A memory flashed like a bolt of lightning inside the president’s mind. He was reminded of the promise he had made to Ellen Watson. “Okay, Michael, now I need you to listen to me. I want to know everything about this project. The timeline. The people involved. What steps they’re taking next to reach this ultimate goal. And, also,” he said, looking out the director’s office window, “why two people connected to these stones have suddenly disappeared.”
“Not a problem, sir. Though I have to tell you that your request comes at a very delicate moment for Operation Elijah.”
“What do you mean?”
“For the first time in a hundred years, we have competition . . . Someone is using their knowledge of this ancient technology to try to establish that communication link before us. And we think that that ‘someone’ is who’s responsible for the disappearance of those two people. But we’re on it, sir.”
“So tell me this, Michael: Who’s in charge of this operation?”
Owen stepped away from his office window overlooking the glowing Washington Monument in the distance and fixed his gaze on the president.
“To answer that question, sir, we need to leave this building. I suppose your limo is still waiting outside?”
“Of course.”
“If you order the route cleared, we can be at the NRO in forty minutes.”
“You want to go to the National Reconnaissance Office? At this time of night?”
Owen nodded. “You need to see this for yourself, sir.”
47
“Keep envisioning a way . . .”
“‘Se te da visionada.’ Juan de Estivadas. ‘Sadavitsed Naoi.’”
“Can’t you see it, Julia?”
I shook my head, completely at a loss. Artemi Dujok’s eyes were twinkling in amazement that two minds could work so differently.
“It’s an anagram!” Dujok said. “It’s so clear!”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. The phrase Martin said in Spanish in the video is an anagram for the name on this sarcophagus. He used all the same letters but mixed up their order. Martin couldn’t come out and tell you in the video where to find the stone, but he sent you a coded message to bring you to this church, to this very tomb. Your adamant is here.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Ms. Álvarez, Martin is using one of the oldest forms of encryption known to man. Remember the last part of the phrase from the video?”
“Yes. ‘Keep envisioning a way’ . . . ‘se te da visionada’ in Spanish.”
“Right. And if you reorder the letters in that phrase you get the name “Ioan de Estivadas” exactly, not a single letter left over.”
I scratched my head, trying to see the pattern. “What I don’t understand, Mr. Dujok,” I said, “is what Estivadas has to do with Noah.”
“I should be asking you. A minute ago you said you’d managed to learn everything about Estivadas, right?”
“Well, just about,” I said. “Let’s see: There’s a street in town named after him. He was the oldest winemaker in Noia. He was born during the period of the Catholic kings, just before the discovery of America. And he was married to a woman of noble birth, María Oanes. That’s what stands out to me the most. And, of course, he was born during the sixteenth century, which doesn’t make him much of a threat to be the Noah.”
“You think so, huh?” Dujok said. “It’s all there in the details you just gave me, Ms. Álvarez.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t seem to understand anything you tell me . . .”
“It’s simple: Juan de Estivadas never existed. He’s a symbol, a marker. Look, Noah himself was a wine grower. And, his wife’s last name has an antediluvian connection. The Babylonians used the name Oannes to refer to the god Enki. You do remember the story of Gilgamesh . . .”
“Of course!” I said, stunned.
“Then I don’t have to tell you that Enki warned the Mesopotamian version of Noah about the impending flood. Plus, take a look at Estivadas’s first name, written right here,” Dujok said, tapping the tomb. “Juan, Ioan. Backward? Naoi. Noah. This is definitely the tomb we’re looking for.”
I was still astonished.
“Well? So what’s inside the tomb, Ms. Álvarez?” Dujok asked.
“Noth . . . nothing. Not that I know of. When they moved it from its original place in the church of San Martiño, it was already empty.”
“Well, I’m guessing it’s not empty anymore. C’mon, Ms. Álvarez, give me a hand with the lid.”
48
Being an atheist, Antonio Figueiras had never wished for magical powers. But just this one time, he wished he could be in two places at once. That way, he wouldn’t have to make the difficult choice of whether to chase the helicopter that had taken off under his nose or head to Marcelo Muñiz’s house to see what the jeweler had discovered about Martin Faber’s precious stones.
The police station had already contacted the military about using their radar to figure out the helicopter’s flight path. So he decided to visit his friend.
Just behind the Santa María Salomé parish, down a narrow alley away from the tourist-trap restaurants and hotels, was Marcelo’s home. He had refurbished one of the oldest historical buildings in Santiago and turned it into his own sort of museum. It was a dream house filled with antiques and books and scrapbooks from trips around the world. On his bookshelves you could find the answer to just about any question. And that’s what Figueiras needed: answers. The initial forensic evidence was right—the shell casings he found next to his murdered officers were the same as the ones found inside the cathedral. If he had only arrived at the plaza a minute earlier, just one minute, he would have caught the killer and saved his officers’ lives.
“And you say they got away in a helicopter?”
Muñiz had just set out coffee and tea cakes on his dining room table. He sat at one end in a dress shirt but wearing his trademark bow tie, his head freshly shaven. He was rapt at the inspector’s story.
“Saw it with my own eyes, Marcelo. Something big—and I mean big—is going on here, man.”
Figueiras looked out of sorts. Compared to Muñiz’s fastidious attire, he looked a mess, disheveled. His glasses barely hid the toll of a very long night. His lips were chapped, his shirt a sea of wrinkles and his hair greasy and matted.
“Well, maybe I can turn your night around,” Marcelo said, serving him a cup of coffee. Marcelo took a sip of his coffee, keeping Figueiras in suspense before saying, “I know why those stones the Fabers brought into the country are so valuable.”
Figueiras froze with the coffee in his hands. “Well . . . out with it, man!”
“You gave me the first clue when you said they’d declared them at customs. I ran a couple of Internet searches and found something . . . curious. Those stones, my friend, are extraterrestrial.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Antonio, I’m serious,” Muñiz said. “I used their registration number and traced their origin. Before the Fabers brought the stones to Spain, they spent some time at the mineralogical research lab at the British Museum. But there’s no information about the findings. Damn shame. But when I looked at the museum’s database, I found the dates the stones went in and out and came up with something interesting.”
“C’mon, Marcelo, I don’t have all day . . .”
Muñiz, very pleased with himself, adjusted his bow tie and gave his widest smile yet.
“The log says it wasn’t Martin Faber but a company that took the stones to the British Museum. A corporation named the Betilum Company. TBC. Ring a bell?”
Figueiras, still dizzy from lack of sleep, shook his head.
“I looked all over the Internet for any sign of it without any luck. It’s some kind of phantom corporation. I was just about to give up when something occurred to me . . .”
“What?”
Muñiz was a renowned computer whiz, but now he was raising Figueiras’s already-high expectations.
“Last night, I ran that name through some of the most common sites for buying antiquities. I got nothing. But when I checked the VIP client lists—bingo! I found the company on a list of people who have purchased antique books in auctions.”
“And . . . what did you find?” Figueiras was growing impatient with Marcelo.
“The Betilum Company has been quietly buying up antique books all over the Internet, for years. Expensive books. All of them having to do with magic, astrology, apocryphal gospels, that type of thing. The last one I saw they bought was Monas hieroglyphica, a textbook published in Holland in 1564, in Latin, by one John Dee of London.”
“And what’s that book about?”
“That’s the most interesting part. It’s a treatise about a symbol that the author says, if used correctly, can help you control the world. This Dee character maintained that that glyph held the principal elements of all creation. A sort of master key to control all of Mother Nature. In a word, to be like God.”
“A symbol is supposed to do all this?”
Muñiz was now the second person since that morning to mention symbols.
“Supposedly. Here, take a look.”
Figueiras pulled out his notebook and drew the symbol as best he could. Still, it didn’t look like the key to world domination.
“So does this symbol mean anything to you?” Marcelo asked.
“Uh . . . no.”
“There is something else you might be interested in. This John Dee became famous for manipulating magical stones during the Elizabethan era—which is how customs described Faber and Álvarez’s stones. They were a sort of oracle, used to predict the future and to speak with spirits, things like that. And most of them were meteorites, which is why I said they’re extraterrestrial. What I think,” he added, sitting up in his chair, “is that those very stones are the ones Faber and Álvarez brought into Spain.”
“Are you sure?”
Marcelo moved the coffee cups and tea cakes off the table and spread out several photocopies that looked to have been taken out of an antique book. All of the writing was in Latin. But it was all gibberish to Figueiras.
“Now, take a look at this. These are copies of pages from the Monas hieroglyphica. A friend of mine in Los Angeles scanned and emailed them to me earlier today. Look. Right here. In the prologue, Dee references the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg, a man of science who also was devoted to magic, and explains that his symbol is actually a mathematical key for establishing contact with the heavens. He goes on to say—in some pretty complex language—that whoever discovers these rare and forgotten symbols and pairs them with heaven-sent ‘stones of Adam’ will be able to speak directly to God.”
“Stones of Adam? What the hell is all this about, Marcelo?”
“Stones of Adam. Adamants. They’ve had many names throughout the centuries, Antonio. But they’re always described as a mineral sent to Earth from paradise itself. Sacred stones, fallen to earth, which are supposed to allow us to see the future, if used correctly . . . It’s obvious they’re talking about some kind of meteorite that you have to ‘activate’ with some kind of religious ritual. Look here,” Marcelo said, putting another photocopied page in front of Figueiras. “It says it right here, clearly: Whoever possesses these stones, ‘aeream omnem et igneam regionem explorabit,’ will come to know all of heaven and earth.”
Figueiras ran his index finger over the words.
“Now, look at what comes just before that phrase,” Muñiz said. “Three Hebrew letters right before the word ‘lapide,’ or ‘stone.’”
“What, you think I can read Hebrew, Marcelo?”
“They’re the letters aleph, daleth, and mem. The consonants in the word ‘Adam.’ Adam lapide, or Adam’s stones, adamants—stones from paradise.”
“And you think Faber and Álvarez have these kinds of stones?”
“No, not those kinds of stones. The very stones themselves. As a matter of fact, do you know what ‘betilum’ means?”
Figueiras shook his head as he felt his cell phone vibrating in his pocket.
“I didn’t think so,” Muñiz added with a smile. “It comes from the Bible, Antonio. Bet-El was the place where Jacob had the vision of a ladder that connected heaven and earth. And he had this vision when he fell asleep with a smooth, black stone for a pillow. That was one of these very same adamants. The place name means ‘house of God’ and in the Middle Ages, the term ‘betilum’, or betyls, came to mean a meteorite with a certain kind of mineral property.”
“So what do you think one of these stones costs?” Figueiras said as he checked to see who had texted him.
Muñiz was taken aback at how little his friend seemed to appreciate the matter. “Well, I guess that depends . . .”
“On what?”
“On the stone’s properties, its age, its documentation . . . Antonio, a stone that can be traced back to John Dee could be worth a fortune. And if they could actually open a gateway to heaven, I couldn’t even venture a guess . . .”
“Oh, you think there are doors in heaven?”
“I’m a man of faith. Not like you . . .”
Antonio Figueiras had stopped paying attention. The text message he’d gotten was from his captain. He’d failed to reach him by phone yet again and instead sent Figueiras his orders in a text. He was supposed to go to the Lavacolla airport to pick up some “very special” reinforcements—right away.
49
The figure on the lid of Juan de Estivadas’s sarcophagus was covered in scars. Its face had been disfigured by some careless or unscrupulous idiot with a chisel. And a repair to a hole on the side had been slathered over slapdash with cement.
Artemi Dujok wordlessly traced his fingers over the damage. He said nothing even after noticing that two of the seven coats of arms had been chiseled away to the point where the entire sarcophagus might be structurally unstable.
“Careful! Don’t stand there,” he told me, mirroring my concerns. “We’ll only move it a couple centimeters, take a peek inside and leave it be.”
“But it’s five hundred years old . . . ,” I murmured.
“I promise you no one will notice.”
We set up at Juan de Estivadas’s feet, grabbed the sides of the lid and steadied ourselves. Our first push did nothing. Either the stone cover was heavier than it looked or the cement repair job had inadvertently sealed it shut. But on our second push, the lid began to give way. It slid open with a deep, hollow scraping that echoed throughout the church.
I turned my head as a pungent, acidic smell emanated from it. But I was stunned when I finally looked inside.
The tomb was empty.
“Nothing,” I said, and Dujok could feel how disappointed I felt.
“Are you sure?” he said, poking his flashlight around the inside of the crypt, finding nothing but dust and cobwebs. The walls of the inside looked even worse than the outside. They were covered in uneven holes, as if they had been eaten by concrete-eating worms. An inch of grime covered the bottom of the tomb. But then the light flashed against something that immediately caught our attention. Drag marks along the grimy bottom led to the corner of the crypt where I stood.
“There! That’s it!” he said.
I reached down to find a small bundle of black fabric tied with a golden string. Someone had tied it neatly and placed it in a small hole in the corner.
My hands began to tremble as I pictured my husband carefully preparing this little package with his large, manly hands and placing it carefully just so. Maybe that’s why I hesitated to open it right away.
“Open it!” Dujok urged.
I untied the string, my hands shaking as I stepped away from the tomb, looking for better light. The fabric unfolded and there it was. Perfectly unharmed. The adamant was set in a pendant with a silver chain so that it could be worn around the neck.
A rush of memories and emotions began to wash over me when Artemi Dujok’s rough voice boomed from behind me.
/> “Well, what are you waiting for? We have to activate it right away!”
50
Roger Castle could recall every detail of the first time he was allowed to speak openly about the National Reconnaissance Office. It was September of 1992. He had just been elected New Mexico’s governor and this military installation was still one of the country’s most closely guarded secrets. But that year, on the heels of the Gulf War and with the country needing to show its military strength, President George Herbert Walker Bush acknowledged the NRO’s existence—and inadvertently opened Pandora’s box, sending the news to televisions across the world. Until that historic decision, insiders like Castle joked only that NRO stood for “Not Referred to Openly,” frustrated that they had no clear answers for where its six-billion-dollar annual budget was going.
Castle had dreamed of one day visiting the installation and putting its cutting-edge technology to work for the taxpayers. The “eyes and ears watching and listening from space” would one day work for all of America—not just for its military interests, he had said. Given that, as his motorcade made its way to the offices of the NRO, President Castle knew he was about to step foot in a place where he was persona non grata.
It wasn’t long before Roger Castle and Michael Owen reached the NRO headquarters in Chantilly, Virginia—a nondescript, inoffensive-looking salmon-colored building. The motorcade pulled in at the back entrance just before one in the morning, and soon, they were standing in an expansive control room that monitored every satellite the world over, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year.
“My name’s Doctor Edgar Scott, Mr. President. It’s a pleasure to have you with us.”
The Lost Angel Page 17