Rogue Angel 52: Death Mask

by Alex Archer

  Even if she could ride out of the city without police interference, the bike would take too long to get her there. It was more than half the length of the country away. She needed to call the old man and make alternate arrangements.

  “I’ve got it,” she said as soon as Roux picked up. “You were right. They’re based in the Alhambra. I have to get down there. The clock’s still ticking.”

  “What’s it like?” Roux asked.

  “Remarkable,” she admitted. “A little bent and battered, but all things considered, wouldn’t you be, if you were that age?”

  “I am that age, dear girl,” he said, but there was no malice in his response. “We have time on our side now, so we need to work out why they want it. Tell me, is there anything unusual about the mask?”

  She thought about it for a moment. She and Roux had already amassed a wealth of information that might or might not be relevant. One thing was for sure, though—the kidnappers didn’t want the mask for itself. It was just part of the bigger picture. But what was that picture? Was she already looking at it without seeing it? Everything she and Roux had found so far had to be linked, didn’t it?

  “There are engravings on the inside. I’m not sure if they’re patterns... In a few places it looks like it might be writing, but I have no idea what any of it means.”

  “Send me a picture.”

  “Will do. I’m going to need you to sort out transport. I don’t have time to ride across the country. And anyway, the bike’s out of action—if it hasn’t been impounded already, it’s only a matter of time.”

  “I won’t ask,” he said. She resisted the temptation to point out she’d seen his latest get-out-of-jail-free exploits on TV. “Get yourself to the airport. My pilot already has my plane in the air, so I’ll get him to make a diversion and pick you up at the nearest airstrip. It shouldn’t take him more than quarter of an hour to get there, so mush, mush.”

  He hung up.

  She needed to recover the ledger if she could. It was unlikely she’d be able to ride the Roadster to the airport, so she’d need to flag down a taxi, too. But the ledger was the most important thing.

  She worked her way back to the main square where she’d parked.

  The police car was gone, but there was a clamp in the front wheel of the Roadster.

  Annja felt an element of relief, glad that it was just her parking the officers had been addressing rather than the speeding, reckless endangerment and overturned semi. It could have been a lot worse. It wouldn’t take long for them to put two and two together, but for now she slipped the ticket into her pocket. She’d give it to Roux, let him smooth the whole mess out later. At least the bike was still there. She unlocked the panniers and removed the ledger along with the backpack that contained her change of clothes. She put the mask into the bag and headed back to the information office.

  The unsmiling woman looked up from her gossip magazine.

  “Where can I get a taxi?”

  The woman held up a hand and picked up the phone.

  A couple of minutes later, a cab pulled up in front of the building.

  17

  11:00—The Alhambra

  The helicopter circled around the magnificent fortress.

  Roux had never seen it from the air before. It was a sight to behold, even after centuries of misuse and abuse, civil war and hostility. He looked for obvious weaknesses in the defenses—an old habit, and those old ones really did die hard. The Moors would have been able to hold out against the Catholics for a long time before the aggressors could have forced their way in. With any kind of military mind behind the defense of the Alhambra, the Catholics would have lost far more men than the Moors in any confrontation, and attempts to starve them out would have been futile. The fortress had everything it needed to be self-sufficient.

  Down there, somewhere in that ancient warren, Roux was certain he’d find the home of the Brotherhood of the Burning. They wouldn’t be able to hide from him in the walled city. He’d leave no stone unturned. That Annja had been told to bring the mask here just reinforced his certainty. With luck, though, he was ahead of the game. Even if they knew he was still an active player, that didn’t mean they knew where he was or even if he was on the move. He was banking on the fact that they couldn’t expect him to be here already. “How long till we land?”

  “Two minutes,” the pilot said. He had time.

  “Keep us low. I need to make another call.”

  “Roger that.”

  Roux had given Oscar as long as possible to discover everything he could about the Brotherhood of the Burning. He placed the call, imagining the hacker sitting behind an array of computer screens, headset on, probably playing dumb computer games in between working for him. He picked up.

  “Well?” Roux asked.

  “Interesting stuff. This Brotherhood has its roots going way back to the days of the Inquisition,” Oscar began. “We’re talking medieval cult, secret brotherhood, sworn in blood, all that fun stuff. Their sole aim seems to have been to recover treasure that was taken from them by the Church.”

  “Which fits with what’s happening,” Roux said, more to himself than the hacker.

  “As far as I can see, they were never able to get any of it back. Not that any records are readily available. And what I have managed to find proves they were still active until the late 1700s, but then they went off the map. Obviously, that could just mean that later records have been destroyed. You can never be sure with this stuff. Books burn, after all.”

  “Well, if they were banging their heads against a brick wall, maybe each subsequent generation just lost a little more hope, and they finally gave up,” Roux said, thinking out loud. After all, how many generations would it take before people stopped searching for heirlooms and treasures taken by the Nazis? “Anything else?”

  “The Brotherhood was started by a group of Mudéjars. A Mudéjar was a Moor who did...”

  “Yes, yes, I’m well aware what a Mudéjar was,” Roux interrupted.

  “Well, anyway, one of these Mudéjars was a man who had been commissioned to create the ceiling in Torquemada’s tomb, another worked on frescos and the third was a silversmith. They all had skills that were sought after by the Church, even though they saw these men as heretics and wanted them banished from Spain. They were all wealthy men. They kept themselves close to the Church, making themselves indispensable. Keep your enemies close, I guess. They seemed to think that it would give them the best chance of finding out where the treasures of dispossessed Moors had been hidden.”

  “Indeed. You said there was a silversmith? Do you have any names?”

  “Hang on a second. Let me call up the list.”

  Roux knew who he was going to name. There was no chance it was going to be anyone but Abdul bin Soor, the Moor who had fashioned the mask and whose remains had lain with it for five centuries.

  Roux was right.

  “How many names have you got?” Roux asked.

  “Nine. Seems like the Church did its best to round them up, but some of them evaded capture and managed to get out of the country. The rest were taken for trial.”

  “Six,” Roux said.

  “How the hell did you know that?”

  “You’ve just confirmed something, that’s all. What about our current Brotherhood?”

  “It’s all a bit sketchy. I’ve got to admit I thought they were just a bunch of right-wing nutjobs at first—there’s plenty of those sprouting up all over Europe these days, and all that made them special was that they knew a bit of their nation’s history, adopting the name to hold up the Inquisition as an example for achieving their own aims. I was wrong. It’s more than that. The more I dug, the more I realized it stinks. The whole thing stinks. Someone is using them as a front. For one, the most obvious link to the past is that the peopl
e seemingly behind this are Muslims from North Africa, descendants of families who were supposed to have been driven from Spain.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Roux said. “They have been behind a number of racist attacks. More specifically, attacks against Muslims. Why would they do that? Why attack their own people? What about the name I gave you? You find anything on him?”

  “Plenty. I’m sure it won’t surprise you to know that Enrique Martínez is not his real name.”

  “Nothing would surprise me right now. Go on.”

  “Until a couple of years ago, Enrique Martínez didn’t exist. He’s a brand-new man. I like this kind of stuff. It makes life interesting. That’s why I like you, old man. It’s like Martínez sprang into life fully formed, complete with bank account, tax identification, passport, the works.”

  “Interesting.” What Roux found even more interesting was that his contact at Europol didn’t seem to be aware of Martínez’s spontaneous incarnation, or had chosen not to tell him. “And his real name?”

  “That’s all I’ve got at the moment.”

  “Find out what his name is.”

  “I will. Trust me. This guy’s got my attention now. Oh, and just a heads-up—that latest video Annja sent me, it came through a different route, but all roads lead back to the same dead zone.”

  “The Alhambra,” Roux said, looking down on the fortress as they began their descent.

  Less than five minutes later, Roux was on the ground, watching the helicopter take off.

  The pilot was going to the airport at Granada to refuel and wait for Annja.

  Even if they had the mask, the clock was still ticking.

  18

  10:00—The Alhambra

  There were security cameras everywhere.

  It was impossible to tell if they were merely for show, if the fortress’s security and maintenance crew had access, or if the Brotherhood of the Burning had tapped into the feeds and was using them as an early-warning system. He figured it was best to assume a worst-case scenario, given the sophistication with which they’d rerouted the video stream and covered their tracks. They were tech-savvy. And realistically, if there was this much security on the outside, what was he going to be up against once he got inside?

  The complex was made up of a maze of buildings behind the defensive walls. It could take forever to find where the Brotherhood was situated, even after Roux had breached the front wall.

  A number of the buildings within the public area bore signs that explained they were closed to the public for repairs and renovations, but there were still plenty of visitors milling around. They were convenient. He didn’t want to stand out from the crowd, so he followed the flow of bodies and listened to a guide who was leading the party through the complex. As exotic as the ancient palace was, it was a much more mundane set of buildings that interested Roux.

  Scaffolding had been erected along the outside of one such building. There was no sign of any workmen, but Roux heard hammering coming from another building not too far away. Men were back at work, but not here. Why? Sometimes it wasn’t what was there that was wrong, but what wasn’t there. Scaffolding without workers? A false front? Cover for something behind the wall? Almost certainly.

  “Here is the altar of the open-air chapel,” the guide said, waving her arms as if to accentuate the fact that there was no roof. A few of the tourists took the opportunity to turn their cameras to where she was pointing and grab a few extra shots. It never ceased to amuse Roux—tourists living life through a lens so they could look at it all again when they got home, but forgetting to actually soak it in unfiltered when they were right there, standing in the presence of such beauty.

  “And here, forming the part of the floor, we have the tombstones of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. But before you get excited, neither of them is actually buried here. Their bodies were laid to rest in the mausoleum in the royal chapel in Granada, which obviously we’ll be visiting later during your stay here in Andalucía.” There were a few nods in the crowd. Roux noticed a man in a lightweight suit and sunglasses push his way carefully through the crowd without speaking so much as a word of apology as he eased gawkers out of his way.

  The guide gave him no more than a brief glance, but Roux stared. And for good reason. The man placed his hand on the shoulder of a tourist in front of him, and Roux saw the flame tattoo on the back of it. He had to force himself to look away before the man inevitably glanced back at him, feeling the intensity of his stare. Roux scanned the rest of the crowd for familiar faces, anyone he might have seen since his arrival in Spain, but it was difficult. The sun was high, dazzling off the sandstone walls and the mirrored shades. Any one of these people could have been at the courthouse or any step along the way from there; he wouldn’t have been able to tell. No one appeared to be regarding him strangely or trying desperately not to look at him, either.

  He watched the man enter the small building surrounded by scaffolding.

  The guide waited until he had closed the door behind him before she pointed the building out to the group.

  Curiouser and curiouser, Roux thought.

  “Over there is the indoor chapel. It is very small inside and no doubt would only have been used on rare occasions, given the beautiful weather we enjoy here in Andalucía. Unfortunately, as you can see, the building is undergoing renovation, so I am unable to show you inside today.”

  The average age of the group, Roux figured, was probably pushing late sixties, early seventies. A fair few of them looked older than he did, which he appreciated.

  The group moved on, the guide urging them toward another landmark building. Roux hung back in the shadows. He really wanted to get inside that chapel. The guy in the suit was a member of the Brotherhood. He’d gone through that door. That meant Roux was going through that door, too. Simple as that.

  He fished out his phone to check in with Annja, hoping to get an idea of how far behind him she was.

  No signal.

  He’d forgotten what Oscar had said about this being a dead zone. The fact that the kidnappers had been able to broadcast from here—even for a moment—meant that they had to be using some kind of jamming device to keep them hidden from modern surveillance techniques.

  It also meant that no one would be able to call for help if the need arose.

  That suited Roux just fine.

  He slipped the phone back into his pocket.

  “Showtime,” he muttered, but he had no intention of charging inside, gate-crashing whatever party they had going on.

  Unfortunately, there was no other obvious entrance to the chapel, and no windows that offered easy line of sight from the ground.

  But the scaffolding would at least give him the opportunity to look inside without being seen.

  He walked past the door, resisting the temptation to ease it open, even a fraction, to peer inside. The security cameras on the chapel were much newer than any of the others he had seen. And they were trained on the door. Even from here, he could see that the black cables hadn’t been bleached by the sun yet, and the plastic clips that pinned them in place were still pristine white. These cameras weren’t just newer; they were brand-new. The Brotherhood had increased the level of security around the chapel. It was as if they knew he was coming. He was touched.

  He glanced around again to be sure no one was paying attention to him, then took a step onto the ladder that led to the scaffold’s first platform. He was already in the shadow of adjacent buildings and out of sight of tourists, but he wanted to be sure he was hidden from the many cameras in the area. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he was good. That would have to be enough.

  The first window was filthy with the grime of building work. It clearly hadn’t been cleaned since long before the scaffolding had been erected. Roux pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his bro
w before applying the cloth to the glass. There were people inside, but a balcony running along the inside of the upper floor prevented him from figuring out how many. He tried the window, but it wouldn’t budge, obviously locked from the inside. He cast his gaze downward in case he’d been spotted before working his way around the scaffolding and into the sun. The second window was locked, too, but a third was more promising. As he worked at it, he realized it was loose around the latch. Not necessarily unlocked, but a bit of give allowed him to work his pocketknife into the gap and worry at the latch.

  The latch slipped off easily and—most importantly—without making a sound.

  Roux could hear chanting. There was a steady rhythm to it. The voices didn’t skip a beat. He eased the window open slowly and climbed inside, the chanting masking any noise he made. He pulled the window closed behind him, not wanting to risk any ambient noise from the street outside to register with the men down there. He waited, not moving, just listening, a hand on the butt of his pistol in case someone tried to blindside him. Drawing it would mean escalating any confrontation. He wasn’t going to do that until he absolutely had to. And then he’d be every bit as ruthless as he needed to be to make sure he walked out of there, preferably with Garin.

  The tempo of the chant shifted, as did the tone, and the voices swelled to fill the dome of the ceiling.

  It echoed all around him.

  Roux crouched lower, moving closer to the edge of the balcony. He risked a glance down through a cutout section of the balustrade to the floor below. The chanting should have been a clue. It seemed that some kind of religious or pseudoreligious rite was taking place, but the longer he watched and listened, the more sure he became that there was something strange about it.

  He couldn’t make out the words, but the chant seemed to have more in common with a black-magic mass than a liturgy. There were at least a dozen armed men in the throng, but none of them looked vigilant. They held their rifles as a medieval knight might have held his sword in a similar rite.