Robin Burcell: The Bone Chamber

“Figures,” she said, staring up at the ceiling, at the shadows.

“You want, I could-”

“Is that light up there?”

“Where?”

She pointed straight up.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

“Where are we?”

“Sort of looks like an unfinished basement, if I had to guess. Maybe the opening was blocked until the cave-in.”

She closed her eyes in relief, opened them again, worried that the light from the windows above would disappear, that it had all been a dream. But no, it was still there. And in that moment, she reached out, felt the round shape of the tube from the cavern. “What time is it?” she asked.

Griffin looked at his watch. “We have less than an hour before Adami expects us to contact him.”

Together they moved to the window. Griffin opened it, about to help Sydney out, but stopped at the sound of the sirens.

“What’s going on?” Sydney whispered.

She peered out the window they’d almost climbed through, saw general chaos with people running in every direction, then froze at the sight of dark-clad legs walking toward their window. She looked up, saw Dumas looking down at them.

“Need a hand?” Dumas said.

Griffin hesitated. He glanced over at Sydney, then turned his attention back to Dumas. “As it turns out, yes.” Griffin held up the window, and Sydney handed him the tube, then allowed Dumas to help her out. Griffin followed.

Dumas eyed the leather tube that Griffin now carried, but said only, “This way.” They followed him down the street to a small car parked about two blocks away. “The professoressa and her friend were most insistent on helping draw off the men searching for you. A favor returned, she said. They are watching for you on the other side of the collapsed building. His cousin has returned to start a search-and-rescue operation for the both of you. He should be back shortly.”

“These men the professor and Xavier drew off? How many?”

“Two chased after them, and just before the collapse I saw another two. Conjecture, of course, based on their inordinate interest in the known locations of that particular tunnel entrance. I recognized Adami’s men. These others, I do not know them. Someone else is after this thing.”

“There were at least two down in the tunnels that we know of. I doubt they’re coming up.”

They piled into the car, Sydney in the front passenger seat, Griffin in the back. “What about Francesca and Xavier?” he asked.

Dumas pulled out and into traffic. “The young man, Xavier, seems to have a grasp of these streets that will serve them well. I will meet up with them after I take you wherever it is you need to go. First I intend to see if we are being followed. I take it you found the key? That is what is in the tube?”

Griffin saw Sydney’s shoulders tense as she said, “What makes you say that?”

“The collapse,” Dumas replied. “After the professoressa fled the Vatican, Father Martinez brought me the documents she’d been researching. It was there I found the passage about di Sangro. Depending on how you interpreted it, it could mean one of two things. Whosoever found the key and moved it would meet a most untimely death, turning their corpses into dust, or, whoever finds the key must choose the right time and direction to avoid such a fate.”

“The eternal clock in the Capuchin Crypt,” Sydney said. “We chose to interpret it as a compass that indicated north. That’s the direction we fled.”

“And a good thing you did,” Dumas said, expertly weaving in and out of traffic with the finesse of a local cabbie. “How did you guess in time?”

“Lady Luck,” Griffin said, as he leaned back, far too exhausted to explain. But he couldn’t help but think of their near escape.

“Or perhaps,” Dumas said, “God was watching over you.”

“As were you, it seems.”

Dumas didn’t reply, and Griffin felt only slightly guilty. He had no doubts as to Dumas’s loyalty. The church first, their mission second. That he’d come here to warn them was something, at least.

Dumas slowed as a bus pulled out in front of him, then glanced in his rearview mirror. “I am not sure what your plans were, but it seems I underestimated the number of men following you. The man in the car directly behind us made a point to let me know he is armed.”

Griffin shifted in his seat, looked out the back, recognizing the man in the front passenger seat as one of the two men who had followed them from the Capuchin Crypt. So much for his plans for quietly leaving Naples with the map.

“What is it you’d like me to do?” Dumas asked.

“Drive us to the hotel,” he said, not wanting to give Adami’s men any inkling that he intended to do anything but trade the map for Tex. Returning to the hotel would allow him to regroup, come up with an alternate plan. Or destroy the map if need be…

Dumas did as he was told, stopping the car in front of the hotel.

Griffin opened the car door. “You’re not even curious as to what this is?” he asked, tapping on the leather tube.

“I’ll find out in good time when you return it to the Vatican.”

“The Vatican?”

“The papal seal on the end?” he said, reaching out, touching the tooled leather. “That shows it is Vatican property. And the records the professoressa found confirm it. But I am a patient man if nothing else.”

Good thing, Griffin thought, because this map wasn’t going anywhere near the Vatican.

Sydney pushed through the door the moment Griffin inserted the key. “Let’s open that thing up and see what’s in there,” she said, walking to the table by the window and clearing the hotel’s literature from it. She looked up to see why he hadn’t immediately followed her. “Well?”

“This thing’s over two hundred years old at the least.”

“And at a constant fifty degrees, probably preserved better than if it was in some museum.” He didn’t move. “What? You think it’s going to disintegrate the moment you unlatch the top? At least take a look before we have to hand it over. If it seems crumbly, we wait. If not, I say pull the damned thing out and let’s see it. I’d like to see what we almost died for.”

He pushed the door closed, then walked over to the table, in no particular hurry.

Sydney tried to keep the impatience from her voice. “Anytime.”

Surprisingly, he handed the tube to her. “You rescued it. The honor should be yours.”

And suddenly she wasn’t sure she wanted it. What if she opened it, and she was the one responsible for destroying a piece of history? That thought lasted until the moment her hand gripped the still supple tube. Now that the danger was seemingly over, and they were no longer running, she had a moment to admire the intricate hand-tooled leather. The case itself was probably worth something, she thought, running her finger over the elaborate papal seal tooled on the top. She slid the thin leather strap up, allowing the top to be lifted. The edge of a rolled parchment was visible just inside, and she touched it with her finger. “It feels sturdy.”

“Slide it out.”

“Shouldn’t we be wearing gloves, or something?”

“Now you’re worried?”

“Maybe we should wait for Francesca. She is the expert, after all.”

Griffin’s answer to that was to grab several tissues from a box on the bathroom counter, then return and hand them to her. “Happy? Take the damned thing out.”

“I’d be happier if we had a camera,” she said. “What about the camera on your phone?”

“No. No photos.”

She looked up at him, wondered why he was so adamant, but figured he had his reasons. “It’s your mission,” she said, using the tissue to keep her fingers from touching the parchment as she carefully slid it partway from the tube, revealing a fleur-de-lis on the top corner. That was the only marking on the outside of the parchment. With Griffin’s help, they unrolled it onto the table, weighting it down with a telephone book on one side and an empty ice bucket on the other.