by James Codlin
Nicolás opened the bag in his lap and pulled out a large green leaf. He ripped off a chunk with his teeth and began to chew it.
“Coca leaves?” Martín asked. “Seriously?”
Nicolás chuckled. “You are naive about so many things. Politics here in Latin America, for example. Ishikawa and his cohorts are all piranhas. They would kill any of their own just to stay in power. Look at Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Nicaragua, Panama.”
“And North Korea is any better?” Martín protested. “Kim murdered his own brother. The Soviet Union, North Korea, the so called ‘Peoples’ Republic of China. Every one of them developed an elite class, and those elite then murdered the proletariat and sold them out just to stay in power.”
Nicolás seemed to deflate a bit. “You do speak some truth, mi hermano. Shit, even Fidel finally went to France, put on a navy-blue suit, and got drunk with the bourgeoisie. Our ‘glorious’ revolution has been hijacked by capitalism around the world.” He chewed some more coca and stared into the distance.
“I’m old now, Martín. My dreams are further away from reality than they were in 1962.” He was lost in thought for a moment, and then continued, “I remember the year I spent with Che. Day and night, drunk or sober, he talked of revolution. He lived revolution every minute of every day. I was with him in Bolivia when he was killed. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“They cut off his hands off and sent them to Fidel to prove he was dead. Back in Cuba, we paraded around chanting ‘We will be like Che,’ pretending we could sustain his revolutionary spirit. Pretending that we could really be like him. Did you know that in Cuba schoolchildren chanted that slogan at the beginning of every day? But we were never like him. Not anything like him.”
Nicolás stared ahead for a long time, slowly patting the hand of the woman standing next to him. Then he shook off the reverie of his revolutionary long march and turned, looking almost surprised to see his brother still standing there. His weathered face had softened while he was reliving the past. Now it became hard again. His eyes were dilated from the coca.
“Listen, Martín, I believe you when you say you didn’t know that anyone would die through your actions.”
Carolina looked at Nicolás sharply. She dragged him several paces away and they hissed back and forth at each other with increasing animation. Finally, Carolina stormed away and retreated back down the hole in the ground, slamming the hatch closed behind her.
“She’s right, you know,” Nicolás said. “I don’t know whether I’m talking to my brother or a direct conduit to the CIA and the Latino Union.”
“Ishikawa did send me to find out what you are doing,” Martín said. “That’s all. No orders to kill you or stop you. And you know in your heart that I could have never accepted such an assignment. The only reason I visited the CIA was to get their opinion about what they thought you were doing.”
“Then you were duped, little brother,” Nicolás slurred. “Someone was following you. Letting you lead them to people, and killing everyone you contacted. Maybe Ishikawa, maybe somebody else. I’ve heard something about priests, but I don’t believe it.”
“Priests?” Martín asked. “Gallego told me to watch out for priests.”
Nicolás’s glassy eyes locked on Martín’s as he processed this. He laughed. “You will be stuck, you know. Caught between your loyalty to me as your brother and your loyalty to Ishikawa and the Latino Union—and Gina’s memory. You know that betraying me will ensure my death. But if you don’t have me killed, a whole city’s going to die.”
“A city? What—”
Nicolás clapped his young brother on the shoulder. “We’re headed east, to the coast—a coalition of all the old revolutionaries for Latin America, and some new foreign muscle, as well. But this time with a common purpose—something big. No more bullshit, no more rhetoric, no more dogma. Did you know you can hire a North Korean rocket scientist for 10,000 US dollars? An Iraqi nuclear physicist for 12? A Russian inertial guidance engineer for 8? Do you know how easy it is to buy nuclear materials? Not just raw materials, but warheads: targeted, guided, ready to plug into a missile. Just make the right contacts in Brussels, Karachi, Kabul, Cairo, Damascus, and they make a few calls to Russia. The goods are shipped from Saint Petersburg.”
Martín was shocked. Was his brother asking to be betrayed and killed? Why else could he be telling him all of this? Maybe it was the coca talking, or some sort of desperate need to impress. “Nico, surely you can’t believe that obtaining nuclear experts and supplies is ‘easy’ for a career revolutionary encamped in the middle of the jungle.”
Nicolás shook his head. “So naive. Things have come together very quickly over the past months. I have new… benefactors… who are as alarmed as I am by the rise of the fascist Latino Union.”
“You’re the one who’s naive! You blow up a city, and then what? The world gets uglier, governments clamp down on their populaces and blow up Arabian wedding parties with their drones. And whoever’s supplying you with these nukes will kill you and everyone in your faction to cover their tracks.”
Nicolás stared for a long time. When he began to speak, his voice rose with revolutionary fervor, casting aside the doubts his brother was trying to sow. “No more demonstrating. No more strikes. No more kidnappings and assassinations of a few fat plutocrats. I have been doing this a long time, my brother—long enough to know that all of these things are too small. Pinpricks and paper cuts. All bullshit—all for nothing. This time we will finally go for the ultimate terror, the one the whole world fears. At last I will have the full attention, and respect, of the rich and powerful. And I will use that attention and respect to further the cause of the people—my people—no matter what anyone who arranged this may want.”
Nicolás emphatically spat out another chewed clump of coca leaves, and Martín fell silent. In the heat, with only the drone of insects buzzing around them, the Ibarra brothers searched each other’s eyes, looking for the truth.
*
Lenin browsed the database for more than an hour. He was astounded by its chronological detail. He had gone forward from the time of Carlos I, pursuing the known figures of the family whose lines had died out in the 18th and 19th centuries. He went back and found two bastard sons. They had been born in Mechelen, Flanders—just like the pope—when the House of Burgundy had its seat there. Their line went forward carrying the Hapsburg genes, if not the legitimacy and name.
He traced the line through the 17th then 18th centuries. The line started by one of the two bastards continued long after the official one died out. It ended with the marriage between Carlos VII and Isabel in Luxembourg, a quiet restoration of the Hapsburg’s Flemish and Austrian branches.
Lenin looked at his watch. It would be very important to have this evidence on hand when he had to present proof. He found a sheet of paper and scribbled a note: “I hope you will forgive me, and please accept my word that I am working on an extremely important project. One that Efraín Bertrán considered vital—and for which he gave his life. I am taking your computer with me, but I swear that I will make restitution to you some day. Please accept my apology. T. Espinosa.” He left $2,000 in cash next to the note.
Lenin shut the laptop and carried it to his car. As he drove away, he thought about the kings’ and queens’ names in the database. The rest of the world believed that the Bourbons continued to rule Spain. But in actuality the Hapsburgs were back in power there and at the Vatican. How much further could they go?
*
As Nicolás chewed on his coca leaves, a sound interrupted the low buzz of the jungle—a whistle that grew to a throbbing roar. Something skimmed over the canopy and then crashed to the ground just a few meters from the two men. A cloud of white powder filled the air. Nicolás stared up at the sky, his jaw slack.
“What have you done?” Nicolás asked. His knees buckled and he collapsed. Martín pulled his handkerchief from his back pocket and clamped it over his mouth. He fe
lt his leg muscles spasm and used his last available strength to twist open the hatch and shove his vomiting brother down the shaft.
Martín’s nose, throat, and mouth burned. He fought through his disorientation to close the hatch, cover it with deadwood, and crawl as far away as he could. He felt his sphincter and bladder muscles go slack and he started to cry with shame and anger as he soiled himself.
*
Lenin had once again outdone himself, chartering a flight to a private airstrip an hour’s drive from San Juan Diego in a small plane piloted by Benjamín Álvarez, a retired air force colonel who had studied under Lenin in Argentina. When Gina joked that Lenin’s loyal base of students across the Americas constituted his own private mafia, Álvarez turned around with a smile and gently corrected her with one word, “Familia.” Lenin grinned proudly as Gina shook her head in amazement.
Waiting at the airstrip was a taxi Álvarez had arranged. The cabbie was more than willing to take them into San Juan Diego for a handsome fare that he wouldn’t have to report to his employer. As the taxi wound its way toward the new capital city, Gina and Lenin sat in silence taking in the beauty of their surroundings. The sun had begun to set behind Chimborazo, the snowcapped volcano to the west of San Juan Diego, and the waning rays of sun elongated the shadows of a herd of alpacas grazing in the plains on the outskirts of the city. Ahead of them shimmered the lights of the new federal district, with a skyline dotted with towering cranes.
The cab made its way into the city proper and dropped Gina and Lenin in front of a small, cheap hotel that had been hastily built for the army of workers that had descended upon the city during the most labor-intensive phases of its construction. Most of the workers had moved on to new projects, and as Gina predicted, a moderate tip forestalled any requests from the desk clerk for passports or paperwork.
They booked adjoining rooms. Lenin opened his stolen laptop, connecting it to the hotel’s Wi-Fi. This was the first time in 24 hours that they were alone and could talk openly.
“Before my house was… vaporized… you may recall that I had called a couple of colleagues in Spain to see if they could find out anything about what David was researching. Before we left Venezuela I reached out to one of them to see if he had found anything.”
Gina looked at Lenin in shock and dismay. “One of your colleagues now knows that you are alive?”
Lenin looked somewhat chagrined but pressed his point. “In order to stay alive and get to the bottom of what’s going on, we’ll need to reach out to people we can trust. I give you my word that I trust this man. And though he was admittedly a bit dumbstruck to hear that I was still alive, he gave me his sworn word to keep our conversation a secret. I told him that it was imperative not just for my safety, but for his.”
Gina shook her head. “We need to be making these decisions together. Both of our necks are on the line, and we need the list of people who know we’re alive to be as short as possible.”
“You’re right, of course. It won’t happen again.” He studied Gina’s face for a moment to make sure that he didn’t need to apologize any further and, sensing that he was okay to proceed, he gestured at a sheet of paper on the coffee table between them. “In Zaragoza David was apparently studying the Spanish fueros—special rights that various regions and cities in Spain had been granted by the crown. He looked up the viceregal seats of Mexico City, Lima, and Buenos Aires to see whether they had fueros that would have given them any special status with respect to the crown.”
“Did someone ask him to do this?” Gina asked.
“I’m afraid I have no idea. All I can say is that he moved on to Sevilla to pore through the Archive of the Indies.”
“That doesn’t tell us much,” Gina said. “They span hundreds of years and dozens of countries.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Lenin said. He turned on the television, and after flipping through the channels for a few minutes, he stumbled upon a joint interview with the pope and the king of Spain. Carlos was dressed in a dark, conservative suit and the pontiff in white papal garb with gold trim.
They were being asked about the roles of temporal and spiritual leadership, and Pius answered that there was a need worldwide for a spiritual aspect to every temporal decision. Carlos added that he saw not only a need for a spiritual basis for every decision leaders make, but also believed the two concepts, spirituality and temporal rule, were inextricably tied. Both should be present in equal measure in all political leaders, he offered.
“I see a future when we live in a world community under the dominion of Christianity,” Carlos said.
The pope gave the king a look. “Not just Christianity.”
“Of course, Your Holiness,” Carlos said. “All the great religions of the world will be stewards of our future.”
“He’s talking about Carlos V,” Lenin said. “After he was elected Holy Roman Emperor, he saw the pope as a kind of co-ruler. With a united Christianity, he wanted to resume the Crusades and finally conquer the Holy Land.”
“The West has already conquered Jerusalem,” Gina said.
“They’ve persecuted the Jews many times before. And with a global reach, they can do the same to the Muslims, the Hindus, the Daoists, the Sikhs—”
Lenin was interrupted by a loud roar coming from both the television and outside their hotel as Pius and Carlos passed a pair of Swiss papal guards in traditional uniforms and stepped out onto a balcony overlooking the Plaza de Santo Narcisa de Jesús Martillo-Morán. The plaza was teeming with people chanting “PI-US, CAR-LOS, PI-US, CAR-LOS…” They unfurled banners depicting a king’s crown with a Christian cross standing in the center of it and the legend ONE WORLD, ONE GOVERNMENT, ONE GOD.
“Oh, my God,” Lenin said. He grabbed the papers they had been working with and quickly shuffled through them, discarding many to the floor.
“Where?… Where?” he mumbled to himself. He found a paper and held it up.
“What is it?” Gina asked.
“I know who David Broch was working for. Look at this.” It was from their transcripts of the various voicemail messages. “When Broch said he was coming back, someone named Julio interrupted. And Broch said that they were going to see Ray. That’s not a name. He meant ‘rey’ with an ‘E.’ This Julio was taking him to see the king. And that’s who commissioned this research about legal sovereignty in the Latin American countries. And once the work was wrapping up, I’ll bet he was the person to ensure that David Broch…”
He trailed off and Gina looked back at the television. As she watched the throngs of people chanting the king’s name in near-hysteria, Gina felt a chill sweep over her.
CHAPTER 15
One Year Ago
It was well past midnight. Harsh sodium vapor lights blazed inside the Basilica Cathedral of Lima. Had anyone tried the doors, they would have found them tightly barred. Work on the massive structure had begun in the 16th century, built on the site of two humbler churches, the first of which had seen the conquistador Francisco Pizzaro plant the ceremonial first log. In the august presence of the old stones and ornate altar of the Spanish Colonial cathedral, workers in spotless coveralls worked silently and efficiently. Had anyone seen them, they would have been struck by the fact that every single one of the workers was Asian. This was not totally out of place in a country with a small but influential Japanese-Peruvian community—one that had produced a Peruvian president. But these men, when they exchanged an occasional word, spoke Japanese, not Spanish, and the blueprints and technical documents to which they referred were written entirely in Japanese.
Some of the men operated laser cutters, burning long grooves into the stone floor, while others pulled cables through discrete openings in the confessionals and pews. An expert on such things would have recognized the high-end fiber optic cables. Another crew wearing night-vision goggles labored up in the old bell tower in complete darkness. They had meticulously cleansed the tower of centuries’ worth of soot and bird droppings, and were
connecting cables coming up from below to a metal box the size of a steamer trunk. Within the metal box was a wireless telecommunications microcell that could transmit reams of data at lightning speeds on spectrum that had been exclusively licensed by the Peruvian government to a subsidiary of Moto Electric. In exchange for having this massive virtual data pipeline all to itself, Moto Electric’s local subsidiary paid the Peruvian government eye-watering fees, with kickbacks finding their way into offshore bank accounts belonging to high-ranking government officials.
This activity was not unique to the cathedral. Every night for the past six months the same activities had been taking place in great cathedrals and parish churches from Guatemala to Tierra del Fuego—any church with an average daily attendance of at least one hundred parishioners.
But the work was only done under the cover of darkness. By daybreak, there would not be any trace of the previous night’s activities.
*
The two men sat facing each other across a large ornate desk. The Vatican City office was sumptuous, with soft velvet drapes, rich hand-woven carpeting, and gold-trimmed Italian Renaissance chairs. The man behind the desk wore the red cassock and skullcap of a cardinal. The other man was dressed in a simple black jacket with dress pants, well-shined black shoes, a black smock, and a crisp white clerical collar. His full head of black but graying hair was stylishly long.
The cardinal was accustomed to visitors being awed by the rich furnishings, high ceilings, and his own scarlet vestments. Subordinates usually sat in nervous silence looking at the floor until he addressed them. But after kissing the cardinal’s ring, the priest looked him directly in the eyes.
Wanting to make the older man sweat a bit, the young cardinal opened a file that lay before him on a clean desk and scanned several pages. At last he looked up and reestablished eye contact. The delay had not induced the slightest anxiety in the priest.
“Do you know why you are here?” the cardinal asked.