Erin’s heart sped up.
“I suggest everyone make their peace with God, then.” Grigori’s lips curved into a familiar half smile. “On three, Rhun?”
Together they lifted the propeller higher and inched toward the back of the room. Jordan and Erin ducked under the blades and helped clear the path for the others’ burdened legs.
Once he was far enough away, Jordan waved them to lower the propeller to a mound of crates near the back of the space.
“What if there are bombs in these crates, too?” Rhun asked, his voice strained by the sheer weight of the engine blades.
Jordan swore, and Erin’s face paled.
“Life is always a risk.” Grigori began lowering his end. “I see no point in perishing while holding this.”
With no choice, doubting he could carry the weight another foot anyway, Rhun followed Grigori’s example. Together, they safely sat the propeller on the pile of boxes.
They all waited, as if expecting the worst.
But the crates held.
Satisfied, Grigori called to one of his acolytes, telling him to seek out the museum curator in the morning and explain what they had found. Rhun was grateful that Grigori had assumed the responsibility to ensure that the missile would be removed.
Over the next long, tense hour, they continued to search this room and others, hitting a series of false alarms, including a rusted truck muffler that Jordan’s detector sniffed out, which must have been exposed to a bomb long ago.
At some point, Erin’s hair had come loose from its fastening and dusty grime now streaked her cheeks. Rhun could see that the chaos around them weighed on her. She seemed to be more upset that so many precious objects were hidden away than that they had made no progress toward finding the book.
Grigori searched with his usual dogged patience, a counterpoint to his reckless daring. The Mad Monk was more careful and cunning than most believed.
Jordan’s detector beeped again.
Erin walked to his side. “Another car part?”
“Let’s hope it’s not another missile.” Jordan moved closer to the room’s corner.
Rhun followed.
The device led them to a crumbling wicker basket holding linens that might have once been white. Thick dust had settled on the top, and black mold ate at the basket’s sides.
Rhun pulled off the top sheet. A tablecloth. He set it atop a Louis XIV–era writing desk and reached for the next one.
“The readings are getting stronger,” Jordan said. “Be careful.”
Rhun lifted off another tablecloth, a pile of napkins, and a red Nazi flag.
Grigori tensed when the flag was unfurled to reveal the black Nazi swastika. How many of his countrymen had died under the waving of that flag? Rhun crumpled the cloth and tossed it aside.
Erin lifted out a linen pillowcase stuffed with oddly shaped objects. She set it on the floor and searched through it, item by item. She pulled out a book, but it was only a German code book.
Rhun closed his eyes. Was it the Gospel’s destiny to remain hidden? Perhaps things were better so. Perhaps the best outcome would be if they never found the book. He opened his eyes. No. They must find it, if only to keep it from the hands of the Belial.
Erin pulled blackened sardine tins out of the pillow sack—then she tensed.
“Jordan! Rhun! Look!” She lifted out a gray concrete fragment identical to the ones that had encased the book.
Jordan ran the sensor across the top. It chirped.
Excited, she removed more fragments until the pillowcase was empty. She shook her head. No book.
Rhun clutched his cross, attempted to hold back the tide of despair that accompanied the pain of burning silver.
Had they come this far only to be disappointed again?
Jordan poked through to the remainder of the basket with his device.
The sensor began to beep again, steady as a heartbeat.
8:31 P.M.
Erin pulled the last threadbare sheet from the basket. She lifted it like a burial shroud, holding her breath, fearful of what she might discover, yet just as excited. But what she found both disappointed and confounded her.
What is it?
Resting at the bottom of the basket was a featureless block of dull gray metal about a foot in width and a little more in length. She lifted it carefully. It felt heavy, like lead.
Jordan ran the explosives detector over it, sagging a bit. “This is definitely what set off my sensors. See the scorch marks? It must have been caught in the same sort of blast.”
Rhun turned away, bowed over his cross in frustration.
Erin refused to succumb to defeat. If nothing else, the oddity of the artifact intrigued her. Could this still be what they were searching for—not a book written by Christ, but a symbolic relic, a piece of ancient sculpture?
She recalled the words of Father Piers, spoken first in German, then translated by Jordan.
Es ist noch kein Buch.
It is not a book.
Is this what Piers meant? Or was this artifact just a piece of lead that had been contaminated by the fragments when it was tossed into the pillowcase with them?
Something about the fragments also nagged at her, something she’d never really had a chance to investigate. But now that she had more pieces of the puzzle …
She turned and handed the lead block to Jordan. “Hold this. I want to try something.”
She then gathered the broken bits of rubble into one of the ancient sheets and took them out into the hall, where she had more room. With the fragments still in her pockets, she might have enough pieces to reassemble the casing more fully. Maybe then she could read the Aramaic lettering impressed on one side of the fragments. At the moment it seemed like a better idea than poking through more piles of rotting junk.
She gestured for Rasputin’s forces to move aside, then spread the sheet across the floor. Grigori’s acolytes gathered around, watching her. She ignored their presence and lifted out the fragments. As she set about arranging the pieces into their original form, concentrating fully on her task, the sounds of Jordan and the priests rummaging next door receded.
Her world became the puzzle.
Sometime later, a hand touched her shoulder, making her jump.
“We found nothing else in there,” Jordan said. “We’re ready to move on to the next room.”
“I need another minute.”
Jordan crouched down beside her. “What do you have there?”
Bare overhead bulbs illuminated the fragments. She had organized them into a square of about one foot by one foot. Fitted together, they revealed a bas-relief of a drawing and impressions of Aramaic letters.
The left side of the bas-relief depicted what looked like a skeleton topped by the Alpha symbol. The right showed the profile of a well-fleshed man with the Omega symbol crowning his head. The two figures were crossed together in an eternal embrace, while a braided rope looped from around the man’s throat to the lower vertebrae of the skeleton, binding them together.