The Bone Chamber

out of there, isn’t he?”

The last thing Griffin needed was to chase after a college student and a professor, because he didn’t doubt for a second that if Xavier took off, Francesca wouldn’t be far behind him. He stood, gave Sydney the signal to watch over Francesca, then walked to the restroom, finding Xavier standing just outside it. His eyes red-rimmed, he leaned against the wall next to the pay phone, and Griffin felt a twinge of guilt for not trusting the kid. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Xavier took a breath, stood a bit straighter. “I’m fine.”

“It’s not easy losing someone you’re close to. I know,” he said, trying but failing to keep from thinking about those he’d lost, and now there was Tex and he wondered if he was safe…

“We weren’t close. Not like that. I mean, I liked her, she just wasn’t interested, you know?”

Griffin merely nodded, since it seemed the right thing to do at the moment.

“She was sort of married to this thing. Wanted to know all the answers. I admired her a lot.”

“Me too,” Griffin said.

“You knew her?”

“For about a year. I worked at-for her father at one time.”

“I didn’t know her father. I met her at the university…All these crazy ideas I had, all this conspiracy stuff I wrote about for my class at UVA, no one believed me. When she talked about it, it was like she knew, really knew this stuff went on. She was the only one who didn’t think I was crazy.”

Griffin glanced at the door, hoped no one would wander their way and interrupt the kid’s flow. “What sort of things did she talk about?”

“I appreciate what you’re doing, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to trust you. The professor said you work for the government.”

“In the end, I work for myself.”

“What does that mean?”

What it really meant was that when the shit hit the fan, the government wasn’t about to take the blame for anything Griffin and his crew did, not something he was about to relay to Xavier, or anyone else for that matter. “That means I’m my own boss. I answer to me.” As if, he thought. “I do what’s right, and what is needed to finish the job.”

“And your job is?”

“To find out who killed Alessandra, and rescue my friend. And to do that, I need to know what she was involved in, who she was involved with.”

“That’s it? You’re only here to help solve her murder?”

“That’s it.” As long as one didn’t count that if the map did exist, and it led to the Templar treasure, and there really were some sort of bioweapons that could come from finding it, and that if it fell into Adami’s hands, he’d use it to manipulate world governments even more than he was currently doing. Something else that bothered him about this was that they had yet to learn who Adami was working for. “But there is one thing you need to understand. I need your cooperation in all things if you want to stay alive. We’re working against some very bad people, who won’t hesitate to kill you, if given the chance. We have very little time.” He looked at his watch. “Six hours before they kill my friend if we don’t find whatever this is that is buried and bring it to them. So any background on what you and Alessandra were working on can only help.”

Xavier nodded. “I was helping her with some of the research when all these weird things started happening. We assumed it was the government,” he said, with a dark look.

Since Griffin wasn’t even aware the kid had existed until now, he seriously doubted the government was involved-at least not the legitimate government. “What sort of weird things?”

“Like we were being followed, or I’d hear clicks on my telephone, like someone was listening in. And then someone shot into my apartment, and the police called it a gang-related drive-by, but I’m not so sure. Alessandra said that she was being followed, too, and that’s when she asked me to stop, back off, you know? But by then, I was too far into it. My cousin works for the Department of the Underground here in Naples, and with his help, I found all this information on the tunnels, and we figured that the prince had to have used the underground caverns to hide the map. My job was to come to Naples, and explore the tunnels to find the one that we’d pinned down, then wait for Professor Santarella to meet up with me here as soon as she got back from some dig she was on.” He looked away, tried to compose himself. “I’ve been here for two weeks, and the entire time, Alessandra’s been dead, and I didn’t even know it…”

“What happened the last time you saw her?”

It took a moment for Xavier to shake off his grief. “By then there was no doubt that she was being followed, and so we borrowed my girlfriend’s car, you know, to throw them off. Alessandra dropped me off at a restaurant, and I slipped out the back, took a taxi to the airport. She stayed on, because she had to do some more research in the States. She was supposed to meet up with that forensic anthropologist who had been working out on that same dig. The one where Alessandra had discovered that they were searching for the first key. Then she was supposed to meet up with some scientist to find out…well, if there was any way this stuff could be true. The biblical plague thing. And then she was going to follow me out here.”

“Did you hear from Alessandra after you arrived in Naples?”

“One call when I got here to let her know I’d arrived safe. She said not to worry if I didn’t hear from her for a bit, because she was going to lay low, and if her phone was being tapped, she didn’t want to lead anyone to me. But I do know this. Whatever it was she was looking for, she’d found it, and she was sending it home, so it would be there when she got back.”

Which verified why Adami’s men had been watching the ambassador’s residence. “Were you on a cell phone when you called her?”

“No, I used a pay phone at the airport. But I called her cell phone.”

Alessandra’s phone had no doubt been compromised, and they’d heard every word. He wondered how long they’d been watching her. “And do you have any idea what she was about after you left for Naples?”

“Like I said, research. She wanted to talk to some scientist about the viability of some virus or plague laying dormant for a couple thousand years, and what would happen if it was suddenly released into the wild, or disturbed. She wasn’t sure if what she was looking for might contain these old plagues, or if they were maybe somewhere else.”

“Do you know the name of this scientist?”

“Dr. Raj? Raja? Something like that.”

“Could it have been Balraj?”

“That was it.”

“Any idea where they were to meet?” he asked, even though he knew the answer.

“Yeah. The Smithsonian,” Xavier said.

“Why the Smithsonian? The Templar display?”

“She wasn’t there for the display, not really. She’d seen all that stuff before, but she knew there was lots of security. She wanted someplace public, just in case she was being followed.”

And a lot of good that did her. The real security guard was probably killed the moment that Alessandra and the microbiologist entered the Smithsonian, and Alessandra’s killer needed a cover. “Any idea if she found what she was looking for? This information on the plagues?”

“You might check with Francesca, since she’s the one that Alessandra sent the flash drive to.”

“She sent what?”

“You know. A mini hard drive? Francesca said she found it stuffed into the spine of some book that Alessandra had mailed to her.”

Griffin wondered how many times he’d be blindsided on this case, and it was all he could do to keep his temper in check. Last thing he needed was to spook the kid, because he wanted to throttle the professor. “Go drink your coffee. We don’t have much time.”

Xavier walked out, joined Sydney and Francesca, and Griffin watched Francesca’s face as Xavier took a seat beside her. Relief. That boded well, he decided, and he called McNiel and related what Xavier told him about why Alessandra wanted to meet with Dr. Balraj, the query into how many centuries a plague or virus could survive under optimal conditions.