“Looks like they left the light on for us,” Monk said, gaping at the spotlighted cathedral. He hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder.
They were all dressed in dark civilian clothes, meant not to stand out. But beneath, each team member wore a clinging undergarment of liquid body armor. Their rucksacks, black Arcteryx backpacks, were stuffed with tools of the trade, including weapons from a CIA contact who had met them at the airport: Glock M-27 compact pistols, chambered in .40-caliber hollowpoints, fitted with tritium night sights.
Monk also had a Scattergun-built shotgun, strapped to his left thigh, hidden under a long jacket. The weapon had been custom-designed for such service, snub-nosed and compact, like Monk himself, with a Ghost Ring sight system for riflelike accuracy in low light. Kat went more lowtech. She managed to hide eight daggers on her body. A blade lay only a fingertip away, no matter her position.
Gray checked his Breitling dive watch. The hands glowed a quarter after two o’clock. They had made excellent time.
They crossed the square. Gray searched the dark corners for anything suspicious. All seemed quiet. At this hour on a weekday, the place was nearly deserted. Only a few stragglers. And most of those weaved a bit as they walked, the pubs having let out. But there were signs of earlier crowds. Piles of flowers from mourners littered the square’s edges, along with the discarded beer bottles of gawkers. Mounds of melted wax candles marked memorial shrines, some with photos of relatives who had died. A few tapers still burned, tiny flickers in the night, lonely and forlorn.
A full candlelit vigil was under way at a neighboring church, an all-night memorial service, with a live feed from the pope. It had been coordinated to empty the square this night.
Still, Gray noted that his teammates kept a wary watch on their surroundings. They were not taking any chances.
Parked in front of the cathedral was a panel truck with the municipal Polizei logo on its side. It had served as the main base of operation for the forensic teams. Upon landing, Gray had been informed by the ops manager of this mission, Logan Gregory, Sigma’s second-in-command, that all local investigative teams had been pulled out by midnight but would be returning in the morning. Zero-six-hundred. Until then, they had the church to themselves.
Well, not entirely to themselves.
One of the flanking side doors to the cathedral opened as they neared. A tall, thin figure stood limned against the light inside. An arm lifted.
“Monsignor Verona,” Kat whispered under her breath, confirming the identity.
The priest crossed to the police cordon that had been placed around the cathedral. He spoke to one of the two guards on duty, posted to keep the curious away from the crime scene, then motioned the trio through the barricade.
They followed him to the open doorway.
“Captain Bryant,” the monsignor said, smiling warmly. “Despite the tragic circumstances, it’s wonderful to see you again.”
“Thank you, Professor,” Kat said, returning an affectionate grin. Her features softened with genuine friendship.
“Please call me Vigor.”
They entered the cathedral’s front vestibule. The monsignor pulled the door closed and locked it. He scrutinized Kat’s two companions.
Gray felt the weight of his study. The man was nearly his height, but more wiry of build. His salt-and-pepper hair had been combed straight back, curling in waves. He wore a neatly trimmed goatee and was dressed casually in midnight-blue jeans and a black V-neck sweater, revealing the Roman collar of his station.
But it was the steady fix of his gaze that most struck Gray. Despite his welcoming manner, there was a steely edge to the man. Even Monk straightened his shoulders under the priest’s attention.
“Come inside,” Vigor said. “We should get started as soon as possible.”
The monsignor led the way to the closed doors of the nave, opened them, and waved the group inside.
As he entered the heart of the church, Gray was immediately struck by two things. First by the smell. The air, while still redolent with incense, also wafted an underlying stench of something burnt.
Still, that was not all that caught Gray’s attention. A woman rose from a pew to greet them. She looked like a young Audrey Hepburn: snowy skin, short ebony hair parted and swept behind her ears, caramel-colored eyes. She offered no smile. Her gaze swept over the newcomers, settling a moment longer on Gray.
He recognized the familial resemblance between her and the monsignor, more from the intensity of her scrutiny than any physical features.
“My niece,” Vigor introduced. “Lieutenant Rachel Verona.”
They finished their introductions quickly. And though there was no outward animosity, their two camps still remained separate. Rachel kept a wary distance, as if ready to go for her gun if necessary. Gray had noted a holstered pistol under her open vest. A 9mm Beretta.
“We should get started,” Vigor said. “The Vatican was able to gain us some privacy, demanding time to sanctify and bless the nave after the last body was removed.”
The monsignor led the way down the central aisle.
Gray noted sections of the pews had been marked off with masking tape. Place cards had been affixed to each with the names of the deceased. He stepped around the chalked outlines on the floor. Blood had been wiped up, but the stain had seeped into the mortar of the stone floor. Yellow plastic markers fixed the positions of shell casings, long gone to forensics.
He glanced across the nave, picturing how it must have looked upon first entering. Bodies sprawled everywhere; the smell of burnt blood, richer. He could almost sense an echo of the pain, trapped in the stone as much as the reek. It shivered over his skin. He was still enough of a Roman Catholic to find such murder disturbing beyond mere violence. It was an affront against God. Satanic.
Had that been part of the motivation?
To turn a feast into a Black Mass.
The monsignor spoke, drawing his attention back. “Over there was where the boy was found hiding.” He pointed to a confessional booth against the north wall, halfway up the long nave.
Jason Pendleton. The lone survivor.
Gray took some degree of grim satisfaction that not all had died that bloody night. The attackers had made a mistake. They were fallible. Human. He centered himself with this thought. Though the act was demonic, the hand that committed it was as human as any other. Not that there weren’t demons in human form.
But humans could be caught and punished.
They reached the raised sanctuary with the slab-marble altar and the tall-backed cathedra, the bishop’s seat. Vigor and his niece made the sign of the cross. Vigor dropped to one knee, then got up. He led them through a gate in the chancel railing. Beyond the railing, the altar was also marked in chalk, the travertine marble stained. Police tape cordoned off a section to the right.
Crashed onto the floor, cracking the stone tile, a golden sarcophagus lay on its side. Its top rested two steps down. Gray shrugged off his backpack and lowered to one knee.
The golden reliquary, when whole, plainly formed a miniature church, carved with arched windows and etched scenes done in gold, rubies, and emeralds, depicting Christ’s life, from his adoration by the Magi to his scourging and eventual crucifixion.
Gray donned a pair of latex gloves. “This is where the bones were enshrined?”
Vigor nodded. “Since the thirteenth century.”
Kat joined Gray. “I see they’ve already dusted it for prints.” She pointed to the fine white powder clinging to cracks and crevices in the reliefs.
“No prints were found,” Rachel said.
Monk glanced across the cathedral. “And nothing else was taken?”
“A full inventory was conducted,” Rachel continued. “We’ve already had a chance to interview the entire staff, including the priests.”
“I may want to speak to them myself,” Gray mumbled, still studying the box.
“Their apartments are across a cloistered yard,�
�� Rachel responded, voice hardening. “No one heard or saw anything. But if you want to waste your time, feel free.”
Gray glanced up at her. “I only said I may want to speak to them.”
She met his gaze without shrinking. “And I was under the impression that this investigation was a joint effort. If we’re going to recheck each other’s work at every step, we’ll get nowhere.”
Gray took a steadying breath. Only minutes into the investigation, and already he had stepped on jurisdictional toes. He should have interpreted her earlier wariness and trodden more lightly.
Vigor placed a hand on his niece’s shoulder. “I assure you the interrogation was thorough. Among my colleagues, where prudence of tongue often surpasses good sense, I doubt you’d gain any further details, especially when being interviewed by someone not wearing a clerical collar.”
Monk spoke up. “That’s all well and good. But can we get back to me?” All eyes turned to him. He wore a crooked grin. “I believe I was asking if anything else was taken.”
Gray felt the attention shift from him. As usual, Monk had his back. A diplomat in body armor.
Rachel fixed Monk with her uncompromising gaze. “As I said, nothing was—”
“Yes, thank you, Lieutenant. But I was curious if any other relics are kept here at the cathedral. Any relics that the thieves didn’t take.”
Rachel frowned in confusion.
“I figured,” Monk explained, “that what the thieves didn’t take may be as informative as what they did.” He shrugged.
The woman’s face relaxed a touch, contemplating this angle. The anger bled away.
Gray inwardly shook his head. How did Monk do that?
The monsignor answered Monk. “There’s a treasure chamber off the nave. It holds the reliquaries from the original Romanesque church that once stood here: the staff and chain of Saint Peter, along with a couple of pieces of the Christ’s cross. Also a Gothic bishop’s staff from the fourteenth century and a jewel-encrusted elector’s sword from the fifteenth.”
“And nothing was stolen from the treasure chamber.”
“It was all inventoried,” Rachel answered. Her eyes remained pinched in concentration. “Nothing else was stolen.”
Kat crouched down with Gray, but her eyes were on those still standing. “So only the bones were taken. Why?”
Gray turned his attention to the open sarcophagus. He slipped a penlight from his nearby backpack and examined the interior. It was unlined. Just flat gold surfaces. He noted a bit of white powder sifted over the bottom surface. More latent powder? Bone ash?
There was only one way to find out.
He turned back to his pack and pulled out a collection kit. He used a small battery-powered vacuum to sniff up some of the powder into a sterile test tube.
“What are you doing?” Rachel asked.
“If this is bone dust, it may answer a few questions.”
“Like what?”
He sat back and examined the test tube. There was no more than a couple grams of gray powder. “We might be able to test the dust for age. Find out if the stolen bones were from someone who lived during Christ’s time. Or not. Maybe the crime was to recover the family bones of someone in the Dragon Court. Some old lord or prince.”
Gray sealed the test tube and packed the sample away. “I’d also like to get samples of the broken glass from the security vault. It might give us some answers as to how the device shattered bulletproof glass. Our labs can examine the crystalline microstructure for fracture patterns.”
“I’ll get on that,” Monk said, slinging off his pack.
“What about the stonework?” Rachel asked. “Or other materials inside the cathedral?”
“What do you mean?” Gray asked.
“Whatever triggered the deaths among the parishioners might have affected the stone, marble, wood, plastic. Something that could not be seen with the naked eye.”
Gray had not considered that. He should have. Monk met his eyes and shrugged his brows. The carabiniere lieutenant was proving herself to be more than a pretty package.
Gray turned to Kat to organize a collection methodology. But she seemed preoccupied. From the corner of his eye, he had noted her interest in the reliquary, all but ducking her head inside to investigate. She now crouched on the marble floor, bent over something she was working on.
“Kat—?”
She held up a tiny mink-haired brush. “One moment.” In her other hand, she held a small butane pistol-lighter. She squeezed the trigger and a tiny blue flame hissed from the end. She applied the flame to a pile of powder, plainly whisked from the reliquary with the brush.
After a couple seconds, the gray powder melted, bubbling and frothing into a translucent amber liquid. It dribbled over the cold marble and hardened into glass. The sheen against the white marble was unmistakable.
“Gold,” Monk said. All eyes had been drawn to the experiment.
Kat sat back, extinguishing her torch. “The residual powder in the reliquary…it’s the same as in the tainted wafers. Monatomic, or m-state, gold.”
Gray remembered Director Crowe’s description of the lab tests, how the powder could be melted down to a slag glass. A glass made of solid gold.
“That’s gold?” Rachel asked. “As in the precious metal?”
Sigma had provided the Vatican with cursory information on the tainted wafers, so their bakeries and supplies could be examined for further tampering. Its two spies had also been informed, but plainly they had their doubts.
“Are you sure?” Rachel asked.
Kat was already busy proving her assertion. She had an eyedropper in hand and dribbled its contents onto the glass. Gray knew what filled the eyedropper. They had all been supplied it by the labs back at Sigma for just this purpose. A cyanide compound. For years, miners had been using a process called heap leach cyanide recovery to dissolve gold out of old tailings.
Where the drop touched, the glass etched as if burned by acid. But rather than frosting the glass, the cyanide carved a trail of pure gold, a vein of metal in glass. There was no doubt.
Monsignor Verona stared, unblinking, one hand fingering his clerical collar. He mumbled, “And the streets of New Jerusalem will be paved with gold so pure as to be transparent glass.”
Gray glanced quizzically at the priest.
Vigor shook his head. “From the Book of Revelations…don’t mind me.”
But Gray saw the way the man drew inward, turning half away, lost in deeper thoughts. Did he know more? Gray sensed the priest was not so much holding back as needing time to dwell on something.
Kat interrupted. She had been leaning over her sample with a magnifying lens and an ultraviolet lamp. “I think there might be more than gold here. I can spot tiny pools of silver in the gold.”
Gray shifted closer. Kat allowed him to peer through her lens, shadowing the glass with her hand so the blue sheen of the ultraviolet light better illuminated the sample. The veins of metallic gold did indeed seem pocked with silvery impurities.
“It might be platinum,” Kat said. “Remember that the monatomic state occurs not just in gold but any of the transitional metals on the periodic table. Including platinum.”
Gray nodded. “The powder might not be pure gold, but a mix of several of the platinum series. An amalgam of various m-state metals.”
Rachel continued to stare at the etched glass. “Could the powder just be from the wearing down of the old sarcophagus? The gold crumbling with age or something?”
Gray shook his head. “The process to turn metallic gold into its m-state is complicated. Age alone won’t do this.”
“But the lieutenant might be onto something,” Kat said. “Maybe the device affected the gold in the reliquary and caused some of the gold to transmute. We still have no idea by what mechanism the device—”
“I may have one clue,” Monk said, cutting her off.
He stood by the shattered security case, where he had been collecting sha
rds. He stepped to a bulky iron cross resting in a stanchion not far from the case.
“It looks like one of our forensic experts missed a shell,” Monk said. He reached out and plucked a hollow casing from beneath the feet of the crucified Christ figure. He took a step back again, held the casing out toward the cross, and let it go. It flew through six inches of air, and with a ping, stuck again to the cross.
“It’s magnetized,” Monk said.
Another ping sounded. Louder. Sharper. The cross spun half a turn in its stanchion.
For half a second, Gray did not comprehend what had happened.
Monk dove for the altar. “Down!” he screamed.
Other shots rang out.
Gray felt a kick to his shoulder, throwing him off kilter, but his body armor saved him from real injury. Rachel grabbed his arm and yanked him into a row of pews. Bullets chewed wood, sparked off marble and stone.
Kat ducked with the monsignor, shielding him with her body. She took a glancing shot to the thigh, half collapsing, but they fell together behind the altar with Monk.
Gray had only managed a quick glimpse of their attackers.
Men in hooded robes.
A sharp pop sounded. Gray glanced up to see a fist-sized black object arc across the breadth of the church.
“Grenade!” he screamed.
He scooped up his pack and shoved Rachel down the pew. They scrambled low and ran for the south wall.
3:20 A.M.
MONK BARELY had time to react when Gray yelled. He grabbed Kat and the monsignor and flattened himself against them behind the stone altar.
The grenade hit the far side and exploded, sounding like a mortar blast. A cascade of marble shattered upward and outward, pelting the wooden pews. Smoke rolled and billowed up.
Half deafened by the blast, Monk simply hauled Kat and Vigor to their feet. “Follow me!”
It was death to stay out here in the open. Toss one grenade behind the altar, and they were all hamburger. They needed a more defensible position.
Monk dashed toward the north wall. Behind him, gunfire remained fierce. Gray was striking for the opposite wall. Just as well. Once in position, they could set up a crossfire across the center of the church.
Map of Bones: A Sigma Force Novel Page 12
