Creed fumbled blindly for Monk’s hand and gripped it tight. Monk covered it with his other palm.
“John…”
One last breath escaped. Creed’s hand slipped away. Monk tried to grab it back, as if that might help, but the man’s eyes went glassy.
“No,” Monk moaned.
Painter leaned down to offer what could only be cold comfort—but a new noise intruded. He swung around, dropping low. It came from the smoky hole.
He watched a group crawl into sight, climbing out of the hole, coughing and staggering.
One figure searched around, then stumbled out into the garden. “Gray…”
4:22 P.M.
They’d only had seconds.
Gray had known the woman would blow the incendiary charge as soon as she was outside. So as the last soldier vanished up the tunnel, he had sprinted over to the Celtic cross and spun its wheel. The monks would have engineered some mechanism for sending the tombs back into hiding.
It was a natural enough guess.
Spin the wheel, spin the floors.
He had been right.
Turning the wheel flipped the tombs back below and rolled the spiral designs up.
As the floors rotated, Gray yelled for Kowalski to toss the suitcase bomb down into the cavity below. He wasn’t sure if it would be enough protection, but they had no other option. Afterward, they fled to the walls and dropped to their stomachs.
When the explosion blew, the circular plates of the floor jumped up, dancing on flames—then crashed back down. The heat seared like a blast furnace. Smoke choked, but most of it got sucked up the tunnel as up a chimney flue.
It was the conflagration below that remained the danger.
The fires baked the stones under them. Off to the side, the bronze spiral began to glow through the smoky pall.
Gray called for them to retreat to the tunnel.
Crouched there, Gray heard a firefight echoing down from above—then the gunfire suddenly ended.
He didn’t know what was happening. He heard a few more shots and then someone yelled. He knew that voice. He almost shook with relief.
Monk.
As the heat grew worse, Gray had led the others up the tunnel and back out into the open. Bodies lay everywhere. French soldiers surrounded them. He stumbled into the garden.
“They’re with us!” Painter shouted, pushing forward.
Gray struggled to understand what his boss was doing here, how he could be here. But explanations would have to wait. Searching around, Gray spotted a familiar stone-and-gold object rolled up against a bush.
The canopic jar.
Relieved, he rushed over, dropped to his knees, and collected it up.
The lid was still in place.
Painter joined him.
“It’s the Doomsday key,” Gray explained.
“Keep it safe.” Painter turned as Seichan joined them. Gray’s boss seemed unsurprised at her being there.
Seichan faced Painter and shook her head.
“We had to attempt it,” he told her cryptically.
“It still failed. I warned you from the start that the Guild would never trust me fully again.” Seichan turned her back and stared into the garden toward the one victim who hadn’t truly escaped. “And I shouldn’t have trusted the Guild.”
Rachel stood numbly, her face turned up to the sky. They were all free, but she was still trapped.
Even now, as Gray watched, her legs trembled.
The heat, the stress, it had worn her body past endurance.
With her face still in the sun, she went boneless and collapsed.
10:32 P.M.
Troyes, France
Hours later, Gray sat on a bench in the corridor outside Rachel’s hospital room. Monk and a French internist were inside. Rachel had been hooked to an intravenous drip and pumped full of a cocktail of antibiotics. Though she was out of danger, it had been a close call. She’d had to be evacuated by helicopter to the medical facility in Troyes.
But at least she was awake again.
Gray picked at the bandage around his hand. His wounds had been debrided, stitched up, and wrapped. But he knew he was far from healed.
A door opened down the hall. He watched Seichan step out of her room. She wore a hospital gown and carried a pack of cigarettes. She glanced down the hall, clearly wondering where she could smoke in a hospital. She turned in his direction and suddenly froze.
She didn’t seem to know what to do with herself. He suspected she would have to get accustomed to that state. The Guild would be hunting for her. The United States still had orders to capture her. It had taken all of Painter’s skill to keep her presence secret. He was still off putting out a thousand fires, holding the world at bay.
But they couldn’t hide forever.
None of them.
Gray patted the seat next to him.
For half a minute, Seichan remained standing, then finally walked over. Half her face was in a bandage. She didn’t sit. She stood with her arms crossed. Her eyes were slightly glazed by morphine. She stared toward Rachel’s door.
“I didn’t poison her,” she said in a hoarse whisper. So soon after surgery, it wasn’t good for her to talk. But Gray knew she had to.
“I know,” Gray said. “She’s got double pneumonia. Too long in the rain, too much stress, a low-grade viral infection.”
Seichan sank to the bench.
Painter had already explained most of the story. A month ago he had approached Seichan, tracked her down using the implant. She hadn’t discovered the bug on her own. In fact, according to Painter, she’d been shocked, angry, and hurt by the betrayal when he finally told her. But he offered her a chance, convinced her to work for him, to attempt one last time to infiltrate the Guild. Painter had caught wind of the pending order to haul her in for interrogation. He knew she still offered the best chance to discover who ran the Guild.
She had agreed and waited for the right mission to arise to prove herself to the Guild, to try to insinuate her way back into their fold. She never suspected it would drive her into conflict with Gray. But once committed, there was no turning back.
“I had to maintain the ruse,” Seichan said, referring to both the poisoning and her overall subterfuge. “I switched thermoses in Hawkshead. I pretended to dose Rachel, but then afterward I destroyed the biotoxin. I knew there were spotters watching our every move. My phone was being monitored. Plus I already had suspicions about Wallace Boyle.”
Gray imagined that those suspicions had less to do with any insight about the professor and more to do with her usual state of constant paranoia, but in this particular case, they were well placed.
“It was only when we reached France, when we all split up, that I had a chance to get away from Wallace, to steal a disposable phone. After I killed the assassins in the woods—”