Sign Of The Cross (2 page)

The duo used to run the MANIACs, an elite counterinsurgency team comprised of the best soldiers that the
M
arines,
A
rmy,
N
avy,
A
ir Force, and
C
oast Guard could find. Whether it was personnel recovery, unconventional warfare, counterguerilla sabotage, or foreign defense, they’d seen more shit than a proctologist. And caused their share of it, too. Clandestine operations all over the globe. Missions that no one else could handle. Or be entrusted with. When they got an assignment, it came straight from the top brass. Right from the Pentagon. And the reason was simple: the less people who knew about the MANIACs, the better. They were the government’s secret weapon. The boogeymen the U.S. wouldn’t admit to.
Couldn’t
admit to.

And that’s what had Payne worried. If he’d been arrested for something he’d done with the MANIACs, would the Pentagon come to his aid? Could they afford the negative publicity?

So far it had been three days and still no word.

Three days and counting…

Orvieto, Italy

(sixty-two miles northwest of Rome)

Dr Charles Boyd dropped his hammer and searched for his canteen. He was in decent shape for a fifty-eight-year-old, but the heat from the floodlights was brutal. Sweat poured off his scalp like rain.

‘Good heavens!’ he complained.

Maria Pelati smiled but kept working. She was half her professor’s age and possessed twice the energy. And while he suffered in the traditional garb of an archaeologist – khaki pants, cotton shirt, hiking shoes – she wore a T-shirt and shorts.

They’d spent the past few days together burrowing into the 900-foot plateau that lifted Orvieto high above the vineyards of the Paglia Valley, a location so impenetrable that it was used as a safe haven by the popes of the Middle Ages. Papal documents prove that the Italian popes transformed Orvieto into the
vacation Vatican
, their home away from home during the most tumultuous era in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Sadly, papal scribes were banned from describing any specifics for fear that their descriptions could be used by their enemies to plan an attack. Still, that didn’t stop rumors from spreading.

According to legend there was supposed to be a city built
underneath
the city – the Catacombs of Orvieto – which was used to store the Church’s most important documents and protect its most precious artifacts. Most experts dismissed the Catacombs as a fairy tale, the creation of a drunk monk from the fourteenth century. But not Dr Boyd. Not only did he believe in their existence, he used all of his free time to search for them.

‘
Professore?
When I was little, my father used to speak of the Catacombs, though he never talked about them in real terms. He always considered them to be like Atlantis.’ Pelati took a deep breath and brushed the hair out of her eyes, something she did when she was nervous. ‘Well, sir, I was wondering, why are you sure that the Catacombs exist?’

He held her gaze for several seconds, then eased the tension with a half smile. ‘Trust me, my dear, you aren’t the first person to question me. I mean, who in their right mind would waste their time searching for the Catacombs? I might as well be fishing for the Loch Ness Monster.’

She laughed. ‘Just so you know, it’s probably cooler near Loch Ness.’

‘And just so you know, I’m not the least bit crazy.’

‘I never said that you were.’

‘But you’ve considered it. You’d be crazy if you didn’t.’

She brushed the hair out of her eyes again. ‘There’s a very fine line between genius and insanity, and I’ve never seen you cross that line… Of course, you
are
rather elusive. You still haven’t told me about the Catacombs yet.’

‘Ah, yes, the Catacombs. Tell me, my dear, what do you know about the Roman Empire?’

‘The Roman Empire?’ she asked, puzzled. ‘I know quite a bit, I guess.’

Without saying another word, he handed her a series of documents from his fanny pack, then took a seat in the shadows of the rear wall, waiting for the reaction that he knew would come.
‘Santa Maria!’
she shrieked. ‘This is Roman!’

‘Hence my question about the Empire. I thought I made that rather clear?’

Pelati shook her head, then returned her attention to the documents. At first glance they seemed to illustrate an elaborate system of tunnels that were hidden underneath the streets of Orvieto, yet it wasn’t the maps or the illustrations that perplexed her but rather the language itself. The document was handwritten in a form of Latin that she was unable to translate.

‘Is this authentic?’ she demanded.

‘That depends on your perspective. You’re holding a photocopy of a scroll that I found in England. The photocopy is obviously fake. The original is quite real.’

‘In
England
? You found the scroll in
England
?’

‘Why is that so surprising? Julius Caesar spent some time there. So did Emperor Claudius.’

‘But what does that have to do with the Catacombs? I mean, the popes came to Orvieto a thousand years after the fall of Rome. How could this be related?’

Pelati knew that Pope Gregory XI died of natural causes in 1378, leaving a vacancy that was filled by Pope Urban VI. Many cardinals claimed that he was improperly selected, and they demanded a second election. When the next outcome differed, the Catholic Church severed, splitting into two factions, with each supporting a different pope. Italy, Germany, and most of northern Europe recognized Urban VI, while France and Spain supported Clement
VII
.

This rivalry, known as the Great Schism of the West, divided Catholicism for almost forty years and in the process put the papal courts in danger – not only from outsiders but from each other. For that reason, the Italian popes spent much of their time in Orvieto, which was virtually impervious to attack because of its location on the plateau. And it was there, in the depths of the tufa stone, that the legendary Catacombs were supposedly built.

Boyd smiled at the confused look on his pupil’s face. Refusing to make it easy on her, he said, ‘Tell me, my dear, have you ever been to the Roman ruins in Bath?’

She growled in frustration. ‘No, sir. Why do you ask?’

‘Ah,’ he sighed, remembering the quaint town on the River Avon. ‘There you are in the middle of the English countryside, yet you’re surrounded by relics from ancient Rome. It seems so surreal. Do you know what the most amazing thing is? The baths still work. The warm springs still bubble up from the ground, and the architecture still stands proud. Ancient pillars rising to the heavens from the magical waters below. It is somewhat amazing, if you think about it.’

Confused by his tale, Pelati grimaced. ‘Not to be rude, but what are you implying?’

‘Think about it, my dear. The popes of the 1300s used the Catacombs for protection. However, that doesn’t mean that they
built
them. The ancient Romans were well ahead of their time. Correct? I figure if they were able to build bathhouses that still work two thousand years later, then they certainly could’ve built some tunnels that were still standing seven hundred years ago.’

‘Wait! So that’s why there were no records of their construction. They were already in place when the pope came to town?’

He nodded, pointing to the documents in her hand. ‘When I found the original scroll, I assumed it was a hoax. I mean, how could it possibly be real? Then I had it tested, and the results were conclusive. The scroll predated the Schism by more than a thousand years, proving once and for all that the Catacombs actually existed. Furthermore, they
weren’t
built for the popes of the Middle Ages. They were built by the ancient Romans.’

‘A date,’ she demanded. ‘Do you have an exact date for the scroll?’

‘As you know, carbon dating isn’t
that
specific. The best I could come up with was an era.’ Boyd took a sip of water, trying to prolong the suspense. ‘According to my tests, the Catacombs of Orvieto were built during the life of Christ.’

Nearly 300,000 tourists flock to Kronborg Castle every year, but none of them had ever seen this before. And those that saw it wished they hadn’t.

By the time Erik Jansen was discovered, his torso was grayish white, and his legs were light purple, caused by postmortem lividity. Birds dined on his flesh like a country buffet.

A group of students spotted Jansen across the courtyard and assumed that he was a historical exhibit. So they walked closer, marveling at all the wonderful little details that made him seem lifelike: the color of his flesh, the horror on his face, the texture of his sandy-brown hair as it blew in the wind.

They crowded around him, begging to have their picture taken with the display. That is until one of them felt a drop. A single drop. That was all it took. One drop of blood and chaos erupted. Kids were wailing. Parents were screaming. Teachers scurried for help.

The local police were called to the scene but were in over their heads. They were used to car accidents and petty crimes, not murders. Certainly nothing of this magnitude. Yet that was to be expected in a quiet place like Helsingør. It sat on the northwestern coast of Sjaelland Island across the øresund from Hälsingborg, Sweden, away from the city life of Copenhagen. The last time anyone was brutally killed here was back in 1944, and
that
had been done by the Nazis.

Still, they shouldn’t have made the mistakes that they made. Some of them were inexcusable.

The first squad arrived by boat, landing on the same shore as the killers. Since the castle’s beach was private, the cops should’ve cordoned off the area, protecting all the information that was scattered in front of them. Clues about the murder. The number of assailants. Their approximate sizes. Their time of departure. All of it was there in the sand, just waiting to be found. But not for very long, because the commanding officer failed to think ahead, opting to sprint across the beach like a soldier at Normandy, soon followed by the rest of his men.

In a flash, the evidence was buried.

Of course, their next error was far worse. The type of screwup that occurs when people are crying, sirens are blaring, and there’s no time to think. When the cops reached the body, they heard the story about the dripping blood and assumed that Jansen was still alive. His temperature should’ve told them otherwise. Same with the color of his skin. But as it was, they ripped the cross out of the ground, hoping to bring him back to life with
CPR
, yet all they managed to do was destroy evidence. Crucial evidence. The kind of evidence that could’ve stopped the killers before they could strike again.

Ironically, their effort to save a life
guaranteed
that others would be killed.

Nick Dial was an American, and that made him very unpopular in certain parts of the globe. So did his career. He ran the newly formed Homicide Division at Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization), the largest international crime-fighting organization in the world, which meant he dealt with death all over the globe.

Simply put, he coordinated the flow of information between police departments anytime a murder investigation crossed national boundaries. All told he was in charge of 179 different countries – filled with billions of people and dozens of languages – yet had a budget that was dwarfed by an American school district.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Interpol is their role in stopping crime. They rarely send agents to investigate a case. Instead they have local offices called National Central Bureaus in all the member countries, and the NCBs monitor their territory and report pertinent information to Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France. From there the facts are entered into a central database that can be accessed via the Interpol’s computer network. Fingerprints,
DNA
, terrorist updates, the works. All of it available twenty-four hours a day.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t always enough. Sometimes the head of a division (Drugs, Counterfeiting, Terrorism, etc.) was forced to hop on a plane and take control of a case. Possibly to cut through red tape. Or to handle a border dispute. Or to deal with the media. All the things that Nick Dial hated to do. He figured in his line of work the only thing that really mattered was
justice
. Correcting a wrong in the fairest way possible. That was his motto, the creed that he lived by. He figured if he did that, then all the other bullshit would take care of itself.

Dial arrived in Helsingør in the late afternoon. He didn’t know much about the case – other than someone had been crucified and the president of Interpol wanted him there – but that was the way he preferred it. He liked forming conclusions based on personal observations, instead of relying on secondhand information.

Most investigators would’ve rushed to examine the body, but that wasn’t the way Dial worked. He preferred to understand his surroundings before he dealt with the crime, especially when he was in an unfamiliar country. If the murder had been committed in France, he would’ve gone right to the corpse because he had lived there for the past ten years and knew how French people thought.

But here, he was a little unsure of the landscape. He needed to understand Denmark – and Danes in general – before he could understand the crime. So instead of studying the victim, Dial headed down a long corridor and searched for someone to talk to. Not to interrogate, but someone to chat with. Someone to give him the lay of the land. It took three attempts until he found someone who spoke English.

‘Excuse me,’ he said as he flashed his Interpol badge. ‘May I ask you a few questions?’

The man nodded, half intimidated by Dial’s credentials and half by his stare. Dial was in his early forties and had a face that looked like it was chiseled out of granite. Clean lines, thick cheekbones, green eyes. Short black hair with just a hint of gray. Not overly handsome, yet manly as hell. Black stubble covered his features even though it wasn’t enough to conceal his chin. His massive, movie-star chin. It sat at the bottom of his face like a tribute to Kirk Douglas.