Free Bones of Angels by Christopher Forrest Page B

being held in one of the labs in the basement above,” said Touchdown. “I was finally able top penetrate the basements with my telemetry.”
    “Come on,” said Angela. “I’ll take you to the Professor’s laboratories.”
    The three figures left the artifact room and hurried up a concealed staircase hidden behind a revolving wooden bookcase.
    “Why am I not surprised?” muttered Hawkeye, looking at the revolving volumes. “This place is downright weird.”
    Hanger 15B, Laguardia Airport
    Queens, New York
     
    Father Reynard stepped aboard the Gulfstream used by members of the Council of Nine. Most of his acolytes would fly a chartered DC-9 to their destination.
    The bones of St. Michael the Archangel.
    He sat in a brown leather seat and fastened his seatbelt as the pilot revved up the twin jet engines mounted directly forward of the tail.
    “And now the world will be judged,” he said to Brothers Antonius and Gerasimus. “The light Himself shall return to the world. The prophecies of Daniel and the Book of Revelation shall come to pass. This unbelieving, adulterous generation shall be judged and consigned to hellfire. With Him, we shall rule over the twelve remaining tribes of the earth. The chosen.”
    He paused and scowled.
    “And I shall be scoffed at no longer,” he added.
    He ran his index finger across the scars of his face.
    “I shall be vindicated. Let the papists be judged first for their arrogance and disbelief.”
    Antonius and Gerasimus merely nodded.
    Whittington Manor, Main Lab
    Long Island, New York
     
    Hawkeye, Quiz, and Angela had first examined the coroner’s table in lab #2, noting warm blood on the stainless steel surface. They then moved on to Charles’ main lab.
    “They’ve got Whittington,” Hawkeye told Caine. “Looks like they tortured him. My guess, though, is that he’s more valuable alive than dead.”
    “Agreed,” said Caine.”
    In the main lab, Angela sat at the computer Charles used for personal correspondence.
    “The Fox, as the Professor calls him, seems to have erased an email and attachment from Archbishop Connolly,” Angela said. “Fortunately, I have this.”
    Angela produced a small jump drive from the pocket of her lab coat.
    “All emails with attachments get copied to my computers in the artifact rooms below,” Angela explained. “I’ve been instructed to research any and all information that comes in pertaining to the bones of Michael.”
    The curator inserted the external drive into the USB port, hit a few keys, and opened the email and its attachment. Together, the small group studied the photographs of the bones.
    “I’ve seen these before,” Angela stated, tapping a few more keys.
    The pixels on the screen transformed into a different display.
    “That’s pretty cool,” said Quiz. “What did you just do?”
    The photographs had changed to several maps.
    “The attachment is a palimpsest,” Angela explained.
    “A what?” said Hawkeye.
    “A message on top of a message. In medieval times, when parchment was scare, original text was erased so that new text could be written on the parchment. But they didn’t have the technology to erase the original perfectly, so that such parchments usually contained two texts if one examined it closely enough. A palimpsest today is essentially a layered message. Government agencies use them all the time.”
    “So what are we looking at?” asked Hawkeye.
    “That,” said Angela, pointing her index finger at one of the onscreen maps, “is where the Professor and Archbishop Connolly obviously believe the bones of Michael are currently hidden. As you can see, the maps were drawn in medieval times. These are photographic reproductions that were apparently scanned into Connolly’s computer.”
    “It looks like we’re going to France,” said Hawkeye, studying the maps.
    “Return to the Alamiranta,” instructed Caine. “And bring Ms. Marshall. We’re going to debrief and re-deploy.”
    “Yes,