by Rob Jones
“The CNI?”
He nodded. “I’d say so, and that means when the cavalry arrives we’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”
“So what shall we do, Harry? I’m scared...”
“First we have to find the research.”
“It could be anywhere!”
“No, not anywhere – it’s specifically somewhere, and that’s different.”
They made a quick search of the professor’s study but found nothing obvious, and then made their way back into the main living area.
“We’re never going to find it!”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I don’t know. How do we know that the killer didn’t find it?”
“Because you’re still alive. If he’d found what he was looking for he would have killed you too. It looks like he was interrupted by your neighbor calling the police and he fled without whatever he was looking for.
“And that means he’ll be back?”
Harry nodded. “Probably. It’s obviously a pretty big deal.”
“So where is it?”
“Wait – you said it was his research – maybe even his life’s work. And now we know it was important enough for someone to be driven to murder. Where is the best place to hide a tree?”
“I don’t understand.”
“A forest. We start with his books.”
They began to search through the books – those the killer had thrown on the floor and those still on the shelves. Then Harry stopped in his tracks. He knew it had to be what he was looking for the moment he saw it. On a shelf with over fifty textbooks on physics and nanotechnology was just one book that didn’t fit in – it was an old, thin book – the Epistola CVI. He reached for it and took it from the shelf.
“What is it?” Lucia asked.
“It’s the Epistola CVI written by Bernard of Clairvaux.”
“Who is he?”
“Who was he, you mean – he died nearly a thousand years ago. He was a French abbott and a founding member of the Cistercian Order. This has to have something to do with this business.”
“How do you know?”
“Very expensive education.”
“No, I mean how do you know it has something to do with the murder?”
“Look at the shelf – look at the whole room – there’s nothing in here except science. His art books are all in the study, but everything in this room is about physics from all the books on the shelves to the little Newton’s Cradle on his desk. The only thing in this entire space that is not about science in this room is this one little book. This book was put here on purpose.”
*
Ruiz accelerated the Spider around the north of the city and approached Chamberí where the apartment was located. He slowed the car and pulled up at the end of the street which was now cordoned off and guarded by several armed police officers.
An unmarked white BMW was parked in front of three black and white cars a few yards away. The cars were marked on the doors Policía Municipal Madrid and had flashing blue lights but no sirens. In the front passenger seat of the BMW, he instantly recognized Inspector Jefe Cristina Fernandez.
As she climbed out of the car, she squeezed her temples and sighed. “There was a time when Madrid was a safe city, Rafael,” she said. “But it’s starting to feel like this is no longer the case.
“How many men?” Ruiz asked.
“Six, but when we arrived and cordoned off the street one of my officers reported movement inside the apartment.”
“Someone’s inside Reyes’s apartment?”
“Yes, they must have gotten in before my officers sealed off the apartment block.”
“Any ID?”
“No, but maybe the killer went back to the scene of the crime.”
“Whoever it is, they’ve run out of time... and luck,” Ruiz said. “We’re going in right now – get the men briefed and ready to go.”
SIX
“You really think this book has something to do with Pablo’s research?”
“I don’t know, but it’s worth a try. Don’t you think it’s odd this is the only book not on science in the entire room?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. He was studying art remember – restoration and history.”
“Yes, but all his art research is in his study, like I said. This is different – this is his sitting room and exclusively about science.” He opened the small book and saw an inscription on the first page: To Andrej Liška: The Man Who Saved the World.
“Who the hell is Andrej Liška?” Harry asked.
“I don’t know exactly...” Lucia said. “But Pablo used to go for walks in the Sierra de Guadarrama sometimes, and he told me he was sometimes meeting an old friend. Perhaps it is the same man. He said they could talk together for hours, but I never met him. I wondered if he was another physicist, but I have never heard of him.”
Harry began to flick through the rest of the old tattered paperback. Seconds later something soon caught his eye – highlighted text. “Wait a minute.”
“What is it?” Lucia asked.
“I’m not sure, but I think it’s our first clue – look – some of the words have been highlighted.”
He showed her one of the pages where two short consecutive sentences were underlined – Experto crede: aliquid amplius invenies in silvis, quam in libris. Ligna et lapides docebunt te, quod a magistris audire non possis. The first sentence was also highlighted with bright pink fluorescent ink, and silvis underlined twice. In the margin Pablo had translated the word into English – woods.
“What does it mean?”
“My Latin is a little rusty,” said Harry, recalling his days at Harrow, “but unless I’m very much mistaken, it literally means believe the expert, you will find more in the woods than in the books – trees and stones shall teach thee, that thou may not be able to hear from their masters.”
“I asked what it meant, Harry.”
“Just what I said – I suppose it was the only way Pablo could think of concealing his research findings. Maybe this Andrej Liška character knows what all this means? After all, Pablo inscribed the book to him.”
She nodded. “And look – there – another highlighted word.”
Harry looked down at the bottom of the page where Lucia was pointing at the word oculis that was also highlighted with the pink pen. “It means eyes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, neither do I. Finding more in the woods than the books I can work with, but why draw our attention to the word eyes like this?”
Lucia took the book from Harry’s hands and flicked through it again. “Look here – Pablo highlighted another single word.”
“Pulchritudo – it means beauty. There must be more in there – go through it again.”
“Yes – another one here on page thirty-one – est.”
“That means ‘is’.”
Lucia glanced at him for a moment. “I know that much, Harry. Spanish is my mother tongue.”
“Of course, forgive me.”
Harry asked for the book back and went through it again more closely under the light of the little lamp on the stand beside Reyes’s leather wing chair. “Another two here on pages forty and forty-one – et and aspicientis which mean and and observer, respectively.”
“So we have eyes, beauty, is, and observer,” Lucia said. “I think I know what he was trying to say.”
“Me too – look here on page forty-nine – in – means the same in Latin as it does in English – so we have “and beauty is in the eyes of the observer, or beholder as the English proverb goes.”
“The same in Spanish – la belleza está en el ojo del espectador.”
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder – what was he trying to tell us?”
Harry searched his mind. It was a common proverb, and the message it delivered was obvious enough, but what could it possibly have to do with Pablo Reyes’s research?
For the first time, Lucia sounded hopeful
. “So you think this is definitely linked to his research?”
“Maybe – what do you think?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I only knew him for a few months. He was a very private and suspicious man. He was secretive about his old career and research in physics. If he really was researching something dangerous, it wouldn’t surprise me if he hid it with the intention of it never being found again, believe me.”
Harry paced the large room and considered what it all meant. He thought about how frightened the old man must have been to go to such lengths to hide his findings. All he had left to the world were a few highlighted words in a small book containing a thousand year-old text written by a Cistercian monk, and if it was supposed to be helpful it was failing in a big way. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... without any other context it could mean any one of a million things.
“I don’t believe that he would want his research never to be found,” Harry said. “No way would he waste years of his life like this. He obviously knew someone was after him and decided to hide his research findings – this was the only way he knew how. If only we knew what he had discovered.”
“That’s a big if.”
“For now we have to assume whoever killed Pablo never got what they wanted because they didn’t find this book, and so they’re going to try again to find out its location. It’s up to us to find it first.”
“I agree, but why are these words so important?”
“Wait a minute,” Harry said, “maybe it’s not the words that are important but the numbers?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look – we know the words add up to a simple Latin sentence - et pulchritudo in oculis aspicientis est – right?”
“Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What are you getting at?”
“They didn’t come in that order though. Starting at the front of the book and working to the back, as you normally read a book, they read oculis pulchritudo est et aspicientis in, and that doesn’t make any sense in Latin at all. If you think about it, Pablo could have found the words he used on any number of pages in this book, so I think the significance of them is the pages they were on.” Harry flicked back through the book, stopping on the pages with the highlighted numbers. “The pages are 3, 24, 31, 40, 41 and 49, and these correspond exactly to the nonsense sentence, but if you rearrange the words so the sentence makes sense, then the sequence changes to 40, 24, 49, 3, 41, and 31.”
“You mean like a code or something?”
“Exactly – did Pablo have a safe or anything like that?”
“Of course – it’s behind that picture.”
Lucia pointed to an original Matisse charcoal from the late 1940s. It was a metre to the left of a large reproduction of a 15th Century map of Italy.
“His safe is behind that?” Harry couldn’t believe the killer had overlooked it, but then hiding safes behind pictures was so clichéd perhaps he had dismissed it as too obvious.
Lucia nodded her head. “Why?”
“It sold through an auction house I know, that’s all.”
“Yes, he bought it at Bonham’s many years ago.”
Harry gently took the Matisse off the wall and laid it on the leather sofa. As Lucia had said, behind it was a compact safe – a steel Burton Standard with an electronic combination lock that Harry was familiar with from his days working in MI6. He quickly tapped in the numbers from the book and tried to open the door.
“Well?” Lucia asked.
“Nothing. Whatever they are, they’re not the combination to this safe.”
Lucia sighed.
“Don’t worry – we’ll work it out, but we need to work fast. Whoever’s holding the police back won’t wait forever – plus the killer could return at any moment.”
“You think?”
“Like I said – they were looking for this,” he held up the small book. “Perhaps Pablo left them something easier to find that has led them on a wild goose chase. When they find out they’re going to come back again so we need to work fast.”
Harry paced the room again, stopping once or twice to peer through the curtains. A team of armed officers was snaking up the pavement and entering the apartment block. “Looks like we have company,” he said.
“The police?”
“And CNI I would guess – they’ll be in here in seconds. Damn it!” He turned and saw the old framed map of Italy on the adjacent wall. For a few seconds he said nothing, and didn’t move a muscle. It couldn’t be, could it?
“Harry, what is it?” asked Lucia.
More silence.
“Harry!”
The man appeared from the shadows of the hallway, lunging forward with a boning knife he’d snatched from the side. It still had meat on it from the meal Pablo had been preparing when he was attacked. He simultaneously swung his left arm back to strike Lucia in the face and brought the knife slicing down through the air towards Harry’s chest.
The Englishman raised his arm to block the wound but the blade slashed deep into his forearm. The blow to Lucia knocked her off her feet and sent her flying back onto the leather chair while the point of the knife missed Harry’s body by millimetres.
The former soldier’s training kicked in without thinking about it, and before he knew what had happened he’d returned fire with a heavy knife-hand strike and smashed the blade from the man’s hand. It clattered onto the floor butt-first. With the handle now wedged into a small gap in the floorboards the blade of the knife was sticking up into the room like a steel stalagmite.
As Lucia staggered back to her feet, the man spun around with the reactions of a ninja, striking Harry in the chest with a sharp palm strike and knocking the breath from his body. In the same move he brought his other hand around and back-slapped Lucia to the floor behind him once again.
Harry fell back onto the knife, stopping himself from getting impaled on it by pushing out his left arm and landing on his elbow a few inches from the sparkling blade. He knew he had to get away but before he could move the man launched himself toward the former spy, slammed his boot down on Harry’s chest and started to push him down onto the knife’s lethal meat-covered blade.
Harry felt the tip of the knife prick into his back as he fought like the devil to stay alive. All the weight of his body plus the force of the man’s boot pushing him down was now supported by his left arm as he used his right arm to twist the assassin’s ankle and push him away. He felt his elbow crunching down into the floorboards and the tip of the knife driving further into his skin.
Lucia was screaming, unsure what to do, but then she picked up a vase from the bookshelf and brought it crashing down on the man’s skull. The killer grunted in pain and collapsed to the floor at Harry’s side, giving the former soldier all the time he needed to spring away from the blade and get to his feet.
He wrenched the knife out of the floorboards and moved toward the man, but then the lights went out and they were plunged into darkness.
Lucia screamed again, and they both heard the assassin scramble to his feet and melt into the shadows of the apartment.
“They’ve cut the power,” Harry said, cursing the timing of it. “They’re about to raid the apartment. Bugger it!”
Then the front door burst open and a heartbeat later an anti-terror squad burst in from the hall and surged into the apartment. They were geared up with night vision scopes and assault rifles.
A wild cacophony of screams in Spanish ordered everyone to get on the floor and put their hands behind their heads, but then a muzzle flash in the darkness lit the room for half a second – just long enough to see one of the policemen collapse to the floor.
SEVEN
With the sound of the gunshot still in the air, Harry leaped at Lucia and rugby-tackled her to the ground behind one of the couches. She took the brunt of the powerful fall as she slammed back-first into the old, hardwood floorboards. She screamed out in shock but the air was pushed out of her a second later when Harry landed
on top of her. The assassin had shot one of the policemen and Harry had anticipated the response in just enough time to save their lives.
Before either could speak, the police raised their guns and fired back, raking the plush apartment with nine mil bullets and blasting the furniture and bookshelves to smithereens. The bullets shredded through the couch above their heads and slammed into the bookcase behind them. Harry strained to see a way out but then realized they weren’t far from the door leading through into the kitchen and the back of the apartment.
“Think you can make it?” he asked, nudging his chin at the kitchen door.
Lucia nodded and struggled up to her elbows. “This is not what a physicist expects out of life!”
They crawled into the kitchen and slammed the door shut, then the guns fell silent and a woman’s voice called over from the door leading to the hall.
“She wants us to give ourselves up,” Lucia said. “Maybe this is a good idea?”
Harry considered Pablo’s corpse and the now the dead policeman. “I don’t think so.”
He caught some movement in his peripheral vision and saw the assassin clambering onto a small balcony outside the kitchen window. They ran over to the window just as the police began shredding the kitchen door with hot lead.
Harry winced and pulled his head in instinctively as the bullets drilled through the kitchen door and smashed it to pieces. “It’s now or never!” he said, and wrenched Lucia by the arm out of the doors and onto the balcony.
He looked below but knew it was no good – they were three storeys up and it was a straight drop to the pavement below. He thought he might just be able to make it down the drainpipe but one look at Lucia in the red dress and heels and he knew she stood no chance at all.
Looking up, the future got brighter. A sloping roof was reachable if they stood on the balcony rail and pulled themselves up, which thanks to a solid-looking cast-iron gutter looked like it might be possible.