said worked. The guard returned to his shack, allowing Griffin and Sydney to enter the premises on their own. Their boots crunched the gravel path that circled the fountain, and just before they left the path, Sydney glanced back to see the guard standing near the open gate.
Flickering candlelight appeared in several windows, the academy residents quickly adjusting to the power outage. Upstairs, just over the main entrance, the windows of Professor Santarella’s studio were dark. Griffin and Sydney climbed the marble stairs, walked the short distance down the hall to studio 257. The door was locked. Griffin took a pick from his toolbox, slipped it into the lock, and had the door open in less than a minute. Sydney used a blue LED light for her search, while Griffin stood guard at the window, watching the gate. She wasn’t even sure where to begin, there were so many papers and books strewn about, as though someone else had already been there and done a hasty search. She glanced over at the desk, where Francesca had been working on her laptop earlier in the day, thinking there might be something there. The laptop was gone. Which meant the professor had returned.
Or someone else had. No doubt, she thought, realizing that the professor wouldn’t need to throw her things around to find them. She’d know where to look. Someone else had definitely been there.
But that didn’t mean they’d found whatever they were looking for, and Sydney checked the long table, the desk, the walls. Nothing screamed, Look at me, the answer is here. More like there were too many answers, and it would take days to search through them.
Griffin stepped back from the window. “We have to go. Now.”
“I need more time.”
“Now,” he whispered. “Someone’s out there, distracting the guard from his post.”
She gave one last look around, saw the hand-drawn maps on the wall, the weird lines drawn across them. What the hell, she thought, and pulled both down, rolled them together. “Ready.”
They walked out the door, and Griffin turned the lock, then pulled it shut. When she started toward the stairs they’d come up, he stopped her, listened. Someone was ascending, the quiet of the footfall enough to warn her it was someone who didn’t want to be discovered. They hurried to the back stairs down the hall, past the kitchen. Griffin drew his weapon, then signaled for her to start down. They walked through the darkened archways of the cortile, slipped out past the fountain, and toward the guard in his shack. Sydney glanced back toward Francesca’s studio, saw a dim light bouncing off the wall as someone searched the room.
Griffin saw it, too. They walked up to the guard, and Griffin waved, told him something in Italian about the power. The guard looked up, nodded as they walked out. “Probably Dumas,” he said, when they’d gotten back in the van, as he picked up the phone to tell Giustino to restore the power in a few minutes. He didn’t want to do it too soon.
“How do you know it’s him and not the guys that came after us at the Passegiata?”
“Because the guard’s still alive. Adami’s men have no consciences.”
“Good point.”
Only when they were well away did he ask, “What was it you took from the wall?”
“A couple maps. Of what, I have no idea.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing in the time we had.”
“She’s on too many radars. That doesn’t bode well for her.”
“I’m more interested in what’s on her radar,” Sydney said.
Griffin looked over at her, then back at the road. “You might make a good spy, after all.”
“The word spy has connotations I don’t care for.”
“Secret agent, then.”
“Special agent.”
“FBI, through and through. Except when you’re busy breaking the rules.”
“Not rules. Guidelines,” she said, unrolling the parchment. Pale yellow moonlight washed the paper, but it was too dark to see.
Sydney turned on the small LED she’d used in the break-in. The light was amazingly bright for such a tiny device, and he glanced over as she studied it. “Sort of looks like a map of the sewer system,” he said.
“Why would a professor intent on ancient history have a map of the sewer system, unless it was the aqueduct, which I don’t think this is.”
Back at the safe house, she unrolled it on the kitchen table. “I’m beginning to think this might be maps of different columbaria,” she said, seeing the arrows drawn on it and the notations, trying to decide what it was Francesca found so important that