Map of Bones (Sigma Force 2)

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.

GRAY 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 f**ked 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.”