He nodded. “The fire alarm. Yeah. Why?” The realization hit him the second he asked the question. “No. Seriously? Now? The fire alarm gag?”
Adriana looked into his eyes with a sincere, sweet gaze as she tilted her head to the side and shrugged. “Why put off until tomorrow the crime you can commit today?”
“Did you just make that up?” Sean asked.
She rolled her eyes and reached into a black clutch dangling from her wrist. Instead of a touch-up makeup kit, the small case contained four metallic rectangular devices, each about three inches long.
Adriana removed the one with a tiny metal wheel set in the center of the tip. The sharp disk glistened on the edge.
“The three of you, make a wall around me,” Adriana ordered. “Try to look like you’re admiring the architecture and all the opulence.”
Sean bit his lip at the way she’d said opulence. It was accurate, just a funny way of saying it. His wife did that now and then, hinting back to her Spanish beginnings. He liked how, to this day, certain things slipped out of translation.
The three turned around, all facing various directions, and formed a half circle around Adriana as she knelt down and ran the cutting tool across the surface of the glass. As she suspected, no alarm sounded. Once she’d scored about three feet across, she ran the tool down the left-hand side of the first mark, cutting another line to the floor.
Adriana glanced around to make sure no one had seen her, then stood up. She still held the tool in her right hand.
“Okay,” she said, turning around to join the others. “One cut left, and I should be in.”
“Why’d you leave one cut?” Tommy asked, pointing at a gilded column in the center of the room as if he’d just mentioned how beautiful it was.
“Because if I made the third one now, the glass could fall in and shatter. Don’t want to raise an alarm before we raise an actual alarm.”
“Ah,” Tommy breathed, feeling embarrassed for not thinking of that. Although to be fair, he was out of his element with this kind of stuff. He consoled himself by remembering that neither Sean nor Adriana was half as good at public speaking as he. Or building an agency.
He realized he was distracting himself when Adriana interrupted his thoughts. “Tommy, go pull the lever—now.”
“Okay.” He bobbed his head but didn’t move.
“Seriously. Go pull the alarm.”
“Wait, me? Tell the MI6 agent to do it. I could get in trouble. She’s a cop. No one can arrest her.”
Adriana rolled her eyes. “Fine.” She turned to Tabitha. “Would you mind?”
Tabitha hesitated, but she was already roped in too deep to turn back now. Despite how crazy their theories were about the shadow caste, she’d seen enough to take another step with the friends.
“Look,” Adriana said convincingly. “You’re already an accessory. Pulling that alarm doesn’t change that.”
“Fine,” Tabitha relented.
She looked over at the bishop still greeting people in the center of the cathedral’s antechamber. Then she strolled over to the red box the same way she would have to a bar to get another drink. Tabitha paused at the alarm and looked up at the nearest image of some patron saint she’d never heard of or seen before. Another turn of the head allowed her to sweep the other direction with a quick gaze. Then, subtly, she reached up and pulled down the white handle on the fire alarm.
The second the klaxon pierced the air, she covered her ears and returned to the group, putting on her most confused and semi-scared look.
Nearly everyone in the church had a delayed reaction to the alarm. The second they realized what was happening, though, it turned into disorganized urgency. To their credit, none of the visitors sprinted to the exits or trampled anyone, but the confusion was evident. The herds of people moved toward the doors in clumps, which only clogged the exits as they tried to push their way out.
Adriana swiftly bent down and made the final cut on the glass, then gently pushed the piece forward. Just as she’d suspected, the glass tipped over and shattered on the floor into hundreds of fragments.
She checked around. No one had seen or heard it.
Safe within the disorder, and with the three members of her party partially blocking her from view, Adriana slipped through the new opening and hurried over to the relic case. She blinked, looking over the four golden latches clasping the ornate golden box lid on top of the container. Her fingers worked fast, flipping the latches back within seconds. She slid the lid off the box and looked inside.
Adriana’s breath caught.
She’d seen a number of priceless artifacts and works of art before, often being one of the first to see them in decades, and in some cases thousands of years. This, however, was different.
All the things her father and Miyamoto told her came to fruition the second she laid eyes on the bones within the container, and on the little golden cylinder resting next to them.
She scooped up the cylinder, recovered the box, and clasped the lid shut.
Wasting no time, Adriana scurried back through the opening in the glass and walked by Sean. “Time to go,” she said.
He and the others followed behind her, melting into the thinning crowd at the door. The cold midmorning air wrapped its fingers around them once more as they stepped outside. Each one of the four moved quickly through the crosswalk and over to the other side of the street where the rental car waited.
Sean unlocked the vehicle before they reached it, and no one took more than two seconds to get in and shut their doors. The engine revved, and Sean waited for the traffic to clear before he stepped on the gas and accelerated through the intersection and around the next corner.
He breathed a sigh of relief, but it wasn’t as big as Tabitha’s, who audibly exhaled from the back seat.
“I can’t believe we just did that,” she said.
“So, what does it look like?” Tommy asked.
Adriana fished the cylinder out of her pocket and handed it back to him.
The tube was only four inches long, with a diameter of perhaps two centimeters. Tommy analyzed it carefully, noting a sequence of dots and lines cut into one end. The cap on the reverse side was solid.
He was tempted to shake it, but tried to pry the dotted lid from the end first. It didn’t budge, so he twisted it around and pulled on the other end.
Sean steered the vehicle back onto the main road leading out of the village and into the countryside.
“Need some help?” Tabitha asked, seeing that Tommy was struggling with the lid to the tube.
Sean let out an audible laugh. “Nice.”
“It’s on tight,” Tommy insisted with a grunt. “It’s only been sealed shut for, oh, I don’t know, nearly seven hundred years.”
The second he finished, the lid popped free. He let out a gasp and tilted the cylinder over to allow the contents to fall into his opposite palm. Nothing, however, fell out of the tube.
He tilted it up and looked inside the container.
Tommy didn’t say anything at first. His face turned ashen, then wrinkled with worry.
“What is it?” Sean asked, suddenly turning serious at the sight of his friend’s expression in the mirror.
Tommy held the tube upside down so all could see it.
The cylinder was empty.
33
Russia
“Empty?” Sean gasped in disbelief. “How could it be empty?”
He kept his eyes focused on the road, despite his instincts telling him to turn around and have a look for himself.
No one had an answer. No one could even speak for nearly two full minutes.
Sean kept driving, leaving the outskirt villages of Moscow behind. They passed farms dotted with cattle or alpacas. Horses loitered by the fence in one of the pastures. Some of the fields were barren, perhaps the summer home to wheat or corn.
No one cared much about the scenery at the moment. Blank eyes peered through the windows and windshield, bar
ely even noticing anything outside.
“Okay,” Tommy said finally. “Let’s think about this.”
“What’s to think about?” Tabitha said. “You came here to find some gem, and all you got was an empty tube. I can’t believe I wasted my time with this. My supervisor is not going to be happy.”
She took out her phone and began typing a text message about how the lead was a dead end and that she would be heading back to headquarters soon.
Tommy reached over and stopped her. “Hold on,” he insisted. “Everything is figure-outable. There has to be a rational explanation behind this tube being empty.”
“Yeah,” Tabitha argued. “Like the people who tried to kill us at the hotel found it before we did.”
Sean and Adriana listened closely from the front seat. Feeling the intensity of the moment building, Sean decided it was a good time to take a break.
He spotted a sign for a roadside restaurant and turned on the blinker.
“What are we doing?” Adriana asked in a hushed tone, wary of interrupting the two in the back.
Tommy and Tabitha stopped arguing and looked to the front.
“Thought it might be a good time to get something to eat,” Sean said in half-truth. “I’m hungry. Any of you guys hungry? I can keep going, but it’s been a while since we ate, and given the circumstances, I don’t even know which direction I’m supposed to be headed. The airport is the other way.”
The blinker clicked like a hammer, emphasizing the dramatic heaviness of the moment.
“Yeah,” Tommy surrendered. “I could eat.”
“Me too,” Adriana said with a smile.
“Fine,” Tabitha joined in.
Sean guided the sedan off the road and into an empty parking spot around the back of a building with wooden siding and a tin roof. It reminded Sean and Tommy of little barbecue joints back in the United States. Those kinds of places dotted the South from North Carolina and Tennessee all the way to the West Texas border.
With the car parked, the group exited the vehicle and made their way into the restaurant. Sean held the door open for the others while he scanned the road and parking lot for potential trouble. There were no silhouettes in any of the vehicles, and at the awkward brunch hour, there were no people going in and out of the building.
Sean and the others were immediately embraced by the intoxicating aromas wafting from the kitchen. Inside, a young brunette girl with bright blue eyes greeted them with a half smile. She asked how many were in the group, a question Sean always found amusing.
“Just us four,” he answered in Russian.
The girl’s smile stretched at his reply. “This way, please,” she said and led the way through a maze of tables with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths shrouding the surfaces.
After the girl sat the group in a dark, corner booth, she placed menus in front of each before returning to the hostess stand at the front.
Everyone perused the list of offerings with semi-disinterest, though Sean quickly decided on an order of mushroom pies and vegetable shchi. He helped the others with their decisions, primarily Tommy and Tabitha, whose Russian was less than conversational.
“So,” Sean said, eyeing the metal tube Tommy cradled in his hands atop the table. “I guess they have these kinds of tablecloths everywhere.”
His joke only invoked a snicker from Adriana and a “humph” from Tommy.
“There must be a factory that makes these and ships them all over the world. Like, it has to be their thing, right?” He mocked a conversation with himself.
“Hey, what do you do?”
“You know those red-and-white tablecloths? I work at the factory that makes all of those for the entire world.”
“You done?” Tommy asked, only slightly amused.
Sean wasn’t. And he boldly pushed onward. “I bet it’s the same place that makes those disgusting candy corn things. You know that there’s only like one factory in the world that makes those. I heard they haven’t made any in years, and that there’s a finite supply of candy corn.”
Tommy finally chuckled. “One can only hope.”
“There he is,” Sean said with a slap on the table.
A waitress with a black apron over black pants and a white shirt walked up to the table. She passed out glasses of water and asked if the group wanted anything else.
Sean gave her the order, taking the liberty of giving her Kevin’s request as well. When she had it all written down, the young woman disappeared back into the kitchen and left the group to their conversation.
“Now that we’ve broken the grumpy streak, can we get back to business?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “That tube was in the reliquary.” He indicated the cylinder with his index finger.
“Yes,” Adriana said. “There wasn’t anything else out of the ordinary. In fact, that being the only item in the box with the bones struck me as odd. Usually, venerated people have several items kept with them in their internment.”
Tommy knew better than to ask Adriana if she was certain.
“Okay,” he said instead, “there has to be an explanation. One plausible theory is that the cult beat us to it.”
“Except that wouldn’t make sense for them to leave this tube”—he pointed again at the object—“in the reliquary. You saw how difficult it was to open.”
“That’s true,” Tommy admitted. “It was sealed shut. I thought I was going to need pliers to get the thing open.”
“Right. And Adriana,” he looked over his shoulder at his wife, “as far as you could tell, was that protective glass tightly sealed against the adjacent walls, floor, and ceiling?”
Adriana saw where Sean was going with his line of questions. “That glass hadn’t been tampered with, not since it was installed. I was the first person to go through it. There was a door in the back for the relics to be removed during the annual ceremony, but based on the dust collected on the container’s lid, I would say no one has been in that room since the last time the priests entered.”
“So, we can assert that the gemstone wasn’t stolen by the cult,” Sean suggested.
“Does that mean someone else took it, perhaps years or decades ago?” Tabitha offered.
“It’s possible it was stolen centuries ago,” Tommy added.
Sean leaned back and sipped on his water. “But how does that explain leaving the cylinder there?”
“Maybe the thieves didn’t want it to look like anything was missing. The longer time passes without someone noticing a theft, the less chance of catching the criminal.” Tabitha’s statement made sense, but she looked irritated. “I’m sorry, can we switch seats?” Her question was directed at Sean.
“No,” he said plainly. “I always keep the exits in my view.”
“I do the same,” Tabitha said with an approving grin.
“Same,” Adriana added.
“I couldn’t care less where I sit,” Tommy confessed. “I just want to know where the gem is we were supposed to find.”
“Perhaps there is more to it than meets the eye,” Sean said. “May I?”
He held out his hand, and Tommy passed the cylinder to him.
Sean inspected the object, particularly the tip with the tiny holes and slots cut into it. He was about to bring up the oddity when the waitress returned with a huge tray full of food.
She set the dishes down in front of the group, in the center of the table where the bowls and platters could be shared.
“Will you need anything else?” the girl asked, catching herself staring into Sean’s wolflike eyes.
“No, thank you. This looks great.” He smiled her away, and she retreated back into the kitchen.
The answer to the question had to wait while the group dove into the feast. Along with the vegetable shchi and mushroom pies, plates of pierogies, bliny cakes similar to crêpes, kasha, and a bowl of red cabbage finished out the meal’s offerings.
Everyone sampled the fair in relative silence, except for the occasional satisfi
ed sigh or moan at the taste of a new dish.
When they were done with the meal, there was very little left on the plates or in the bowls except a residue of sauces.
Sean immediately resumed his inspection of the cylinder as the waitress returned to collect the dishes and leave the check.
“There is something funny about the tip,” Sean drawled, holding the shaft close to his face. He narrowed his eyelids, but that wasn’t enough. The windows in the place were blinded and covered with curtains, forcing the restaurant to rely on little candles burning in the center of the tables or the fake sconces flickering along the walls.
Ambiance was everything, Sean thought dryly, although he’d appreciated the food.
He cocked his head to the side and raised the tube up to inspect the bottom. As he did, Sean realized that he could see through the needle-thin holes and slits at the other end, though they were too tiny to make out any details on the other side.
“Still checking to see if it’s in there?” Tommy joked as he thumbed enough euros down on the table next to the check to cover the bill and a little extra.
Tabitha laughed.
Sean was glad the tension between the two had eased, but he ignored Tommy’s comment.
“What is it?” Adriana asked.
Holding back the answer, Sean pressed his lips together and removed the phone from his pocket. He kept the device low around his lap and turned on the flashlight. Before it sprayed bright light all over the room, Sean covered it with the tube, sealing the light with the hole at one end.
He raised the device, keeping the shaft over the light, and set the phone down on the table.
The other three nearly fell out of their seats. Even Adriana, who was rarely surprised or shocked by anything, was taken aback by the sight.
The bright light from Sean’s phone pierced the minuscule holes at the top of the shaft. Four pairs of eyes darted up to behold the strange sight.
There, on the ceiling over the table, was a message shining in Russian.
“What does it say?” Tommy asked.
Sean held back for several heartbeats. “Salvation and doom lie with God’s artist.”
The Milestone Protocol Page 28
