Map of Bones (19 page)

Something important.

But what?

3:39
P
.
M
.

A
N HOUR
later, Rachel crossed from the bathroom to the first-class compartment in the ETR 500 train. Kat accompanied her. It was decided no one would leave the group by themselves. Rachel had wet her face, combed her hair, and brushed her teeth while Kat waited outside the door.

After the horrors in Milan, she had needed a personal moment in the cubicle. For a full minute, she had simply stared at herself in the mirror, teetering between fury and a need to cry. Neither won out, so she had washed her face.

It was all she could do.

But it did make her feel better, a private absolution.

As she strode down the hall, she barely felt the tremble of the tracks under her heels. The Elettro Treno Rapido was Italy’s newest and fastest train, connecting a corridor from Milan to Naples. It traveled at a blistering three hundred kilometers per hour.

“So, what’s the story on your commander?” Rachel asked Kat, taking advantage of the time alone with the woman. Also, it felt good to talk about a subject outside of murder and bones.

“What do you mean?” Kat did not even look over.

“Is he involved with anyone back home? A girlfriend maybe?”

This question earned a glance. “I don’t see how his personal life—”

“What about you and Monk?” Rachel said, cutting her off, realizing how her original question sounded. “With
all
your professions, do you have time for personal lives? What about the risks?”

Rachel was curious how these people balanced their regular lives with all the cloak-and-dagger. She had a hard enough time finding a man who could handle her position as a lieutenant in the Carabinieri Force.

Kat sighed. “It’s best not to get too involved,” she said. Her fingers had wandered to a tiny enameled frog pinned to her collar. Her voice grew stiffer, but it sounded more like bolstering than true strength. “You form friendships where you can, but you shouldn’t let it go any further. It’s easier that way.”

Easier for whom? Rachel wondered.

She let the matter drop as they reached their compartments. The team had booked two cabins. One was a sleeping compartment to allow them to take short catnaps in shifts. But no one was sleeping yet. Everyone had gathered in the other cabin, seated on either side of a table. The shades had been drawn across the windows.

Rachel slid in next to her uncle, Kat next to her teammates.

Gray had unboxed an assortment of compact analyzing equipment from his backpack and wired it to a laptop. Other tools were neatly aligned in front of him. In the center of the table, resting on a stainless steel sample tray, was the relic from one of the Magi.

“It was lucky that this bit of finger bone escaped their net,” Monk said.

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Rachel bristled. “It cost good men their lives. If we hadn’t come when we did, I suspect we would’ve lost this bit of bone, too.”

“Luck or not,” Gray grumbled, “we have the artifact. Let’s see if it can solve any mysteries for us.”

He slipped on a pair of glasses outfitted with a jeweler’s magnifying loupe and donned a pair of latex gloves. With a tiny trepanning drill, he cored a thin sliver through the center of the bone, then used a mortar and pestle to grind the sample to a powder.

Rachel watched his meticulous work. Here was the scientist in the soldier. She studied the movements of his fingers, efficient, no wasted effort. His eyes focused fully on the task at hand. Two perfectly parallel lines furrowed his brow, never relaxing. He breathed through his nose.

She had never imagined this side of him, the man who leapt between fiery towers. Rachel had a sudden urge to tip his chin up, to have him look at her with that same intensity and focus. What would that be like? She pictured the depth of his blue-gray eyes. She remembered his touch, his hand in hers, both strength and tenderness, somehow at the same time.

Warmth swelled through her. She felt her cheeks flush and had to glance away.

Kat stared up at her, expressionless but still somehow making her feel guilty, her words too fresh.
It’s best not to get too involved. It’s easier that way
.

Maybe the woman was right….

“With this mass spectrometer,” Gray finally mumbled, drawing back her attention, “we can determine if any of the m-state metal is in the bones. Attempt to rule out, or in, the possibility that the Magi bones were the source of the powder found in the gold reliquary.”

Gray mixed the powder with distilled water, then sucked the silty liquid into a pipette and transferred it to a test tube. He inserted the sample tube into the compact spectrometer. He prepared a second test tube of pure distilled water and held it up.

“This is a standard to calibrate,” he explained, and placed the tube into another slot. He pressed a green button and turned the laptop screen toward the group so all could see. A graph appeared on the screen with a flat line across it. A few tiny barbs jittered the straight line. “This is water. The intermittent spikes are a few trace impurities. Even distilled water is not a hundred percent pure.”

Next, he switched a dial so it pointed to the slot with the silty sample. He pressed the green button. “Here is the breakdown of the pulverized bone.”

The graph on the screen cleared and refreshed with the new data.

It looked identical.

“It hasn’t changed,” Rachel said.

With his brow pinched, Gray repeated the test, even taking out the tube and shaking it up. The result was the same each time. A flat line.

“It’s still reading like distilled water,” Kat said.

“It shouldn’t,” Monk said. “Even if the old magi had osteoporosis, the calcium in the bone should be spiking through the roof. Not to mention carbon and a handful of other elements.”

Gray nodded, conceding. “Kat, do you have some of that cyanide solution?”

She swung to her pack, fished through it, and came up with a tiny vial.

Gray soaked a cotton-tipped swab, then pinched the bone between his gloved fingers. He rubbed the wet swab across the bone, pressing firmly, rubbing as if he were polishing silver.

But it was not silver.

Where he rubbed, the brownish-yellow bone turned a rich gold.

Gray glanced up at the group. “This isn’t bone.”

Rachel could not keep the awe and shock from her voice. “It’s solid gold.”

5:12
P
.
M
.

G
RAY SPENT
half the train trip disproving Rachel’s statement. There was more than just gold in these bones. Also it wasn’t heavy
metallic
gold, but that strange gold glass again. He attempted to backward engineer the exact composition.

While he worked, he also grappled another problem. Milan. He went over and over again the events at the basilica. He had walked his team into a trap. He could forgive last night’s ambush up in Germany. They had been caught with their pants down. No one could have anticipated such a savage attack at the cathedral in Cologne.

But the close call in Milan could not be so easily dismissed. They had gone into the basilica prepared—but still came close to losing everything, including their lives.

So where did the fault lie?

Gray knew the answer. He had fucked up. He should never have stopped at Lake Como. He should not have listened to Kat’s words of caution and wasted so much time canvassing the basilica, exposing themselves, giving the Court time to spot them and prepare a trap.

Kat was not to blame. Caution was part and parcel of intelligence work. But fieldwork also required swift and certain action, not hesitation.

Especially in its leader.

Up until now, Gray had been going by the book, staying overly cautious, being the leader that was expected of him. But maybe that was the mistake. Hesitation and second-guessing were not Pierce family traits. Not in the father, not in the son. But where was the line between caution and foolhardiness? Could he ever achieve
that
balance?

Success on this mission—and possibly their lives—would depend on it.

Finished with his analysis, Gray leaned back. He had blistered his thumb, and the cabin reeked of methyl alcohol. “It’s not pure gold,” he concluded.

The others glanced to him. Two were working, two drowsing.

“The fake bone is a mixture of elements across the platinum group,” Gray explained. “Whoever crafted this, they mixed a powdery amalgam of various transitional metals and melted it down to glass. As it cooled, they molded the glass and roughed up the surfaces to a chalky complexion, making it
appear
like bone.”

Gray began putting away his tools. “It’s predominantly composed of gold, but there’s also a large percentage of platinum and smaller amounts of iridium and rhodium, even osmium and palladium.”

“A regular potpourri,” Monk said with a yawn.

“But a potpourri whose exact recipe may be forever unknown,” Gray said, frowning at the abused piece of bone. He had preserved three-quarters of the artifact untouched and put the remaining quarter through the battery of tests. “With the m-state powder’s stubborn lack of reactivity, I don’t think any analyzing equipment could tell you the exact ratio of metals. Even testing alters the ratio in the sample.”

“Like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,” Kat said, feet up on the opposite bench, her laptop on her thighs. She tapped as she spoke. “Even the act of looking changes the reality of what’s being observed.”

“So if it can’t be completely tested—” Monk’s words were cut off by another jaw-popping yawn.

Gray patted Monk on the shoulder. “We’ll be in Rome in another hour. Why don’t you catch some sleep in the next room?”

“I’m fine,” he said, stifling another yawn.

“That’s an order.”

Monk stood with a long stretch. “Well, if it’s an order…” He rubbed his eyes and headed out the door.

But he paused in the doorway. “You know,” he said bleary-eyed, “maybe they had it all wrong. Maybe history misinterpreted the words
the Magi’s bones
. Rather than referring to the skeleton of those guys, maybe it meant the bones were
made
by the Magi. Like it was their property. The Magi’s bones.”

Everyone stared at him.

Under the combined scrutiny, Monk shrugged and half fell out the door. “Hell, what do I know? I can hardly think straight.” The door closed.

“Your teammate might not be so far off base,” Vigor said as silence settled around the cabin.

Rachel stirred. Gray glanced up. Until the recent exchange, Rachel had been leaning against her uncle and had napped for a short while. Gray had watched her breathing from the corner of his eye. In slumber, all hard edges softened in the woman. She seemed much younger.

She stretched one arm in the air. “What do you mean?”

Vigor worked on Monk’s laptop. Like Kat, he was connected to the DSL line built into the new train’s first-class cabins. They were searching for more information. Kat concentrated on the science behind the white gold, while Vigor searched for more history connecting the Magi to this amalgam.

The monsignor’s eyes remained on his screen. “Somebody forged those fake bones. Somebody with a skill barely reproducible today. But who did it? And why hide them in the heart of a Catholic cathedral?”

“Could it be someone connected to the Dragon Court?” Rachel asked. “Their group traces back to the Middle Ages.”

“Or someone within the Church itself?” Kat said.

“No,” Vigor said firmly. “I think there is a third group involved here. A brotherhood that’s existed before either group.”

“How can you be certain?” Gray asked.

“In 1982, some of the Magi burial cloths were tested. They dated to the second century. Well before the Dragon Court was founded. Before even Queen Helena, mother of Constantine, discovered the bones somewhere in the East.”

“And no one tested the bones?”

Vigor glanced to Gray. “The Church forbade it.”

“Why?”

“It takes a special papal dispensation to allow bones to be tested, especially relics. And the relics of the Magi would require extraordinary dispensation.”

Rachel explained, “The Church doesn’t want its most precious treasures to be ruled fake.”

Vigor frowned at Rachel. “The Church places much weight on faith. The world certainly could use more of it.”

She shrugged, closed her eyes, and settled back down.

“So if not the Church or the Court, who forged the bones?” Gray asked.

“I think your friend Monk was correct. I think an ancient fraternity of mages fabricated them. A group that may predate Christianity, possibly going back to Egyptian times.”

“Egyptians?”

Vigor clicked the mouse on his laptop, bringing up a file. “Listen to this. In 1450
B
.
C
., Pharaoh Tuthmosis III united his best master craftsmen into a thirty-nine-member group called the Great White Brother-hood—named from their study of a mysterious
white
powder. The powder was described as forged from gold, but shaped into pyramidal cakes, called ‘white bread.’ The cakes are depicted at the temple of Karnak as tiny pyramids, sometimes with rays of light radiating out.”

“What did they do with them?” Gray asked.

“They were prepared only for the pharaohs. To be consumed. Supposedly to increase their powers of perception.”

Kat sat straighter, lowering her feet from the opposite bench.

Gray turned to her. “What is it?”

“I’ve been reading some of the properties of high-spin-state metals. Specifically gold and platinum. Exposure through ingestion can stimulate endocrine systems, creating heightened senses of awareness. Remember the articles on superconductors?”

Gray nodded. High-spin atoms acted as perfect superconductors.

“The U.S. Naval Research Facility has confirmed that communication between brain cells cannot be explained by pure chemical transmission across synapses. Brain cells communicate too quickly. They’ve concluded that some form of superconductivity is involved, but the mechanism is still under study.”