A BELL JETRANGER HELICOPTER SKIMMED LOW ACROSS a wooded ridge and dropped toward a river junction, the confluence where the Holston and the French Broad joined to form the emerald-green headwaters of the Tennessee. Beneath the right-hand skid of the chopper, a rusting railroad trestle spanned the narrow mouth of the French Broad. Just ahead, at Downtown Island Airport, a small runway paralleled the first straightaway of the Tennessee, and a single-engine plane idled at the threshold, preparing for takeoff. The helicopter pilot keyed his radio. “Downtown Island traffic, JetRanger Three Whiskey Tango is crossing the field westbound at one thousand, landing at the Body Farm.”
“Three Whiskey Tango, this is Downtown Island. Did you say landing at the Body Farm, over?”
“Roger that.”
“Three Whiskey Tango, are you aware that the Body Farm is a restricted facility?”
“Downtown Island, we’re a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation aircraft. I reckon they won’t mind.”
Two miles west of the airstrip, the modest skyline of downtown Knoxville sprawled above the right-hand riverbank. The skyline was defined by two twenty-five-story office towers built by a pair of brothers who began as bankers and ended as swindlers; a wedge-shaped pyramid of a hotel, Marriott-by-way-of-Mayan; a thirty-foot orange basketball forever swishing through the forty-foot hoop atop the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame; and a seventy-five-foot globe of golden glass balanced on a two-hundred-foot steel tower like a golf ball on a tee—the Sunsphere, a relic of a provincial world’s fair orchestrated by the swindling banker brothers in 1982.
The epicenter of Knoxville, though—its beating heart if not its financial or architectural nucleus—lay another mile down-river: the massive oval of Neyland Stadium, home and shrine to the University of Tennessee Volunteers. During home games against the Florida Gators or the Alabama Crimson Tide, the stadium roared and rattled with the fervor of 102,000 rabid fans. Beneath the stadium, in a grimy building wedged under the stands, was the university’s Anthropology Department, home to twenty professors, a hundred graduate students, and thousands of human skeletons.
A mile beyond the stadium, the TBI helicopter crossed to the river’s hilly, wooded left bank. Easing below the treetops, it touched down just outside the fence of the Body Farm. Brockton emerged from the research facility’s entrance. Fighting the blast of the rotor wash, he wrestled the wooden gate into place and locked it, followed by the outer fence. Then he ducked under the spinning blades and clambered into the cockpit. As he swung the door shut, the turbine spooled up and the chopper vaulted upward, buffeting the fence and shredding oak leaves as it climbed. The pilot banked so steeply that Brockton found himself looking straight down at the naked form of 49-12, and he realized with a queasy smile that if his harness should fail and the door fly open at this moment, he would deliver his own fresh corpse to the Body Farm. But luck and latches held, and the chopper leveled off and scurried upriver with the anthropologist strapped safely aboard.
The GPS screen on the instrument panel displayed a map and a course heading, but the pilot didn’t need either. He simply aimed for the plume of smoke twenty miles to the east.
The plume marked the smoldering remnants of an airplane hangar, and the charred remains of a dead undercover agent.
PARIS, FRANCE
MARCH 18, 1314
Jacques Fournier has three advantages over most of the spectators filling the square of Notre Dame. He’s uncommonly tall, so he’s able to see over everyone else; he’s uncommonly stocky, so he’s able to push his way through the throng; and he’s uncommonly dressed—in the white cassock and black scapular of a Cistercian monk—so he benefits from grudging deference as he nudges his way toward the cathedral. If someone moves to protest or shove back, he makes the sign of the cross, and that generally settles the matter. Nudge by nudge, foot by foot, cross by cross, Fournier edges toward the front of the cathedral, where a platform has been built for this morning’s spectacle. The cathedral’s fa?ade is shadowed, backlit by the rising sun, but the massive rose window—fired from within by sunbeams slanting through the nave—blazes red and gold.