Rachel Lee - The Crimson Code

“Daugherty, you have to get out of there.” His captain’s voice crackled over the radio.

“There may be survivors,” Kevin answered. “My family is in here somewhere. I’ve got to find them.”

“We’re going to lose the building,” the captain said. “You have to get out. Now. That’s an order, Daugherty.”

Kevin shook his head and kicked aside burning missals, clearing a path to the next row of pews, until he felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him. He turned and saw his partner, Gerry O’Brien, eyes wide behind the breathing mask.

“We gotta go, Kev,” Gerry said, pointing upward. “It’s coming down.”

Kevin looked up at the roof section above him, watching it swell and recede as if breathing with the heat of the flames. It would not last another two minutes, he knew. Once a building started to breathe, it gave way. It was basic firefighting training: Get out.

But his wife was here somewhere, along with Kevin Junior and little Becky. He couldn’t just leave them to the merciless fire, leave them to be nothing but charred forms to be pulled out days later, when the embers had cooled enough for rescue teams to pull apart the wreckage. Mary and Kevin Junior and Becky couldn’t be hauled out like so many slabs of barbecue.

“I’m not going,” Kevin said. “I have to find them.”

“Anyone still in here is dead already,” Gerry said. “And we’re gonna be dead, too. We’re pulling out. Now.”

“You go,” Kevin said.

Gerry shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way, Kev. You stay, I stay. I go, you go. Are you going to kill me, too, along with them?”

And there was the truth of it. Kevin’s partner, and the hose team, wouldn’t abandon him. If he stayed in the inferno, they would die with him. He had no right to heap their families’ grief atop his own. Slowly, slowly, his fingers opened and the fire axe fell from his hands. The bitter tears clouded his vision more than the smoke around him as he shuffled back behind the hose team and began to make his way out.

He could escape the wreckage of the cathedral. He could not escape the wreckage of his heart.

Rome, Italy

Renate Bächle had dragged Lawton Caine to Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. How she had gained the coveted tickets to hear the pope serve one of the two most beautiful Masses of the year, she would not say. She had merely given him a look from those icy blue eyes of hers that these days sometimes even held a twinkle. They had twinkled when he asked.

Lawton Caine, formerly Tom Lawton of the FBI, now a dead man with a new identity working for the U.N.’s ultrasecret Office 119, would ordinarily have skipped Mass entirely. He was a lapsed Catholic who liked being lapsed.

But this Midnight Mass…it was unlike any he had ever attended. There was no sense of urgency, no sense that a schedule must be met, no tired children longing for their beds and keeping parents preoccupied.

No, this had been a Mass devoted to true spirituality. Every moment had been treated as if it were the end in itself. Dignitaries from all over the world had shared in the solemnity and celebration, and Tom had walked out of the Basilica feeling as if he had for the very first time come in contact with the core of his Catholic faith. As if for that brief period he had stepped out of time into eternity.

In short, he’d been wowed.

Renate, too, had been wowed. For those moments, she had allowed herself to feel something she hadn’t felt in a long time: vulnerable. She had opened herself to the miracle that the Mass was supposed to be. Of course, that vulnerability couldn’t last long. Vulnerability seemed to be something she had virtually erased from her nature.

But after the Mass, she had mentioned to Lawton that she missed home and the Weihnachtsmärkte, the traditional Christmas markets set up in every German city and town. She let her thoughts drift back to memories of those festive squares, decorated with holiday lights, where carols, laughter and Glühwein flowed in equal measure. To his surprise, she had carried him away with her into the city of Rome, to a small German restaurant that was open all night. There they drank the traditional hot spiced wine, joined in the carols and ate bratwurst that, if it could not take the whole of her back home, could at least take her taste buds there.

Tom, she knew, was missing Miriam Anson and Terry Tyson, friends from his previous life with the American FBI and the closest thing he had to family. She hoped that the restaurant gave him at least some sense of a home.

They left at five in the morning and wandered the darkened streets of Rome, taking in the age of the place, the history that seemed to fill even the air. They spent some time at the Trevi Fountain, shivering in the cool air, receiving a blessing from a passing monsignor who paused to smile at them—probably thinking they were lovers. He made a swift sign of the cross over them, murmuring the Latin words: In nomine Patris, Filii et Spiritu Sancti.

Magical.

“Right about now,” Renate said, “my parents and the rest of my family are sitting in Mass back home.”

She rarely spoke of her family. She, too, was officially dead, as were all of the agents at Office 119. They were a small community of people without country, without family. Save for each other.

Tom reached out and squeezed her hand. She didn’t pull away.

All of a sudden, the magic shattered.

They heard a rumble and saw flames rise into the predawn sky. Almost at the same instant, both their pagers went off, hers with a shrill beeping, his with a demanding buzz.

They exchanged worried looks and hailed the first cab they could find. Renate slammed the door on vulnerability. It was time to work.

“The bombs exploded within minutes of each other,” the man they all called Jefe was saying. In his past life, Tom had known him as John Ortega, a fellow FBI agent. Now his name was unknown and unspoken. He was simply Jefe. Chief. “Midnight Mass in Boston. Early-morning Mass in Baden-Baden, and here in Rome. Noon Mass in Jakarta. All were timed for fifteen minutes after the hour. I guess they didn’t want to miss the late arrivals.”

“Baden-Baden.”

Renate whispered the name. Her face went from rosy to ashen in a single instant.

Jefe paused, his attention drawn from the other agents to Renate. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“My…family,” she said, breaking the unwritten code of silence about such things, a code enforced by the desire to protect loved ones left behind.

Color returned to Renate’s face, but it was not the glow of earlier that morning. Whatever warmth she had felt then was freezing now into a cold, killing resolve.

Tom met her eyes and pressed her shoulder. “Take it easy, Renate. You can’t do a damn thing right now.”

“Yeah,” said the chief. “Besides, the info is still scattered. We don’t know anything for sure yet.”

Renate’s eyes fixed on the chief. “My entire family was at the six o’clock Mass in Baden-Baden.”

From outside, the endless wail of sirens could still be faintly heard.

Intel continued to come in to the office, but it remained sparse for hours. The chaos in each stricken city was such that little information was being sent out of the affected areas. Everyone was too busy dealing with the death and destruction.

A huge rear-projection screen displayed a world map, political boundaries in blue, continents outlined in green. As the morning progressed, red dots appeared by more and more cities, as reports came in.

Large television sets built into another wall were tuned to CNN International, Al Jazeera and other European, Asian and American networks. Pictures of destruction began arriving, but little was actually known.