Map of Bones (Sigma Force 2)

Kat didn’t look convinced, but she was difficult to read, playing her cards close to the chest. Like she had been trained.

Gray settled the matter. “Either way, for now, exploring opportunity offers no inroads into who perpetrated the massacre. Let’s move on to motive.”

“Why steal bones?” Monk said with a shake of his head and sat back. “Maybe they mean to ransom them back to the Catholic Church.”

Kat shook her head. “If it was only money, they would’ve stolen the golden reliquary. So it must be something else about the bones. Something we have no clue about. So maybe it’s best we leave that thread to our Vatican contacts.”

Gray frowned. He was still uncomfortable working jointly with an organization like the Vatican, an establishment built on secrets and religious dogma. He had been raised Roman Catholic, and while he still felt strong stirrings of faith, he had also studied other religions and philosophies: Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism. He had learned much, but he never could answer one question from his studies: What was he seeking?

Gray shook his head. “For now, we’ll mark the motivation for this crime with another big question mark. We’ll pursue that in more depth when we meet with the others. That leaves only means to discuss.”

“Which goes back to the whole financial discussion,” Monk said. “This operation was well planned and swiftly executed. From the manpower alone, this was an expensive operation. Money backed this theft.”

“Money and a level of technology that we don’t understand,” Kat said.

Monk nodded. “But what about that weird gold in the Communion bread?”

“Monatomic gold,” Kat mumbled, creasing lines around her lips.

Gray pictured the gold-plated electrode. They had been given reams of data in their dossier on this strange gold, culled from labs around the world: British Aerospace, Argonne National Laboratories, Boeing Labs in Seattle, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

The powder had not been ordinary gold dust, the flaky form of metallic gold. It had been an entirely new elemental state of gold, classified as m-state. Rather than its usual metallic matrix, the white powder was gold broken down into individual atoms. Monatomic, or m-state. Until recently, scientists had no idea that gold could transmute, both naturally and artificially, into an inert white powder form.

But what did it all mean?

“Okay,” Gray said, “we’ve all read the files. Let’s round-robin that topic. See if it leads anywhere.”

Monk spoke up. “First, it’s not just gold that does this. We should keep that in mind. It seems any of the transitional metals on the periodic table—platinum, rhodium, iridium, and others—can also dissolve into a powder.”

“Not dissolve,” Kat said. She glanced down to the dossier with its photocopied articles from Platinum Metals Review, Scientific American, even Jane’s Defense Weekly, the journal of the UK’s Ministry of Defense. It appeared as if she itched to open the folder.

“The term is disaggregate,” she continued. “These m-state metals break down into both individual atoms and microclusters. From a physics standpoint, this state arises when time-forward and time-reverse electrons fuse around the nucleus of the atom, causing each atom to lose its chemical reactivity to its neighbor.”

“You mean they stop sticking to each other.” Monk’s eyes danced a bit with amusement.

“To put it crudely,” Kat said with a sigh. “It’s this lack of chemical reactivity that makes the metal lose its metallic appearance and disaggregate into a powder. A powder undetectable to ordinary lab equipment.”

“Ah…” Monk muttered.

Gray frowned at Monk. He shrugged. Gray knew his friend was playing dumb.

“I think,” Kat went on, oblivious of the exchange, “that the perpetrators knew about this lack of chemical reactivity and trusted the gold powder would never be discovered. It was their second mistake.”

“Their second?” Monk asked.

“They left alive a witness. The young man. Jason Pendleton.” Kat opened her dossier folder. It seemed she couldn’t resist the temptation after all. “Back to the matter of the gold. What about this one paper on superconductivity?”

Gray nodded. He had to give Kat credit. She had zeroed in on the most intriguing aspect of these m-state metals. Even Monk sat straighter now.

Kat continued, “While the powder appears inert to analyzing equipment, the atomic state is far from low-energy. It was as if each atom took all the energy it used to react to its neighbor and turned it inward on itself. The energy deformed the atom’s nucleus, stretching it out to an elongated shape, known as…” She searched the article at her fingertips. Gray noted it had been marked up with a yellow highlighter.

“An asymmetrical high-spin state,” she said. “Physicists have known that such high-spin atoms can pass energy from one atom to the next with no net energy loss.”

“Superconductivity,” Monk said with no dissembling.

“Energy passed into a superconductor would continue to flow through the material with no loss of power. A perfect superconductor would allow this energy to flow infinitely, until the end of time itself.”

Silence settled over them as they all pondered the many perplexities here.

Monk finally stretched. “Great. We’ve ground the mystery down to the level of the atomic nucleus. Let’s pull back. What does any of this have to do with the murders at the cathedral? Why poison the wafers with this weird gold powder? How did the powder kill?”

They were all good questions. Kat closed her dossier, conceding that no answers would be found there.

Gray was beginning to understand why the director had given him these two partners. It went beyond their backgrounds as an intelligence specialist and a forensics expert. Kat had a focused ability to concentrate on minutiae, to pick out details others might miss. But Monk, no less sharp, was better at looking at the bigger picture, spotting trends across a broader landscape.

But where did that leave him?

“It seems we still have much to investigate,” he finished lamely.

Monk lifted one eyebrow. “As I said from the start, we don’t have a lot to go on.”

“That’s why we’ve been called in. To solve the impossible.” Gray checked his watch, stifling a yawn. “And to do that, we should grab as much downtime as we can until we land in Germany.”

The other two nodded. Gray stood and crossed to a seat a short distance away. Monk grabbed pillows and blankets. Kat closed the shades on the windows, dimming the cabin. Gray watched them.