The Doomsday Key

Passing between the giant statues of Saint Peter and Saint Paul that stood guard before the basilica, she glanced at the inscription below the sword-bearing apostle Paul. In Hebrew, it read, "I can do all things in Him who strengthens me." She couldn't read Hebrew, but it had been her uncle Vigor who had taught her the words as a young girl. She took strength from both that message and the memory of her uncle.

With renewed determination, she climbed the steps to the entrance to Saint Peter's. She found the doors unlocked. Crossing the church portico, she passed into the cavernous nave of the basilica. It stretched almost two hundred meters ahead of her. The church was dark except for a scatter of flickering votive candles, and at the far end of the nave the papal altar shone with the glow of portable sodium lamps. Even from here, Rachel made out the crisscross of crime tape.

The explosion took place in the apse, the area behind the main altar. She headed down the center aisle, ignoring the wealth of art, architecture, and history all around her. Her attention was focused on her goal.

Reaching the main altar, she stepped to the edge of the crime scene. At this hour, the area was deserted. Over the past two days, the investigators and experts had gone over the site with their evidence bags, brushes, swabs, tubes, and vials of chemicals. It was already known that the explosive charge was a dense form of heptanitrocubane, a new class of powerful energetics.

A shiver passed through Rachel as she stared down at the scorched marble. It was the only sign left of the actual attack. Even the blood had been cleaned off. But the floor was still marked with tape, displaying splatter patterns and estimating force trajectories of the blast. On the far side of the apse, a chalk outline marked where Father Marco Giova

Rachel had read the report on the young priest. He'd been a student of her uncle, a fellow Vatican archaeologist. According to the file, he'd spent the past decade in Ireland, researching the roots of Celtic Christianity, studying the early fusion of pagan rituals with the Catholic faith. He concentrated specifically on the mythos surrounding the Black Mado

Why would such an archaeologist be targeted? Or was it random? Had her uncle and his student just been at the wrong place at the wrong time?

None of it made sense.

Rachel swallowed and turned. They'd found her uncle crumpled by the papal altar, blown by the blast wave, barely conscious.

Not wanting to contaminate the crime scene, Rachel circled around the outside of the taped-off area. She climbed the two steps to the left side of the apse. There was little room. She edged along the monument to Pope Paul III, with its statues of the virtues, Justice and Prudence, done in the likeness of the deceased pope's sister and mother.

Her feet slowed.

What am I doing here?

Rachel suddenly grew too conscious of the tomblike quiet of the basilica, of the weight of ages and death, of the stacks of tombs around and below her. It didn't help that across the apse, on the far side of the crime scene, stood the sepulcher of Pope Urban VIII. A bronze statue of the pope sat atop the monument, his hand raised in blessing. But below his feet rested his tomb, and rising from the top of the tomb was a bronze skeleton. An upraised bony hand was frozen as it wrote the name of the deceased pope on an open scroll.

Rachel shivered at the sight.

She was not normally so superstitious, but with Uncle Vigor so near death himself...What if she lost him?

She wanted to turn away, but she found her gaze lingering on the macabre statue, the symbol of death. Then she remembered. A cold wash swept through her, raising goose bumps over her arms.

Death.

She mumbled aloud the one word Vigor had kept repeating in his delirium. "Morte."

She studied the bronze statue crouched atop the tomb. What if Vigor had been trying to tell them something, something he knew?

Rachel hurried back around the taped-off crime scene to the other side of the apse. She tipped up on her toes to peer more closely at the statue, but though she examined it carefully, she still almost missed it. The brown leather cord was the same color as the aged bronze.

She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and climbed up on the edge of the tomb to reach it. Grasping the cord, she freed a tiny satchel that was half-hidden behind the bony palm of the Grim Reaper. She dropped back down with her prize. Was her discovery of any significance? Or was this some bit of decoration left by a supplicant or tourist?

She noted a mark burned into the leather. It held no significance. It was a crude spiral, like some magic charm.

Disappointed, she turned the small leather pouch over. Her breath caught in her throat as she saw what was burned into the leather on this side.

A circle stamped with a cross.

She had seen this mark before.

In the forensics report on the body of Father Marco Giova

The same symbol had been branded into the forehead of the dead priest. It had to be significant, but what did it mean?

Rachel knew one place to look for an answer. She teased open the pouch and dumped the contents into her palm. She frowned down at the single object. It looked like a small blackened twig. She lifted it closer-and immediately realized her error.

The twig had a fingernail.

Horrified, she almost dropped it.

What she held wasn't a twig.

It was a human finger.

2:55 P.M.

Washington, D.C.

Painter sat at his desk in his windowless office and rolled a bottle of aspirin between his palms. A dull ache had taken root between his eyeballs, presaging a full-blown migraine. He shook the aspirin bottle and wished for something stronger, perhaps something chased by a tall single-malt Scotch.

Still, he would trade it all for one neck massage by his girlfriend. Unfortunately, Lisa was off on the West Coast, visiting her rock-climbing brother in Yosemite. She wouldn't be back for another week. On his own, he would have to settle for the comforts of Bayer Extra Strength.

For the past hour he'd been analyzing data and reports, most of which were still posted on the giant LCD wall monitors that surrounded his desk. As he glanced at one of the screens, he wished for the thousandth time that his office had an actual window. Maybe it was that part of him that was half Mashantucket Indian, but he needed some bit of co

But that was never going to happen.

His office, along with the rest of Sigma Command, was buried beneath the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall. The covert facility occupied the Castle's old WWII-era bomb shelters. The location had been picked both for its convenient access to the halls of power and for its proximity to the Smithsonian Institution's many research facilities.

At the moment, Painter would've traded it all for one window. Still, this had been his home for the past few years, and he was very protective of it. After last year's assault on the facility, Sigma was still recovering. The damage had gone much deeper than just scorched walls and destroyed equipment. Washington politics was a complicated web of power, ambition, and bitter enmities. It was a place where the weak were torn apart by the strong. And fair or not, the assault had damaged Sigma's position among U.S. intelligence forces.

To make matters worse, Painter suspected that the true masterminds of the attack were still at large. The man who had led the assault, a division chief for the Defense Intelligence Agency, had been dismissed as a rogue agent, but Painter wasn't so sure. To pull off the assault, someone had to have been supporting him, someone buried even deeper within the web of Washington politics.