James Rollins - Map of Bones

Fingers shaking, the man peeled back the top and shook out the contents. Six cigarettes — and a broken stub of chalk. The man dropped the cigarettes and held out the ochre bit.

Vigor took it.

Not chalk. Bone.

“Father Belcarro feared sending away all the holy relics,” the young priest explained. “In case something happened. So he kept a bit aside. For the church.”

Rachel wondered how much of this subterfuge was motivated by a selfless desire to preserve the relics and how much was due to pride, and the memory of the last time the bones had been stolen from Milan. Carted off to Cologne. Much of the basilica’s fame was centered on those few bones. But either way, Father Belcarro had died a martyr. Tortured while hiding the holy relic on his own body.

A loud blast made them all jump.

The priest fell back to the floor.

But Rachel recognized the gauge of the weapon.

“Monk’s shotgun…” she said, eyes widening with hope.

GRAY REACHED through the smoking hole in the sacristy door.

Monk shouldered the shotgun. “I’m really going to owe the Catholic Church a month’s salary for carpentry repair.”

Gray shoved aside the pole blocking the way and opened the door. After the shotgun blast, there was no further need for subterfuge. “Rachel! Vigor!” he called as he entered the rectory hall.

A scuffle sounded from down the hall. A door opened. Rachel stepped out, pistol in hand. “Over here!” she urged.

Uncle Vigor led a half-naked man out into the hallway. The man looked pale and haunted, but he seemed to gain strength from their presence.

Or maybe it was the sound of the approaching sirens.

“Father Justin Mennelli,” Vigor said in introduction.

They quickly compared notes.

“So we have one of the bones,” Gray said, surprised.

“I suggest we get the relic back to Rome as soon as possible,” Vigor said. “They don’t know we have it, and I want to be behind the Leonine Walls of the Vatican before they do.”

Rachel nodded. “Father Mennelli will let the authorities know what happened here. He’ll leave out the details of our presence — and of course, about the relic we have.”

“There’s an ETR train leaving for Rome in ten minutes.” Vigor checked his watch. “We can be in Rome by six o’clock.”

Gray nodded. The more under-the-radar they operated, the better. “Let’s go.”

They headed out. Father Mennelli led them to a side exit not far from where they had parked. Rachel climbed into the driver’s seat as usual. They sped off as sirens converged.

As Gray settled back, he fingered the Chinese coin in his pocket. He sensed he had missed something.

Something important.

But what?

AN HOUR later, Rachel crossed from the bathroom to the first-class compartment in the ETR 500 train. Kat accompanied her. It was decided no one would leave the group by themselves. Rachel had wet her face, combed her hair, and brushed her teeth while Kat waited outside the door.

After the horrors in Milan, she had needed a personal moment in the cubicle. For a full minute, she had simply stared at herself in the mirror, teetering between fury and a need to cry. Neither won out, so she had washed her face.

It was all she could do.

But it did make her feel better, a private absolution.

As she strode down the hall, she barely felt the tremble of the tracks under her heels. The Elettro Treno Rapido was Italy’s newest and fastest train, connecting a corridor from Milan to Naples. It traveled at a blistering three hundred kilometers per hour.

“So, what’s the story on your commander?” Rachel asked Kat, taking advantage of the time alone with the woman. Also, it felt good to talk about a subject outside of murder and bones.

“What do you mean?” Kat did not even look over.

“Is he involved with anyone back home? A girlfriend maybe?”

This question earned a glance. “I don’t see how his personal life—”

“What about you and Monk?” Rachel said, cutting her off, realizing how her original question sounded. “With all your professions, do you have time for personal lives? What about the risks?”

Rachel was curious how these people balanced their regular lives with all the cloak-and-dagger. She had a hard enough time finding a man who could handle her position as a lieutenant in the Carabinieri Force.

Kat sighed. “It’s best not to get too involved,” she said. Her fingers had wandered to a tiny enameled frog pinned to her collar. Her voice grew stiffer, but it sounded more like bolstering than true strength. “You form friendships where you can, but you shouldn’t let it go any further. It’s easier that way.”

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.”