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Gregory spoke over him. “There’s something inside, but we can’t tell what it is. We didn’t want to open it without you.” He held up a tablet, showed them the screen of the x-rayed crate. They saw something that looked like a cross wedged against a side of the crate.
Ajax took Cassandra’s hand. “Open it. Now.”
The wood was old, very old, and came apart easily. Cassandra saw the flash of metal. Maccio lifted an object out of the shifting sands that nearly filled the crate.
Gregory examined it. “It’s nothing but an old soil core, to collect soil samples.” He started to throw it away.
Ajax said, “Wait, careful, Gregory. There’s something inside of it.”
Maccio set the soil core on a table, and Ajax teased out a piece of paper.
“Hurry, Ajax, hurry.”
He carefully unrolled it, looked at her, eyes gleaming. “It’s a map. It’s Mother’s handwriting.”
She looked down to see the map was covered with topographic images, with dozens of circular wavy lines radiating from the center. Ajax said, “The concentric lines keep getting smaller and that indicates altitude. It’s a mountain. Turn it over, Cassandra, carefully now.”
On the back was a handwritten note. It, too, was in her mother’s writing, but the letters looked somehow strange, curved and looped, unlike her mother’s spare, straight cursive, and the words looked somehow ancient, which was ridiculous. Still, her hands trembled as she read aloud:
The answers to the true resting place of the Ark are in the pope’s letters. My beloved children, use this knowledge wisely.
“But where is it?” Dr. Gregory asked.
Smiling, Cassandra carefully turned the map back over and pointed to the legend in the corner. “Longitude and latitude. Ajax, it’s Castel Rigone. The Ark is at home.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Venice, Italy
Kitsune walked through the Piazza San Marco wearing a cream-colored straw hat over a long blond wig, shorts, and sandals, and following the tail end of a tour group. The guide stopped in front of the basilica and began droning on about Saint Mark. Kitsune watched the pigeons congregate in the square, flocking about tourists throwing bread for them.
Children ran screaming into the flocks of birds, making them scatter.
Drummond and Caine were due in an hour, which meant backup in the shape of the Carabinieri should be there soon. Michaela the rule follower would have it all set up.
Kitsune had arrived early, as always, in order to scope out the square, locate possible escapes. And there were multiple ways out of the piazza. After she was satisfied she’d found an appropriate bolt-hole, she sat down at a café in the middle of the piazza, at a table in the shade, near one of the many mini-orchestras playing Italian music for the tourists.
She would wait. She took off her sunglasses and began her watch.
She would make sure Drummond and Caine were safe, even if Kitsune herself was not. She owed it to them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mike wasn’t much impressed with Venice until their water taxi went around a promontory and into a world of sprawling estates with brick walls and small paths leading from the individual docks. Then their driver motored into the heart of the city and Mike didn’t think she’d ever seen anything so utterly surreal, like a movie set with too many extras roaming everywhere. Everything was so very old, so precariously situated, yet this incredible place had endured.
And it sure wasn’t Omaha. Mike laughed at that thought and raised her face to the hazy sky, and breathed in the lovely smell, the smell of magic. Nicholas smiled, took her hand. “This is your second trip to Europe, but alas, you’re still not here as a tourist. When this is done, Mike, we’ll come back.”
“You promise?”
“Oh yes,” he said. He’d also told her the magic smell was gone in August, when the weather was hot and ripe, but she didn’t think she’d mind it. Everything was like an impressionist painting and she’d been plunked into it.
Adam was hunkered down, his laptop out. He looked up. “Kitsune was right to tell us not to take the airport vaporetto—it would take an hour to get to the hotel. At least this way, we’re going fast.”
Nicholas’s hair was blown back from his face, and he was grinning like a maniac. “The water taxis are much more fun, anyway. The vaporetti are too slow.”
Lia said, “It was nice of Kitsune to send a boat for us.”
Mike pulled herself away from the glory of Venice and opened her gun case, took out her Glock. She slipped it into its leather holster and attached it to her belt on her right hip. Nicholas raised a brow. “Don’t you think it’s a bit early to arm yourself, Mike?”
