Scott Mariani - The Armada Legacy

But then, Nico was a cop, and cops couldn’t always know these things.

La Catalina was a modestly-sized former granary on the edge of the village, with thick stone walls painted white like all the other homes in Montefrio. Nico parked the car round the back and led Ben inside, carrying the machine carbine wrapped in his jacket.

It was warm inside the house. The Colombian hung the SIG from its sling over the banister post in the hallway. ‘Professor Cabeza!’ he called out; then again, more loudly, ‘Hey, Cabeza, where the hell did you go, man?’ No response.

Left alone for a few moments while Nico went off to search the house, Ben wandered into the main room and glanced around. The furnishings were simple and rustic: a pitted slab table; an old pine dresser; some canvas chairs. A single large window looked out onto a terrace with a view of the high rocky mound, the church seeming to hang off the side of the lopsided precipice, just waiting to come sliding down to crush the whole village below. The table was littered with history books, papers and a laptop – the kind of things he could imagine a man like Cabeza insisting on bringing with him from home. Next to them was a glass of white wine, half finished and lukewarm to the touch. He walked over to the dresser and pulled open the middle drawer.

He could hear Nico calling Cabeza’s name in the background, sounding increasingly irritated.

Stepping back to the table, Ben touched the finger pad of the laptop and the sleeping machine sprang back into life. Whoever had been using it last, presumably Cabeza, had been looking at a website about the history and architecture of Montefrio. The photos on the site looked similar to the view from the window, except that they’d been taken in summer when the high rock was lush with greenery.

Between the images was a piece of text describing the origin of the church. As quickly as Ben learned that it was called the Iglesia de la Villa and had been built in 1486 on the site of a much older Moorish castle following the defeat of the Muslim kingdom of Granada by Christian armies, he shoved that knowledge to the remotest corner of his mind and minimized the webpage to click into the laptop’s email program.

‘Cabeza! Come on, man! It’s okay, it’s me!’ came Nico’s muffled voice from another room. Ben could have called out to him not to bother – Cabeza clearly wasn’t there – but he was too busy reading the email exchange he’d just found between the historian and Roger Forsyte. The messages dated back from the discussions arranging their meeting in Spain, all the way back to early December: the time when, according to what Simon Butler had told Ben in Southampton, Forsyte had salvaged the mysterious casket from the wreck of the Armada warship.

There was too much to take in all at once, and both men had been cautious not to give away secret information by email – in places the messages were as heavily coded as the encrypted papers that Forsyte had wanted Cabeza to decipher – but Ben caught veiled references to the land grant from Philip of Spain that Nico had mentioned, as well as to the Spanish secret agent it had been intended for.

‘ I certainly would concur with you that revelations of this kind, even after five hundred years, could cause significant ripples ,’ Cabeza had written sometime in January. ‘ If even half the names on this list were truly involved in espionage, it is an incredible discovery .’

‘ Ripples are precisely what I have in mind to cause ,’ Forsyte had written back the same day. ‘ The more significant the better .’

Ben was scrolling through to read more when Nico came running back into the room, red-faced with annoyance. ‘I can’t find the fucker anywhere,’ he announced.

Ben picked the wineglass up from the table. ‘You drink this stuff at room temperature?’ he asked.

Nico sipped from the glass and pulled a face. ‘No, the bottle’s in the refrigerator. What’s that got to do with—?’

‘It means that your man’s been gone for some time.’ Ben pointed out of the window at the church in the distance. ‘And I’d bet that’s where you’ll find him, taking a little sightseeing tour.’ He clicked back into the website Cabeza had been looking at, and showed Nico.

‘Ah, shit. I told him to stay here. I said not to go wandering about. He knows he’s in danger. But he kept talking about that damn church up there, said it was someplace he’d never visited before and wanted to see it. I told you he was kind of an oddball, didn’t I?’

Ben hesitated. A voice was screaming inside him to stop wasting time in this place. Brooke was out there somewhere. He couldn’t afford the slightest delay in searching for her. But he now knew he couldn’t do that without Nico’s help. And what if Cabeza knew something?

‘Let’s go and get him,’ he said.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The tallish, slightly stooped solitary figure making his way through the meandering village streets might have stood out somewhat in a crowd in his suede jacket, bright yellow trousers and rumpled pork pie hat, if there had been any crowds in Montefrio at this time of year. Not that the historian would have taken much notice of them, wrapped up as he was in his own thoughts, as he walked along with half an eye fixed on the Iglesia de la Villa whose bell tower was constantly visible over the rooftops.

Juan Fernando Cabeza was glad to be free again. He couldn’t have sat around in that poky La Catalina another minute, with nothing to do except stare at the few books he’d managed to bring from home and helpless against the recurring panic attacks that had been leaving him breathless and shaking every few hours since this whole ordeal had begun.

Every time he shut his eyes he could see the terrifying figure of the hit man César Cristo standing there about to shoot him to pieces with that huge gun. Never before had he come that close to death. It made him realise how profoundly attached he was to living.

But what kind of existence was it for him now, with his world turned inside out, unable to return home because of the threat against him from some obscure enemy, and having to obey the orders of some undereducated, rough-mannered Colombian policeman who’d arrived out of the blue and taken over his life? Admittedly, Nico Ramirez had saved him, and for that he was grateful – but at the same time this situation was just unendurable. What was going to happen to him?

‘I’m only a simple historian,’ he’d said to himself over and over, often out loud, as he lay wide awake in his bed at night. ‘What harm have I ever done to these people? Why can’t they just leave me alone?’

But he knew perfectly well what they wanted. For all that he’d led a sheltered, closeted life among his dusty old books, far away from the evils of the modern world, Cabeza was savvy enough about its ways to have been certain, right from the first shocked moments after Nico Ramirez had rescued him from the jaws of death, that this all had to do with the new project of Roger Forsyte’s that he’d become involved in. When he’d first heard the stunning news of Forsyte’s abduction on the car radio as Nico had been driving him to safety, then learned of the Englishman’s death from the TV here in Montefrio, it had only confirmed his certainty. The key to the whole thing lay in those documents, lost for so long at the bottom of the ocean in their watertight casket.

Roger Forsyte had always been secretive about his past life, but he’d dropped enough tiny hints in passing over the years they’d known each other for Cabeza to understand that, long before founding Neptune Marine Exploration, the Englishman had played some kind of role within military intelligence. Cabeza could only suppose that part of Forsyte’s training must have been in code-breaking, as by the time he’d first excitedly contacted him about his discovery back in December, he’d already deciphered enough of the documents’ hidden meaning to know how important they were.