“My husband, I know,” I said, stopping him from saying anything I could not bear to hear, as my throat tightened. I wordlessly fingered the gold wedding band on my ring finger, fighting back tears. “Who’s done this? Why . . . ? What do they want from him?”
“Please, try to stay calm.”
“Calm? How can you expect me to stay calm?”
The waiter glanced our way as I shouted at the colonel, my eyes swimming with tears and an invisible hand squeezing the breath out of my chest. He gently took my hands as the waiter disappeared into the next room.
“I’ll answer all of your questions, Ms. Álvarez, as much as the US government knows. But I need you to try to stay calm and answer my questions too, okay?”
I couldn’t make a sound. My eyes just kept going back to Martin’s frozen image on the screen. He was almost unrecognizable. Days’ worth of stubble on his face, his hair matted, his skin covered in sun blisters. An ocean of remorse washed over me, threatening to drown me. How could I have been so stupid? Why did I let him make that trip alone? The memory of our last conversation flashed in my mind. It was just before he left for Kars, near Ararat. For five years, he’d used me to help him with his experiments. Finally, I told him I wouldn’t do it anymore.
“Not even for love?” he said, surprised at my anger.
“No . . . not even for love!”
Now I was regretting my decision. Was I the one who got him into such danger?
“First thing you should know is that a terrorist group has claimed responsibility for his kidnapping,” Allen said, oblivious to my thoughts. “The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, an illegal Marxist faction that’s been at war with the Turkish government for decades. The good news”—and he grinned as he said it—“is that they have a long history of kidnapping hikers and returning them safely. The not-so-good news is that in this case, they’ve been very careful and left no traces of their whereabouts. Not even our satellites have been able to find them.”
“Sat . . . ellites?” I said, chocking back my sobs.
“Our government has come to you as a last resort, Ms. Álvarez,” he said. “Before Martin met you, he worked on some very important projects for our country. He knows sensitive information that cannot fall into the wrong hands. That’s why I’m here. To help you find him, but also so you can help us. Do you understand?”
“I’m not sure.”
A wave of realization engulfed me. Martin had never said much to me about his time in Washington. He barely mentioned that part of his life. It’s like there was something about it he just wanted to forget, like an old girlfriend you just don’t mention to your new wife. Then Nicholas Allen brought me back to the present by turning the conversation toward something I couldn’t have imagined.
“Now, I need you to watch the rest of the tape,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m not showing this to you to torture you, believe me. I need you to help us decipher a message your husband sent you.”
“To me? In the video?”
A slight tremor shot through my tired hands.
“Yes, a message to you.”
The device came back to life, bathing the back corner of the café in a bluish glow. Colonel Allen slid his finger across the touch screen and the video jumped to minute seven. I clasped both hands to my stomach, as if that would help me control my emotions. When the screen showed my husband’s emaciated face, frozen in time, I prepared myself for the worst.
The first sounds were from a man’s voice with a broken English accent.
“I said, say your name!”
The voice was hostile, impatient, and came from somewhere off-screen.
“Didn’t you hear me? Your name!”
Martin raised his tired face, as if he’d finally heard the order.
“My name is Martin Faber. I’m a scientist—”
“Do you have a message for your loved ones?”
My poor husband nodded. His inquisitor hissed his orders, venom dripping with every syllable accentuated in Russian, as if he’d just walked off the set of The Hunt for Red October. Martin fixed his gaze straight ahead, as if he were talking directly to me and we were the only ones in the room.
“Julia,” he said, speaking to me in Spanish, my native language. “We may never see each other again . . . And if I don’t get out of this alive, I want you to remember me as a happy man, a man who found his other half at your side . . .”
A single restless tear rolled down my cheek. And I saw his hands tightly grasp the symbol of our love. The object that had given our lives—or mine, at least—an unexpected purpose. With his voice trembling and the sound cutting in and out, he continued.
“If you squander your remaining time, all will be lost. The discoveries we made together. The world that opened up to us. All of it. Fight for me. Use your gift. And though others may strive to steal what was ours, keep envisioning a way for these two halves to be made whole again—”
The video ended abruptly.
“There’s nothing else?” I said, feeling as if the wind had been knocked out of me.
“No.”
I was confused, my mind spinning. And Colonel Allen, who hadn’t stopped holding my hands, gripped them tighter.
“I’m sorry,” he said, whispering still lower, “I’m truly sorry.”
As Martin’s words were still ordering themselves in my mind, the colonel, whose intentions I wasn’t completely clear on, asked me a question so unexpected that it only managed to confuse me further.
“Ms. Álvarez,” he asked, “what gift was your husband referring to?”
10
Miguel Pazos and Jaime Mirás had only been working at the Santiago de Compostela police department for a year after whisking through the police academy with stellar grades. They loved their job, in the county seat, with the largest tourist population in northern Spain, even though almost nothing worth mentioning ever happened there.
Inspector Figueiras had posted them at the stairway leading to the entrance to the cathedral and the Pórtico de la Gloria, and they couldn’t help gossiping excitedly about the commotion. But there was no reason to worry, not really, they figured. After all, the gunshots that sent everyone scrambling had passed. Thank goodness the cathedral wasn’t on fire and no one had been hurt in the gunfight. Still, Figueiras wanted them on high alert for anything suspicious. An armed suspect was still at large, maybe hiding somewhere down one of the alleys leading to the wide open Plaza del Obradoiro, and he needed to be found.
At the door to the Hostal de los Reyes Católicos, everything seemed quiet. The state-run hotel was shut tight, as it always was at this hour of the night. Power had been restored, bathing the cathedral and the façade of the Palacio de Rajoy in a pale light. The constant rain played in the young officers’ favor. They could sit inside the dry patrol car, parked along the Calle San Francisco, where they had a perfect view of anyone who looked suspicious.
Neither of them expected that, exactly at two forty in the morning, the ground would begin to tremble.
It was just a soft tremor at first, as if the rain simply had started pounding harder against the roof of their Nissan X Trail. The young cops looked at each other wordlessly. But when a deafening rumble thundered all around them, they started shaking in their seats.
“What the hell is that?” Pazos said.
His partner tried to calm him down. “It’s probably just the helicopter,” he said.
“You’re probably right.”
“Man, you have to have some balls to fly that thing in this kind of weather.”
“Big ones . . .”
The rumbling grew louder. Nearby puddles rippled in rhythm and blew apart as a downward windstorm beat the air around the officers.
“Jaime . . . ,” Pazos said, pressing his face against the windshield to watch. “Is that our chopper?”
A huge black aircraft, fifty feet long with two sets of spinning rotors and a third on its rudder, descended in fron
t of them, its power levitating their two-ton all-terrain truck a hair’s breadth off the ground.
The helicopter’s powerful engines came to a halt, producing a deafening, high-pitched whistle that forced them to cover their ears.
“Who called in the army?” Pazos yelled over the noise.
But his partner wasn’t listening.
He was too distracted by the sight in his passenger window. A man with olive skin, his hair pulled back into a braid and a scar just below his right eye, gave a few quick taps against the patrol car’s window. Mouth still hanging half-open, lowered the glass.
“Hey! What’s going—”
He didn’t have time to finish his sentence.
Two silent blasts, lost in the fading whistle of the helicopter’s engines, flung the officers’ skulls against their headrests. The shots from the stranger’s Sig Sauer pistol were so quick, so precise, that the two young men never saw it coming. And they never heard their executioner mumble something in a strange, unintelligible language—“Nerir nrants, Ter, yev qo girkn endhuni!”—before he crossed himself and left their motionless bodies in his wake.
11
“It’s a long story, Colonel. And I’m not even sure it’s appropriate for me to be telling you,” I said, swallowing hard.
Nicholas Allen took a long, slow drink of coffee and leaned back in his chair before putting his massive hands on the table.
“All right,” he said, his voice shifting into a serious tone. “I want you to think hard about this. Your husband used a kidnapper’s proof of life to send you a message. And also a warning. You’re aware of that, aren’t you?”
I nodded without being completely sure.
“When I first saw this video in Washington,” he said, tapping the iPad, “I understood that the allusion to someone stealing what was yours was a message. Do you have something valuable that you need to protect?”
Allen asked in such a way that he seemed to know the answer to the question. In fact, he didn’t even wait for me to respond.
“One thing’s clear,” he said. “Your husband’s right about you being in danger.”
My pulse quickened. “Do you think that ‘monk’ from the cathedral was going to . . . ?”
“Don’t you? He was after you, I’m sure of it. Did he speak to you? Did he say anything at all?”
“Well, he mentioned Martin . . .”
“In what regard?”
“I don’t know,” I said, frustrated. “I couldn’t understand him!”
“It’s okay. Don’t worry. We’ll go step-by-step. I’d like you to go back and answer my first question.”
So we started again.
“Fine . . .” I sighed.
“What ‘gift’ was your husband referring to in the video, Ms. Álvarez?”
“I have visions, Colonel.”
I said it without thinking, without caveats or provisos, and I felt as if a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders. And just as I’d expected, Nicholas Allen looked perplexed. Just like everyone else.
“I guess it is going to be a long story . . . ,” he said, shaking his head.
“It runs in my family. Like something innate, you know? My mother had it. My grandmother, too. In fact, every woman on my mother’s side of the family has had it, as far as I can tell. Sometimes I’ve wondered whether it’s some kind of genetic mutation. I’ve tried to repress the visions with medication, but it’s no use. I don’t know how, but Martin knew that I had this gift. It’s a lot like what people call clairvoyance, but it’s not that, exactly. You can imagine, I kept it secret. When I was in college, it was a struggle to keep it from my professors and classmates. We’d walk into a museum or some historical site and my visions would come flooding over me. At first, it was something I could feel. I could presage that something was going to happen.”
“What kind of visions do you see?”
“It’s hard to put into words,” I said, twisting a napkin into knots. “I never talk about it, and I’ve never done it in public. I could pick up an object and ‘see’ its history. I could see where it had been and who it had belonged to. Martin told me it’s called ‘psychometrics.’ But I could do more than that. Sometimes, I would forget my own language and slip into other languages, some of them unrecognizable. One time, my grandmother relaxed me into a deep trance and I started speaking in perfect Latin. This gift of speaking in tongues is called ‘xenoglossy.’ It was Martin who helped me develop my gift, to not be afraid of it.”
If the colonel doubted my story, he didn’t let on. “How did you and your husband meet?”
“Is that important?” I asked.
“It might be.”
“Fine.” I sighed. “It was several years ago. Martin came to my town as just another pilgrim making his journey along the Way of St. James. I was a tour guide then at a church in Noia, along the Costa da Morte. He visited the church and we got to talking. We hit it off right away, and he started telling me about things in my life. Personal things, about my work, my friends . . . I thought it was some kind of magic trick he used to pick up women. But it was more than that. He told me I could do that kind of thing, too. That I had a natural ability for it. He told me he could teach me to develop my gift to its full potential. He stayed in my town, and as time went on, little by little, we fell in love. Simple as that.”
I glanced up and noticed “the look” on the colonel’s face, the look everyone got whenever I told this story. But I decided to press on.
“I need you to find Martin, Colonel. If you promise me you’ll find him, I’ll tell you anything you want to know about my gift. But help me.”
Allen’s gaze turned from worried to compassionate. Even sweet. His silvery eyebrows arched sympathetically.
“I promise,” he said finally. “That’s why I’m here.”
And with an innocence he hadn’t shown until that moment, he added, “I imagine that ‘teaching you to reach your full potential’ has something to do with that stone he showed in the video, right?”
“Right. When I finish my story, I think you’ll understand.”
“Where were we?”
“The gift of visions. Can you imagine what that kind of gift means in a world like ours, a world of facts and reason? I always felt out of place because of my gift. I was convinced that if I didn’t find a way to muffle it, it would drive me insane.”
“And Martin Faber was interested in this gift of yours?”
“Mesmerized.”
“Do you know why?”
“Y-yes,” I stuttered.
“Please.” He smiled, noticing my hesitation. “Go on. Don’t hold anything back. I’ve given you my word that I’m going to help you find Martin. But I need your collaboration.”
“Well, it has to do with a family secret.”
“Another family secret?”
“Yes. From the Fabers . . . That stone Martin is holding in the video? It’s actually a talisman, a stone with immeasurable power.”
Allen’s face took on its most serious gaze yet.
“I learned about it for the first time the day before Martin and I were to be married. It’s an incredible story. Though it’ll probably take all night to tell it.”
“Go ahead, Ms. Álvarez. I want to hear all about it . . .”
12
It was late and it had been a long night already, but Inspector Figueiras needed to get some work done. He headed for the police station to start filling out the mountain of paperwork from the night’s incident and to put out an APB on the monk from the cathedral.
The old city was deserted. He turned the wrong way down Calle Fonseca with his police lights flashing and left a standing order for his men to keep an eye on whatever might be happening at La Quintana. They were to bring the witness to him as soon as the American was through with his interrogation. She can sleep in the holding cell, for all I care, he thought. But I need her in custody until I have answers about what the hell’s going on here.
As t
he cathedral’s spires disappeared in his rearview mirror, he looked out on the plaza and could see the profile of an enormous airship in the center of the courtyard. Between the swipes of his wiper blades, he guessed it was the helicopter he had called in. He figured it must be waiting out the storm before returning to base.
“Hmm. Better that way,” he said.
As he cruised down Avenida de Rodrigo de Padrón, out of the historical district and came to rest at the police station’s underground parking lot, his only thoughts were on what role the Fabers’ precious talismans played in this whole mess. Because they must play some role, he figured. Something worth that much, he said to himself, two million pounds, to be exact, according to the customs documents . . .
“A couple of stones from the sixteenth century?” The voice on the other end of the line couldn’t believe he had been awakened at this time of night for a professional opinion.
“That’s right, Marcelo. Elizabethan. English, at least.”
Marcelo Muñiz was Figueiras’s friend and Santiago’s best-known jeweler. Any precious gem bought or sold anywhere in Galicia first passed across his desk.
“I don’t remember seeing anything like that,” Muñiz said firmly. “Who were the owners?”
Figueiras gave him the information on Martin Faber and Julia Álvarez, and Muñiz went to work. He put down the phone, flipped open his laptop and sifted through his professional database. After a few minutes, Muñiz came back on the line with bad news.
“Sorry, Figueiras. Nothing. But I can assure you of this: Those stones didn’t pass this way. Any chance they didn’t sell them?”
“Maybe,” Figueiras said. “But let me ask you something. If you were moving from England to Spain and you had something like that in your possession, why would you even declare it at customs?”
“For the insurance, of course,” Muñiz said. “If they’re incredibly valuable and you want your insurance company to cover them when you leave the country, you have to have a paper trail.”
The Lost Angel Page 4