The Bone Chamber (31 page)

“And that was?”

“To let him know where you are going. When he passes that information, the man will pay him again.”

Griffin held out the euros. “I don’t suppose you caught this man’s name?”

“No,
signore
. The man, he carried a big gun.”

“What should we do?” Francesca asked.

“I want you and Sydney to get back in the taxi queue. I intend to find out if this is part of Adami’s crew. If it isn’t, then I want to know who else is watching us.” He looked at the girl, and said, “One hundred euros to you and your brother, if you create a distraction that will draw that taxi driver from his cab for at least sixty seconds.”

The dark-eyed street girl left to get her brother,
while Sydney and Francesca returned to the long taxi line. Griffin kept an eye on them, as he took out Adami’s cell phone from the special pouch that Giustino had given them. The case helped to ensure that their own conversations were muffled, but the GPS would not be inhibited.

Griffin hit redial. A man answered. Not Adami. The voice sounded much like the leather-clad man from the Capuchin Crypt.

“This is Griffin.”

“I see you are in Naples.”

“Did you follow us on the train?”

“Why would I need to do that? The phone has GPS. We know where you are. And your friend here has every confidence in your abilities.”

“My sources tell me that someone is paying a pirate cab to follow us. It’s not yours, is it?”

There was a rustling sound, as though he covered up the phone to speak to someone. A moment later, he came back on. “Signore Adami informs me that we sent no one. We will be meeting you at the appointed hotel.”

“What hotel?”

He gave him the address. “There will be a room waiting for you under your name. When you have the map, I will meet you there.”

“Who would be following us?”

“I can assure you it is not we.” And then he hung up the phone.

Griffin replaced the phone into the pouch. A moment later, the street girl dragged her brother by his hand, his accordion strapped over one shoulder.

“My brother, Mario.”

In Italian, Griffin told them that he needed a distraction, one that the driver wouldn’t know was directed at him, but that would allow Griffin uninterrupted access to his cab for at least sixty seconds. The two kids grinned, apparently thinking this an easy prospect.

Griffin moved around the kiosk as Mario and his sister raced across the piazza toward the pirate taxis, so called because the vehicles’ owners either failed or refused to be regulated by the government, which forced them to remain on the fringes, hoping to pick up a fare from anyone who didn’t want to wait in the long official taxi queue. The pirate cabdriver who was allegedly being paid to watch Francesca, definitely had his attention fixed on the two women, who were about halfway through the rapidly moving line. Griffin crossed the piazza toward the driver, figuring he had no more than five minutes to take care of business, before they hit the front of the line. And just when he wondered what it was the two street kids had planned, he looked up to see Mario slapping the hoods of the pirate taxis, darting in and out between the cars, while his sister chased him.

As Griffin came up behind the suspect cab, Mario ran in front of it, drumming the hood with both hands, laughing. The driver leaned his head out the window, yelling at Mario. Mario laughed, ran off a few feet, then returned and did it again. This time the driver opened his door, only to have it hit Mario’s sister, who seemed to appear out of nowhere. She started crying loudly, and when the driver told her to shut up, she started wailing that the man had hit her. Mario then
called out for the
carabinieri
, that his sister had been hurt, which immediately set the driver on alert. He looked around, tried to quiet the two kids, no doubt worried that the police might show up.

It was the opening that Griffin needed. From a small case from his backpack, he had removed a jet-black device no bigger than a dime, and maybe twice as thick as a nickel. Flipping it over, he pushed a tiny switch with his thumbnail to turn it on. He glanced over at the trio, the girl still crying, the driver trying to shush her, but desperately watching the taxi line, seeing his chance at easy money evaporate the closer the two women got to the front. Griffin casually walked past the taxi, tossed the bug into the open door—not his preferred method, but right now, the most efficient method—and continued past it, judging that it probably landed on the floorboard of the front passenger seat. The driver wouldn’t be looking for it, his attention would be fixed on whatever cab he was following.

Griffin made eye contact with Mario, as he started across the piazza toward the taxi queue. And just as suddenly as it started, Mario grabbed his sister, telling her to quit being such a big baby. That she wasn’t hurt. The two kids ran across the street and waited for Griffin by the newspaper kiosk.

“We did good, yes?” Mario asked.

“You did excellent.” Griffin removed a hundred euros from his wallet, then handed them to Mario. “
Grazie
.”

The girl smiled at the sight of the money. “If you want help with your tunnels, come to San Gennaro—Duomo of Naples.” Suddenly she grinned. “I saw it on the
signorina
’s map.” And then, before Griffin could question her further, she and Mario darted off into the crowd.

Heaven help the next unwary traveler, he thought, rejoining Sydney and Francesca as they reached the front of the line, about to get into a taxi.

Griffin gave the man the name of the hotel. About ten minutes later, the cab pulled up in front of the hotel, its seventeenth-century edifice giving testament to a past grandeur that had faded due to neglect or lack of money over the last couple centuries. The property was either
owned by Adami, or the owner was in his pockets, which meant that anyone who worked within was suspect. They exited, and Griffin paid the driver. The pirate cab had indeed followed them, was parked just down the street. Griffin escorted the women toward the hotel’s front door, at the same time, removing the listening device from his backpack, something that resembled a portable music player, replete with little white headphones that completed the look. He put one earpiece in his right ear, said, “It sounds like he is making a call…He is. Saying our taxi dropped us off at the hotel, and where should he wait to collect the rest of his money…”

They entered the lobby, crossing a marble floor, the brown and white swirls having lost their gleam long ago. Only the wood-paneled walls and the counter were polished. Griffin gave his name to the lone man at the reservation desk, and was given a key, then directed to the elevator. Inside the lift, he lost the signal completely. “Let’s hope the room faces the front street,” he said. But judging from the direction they had to take when they stepped off the elevator, it did not.

“Why hope for a room at the front?” Sydney asked, as he unlocked the door, and they entered. There were two double beds, a table and two chairs cramped into a space that barely fit the furniture. The only thing that saved the room was the tall French window that overlooked a narrow alley, the light pouring in giving the illusion of spaciousness.

“The digital listening device I planted in the cab. Direct line of sight brings a clearer signal.” He moved to the window. Could just make out the main street from his view of the alley.

Francesca moved straight toward the bathroom. The moment she closed the door behind her, Sydney said, “I get the feeling she’s still hiding something.”

“As long as she doesn’t take too long in revealing it. All we can do is watch and wait. Unless you’re any good at reading maps,” he said, nodding at the rolled-up parchment in the bag she’d tossed onto the bed.

“Tunnels leading to ancient burial sites aren’t my forte.”

“Mine either. But I have it on good authority that we want to head toward the San Gennaro. At least that’s what your little street urchin told me.”

“Quite the entrepreneur, that one.”

“Quite.”

A few minutes later, Francesca emerged from the bathroom, took a seat in a chair by the window, tapping her fingers on the small table. “How long will we be here?”

“That depends,” Griffin said. “How much time do you need, Professor?”

“Enough time to contact—to get a computer and look up my notes, and try to pin the last coordinates from the map.”

Griffin stepped closer to the window, pressing the earpiece tighter. “Quiet,” he said. “The cabdriver is talking.”

Sydney glanced toward Griffin, decided he was listening to the cabbie, maybe even missed what Francesca had said about contacting someone. She moved closer to the professor. “Contact who?”

“No one. A misstatement.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I know the risks. Please let me handle this my way.”

Apparently Griffin had been listening to her. “Had we done that from the beginning, you’d be dead.”

“It’s dangerous. I realize that.”

He pressed a button on the receiver, removed the headphones, and turned up the volume so that they could hear what had been recorded. Sydney understood little, as they were speaking Italian, but of course Francesca understood every word. Sydney did, however, recognize the name of the hotel where the taxi driver dropped them off. Then another voice saying, “
Grazie
,” and then the sharp ping of gunfire, muted by the tiny device, but still recognizable.

Francesca’s face paled. She sank back in her chair. “Why? They said they wouldn’t hurt anyone if we brought them the map.”

Griffin wrapped the earphones around the receiver, dropped it into his pocket. “I don’t believe these are Adami’s men. Someone else is following us. Who, I have no idea.
But whether it’s them or Adami, any witnesses are liabilities. That includes anyone who has contact with them, even cabdrivers or government agents. Are you starting to understand how serious these people are, Professor?”

She nodded.

“Now is there something you wanted to tell us about your contact in Naples?”

“I’m supposed to meet a colleague who knows the history of Sansevero. He e-mailed me the other morning, saying that he had found the right tunnel, but he ran into a dead end, and he thought if he could find another entrance, it would lead to the right chamber.”

“This e-mail, it was on your computer when it was stolen?”

“Oh my God.”

Griffin handed her his personal cell phone. “You need to call him now, and tell him to leave his house, office, or wherever else he’s known to hang out. Then have him meet up with us somewhere not even remotely associated.”

“What if—”

“No time for what-ifs,” he said, urging them toward the door. “If we’re lucky, we buy your friend a bit of time while they search for us. Let’s not make it too easy.”

They were just exiting the stairwell into the main lobby, when Sydney saw a man at the registration desk. She put her arm out, stopping Francesca and Griffin from moving forward. “Time for Plan B. I’m sure I saw that man on the train.”

“What is Plan B?” Francesca asked.

And Griffin said, “In this case, I’d say the service entrance.” They turned back into the stairwell, wandered through a hallway then through a side door, exiting into a narrow street that was blocked by a delivery truck unloading towels and linens to the hotel. Griffin gave Francesca a secure phone to call her contact, and when she finished, he asked, “Where are we meeting your friend?”

“A café not too far from here. We can walk.”

The streets at the center of town were narrow, cobbled, and filled with pedestrians, small cars, and scooters. The
café was about five minutes from the hotel. The inside was dark, and Sydney’s eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the change in lighting. Francesca led them to the back, where they took a seat at a table, but had a clear view of the door. About ten minutes later, a man walked in, his features silhouetted by the light from outside. Francesca stood, called out his name, and that’s when Sydney realized the identity of the professor’s so-called colleague.

Xavier Caldwell.

The missing student from UVA.

Francesca rushed forward, so relieved to see Xavier
that she nearly knocked over the table as she embraced him. “You’re okay. Thank God.”

“Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be?” He looked past her to the two agents, before holding her by her shoulders and searching her face. “What is going on? Where’s Alessandra? I’ve been trying to call her for two weeks.”

Francesca wasn’t sure how to tell him, wasn’t sure how he’d react. She would have liked more time, and hated that she had to break the news this way. “She’s…she’s been murdered.”

His face blanched, and she reached up, grasped his hands from her shoulders, then guided him to the table. “That’s impossible,” he finally said. “She was fine when I last saw her. She said—She told me—I can’t believe it.”

“I didn’t believe it at first, either, but it’s very real, and these people with me are working to find out who killed her.”

“Who are they?” he said, as he took a seat at the table.

She gripped his hand tighter, knowing he wouldn’t like this news any better. “Government agents.”

“What?” He tried to rise from his seat, and she pulled him back down.

“Don’t worry. They’re on our side.”

“The government’s never on our side.”

“You have to trust me,” Francesca said. “Trust me that they’re here to protect us and everything will be fine.”

“Alessandra’s dead. How can everything be fine?”

“Because she wanted this as much as you. You honor her by continuing with what she started.”

He gave a slight nod, seemed to calm, then turned his attention to the two agents, his expression guarded. “Who are you?”

Sydney held out her hand, and said, “Sydney Fitzpatrick, FBI. I’m here because my friend was killed looking into Alessandra’s murder.”

“This friend was an agent?” he said.

“A forensic anthropologist.”

He shook her hand, said, “I’m sorry about your friend.”

“Thank you.”

“And you? Who are you?”

“Zachary Griffin. I was a friend of Alessandra’s, and she asked me to help her. Unfortunately, I was too late.”

Xavier covered his face with his hands. “I shouldn’t have left her. Maybe I could have done something…”

Grief was better than blinding distrust, Francesca figured, and she turned to Griffin. “I think we could all use some coffee.”

He left to order the coffee.

“Xavier, I need you to listen to me,” Francesca said.

“Can’t I have a few moments?”

“We don’t have time. A friend of theirs was kidnapped by these people. Your life is in danger. All our lives.”

“What do you mean?”

“The people who came after Alessandra and Sydney’s friend? They’re after me, and they stole my computer. It had the e-mail you sent to me. Griffin thinks you’re in danger.”

“Why come after me?”

“Because they want what I have, what we’re looking for—
and they’re willing to kill anyone who gets in the way of their plans.” There, she said what she hadn’t been willing to admit before. It did little to ease her guilt over the needless deaths. No, not deaths. Murders—something neither she nor Alessandra had foreseen. Alessandra’s murder had been totally unexpected, as had the attack up at the Passegiata. And while she couldn’t bring Alessandra back, she could damned well find the answers and thereby ensure that Alessandra hadn’t died in vain. But after the murder of the taxi driver, she realized that every step she took from that point on was as dangerous as walking on the highest, crumbling cliff with nothing but jagged rocks below. And now everyone she encountered on that walk was subject to the same torturous death, whether they were truly involved or not. “If you come with us, your life is in danger. I can’t ask that of you.”

“But if I
don’t
go with you, it seems my life is in danger.”

“I think so.”

“Then I go with you. For Alessandra,” he said, his voice catching.

“For Alessandra.”

He looked away, brushed at his eyes, and just when Griffin returned, said, “I think I’ll go see what’s taking that coffee so long.”

Xavier got up, walked to the front, then made a right toward the restroom instead.

As soon as he disappeared around the corner, she turned to Griffin and Sydney. “I would rather he didn’t come. He’s too young. He hasn’t even graduated college yet.”

“I think,” Griffin said, “that we can arrange for safe passage home, once we get him out of Naples. Until then, he’s probably safer with us than without.”

“All right,” she said, as the waiter arrived with their coffees. She dusted hers with cinnamon, then sipped at the steaming foam, trying to relax, telling herself that all would be fine. But then, they still had the tunnels to negotiate, and she looked at Xavier’s backpack, and the laptop she knew was within. And suddenly panic set in. She reached for the lanyard around her neck, worried that she’d lost the flash drive. But no, it was there.

That thought quickly fled to worse thoughts when, several minutes later, Sydney said, “Xavier is going to come out of there, isn’t he?”

The last thing Griffin needed was to chase after a college student
and
a professor, because he didn’t doubt for a second that if Xavier took off, Francesca wouldn’t be far behind him. He stood, gave Sydney the signal to watch over Francesca, then walked to the restroom, finding Xavier standing just outside it. His eyes red-rimmed, he leaned against the wall next to the pay phone, and Griffin felt a twinge of guilt for not trusting the kid. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Xavier took a breath, stood a bit straighter. “I’m fine.”

“It’s not easy losing someone you’re close to. I know,” he said, trying but failing to keep from thinking about those he’d lost, and now there was Tex and he wondered if he was safe…

“We weren’t close. Not like that. I mean, I liked her, she just wasn’t interested, you know?”

Griffin merely nodded, since it seemed the right thing to do at the moment.

“She was sort of married to this thing. Wanted to know all the answers. I admired her a lot.”

“Me too,” Griffin said.

“You knew her?”

“For about a year. I worked at—for her father at one time.”

“I didn’t know her father. I met her at the university…All these crazy ideas I had, all this conspiracy stuff I wrote about for my class at UVA, no one believed me. When she talked about it, it was like she knew, really knew this stuff went on. She was the only one who didn’t think I was crazy.”

Griffin glanced at the door, hoped no one would wander their way and interrupt the kid’s flow. “What sort of things did she talk about?”

“I appreciate what you’re doing, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to trust you. The professor said you work for the government.”

“In the end, I work for myself.”

“What does that mean?”

What it really meant was that when the shit hit the fan, the government wasn’t about to take the blame for anything Griffin and his crew did, not something he was about to relay to Xavier, or anyone else for that matter. “That means I’m my own boss. I answer to me.”
As if
, he thought. “I do what’s right, and what is needed to finish the job.”

“And your job is?”

“To find out who killed Alessandra, and rescue my friend. And to do that, I need to know what she was involved in, who she was involved with.”

“That’s it? You’re only here to help solve her murder?”

“That’s it.” As long as one didn’t count that if the map did exist, and it led to the Templar treasure, and there really were some sort of bioweapons that could come from finding it, and that if it fell into Adami’s hands, he’d use it to manipulate world governments even more than he was currently doing. Something else that bothered him about this was that they had yet to learn who Adami was working for. “But there is one thing you need to understand. I need your cooperation in all things if you want to stay alive. We’re working against some very bad people, who won’t hesitate to kill you, if given the chance. We have very little time.” He looked at his watch. “Six hours before they kill my friend if we don’t find whatever this is that is buried and bring it to them. So any background on what you and Alessandra were working on can only help.”

Xavier nodded. “I was helping her with some of the research when all these weird things started happening. We assumed it was the government,” he said, with a dark look.

Since Griffin wasn’t even aware the kid had existed until now, he seriously doubted the government was involved—at least not the legitimate government. “What sort of weird things?”

“Like we were being followed, or I’d hear clicks on my telephone, like someone was listening in. And then someone shot into my apartment, and the police called it a gang-
related drive-by, but I’m not so sure. Alessandra said that she was being followed, too, and that’s when she asked me to stop, back off, you know? But by then, I was too far into it. My cousin works for the Department of the Underground here in Naples, and with his help, I found all this information on the tunnels, and we figured that the prince had to have used the underground caverns to hide the map. My job was to come to Naples, and explore the tunnels to find the one that we’d pinned down, then wait for Professor Santarella to meet up with me here as soon as she got back from some dig she was on.” He looked away, tried to compose himself. “I’ve been here for two weeks, and the entire time, Alessandra’s been dead, and I didn’t even know it…”

“What happened the last time you saw her?”

It took a moment for Xavier to shake off his grief. “By then there was no doubt that she was being followed, and so we borrowed my girlfriend’s car, you know, to throw them off. Alessandra dropped me off at a restaurant, and I slipped out the back, took a taxi to the airport. She stayed on, because she had to do some more research in the States. She was supposed to meet up with that forensic anthropologist who had been working out on that same dig. The one where Alessandra had discovered that they were searching for the first key. Then she was supposed to meet up with some scientist to find out…well, if there was any way this stuff could be true. The biblical plague thing. And then she was going to follow me out here.”

“Did you hear from Alessandra after you arrived in Naples?”

“One call when I got here to let her know I’d arrived safe. She said not to worry if I didn’t hear from her for a bit, because she was going to lay low, and if her phone was being tapped, she didn’t want to lead anyone to me. But I do know this. Whatever it was she was looking for, she’d found it, and she was sending it home, so it would be there when she got back.”

Which verified why Adami’s men had been watching the
ambassador’s residence. “Were you on a cell phone when you called her?”

“No, I used a pay phone at the airport. But I called her cell phone.”

Alessandra’s phone had no doubt been compromised, and they’d heard every word. He wondered how long they’d been watching her. “And do you have any idea what she was about after you left for Naples?”

“Like I said, research. She wanted to talk to some scientist about the viability of some virus or plague laying dormant for a couple thousand years, and what would happen if it was suddenly released into the wild, or disturbed. She wasn’t sure if what she was looking for might contain these old plagues, or if they were maybe somewhere else.”

“Do you know the name of this scientist?”

“Dr. Raj? Raja? Something like that.”

“Could it have been Balraj?”

“That was it.”

“Any idea where they were to meet?” he asked, even though he knew the answer.

“Yeah. The Smithsonian,” Xavier said.

“Why the Smithsonian? The Templar display?”

“She wasn’t there for the display, not really. She’d seen all that stuff before, but she knew there was lots of security. She wanted someplace public, just in case she was being followed.”

And a lot of good that did her. The real security guard was probably killed the moment that Alessandra and the microbiologist entered the Smithsonian, and Alessandra’s killer needed a cover. “Any idea if she found what she was looking for? This information on the plagues?”

“You might check with Francesca, since she’s the one that Alessandra sent the flash drive to.”

“She sent what?”

“You know. A mini hard drive? Francesca said she found it stuffed into the spine of some book that Alessandra had mailed to her.”

Griffin wondered how many times he’d be blindsided on
this case, and it was all he could do to keep his temper in check. Last thing he needed was to spook the kid, because he wanted to throttle the professor. “Go drink your coffee. We don’t have much time.”

Xavier walked out, joined Sydney and Francesca, and Griffin watched Francesca’s face as Xavier took a seat beside her. Relief. That boded well, he decided, and he called McNiel and related what Xavier told him about why Alessandra wanted to meet with Dr. Balraj, the query into how many centuries a plague or virus could survive under optimal conditions.

“You think this map really exists?” McNiel asked.

“A good chance, considering the research the professor did at the Vatican. She no doubt knew Alessandra was inquiring into the viability of dormant plagues and viruses, since she’s the one who told us that the map was believed to lead to them. It certainly explains Adami’s interest.”

McNiel gave a sigh of resignation. “Do what you can to rescue Tex, but that map is not to fall into Adami’s hands. If it ends up a suicide mission, I want that map destroyed. Clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll send a chopper out from Rome and have them stand by at the Naples airport.”

Griffin disconnected, knowing there was no way he could break the news to Sydney. Her world was not so black and white as his. How was he going to tell her that their mission was to destroy the map if it left their hands, even if it meant Tex’s life? Or their lives?

Her instinct would be to save Tex. He would deal with that when the time came. Now, he had to worry about what Francesca knew, what she was holding back, and if she assumed Xavier had kept all her secrets. He returned to the others, sat down across from the professor, smiled. “You didn’t forget to mention anything that might have come from Alessandra, did you?”