The Lost Angel

by Sierra, Javier

  “What . . . kind of things?”

  There was a sharpness to his smile now. “Do you know, for example, why Martin wanted to be married at Biddlestone? And why he wanted me at your ceremony?”

  I looked Artemi Dujok in the eye. I knew this man with his bushy mustache and courtly manners was trying to gain my trust. And I could see in his warm brown eyes the same man I’d met just a while ago in my preternatural vision.

  “Actually, I think I do know why, Mr. Dujok . . . You went to Biddlestone to find something,” I said, remembering the last image before I found myself on the helicopter. “Something you dug outside the church, secretly, while we were being married. Isn’t that right?”

  His eyes flashed. “W-well, I, uh . . . ,” he stammered. “You . . . you’re absolutely right. Can I ask you who told you about this?”

  “I’ve seen it. Just before you woke me up.”

  “That’s incredible!” he whispered, drawing out the words. “I can’t tell you how great it is to know you still have your gift. Have you started using it again?”

  God, what else does this man know about me? “I guess so . . . ,” I said, looking down.

  “All right. I understand that you’re suspicious,” he said. “But maybe I can help you understand what happened the day of your wedding. You chose to marry in Biddlestone according to a secular angelic ritual; the Book of Enoch was used in addition to the Bible for part of the ceremony, and the adamants used in the wedding were last used by John Dee to communicate with angels during the sixteenth century.”

  “Are you going to talk to me about angels now?” I said, but Dujok barely skipped a beat.

  “John Dee, as your husband I’m sure told you, was one of the last Westerners to successfully communicate with them. And like you, he wasn’t exactly a mystic. He didn’t float off into trances or anything like that. He was more a man of science than anything else, and that’s the approach he took. He used three elements in his experiment: powerful stones, a medium named Edward Kelly who knew how to ‘read’ the stones and a kind of tablet covered in symbols to help open the channel to the other side. Then, all of those items would have to be brought together at a specific place and time for them to work, and Dee determined when that was.”

  “I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with what you were doing at my wedding.”

  “It’s actually very easy to understand.”

  “Well . . . go on.”

  “Toward the end of their lives, John Dee and Edward Kelly were discredited and persecuted by their contemporaries. And it’s all because of how they misused their instruments. Kelly became arrogant. He thought himself the heir to the prophets Enoch and even St. John, but with a twist. He sought to make himself rich using the angels’ prophecies. It was only a matter of time before fate turned on him. That’s why, when they split, Dee set out to make sure his two tools for summoning the angels would never fall into the wrong hands. He concealed the adamants by setting them into the cover of a copy of the Book of Enoch, the one the Faber family has safeguarded for generations. And he buried the tablet at Biddlestone, just outside of the church where you were married. Now do you understand? Dee chose that location for mystical reasons, yes, but also because in an ancient dialect in Wiltshire, Biddlestone means “Bible Stone.” And that’s how Dee saw his ancient instrument—as an actual Bible, a testament to God’s word.”

  “But how did you know the tablet was buried there?”

  “Martin discovered it while studying Dee’s last notes at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford. And shortly thereafter, he met you. When he did, he thought it was a sign that he should rebuild Dee’s instrument for communicating with the angels: He had the stones; he knew where the tablet was buried; and then, on a pilgrimage to Spain to travel the Way of St. James, he met you. And he knew right away you had the natural talent to be a medium, that you had the ‘second sight’ that the English spiritualists talked about.”

  Dujok paused and took a deep breath.

  “It wasn’t too much of a stretch for him to want to unearth the tablet when all three of the elements were so close at hand. And with all three together again, after four centuries, he felt it would bring a great blessing on your marriage—a direct line to the heavens.”

  “But I still don’t understand why he called on you.”

  “I met Martin in Armenia when he still worked for the US government—”

  “Which I just learned of today,” I said.

  “That was about the time I convinced him to stop trying to find other stones for the US government. They certainly weren’t going to use the stones for any noble purpose and wouldn’t know how to handle them correctly, even if they were. But leaving the NSA only brought him trouble. That’s why he decided to separate his adamants and left me in charge of the tablet. He’d hoped to keep them apart—until just recently. Ms. Álvarez, your husband discovered there is a very important reason why the adamants and the tablet should be reunited now to try to communicate with Dee’s angels.”

  “What reason? Why now?”

  “The stones respond to vibration. They react to resonance, ultrasound and certain electromagnetic frequencies. And right now, the sun is reacting like never before. Solar storms on its surface are roiling, and the solar flares that have come off the star are the most intense in the last century. All that’s missing is for a solar wind to blow those trillions of electrons toward Earth, so that the adamants, the tablet—and you—can use that shower of energy to reopen a gateway to heaven.

  “But unfortunately, others have made the same discovery,” he said. “And I’m afraid that’s why they’ve kidnapped Martin—to control that conversation with the divine.”

  The helicopter bounced over another patch of turbulence.

  “So . . . you don’t think he’s been kidnapped by a group of Kurdish terrorists at all.”

  “Hardly,” he scoffed. “That’s what Martin’s old bosses want you to believe, so you won’t ask too many questions.”

  “But in the video he says they’re terrorists.”

  “That’s a ruse. The people orchestrating this are much more powerful than the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The PKK is a gnat compared to these guys.”

  “So who are they?”

  “I can’t talk about that . . . not right now.”

  “Well, can you at least tell me where we’re going?”

  “That I can tell you,” he said, smiling and reaching out to hold the medallion hanging around my neck. “To the place where it all began for you.”

  He let the words hang in the air, as if waiting for me to finish his thought. But I didn’t understand what he meant.

  “The last line of Martin’s video . . . do you remember it? ‘Keep envisioning a way for these two halves to be made whole again,’” he said, smiling. “ ‘A way.’ Now do you understand?”

  “No . . .”

  “Where did the two of you meet?”

  “In Noia, in Spain. I used to live there. It’s exactly at the end of the Way of St. James.”

  “And this is the coat of arms for your town, isn’t it?” he said, caressing the medallion around my neck, the one with the boat and the birds flying overhead. “Well, that’s exactly where we’re headed, Ms. Álvarez.”

  40

  At a quarter to six in the morning, the only light in conference room 603B on the sixth floor of the US embassy in Madrid came from the overhead projector casting an image on one wall. A cloud of cigarette smoke wafted over the picture. This was the only nook in the whole building where you could still smoke indoors without getting reprimanded, but Rick Hale had bigger things on his mind at the moment. The embassy’s intelligence attaché had just gotten off the phone with one of his field agents, and clearly, things had not gone smoothly.

  Hale had had to slap together this briefing as best he could—and fast.

  “This is Julia Álvarez. Spaniard. Thirty-five years old. Separated for the last five month
s from her husband, Martin Faber, the man the PKK kidnapped several days ago near the Turkish-Armenian border,” he said, standing in front of a picture of an attractive redhead taken with a telephoto lens. “These pictures were taken yesterday afternoon in Santiago de Compostela, a city in the northwest corner of Spain.”

  The intelligence officer spoke with a smooth southern accent and easily could have been a country singer. He had a hangdog face that made him look constantly unhappy. And he probably was. That short little bald man was hating life at that moment, giving a briefing before sunrise to a pair of bureaucrats fresh off a plane from Washington, DC. And this was amid another sensitive intelligence operation.

  He continued. “Last night, Colonel Nicholas Allen met with Ms. Álvarez to inform her of her husband’s kidnapping. As is standard protocol in a case of leaked state secrets, we wanted to find out everything about Martin Faber’s private life. Anything that might confirm our suspicions.”

  “What’s your theory, Mr. Hale? You don’t trust your agent?” asked Tom Jenkins, a senior adviser to the president.

  It was rare for a man like Jenkins to be involved in fieldwork. But his orders were clear. Half an hour after he got off the plane in Madrid, he wanted to see everything the embassy had on Martin Faber.

  “Actually, sir, you should know that Faber hasn’t worked for the US government since 2001,” Hale said.

  “No, he hasn’t worked for the NSA since 2001,” Jenkins corrected him.

  Jenkins, a strapping blond with icy blue eyes, caught Hale off guard and used the opportunity to bring up another matter.

  “Mr. Hale, when the Office of the President looked over agent Faber’s file, we found something curious. No sooner had Faber accepted an assignment to the Kurdish-Armenian border than he put in a request for some confidential information from Langley.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Photographs, to be exact.”

  Richard Hale just shrugged his shoulders. “I’m all ears.”

  “Here’s the rub: Just before he resigned from the NSA, Mr. Faber requested that a series of old photographs, aerial shots taken of the region he’d been studying, be sent to him by diplomatic pouch to Yerevan. These pictures were taken in 1960 and 1971 by U-2 and SR-71 spy planes and by our KH-4 satellites. And they were all of the Mount Ararat region, exactly where he is now. Sound like a coincidence to you?”

  “Did you say KH-4?” Hale snickered and his southern twang rang out. “Man, that’s nothin’ but scrap metal left over from the Kennedy administration. Those things haven’t been operational in years—”

  “Never mind that,” Jenkins said, hushing him. “The pictures that satellite took were classified and considered very sensitive at the time. Don’t forget the mountains of Ararat marked the natural border between Turkey and the old Soviet Union. If that information had leaked, we would’ve had an international incident on our hands. Maybe even a war.”

  “So I hope you’re going to tell me why Faber would’ve found those photos so interesting.”

  “In those shots, taken from about sixteen thousand feet, was something that’s kept half the CIA’s analysts baffled for years. They called it the Ararat Anomaly. At first, they thought this perfectly rectangular building was some kind of Soviet spy base or transmission station, built right on the edge of one of the glaciers near the summit. But they never managed to identify its purpose.”

  Jenkins pointed a remote at his laptop, which was connected to the overhead projector. The image flashed to a black-and-white photo of a mountaintop. A red circle had been superimposed over something about the size of a nuclear submarine, with straight, even sides and tapered edges, under a blanket of snow.

  “Isn’t that a Soviet bunker?” Hale guessed.

  “You know as well as I do that it’s not, Mr. Hale,” Jenkins said flatly. “C’mon, a veteran like you? You know this story. And you know that after years of studying it, Langley concluded it could only be one thing atop the Parrot Glacier: Noah’s Ark. Am I wrong?”

  “Look, Mr. Jenkins, I’m an atheist. And I don’t believe in children’s stories.”

  “Well, this is an Old Testament story, Mr. Hale. And you better start believing,” said a voice from the back of the room, where a young woman was leaning against the door frame.

  “Okay, so it’s an Old Testament fairy tale.”

  “Actually, if I may, gentlemen,” the beautiful brunette said, striding forward with the telltale gait of a lifelong soldier, “it’s Sumerian, to be exact.”

  “Sumerian?” Hale asked.

  “The story of the Great Flood is originally Sumerian, Mr. Hale. And any student of ancient history knows the Sumerians were the first ones to tell a story of a ship that saved humanity from a rising tide.”

  “I’m sorry, miss. And you are . . . ?”

  “Ellen Watson,” she said, reaching out to greet him with a slender, well-manicured hand. “I work for the Office of the President. And let me cut right to the chase.”

  “Well, I’d appreciate it,” Hale said, flipping on the lights and disconnecting the projector.

  “Tell me about this Operation Elijah that Faber was working on.”

  Hale’s stomach immediately tensed up. “How the hell did you . . . ? Look, I can’t discuss classified information without knowing your clearance level. This is a matter of national security.”

  “I have White House–level clearance, Mr. Hale.”

  “Sorry. Not good enough, ma’am. Not for this kind of information.”

  The woman’s mood darkened.

  “Listen, I’m not authorized to discuss it,” Hale said, “not without a written letter from NSA director Michael Owen. You know him, don’t you?”

  “That’s a shame.” She sighed. “Well, I suppose you could at least tell us about what Faber’s wife had to say to the NSA’s field agent. Do you know whether they discussed the ark? Did she tell him about her husband’s secret obsession with that biblical relic?”

  Hale knew she wasn’t joking. And he knew he had to be diplomatic with his answers. “I’m afraid the conversation wasn’t nearly that exciting, Miss Watson,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it turns out our agent didn’t get to finish interviewing her. He had a minor . . . setback.”

  “What kind of a setback?”

  Jenkins’s eyes widened. “Look, I don’t have all the details,” he admitted. “But just before you got here, I got a call from the agent, Colonel Nicholas Allen, and the news wasn’t good.”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “That’s because what you don’t know is that Colonel Allen was in a gunfight tonight with someone trying to shoot Ms. Álvarez.”

  “Someone tried to kill her?”

  “Don’t worry. No one was hurt. And she was under our protection until our agent . . . well . . . all I can say for sure is that while he was interviewing her, they were ambushed with an EM attack. Allen was out of commission for an hour and when he came to, the woman was gone. There’s an all-points bulletin out on her right now . . .”

  “An EM attack? Electromagnetics?” Tom Jenkins couldn’t believe it. “In a civilian setting like Spain? That can’t be right. That’s like accusing the Russians of using a dirty bomb to hold up a supermarket in New Hampshire.”

  “I know it sounds crazy. The Department of Defense restricts EM blasts to testing ranges, but there are a bunch of hostile countries that are dabbling in rudimentary electromagnetics. Shoot, if you Googled it, you’d probably find an instruction manual.”

  “What are you getting at, Mr. Hale?” Ellen Watson said.

  “The NSA believes an enemy of the state is cookin’ up a plot behind our backs,” he said. “A big one.”

  “And would you be divulging some big state secret by telling us exactly who this phantom enemy might be, Mr. Hale?” Watson said.

  Hale rubbed his scalp nervously. “What I’m going to tell you doesn’t leave this office,
understand?” he said.

  “Of course,” Watson said with a sly smile.

  “This is as plain as I can put it, miss. The agency believes some group with the capabilities to build an EM weapon took an interest in Faber. The theory we’re bouncing around is that first they wanted to get him and then his wife.”

  “And you think this has something to do with the Ararat Anomaly?” Jenkins said, pressing him.

  “We don’t know.”

  “And, according to the NSA, this dangerous enemy is . . . the PKK? Who? Who, goddamn it?”

  Richard Hale, now sweating profusely, nodded toward the file on the desk with the CIA emblem on the cover.

  “That’s all I can give you,” he said. “If you take a look through that, you’ll know everything we know about Agent Faber’s disappearance. Even though it’s highly unlikely they would have discovered Faber was one of ours, the PKK looks like the culprit.”

  “You want us to believe that some extremist group of Kurds, who don’t even have enough money to buy cartridges for their AK-47s, have a weapon of this caliber at their disposal?”

  Jenkins’s question hemmed him in further. “We shouldn’t underestimate them.”

  “What are you trying to say, Hale?”

  “Maybe behind the PKK is someone who does have the technical and tactical knowledge.”

  “Maybe? Are you guessing or do you have some kind of proof?”

  “Just take a look at the file,” Hale said insistently. “I think you’ll find something that . . . supports that theory. Martin Faber was grabbed during some huge traffic jam on the road that leads from Bazargan, in Armenia, to the settlement of Gurbulak on the border. It’s a tough mountain passage peppered with tiny villages along the way, and the border’s been closed—officially, anyway—since 1994.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Our sources tell us that on the day he disappeared, a sudden and total blackout settled over that entire area.”