Glancing longingly back there, Jason was the first to spot a group of monks entering the rear of the cathedral, filing through all the back doors. Though in full-length black robes, hooded and belted at the waist, something immediately struck Jason as odd. They moved too quickly, with an assured military precision, slipping into shadows.
Was this some final bit of pageantry?
A glance around the cathedral revealed more cloaked figures at other doors, even beyond the roped transept beside the altar. While keeping their heads bowed piously down, they also seemed to be standing guard.
What was going on?
He spotted Mandy near the altar. She was just accepting her Communion. There were only a handful of parishioners behind her. Body and blood of Christ, Jason could almost lip-read.
Amen, he answered himself.
The Communion finished. The last parishioners returned to their seats, including Mandy. Jason waved her into the pew, then sat next to her.
“What’s with all the monks?” he asked, leaning forward.
She had knelt down with her head bowed. Her only answer was a shushing sound. He sat back. Most of the parishioners were also kneeling, heads bowed. Only a few like Jason, those who had not taken Communion, remained seated. Ahead, the priest finished tidying up, while the elderly archbishop sat atop his raised dais, chin to chest, half dozing.
The mystery and pageantry had died to embers in Jason’s heart. Maybe it was just the pressure of his bladder, but all he wanted to do was get out of here. He even reached to Mandy’s elbow, ready to urge her to leave.
Motion ahead stopped him. The monks on either side of the altar pulled weapons from beneath folds of cloth. Gunmetal shone with oil in the candlelight, snub-nosed Uzis, mounted with long black silencers.
A chatter of gunfire, no louder than a chain-smoker’s staccato cough, spat across the altar. Heads rose along the pews. Behind the altar, the priest, garbed in white, danced with the impacts. It appeared as if he were being pelted with paintballs—crimson paintballs. He fell atop the altar, spilling the chalice of wine along with his own blood.
After a stunned silence, cries rose from the parishioners. People sprang up. The elderly archbishop stumbled from his dais, drawing to his feet in horror. The sudden motion knocked his miter hat to the floor.
Monks swept up the aisles…from the rear and the sides. Orders were shouted and barked in German, French, and English.
Bleiben Sie in Ihren Sitzen…Ne bouge pas…
The voices were muffled, the faces beneath the hoods obscured by half-masks of black silk. But the raised weapons punctuated their orders.
Stay seated or die!
Mandy sat back with Jason. Her hand reached for his. He clutched her fingers and glanced around, unable to blink. All the doors were closed, guarded.
What was going on?
From the pack of armed monks near the main entrance, a figure appeared, dressed like the others, only taller, seeming to rise as if called forth. His cloak was more like a cape. Clearly some leader, he carried no weapon as he strode boldly down the central aisle of the nave.
He met the archbishop at the altar. A heated argument ensued. It took Jason a moment to realize they were speaking in Latin. The archbishop suddenly fell back in horror.
The leader stepped aside. Two men came forward. Guns blazed. The aim was not murder. They fired upon the faceplate that sealed the golden reliquary. Glass etched and pocked, but held. Bulletproof.
“Thieves…” Jason mumbled. This was all an elaborate robbery.
The archbishop seemed to draw strength from the stubbornness of the glass, standing taller. The leader of the monks held out his hand, speaking still in Latin. The archbishop shook his head.
“Lassen Sie dann das Blut Ihrer Schafe Ihre Hände beflecke,” the man said, speaking German now.
Let your sheep’s blood be upon your hands.
The leader waved another two monks to the front. They flanked the sealed vault and lifted large metal disks to either side of the casement. The effect was instantaneous.
The weakened bulletproof glass exploded outward as if shoved by some unseen wind. In the flickering candlelight, the sarcophagus shimmered. Jason felt a sudden pressure, an internal popping of his ears, as if the walls of the cathedral had suddenly pushed inward, squashing all. The pressure deafened his ears; his vision squeezed.
He turned to Mandy.
Her hand was still clasped tightly to his, but her neck was arched back, her mouth stretched open.
“Mandy…”
From the corner of his eye, he saw other parishioners fixed in the same wracked poses. Mandy’s hand began to tremble in his, vibrating like a speaker’s tweeter. Tears ran down her face, turning bloody as he watched. She did not breathe. Her body then jerked and stiffened, knocking his hand free, but not before he felt the bite of an electrical shock arc from her fingertips to his.
He stood up, too horrified to sit.
A thin trail of smoke rose from Mandy’s open mouth.
Her eyes were rolled back to white, but already they were smoldering black at the corners.
Dead.
Jason, muted by terror, searched the cathedral. The same was happening everywhere. Only a few were unscathed: a pair of young children, pinned between their parents, cried and wailed. Jason recognized the unaffected. Those who had not partaken of the Communion bread.
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, agai
nst 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.
His only weapon.
He couldn’t risk bringing anything else through the security gate.
Gray closed the door and crossed to the stairwell on the right. The only light on the stairs came from the red EXIT sign. He reached to his motorcycle helmet and toggled on the night-vision mode. The world brightened in tones of green and silver. He mounted the stairs and climbed quickly to the fourth floor.
At the top, he pushed through the landing’s door.
He had no idea where he was supposed to meet his contact. Only that he was to await the man’s signal. He paused for a breath at the door, surveying the space before him. He didn’t like it.
The stairwell opened at the corner of the building. One corridor stretched straight ahead; the other ran to the left. Frosted glass office doors lined the inner walls; windows slitted the other. He proceeded directly ahead at a slow pace, alert for any sign of movement.
A flood of light swept through one of the windows, washing over him.
Dazzled through his night-vision, he rolled against one wall, back into darkness. Had he been spotted? The sweep of light pierced the other windows, one after the other, passing down the hall ahead of him.
Leaning out, he peered through one of the windows. It faced the wide courtyard that fronted the building. Across the way, he watched a Humvee trundle slowly down the street. Its searchlight swept through the courtyard.
A patrol.
Would the attention spook his contact?
Cursing silently, Gray waited for the truck to finish its round. The patrol vanished momentarily, crossing behind a hulking structure that rose from the middle of the courtyard below. It looked like some rusting spaceship, but was in fact a million-liter steel containment sphere, three stories tall, mounted on a dozen pedestal legs. Ladders and scaffolding surrounded the structure as it underwent a renovation, an attempt to return it to its former glory when it was a Cold War research facility. Even the steel catwalk that had once circumnavigated the globe’s equator had been replaced.
Gray knew the giant globe’s nickname at the base.
The Eight Ball.
A humorless smile creased his lips as he realized his unlucky position.
Trapped behind the eight ball…
The patrol finally reappeared beyond the structure, slowly crossed the front of the courtyard, and rolled away.
Satisfied, Gray continued to the end of the corridor. A set of swinging double doors blocked the passage, but their narrow windows revealed a larger room beyond. He spotted a few tall, slender metal and glass tanks. One of the old labs. Windowless and dark.
His approach must have been noted.
A new light flared inside, incandescent, bright enough to require Gray to flick off his night-vision. A flashlight. It blinked three times.
A signal.
He stepped to the door and used a toe to push open one of the swinging sides. He slid through the narrow opening.
“Over here,” a voice said calmly. It was the first time Gray had heard his contact’s voice. Prior to this moment, it had always been electronically muffled, a paranoid level of anonymity.
It was a woman’s voice. The revelation piqued his wariness. He didn’t like surprises.
He followed through a maze of tables with chairs stacked on top. She sat at one of the tables. Its other chairs were still stacked atop it. Except for one. On the opposite side of the table. It shifted as she kicked one of the legs.
“Sit.”
Gray had expected to find a nervous scientist, someone out for an extra paycheck. Treason for hire was becoming more and more commonplace among the top research f
acilities.
USAMRIID was no exception…only a thousandfold more deadly. Each vial for sale had the capability, if properly aerosolized in a subway or bus station, to kill thousands.
And she was selling fifteen of them.
He settled into his seat, placing the satchel of money on the table.
The woman was Asian…no, Eurasian. Her eyes were more open, her skin deeply tanned to a handsome bronze. She wore a black turtlenecked bodysuit, not unlike the one he wore, hugging a slim, lithe frame. A silver pendant dangled from her neck, bright against her suit, bearing a tiny curled-dragon charm. Gray studied her. The Dragon Lady’s features, rather than taut and wary like his own, appeared bored.
Of course, the 9mm Sig Sauer pointed at his chest and equipped with a silencer might be the source of her confidence. But it was her next words that truly iced his blood.
“Good evening, Commander Pierce.”
He was startled to hear his name.
If she knew that…
He was already moving…and already too late.
The gun fired at near-point-blank range.
The impact kicked his body backward, taking the chair with him. He landed on his back, tangled in the chair legs. Pain flattened his chest, making it impossible to breathe. He tasted blood on his tongue.
Betrayed…
She stepped around the table and leaned over his sprawled form, gun still pointing, taking no chances. The silver dragon pendant dangled and flashed brightly. “I suspect you’re recording all this through your helmet, Commander Pierce. Perhaps even transmitting to Washington…to Sigma. You won’t mind if I borrow a little airtime, will you?”
He was in no position to object.
The woman leaned closer over him. “In the next ten minutes, the Guild will shut down all of Fort Detrick. Contaminate the entire base with anthrax. Payback for Sigma’s interference with our operation in Oman. But I owe your director, Painter Crowe, something more. Something personal. This is for my sister in the field, Cassandra Sanchez.”
The gun shifted to his faceplate.