People filled the pews and congregated in the transepts on either side of a long, narrow nave. Though heated, the air bore enough of a chill that coats were worn in abundance. Many of the worshipers carried shopping bags, backpacks, and large purses. All of which meant that his task of finding a bomb, or any weapon, had just become a million times harder.
He casually strolled through the edge of the crowd. The interior was a cadre of niches and shadows. Towering columns not only held up the roof, they provided even more cover for an assailant.
He was armed and ready.
But for what?
His phone vibrated. He retreated behind one of the columns, into an empty side chapel, and quietly answered.
“Services here are over,” Stephanie said. “People are leaving.”
He had a feeling, one that had overtaken him the moment he entered.
“Get over here,” he whispered.
ASHBY WALKED TOWARD THE MAIN ALTAR. THEY’D ENTERED the basilica through a side entrance, near one inside staircase that led up to the chancel and another that dropped to a crypt. Row after row of wooden chairs stretched from the altar toward the north transept and the main entrances, the north wall perforated by an immense rose window, dark to the disappearing day. Tombs lay everywhere among the chairs and in the transepts, most adorned with inlaid marbles. Monuments extended from one end of the nave to the other, perhaps a hundred meters of enclosed space.
“Napoleon wanted his son to have the cache,” Caroline said, her words sputtering with fear. “He hid his wealth carefully. Where no one would find it. Except those he wanted to find it.”
“As any person of power should,” Lyon said.
Rain continued to fall, the constant patter off the copper roof echoing through the nave.
“After five years in exile, he realized that he would never return to France. He also knew he was dying. So he tried to communicate the location to his son.”
“The book that the American gave you in London,” Lyon said to Ashby. “It’s relevant?”
He nodded.
“I thought you told me Larocque gave you the book,” Caroline said.
“He lied,” Lyon made clear. “But that doesn’t matter anymore. Why is the book important?”
“It has a message,” Caroline said.
She was offering too much, too fast, but Ashby had no way of telling her to slow down.
“I think I may have deciphered Napoleon’s final message,” she said.
“Tell me,” Lyon said.
SAM WATCHED AS THORVALDSEN ABANDONED MEAGAN AND she plunged back into the rain, running toward where he stood hidden by one of the many juts from the outer wall. He pressed his back against cold, wet stone and waited for her to round the corner. He should be freezing, but his nerves were supercharged, numbing all feeling, the weather the least of his concerns.
Meagan appeared.
“Where are you going?” he quietly asked.
She stopped short and whirled, clearly startled. “Damn, Sam. You scared me to death.”
“What’s going on?”
“Your friend is about to do something really stupid.”
He assumed as much. “What was that clamor I heard?”
“Ashby and two others broke into the church.”
He wanted to know who was with Ashby, so he asked. She described the woman, whom he did not know, but the second man matched the man from the tour boat. Peter Lyon. He needed to call Stephanie. He fumbled in his coat pocket and found his phone.
“They have trackers in them,” Meagan said, pointing to the unit. “They probably already know where you are.”
Not necessarily. Stephanie and Malone were busy dealing with whatever new threat Lyon had generated. But he’d been sent to babysit Thorvaldsen, not confront a wanted terrorist.
And another problem.
The trip here had taken twenty minutes-by subway. He was a long way from Paris central, in a nearly deserted suburb being drenched by a storm.
That meant this was his problem to deal with.
He replaced the phone in his pocket.
“You’re not going in there, are you?” Meagan asked, seemingly reading his mind.
Even before he said it, he realized how stupid it sounded. But it was the truth. “I have to.”
“Like at the top of the Eiffel Tower? When you could have been killed with all the rest of them?”
“Something like that.”
“Sam, that old man wants to kill Ashby. Nothing’s going to stop him.”
“I am.”
She shook her head. “Sam. I like you. I really do. But you’re all insane. This is too much.”
She stood in the rain, her face twisting with emotion. He thought of their kiss, last night, underground. There was something between them. A connection. An attraction. Still, he saw it in her eyes.
“I can’t,” she said, her voice cracking.
And she turned and ran away
THORVALDSEN CHOSE HIS MOMENT WITH CARE. ASHBY AND HIS two companions were nowhere in sight, vanished into the gloomy nave. Darkness outside nearly matched the dusky interior, so he was able to slip inside, unnoticed, using the wind and rain as cover.
The entryway opened in nearly the center of the church’s long south side. He immediately angled left and crouched behind an elaborate funerary monument, complete with a triumphal arch, beneath which two figures, carved of time-stained marble, lay recumbent. Both were emaciated representations, as they would have appeared as corpses rather than living beings. A brass plate identified the effigies as those of 16th century Francois I and his queen.
He heard a clamor of thin voices, beyond the columns that sprouted upward in a soaring Gothic display. More tombs appeared in the weak light, along with empty chairs arranged in neat rows. Sound came in short gusts. His hearing was not as good as it once was, and the rain pounding the roof wasn’t helping.
He needed to move closer.
He fled his hiding place and scampered to the next monument, a delicate feminine sculpture, smaller than the first one. Warm air rushed up from a nearby floor grate. Water dripped from his coat onto the limestone floor. Carefully, he unbuttoned and shed the damp garment, but first freed the gun from one of the pockets.
He crept to a column a few meters away that separated the south transept from the nave, careful not to disturb any of the chairs.
One sound and his advantage would vanish.
ASHBY LISTENED AS CAROLINE FOUGHT THROUGH HER FEAR and told Peter Lyon what he wanted to know, fishing from her pocket a sheet of paper.
“These Roman numerals are a message,” she said. “It’s called a Moor’s Knot. The Corsicans learned the technique from Arab pirates who ravaged their coast. It’s a code.”
Lyon grabbed the paper.
“They usually refer to a page, line, and word of a particular manuscript,” she explained. “The sender and receiver have the same text. Since only they know which manuscript is being used, deciphering the code by
