Before Janos could comply with the order, a thirty-caliber bullet plunged into his back and sent him face-first to the ground. Janos felt his heart stop for a full three seconds, leaving him breathless.
Waasfi then saw their attacker dash along the cemetery’s perimeter. He was carrying an assault rifle, and from the way he moved, he looked well-trained. He moved in a zigzag pattern that Waasfi recognized. A SEAL? Here? Waasfi wouldn’t move a muscle as he waited to get a clear look at his target. Unfortunately, they saw each other at exactly the same moment.
Waasfi had no choice. He squeezed the trigger, firing off six rounds a second and knocking his enemy against a wall of tombs. He was dead before he hit the ground.
There was barely time to let it sink in. The unmistakable sounds of footsteps crunching over gravel were at his back, and he turned just in time to unload another barrage of gunfire and see another heavily armed navy SEAL fall to the ground in a motionless lump.
Two.
The adrenaline from nearly being ambushed shook his entire body. And that’s when he remembered Haci. Although their enemies were using silencers, Haci should have heard his gunfire. The sound seemed to come from everywhere; Santa María a Nova was encircled by apartment buildings and thus the cemetery was surrounded by walls, forming a virtual soundstage. They must have killed Haci . . . And that’s when he remembered something else: SEAL assault teams never operate in pairs. They are always in teams of six or more.
“Lower your weapons and come out with your hands up,” he heard an American voice say. “We’ve got you surrounded.”
Waasfi lay flat against the ground, silent. He slithered across the dirt until he reached a large stone crucifix and a stone wall he could use for cover. He wasn’t about to give up. He knew if he could make out where the voices were coming from, he still had a chance.
He saw a third soldier headed for the main entrance to the church, where Dujok and Julia Álvarez were oblivious to everything outside. His sheikh and the seer were helpless. And that’s why Waasfi didn’t hesitate. He fixed the crosshairs of his night-vision scope on the soldier’s left temple.
“Give yourself up and abandon your position!” the American voice said just as Waasfi squeezed the trigger. “Otherwise we will open fire—”
The third soldier went down, and the Armenian crossed himself, thanking God—and his uncle for having provided him with armor-piercing bullets.
Waasfi narrowed his vision. Are they carrying heavy artillery?
He’d barely finished the thought when five bullets splintered the stone an inch above his head, destroying the Latin inscription. They’re shooting to kill. He grabbed the Uzi and hit the ground as a fresh barrage of gunfire covered him in marble dust from overhead. Falling backward, Wassfi looked up to find his executioner standing above him.
He was huge, dressed in black and had Waasfi dead in his sights.
A bullet buried itself next to Waasfi’s knee. And then another. And another. That bastard in the ski mask had Waasfi at his mercy and was toying with him like a lion with its prey.
“Pray . . . ,” the voice said, muffled behind the black ski mask.
“What?”
“Pray to whatever God you believe in, motherfucker.”
Waasfi’s mind immediately went to Melek Taus, the angel that was sworn to protect their clan, and he clung to his rifle, hoping at least to be remembered as a hero. His last thought was for his uncle. The man who had converted him. Sheikh Artemi Dujok.
And then came the shot.
It came somewhere from the east and smashed the soldier’s Adam’s apple. He gurgled his last breath as Waasfi looked around, confused.
Praise be to God!
Haci had stealthily crawled across the cemetery and saved his life.
That’s four . . .
“You all right, kid?”
“Yeah. Yeah!”
Waasfi hopped up, fueled by adrenaline, and signaled for his partner to meet him at the cathedral’s north wall to regroup. They first had to secure the Amrak. Haci, a wiry man with bulging eyes who had grown up fighting on the border between Armenia and Turkey, calculated the distance and danger to the meeting spot. There, Janos was struggling to pull himself together. He held the “box” tight against his chest and tried to wriggle his way toward the north wall. Lying between others’ final resting places helped to keep him focused on staying alive.
The American’s voice came over the megaphone. “This is your last chance!” But this time, the voice seemed farther off. “Turn over the transmitter and we’ll spare your life.”
Transmitter? Janos shook his head. That’s what they call this thing?
“Five . . . four . . .”
The American voice counted down.
“Three . . .”
Waasfi and Haci pointed their rifles left, then right, unable to determine where the voice was coming from.
“Two . . .”
There was a pause.
“One.”
Janos felt a pull, like a vacuum sucking him backward. A puff of smoke. Something huge and hot sailed overhead, destroying a wall of Santa María a Nova. Janos instinctively tried to cover his ears. But the blast had already blown his eardrums. Wait, didn’t they want the Amrak? he thought as a flurry of machine-gun fire exploded. He figured his partners had opened fire. As he felt along the ground with his good arm, trying to find the box containing the Amrak in the shower of dust and smoke, a pair of large, powerful hands grabbed him under the arms and dragged him inside the church.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” he heard Waasfi yell. “Now!”
66
First came the explosion.
Then the noise and the rumbling and the smell of hundred-year-old dust and scorched earth.
And if you had asked me then, I’d have said I thought the angel of the apocalypse himself had batted me across the back with his golden trumpet, launching me into Dujok’s laptop and against Juan de Estivadas’s sarcophagus. Oh, Jesus . . . ! My knees crashed onto the floor, my forearms and face fell against the cold, hard ground, and I finally came to rest somewhere near the middle of the church.
When I had stopped bouncing from stone to stone, it felt like I was broken deep inside. The pain throughout my body and the metallic taste of blood in my mouth made me wish I had lost consciousness. I should have been woozy, disoriented. But instead, I felt all of my senses heightened; a shock wave was bringing me back from the brink. The room started spinning. I lay on my back, my clothes in charred tatters, and one of my boots had been knocked clear across the floor.
For a minute, I lay perfectly still as my body and mind regained their composure. A dust cloud floated throughout Santa María a Nova and settled over me, and I began coughing violently and painfully.
“Are you okay?”
Artemi Dujok staggered toward me in the settling mist, coughing and trying to wave the dust cloud from his face.
“Julia! Say something!”
He inched his soot-covered face close to mine. He shook me, then tried unsuccessfully to lift me.
“C’mon, Julia, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“What’s happened?”
“No time to explain. Come on, get up. Here, this way . . .”
He finally managed to help me to my feet and we stumbled toward the wall where Juan de Estivadas’s crypt had rested. It had been blown to smithereens.
“Here. This way. Follow me.”
I wasn’t sure what he was thinking. I knew there was another twenty-foot wall in the direction we were headed, but I was too weak and dizzy to argue. I followed him. I didn’t expect to trip over a mass on the ground. I looked down and saw that it was one of Dujok’s men, and I started to realize the severity of the situation. It was Janos, slumped over and grabbing at a bleeding wound in his side.
“Keep moving, Julia.”
“But your man—”
“Janos knows what he has to do. We need to get out of here.”
&n
bsp; As I watched Dujok disappear into the swirling smoke, I started to realize what had happened. A bomb—or some kind of explosive—had gone off outside the church, blasting shards of marble and stone in all directions. The enemy Dujok was so reticent to talk about had finally caught up to us. And the damage they had caused to the centuries-old church was inconceivable. The blast had blown a hole in the eastern wall, the oldest part of the church, turning centuries-old relics into dust—among them the base of an ancient monument. Where stone had once stood, there was now a dust-covered set of narrow stairs leading down into the basement.
At first, I thought I was seeing things, still shaken from the blast. But it was no illusion. Dujok hurried down the stairs, and I followed him.
At the bottom of the stairs, we came to a wall and found a small crawl space about three feet high that Dujok quickly began to squirm through.
“What are you waiting for?” I heard him yell from the other side.
I hesitated—until I heard footsteps rushing up from behind me. They resounded throughout the cavernous church. And I knew that whoever had caused this kind of destruction—and likely had kidnapped Martin as well—meant business.
I dove into the tunnel just as a single thunderclap of gunfire exploded somewhere upstairs in the church.
Janos! Oh, God . . . !
Sure that Janos had been killed, I quickly wriggled through the small tunnel and out of the church. The ancient drainpipe went on for about a hundred feet east beneath Calle Escultor Ferreiro and joined what was undoubtedly part of the city’s sewer system. Daylight from the drains above us lit our path through the ancient sewers, which stank of urine and rotten eggs, but at least they were leading us farther away from the church.
“What’s going on?” I said, pulling myself out of the other end of the pipe and into a newer section where we could stand upright. I tried to take inventory of my situation: I was missing my boot, and my clothes were infused with such a wretched stench that I fought not to gag.
“They found us, that’s what’s happened.”
“Colonel Allen?”
“Him or his people, who knows?” he said, grabbing me by the arm and rushing up the tunnel. “One thing’s for sure. They’re after you . . . and this.”
Dujok held my adamant in his left hand as we rushed ahead. It was still emitting a soft glow.
“Just promise me one thing,” I said. “Promise me we’ll find him.”
“Martin? Of course we will! And now we know exactly where he is. He’s a stone’s throw from Ararat. Right now, we’ve got to get out of here—”
“No! No, you can’t leave me hanging by a thread like this, Mr. Dujok! I’m just supposed to keep following you around on blind faith? How do I even know the adamant sent that signal to find Martin?”
I’d stopped thinking straight. My head was spinning as I found myself shoeless and disoriented, limping along the sticky and slippery bowels of the city of Noia. My heart was pounding, my breathing labored, and I felt like I might pass out or throw up at any minute.
“Keep your voice down!” he hissed. “And keep moving!”
“No, I won’t shut up!” I said, my voice now rebounding through the drain system, bordering on hysterics. “They’re trying to kill us. They’re trying to kill us!”
“Shut your mouth!”
“No, no, I won’t! I won’t!”
Dujok squeezed my hand to the point where I winced. “Don’t you understand the kind of people who are after us?”
“I don’t care! I want to get out of here. Let me out of here!” I yelled, blind with fear, and wrenched my arm free, making Dujok lose his balance at the edge of a small ramp leading down. He slipped and fell hard to his knees against the stone ground where a river of filth flowed.
His Uzi crashed down with a splash and disappeared down the slope. His eyes flashed with an incandescent rage that shook me out of my histrionics. And for a few brief seconds, I thought Artemi Dujok was going to tear me limb from limb. He picked himself up, rubbing his aching knees, and turned his attention toward the street above us, listening, standing perfectly still. I was trembling . . .
“You hear that?” he said.
I was still waiting for his retribution. But he just calmly looked down the tunnel behind us.
“Notice anything?”
“No . . .”
“I think they’ve stopped following us.”
We froze and listened, hearing only the sound of water lapping gently across the ground. A few minutes passed. Dujok was right. And that respite was all I needed for my heart to slow. Although my body still ached and my head was pounding, I was starting to think clearly again.
“We should keep going . . . ,” Dujok said calmly, breaking the silence.
I exhaled.
“You have nothing to worry about, Ms. Álvarez. I promise you everything will be all right.”
Somewhere on the street above us, I heard the distant wail of police sirens, and I knew we couldn’t stay here for long.
“You know, you remind me of Jacob,” he said as we made our way down the tunnel.
“Which Jacob is that?”
“From the Bible. He lived an amazing life. He bought his family’s birthright from his brother Esau. He fought and defeated an angel, even injured its leg. But most important, thanks to an adamant just like yours, he had a vision on his way to the promised land.”
“He had an adamant?” I asked, while also amazed that Dujok could think of the Bible at a time like this.
“He rested his head against a stone—an adamant—and fell asleep during the journey, and what a dream he had! The skies opened up and he saw these heavenly creatures going up and down a fiery staircase—Jacob’s ladder—oblivious to him. Without knowing exactly how he had done it, he had attracted the messengers of God and had used the adamant to open a portal for them to come to earth.”
“And what does Jacob’s story have to do with me, Mr. Dujok?” I said, sighing. “Is that what you did with my adamant? You used it to open a stairway to heaven?”
Artemi Dujok smiled for the first time in hours. “You’re the one who said it . . .”
A sharp, far-off noise, as if another wall had just come crumbling down at the church behind us, made us hasten our step.
“And who do you hope will come down that staircase?”
“Angels. Beings of light. The messengers who are mentioned in all forms of religion, Ms. Álvarez. They’re the only ones who can help us overcome the impending apocalypse.”
“You really believe this?”
“I’m not the only one, Ms. Álvarez,” he said, leading me to a clearing up ahead where the tunnel forked. “Martin believes it, too.”
My thoughts went to my husband as we trudged along the dank underground cavern.
“Now that you mention him, I still haven’t asked you why they’ve kidnapped him.”
“Same reason they’re after us. They want the adamants so they can be the first—and maybe the only ones—to open that passageway to the other side to speak directly to God.”
“And they can do that with the adamants?”
“No. They also need the tablet to make them work.”
Dujok climbed a set of corroded stairs that led up through the roof of the tunnel and into a round clearing—where Waasfi was waiting for us.
“Tablet? What kind of tablet?” I asked, following him up.
“Come up. Quickly,” he said, helping me through. “I’ll ask my men to show it to you. Today, you’ve earned at least that much.”
67
The door to room 616 in the intensive-care wing of Our Lady of Hope swung open. Nicholas Allen had been starving for breakfast all morning and looked up hungrily. But he immediately lost his appetite. Not this guy again . . . he thought, rolling his eyes at the sight of Antonio Figueiras. A man he didn’t recognize followed him in.
“Mr. Allen,” Figueiras said in his muddled English, his trench coat a wrinkled mess, “one of your fellow
countrymen has come to visit you.”
An IV bag was dripping into his arm as Allen nodded at the new visitor. “If he’s from the funeral home, tell them this one’s still breathing,” Allen grumbled.
Tom Jenkins feigned a smile. “Well, it’s good to see you still have your sense of humor, Colonel.”
“Do I know you?”
“Tom Jenkins. I work for the Office of the President of the United States. I’ve come here personally on his behalf.”
“Hmph. The Office of the President? Well, that was fast.”
“Our embassy in Madrid tells us you and Julia Álvarez were attacked with some sort of electromagnetic weapon about eight hours ago, is that right?”
“Who told you that?”
“The embassy’s director of intelligence, Richard Hale.”
“Oh, right. Rick,” he said, letting his guard down a bit. “I guess Director Owen’s got you up to speed on my mission.”
Jenkins noticed the look of surprise on Inspector Figueiras’s face. His English might not have been good enough to catch every detail of the conversation, but he understood enough. He still hadn’t put two and two together, between the electromagnetic weapon and the blackout in Santiago the night before, but he was starting to get the idea.
“So tell me, Colonel. Any idea who got the drop on you?” Jenkins asked.
“Of course. I’ve already told Owen all about it. But if you want to know anything else”—he coughed—“you’re going to have to wait for my final report.”
“A report we’ll never see because it belongs to Operation Elijah, isn’t that right?”
Allen didn’t answer.
“Listen to me, Colonel. It’s urgent that we find the woman,” Jenkins said. “We can’t waste time with this bureaucratic nonsense.”
“Why does the president of the United States care about Julia Álvarez?”
Tom leaned in to whisper something that Figueiras overhead—and that immediately made him perk his ears up.
“You know as well as I do, Allen. We need the stone. The president wants to be out in front of this whole situation.”
Whatever weakness Allen felt was immediately gone as he sat himself straight up in his hospital bed.
The Lost Angel Page 23