The Bone Chamber

Flickering candlelight appeared in several windows, the academy residents quickly adjusting to the power outage. Upstairs, just over the main entrance, the windows of Professor Santarella’s studio were dark. Griffin and Sydney climbed the marble stairs, walked the short distance down the hall to studio 257. The door was locked. Griffin took a pick from his toolbox, slipped it into the lock, and had the door open in less than a minute. Sydney used a blue LED light for her search, while Griffin stood guard at the window, watching the gate. She wasn’t even sure where to begin, there were so many papers and books strewn about, as though someone else had already been there and done a hasty search. She glanced over at the desk, where Francesca had been working on her laptop earlier in the day, thinking there might be something there. The laptop was gone. Which meant the professor had returned.

Or someone else had. No doubt, she thought, realizing that the professor wouldn’t need to throw her things around to find them. She’d know where to look. Someone else had definitely been there.

But that didn’t mean they’d found whatever they were looking for, and Sydney checked the long table, the desk, the walls. Nothing screamed, Look at me, the answer is here. More like there were too many answers, and it would take days to search through them.

Griffin stepped back from the window. “We have to go. Now.”

“I need more time.”

“Now,” he whispered. “Someone’s out there, distracting the guard from his post.”

She gave one last look around, saw the hand-drawn maps on the wall, the weird lines drawn across them. What the hell, she thought, and pulled both down, rolled them together. “Ready.”

They walked out the door, and Griffin turned the lock, then pulled it shut. When she started toward the stairs they’d come up, he stopped her, listened. Someone was ascending, the quiet of the footfall enough to warn her it was someone who didn’t want to be discovered. They hurried to the back stairs down the hall, past the kitchen. Griffin drew his weapon, then signaled for her to start down. They walked through the darkened archways of the cortile, slipped out past the fountain, and toward the guard in his shack. Sydney glanced back toward Francesca’s studio, saw a dim light bouncing off the wall as someone searched the room.

Griffin saw it, too. They walked up to the guard, and Griffin waved, told him something in Italian about the power. The guard looked up, nodded as they walked out. “Probably Dumas,” he said, when they’d gotten back in the van, as he picked up the phone to tell Giustino to restore the power in a few minutes. He didn’t want to do it too soon.

“How do you know it’s him and not the guys that came after us at the Passegiata?”

“Because the guard’s still alive. Adami’s men have no consciences.”

“Good point.”

Only when they were well away did he ask, “What was it you took from the wall?”

“A couple maps. Of what, I have no idea.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing in the time we had.”

“She’s on too many radars. That doesn’t bode well for her.”

“I’m more interested in what’s on her radar,” Sydney said.

Griffin looked over at her, then back at the road. “You might make a good spy, after all.”

“The word spy has connotations I don’t care for.”

“Secret agent, then.”

“Special agent.”

“FBI, through and through. Except when you’re busy breaking the rules.”

“Not rules. Guidelines,” she said, unrolling the parchment. Pale yellow moonlight washed the paper, but it was too dark to see.

Sydney turned on the small LED she’d used in the break-in. The light was amazingly bright for such a tiny device, and he glanced over as she studied it. “Sort of looks like a map of the sewer system,” he said.

“Why would a professor intent on ancient history have a map of the sewer system, unless it was the aqueduct, which I don’t think this is.”

Back at the safe house, she unrolled it on the kitchen table. “I’m beginning to think this might be maps of different columbaria,” she said, seeing the arrows drawn on it and the notations, trying to decide what it was Francesca found so important that she went to the trouble of mapping it out on her wall. “Her writing’s terrible.” She squinted, tried to make out the tiny notations scrawled at various locations.

“I’d settle for finding which place she might be heading.”

“If I had to guess,” Sydney said, pointing, “it would be here.”

“Why there?”

Sydney couldn’t forget the image of Alessandra’s disfigured face. “Because the note she jotted on here looks like it says ‘pyramid skull.’ Alessandra’s killer used that symbol for a reason.”

“As damned good a place to start as any. Call your Doc Schermer and see what he can dig up on this.”

“When do we leave?”

“In the morning. The professor has to sleep, too.”

But the professor wasn’t sleeping. She sat at her desk in the dark, even after the power had been restored, not sure if she should cry, scream, or laugh. How stupid to wait for dark to break into her own studio at the academy. Or go to the trouble of calling the guard away, to explain that she needed to enter without being seen, and could he just let her through the gate?

Someone had already been here.

The maps were missing from the wall.

And her laptop.

Neither was good without the other, but someone had them both.

It had taken her months and months to plot out the maps. They were important. But so was the info on her computer, and she seriously questioned her ability to find the final location of the Prince of Sansevero’s crypt without it. How had she been so careless as to leave it on her laptop-believing that a lone guard at the gate would keep it safe?

If it was so damned safe, why’d she feel it necessary to sneak in herself?

“Idiot,” she whispered. She should have grabbed the computer at the same time she grabbed the package Alessandra had sent. A lot of good that did her friend, getting involved with the government. Killed.

The thought of her own close call on the Passegiata with the men chasing after them brought her to her feet. Time enough to mourn her friend later. Right now she had to figure out what the hell she was going to do next. Her gaze strayed to the desk, where her laptop had been, her sight adjusting to the dark. A shaft of moonlight fell across the floor, washing the terra cotta tile in a pale blue glow. There beneath her desk, she saw what looked like a long dark shoestring upon the pattern of octagons…

Francesca crossed the room, reached down, picked it up. Not a shoestring, but the lanyard connected to a flash drive. She’d thought she’d left it in the laptop right after the FBI agent had knocked at her door this afternoon…It must have fallen off when whoever it was came in and stole her computer.

Not completely lost after all.

She slipped the lanyard around her neck, tucking the drive beneath her shirt, then grabbed her coat, locked her door, then walked down the hall. If anyone was looking for her, they’d search her studio or her apartment. She doubted anyone would bother looking in the TV room off the kitchen. As good a place to sleep as any, she figured. And then at first light, to the Columbarium of the Nile Frescoes.

There was little traffic in the predawn hours, and Griffin made good time on their drive. After the immense Baths of Caracalla, the long narrow road forked, and Griffin veered to the right. He glanced over at Sydney, who was studying the map. “Well?” he asked, as he drove the van slowly down the Via di Porta San Sebastiano, which was almost pitch dark with its high walls and dense foliage.

“According to Doc Schermer’s instructions, the entrance to the Columbarium of the Nile Frescoes is somewhere on the left past the Tomb of the Scipios.”

“And according to the map?”

“Assuming the professor is talking about the same columbarium, I’d say it puts the entrance just over there,”