The Sacred Blood

buildings throughout Vatican City.

Though Donovan acted outwardly enthusiastic about Martin’s offer to arrange meetings for the following morning with the archbishop in charge of the Pontifical Commission, as well as the inspector general of the Corpo della Gendarmeria (Vatican City’s police force in charge of general security and criminal investigations), he was most interested in performing an investigation of his own—an investigation that would commence at the heart of Vatican City: St. Peter’s Basilica.

Donovan knew little about the cunning enemies he was dealing with. Nevertheless, of one thing he was certain. The critical information they’d been given could only have come from someone inside Vatican City. And earlier that afternoon, he’d very discreetly sprung a trap to test his hypothesis.

***

Donovan didn’t use his new key card to enter St. Peter’s Basilica, since his last after-hours visit there back in June had left a digital trail in the security center’s activity log. And what needed to be done here required utmost furtiveness.

At six thirty, he came in the grand front entrance, just like every other tourist. And for the next half hour, he slowly paced the voluminous nave and transepts, reacquainting himself with the shrines and statues, which spoke to him like old friends.

Soon the docents announced the basilica’s seven p.m. closing and began shepherding everyone outside. That’s when Donovan nonchalantly slipped through the balustrade leading to the deep grotto set at the foot of the main altar, beneath Bernini’s towering baldachino.

He moved quickly down the semicircular marble steps, past St. Peter’s shrine and the Confessio set before it, back beneath the mammoth white plaster-covered arches supporting the basilica’s main floor. Deeper he went into the underground graveyard where late popes and dignitaries had been laid to rest in massive sarcophagi and elaborate crypts, until he came to the tomb of Benedict XV.

Looking back over his tracks, he made sure he still had a straight sight line to the Confessio and St. Peter’s shrine. Then he crouched beside the mammoth cippolino marble sarcophagus topped by an incredibly lifelike bronze effigy of the late pope laid in state.

It took another fifteen minutes before he heard a docent descend the steps for a final run-through. Staying low, Donovan quietly shifted around the tomb’s base to stay out of view as the docent roved past, whistling.

Five minutes later, the sconces throughout the grottoes dimmed to blackness, and security lights glowed gently in the necropolis’s main corridors.

Now he would wait.

38

******

If the four-course meal served up at the Apostolic Palace—antipasti, braciole, zuppa di faro, and linguine al pescatore—hadn’t made Charlotte’s eyelids heavy, the two glasses of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo certainly had. She’d endured the most stressful day of her life, short of the hellish Monday back in March when her oncologist first told her she had bone cancer.

So while Father Donovan sorted out the administrative details of his return to Vatican City, she’d returned to the dormitory, emotionally drained and physically spent. Though it violated her cardinal rule for skipping multiple time zones—immediately acclimate to the local time and let your body adjust—she surrendered to a late afternoon nap.

When the alarm clock went off around six p.m., she hit the snooze button three times, then shut it off altogether.

Her sleep was deep, yet far from peaceful.

Images of Evan’s murder kept cycling through her subconscious— oddly, in black and white, as if it were a movie from the forties: the strange gunman disguised as a lab tech . . . the gun arcing up at Evan . . . the silent shot ...Evan’s head snapping forward in slow motion ... a gush of black liquid ... falling ... falling ...

She could see herself, there in the office, screaming through the deafening silence. Helpless.

Wake up... WAKE UP!

. . . The gunman turns to her, two words growling from his twisted lips: “The bones!” ...

Then Donovan sitting in the Volvo, calmly saying, “The bones? Why would they want the bones?” ’

...Cut to chromosomes furiously replicating and dividing in microscope view to the roar of unearthly shrieking and howling . . . souls tormented by hellfire . . .

Silence.

Next: blackness giving way to blinding light.

A skeleton on a stainless steel table.

Gouged ribs.

Ground-up bones around the wrists and feet.

Broken knee bones.

...A leather whip streaming through the air—WHOOOOSH—its barbed thongs tearing across bare flesh . . . blood spilling out from long, ragged gashes . . . again ... slashing ... again ... ripping ... again ... shredding ...

A sturdy wooden beam laid upon rocks . . . a bloodied, semi-naked figure splayed across it . . . indiscernible shapes shifting through the surrounding thick haze . . . limbs pulled and stretched over the wood . . . sinewy fingers clamping down . . . more hands clutching jagged spikes . . . silent screams . . . pressure on the wrists . . . a hammer cutting the air . . .

WA K E UP !

Charlotte awoke with a start.

Though the images in her nightmare had instantly disappeared, the pressure on her wrists had not—a sharp pain bolted up to her shoulders.

There was an instant where she thought she was still dreaming. But the pain—the terror—was all too real.

When she tried to scream, an enormous hand came down over her mouth and nose. She detected some kind