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the screen, her expression cold and angry. The assassin also had a past history with Rachel and her uncle.
    And now she was back in Italy.
    A sense of foreboding jangled through him.
    Something was wrong with this whole situation. He sensed a storm brewing out there, but he didn’t know which way the winds were blowing. He knew only one thing for certain.
    “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he promised Rachel.

3
October 10, 7:28 P.M.
Rome, Italy
    As Lieutenant Rachel Verona stepped out of the hospital and into the dusky twilight of central Rome, she took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air, her anxiety easing a little. The sting of disinfectant had barely masked the odor of bodies languishing in beds. Hospitals always smelled like dread.
    For the first time in years, she wished for a cigarette, anything to smoke out the sense of apprehension that had built inside her with every passing hour as her uncle remained in a coma. He was hooked to IV lines; electrodes led to machines that monitored his vital signs; a respirator moved his chest up and down. He looked a decade older, his eyes blackened and bruised, his head shaved and wrapped. The doctors had explained: subdural hemorrhage along with a small skull fracture. They were closely monitoring his intracranial pressure. MRI showed no brain damage, but he remained unconscious, which worried the doctors. According to the medical and police report, Vigor had arrived at the hospital in a semidelirious state. Before he slipped into a coma, he kept repeating one word in a frantic manner.
    Morte.
    Death.
    But what did that mean? Had Vigor known what had happened to the other priest? Or was it just delirium?
    No one could ask him. He remained unresponsive.
    Still, it bothered her. She had held his hand most of the day, squeezing it occasionally, praying for some sign of recovery. But his fingers remained lax, his skin cold, as if something vital had escaped his body, leaving only this shell behind.
    What especially tortured Rachel was that she couldn’t help her uncle. Vigor had practically raised her, and he was the only real family she had left. So she had sat with him all day, only leaving her vigil to make the call to the United States.
    Gray would be here by morning.
    It was the only bit of good news in the past twenty-four hours. Though she couldn’t help Vigor medically, she could use her resources to discover the truth behind the attack.
    At the moment, the investigation into the explosion at Saint Peter’s had turned into a multiagency quagmire, involving everyone from Italian intelligence services to Interpol and Europol. Everyone seemed to have come to the consensus that it was a terrorist attack. This assessment rose mainly from the postmortem mutilation of the dead priest’s body. A strange mark had been burned into his forehead.
    Someone had definitely left a message. But what was that message and who had sent it? As of yet, no group had claimed responsibility.
    Rachel knew the quickest way to discover the truth was to instigate her own investigation, something with a narrower focus, more surgical than the current chaos generated by the various agencies.
    So she had called Gray. Though such a plea for help was awkward on a personal level, she recognized she would need Sigma’s global resources if she hoped to discover the truth. She also recognized that she couldn’t do this alone. She needed someone she could fully trust. She needed Gray.
    But was the call to him more than just professional?
    She pushed that last thought aside as she crossed the hospital parking garage. Reaching her small blue Mini Cooper, she climbed inside and set off across Rome. She left the top down, and the freshening breeze helped clear her head, until a trundling tour bus swooped ahead of her, belching fumes.
    Rachel swung off the main thoroughfare and wound through smaller streets framed by shops, cafés, and restaurants. She had been planning tohead over to her apartment, to