'Ancient stone circles, henges, barrows, dolmens, hill forts. While Stonehenge might be the most famous, it's only one among several hundred such sites spread across the British Isles.'
'But what interested Father Giovanni about your specific excavation?' Gray asked, seeking to draw the professor closer to the core of their investigation.
Wallace cocked one brow. 'Ah, well, that you will have to see for yourself. But I can tell you what led me to this region.'
'And what was that?'
'A single entry in an old book. An eleventh-century text nicknamed the Doomsday Book.'
Kowalski stepped to their table. He carried a tall glass of pilsner in each hand, drinking from both. He paused in midsip upon hearing Wallace's words. 'Doomsday,' he said. 'Great. Like we don't have enough problems already.'
11:05 A.M.
Seichan walked the full length of the square. In her mind, a map formed of the local area. Every detail, brick by brick, every street, alley, building, and parked car. All became fixed in her head.
She noted two men dressed in hunting gear as they left the pub. She stalked them as they ambled over to a truck in the parking lot. She made sure they drove away.
Afterward, she found a good vantage point from which to observe the Kings Arms Hotel. It was the doorway of a closed gift shop. The alcove allowed her to shelter against the occasional stiff gust and to keep out of direct sight. On her right, the shop's window displayed a pastel-colored diorama of small ceramic animals dressed in little outfits: pigs, cows, ducks, and, of course, tiny bunnies...lots and lots of bunnies. The Lake District was the home of Beatrix Potter and her creation Peter Rabbit.
Despite her need to watch the hotel, Seichan's attention drifted to the shop window. She remembered very little about her childhood, and what she did remember she wished she could forget. She had never known her parents and was raised in an orphanage outside of Seoul, South Korea. It had been a squalid place with few comforts. But there had been a few books, including Beatrix Potter's, brought years ago by a Catholic missionary. Those books and others were her true childhood, a place to escape the hunger, abuse, and neglect. As a young girl, she had even made a toy bunny out of a scrap of burlap stuffed with dry rice. To keep it from being stolen, she had kept it hidden behind a loose board in the wall, but eventually a rat found it and ate out the stuffing. She had cried for a solid day, until one of the matrons beat her, reminding her that even sorrow was a luxury.
In the doorway, Seichan turned her back to the window display, shutting out those memories. Still, it wasn't just the past that pained her. Through the window, she watched Gray converse with an older man in tweed garb. It had to be Dr. Wallace Boyle. Seichan studied Gray. His black hair was longer, lankier across his forehead. His face had also grown harder, making his cheekbones stand out. Even his ice-blue eyes had a few more crinkles at the edges-not from laughter, but from the passing of a hard couple of years.
Standing in the cold, dusted with snow, Seichan remembered his lips. In a single moment of weakness, she had kissed him. There had been no tenderness behind it, only desperation and need. Still, she had not forgotten the heat, the roughness of his stubble, the hardness of his hold on her. Yet in the end it had been meaningless to both of them.
The hand in her coat pocket touched the scar on her belly.
They had just been dancing a game of betrayal.
Like now.
A vibration in her pocket alerted her to a call.
Finally.
It was the real reason she had stayed out in the cold. She removed the phone and flipped it open.
'Speak,' she said.
'Do they still have the package?' The voice on the phone was calm and assured but crisp at the edges, with an American accent. It was her sole point of contact, a woman named Krista Magnussen.
Seichan bridled at having to take orders from anyone, but she had no choice. She had to prove herself. 'Yes. The artifact is secure. They're meeting with the contact right now.'
'Very good. We'll make our move once they're at the excavation site in the mountains. The team set the charges in place last night. The fresh snowfall should cover up any evidence.'
'And the objective?'
'Remains the same. To light a fire under them. In this case, literally. The archaeological site is now more of a liability than an asset. But its destruction must appear natural.'
'And you have that covered.'
'We do. Leaving you free to focus fully on your objective.'
Seichan read the threat behind the words. There would be no excuse for failure. Not if she wanted to live.
As she listened to the mission specifics, she continued to watch the hotel window. Not focusing on Gray any longer, she stared at the Italian woman seated beside him. Rachel smiled at something the professor said, her eyes sparking warmly even across the cold distance.
Seichan held nothing against Rachel Verona-but that would not stop her from poisoning the woman.
11:11 A.M.
Rachel listened as the conversation continued. While the professor's history lesson was intriguing, she sensed something deeper going on here-in regard to the story of Father Giovanni and something else, something yet unspoken. The man's gaze kept lingering on her, not lasciviously, but more like he was sizing her up. She had a hard time maintaining eye contact with him.
What was going on?
'I still don't understand,' Gray said beside her. 'What does this Doomsday Book have to do with your discovery up in the mountains?'
Wallace held up a hand, asking for patience. 'First of all, the book's true name wasn't Doomsday, but rather Domesday. After the old English root dom, which meant 'reckoning' or 'accounting.' The book was commissioned by King William as a means to assess the value of his newly conquered lands, a way to assign tax and tithing. It mapped out all of England, down to every town, village, and manor house, and took a census of the local resources, from the number of animals and plows in the fields to the number of fish in its lakes and streams. To this day, the book remains one of the best glimpses of life during that time.'
'That's all fine,' Gray pressed, plainly wanting to hurry him along. 'But you mentioned that a single entry led to your current excavation. What were you talking about?'
'Ah, now there's the rub! You see, the Domesday Book was written in a cryptic form of Latin, compiled by a single scribe. There remains some mystery as to why this level of security was necessary. Some historians have wondered if there might not have been a secondary purpose to this great compilation, some secret accounting. Especially as a few of the places listed in the book are ominously marked with a single word in Latin that meant 'wasted.' Most of those locations are concentrated in the northwest region of England, where the borders were constantly changing.'
'By the northwest,' Rachel asked, 'you mean like here, the Lake District?'
'Exactly. The county of Cumbria was rife with border wars. And many of the spots listed as wasted were sites where the king's army had destroyed a town or village. They were noted because you couldn't tax what no longer existed.'
'Really?' Kowalski asked, scowling at his two glasses of ale. 'Then you never heard of the death tax?'
Wallace glanced from Kowalski to Gray.
'Just ignore him,' Gray recommended.
Wallace cleared his throat. 'Closer study of the Domesday Book revealed a bit of a mystery. Not all of the wasted sites were the result of conquest. A scattering of references had no explanation. These few were marked in red ink, as though someone had been tracking something significant. I sought some explanation and spent close to ten years on one of those entries, a reference to a small village up in the highland fells that no longer exists. I searched for records to this place, but it was as if they'd been expunged. I almost gave up until I found an odd mention in the diary of a royal coroner named Martin Borr. I found his book up at Saint Michael's.'
He waved toward the hilltop church at the edge of town. 'The book was discovered in a bricked-off cellar during a renovation. Borr was buried up in the cemetery at Saint Michael's, his possessions given over to the
