by Rob Jones
“Maybe we got it wrong,” Harry said. “Maybe his notes were just simple notes, and not a message at all.”
Lucia shook her head. “No – I don’t believe Pablo would do something like that. None of his other books had writing in them. This book is different – and the reference to beauty being in the eye of the beholder, and how we would find the answer not in books but in the woods – and don’t forget the page numbers were cartographic grid references that led us exactly to this point in the museum. No – his reference means something and what we are looking for is in the woods.”
Harriet returned with a steaming cup of coffee in her hand. “Did I miss anything?”
“Wait!” said Harry, turning from the panel and fixing his eyes on Lucia. “The Latin for woods is silvis, but why did Pablo translate it into English in the margin?”
“Pablo often spoke English, especially at work or when he was at a conference.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t explain why he would make a private note in the margins of one of his own books in English and not in Spanish, and yet that is exactly what he did here.” Harry held up the book. “What’s the Spanish word for woods?”
“Bosque, but why do you ask?”
“Did he speak Spanish at home?”
“Usually, but most of his work was written in Italian – it was his mother’s language.”
“And what is the Italian for the woods?”
“Bosco.”
Harry ran a hand through his hair in disbelief and fixed his eyes on Lucia. “How could I have been such a fool? Pablo’s reference to the woods wasn’t about woods in a painting – it was about a particular artist – The Woods.”
“I don’t understand,” Lucia said.
“I do,” Harriet said, and let out a low laugh. “It seems I managed to teach you something after all, Henry.”
THIRTEEN
Aleksi Karhu had watched the conversation between Harry, Lucia and the security guard with interest. Why had they come to the Prado? He knew it must have something to do with Reyes – maybe he had hidden what they sought so desperately here, in Spain’s most famous museum? If the old man’s heart hadn’t given out before he had finished interrogating him he would have been able to get this information first-hand and saved all of this trouble. But this was the best way now – allow this Englishman to work it out for him and follow him straight to the location of what the old man had stolen from them.
He made sure the puukko knife was out of sight by pushing it through his belt on the back of his trousers and walked casually to the entrance of the Prado. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and slid it onto his lower lip. Then he approached the door and pretended to be a little drunk. He tapped on the glass and waved at the guard.
“Get lost!” was the reply.
He tapped again and beckoned the guard over.
Miguel approached and spoke through the glass door. “Qué desea?”
“Sorry, no habla español.”
“What do you want?” he repeated in hesitant English.
“Just a light, that’s all,” Aleksi said in English. He took the cigarette from his mouth and waved it goofily in the air, dropped it, and when he picked it up swayed a little to indicate drunkenness. He wanted to put the guard off-guard, and it was working.
“Just wait,” the guard said, and unlocked the door, “I can give you a light, but then you go away or I call the police, okay?”
“Got it.”
Aleksi watched the guard move as he opened the heavy door. He was trained in assessing a potential enemy’s capability, and it took just a few seconds for him to work out that the guard was probably less than seventy kilos, and extremely unlikely to have any martial arts training. Plus he was young and had an air of innocence. That always made things easier.
The guard opened the door and stepped out into the night. Aleksi felt a rush of warm air from inside the museum rush over his face as the guard pulled a lighter from his pocket. Aleksi let things go this far because he wanted to know if the guard was right or left-handed.
There was a ten percent chance he would be a southpaw, but the odds were right again: the guard was right-handed. This could sometimes make a difference if his opponent just happened to know any moves, but in this case the guard knew nothing, and seconds later he was kicking out against Aleksi’s bear-like embrace around his neck in the doorway of the museum, his eyes bulging with terror and his face a rich purple with exploded blood vessels as he struggled against the much stronger man for his survival.
“Where is the security office?”
“Please!”
“Tell me where the office is – the office with the CCTV.”
“Please let me go!”
“Last chance.”
“On the ground floor – behind the main reception desk there’s a long corridor. It’s at the end.”
A moment later the guard was dead thanks to a violently broken neck. Aleksi dragged the dead guard inside and hid the body behind a large potted yucca plant in the corner of the entrance hall. He took his swipe card for the internal doors and made off into the museum on his way to the main security office.
A man in his line of work rarely saw such treasures as were to be found in a place like the Museo del Prado. All of this was a world away from his home village in northern Finland where he was raised by his mother after his father was killed in a hunting accident. That world was hard and unforgiving, and covered in snow and ice for at least half the year.
There, his father’s death had made him responsible for his mother and sister when he was just sixteen years old, and that is why he had joined the Finnish Army. His proclivity for hunting and killing quickly came to the attention of those training him and within two years he was transferred, upon request, to the Utti Jaeger Regiment, the Finnish Special Forces, where he excelled in long-range recon in Arctic environments and martial arts. But even that went wrong eventually, and only a year later he crossed an uncrossable line and was dishonorably discharged without a pension. That was where the old man stepped in.
All of that was a long time ago now, and the black and white landscape of the Lapland training ranges had been replaced with a bank of black and white CCTV images in the Prado which he now studied with care. In all, there were over a dozen monitors, all time and date stamped, each one relaying to the guards a rolling sequence of two or three images of various rooms and corridors around the enormous museum.
For a few moments they showed nothing but still images of empty galleries. There was a security guard on the ground floor of the Jerónimos Building where a temporary exhibit was installed, and another on the first floor of the Villanueva Building in the section housing the Spanish Paintings, but no sign of his prey. But then he saw them – two silent black figures walking briskly along a corridor on the ground floor of the main building, in the Italian Renaissance gallery.
He drew his puukko knife and stepped out of the security office. If they found what he was looking for they would both be dead in a matter of minutes.
FOURTEEN
For a few moments there was silence between them, and then Harry was aware of the sound of Lucia’s breath, close to him in the long empty corridor. His mind was still trying to make sense of everything that had happened since she crashed his impromptu dinner date with Anaïs – four murders and an illegal trip to the Prado – but now they were racing toward the Woods at last.
El Bosco.
He couldn’t deny this was the sort of excitement he had missed since quitting MI6 and devoting his life to burning out on the casino circuit, but part of him had already moved on and gotten used to his new life. It had been several years since he had worked in intelligence and up until a couple of hours ago he had thought his days of car chases and hidden clues were finished forever.
But now this.
This night – an old Spanish flame whom he hadn’t seen for so long – looking at him with her brown eyes, expectant of something, but also scared of some
thing maybe, he thought. Was she lying to him? It was hard to tell.
“Tonight is the worst night of my life,” Lucia said as they rushed along the corridor.
“Tonight is not forever, Lucia,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”
She seemed genuine, but years of training and experience as an army officer and MI6 agent had taught him a great deal, and much of his SIS work had taken him onto the streets. There, he’d had to think fast, and make judgements about the character of those he was working with, but this was different. This woman he knew and yet didn’t know. She seemed to be telling the truth, but he had learnt a long time ago never to believe anything until it was over. “We’ll be at the Woods soon enough,” he said.
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Harry,” Lucia said, staring into his eyes for an explanation.
“Woods, or in Italian, Bosco,” Harry repeated, more softly, reducing his voice to a whisper filled with urgency. “They call him El Bosco.”
“Who is El Bosco?”
Harriet spoke up, her voice rising from the iPhone in Harry’s hand. “El Bosco is the Spanish nickname for Hieronymus Bosch.”
“The artist?” Lucia asked.
Harry smiled. “And I’m betting that this is what Pablo was referencing when he wrote we would find more in the woods than in the books – he meant we would find the answer not in the woods, but in The Woods, or El Bosco.”
“Are his paintings here in the Prado?”
“You’re Spanish and you ask me that?”
Lucia shrugged her shoulders. “I grew up on the streets of Seville, Harry, and I devote my life to physics. I don’t know the first thing about art. Do you think a knowledge of fine art helps you eat when you sleep in a storm drain?”
“I’m sorry.” Harry was contrite. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
He watched the faint outline of a grin appear on her face. “Apology accepted,” she said, and touched his arm. “You haven’t really hurt me, don’t worry.”
With these words, Harry could feel himself being taken back to Berlin, sitting in a small café opposite the last person who had uttered this to him. Her name was Anna Maurer, a German double agent working in the BND, the German equivalent of MI6 or the CIA. She was also working for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service and reporting regularly back to its Moscow headquarters in the Yasenovo District.
Harry had struggled to refrain from his usual modus operandi, and after a few tense meetings with her, in which he passed her disinformation aimed at disrupting certain Russian espionage operations in London, he had taken her away for a long weekend on the Austrian ski slopes, and slept with her after one of his standard seductions – champagne, chocolates and an open fire. This was easy because she believed her status as a double agent had not yet been compromised, but Harry had worked it out soon enough.
That morning in the cold café seemed like yesterday, but it was years ago. He put down his coffee cup and looked into her face. She looked scared. “I know,” he’d said.
“You know what?” she said, playing for time. She knew what he knew. People in her game always knew.
“I know you’re passing information to Moscow.”
“How?” Her response was calm and straight – businesslike.
“Your meetings with the SVR contact. I followed you.”
“You didn’t trust me?”
“There is no such thing as trust, Anna. You know that.”
“Only a temporary suspension of cynicism – isn’t that what you once told me, Harry?”
“Did I? I can’t recall.”
“Do my people know?” she asked, referring to the Germans.
“Not yet.”
Neither of them spoke for a long time. Outside the people walked along the Kanstraße in the drizzle, holding umbrellas and handkerchiefs. A tram rattled by. Both of them knew there would be no more ski lodges.
“It’s all right for you,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re rich. You don’t have to get your hands dirty.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean there is a big difference between a gentleman officer working in intelligence, and a poor, working-class girl in the BND. I have family commitments. Some people pay more than others.”
“You sold out your country, and could have caused a lot of problems back in my country as well.”
“Could?”
“You were being fed lies, Anna. Everything you passed to the Russians was rubbish.”
Another long pause. He could see she was thinking fast. “I thought you loved me,” she finally said.
“It’s over, Anna.”
“You’re going to tell them about me?”
“Of course. But I’ll give you one day’s head start.”
“That is considerate.”
“Naturally.”
“You haven’t really hurt me,” she said. “I can live with it.”
He watched her walk out into the rain and fade into the crowd and he never saw her again.
That was then, and this was now, as his father often used to say, and now meant standing in Madrid’s Museo del Prado searching for something that Pablo Reyes had hidden – something so important that the professor had gone to insane lengths to hide it and stop it falling into the wrong hands.
Now, at last, he thought he finally knew what Pablo had been trying to tell them – it had become clear a few moments ago just before his mind had drifted back to Anna Maurer, but now that part of his past had subsided, and left his mind clear to focus on the here and now.
Lucia struggled to keep up with him as he pounded down the corridor toward the Bosch collection. “But you still haven’t told me if his paintings are in this museum!”
“I’m sorry?” he said, startled from his thoughts by the sudden sound of Lucia’s voice.
“You said Bosch had many paintings, and I asked if any of them were in this museum?”
“Sorry – my mind was elsewhere,” he said. “Some of his paintings are here, including his most famous of all – and close enough to be in the same coordinates Pablo left in the Epistola.”
Once again Lucia looked at him with expectation, but Harry’s mind was too occupied with the thought of what Pablo had been trying to hide from the world. He raced through everything he knew about Bosch, and what its relevance could possibly be in terms of something that so frightened a physicist that eventually it took him to an early grave.
“Why Bosch, Hattie?”
“Why Bosch? Hieronymous Bosch – a mystery who never wrote anything about either himself or any of his works, and as a result less is known about him or his paintings than almost any other artist in renaissance history.”
Pablo would have picked him, wouldn’t he? Harry thought with a sigh.
So why Bosch? Was it because of the man or the art? He needed his sister more than ever right now. He knew Harriet had made it her business to learn as much about art history as was prudent given she made her living running an auction house, not to mention personally investing and trading in art. The fact she could have afforded a piece by the Dutch renaissance master once again reminded him of his background – a past he fought hard to deny and forget.
“It’s pretty obvious what picture your clue is referring to, right?” Harriet said.
“It is,” Harry said firmly.
Lucia looked up at him. “And what’s that?”
“The most mysterious painting ever made by man – the Garden of Earthly Delights, and according to this map it’s in the next room.”
*
Lucia stepped into the adjoining room with Harry close at her side. They were now standing in a slightly larger room with a table in the center of the floor. The table itself happened to be a work of art by Hieronymus Bosch, but the table, like everything else in this space, including Bruegel’s magnificent Triumph of Death, was overshadowed by the large painting fixed to the wall at the far end of the
room.
It was breathtaking, and stole her attention the moment she entered the darkened room, illuminated only by the gentle glow of the security lighting and fire escape signs. She moved closer until the image filled even her periphery. Lucia realized she had almost stopped breathing as she stared at The Garden of Earthly Delights.
It felt like the painting was a magnet, pulling her closer, and without realizing it she stepped forward yet again, her eyes fixed on the wild, complicated image in front of her. She had only ever seen photos of it before, and was struck by how large it was in real life as her eyes crawled all over it, desperately trying to take it all in.
And how much there was to take in. The enormous work of art was divided into three panels, two slim images either side of a much larger painting, and together they constituted a startling and terrifying triptych that had been mystifying experts for centuries.
“I’ve never see this painting before, not in the flesh, so to speak,” Harry said in wonder.
“Bloody heathen,” his sister said.
The reverse of the painting was rendered in grisaille, or monochrome, on wooden panels that folded in to encase the art, and featured a distant God staring down at his creation of the world, but that was not the main attraction – which now stared the two of them in the face in all its intriguing and horrifying complexity.
And in the flesh was about the right way to describe it, Lucia considered. The image was overflowing with naked bodies, and their meaning had been open to interpretation for the five hundred years since its creation. “What’s it about?” she asked.
Harriet said, “The orthodox explanation is that the image is a straight-forward depiction of the fall of man – a doctrinal warning on the dangers of yielding to life’s wicked temptations – but the staggering complexity of its symbolism makes the work much harder to interpret than many would like.”
“It’s creeping me out,” said Lucia.
“You’re not the first,” Harriet replied. “The painting has caused many divisions.”