wet and bloody. He stepped into the room and used a blessed stole hanging in a closet to wipe it clean.

Rachel felt Vigor wince next to her.

The blood. The missing priests. Oh God…

The tall man no longer wore a monk’s garb, but ordinary street clothes, charcoal khakis and a black T-shirt, over which he wore a dark suit jacket. He carried a pistol in a shoulder holster beneath it and wore a radio headset over one ear, the mike at his throat.

“So you both survived Cologne,” he said, his eyes traveling up and down Rachel’s form, as if sizing up a prized calf at a country fair. “How very fortunate. Now we can become better acquainted.”

He tipped his throat mike up and spoke into it. “Clear the church.”

Behind her, Rachel heard doors slam open in the nave. Gray and the others would be caught off guard. She waited for a spate of gunfire or the blast of a grenade. But all she heard was the patter of boots on marble. The church remained silent.

The same must have been noted by their captor.

“Report,” he ordered into his mike.

Rachel did not hear the reply, but she knew from the darkening of his face that the news was not good.

He shoved forward, passing between Vigor and Rachel.

“Watch them,” he growled to the fake priest. A second gunman had taken up post by the back exit to the sacristy.

Their captor yanked open the door to the nave. An armed figure strode over to him, accompanied by the Eurasian woman, holding her Sig Sauer pistol at her side.

“No one’s here,” the man reported.

Rachel spotted other gunmen searching the main nave and side chapels.

“All exits have been guarded.”

“Yes, sir.”

“At all times.”

“Yes, sir.”

The giant’s eyes settled on the Asian woman.

She shrugged. “They might have found an open window.”

With a grumble, he cast a final search around the basilica, then swung around with a sweep of his suit jacket. “Keep searching. Send three men to canvass the outside. They can’t have gotten far.”

As the giant turned, Rachel made her move.

Reaching behind her, she snatched the ceremonial pole with the silver crucifix and rammed its butt end square into the man’s solar plexus. He grunted and fell back into the priest. She yanked the pole back, under her elbow, and slammed the cross end into the gunman’s face behind her.

His pistol blasted, but the shot went wild as he fell back out the door.

Rachel followed him, tumbling out the back exit into a narrow hallway, her uncle on her heels. She slammed the door and propped the pole against it, jamming it against the hallway’s far wall.

Beside her, Uncle Vigor smashed a heel on the fallen gunman’s hand. Bones cracked. He then kicked the man square in the face. His head bounced against the stone floor with a thud, then his form went slack.

Rachel bent down and grabbed his pistol.

Crouched, she searched both ways down the windowless hall. No other men were about. The additional forces must have been placed to ambush Gray and his team. A large crash rattled the door in its frame. The Bull was trying to break through.

She dropped flat to the floor and searched beneath the jam. She watched the play of light and shadow. She aimed for darkness and fired.

The bullet sparked off the marble floor, but she heard a satisfying bellow of surprise. A little hotfoot should slow the Bull.

She rolled to her feet. Uncle Vigor had crossed down the hall a few steps.

“I hear someone groaning,” he whispered. “Back here.”

“We don’t have time.”

Ignoring her, Uncle Vigor continued deeper. Rachel followed. Without a frame of reference, one way was no worse than the other. They reached a door cracked open. Rachel heard a moan from inside.

She shouldered in, gun ready.

The room had once been a small dining hall. But now it was a slaughterhouse. One priest lay facedown in a pool of blood on the floor, the back of his head a pulp of brain, bone, and hair. Another black-robed figure lay sprawled on one of the tables, spread-eagled, tied to the bench legs. An older priest. His robes had been stripped to the waist. His chest was a pool of blood. His head was missing both ears. There was also the smell of burned flesh.

Tortured.

To death.

A sobbing moan sounded to the left. On the floor, tied hand and foot, was a young man, stripped to boxer shorts, gagged. He had a black eye and blood dribbled from both nostrils. From his half-naked form, it was plain where the clerical garb for the fake priest had come from.

Vigor came around the table. When the man spotted him, he struggled, eyes wild, frothing around his gag.

Rachel held back.

“It’s all right,” Vigor soothed.

The man’s eyes fixed on Vigor’s collar. He stopped struggling, but he was still wracked with sobs. Vigor reached out to free the gag. The man shook and spat it out. Tears flowed down his cheeks.

“Molti…grazie,”
he said, his voice weak with shock.

Vigor cut the plastic ties with a knife.

As he worked, Rachel locked the door to the dining room and jammed a chair under the knob for good measure. There were no windows, only a door leading deeper into the rectory. She kept her gun pointed that way and crossed to a phone on the wall. No dial tone. The phone lines had been cut.

She fished out Gray’s cell phone and dialed 112, the universal EU emergency number. Once connected, she identified herself as a Carabinieri lieutenant, though she didn’t give her name, and called for an immediate medical, police, and military response.

With the alarm raised, she pocketed her phone.

Outgunned, it was all she could do.

For herself…and for the others.

12:45
P
.
M
.

F
OOTSTEPS APPROACHED
Gray’s hiding place. He held perfectly still, not breathing. The steps stopped nearby. He strained to listen.

A man spoke. A familiar voice, angry. It was the leader of the monks. “The Milan authorities have been alerted.”

There was no reply, but Gray was certain two people had approached.

“Seichan?” the man asked. “Did you hear me?”

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
.

R
ACHEL 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
.

G
RAY 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.