Map of Bones Read Free Page A

shock arc from her fingertips to his.
    He stood up, too horrified to sit.
    A thin trail of smoke rose from Mandy’s open mouth.
    Her eyes were rolled back to white, but already they were smoldering black at the corners.
    Dead.
    Jason, muted by terror, searched the cathedral. The same was happening everywhere. Only a few were unscathed: a pair of young children, pinned between their parents, cried and wailed. Jason recognized the unaffected. Those who had not partaken of the Communion bread.
    Like him.
    He fell back into the shadows by the wall. His motion had gone momentarily unnoticed. His back found a door, one unguarded by the monks. Not a true door.
    Jason pulled it open enough to slip inside the confessional booth.
    He fell to his knees, crouching down, hugging himself.
    Prayers came to his lips.
    Then, just as suddenly, it ended. He felt it in his head. A pop. A release of pressure. The walls of the cathedral sighing back.
    He was crying. Tears ran cold over his cheeks.
    He risked peeking out a hole in the confessional door.
    Jason stared, finding a clear view of the nave and the altar. The air reeked of burnt hair. Cries and wails still echoed, but now the chorus came from only a handful of throats. Those still living. One figure, from his ragged garb apparently a homeless man, stumbled out of the pew and ran down a side aisle. Before taking ten steps, he was shot in the back of the head. One shot. His body sprawled.
    Oh God…oh God…
    Biting back sobs, Jason kept his eyes focused toward the altar.
    Four monks lifted the golden sarcophagus from its shattered case. The slain priest’s body was kicked from the altar and replaced by the reliquary. The leader slipped a large cloth sack from beneath his cloak. The monks opened the reliquary’s lid and upended the contents into the bag. Once empty, the priceless sarcophagus was toppled to the floor and abandoned with a crash.
    The leader shouldered his burden and headed back down the central aisle with the stolen relics.
    The archbishop called to him. Again in Latin. It sounded like a curse.
    The only response was a wave of the man’s arm.
    Another of the monks stepped behind the archbishop and raised a pistol to the back of the man’s head.
    Jason slunk down, wanting to see no more.
    He closed his eyes. Other shots rang out across the cathedral. Sporadic. Cries suddenly silenced. Death stalked the cathedral as the monks slaughtered the few remaining survivors.
    Jason kept his eyes closed and prayed.
    A moment before, he had spotted the coat of arms upon the leader’s surcoat. The man’s black cloak had parted as he’d lifted his arm, revealing a crimson sigil beneath: a coiled dragon, the tail wrapped around its own neck. The symbol was unknown to Jason, but it had an exotic feel to it, more Persian than European.
    Beyond the confessional door, the cathedral had grown stone silent.
    The tread of booted footsteps approached his hiding place.
    Jason squeezed his eyes tighter, against the horror, against the impossibility, against the sacrilege.
    All for a sack of bones.
    And though the cathedral had been built around those bones, and countless kings had bowed before them, even this very mass was a Feast to those long-dead men—the Feast of the Three Kings—one question rose foremost in Jason’s mind.
    Why?
    Images of the Three Kings were found throughout the cathedral, done in stone, glass, and gold. In one panel, the Wise Men led camels across a desert, guided by the Star of Bethlehem. In another, the adoration of the Christ child was depicted, showing kneeling figures offering of the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
    But Jason closed his mind to all of this. All he could picture was Mandy’s last smile. Her soft touch.
    All gone.
    The boots stopped outside his door.
    He silently cried for an answer to all this bloodshed.
    Why?
    Why steal the bones of the Magi?

1
BEHIND THE EIGHT BALL
    JULY 24, 4:34 A . M .
FREDERICK, MARYLAND
    T HE SABOTEUR had