The Judas Strain - James Rollins [11]
Vigor studied the stone floor. “What carving?”
“Lean closer. Feel here.”
Concentrating, Vigor obeyed. He felt more than saw, with his fingertips, like a blind man reading Braille. There was a faint inscription in the stone.
Vigor didn’t even need Balthazar’s assessment to know the carving was ancient. The symbols were as crisp as scientific notation, but this was no physicist’s scrawl. As the former head of the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology, Vigor recognized the significance.
Balthazar must have read his reaction. His voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. “Is it truly what I think it is?”
Vigor sat back and rubbed the dust from his fingertips. “A script older than Hebrew,” he mumbled. “The first language if you were to believe the stories.”
“Why was it drawn here? What does it signify?”
Vigor shook his head and studied the floor, another question growing. Again the dragon sigil appeared, but only in his mind’s eye, lit by his worry rather than the glow of ultraviolet. Upon the stone, the dragon had coiled around the inscription, as if protecting it.
His friend’s earlier words returned to Vigor. We would have missed this if not for the dragon painting on the floor. Maybe the dragon was not so much protecting the ancient carving as meant to illuminate it, to cast a spotlight upon it.
But whose eyes was it meant for?
As Vigor pictured the twisted dragon, he again felt the weight of Jakob’s body in his arms, smoking and charred.
In that moment Vigor knew the truth. The message was not meant for another Dragon Court operative, another traitor like Prefect Alberto. It was meant to draw someone intimately tied to the history of the Dragon Court, someone who would know its significance.
The message had been left for him.
But why? What was its meaning?
Vigor slowly stood. He knew someone who might be able to help, someone he had avoided calling for the past year. Until now, there had been no need to keep in touch, especially after the man had broken up with Vigor’s niece. But Vigor knew a part of his reticence rested not just with broken hearts. The man, as much as this tower, reminded Vigor of the bloody past here, a past he wanted to forget.
But now he had no choice.
The dragon sigil glowed before his mind’s eye, full of dread warning.
He needed help.
JULY 4, 11:44 P.M.
Takoma Park, Maryland
“GRAY, CAN YOU empty the kitchen trash?”
“Be right there, Mom.”
In the living room, Commander Gray Pierce picked up another empty bottle of Sam Adams, another dead soldier of his parents’ July Fourth celebration, and chucked it into the plastic bin under his arm. At least the party was winding down.
He checked his watch. Almost midnight.
Gray gathered another two beer bottles off the front entry table and paused before the open doorway, appreciating a bit of breeze through the screen door. The night smelled of jasmine, along with a lingering hint of smoke from fireworks exploded by the block party. Off in the distance, a few whistles and crackles continued to punctuate the night. A dog howled from the yard behind his mother, aggravated by the noise.
Only a few guests remained on the front porch of his parents’ Craftsman bungalow, lazing about on the porch swing or leaning on the railing, enjoying the cool night after the usual swelter of a Maryland summer. They had watched the fireworks from the perch there hours earlier. Afterward, the partygoers had slowly dwindled away into the night. Only the most diehard remained.
Like Gray’s boss.
Director Painter Crowe leaned against a post, bent next to the teaching assistant who worked for Gray’s mother. He was a dour young man from the Congo who attended George Washington University on a scholarship. Painter Crowe had been inquiring about the state of hostilities in the man’s homeland. It seemed even at a party, the director of Sigma Force kept a finger on the