Free Innocent Blood by James Rollins, Rebecca Cantrell Page A

the heart of a thumbnail-size mechanism.
    The spring tightened and caught.
    He smiled his satisfaction and closed the two halves of the mechanism, forming what appeared to be the metal sculpture of an insect, with six jointed legs and an eyeless head. The latter was spiked with a needle-sharp silver proboscis and crowned by the gentle sweep of a pair of feathery brass antennae.
    Blessed with steady hands, he shifted to another corner of his workspace and tweezed up the disarticulated forewing of a moth from a bed of white silk. He lifted the iridescent petal toward the glow of his halogen work light. The moth’s scales shone silvery green, barely hiding the delicate lace of its internal structure, marking the handsome pattern of Actias luna, the luna moth. With a total wingspan of four inches, it was one of the world’s largest moths.
    With patient and clever motions, he fitted the fragile wing into tiny clips lining the brass-and-silver thorax of his mechanical creation. He repeated the same with the other forewing and two more hind wings. The mechanism inside the thorax held hundreds of gears, wheels, and springs, waiting to beat life back into these beautiful organic wings.
    Once finished, his eyes lingered on each piece. He loved the precision of his creations, the way each cog caught another, meshed into a larger design. For years he had made clocks, needing to see time measured on a device as it was not measured on his own body. He had since moved his interest and skill toward the creation of these tiny automatons—half machine and half living creatures—bound for eternity to his bidding.
    Normally he found peace in such intricate work, settling into easy concentration. But this night, that perfect calm escaped him. Even the soft tinkling of a neighboring fountain failed to soothe him. His centuries-old plan—as intricate and delicate as any of his mechanisms—was at risk.
    As he made a tiny correction upon his latest creation, the end of the tweezers quivered, and he tore the delicate forewing, sprinkling iridescent green scales upon the white silk. He uttered a curse that had not been heard since the days of ancient Rome and threw the tweezers to his glass desktop.
    He drew in a long breath, searching again for that peace.
    It eluded him.
    As if on cue, the telephone on his desk rang.
    He rubbed his temples with his longer fingers, seeking to work calm into his head from the outside. “ Sì, Renate?”
    “Father Leopold has arrived in the downstairs lobby, sir.” The bored tone of his beautiful receptionist strummed through the speaker. He had rescued her from a life of sexual slavery on the streets of Turkey, and she repaid him with loyal, yet indifferent, service. In the years he had known her, she had never once expressed surprise. A trait he respected.
    “Allow him up.”
    Standing, he stretched and walked to the bank of windows behind his desk. His company—the Argentum Corporation—owned the tallest skyscraper in Rome, and his office took up its uppermost floor. The penthouse looked out upon the Eternal City through windowed walls of ballistic glass. Underfoot, the floor was polished purplish-red marble, imperial porphyry, so rare it was found in only one site in the world, an Egyptian mountain the Romans called Mons Porphyrites . It had been discovered during Christ’s lifetime and became the marble of kings, emperors, and gods.
    Fifty years before, he had designed and engineered this spire with a world-renowned architect. That man was dead now, of course. But he remained, unchanged.
    He studied his reflection. In his natural lifetime, scars from a childhood scourge had pocked his face, but the imperfections had disappeared when the curse of endless years found him. Now he could not remember where those scars had been. He only saw smooth, unblemished skin, a set of small wrinkles that never deepened around his silver-gray eyes, a square rugged face, and a mass of thick gray hair.
    Bitter thoughts