After a minute, he returned to his mistress’s side. They spoke with their heads bowed. Once her lieutenant stepped back, Guan-yin faced Gray.
“Zhuang has heard news from Macau,” she said.
Gray tensed for the worst.
“My daughter still lives.”
Thank God.
“But Ju-long has whisked her off the peninsula, out of China.”
“Where—?”
Her scarf failed to muffle the dread in her voice. “To North Korea.”
Gray pictured that reclusive country, an isolated no-man’s-land of macabre desolation and dictatorial madness, a place of strict control and impenetrable borders.
“It’ll take an army to get her out,” he mumbled to the smoke and fire.
Guan-yin clearly heard him, but instead said, “You never answered my earlier question.”
He faced her, finding only a terrified mother staring back.
“Do you love my daughter?”
Gray could not lie, but fear choked him silent. Still, she read the answer in his eyes and turned away.
“Then I will give you that army.”
SECOND
SAINTS & SINNERS
Σ
7
November 18, 1:34 P.M. ORAT
Aktau, Kazakhstan
“It looks like the ocean.”
Monsignor Vigor Verona stirred at the words of his niece. He lifted his nose from a DNA report. He kept returning to the papers over and over again, sensing he was missing something important. The results had been faxed from the genetics lab just before the early-morning flight to this westernmost port city of Kazakhstan.
He took a deep breath and pulled himself back to the present, needing a break anyway. Maybe if I clear my head, I’ll figure out what is nagging me.
He and Rachel were seated at a small restaurant overlooking the Caspian Sea. Beyond the windows, its wintry waters crashed against the neighboring white cliffs for which the small town of Aktau had been named. The team from Sigma was scheduled to meet them here in less than an hour. Together, they’d take a chartered helicopter from here to the coordinates Father Josip had hidden inside the inscribed skull.
“Once upon a time, the Caspian was indeed an ocean,” Vigor said. “That was five million years ago. It’s why the Caspian still has salt in it, though only about a third of the salinity of today’s oceans. Then that ancient ocean became landlocked, eventually drying out to become the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea . . . and where we’re headed next, the Aral Sea.”
“Not that there’s much sea left in the Aral Sea,” Rachel said with a smile. She had traded her Carabinieri uniform for a red turtleneck sweater, jeans, and hiking boots.
“Ah, but that’s not the fault of geology, but the hand of man. The Aral Sea used to be the fourth-largest lake in the world, about the size of Ireland. But then the Soviets diverted its two main rivers for irrigation back in the sixties, and the sea dried up, losing ninety percent of its water, becoming a salty, toxic wasteland, dotted by the rusting hulks of old fishing boats.”
“You’re not selling this upcoming tour very well.”
“But Father Josip must believe the place is important. Why else summon us there?”
“Besides the fact that he might be crazy? He’s vanished for almost a decade.”
“Perhaps, but Director Crowe has enough confidence in this venture to supply us with field support.”
She leaned back and crossed her arms, scowling her dissatisfaction. After the attack at the university, she had been against this venture entirely, even threatening to lock him up in order to keep him in Rome. He knew the only reason they were seated at the edge of the Caspian Sea was because of Sigma’s conditional support.
Yet Director Crowe hadn’t explained why he had agreed to supply this help—not to Vigor or Rachel—which was troubling to both of them. The director had only expressed that he might need their help afterward as a cover story for a mission in a restricted area of Mongolia.
Mongolia . . .
That fact intrigued him.
His eyes drifted again to the DNA report concerning the relics—the skull and the book—but Rachel reached across and shifted the papers to the side.
“Not this time, Uncle. You’ve been looking at those for hours, and only growing more frustrated. I need you to focus on what’s ahead.”
“Fine, but then let me talk it out. I’m sensing I’m missing something critical to all this.”
She shrugged, conceding.
“According to the initial report compiled by the lab, the DNA is consistent with an East Asian ethnicity.”
“You mentioned that already. The skin and the skull came from the same guy, someone from out in the Far East.”
“Right, but from the autosomal study that was faxed overnight, the lab compared our sample to various known ethnicities. From that, they were able to compile a rank of the top possibilities of race.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Han Chinese, Buryats, Daur, Kazakhs—”
Rachel interrupted, “As in the people of Kazakhstan.”
“Right. But at the top of the ranking was Mongolian.”
She sat straighter. “Where Painter’s team wants us to go.”
“That’s what has got me so obsessed. I know there’s a connection I’m missing.”
“Then let’s start there,” she said. “Did Director Crowe say exactly where his team was planning to head in Mongolia?”
“Somewhere in the mountains northeast of their capital . . . the Khan Khentii Mountains.”
“And that’s a restricted area.”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“It’s both a nature preserve and historically significant.”
“Why historically?”
Vigor opened his mouth to answer—then went cold as a frightening possibility struck him. For a moment, the insight blinded him to his surroundings, so filling his brain he could not see.
“Uncle . . .”
His vision snapped back, as he recognized the mistake he’d made. “I’ve been looking at the trees and missed the forest . . .”
He reached into his pocket and took out his phone. He dialed the DNA lab and demanded to speak to Dr. Conti. Once the researcher came on the line, he told him what he needed done to confirm his fear. It took some convincing, but Conti finally relented.
“Check those Y chromosome markers,” Vigor finished. “And get back to me as soon as you can at this number.”
“What’s wrong?” Rachel asked as he hung up.