The Lost Angel

by Sierra, Javier

  “Listen, I don’t know what you think you know about Elijah, but this operation has maximum priority. And you can’t order me to tell you a damn thing. You hear me? Not a damn thing! You want answers? Talk to my boss.”

  Tom Jenkins snickered. “You’ll have to play ball sooner or later, Colonel . . . ,” Jenkins whispered, eyeing Figueiras, whose eyes were as wide as saucers.

  Figueiras remembered his jeweler friend’s information about the stones and now hearing the word in English confirmed there was a connection.

  Jenkins continued. “Have it your way. We’ll eventually find the woman and you and your men will go down as the unpatriotic rogue agents who ignored a direct order from your commander in chief.”

  Nick Allen tried to contain himself.

  “May . . . I . . . ask a question, Colonel?” Figueiras ventured suddenly, feeling this might be his only chance to get some answers. “Do the initials ‘TBC’ mean anything to you? What do you know about the Betilum Company?”

  Jenkins was even more surprised than Allen at the question.

  “Where the hell did you hear about that?”

  “Please, answer . . .”

  Allen hesitated for a moment. “It’s a phantom company owned by the agency, Inspector. That’s all I can tell you. It’s top-secret.”

  “Can you at least tell me why that company has been buying old manuscripts and first-edition books by one”—Figueiras flipped through his notebook—“John Dee?”

  Allen was backed into a corner. That information wasn’t easy to come by. The cop had done his homework. Everyone associated with Elijah knew Dee was Martin Faber’s obsession. As it was his father’s. Faber had worked for his father as a climatologist at the NSA until they started to distance themselves from the project and the agency took it over—putting Allen in charge of operations. Most recently, the agency had been trying to get its hands on as many of Dee’s works as possible to try to understand what insights Faber and his father thought Dee might have.

  “We needed . . .” Allen hesitated. “We wanted to decipher a symbol we found in some old photographs. Top-secret material. I can’t say anything else.”

  Tom cut in. “Photos? When we were in Madrid, they told us about some old photos of Mount Ararat that Martin Faber had requested from the CIA before he resigned. Are we talking about the same ones?”

  “Could be,” Allen admitted reluctantly. So much for leading Figueiras down a dead end.

  “And the symbol you were trying to decipher,” the inspector said. “Could it be this one?”

  Figueiras handed him the drawing in his notebook.

  Nicholas Allen furrowed his brow at seeing the symbol. He took the notebook from the cop and wondered how much he could say. The symbol was from the cover of one of Dee’s books, printed in 1564. That was no big secret. He figured Figueiras already knew that.

  “Yes . . . That’s the one,” Allen said, handing him back the notebook.

  “So what does this symbol have to do with the stones?” Jenkins asked. Figueiras was starting to get ticked off at Jenkins’s butting in on his own investigation.

  But Allen just turned away to face the window.

  “It’s okay, Colonel. You don’t have to answer anything now,” Jenkins said, patting Allen’s leg. “You will soon enough, though. Because we know where the two adamants are at this very moment. Our satellites have pinpointed their location. And we also know where Julia Álvarez and her kidnapper are headed. And you know what else? You’re coming with me to find them. To Turkey. Right now.”

  “Turkey?” Allen looked back at Jenkins. “I’m in the goddamn hospital!”

  “I could go with you too,” Figueiras said. But Jenkins ignored him.

  “Colonel, you already know the country where the adamants are to be reunited, you speak the language, and you know both of the people who’ve been kidnapped. I’m asking you to help your president. Your country.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Then I’ll make sure you don’t leave this hospital, Colonel. Ever.”

  68

  “What is that tablet, exactly?”

  Waasfi smiled and the snake tattooed on his cheek recoiled. I don’t think he understood a word I said, but from my pantomime he knew I was talking about the object he was carrying in his black nylon backpack. The explosion at the church had left barely a scratch on him. His clothes weren’t torn or charred, and he looked no worse for the wear.

  “Ta-blet?” he repeated, pointing at his treasured possession. “Amrak?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s a relic from John Dee’s era, Ms. Álvarez,” Dujok said from behind me. “He called it his ‘table of practice’ or ‘invocation tablet.’”

  As Dujok came up out of the tunnel and dusted off his clothes and boots, Waasfi opened the bag and let me peek inside.

  At first, I thought it was empty. The bottom of the bag was dark and wrinkled, and I never imagined that could be John Dee’s famous relic. But as I could see by the approaching daylight, I was wrong. There was indeed something in the bag, a coarse, square tablet that looked like it was made of coal, covered in bumps and pits. Inscrutable inscriptions were scrawled all over it. It clearly had been weathered over the years . . . or eons.

  “Not since the disappearance of the Ark of the Covenant—about a thousand years before the birth of Christ—had God given us instructions on how to build another sacred object. That is, until he gave us what you are looking at,” Dujok said, standing over the tablet.

  “And you think it was God who . . .”

  “It was the archangel Uriel.” Dujok smiled. “Rather, that’s what John Dee explains in his book De heptarchia mystica. Uriel, a being whose head shone as bright as the sun, with long, flowing hair and a dazzling light gleaming from his left hand, appeared to Dee. He handed him two stones and went on to give him instructions on how to build this tablet, this ‘invocation tablet.’”

  “And that’s what you dug up in Biddlestone.”

  “Precisely. Martin found it and wanted to activate it on your wedding day. And since that day, it hasn’t stopped emitting signs of life.”

  “What kinds of signs?”

  “Well, for starters, it maintains a constant temperature of sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit. No other mineral on Earth does that.”

  “Doesn’t seem like such an important detail.”

  “Oh, but it is. Every detail is important.”

  “Okay, well, do you have an idea why the angels would give John Dee this object?”

  Dujok placed his hand on my shoulder the way a father would a daughter. “That’s a very good question. Martin and I ask each other that all the time and we always come to the same conclusion. Here’s how I see it: Dee spent the last few years of his life obsessed with writing what he called the Book of Nature. He believed the universe could be read the way you read a grimoire, a book of spells. Moreover, he believed you could manipulate the universe if you changed around the words that were used to create the universe—that is, if you understood the language God used in the creation. But the fact is the angels seemed anxious about entrusting him with this tablet. So they told Dee that it was imperative that he learn this secret language, the foreign tongue that would allow him to modify the work of God. Imagine: It must have been like trying to teach genetics to an eleven-year-old—there was no way. They warned him that the survival of the human race depended on him, that cataclysmic climate changes and unrivaled destruction would happen if he couldn’t master the language and use the tablet. But he died before they ever finished their lessons.”

  “So what ever happened with these natural disasters?”

  “They came to pass, Ms. Álvarez.” Dujok sighed. “They certainly did.”

  “Really?”

  “A few years after his death, around 1650, Europe suffered one of the worst climate shifts in the last nine thousand years. Temperatures dropped and entire crops were lost. Thousands of families died of famine and sickness. An
d using today’s technology, we know why. It was all because of the sun. The sun’s magnetic activity reached historic lows. Astronomy books would come to refer to those times as the Maunder Minimum, when sunspots were exceedingly rare. And the effects lasted well into the eighteenth century. We think that’s what the angels wanted to warn Dee about, but he was never able to understand.”

  “And you think you can do a better job?”

  “Well . . .” He smiled. “If his holy messengers reestablished communication with us now, I think we’d be able to do a much better job. Unlike the time of Dee and Moses, we live in an age where we have access to the language of science, not just story and metaphor. And we can interpret the messages more accurately. That’s why it’s important for us to be the ones to establish communication and not someone who might use the knowledge for some other, dark purpose.”

  “So, you’re not in this for religion or power or wishful thinking.”

  “No, miss. We’re in this for the sheer survival of the human race. And we know that the angels only speak by way of the tablet and the adamants when they have something vital to communicate to us. And this time is no different. Of that, I’m sure.”

  69

  A full silvery moon hung over the National Mall as the president’s bulletproof Cadillac pulled up to the White House. The Washington Monument cast a long, swordlike shadow toward the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial. Roger Castle took that as an ominous sign as he paced the carpet of the Oval Office, calculating what his next move would be if Owen’s men got their hands on the stones before his people did. Could he trust the NSA director? Who could he even talk to, given that he’d signed a confidentiality agreement not to discuss the Elijah project?

  He’d never felt so alone.

  He was sure no one else in his administration could ever understand something that, from the outside, might look like a bizarre eccentricity. Only he understood that it was much more than that.

  Well, at least I know Elijah exists. Dad was right . . .

  And just like that, his mind flashed to dinner the night after the reception with the Hopi Indians. It’s funny how memory works. A single musical note, the scent of perfume, anything can take you back to a far-off time you thought you had forgotten . . . This time, it was the mention of a name while visiting with Michael Owen that had taken him back: Chester Arthur. It was White Bear, the barrel-chested elder with a lifetime’s worth of worries wrinkled into his forehead, who recalled Chester Arthur signing the executive order that gave the Hopi two and a half million acres in the heart of Arizona in 1882.

  “But it was a cursed gift,” White Bear had told him. “Until that day, our tribe had been hounded by colonists who despised us and missionaries who wanted to convert us. Having our own land was like rain for a people in a terrible drought.”

  “So where’s the curse?” Castle had asked. He knew that Arthur was sensitive to America’s ethnic tribes of New Mexico and Nevada and wanted to grant them their own space away from pillagers and invaders. He couldn’t convince White Bear to concede the point.

  The eighty-five-year-old tribesman had gone to Santa Fe that day to tell something important to a white man with power, with influence. He chose Castle.

  “You know, Mr. Governor, it amazes me the lengths to which politicians will go to get votes.”

  “Why do you say that? The reception isn’t to your liking?”

  “No, it’s wonderful,” White Bear said, smiling. “It’s just that . . . I wonder, if you knew what our ancestors said about humanity’s future, whether you wouldn’t spend more time with your family and less time at these parties.”

  “Oh, so you want me to retire? Is that it?” Castle joked.

  “No, I want you to be prepared. The prophecy is very clear.”

  “Prophecy?” he said as a waiter refilled his coffee cup. “What does your prophecy predict?”

  “That we are near the end of the fourth world, Mr. Governor. Our children, and perhaps even we, will live to see the end of our civilization.”

  “The fourth world? I’m only aware of this world, my friend . . .”

  The old Indian smiled kindly. “We know very little about the first world. Man did not exist then to witness the volcanic eruptions and landslides that brought about its end. And fortunately, neither did he endure the freezing earth of the second. Now the third . . . we certainly suffered its destruction.”

  “The third . . . ?”

  “The third world was destroyed by an apocalyptic flood.”

  “Ah, yes, the Great Flood!”

  The old man nodded. “That is what you Christians call it. Though you all have tried to forget what happened just before the catastrophe. The Hopi do not. Our elders still tell the story of the capital of the last world—the Washington, DC, of its time, if you will: Kasskara. It was founded on an island in the middle of the ocean. But it sank below the seas as the waters rose.”

  “I know that myth, too . . .”

  “Everybody knows it, Mr. Governor. But the question is, do people believe it? The ancient Kasskarans were the last ones who had the privilege of speaking directly to the gods. The “high and respected sages” called their gods the Kachinas, bestowed the knowledge of the ages on the citizens of that great land. For millennia, they were the true kings of Earth. They built flying machines, could communicate over long distances, controlled the forces of wind and rain and even had the power to destroy an entire country overnight. When President Arthur first heard the story of the Kasskarans and realized how much their story resembled that of the city of Atlantis, he acknowledged the Hopi as the keepers of an ancient truth he was interested in. And he went about trading US land for that knowledge. And that, Governor, is why I say his gift was cursed.”

  White Bear ignored Castle’s incredulous stare. If Castle had known then what he came to know about Arthur’s fascination with the “Big Secret” and the end of days, he might have paid closer attention.

  “Despite all their science and their technological advances, the Kachinas weren’t able to stop the great flood. When they realized that destruction was inevitable, they decided to save at least some of the human race. And they entrusted them with a gift to help humanity survive the next great catastrophe.”

  “A lifeboat?”

  White Bear continued, unfazed. “A sacred stone, Governor. Or rather several stones, which were hidden throughout the four corners of the earth in sacred places.”

  “A rock doesn’t sound like much of a gift.”

  “Do not be so quick to judge. One very powerful stone was brought here, to what is now New Mexico and Arizona. It was carved by the Kachinas and hidden in a secret place where only the chiefs of each tribe may visit it from time to time. They seek out the oracle to know whether it has anything to tell us, anything to warn us about. President Arthur learned of the oracle from one of my ancestors and he consulted it on various occasions. I visited it for the first time in 1990. And I can tell you, Governor, that it remains hidden in that very place.”

  “So did the stone have anything to say to you?” Castle said, holding back a smile.

  “I feared I would leave this earth without it ever speaking to me. That is, until this week. And now, Governor, I wish it had spared me and spoken instead to my successor. Because something has happened . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “The recent drought and falling water levels of our major rivers convinced me it was time to visit the oracle again. And this time, after three thousand years of silence, the stone has spoken again. I know what you’re thinking. And no, I’m not crazy.” A darkness had overcome White Bear. “Believe me or don’t, but the stone has foretold that the end of the fourth world is upon us. Possibly in as little as a few years. Our people swore an oath to the government of the United States when they signed the pact with President Arthur, and I’ve come to you on their behalf. You, as the governor, can speak to the White House before this chain of events begins to unfold. And you mus
t do it, quickly. If you like, I could take you to consult the stone yourself, so that you can speak with authority before the nonbelievers.”

  70

  Sergeant Major Jerome Odenwald shook with fury as he looked through the scope of his M72 grenade launcher at his target. The motherfuckers who killed four of his fellow soldiers—his brothers—and injured another were going to pay. He didn’t care whether he’d be court-martialed and charged with war crimes for turning a small town in northern Spain—clearly a NATO territory—into a war zone or for risking the lives of civilians. Odenwald was blind with rage. Still, the adrenaline from coming across one of their enemies in the church and blowing his brains out had started to subside. The more he thought about it, he should have shot him in the stomach and let him die a slow death—the bastard. But that still wouldn’t have given him the answers he wanted. Like how that son of a bitch ended up with a high-powered military rifle. Or where the hell he’d been trained to use it with such deadly accuracy.

  But Odenwald was sure of one thing: The killers he was lining up in his scope weren’t your garden-variety terrorists. Certainly not the low-level risks described back at headquarters.

  The soldier switched off his radio and focused on the targets in his scope.

  “I’ve got you now . . . ,” he whispered.

  Three men and one woman—Dujok, Waasfi, Haci and Julia Álvarez—had just emerged from an underground sewer near the entrance to the Noela Theater. The SEAL recognized them immediately. They were running from the chaos just down the road, where a swarm of cops and paramedics were trying to make sense of what had happened.

  But just as he started to squeeze the trigger, he noticed the tired filthy group gather around something on the ground, some object they pulled out of a black bag.

  The Amrak!

  Odenwald froze. His eyes widened. That was his mission objective.

  He took his finger off the trigger and felt around for the “whisper detector,” a directional surveillance device built into his weapon. Through the earphones underneath his wool skullcap, he could hear any conversation up to five hundred feet away. He pointed his weapon, flipped the switch and listened.