Map of Bones (Sigma Force 2)

Like him.

He fell back into the shadows by the wall. His motion had gone momentarily unnoticed. His back found a door, one unguarded by the monks. Not a true door.

Jason pulled it open enough to slip inside the confessional booth.

He fell to his knees, crouching down, hugging himself.

Prayers came to his lips.

Then, just as suddenly, it ended. He felt it in his head. A pop. A release of pressure. The walls of the cathedral sighing back.

He was crying. Tears ran cold over his cheeks.

He risked peeking out a hole in the confessional door.

Jason stared, finding a clear view of the nave and the altar. The air reeked of burnt hair. Cries and wails still echoed, but now the chorus came from only a handful of throats. Those still living. One figure, from his ragged garb apparently a homeless man, stumbled out of the pew and ran down a side aisle. Before taking ten steps, he was shot in the back of the head. One shot. His body sprawled.

Oh God…oh God…

Biting back sobs, Jason kept his eyes focused toward the altar.

Four monks lifted the golden sarcophagus from its shattered case. The slain priest’s body was kicked from the altar and replaced by the reliquary. The leader slipped a large cloth sack from beneath his cloak. The monks opened the reliquary’s lid and upended the contents into the bag. Once empty, the priceless sarcophagus was toppled to the floor and abandoned with a crash.

The leader shouldered his burden and headed back down the central aisle with the stolen relics.

The archbishop called to him. Again in Latin. It sounded like a curse.

The only response was a wave of the man’s arm.

Another of the monks stepped behind the archbishop and raised a pistol to the back of the man’s head.

Jason slunk down, wanting to see no more.

He closed his eyes. Other shots rang out across the cathedral. Sporadic. Cries suddenly silenced. Death stalked the cathedral as the monks slaughtered the few remaining survivors.

Jason kept his eyes closed and prayed.

A moment before, he had spotted the coat of arms upon the leader’s surcoat. The man’s black cloak had parted as he’d lifted his arm, revealing a crimson sigil beneath: a coiled dragon, the tail wrapped around its own neck. The symbol was unknown to Jason, but it had an exotic feel to it, more Persian than European.

Beyond the confessional door, the cathedral had grown stone silent.

The tread of booted footsteps approached his hiding place.

Jason squeezed his eyes tighter, against the horror, against the impossibility, against the sacrilege.

All for a sack of bones.

And though the cathedral had been built around those bones, and countless kings had bowed before them, even this very mass was a Feast to those long-dead men—the Feast of the Three Kings—one question rose foremost in Jason’s mind.

Why?

Images of the Three Kings were found throughout the cathedral, done in stone, glass, and gold. In one panel, the Wise Men led camels across a desert, guided by the Star of Bethlehem. In another, the adoration of the Christ child was depicted, showing kneeling figures offering of the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

But Jason closed his mind to all of this. All he could picture was Mandy’s last smile. Her soft touch.

All gone.

The boots stopped outside his door.

He silently cried for an answer to all this bloodshed.

Why?

Why steal the bones of the Magi?

DAY ONE

1

BEHIND THE EIGHT BALL

JULY 24, 4:34 A.M.

FREDERICK, MARYLAND

THE SABOTEUR had arrived.

Grayson Pierce edged his motorcycle between the dark buildings that made up the heart of Fort Detrick. He kept the bike idling. Its electric engine purred no louder than a refrigerator’s motor. The black gloves he wore matched the bike’s paint, a nickel-phosphorous compound called NPL Super Black. It absorbed more visible light, making ordinary black seem positively shiny. His cloth body suit and rigid helmet were equally shaded.

Hunched over the bike, he neared the end of the alley. A courtyard opened ahead, a dark chasm framed by the brick-and-mortar buildings that composed the National Cancer Institute, an adjunct to USAMRIID, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Here the country’s war on bioterrorism was waged across sixty thousand square feet of maximum-containment labs.

Gray cut the engine but stayed seated. His left knee rested against the satchel. It held the seventy thousand dollars. He remained in the alley, avoiding the open courtyard. He preferred the dark. The moon had long set, and the sun would not rise for another twenty-two minutes. Even the stars remained clouded by the shredding tail of last night’s summer storm.

Would his ruse hold?

He subvocalized into his throat mike. “Mule to Eagle, I’ve reached the rendezvous. Proceeding on foot.”

“Roger that. We’ve got you on satellite.”

Gray resisted the urge to look up and wave. He hated to be watched, scrutinized, but the deal here was too big. He did manage to gain a concession: to take the meeting alone. His contact was skittish. It had taken six months to groom this contact, brokering connections in Libya and the Sudan. It hadn’t been easy. Money did not buy much trust. Especially in this business.

He reached down to the satchel and shouldered the money bag. Wary, he walked his bike over to a shadowed alcove, parked it, and hooked a leg over the seat.

He crossed down the alley.

There were few eyes awake at this hour, and most of those were only electronic. All of his identification had passed inspection at the Old Farm Gate, the service entrance to the base. And now he had to trust that his subterfuge held out long enough to evade electronic surveillance.

He glanced to the glowing dial on his Breitling diver’s watch: 4:45. The meeting was set for fifteen minutes from now. So much depended on his success here.

Gray reached his destination. Building 470. It was deserted at this hour, due for demolition next month. Poorly secured, the building was perfect for the rendezvous, yet the choice of venue was also oddly ironic. In the sixties, spores of anthrax had been brewed inside the building, in giant vats and tanks, fermenting strains of bacterial death, until the toxic brewery had been decommissioned back in 1971. Since then, the building had been left fallow, becoming a giant storage closet for the National Cancer Institute.

But once again, the business of anthrax would be conducted under this roof. He glanced up. The windows were all dark. He was to meet the seller on the fourth floor.

Reaching the side door, he swiped the lock with an electronic keycard supplied by his contact at the base. He carried the second half of the man’s payment over his shoulder, having wired the first half a month before. Gray also bore a foot-long plastic, carbonized dagger in a concealed wrist sheath.