The Lost Angel

by Sierra, Javier

  “And if you had something that valuable, would you keep working? Would you keep up a crazy schedule that had you toiling away inside an old church in the middle of the night?”

  “Well, maybe its owners didn’t want to call too much attention to themselves,” Muñiz said. “Maybe their interest in the stones isn’t purely monetary. You’d be surprised how much some people value objects beyond what they’re worth.”

  “Maybe . . . ,” Figueiras said, exhaustion finally setting in. “I guess I’ll figure that out tomorrow.”

  13

  It was a long story. I’d warned him. But Nicholas Allen was determined to hear it. He asked for a double espresso and whatever pastry the café had left at this hour. The waiter, resigned at seeing local and federal police cars parked out front, had no choice but to wait these two customers out—no matter how long it took.

  “Start wherever you like,” Allen said.

  “Okay. How about I start with the day I saw these stones for the first time? It was the eve of our wedding . . .”

  I’d never seen my fiancé as excited as he was on that early summer morning. It was toward the end of June 2005, and we’d arrived at our hotel in the West End with a little time to rest before the ceremony. We were going to get married in a small Norman church in Wiltshire, a beautiful place. It was to be a simple service, just a handful of guests. We called a priest who was a friend of Martin’s family, quickly filled him in and asked him to preside over our ceremony.

  I was madly in love with this man. In all other areas of my life, I was tough, determined. But not when it came to Martin. He was like a sculptor who could chisel and mold the world around us, bringing beauty to all aspects of my life.

  Everything happened so quickly between us. Within ten months we were hurrying down the aisle. Martin left his job in the United States and frankly, I didn’t even think twice about leaving mine.

  You’re going to think this is ridiculous, Colonel. But shortly before I met Martin, I’d read somewhere that if you asked the universe for guidance and wrote down the things that you wanted in life, you could achieve them. Just writing things down helps order them in your mind and makes the goals seem attainable. So I wrote a three-page letter the day I turned twenty-nine, summarizing everything I wanted in a man. I asked for my soul mate. A good man. Someone to share adventures with. He had to be someone who was pure of heart and capable of making my heart soar with his words.

  I tucked the message inside a sandalwood box that I stashed in the back of my closet. And just when I’d forgotten about it, Martin came to Noia. You should have seen him. Behind the ragged clothes he wore for his pilgrimage, he glowed with the most radiant smile in the world. He was so magnetic, so perfect. Down to the letter, he was the man I’d described in my letter to the cosmos.

  The day before our wedding, on the flight from Santiago to London’s Heathrow, Martin showed me a couple of pictures of the church he’d chosen for the ceremony. He’d kept it all a secret. And just as you’d expect, I thought it was perfect.

  That afternoon, in London, we took a cab south because there was something important he wanted to show me. As we left behind the busy city, he asked the driver to take us to an address on Mortlake Road in Richmond upon Thames. When we finally reached our destination—a modern brick four-story apartment building in a quiet residential neighborhood—I felt a little disappointed. I’d imagined he was taking me to some exotic restaurant where we’d make all sorts of exciting plans for our future. But Martin had something else in mind that afternoon.

  “Have you ever heard of John Dee?” he asked me flatly as the cab left us in front of the building.

  “Is he a family member of yours?”

  “No, no,” he laughed. “Dee was a magician and the personal astrologer to England’s Queen Elizabeth the First. He was considered a master of the occult and his fame was rivaled only by his contemporary Nostradamus.”

  “Martin, are you going to talk to me about wizards again?” I said in protest. “I thought all that stuff—”

  “I need to tell you about this. It’s time,” Martin said, aiming a serious gaze at me.

  “Oh, enough . . .” I sighed.

  The only times Martin and I had ever fought was when he brought up his obsession with the science of the occult. He was fascinated with it in a way I never was. At that point, I hadn’t yet written my book about the hidden symbols on the Way of St. James. Anything that remotely approached the supernatural, I just ignored. I’d lived through some . . . strange things in my youth, and I didn’t want to admit there were some phenomena that science couldn’t explain. It was easier to believe those topics were for the superstitious and the ignorant. I guess it just went against everything I grew up hearing at home. Yet here was a man steeped in science—he had a doctorate in physics from Harvard University—and he believed blindly in things like clairvoyance and mediums. He said they were the world’s science before actual science. But I just couldn’t follow Martin down that path of reasoning.

  “I’m begging you to listen to me, Julia,” he said, holding me by the shoulders. “Just this once.”

  “Okay.”

  “Before we go inside, there’s something else you should know about John Dee. He was one of the world’s most important mathematicians, cartographers and philosophers during the sixteenth century. And, like any good Catholic—like you—he was skeptical about anything supernatural. He translated Euclid, Greece’s foremost scholar in geometry, into English for the first time. He was the first man to apply geometry to navigation. His discoveries helped make the tiny island of England into one of the world’s greatest empires.”

  “But I don’t get it. Why do you care so much about some old, dead warlock, Martin?”

  “There’s a part of John Dee’s work that’s always fascinated me,” he said, skirting my question and taking a deep breath. “He devised a way to speak to angels. His method is still a mystery.”

  What was this man, this man who was going to be my husband in a few hours, trying to tell me?

  “You have to believe in this, Julia. At least, you have to open yourself to the possibility,” he pleaded. “In 1581, a solar storm occurred and a real angel of flesh and blood, a being who blended in so seamlessly with humans that he might cross this street without you giving him a second look, came to see John Dee—and taught him how to speak to angels. And from that day, Dee became an ambassador to the angels, learning incredible, marvelous things that would inspire a golden age of technology for centuries to come.”

  Martin’s eyes were on fire. I couldn’t have stopped him if I’d wanted to.

  “What you don’t know about me is a family secret that we only speak of when we welcome a new member, someone like you. After Dee’s death, our family inherited all of his research, all of his books and all of his spells. Although, through the centuries, we’ve lost most of his ability to communicate with the divine.”

  “Wait. Are you telling me that your family speaks to angels?” I asked, frightened.

  “Tonight, you’re going to meet a group of people who have seen more and done more than anyone else in that realm, Julia. And then you’re going to understand why I brought you here to meet them. All I’m asking for is a little patience . . . and faith.”

  14

  The massive airship that had landed in the center of Plaza del Obradoiro was not your run-of-the-mill helicopter. An experimental prototype, it was one of only three in the world, and could fly smoothly in this kind of hammering weather. It was clad in bulletproof armor and loaded with heavy artillery. It could fly at an altitude of more than sixteen thousand feet—unheard-of for a warship of this kind—and slice through the skies at more than three hundred miles an hour, remaining airborne for twelve hours straight without refueling. Its alloy coating made it impervious to extreme temperatures and it was equipped with one of the world’s most advanced navigation systems.

  That flying beast had no flight plan and no ID. Officially, it di
dn’t even exist. So naturally, no one expected it to turn up in Galicia. It had come out of nowhere, bisecting Europe and holing up in a little-known hangar near the Fervenza reservoir, awaiting this very moment.

  When its side door whooshed open, the man who’d ended the lives of the two young officers jumped inside, still dripping with rain as the door zipped closed behind him.

  “What happened out there?”

  Waiting inside was a man in his midforties, his eyes dark and piercing, and the parts of his face not covered in a long, neat beard were toughened from the sun. And he wanted answers. The soldier lowered his weapon, bowed at his feet and spoke in his native Armenian, barely raising his voice.

  “Tsavum e. I had to do it, Sheikh.”

  The bearded man remained silent.

  “If I hadn’t neutralized them, they would have detained me and it would have cost us the entire mission. I’m sorry, master.”

  “It’s all right . . . ,” his superior said, placing his hand gently on the kneeling man’s head as if bestowing a blessing. “And how did it go in the church? Did you see her?”

  The young man’s eyes filled with tears.

  “You were right, Sheikh,” he said, now breathing heavily, his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him. “It’s her. That woman can activate the Amrak. In the cathedral, she did it without even noticing.”

  “She wasn’t aware of it?”

  “That’s how great her power is, master.”

  The sheikh simply stared down at his kneeling disciple for a moment, shaken by this information. What would his ancestors have said about this? How would they have explained a foreigner having such power over one of their most sacred heirlooms? Fortunately, he no longer resembled his predecessors. If anything, he was more like a doctor impatiently awaiting the results of a critical lab test. Not what you might expect from the supreme leader of one of the world’s oldest and most secret societies.

  “What else did you learn?” he asked, holding his voice steady.

  “Votsh. Nothing. I didn’t have a chance, Sheikh. They arrived before I could—”

  “They? Do you mean . . . ?”

  The young man nodded.

  “The Americans . . .”

  The master lifted his hand from his disciple’s head and the young man’s gaze rose to meet his.

  “Then we have no other choice, my son,” he said intently. “We must intervene before evil has its way.”

  15

  “Is that when you saw the stones, Julia? Didn’t you say that was the first day you ever saw them?”

  Nicholas Allen was getting anxious. He made it seem vital that he understand my connection to the stones.

  “I’m getting there,” I said, unwittingly feeding his suspense. “If you want to understand, you have to let me tell the story step-by-step.”

  “Right. Of course,” he said. “Go on . . .”

  After his careful speech, Martin brought me toward a white aluminum door that led to the building’s apartments nine through sixteen on the Mortlake side of the road. Above the door frame was a metal plaque with white letters against a blue background that read JOHN DEE HOUSE.

  “This is it,” he said.

  “John Dee’s house?”

  A sly grin ran across his cherubic face and chased away my anxiety. I could see his excitement in his sweet dimples and in the way he looked at me.

  “What are you waiting for? C’mon!” he said.

  We ran up the first flight of stairs two at a time and came to a wide, airy hallway bathed in warm light. If a necromancer’s house once stood here, none of that darkness remained. I was just about to say that to Martin when the apartment door right in front of us swung open.

  “Martin, my boy!”

  An older woman stepped out of the door and flung herself into Martin’s arms. She was about sixty, elegant, her brown hair cut into a neat bob that framed her smooth, made-up skin, and she wore a conservative blue dress.

  “We’ve been expecting you!”

  “God, Sheila, how many years has it been? You look incredible!”

  They hugged each other for a long time, long enough for me to notice her name, Sheila Graham, engraved on a small golden plaque flanked by a pair of angels hanging on her door.

  “So this must be . . .”

  “Julia,” Martin said, finishing her sentence. “And as of tomorrow, my dear aunt, she’ll be the newest member of the family.”

  “Such beautiful red hair,” she said, whistling and running her eyes over my print dress. “You have chosen wisely . . .”

  She flashed me a knowing grin and led us inside. We followed her down a long, dimly lit hallway into her lavish home. We passed bookcases whose shelves seemed ready to burst under the weight of their countless tomes and went into a quiet living room whose large bright windows opened up to the street below. Waiting for us there was a young man reclining on a wingback sofa, his attention focused on a heavy book in his lap. He was tall but muscular with a curly beard and curly hair framing his ruddy face. When he saw us come in, he nodded in our direction.

  “Hello,” he said simply. “Sit wherever you like, love.”

  Love?

  That young lion perched on his rock was named Daniel. “Like the prophet,” Sheila said. “Daniel Knight. And if you think I’m some old cougar who’s gotten herself a boy toy twenty years her junior, think again, my dear,” she said, and I blushed because it was exactly what I’d thought.

  Martin and Sheila went down the hall to bring back drinks and I was left with Daniel, who was again engrossed in his reading. At least it gave me time to get a good look at my surroundings. The room was large, about two hundred square feet, divided between this sitting area and the adjacent dining room. The long table at its center, with its high-backed chairs, must have hosted some interesting dinner parties. Against the window was an antique curio cabinet whose glass doors enclosed a motley collection of trinkets: a pan flute; a crystal sphere; a strange, long pipe carved with the image of a Bedouin nomad; several lithographs organized neatly in a row, and four plaster figurines covered in black lacquer . . .

  But what really caught my attention was the opposite wall, which was covered in old photographs. Sheila was a young woman in several of them, and she clearly had been attractive. There were pictures of her posing at historical sites all over Great Britain. The Glastonbury Tower, which shows up on the cover of all the King Arthur books. The British Museum. The monoliths at Stonehenge. Riding on a white horse over the rolling Wiltshire hills. And in another picture, she was posing next to a group of smiling hippies in white tunics holding large, extravagant walking sticks.

  “Those are Druids, love,” Daniel murmured as I leaned in for a closer look. “One of them is John Michell.”

  “Druids. Right. Of course,” I said, not knowing what a Druid was. “Can I ask you what Sheila does for a living?”

  Daniel looked up from his book.

  “Your fiancé hasn’t told you?”

  I shook my head.

  “We study the occult,” he said flatly. “And, I must say, we’re quite good at it.”

  Daniel was looking for a reaction. And although he clearly got it from the dumbstruck look on my face, he left me swinging in the wind. He let Martin, who came into the room balancing a tray of petit fours, tell me exactly who our hosts were.

  “Julia, Daniel Knight works for the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. He’s an astronomer. But he’s also the world’s foremost expert on John Dee. He’s just published a book in which he breaks down how Dee communicated with angels. Right now, he’s studying the language they spoke. Care for a wedge of baklava?”

  “Wait, didn’t we just agree that Dee was a scientist?” I asked ironically as I chose one of the delicious pastries.

  “He was. And one of the great ones! But you have to understand, during the Renaissance, they had a very different definition of what constituted a ‘scientist.’ We owe a tremendous amount of our fundamental understandin
g of science to the early alchemists. Paracelsus, for example, was the first to apply the scientific method to medicine. Robert Fludd, a famous Rosicrucian mason, invented the barometer. And another alchemist, Jan Baptiste van Helmont, coined the term ‘electricity’ while he was studying magnets . . .”

  “Well done, Martin,” Daniel said proudly.

  “Daniel, maybe you can convince her. Julia refuses to believe me when I tell her the world has a rich history of occultism as important as anything we learn in school.”

  Finally, something seemed to light a fire in the aloof astronomer.

  “Very well. I’ll try,” Daniel said, eager to take up the challenge. “You should know that until the Industrial Revolution, this country’s burgeoning scientists were more concerned with questions of spirituality than of the physical world. Just look at Sir Isaac Newton. He put all of his time and energy into trying to reconstruct the Temple of King Solomon. His writings show he was obsessed with trying to re-create the only place in the Old World where man could speak ‘face-to-face’ with God. The Principia Mathematica, which asured him a place in the history of science, was to him only a rudimentary accomplishment. To Newton, mathematical principles were just a tool, the means to a greater end. He believed numbers were the basis of God’s language and that we had to learn mathematics if we ever hoped to speak to Him.”

  “He really wanted to reconstruct King Solomon’s Temple?” I said, munching on a pastry.

  “He wrote all about it,” Daniel said. “We have his notes and they prove he was trying to find a way to communicate with the universe’s architect. Newton imagined the Temple to be a kind of telephone switchboard we could use to talk to God.”

  “Well, according to Martin, Dee got closer than even Newton to speaking to God. Well, to angels, anyway,” I said with a wry smile.

  “Make no mistake, Julia: Sir Isaac Newton believed in angels.”

  I blushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you . . .”