The Lost Angel

by Sierra, Javier

  It all happened so fast . . .

  The young “monk” turned on his heel, whipped off the black habit and dove behind a row of benches to his right. He wore a running suit under his garment and brandished an object that I didn’t immediately recognize.

  But if his reaction startled me, it was nothing compared to the series of silent explosions along the wooden bench that sent clouds of splinters into the air.

  “Julia Álvarez?”

  The same voice that had ordered us to put our hands up was now pronouncing my name. His pronunciation was better than the young monk’s. I heard the voice coming from behind me, but I was so shocked by what I assumed was gunfire that I failed to be surprised that, on that night, everyone seemed to know my name.

  “Get down!”

  Oh, God . . .

  I hit the ground hard again and managed to crawl into a confessional against a wall. What sounded like three or four thunderclaps resounded through the cathedral, followed by flashes of light. But this time, the shots were coming from the young, tattooed monk. He was armed, too!

  And then, for several seconds frozen in time, everything stood still.

  A deathly silence fell over the cathedral. I curled up in the fetal position with my heart threatening to pound out of my chest, not daring to breathe. I wanted to cry, but fear—a visceral, gripping terror like I had never felt—had wrapped itself around my throat. What is going on? What are they doing firing at each other in a church filled with . . . Jesus Christ! . . . filled with priceless artifacts?

  It was when I looked up at the roof to find a reference point, something that could help point me toward an exit, that I saw it. It’s still hard to describe . . . In the center of the cathedral, flowing the length of the aisle from the keystone of a crypt decorated with the Eye of God, was an ethereal substance, as a translucent veil some sixty feet in the air, flashing with bolts of orange light. I’d never seen anything like it. It was like a tiny storm cloud had slipped into the cathedral and came to float exactly over the tomb of the apostle St. James.

  God, would Martin love to see this, I thought.

  But then my survival instincts kicked in. I had to find a way out of there.

  I was about to leave my hiding place to crawl toward one of the stone columns for better cover when an enormous hand pressed down on my back, keeping my nose to the floor.

  “Ms. Álvarez, don’t even think about moving,” the voice said, as his hand pressed against my ribs.

  I was frozen with fear.

  “My name is Nicholas Allen, ma’am. I’m a colonel with the United States military and I’ve come to rescue you.”

  “To rescue me?”

  Had I heard him right?

  That’s when I realized that this Colonel Allen had been calling out all of his orders in an English flecked with a mild southern accent. Like Martin’s.

  “Martin . . . !”

  But before I could ask another question, a fresh volley of what I assumed was gunfire exploded above us, splintering the wooden confessional and ricocheting off the stone wall.

  “We better get out of here, fast,” the colonel said. “He’s got a gun!”

  6

  Antonio Figueiras’s face grew pale.

  “Were those gunshots?” Everyone froze. “Holy shit, those are gunshots!”

  The six police officers and two security guards next to him looked at each other, confused, as if they doubted that the hollow volley of explosions could have come from a gun’s barrel.

  “That son of a bitch got himself into a gunfight inside the cathedral!” Figueiras shouted, shooting a look at Jiménez, as if he were, to blame. He whipped out his sidearm, a nine-millimeter Heckler & Koch Compact he kept under his trench coat. “We have to arrest him . . .”

  Jiménez just shrugged.

  “Then you’ll explain to me exactly who this character is,” Figueiras spat. “Now, cover me. I’m going in!”

  Four officers followed his lead, cautiously approaching the Platerías entrance, careful to stand on either side in case someone opened fire. Three others stood guard, covering the other exits, including the nearby Puerta Santa, the Holy Door, located behind the main altar. The driving rain was blinding and made it almost impossible to see the cream-colored awnings of the nearby Otero jewelry store. Moreover, the darkness caused by the blackout gave the oldest entrance to the cathedral a haunting feel. Almost sinister. The Old Testament scenes depicted above it didn’t help: the statue of an adulterous woman holding her lover’s severed head, famous among those who make the pilgrimage as a warning of divine justice. The scene of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden. And on the spandrels of the main archway, glistening in the rain, the angels of the apocalypse sounding their trumpets.

  “What did you say this character’s name was?” Figueiras whispered as he leaned against one of the archway’s fluted columns.

  “Nicholas Allen, Inspector. He flew in from Washington on a chartered flight to the Santiago airport.”

  “And they let him through customs with a weapon?”

  “Looks like it, sir. He must have had high-level clearance.”

  “Well, I don’t give a shit who the hell he is, you hear me? Go back to the car and call for backup. Tell them to send an ambulance . . . and a helicopter! Have them land it in the Plaza del Obradoiro and send another unit to cover the northern exit. Go!”

  Jiménez withdrew to carry out his orders. Figueiras’s plan—unless things went awry—was just to hang tight, cover the exits and wait for the American to show his face so they could arrest him. Better that no one should have to fire another shot.

  So much for the best-laid plans . . .

  Three powerful, hollow thuds caught everyone by surprise. Then just overhead, along the so-called Treasury façade, which runs from the Platerías door all the way to the Caballos fountain, a window shattered into a thousand pieces.

  “What the hell . . . !”

  Figueiras barely had time to look up. Above them, past falling shards of glass, he saw a scene that left him dumbstruck: the wiry silhouette of a man with an athletic build, his hair tied into a long ponytail and clutching something under his arm, leaped along the five-hundred-year-old rooftop, trailed by a cloud of strange, luminous dust.

  The inspector, an atheist raised by leftist Spanish communists, felt the blood drain from his face, and shouted only a single phrase from his mother’s native language.

  “O demo!”

  The devil.

  7

  When I finally left the cathedral, I was doused by a curtain of rain. The storm had plunged the street into total darkness and only lightning flashes lit the doorways of nearby homes. I felt stunned, like I’d lost the hearing in my left ear, and I couldn’t keep my arms and legs from shaking. It felt good to be soaked through by the rain. It reminded me that I was alive . . . and that anything could still happen. I clung to the sea of smells that washed over me—the smell of moss, of soaked earth, of wood burning in nearby chimneys. That and the rhythmic pounding of the rain helped calm my heart.

  Not everyone was as lucky.

  The man who led me out of the cathedral was raging. I could hear him arguing with someone who was waiting for him just outside the door. Luckily, someone quickly got me away from him. Two firefighters whisked me to an arcade to shelter me from the incessant rain, and then covered me with a blanket.

  “Look!” one of them said as a nearby streetlamp flickered. “The power’s back.”

  The firefighters thoughtfully brought me a plastic chair and a bottle of water that I downed in seconds.

  “Don’t worry, miss. You’ll be all right.”

  “Will I?”

  The stress of this recent commotion, combined with nine uninterrupted hours of tedious work, should have shown on my face. Maybe it sounds superficial, but I instinctively looked for a place to check my reflection. I guess I was trying to busy my mind with something, anything, other than monks, gunshots and mysterious
ly glowing thunderclouds. And for at least a little while, it worked. The glass door of the only café still open at this time of night was all I needed to see the sorry shape I was in. There, in the reflection, was a girl with wild, tangled hair who seemed totally out of place. Her flame of red hair barely showed its usual fire in this dim, fading light, and her piercing green eyes faded into dark circles that made me shudder.

  What have you gotten yourself into, Julia?

  What worried me most about my reflection was what I didn’t see: suddenly I’d lost all my muscle tone. And I must have slammed hard into something during the commotion, because my upper back ached as if I’d fallen off my scaffolding . . .

  The scaffolding!

  I prayed that the gunshots hadn’t knocked anything loose. My work space was set up just below it, all the data from my experiments cocooned in that hard drive.

  “The police will want to talk with you,” the nearest of the firefighters said. “Wait right here, okay?”

  A cop wrapped in a beige trench coat, dripping wet and desperately trying to wipe the moisture off his white thick-framed glasses, trudged over, grumbling under his breath as he greeted me half heartedly. He dried his hands on the back of his coat and reached out to shake my hand with a rather stiff formality.

  “Good evening, miss,” he said. “My name is Antonio Figueiras of the Santiago police department. Are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  “This whole situation is a little . . .” He hesitated. “A little embarrassing for us. The man who rushed you out of the cathedral said you were ambushed. He told us in his broken Spanish that you’re Julia Álvarez—is that right?” I nodded and the annoyed inspector continued. “Look, it’s my job to question you immediately about all this, but this character—he works for the U.S. government—says he has something important he needs to discuss with you.”

  “The colonel?”

  The inspector looked surprised to hear Nicholas Allen’s rank. He seemed to process the information before nodding his head. “That’s right. Do you mind speaking with him first? If you do, I could always—”

  “No, no, not at all. As a matter of fact, I have a few questions for him, too.”

  The inspector called him over.

  I saw Nicholas Allen emerge from a car parked at the far end of the plaza and make his way toward me. When I saw him in the light for the first time, I was a little surprised. He was about six feet tall, about fifty years old, and had the demeanor of a perfect gentleman. His suit had been crumpled in the fracas, but his designer tie and crisply starched shirt still gave him an air of distinction. He carried a leather briefcase and pulled up a chair next to me before greeting me again.

  “You can’t imagine how glad I am that I got to you when I did, Ms. Álvarez,” he said with a sigh of relief, reaching out to hold my hands.

  “Do we . . . know each other?”

  The colonel turned his face toward the light, as if pretending to model his face for me. But up close, I could see an alarming scar running the length of his brow and disappearing beneath his slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair.

  “Well, I know you,” he said. “I was a friend of your husband’s. He and I worked together on several government projects, long before the two of you met. And since . . . well, let’s say I’ve followed your careers.”

  Something about the colonel’s admission caught me off guard. I’d never heard Martin mention this man. For a moment, I wondered whether I should bring up the monk—or whatever he was—who had mentioned Martin to me. But I decided to hear the colonel out first.

  “I need to ask you some important questions. But I think you and I should have this conversation in private,” Allen said, shooting a sideways look at Inspector Figueiras, who was lurking a couple of feet away.

  “Whatever you think is best,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

  “Great, just let the inspector know and we’ll get to it,” he said, smiling.

  I hesitated for a second, but my curiosity had gotten the better of me. I walked over to the disheveled-looking inspector and asked him for a few minutes alone with Allen. He agreed, even though he looked uneasy about it.

  “Thank you,” the colonel whispered.

  We ducked inside the nearby La Quintana café, where the staff was buzzing about, recovering from the recent blackout and hoping to close soon. The espresso machine whirred in the background while the remaining waiter sat us near the back.

  “Julia . . .” He sounded hesitant. “I know you and Martin met in 2000, when he made the Way of St. James pilgrimage. That he left everything for you. His work. His parents. That you were married near London and—”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You want to ask me about Martin after everything else we’ve just been through?”

  “That’s right. He’s the reason I’m here. Well, he and that man I saved you from tonight.”

  The waiter brought us cups of coffee.

  He continued. “Tell me, when was the last time you spoke to your husband?”

  “A month ago. He was in a mountainous region in Turkey, gathering data for a study on climate change.”

  “Near Mt. Ararat?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I know a lot more than that, ma’am,” he said, pulling an iPad out of his briefcase and setting it in front of me as the screen came to life. “Your husband is in serious danger. He’s been kidnapped.”

  8

  “What are you waiting for? Send me that information immediately!”

  Despite his sloppy appearance and lack of social graces, the inspector wasn’t the type of man to sit around waiting for things to happen. He hung up the phone hastily even before the person on the other end could even answer. It was bad enough that some foreign cop was interviewing his only witness to the shooting in the cathedral and had a better idea of what was going on than he did. But after an enlightening conversation with the dean of the cathedral while his men picked up shell casings and noted the damage to the sacred building, Inspector Figueiras had a much better idea about who Julia Álvarez was.

  Father Fornés described her as strong-willed—perhaps even too much so. She wasn’t much for church dogma and, in Fornés’s opinion, might have let herself stray into pagan ideas. “‘Spiritual,’ New Age–y, that kind of thing,” the priest said, unsolicited. “But I will tell you, she’s the best there is at her job. I know that girl is going to make a huge discovery one day.”

  What surprised Figueiras most about the conversation was the revelation that Julia Álvarez was married to an American.

  That’s why he had called the police station and asked them to send him everything they could find out about the couple. Figueiras was focused on the portable computer in his patrol car when he felt the beating of helicopter blades pulsing through the air and rattling the windows of every building in the plaza. He’d almost forgotten his impulsive order to call for his only helicopter in the driving rain. He barely had time to regret it when the chief of police called.

  “We have that information you asked for,” he said. “First off, we don’t have anything on Julia Álvarez. She’s got no prior arrests. Not even a parking ticket. But we do know she has a doctorate in art history and wrote a book on the Way of St. James pilgrimage. But that’s about all we found.”

  “Her husband, however, is a lot more interesting. Martin Faber is a climatologist. One of the best, Figueiras. Actually, no one really understands why he lives here. In 2006, the United Nations awarded him a prize after he published a study on the melting permafrost in the European and Asian mountain ranges. And all of his predictions seem to be coming true. This guy’s well respected, Inspector. The interesting thing, though, is that he studied at Harvard and was recruited by the National Security Agency, where he worked until he married Julia Álvarez and retired here with her.”

  “Her husband is a spy?”

  “Technically? Yes,” the chief said, lowering his voice, “but the bad part is the rest of his f
ile is labeled ‘classified.’”

  “How convenient . . .”

  The inspector’s eyes came alive behind his white-rimmed glasses. How convenient, indeed, that the man interrogating his witness and her husband both worked for the same intelligence agency, the NSA. There’s something big going on here, he decided.

  “Do we know when they got married, Chief?”

  “I haven’t been able to find it yet. But when I looked in the register of US citizens living in Spain, I noticed they were married in Great Britain. And there’s a pretty interesting little fact in their customs file . . .”

  “On with it, Chief!”

  “Well, it seems they lived in London for a year, working on something that was a complete departure for the both of them. They were antique dealers. But after moving here, they sold everything. Except for two Elizabethan-era stones, which they declared when they moved into the country.”

  “Two stones?”

  “Two ancient relics. Strange, right?”

  9

  The images flashing before my eyes seemed unreal. It was like something out of a brutal Gulf War movie. It was almost too hard to watch, yet I couldn’t look away—because I instantly recognized the film’s main character, dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, whose face filled the entire screen. Oh, God . . . I recognized his sharp features; the profile of his face; the big, strong hands that were now bound; and that look he got on his face when something had gone terribly wrong. And I knew immediately I couldn’t watch any more.

  “What . . . is this?” I pleaded.

  The colonel froze the video.

  “It’s a ‘proof of life,’ Ms. Álvarez. It was found last week in the northeastern part of the Anatolia region of Turkey. As you can see, it shows—”