by James Codlin
“You may not.”
“Then may I instead ask the bishop if the monk made a similar admission about himself?”
“It is irrelevant. You need only admit that the charge about you is true.”
“In what capacity does this… admission… claim that I serve the Holy Office?” Cruz asked.
“You are presumptuous in asking these questions! I am asking the questions.”
Cruz ignored the bishop’s indignation and looked directly into his eyes. “Bishop, have you checked to see if my name is inscribed among the servants of the Holy Office?”
Cano reddened. “We looked but could find no such enrollment. But we—”
“And because of King Felipe III’s stipulation that inquisitors must have studied law, you surely would have also looked to find my name among the law faculty graduates.”
“We have searched all the law faculties and do not find that you were enrolled. However—”
“Bishop, you also know an inquisitor must be of the secular clergy—not a member of an order such as mine. The abbot will attest to my affiliation as an Augustinian for many years.”
The abbot looked down at his desk. “Yes, I can confirm that,” he said quietly.
“I only say that the monk in question is mistaken,” Cruz said. “I am no more than what you see before you, a brother of the Augustinians. No law studies, no university education. I meet no prerequisites to be an inquisitor, and as such I cannot be an inquisitor.”
“Your insolence violates the customary humility of your order,” Cano protested. “Without those prerequisites you could be a lesser functionary of the Holy Office—”
“I can only state what is true, Bishop.”
It was more than the bishop could bear. “Get out!” Cano shouted. “Get out of my sight!”
“As you wish, Bishop Cano. Abbot, may I be excused?”
The abbot nodded weakly. Cruz walked across the monastery and down the steps to his cell. He lit a candle, removed quill and ink from his small desk, and wrote a letter addressed to Brother Rodrigo Talamera at the Monastery of Santo Toribio de Liébana. The letter depicted at length the mundane and repetitive activities of a monk in a monastery, extensive observations about the spiritual results of daily prayer and meditation, the glories of living the ascetic life, and his efforts to help the poor and incapacitated of Burgos.
He wrote the letter using an extensive memorized transcription of every letter of every word that hid the true encoded text. The hidden text read:
Dear Brother Talamera:
Bishop Sergio Cano of the Holy Office tribunal in Valladolid is accusing me of being a functionary of the Holy Office. It appears that Brother Ferrer, for reasons I do not know, was taken and tortured, and he divulged some small bit of information about me. Brother Talamera, I applaud your efficacy years ago in removing my name from the rolls of the university in Valencia, the law faculty in Salamanca, and the rolls of the secular clergy. Having no proof, Cano failed to press his accusation. Brother, I call upon your specialized expertise to immediately locate and silence Brother Ferrer, if he is still alive, lest under further torture he confesses additional information. You must also silence anyone in whom Bishop Cano may have confided. I will handle the rest. I know I can count on your alacrity in addressing these threats to our sacred trust and to nominate a candidate in Burgos to take into our confidence to replace Brother Ferrer.
This we do for one, ten, a hundred, or a thousand years, whatever is required to bring on the Millennium.
Sebastián Cruz, Guardian of the Fourth Angel
Brother Cruz rolled up the parchment and placed it aside. He would set about the process of finding a reliable courier in the morning. In the meantime, there was some unpleasant work to be done. Given the lateness in the day, the bishop would be staying for dinner as a guest of the abbot and spend the night before making the short journey home at first light. That made things much easier, as Cruz would only have one location to visit tonight.
Cruz retrieved a key from underneath his simple cot and unlocked a drawer in his desk. He withdrew a dagger and unwrapped the cloth that bound it, admiring the ornate blade, but the weapon’s unparalleled craftsmanship did not inspire its usual pleasure. It disheartened Cruz that the abbot was going to be an innocent victim of Brother Ferrer’s inability to live up to his oath. The abbot was a kind man, and apolitical. All he had wanted for his simple life was to do God’s work. Sadly, that work was about to end.
Cruz inspected the blade and found its sharpness satisfactory. He vowed to himself that he would make the abbot’s exit from this world quick and painless. Bishop Cano, however, had been nothing but arrogant and rude. Most damning of all, the bishop had been complicit in the arrest and torture of one of Cruz’s fellow Guardians.
Cruz slowly turned the dagger in his hand. The manner of Bishop Cano’s death this evening would be unspeakable.
CHAPTER SIX
Martín looked around the room he knew so well from his own sketches and blueprints. One entire wall was glass, and beyond it the Andes rose to snow-capped heights. The wall opposite the window was paneled with a rich dark red wood and highly polished. The far end of the room had a large stone hearth and chimney with a metal hood made from copper mined in Chile, smelted by native artisans, and hammered by hand into sheets. The carpeting was a rich beige, as was the leather furniture—comfortable and informal.
The door opened and Takeshi Ishikawa walked in. His build was slight, and he was dressed in a maroon V-neck sweater, a starched blue oxford cloth shirt open at the collar, and beige pants with sharp creases running down the legs. His full head of silver hair was carefully brushed. He had the same gentle and wise eyes as Gina, and his well-proportioned nose was also reflected in her face. He looked tired.
Martín bowed slightly. “Your Excellency, Mr. President.”
The two men looked at each other for clues as to how this interaction would play out.
“Martín, thank you for coming. Please be seated. I trust that, as usual, we can put aside personal matters.”
The younger man nodded.
“Martín, I do not have to recite for you the problems facing this office—you know them well.” Martín nodded again, acknowledging the long list. It began with the Latin American countries themselves, each fiercely protective of its sovereignty, all with a history of warring against each other, and many still harboring both secret and overt agendas of revenge. Mexico still had not yet joined, hypersensitive about a history of interventions by their neighbor to the north. French-speaking French Guiana was a department of France, and Paris had not permitted it to join. There was also the tenuous financial situation of the union, which was short of cash because the member countries only grudgingly paid their dues—most of them well after the agreed-upon deadlines. Then there was the “problema brasileño”—the Brazilian problem. When English-speaking Guyana and Dutch-speaking Suriname had opted to join the union, but insisted upon recognition of their official languages, their relatively small populations and economic impact made it easy enough to accommodate them. But Brazil, whose customs and roots went back to Portugal, not Spain, was the most populated country with the largest economy, and its people feared they would gradually lose their unique language and culture.
The litany went on.
“The Americans, as a gesture of friendship to this office and to the union, are sharing some of their intelligence information with me,” the president continued. He held out a small remote control and clicked a button. On the wall opposite the hearth a large screen television flipped from a BBC news feed to a high-resolution map depicting South and Central America. Dots of various colors were speckled throughout.
“What I am showing you is highly classified. I am counting on your discretion.”
Martín nodded and the president continued, using an on-screen marker to highlight each of the countries as he discussed them.
“You know of the hostilities that are just under the su
rface in El Salvador and Honduras, where gangs can currently outgun the governments. In Guatemala, a strongman barely keeps a lid on revolutionaries in the rural areas. Though Colombia has largely stabilized, there are still powerful drug cartels there, and the cartels in Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru have taken advantage of the power vacuum. The Shining Path guerrillas have found new life using the existence of the LU as a foil. Radical Peronistas are still active in Argentina. Bolivia remains far to the left under Evo Morales.
“You know all this, of course. But there are new elements to the equation. The foreign nuclear experts who helped North Korea develop its program are now available for hire, and we have intelligence placing a number of them within the LU’s borders. ISIS terrorists, fragmented now in the Middle East, are regrouping by redirecting some of their most radical followers to islands off the South American coasts. Even though we have done our best to watch for them, there are too many thousands of kilometers of unoccupied coasts, and they are now here with us.”
Ishikawa clicked his remote, and the dots on the map sprouted arrows. Those from South American points of origin swept toward the north and those in Mexico and Central America extended south, through Panama, and then fanned out into Colombia and Venezuela.
“All the loose pieces are coming together,” Martín said.
“Yes, though we do not know why. They pose not just a threat on their own but in how they might provoke the many restive militaries in our union. My own general staff in Brazil has warned me that if they determine a threat to Brazilian sovereignty, they will act to ‘restore’ it, as they say. I am sure the generals in other countries have said the same. That would, of course, be the end of the union—whose capital we will not even officially inaugurate for another week. And then what? Back to military rule? People disappearing during the night? Hyperinflation? I cannot allow that to happen, yet I do not have the assets or the political capital this early in the union’s existence to deal with this.”
Ishikawa stared at Martín for a long time. “In spite of what happened on a personal level, I want you to know that I believe you are an intelligent young man. You are Latino in language and personal philosophy. There are many here who would follow your leadership.”
Martín shook his head. “Sir, we have already discussed this. I will not accept a political position.”
Ishikawa’s eyes narrowed. “I understand. But at this moment, I am referring to other leadership skills. Those that you learned in Guatemala. From the CIA.”
Martín tried his best to maintain a neutral expression, but he was stunned. Though he’d known that the president was likely fully aware of the nature and scope of his flirtation with an Agency-sponsored career, for him to raise it now as part of a request for his continued involvement with the LU was an extraordinary leap of faith. What could possibly make Ishikawa think that he would consider this?
“You are probably not aware of the identity of the man who has emerged as the leader of this assemblage of terror,” Ishikawa said. “He is from Cuba, a protégé of Fidel Castro, and a young trainee of Che Guevara. He attended the best revolutionary schools in Russia and China. He has admirers—and patrons—in Chechnya, Syria, Libya, the Philippines, Indonesia, Nigeria—everywhere that terror lives today. Though he is of an advanced age for a revolutionary, he has lost none of his zeal.”
The president gazed out the window at the Andes, his arms crossed behind his back. “You have unique knowledge of this man.” Without turning around, he clicked his remote again.
Martín froze as he stared at the portrait of a man whose heavy beard and long hair was graying, and whose face was dry and tight—an aged reflection of his own. The man was Nicolás Ibarra, his oldest brother.
*
Gina Ishikawa lay on the bed in her hotel room. Her mind spun with the irreconcilable dates of the birth records and the tombstone. And there was the paper that Father Croix found showing three girls born to Antoine and Claire Legendre, but no son. To distract herself she grabbed her phone and thumbed through her emails and saw that she had two voicemails. They had come in thirty minutes apart, with the most recent one recorded only ten minutes earlier while she had been in the shower trying to unwind from her day’s work.
Both messages were from Dave Broch. She tapped the play icon and was unsurprised by the Brazilian music suddenly blaring from the phone’s speaker. Laughter and boisterous conversation added to the background din.
“Hey, Gina.” Dave’s voice was loud and his speech was slowed by exaggerated enunciation. “I’m leaving Seville tomorrow afternoon to head back to the States, so I just wanted to give my favorite girl a call to say good-bye. Sorry we couldn’t get together. I’ll be back in Miami and Marty is meeting my flight… Look, I don’t exactly know how things stand between you two right now, so… if there are any messages you want me to give him… wait a minute…”
There was a muffled sound over the samba music in the background and Dave, who had clearly put his hand over the mouthpiece, shouted to someone. Gina could just barely make out the words: “Yeah, Julio, I’ll be there en seguida, okay? Tell Ray to hang on, momentito, keep his pantalones on!”
The music surged again as the hand came off the mouthpiece, and Dave resumed talking as though he was speaking to someone severely hard of hearing. “Gina? Sorry, what I was saying was if, you know, you want me to tell Marty anything… well, just let me know. You’re the best. Bye.”
Gina loved hearing from Dave, who had been a great friend while she and Martín were together, but her smile faded a bit as she thought about how much had changed. Now, it was… harder. She needed to close out that part of her life and move on to… well, what was expected of her. Gina sighed. Dave had called her several times while he was in Madrid and Seville, but they just couldn’t seem to synch up with dates to see each other, and probably that was for the best.
The next message began. There was the party music again, but this time it was more distant, and Dave’s voice sounded tense and guarded.
“Gina, Dave again. Look, I’m going to have Marty call you, and when he does, tell him exactly these words. I have—”
The message cut off. She dialed Dave’s number, but there was no answer.
For a few minutes Gina stewed about the second message, and how serious Dave had sounded, but she decided that he was still trying to reestablish diplomatic relations between Gina and Martín. She knew that nothing would make Dave happier than to see them back together again. But it was simply out of the question.
Gina’s mind wandered back to Martín, and she knew she was in danger of going into a funk if she didn’t refocus her thoughts. Perhaps she could get in just a little more work before she allowed her mind and body to succumb to sleep. She dialed Father Croix’s number at the rectory, and a man answered.
“Yes?”
Gina paused. “Father Croix?”
“Who is this?” the man demanded.
“Who are you?” Gina asked, somewhat indignantly.
“This is the rectory of Saint Jean Baptiste Church.”
Her irritation grew, sharpened by her fatigue and souring mood. “I am calling for Father Croix.”
“Who is calling for him?”
“I am… a friend. Is he there?”
“Where are you calling from?”
“Look, is Father Croix there, or not?” Gina asked.
“Are you the young woman who was with Father Croix earlier today? You must tell me who and where you are.”
Gina felt a rush of anger and abruptly hung up. She didn’t have time for games with an anonymous man at the rectory, and would try to reach Father Croix directly in the morning. She lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Her mind still balked at the notion of shutting down for the night. She picked up the remote control from the nightstand and turned on the television. One of France’s interminable talk shows was ending, followed by a series of commercials. Gina went to the sink and began brushing her teeth as the nightly local ne
wscast began, which she absently watched in the mirror. She wondered whether there would be any more stories about Pope Pius XIII tonight, or if the news cycle had already moved on. Part of her worried that someone else would uncover the lineage discrepancies before she had gotten her arms around the potential story.
Gina was spitting into the sink when the announcer said, “Tonight in the town of Vincennes there was a tragic automobile accident involving a young priest from the local church.”
Gina spun toward the television and saw an old Citroen upended beside the curve of a road. Smoke spilled out from the crumpled hood, and the roof of the car was completely crushed inward.
“Father Regis Croix, church priest for the past two years, and only twenty-eight years old, was involved in a one-car accident. He was apparently driving at an excessively high speed when he failed to control the car in a curve and ran off the road and into a tree, flipping the vehicle. Vincennes is mourning the loss of its priest.”
Gina gawked at the television, her toothbrush still clutched in her hand. The next story was about fires—attributed by authorities to vandals or skinheads—in the offices of three parish churches in Lille. The announcer said that thousands of historical documents were destroyed in the blazes.
Gina picked up her phone and tapped Dave Broch’s number. A recording said that the phone was either turned off or out of range, and she was not given the option to leave a voicemail.
There would be no sleep tonight. Gina threw her toiletries in her travel bag and rushed out the door.
*
Martín pulled his necktie knot tight against his shirt collar and stared into the mirror. He had tossed and turned all night thinking about the previous day’s meeting with Ishikawa.
Nicolás’s decision to stay in Cuba—made before Martín was even born—was a dark day in the family’s history. When Martín’s father finalized the arrangements for the family to escape to Miami, where they would be welcomed by the burgeoning Cuban population and would no longer have to conceal their religion, Nicolás announced that he believed in the Marxist revolution, condemned his parents’ bourgeois mentality, hugged his younger brothers and sisters, and calmly left the house. They lived in terror for the next two days and nights, fearing that Nicolás would turn them in. But the police never arrived and the go-fast boat had met them at the rendezvous point on schedule.