Alex Archer - Death Mask

“Yes. It’s a matter of public record. Unfortunately, his grave was ransacked only a couple of years before the Inquisition was disbanded.” Meaning the task had already become exponentially more difficult than she’d thought it would be in the matter of a few seconds. “They took everything in the tomb. Burned his bones, mask, everything destroyed in an auto-da-fé. An act of faith.” He fell silent and she knew he was waiting for her, giving her the chance to respond and draw her own conclusions.

“Okay. Well... If it was destroyed, then that’s a death sentence for Garin, so I’m going to ignore that option for now and assume that the mask was stolen and is still intact. People are greedy. If it was worth something, someone might have taken it.” She took the old man’s silence as agreement. “Where was he buried?” It was a starting point. Nothing more than that. But it was better than sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike. Five hundred years was a long time, but Annja hoped the normal logic of a search would hold true: the best place to start looking for something that had been lost was the last place it had been seen.

“The Monastery of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Ávila,” he said. “I’ll join you there as soon as I can, but first I think I shall pay a visit to Seville.”

“What has Seville got, apart from a barber and some oranges?”

The old man chuckled down the long-distance line. “It’s where so much of it began, my dear. As you say, for want of a better place, why not start at the beginning? Seville is where the first of these so-called acts of faith of the Inquisition took place in a particularly grisly sacrifice. Six people were burned alive.”

“That’s barbaric.” The history of the Inquisition was fascinating in and of itself, but she’d never considered it for the show. There were plenty of human monsters from that time, without the need to invent others for public edification. Using religion and ethnicity as a means of population control turned her stomach. It didn’t matter if it was five hundred years ago in Spain, sixty years ago in Germany or twenty years ago in Rwanda. Genocide was one of the few horrors that didn’t lessen with time.

“Yes, it was. Just as all forms of human sacrifice are,” Roux agreed. There was a pause. He was obviously thinking. “I won’t touch down for at least three hours, even if I get airborne in the next thirty minutes. I’ll contact you as soon as I land. In the meantime, I’ll make a call. Garin isn’t the only one with a little black book. I know a guy...he might be able to pinpoint the IP address from the webcam. See if we can’t find a source. You look at finding the mask, I’ll try to find Garin—hopefully, we’ll meet somewhere in the middle. Twenty-four hours is a long time.”

“In politics, maybe. In kidnap and ransom? I’m not so sure.”

“Just concentrate on getting to Ávila. I’ll give my guy your details and have him meet you there.” Roux hung up without waiting for her response. There was no “good luck.” He was all business, which was exactly what she needed from him right now. There wasn’t a moment to lose. She pillaged the hotel room of anything useful, throwing a change of clothes into a backpack, then zipped herself into her motorbike leathers and headed down to the hotel’s underground garage.

The Triumph Rocket III Roadster was where she’d left it.

It was a beast of a machine. She loved it. Annja slipped her bag from her shoulder and stowed it inside one of the panniers, then straddled the bike. It was bigger and heavier than she was used to, but the Roadster had so much pent-up power as she gunned the engine, she couldn’t help but grin at the thrill when it roared to life beneath her. There were perks to being a celebrity of sorts: companies bent over backward in exchange for a little publicity. She was a great ad for the bike. As Doug said, there was something inherently powerful about a great bike and a leather-clad rider. He would have called it sexy. She liked to think of it as iconic. Giving the Roadster up when she left Spain was going to be tough. She intended to hit the open road and see as much of the countryside as she could before then.

The bike roared up the ramp and out of the garage, banking sharply as she took the turn into the street. She was strong, but still, the muscles in her shoulders and forearms tightened as she leaned to keep the bike upright. She opened up the throttle, slipping into the early-morning city traffic. In a car, the congestion would have been a problem, bumper-to-bumper impatient drivers trying to cut in and out of lanes. But even though the Roadster was designed for the open road, it was maneuverable enough to weave in and out of the snarl of vehicles.

She accelerated ahead of the traffic jam, hitting the lights just as they changed from red to green, and left the line of cars trailing in her wake. They couldn’t match the bike’s speed in these conditions.

A few minutes later, she was more than a mile outside of the city, but the road ahead was blocked by a pair of trucks struggling uphill side by side, slowly losing momentum as the incline increased, neither one prepared to slow down or change lanes in case they couldn’t make it to the top of the hill. A snake of frustrated drivers had built up behind them.

Annja didn’t have time to waste.

She leaned to the left, letting her weight steer the bike into the narrow space between the lanes, and raced toward the gap between the two trucks. Drivers vented their frustration at her gambit, but that voice and its damned “ticktock, ticktock” was all she could hear. Annja twisted the throttle hard. Her grip tightened as she leaned forward, and the rush of air battered her. Still, she accelerated, surging past the barely moving cars. A chorus of horns bade her farewell as she disappeared between the trucks, her shoulder blades inches from the high-paneled sides of both. The huge vehicles drifted closer together as she sped between them.

She caught a glimpse of one of the drivers in his wing mirror. There was no mistaking the panic in his eyes. She grinned, but realized there was no way he’d be able to see the expression through her helmet’s black visor, which, all things considered, was probably for the best. He veered away suddenly, widening the gap for Annja, who surged ahead of the trucks and into the freedom of the open road.

She hit a hundred and thirty-six miles an hour in a few seconds, topping out the engine. The landscape blurred in her peripheral vision. Annja kept her head down. Speed limits didn’t matter. She’d take the ticket, if the cops could keep up with her. Ticktock. Ticktock. It was just her and the road, but she didn’t have time to enjoy it. She only had eyes for the dashed line leading all the way to the horizon.

She could feel the heat of the engine through the leathers on the inside of her right leg by the time she pulled up outside the high stone walls of the Royal Monastery of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Ávila.

She’d ridden as if the devil was on her tail.

The journey hadn’t even taken an hour.

She checked her phone. There was a message from Roux’s hacker giving her the name of a café—Giorgio’s—and instructions to meet her there in forty-five minutes. The message was fifteen minutes old. That gave her half an hour to unlock the secrets of the Grand Inquisitor’s shrine.

Ticktock.

3

23:00 —Ávila

Ávila, the City of Stones and Saints.

That was how the place was described in the tourist brochure Annja picked up from the dispenser just inside the monastery walls. Footsteps echoed deeper inside the medieval building. She thumbed through the leaflet. It was the standard tourist fodder, ready to guide her to all kinds of attractions inside the city. She was only interested in the monastery. She handed over five euros at the glass window and put the change in a tip jar for renovations. Annja couldn’t tell whether the look the young museum worker gave her was admiring or disapproving, but the way his eyes lingered was most certainly lacking piety.