The Doomsday Key

by James Rollins

  Finally a woman’s stern voice spoke in Gray’s ear, speaking rapidly in Italian. After dating Rachel for over a year, Gray had acquired some fluency with the language.

  “Lieutenant Verona is not in the TCP today. According to the roster, she’s on leave. Perhaps another officer might assist you—”

  “No, thank you. Grazie”

  Gray hung up and pocketed his phone. He knew Rachel had been planning to take time off, but he’d hoped she was at the station for some reason. He grew worried. Where could she be?

  Kowalski hailed a taxi, and they climbed inside.

  His partner glanced at him. “How about that hospital?” he said. “The one where her uncle is being treated?”

  “Right.” Gray nodded. He should’ve thought of that. Maybe her uncle had taken a turn for the worse. Such an emergency would’ve pulled Rachel away. Distraught, she could easily have forgotten about the time.

  Gray dialed information and got connected to the hospital operator. An attempt to reach Vigor’s room failed. He did reach a floor nurse.

  “Monsignor Verona remains in intensive care,” the woman informed him. “Any further inquiries must be made through his family or through the polizia.”

  “I just wanted to know if his niece might be there visiting. Lieutenant Rachel Verona.”

  The woman’s voice warmed up. “Ah, his nipote Rachel. Bellissima ragazza. She spent many hours here. But she left last night and has not come in this morning.”

  “If she does show up, can you let her know I called?” Gray left his number.

  Pocketing his cell phone, he sagged in his seat. He stared at the passing scenery as the taxi sped along the interstate toward downtown Rome. Rachel had arranged a room at a small Italian bed-and-breakfast. Gray had stayed there before. Back when they were dating.

  He struggled to think of any other reason why Rachel would not have shown up. Where could she be? Worry edged toward panic. He willed the taxi to go faster.

  He would check for any messages at the hotel, then head directly over to her apartment. It was only a handful of blocks from the hotel.

  Still, it would take time to get there.

  Too much time.

  With each passing mile, his heart pounded harder, his left hand tightened on his knee. As they finally passed through one of the ancient city gates and headed into central Rome, the taxi’s passage became a crawl. The streets grew narrower and narrower. Pedestrians scooted sideways; a bicycle zigzagged between the cars.

  At last the taxi pulled into a side street and came to a stop in front of the small hostelry. Gray hopped out, grabbed his bag, and left Kowalski to pay the driver.

  The hotel appeared nondescript from the street. A small brass plaque on a wall, no larger than Gray’s palm, read Casa di Cartina. The hotel had been converted out of three adjoining buildings, all dating from the eighteenth century. A half flight of stairs led down to a small lobby.

  Gray headed below. The reason for the hotel’s name became apparent as soon as the brush of the hanging bell announced Gray’s entrance. All four walls of the room were covered with ancient maps and bits of cartography. The hostelry’s owners came from a long line of world travelers and mariners, stretching back to before Christopher Columbus.

  A wizened old man in a buttoned vest met Gray behind a small wooden front desk. His face cracked into a warm smile. “It has been a long time, Signor Pierce,” the proprietor said warmly in English, recognizing Gray.

  “It has, Franco.”

  Gray exchanged a few pleasantries, long enough for Kowalski to come striding into the space. The larger man’s eyes swept the walls. With a background in the navy, he nodded his approval at the choice of decor.

  “Franco, I was wondering if you had heard any word from Rachel.” Gray forced his voice not to sound strained. “I was hoping she’d left a message.”

  The man’s face crinkled in confusion. “A message?”

  Gray felt a sinking in his chest. Clearly there had been no message. Maybe she was back at her—

  “Signor Pierce, why would la signorina Verona leave a message? She is already up in your room, waiting for you.”

  Gray’s relief felt like a rush of cold water. “Upstairs?”

  Franco reached into a cubby behind his desk, removed a key, and passed it to Gray. “Fourth floor. I gave you a nice balcony room. The view of the Coliseum is very nice from that room.”

  Gray nodded and took the key. “Grazie.”

  “Can I have someone bring up your bags?”

  Kowalski scooped Gray’s duffel from the floor. “I got it.” He bumped Gray in the rear with his bag to get him moving.

  Gray thanked Franco again and headed to the stairs. It was a narrow, winding way, more ladder than stairwell. They had to go single file. Kowalski eyed it doubtfully.

  “Where’s the elevator?”

  “No elevator.” Gray set off up the stairs.

  Kowalski followed. “You’ve got to be goddamn kidding me.” He wrestled to get himself and the bags up. After two flights, his face had turned a deep red and a string of curses flowed in a continual stream.

  Reaching the fourth floor, Gray followed the wall signs to find their room. The layout was a convoluted maze of sharp corners and sudden dead ends.

  He finally reached the correct door. Though it was his room, he still knocked before using the key. He pushed open the door, anxious to see Rachel, surprised at the depth of his desire. It had been a long time … maybe too long.

  “Rachel? It’s Gray.”

  She was seated on the bed, framed against the window, bathed in the morning sunlight. She stood up as he quickly entered the room.

  “Why didn’t you call?” Gray asked.

  Before she could speak, another woman answered, “Because I asked her not to.”

  Only now did Gray notice the handcuff that bound Rachel’s right arm to the headboard. Gray turned.

  A slim figure, wrapped in a robe, stepped from the bathroom. Her black hair was wet, freshly combed straight past her shoulders. Almond eyes the color of cold jade stared back at him. Her legs, bare to mid-thigh, crossed casually as she leaned on the bathroom door frame.

  In her free hand, she leveled a pistol at him.

  “Seichan …”

  1:15 A.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  “We’re not going to get anything more out of her,” Monk told Painter as he sank into the seat across the desk. “She’s exhausted and still in a state of shock.”

  Painter studied Monk. The man looked just as exhausted. “Did Creed finish his assessment of the genetic data?”

  “Hours ago. He still wants to crunch the data past a statistician to be sure, but for the moment, he confirms Andrea Solderitch’s story. Or at least as much as we can verify.”

  Painter had kept current with the status reports. Dr. Malloy’s assistant had described a conversation with the professor just an hour before he was murdered. The professor had been compiling the genetic assay that made up the bulk of the file that Jason Gorman had e-mailed his father. It had revealed a genetic map of the corn harvested in Africa. Radioactive markers showed which genes were foreign to the corn.

  Two chromosomes.

  “And what about that original file?” Painter asked. “The one Jason Gorman sent to the professor two months ago. The one that contained the genetic data from the seeds originally planted in that field?”

  Monk ran a hand over his bald scalp. “The techs at Princeton are still trying to recover the data. They’ve checked all the servers. The professor must have kept the file isolated to his own computer. The one torched by the assassins. All evidence of it is gone.”

  Painter sighed. They kept hitting dead ends. Even the gunmen had vanished. No bodies had been found. The assassins must have escaped the blast and slipped past the cordon around the laboratory.

  “Though we don’t have hard proof, I believe Andrea’s story,” Monk continued. “According to her, the professor found on
ly one chromosome of foreign DNA in the original seed. He believed the two files showed that genetic modification was unstable in the harvest.

  “But without that first file,” Painter said, “we can’t prove it.”

  “Still, it had to be why the professor was tortured and murdered. The assassins must have had orders to destroy all evidence of that first file … and everyone who knew about it. And they almost succeeded.”

  Painter frowned. “Still, all we have is Ms. Solderitch’s word. And according to her, even the professor wasn’t entirely certain about that instability. The samples could have come from two different genetic hybrids. They might be unrelated to one another.”

  “So what do we do next?”

  “I think it’s time we go to the source of all this.”

  Monk stared at the seed-shaped logo printed atop the file on Painter’s desk. “Viatus.”

  “It all seems to come back to that Norwegian corporation. You’ve read the intelligence report on that symbol burned into the boy and the professor.”

  Monk’s face tightened with distaste. “The quartered circle. Some pagan cross.”

  “Initial conjecture is that it might represent an ecoterrorist group. And maybe it does. Maybe some lunatics have a personal vendetta against Viatus. And that first file held some clue about it all.” Painter sighed and stretched. “Either way, it’s high time we had a talk with Ivar Karlsen, CEO of Viatus International.”

  “What if he won’t talk?”

  “Two murders on two continents—he’d better talk. Bad press can sink stock values faster than any sour earnings report.” “When do you want to—”

  A hurried knock on the door cut Monk off. Both men turned as the door swung open. Kat rushed into the room and crossed to the desk. Monk lifted an arm, offering a hand, but he was ignored.

  Painter sat straighter. This can’t be good …

  Kat’s eyes were narrow with concern, her cheeks flushed as if she’d run all the way down here. “We’ve got trouble.”

  “What?” Painter asked.

  “I should’ve gotten this sooner.” Her voice was brittle with frustration. “Interpol’s inquiry and ours must have crossed somewhere over the Atlantic, got mixed up. Neither side realized we were talking about two separate incidents. Stupid. Like dogs chasing their tails.”

  “What?” Painter asked again.

  Monk took his wife’s hand. “Slow down, hon. Take a breath.”

  The suggestion only made her angrier, but she kept her grip on his hand. “Another murder. Another body marked with the cross and circle.”

  “Where?”

  “Rome,” Kat said. “The Vatican.”

  She didn’t have to explain more.

  7:30 A.M.

  Rome, Italy

  “Let’s all just stay calm,” Seichan said, keeping her pistol steady as a rock.

  Behind Gray, Kowalski dropped both bags and raised his hands. His voice soured. “I hate traveling with you, Gray. I really do.”

  Gray ignored him and faced the former Guild assassin … that is, if she was former. “Seichan, what are you doing?”

  His words encompassed multiple questions. What was she doing in Rome? Why was she holding Rachel hostage? What was she doing pointing a gun at him? How could she even be here?

  The satellite feed from her implant had her placed in Venice. Painter would have called Gray immediately if she had moved from there to here.

  She ignored his question and asked one of her own. “Are you armed?” She nodded to encompass Kowalski.

  “No.”

  Seichan eyed Gray, as if weighing the truth of his words. And it was the truth. They had traveled by commercial airline and had no time to acquire weapons.

  Seichan finally shrugged, pocketed her pistol, and entered the room. She moved with a leonine grace, all legs and hidden strength. Gray didn’t doubt she could have her pistol back out in the blink of an eye.

  “Then we can all talk like friends,” she said mockingly and tossed Gray a tiny key. It plainly fit Rachel’s handcuff.

  He caught the key, stepped over to the bed, and leaned down to unlock the cuff.

  “Are you okay?” he whispered in Rachel’s ear as he worked the key, his cheek near hers. The nape of her neck smelled familiar, stirring old feelings, warming embers that Gray thought had long gone cold. As he straightened, he noted that she’d let her hair grow out longer, past her shoulders. She had also thinned down, making her high cheekbones more prominent, increasing her resemblance to a young Audrey Hepburn.

  Freed, she rubbed her wrist. Her voice was hard with fury and brisk with embarrassment. “I’m fine. In fact, you might want to hear what she has to say.” Her voice lowered. “But be careful. She’s drawn tight as a bowstring.”

  Gray turned to face Seichan. She strolled to the window, staring out across the rooftops of Rome. The curve of the Coliseum stood against the horizon.

  “Where do you want to start, Pierce?” She didn’t bother to glance at him. “Not expecting me in Rome?”

  She dropped a hand to her lower left side. It wasn’t done casually, but accusingly. The tracker had been implanted during abdominal surgery last year. Just in that spot.

  She confirmed what Gray feared. “It was suspicious enough that I escaped so easily from Bangkok. But when there was no hard pursuit, I knew something was wrong.” She turned and cocked an eyebrow at Gray. “A Guild agent escapes custody, but there is no more than a cursory search?”

  “You found the implant.”

  “I’ll give you all credit. It was difficult to find. Even a full-body MRI in Saint Petersburg failed to reveal it. Five months ago, I had a doctor perform exploratory surgery, starting with where you all operated on me.”

  Here was the flaw in Painter’s original plan. They’d underestimated the level of paranoia in their target.

  “The surgery took three hours,” she continued with a growing edge to her voice. “I watched it all in a mirror. They found the implant buried in my healed wound—a wound I sustained saving your life, Pierce.”

  Anger hardened her face, but he didn’t fail to note a slight wounding in her eyes.

  “So you removed our tracker.” Gray pictured the crooked path on the surveillance monitor. “But you still kept it with you.”

  “I found it useful. It allowed me to hide in plain sight. I could park the tracker somewhere for a while, then move off on my own.”

  “Like you did in Venice.”

  She shrugged.

  “The city where the curator you murdered lived. Where his family still lives.”

  Gray let the accusation hang. Seichan shook her head very slightly and glanced away. He had a difficult time reading the play of emotions that flickered past.

  “The girl had a cat,” she said more quietly. “An orange tabby with a studded collar.”

  Gray knew the girl must be the curator’s daughter. So Seichan had indeed gone to check on the family, moved in close enough to observe the simple routine of their lives, a family shattered by the death of a husband and a father. She must have planted her tracker on the cat’s collar. It was a smart move. The cat’s wandering through the neighborhood streets and rooftops would make the tracker seem active. It was no wonder the agents on the ground could find no trace of her in the Venetian neighborhood. With the hounds following the false trail, the real cat had escaped.

  Gray wanted more answers from this woman. One question was foremost in his mind, a conversation they’d never completed. “What about your claim that you’re a double—”

  Seichan glanced sharply back at him. Her expression didn’t change, but her eyes turned rock hard, warning him to back off. He had been about to question her assertion that she was a mole planted in the Guild, a double agent put there by Western forces, but plainly this was a conversation she didn’t want in public. Or maybe he misread her expression. Maybe the bitterness in those eyes merely scoffed at his gullibility. He remembered her last words in Bangkok.
<
br />   Trust me, Gray. If only a little.

  Staring at her now, he let the question drop.

  For now.

  “Then why are you here in Rome? Why meet like this?” Gray gestured toward Rachel.

  “Because I need a bargaining chip.”

  “Something to leverage against me?” Gray glanced at Rachel.

  “No. Something to offer the Guild. After events in Cambodia, suspicions have run high concerning my loyalty. AS well as I can tell, the Guild has been sniffing around the recent bombing at Saint Peter’s. Something has piqued their interest. Then I heard that Monsignor Verona was involved in this incident—”

  “Incident?” Rachel burst out. “He’s in a coma.”

  Seichan ignored her. “So I came here. I believed I could benefit from this situation. If I could acquire some key piece of information about this bombing, I could buy my way back into the full trust of the Guild echelon.”

  Gray studied Seichan. Despite the callous nature of her words, the reasoning matched her claim two years ago. She had supposedly been sent into the Guild to root out its leaders. The only way to keep rising in the shadowy hierarchy—up the bloody food chain—was to produce results.

  “I’d hoped to interrogate Rachel,” she explained. “But when I got here, I found someone ransacking her apartment.”

  Gray turned to Rachel, who nodded confirmation, but there remained an angry glint in her eyes.

  “The Guild determined that the assassins were after something the murdered priest had in his possession, something they wanted desperately. The assassins probably searched the man’s body, but the explosion left them time for little else. Like searching the monsignor.”

  “So someone assumed Vigor must have had it,” Gray realized and turned to Rachel. “And that his niece might have ended up with it after acquiring his possessions from the hospital.”

  Seichan nodded. “They went to look for it.”

  A wince of dread tightened in his gut. If they’d found Rachel, they would have carried out a brutal interrogation, then killed her. And after failing to find anything at her apartment, they were probably hunting for her right now, setting up surveillance at likely locations: apartment, place of work, even the hospital.