by James Codlin
Sister Trinidad heard soft sobs from the other side of the wall, and could not keep her composure any longer. Tears rolled down her face as she sprinted out of the autoclave room and down the hall, hoping to reach the bathroom before she threw up.
*
Martín looked up as Sister Trinidad slipped into the room. He smiled.
“Sister, I apologize. I had no right to ask you to—wait, have you been crying?”
She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her habit. “You said you had something important to do, right?”
“Yes, I have very important business that will benefit many people. But I don’t want to get you into trouble.”
“The others don’t want you to leave. Father Serrano said we should watch you, and always keep the door locked.”
“Am I a prisoner here?”
Sister Trinidad started crying again.
“What is it, Sister?”
She glanced at the door before taking his hand in both of hers and staring into his eyes for a long time. She took more deep breaths and then spoke again, this time with more firmness and certainty. “I will help you. Let me see what I can do about clothes.”
“Thank you. And I need access to a phone. A pay phone, an office phone, a mobile—anything.”
Sister Trinidad looked back at him with determination. “I will do all I can,” she said. “Pray for me.”
And then she was gone.
*
Martín had been dozing when the sound of the door opening awakened him. Sister Trinidad entered, unlocked his harness, and then handed him a tightly rolled janitor’s jumpsuit.
“Don’t detach the wires until you’re ready to flee,” she said. “It will set off alarms and they’ll be in here quickly.”
He was surprised at the weight of the bundle. When he unrolled the jumpsuit, a cell phone and a plastic bag spilled out. The plastic bag contained his wallet and passport.
Martín’s eyes widened in amazement and gratitude. “Is this your phone?” he asked.
Sister Trinidad’s face went serious. “I am quite sure God wants me to help you. It’s a small sacrifice to do His work.”
With that pronouncement she went to the door and slipped out of the room.
Careful not to disturb the biomedical monitors attached to the band around his chest, Martín slipped out of bed and craned his neck out the window. He couldn’t tell how far he was above the ground, but there was a tree with branches that looked sturdy enough to support his weight within leaping distance.
Martín looked around the room for something to jimmy the lock. Nothing. He sat back down on the bed and carefully wriggled halfway into his jumpsuit, filling its pockets with Sister Trinidad’s phone and his wallet and passport. He looked down at his bare feet and cursed his lack of shoes, but he didn’t have the time or inclination to send Sister Trinidad on another errand. It was time to go.
Martín wrapped the top and fitted sheets around his right forearm. After taking a deep breath, he lunged toward the window and hammered at the seam connecting the two windowpanes, forcing the cheap lock to give way and shattering the glass. He expended a few precious seconds sweeping the windowsill clean, and then ripped the monitor wires from his chest before crawling onto the ledge.
He was about 10 meters above the ground, and a closer look made him doubt that the branches would hold his weight. The fall was going to be brutal, but he was pretty sure that whatever Serrano had in mind for him would be worse.
Martín gathered his courage and leaped for the thickest branch within reach, grasping it with both hands. It immediately snapped, and his ailing body tumbled through the ones below until he landed hard on the grass below, forcing the air from his lungs as the pain spread throughout his body. He gasped, feeling the panic of being unable to breathe, but also gratitude for being alive. Slowly he staggered to his feet. The right side of his ribcage burned and there was a sudden sharp pain from his foot that caused him to collapse back down to the ground. Cursing, he pulled a shard of glass out of his heel.
Martín stood back up and retched from the pain. There was a parking lot to his left with cars and ambulances parked in it. To the right, there was an expanse of grass going down a hill that terminated in a stone wall, with small houses crowded together beyond it. He pulled the mobile phone out of his pocket and keyed a number. His pilot answered.
“Pedro,” he whispered, “this is Martín. Get the plane ready to fly. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“What? Martín? Where are you? We’ve been—”
“No time. Just prep the plane.” He hung up.
After a moment’s hesitation, Martín cautiously edged toward the parking lot, though he didn’t know how to hotwire a car. He stayed low and ran in a crouch to the rows of cars, keeping them between himself and the hospital. None of the cars had keys in their ignitions and he couldn’t risk setting off an alarm by shattering one of their windows. He turned to search for a way to make his escape on foot and saw a rack of bicycles at the edge of the parking lot. It was completely out in the open, and Martín had to assume that the bicycles would be locked. But with a little bit of luck…
There!
A doctor in scrubs and a backpack was pedaling on an expensive-looking mountain bike toward the bike rack, slowing as he approached. Martín looked back at the hospital entrance, saw no one, and dashed forward. Just as the doctor began to dismount his bike, blissfully unaware of the man sprinting toward him from his blind side, Martín planted his remaining healthy foot and lunged forward, lowering his shoulder. As Martín’s body plowed into the unsuspecting doctor there was a surprised and frightened grunt. The two men’s bodies spilled onto the sidewalk, with the doctor letting out a dismayed “Ooof!” has he landed. Martín scrambled to his feet, lifted the toppled bike from the ground, and jumped into the seat. The bike wobbled beneath Martín as he realized that the seat’s height was extremely low, but he managed to start awkwardly peddling toward the parking lot’s exit. In Martín’s peripheral vision he saw the hospital’s automatic doors slide open and a group of men emerge. Shouts erupted as they spotted Martín. The road dropped down a steep hill, and in a short distance Martín was increasing speed. He shifted to a higher gear, pedaled hard, and was soon flying down the incline. Behind him, he heard engines starting. He turned to see two ambulances surging forward.
The road was now winding among the shanties of one of Caracas’s barrios. He slowed at an intersection, weaving to avoid cars and trucks, and then pedaled hard again once he had cleared the traffic. There was a blur to his left, and a quick glance confirmed that one of the ambulances was already right beside him. Father Serrano was in the passenger seat, barking something at the driver. Any words Martín might have picked up were drowned out as the ambulance’s siren roared to life.
Martín pedaled frantically, pulling ahead. The ambulance matched his acceleration, moving toward the shoulder and crowding him. But it stopped short of running him over. They clearly wanted him alive.
At the next intersection Martín didn’t slow down, swerving violently to avoid a bus and a heavy truck that were crossing the intersection perpendicular to his path. He heard the screech of rubber on pavement and he anticipated the crunch of metal impacting metal, but was not rewarded. Instead he heard the bleating of the electronic siren closing the distance.
His legs were tiring. The ambulance came alongside him again, trying to force him off the road. “Stop, Ibarra, stop!” Serrano yelled.
Martín willed his burning legs to push harder, but the ambulance pulled slightly ahead, and he saw the priest aiming a gun. A bluff, he thought to himself, and turned the handlebars hard to the right, swerving off the pavement. He heard loud cursing behind him as he crossed the dirt shoulder and zipped into a narrow gap between two shacks.
Martín followed the dirt path as it turned to the left and pitched downhill into a slum. A man too well dressed to be from this part of town dashed on foot from an intersecting path and dropped
to one knee. He had a gun and looked as if he fully intended to use it. Suddenly Martín was no longer certain that they intended to keep him alive if the alternative was his escape. The man shouted for him to stop, but Martín raced forward. Two bullets snapped past his ear. He bore down on the shooter, who dove to one side and rolled while Martín’s mountain bike streaked past.
The garbage-strewn path curved to the right, taking Martín out of sight of his pursuers. As he was gaining speed, a small naked child darted out in front of him. Martín braked and turned, crashing into a wall of sheet metal, knocking him from his seat and onto the ground where the bike fell on top of him, followed by the sheet metal. Dogs barked somewhere in the shacks above him.
Martín struggled to free himself as his battered body shrieked in pain, but he was somehow able to stand back up. He was mounting the bike when he felt something hard pressed against the base of his skull.
“Don’t move,” a voice said behind him. Then, much louder, “Down here!”
Martín heard a sound like a ripe melon being thumped hard, and felt a bulk pitch against his back, then slump to the ground. He turned to see the gunman face down in the dirt. A ragged young man stood over him, holding a length of pipe.
“Fucking cops,” he said. He gestured at Martín’s torn and dirty coveralls. “Me and you, we’re just shit that these guys scrape off their shoes. Get moving, we’ll take care of the other assholes.”
Martín stood in stunned disbelief as he saw other men appearing from the shadows, armed with rocks and steel bars. He nodded at the man in thanks, got on the bike, and headed downhill.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Gina looked up at Lenin with a grin. “Patricia!” she exclaimed.
Gina and Lenin had spent the morning debating who they could contact to help them gain an audience with her father without revealing that they were still alive. Gina
had contemplated simply calling his personal line, but she knew that her call would be screened and monitored. This inconvenience extended to her mother as well. She had
always wondered whether this was a necessity of the office, or a choice her parents had made to avoid being bothered by personal matters.
Then it had hit her.
“I don’t follow,” Lenin said, searching his memory for a member of the president’s staff with that name and coming up empty.
Gina smiled, grabbed the hotel room’s phone, and dialed.
Patricia was a maid who had taken care of Gina since she was an infant. After Gina left home for college, Patricia stayed on, practically a member of the family by that
point, and accompanied the president and his wife when they moved from Brasília to San Juan Diego.
When Gina called, the poor woman broke into hysterical tears. After a lengthy process of relating incidents from her childhood that only Gina and her nanny would
know, the woman accepted that Gina was either still alive or she had returned from the dead—a possibility not completely excluded due to her crenças supersticiosas.
Gina asked Patricia if she could manage to get her and Lenin into the presidential residence without being noticed by security. The answer was an enthusiastic “sim!”
True to her word, Patricia proved to be remarkably resourceful, occupying the security men and women on fools’ errands while furtively bringing Teodoro and Gina inside from their taxi.
After a brief private reunion with her mother, Gina led Lenin to her father’s study. Gina knocked softly, then opened the door. Her father was sitting behind his desk. He glanced toward the door, did a double take, and shot to his feet. Gina said something softly in Japanese and closed the door behind her.
Lenin waited outside, letting the father and daughter have a few moments alone. When Lenin was eventually admitted to the study, the three of them sat around a coffee table.
“Professor Lenin, I am greatly in debt to you for saving my daughter’s life,” Takeshi Ishikawa said.
“Mr. President, I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. Your daughter is a very strong and resourceful person who would have done just as well without me.”
Ishikawa nodded. “My daughter tells me you have information about troubling things.”
“Mr. President, I have deductions, inferences, and hypotheses based on my knowledge of history. What I do not have is proof.”
“Tell me quickly, then—important points only.”
“Sir, I believe there is a conspiracy in Europe to restore old power structures.” Lenin spoke awkwardly from his seated position on the sofa. After several false starts he stood, walked to the center of the room, and began to pace with his hands locked behind his back. The professorial stance relaxed him, and his thoughts began to flow.
“Item: The king of Spain is suddenly stricken. Behind closed doors, in the presence of only a cardinal, he changes his will and the succession to his throne. We have traced his successor, the current king, to a line of the Hapsburgs.
“Item: A year after the change of Spanish succession, the pope dies suddenly, the College of Cardinals meets, and after an unusually long deliberation, they elect a young and obscure priest from France. We have also traced his lineage to the Hapsburgs.
“Item: Carlos’s wife of three years is from Austria. Her lineage is that of nobility, but vague. I have traced her to the Hapsburgs.”
“Professor, what are you suggesting?” Ishikawa asked.
Lenin stopped pacing and faced Ishikawa. “Mr. President, I am suggesting that the Hapsburgs are engineering a return to power in Spain, Austria, and other countries. They intend to reinstate the Holy Roman Empire.”
Ishikawa was expressionless and did not move for several seconds. “Doctor Lenin, what you propose is preposterous. And even if it were true, that would be a political problem for Europe, not the Latino Union. I must focus on our own problems here—not be concerned about some political abstraction overseas.”
Lenin nodded. “In the absence of proof, I agree. It does sound ridiculous. But I’d hesitate to say that it doesn’t involve the fate of this union. The Hapsburgs once called these lands their own as well. A colleague of ours, an expert in international law, was retained by King Carlos to research legal issues regarding Spain’s sovereignty over its Latin American colonies. It stands to reason that a similar study of the legalities of the colonial relationship between Brazil and Portugal has been done.”
Ishikawa frowned.
“Mr. President, I believe King Carlos intends not only to restore the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, but also to restore all of our countries to Spanish rule. This is a plan to turn the clock back five centuries and make things as they were then. The king intends to once again rule the Spanish overseas empire.”
Lenin paused, looked up at the president, and waited to see if he would be thrown out of the room.
Instead, the president’s phone rang.
Ishikawa answered it curtly, but then a look of surprise crossed his face. He put the caller on hold and said to Gina and Lenin, “If you will excuse me.”
Gina felt a flash of anger. She started to speak, but he chopped at the air with his hand dismissively—a gesture she recognized all too well from a childhood spent trying to get her father’s attention. Defeated, she went with Lenin into the corridor, closing the door behind them.
*
Martín peered out from the alley. He had ridden his stolen bicycle to the main entrance of Francisco Medina Army Airfield, but one of the ambulances from the hospital was parked across the street. He saw two men inside the cab, and Father Serrano standing on the curb. Some of their faces were swollen, and one of the men in the ambulance repeatedly wiped blood from his face as it poured from a scalp wound. All of them looked royally pissed off.
The rumble of a diesel engine grew louder. Martín looked to his right and saw an approaching flatbed tractor-trailer that was carrying an armored personnel carrier. It was time to do something brilliant, or fatally stupid.
As the tru
ck began to rumble past the alley, Martín pedaled until he was between the enormous truck’s tires and grabbed its undercarriage. His back and stomach burned as he bounced between the pavement and the driveshaft.
After an eternity of several minutes, the tractor-trailer stopped. Martín rolled back out and stood up to find himself staring directly into the muzzle of a soldier’s rifle.
“Don’t shoot!” Martín shouted. “I’m here to see Major Valencia!”
The guard kept his rifle aimed, cocking his head at this stowaway in a torn and scuffed janitor’s coverall. He nodded at another soldier, who trotted off purposefully.
“So… who’s your side?” Martín asked to pass the time.
The soldier smirked, still aiming his rifle at Martín’s face.
“For me it’s Corinthians. My father got to see Pelé, but Tevez wasn’t a bad—”
The soldier’s smirk turned into a smile, showing his teeth. “Liar. Your Spanish might be good, but I know a gringo when I see one. You support Madrid, or Barcelona, or both.”
“At ease, soldier!” Valencia shouted. “I can vouch for this man. He’s an official of the Latino Union.”
The young soldier lowered his rifle and winked. “Good luck, gringo. Maybe when you get back to America you can buy yourself some shoes.”
The pilot and architect rapidly boarded the plane as Martín asked, “Are you ready to go?”
“Where did you have in mind?” Valencia asked.
“San Juan Diego.”
“I’ll get clearance in the air.” Valencia looked Martín up and down. “I imagine you’ve got one hell of a story. Would love to hear it some time.” With that, he spun on his heel and entered the cockpit.
Martín pulled out Sister Trinidad’s battered phone and placed a call to the Latino Union military communications center, connecting directly with the president’s residence. Ishikawa’s secretary came on the line, and Martín said, “This is a priority communication from One-Five India for the President.”
“I’ll put you through,” the woman said.
There was a series of clicks, and then, “Ishikawa here.”