The Crimson Code. Rachel Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ down. As he reached down, trying vainly to push himself free from eight hundred pounds of bloodstained granite, he realized he was going to die. Protruding from his belly was the stem of a chandelier that, seconds earlier, had hung from the ceiling. When he tried to move it, mind-shattering pain exploded through his body. Kirsten, a doctor, would have told him that the metal had pierced his spine.

      But Kirsten was not there. She ought to be. They had been sitting together, hand in hand, listening to the traditional Christmas morning readings, when the world had turned upside down in a flash of fire and thunder and darkness. But, reaching around as best he could, he felt no one. No one…except a young girl. Stretching his arm out, he felt the tiny hand.

      His niece’s hand. He knew it was her, because the wrist still bore the charm bracelet he had given her that morning. One gift, he had said, then the rest after Mass. The rest would never be given, for her hand was limp in his, and he could find no pulse.

      Tears prickled at his eyes as he reached to the other side, above him, anywhere, hoping against hope to spend his last moments touching Kirsten. But it was not to be. She might lie only a meter away, or she might be buried beneath the stone that had crushed his legs. Regardless, he could not find her.

      And so he took his niece’s hand once more in his, the limp fingers the last human contact he would carry with him into eternity.

      Boston, Massachusetts

      Kevin Daugherty worked with the fury of a man possessed. He had felt the rumble through the floor of the firehouse an instant before the thundering boom had shattered the windows around him. Like the other men of his company, he had resented the Christmas Eve shift. He had wished he could be at Midnight Mass with his wife, Mary, and their two children, his parents, brothers, nieces and nephews. Midnight Mass had always been a Daugherty family tradition.

      Well, now he was at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Not as a worshipper, but as a fireman. As a son, brother, husband and father, looking for his family. Crouching beneath the wall of water being thrown up by the hose team behind him, he and his partner kicked aside broken glass, and lifted shattered and still burning pews, hoping for any sign of life in the blackened faces.

      Kevin’s grandfather had told stories about bomb-shattered buildings in France, back in the early weeks after D-day, and a second cousin in New York had helped to pick through the wreckage of the World Trade Center. A four-year veteran, Kevin had seen his share of burned-out buildings. But nothing could have prepared him for what he saw now.

      “Daugherty, you have to get out of there.” His captain’s voice crackled over the radio.

      “There may be survivors,” Kevin answered. “My family is in here somewhere. I’ve got to find them.”

      “We’re going to lose the building,” the captain said. “You have to get out. Now. That’s an order, Daugherty.”

      Kevin shook his head and kicked aside burning missals, clearing a path to the next row of pews, until he felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him. He turned and saw his partner, Gerry O’Brien, eyes wide behind the breathing mask.

      “We gotta go, Kev,” Gerry said, pointing upward. “It’s coming down.”

      Kevin looked up at the roof section above him, watching it swell and recede as if breathing with the heat of the flames. It would not last another two minutes, he knew. Once a building started to breathe, it gave way. It was basic firefighting training: Get out.

      But his wife was here somewhere, along with Kevin Junior and little Becky. He couldn’t just leave them to the merciless fire, leave them to be nothing but charred forms to be pulled out days later, when the embers had cooled enough for rescue teams to pull apart the wreckage. Mary and Kevin Junior and Becky couldn’t be hauled out like so many slabs of barbecue.

      “I’m not going,” Kevin said. “I have to find them.”

      “Anyone still in here is dead already,” Gerry said. “And we’re gonna be dead, too. We’re pulling out. Now.”

      “You go,” Kevin said.

      Gerry shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way, Kev. You stay, I stay. I go, you go. Are you going to kill me, too, along with them?”

      And there was the truth of it. Kevin’s partner, and the hose team, wouldn’t abandon him. If he stayed in the inferno, they would die with him. He had no right to heap their families’ grief atop his own. Slowly, slowly, his fingers opened and the fire axe fell from his hands. The bitter tears clouded his vision more than the smoke around him as he shuffled back behind the hose team and began to make his way out.

      He could escape the wreckage of the cathedral. He could not escape the wreckage of his heart.

      1

      Rome, Italy

      Renate Bächle had dragged Lawton Caine to Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. How she had gained the coveted tickets to hear the pope serve one of the two most beautiful Masses of the year, she would not say. She had merely given him a look from those icy blue eyes of hers that these days sometimes even held a twinkle. They had twinkled when he asked.

      Lawton Caine, formerly Tom Lawton of the FBI, now a dead man with a new identity working for the U.N.’s ultrasecret Office 119, would ordinarily have skipped Mass entirely. He was a lapsed Catholic who liked being lapsed.

      But this Midnight Mass…it was unlike any he had ever attended. There was no sense of urgency, no sense that a schedule must be met, no tired children longing for their beds and keeping parents preoccupied.

      No, this had been a Mass devoted to true spirituality. Every moment had been treated as if it were the end in itself. Dignitaries from all over the world had shared in the solemnity and celebration, and Tom had walked out of the Basilica feeling as if he had for the very first time come in contact with the core of his Catholic faith. As if for that brief period he had stepped out of time into eternity.

      In short, he’d been wowed.

      Renate, too, had been wowed. For those moments, she had allowed herself to feel something she hadn’t felt in a long time: vulnerable. She had opened herself to the miracle that the Mass was supposed to be. Of course, that vulnerability couldn’t last long. Vulnerability seemed to be something she had virtually erased from her nature.

      But after the Mass, she had mentioned to Lawton that she missed home and the Weihnachtsmärkte, the traditional Christmas markets set up in every German city and town. She let her thoughts drift back to memories of those festive squares, decorated with holiday lights, where carols, laughter and Glühwein flowed in equal measure. To his surprise, she had carried him away with her into the city of Rome, to a small German restaurant that was open all night. There they drank the traditional hot spiced wine, joined in the carols and ate bratwurst that, if it could not take the whole of her back home, could at least take her taste buds there.

      Tom, she knew, was missing Miriam Anson and Terry Tyson, friends from his previous life with the American FBI and the closest thing he had to family. She hoped that the restaurant gave him at least some sense of a home.

      They left at five in the morning and wandered the darkened streets of Rome, taking in the age of the place, the history that seemed to fill even the air. They spent some time at the Trevi Fountain, shivering in the cool air, receiving a blessing from a passing monsignor who paused to smile at them—probably thinking they were lovers. СКАЧАТЬ