The Lost Angel

by Sierra, Javier

  “. . . Ms. Álvarez . . .” Artemi Dujok’s military-like voice sounded clear in Odenwald’s earphones. “You’re looking at the world’s oldest radio. It’s four thousand years old and works just as it did the first day.”

  Four thousand years . . . Odenwald adjusted the volume.

  Dujok continued. “Martin and I spent years trying to find it. Finally, Martin discovered where it was hidden after deciphering a list of angelic names Dee wrote before he died.”

  “And the list said you could use this to . . . to speak to God?” the young woman stuttered while glancing at the Amrak. “How did it get to Biddlestone?”

  “One legend has it that Saint Jeremiah used this very tablet to interpret the Word of God and write the Bible’s Book of Jeremiah. Thanks to this stone, he was able to foresee the turbulent times that would lie ahead for Jerusalem, the coming of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian Exile. So to keep such a precious artifact from falling into the wrong hands, Jeremiah took it as far away as he could, as far as the British Isles . . .

  “We also know that this object only becomes active when it feels the electromagnetic force of an adamant on one of these ‘special days,’ and when there is someone special—like Jeremiah—to act as the catalyst. And you, Julia, have made this tablet come to life twice, without even knowing it. No other person we’ve met has ever done anything like it.”

  Odenwald had heard enough. He was sure that was the item his team had been ordered to secure. If his aim was true—and it always was—those bastards had exactly three seconds to live before he could get his hands on the Amrak and end this goddamn mission.

  Maybe his permanent record wasn’t completely screwed after all.

  71

  Despite the hand and seat warmers in her rented BMW K1200 motorcycle, Ellen Watson couldn’t shake the freezing cold in her bones. So she just cranked the throttle and zoomed ahead. She knew there was no time to waste if she hoped to catch up to Julia Álvarez and her kidnappers before they left Noia, which is why she opted for a motorcycle. Although the little fishing village was only about twenty-five miles outside of Santiago, it was beyond a wet and foggy valley that made the trip take almost an hour. The road between the towns had been under construction for years, so unless she had a fast ride, the drive could take forever.

  She made the right choice.

  It was twenty minutes to nine when the motorcycle’s one-hundred-ten-horsepower engine rumbled onto Rua de Juan de Estivadas in the town of Noia. She’d be at the center of town in no time. The GPS talking into her Bluetooth earphone counted down the meters to her destination. But she found it strange that none of the local businesses were open yet.

  Don’t these people work for a living?

  It wasn’t until she turned the final corner toward her destination that she saw the silhouette of a person. The young man was leaning over the hood of a pickup truck. Resting, maybe? And that’s when she noticed he was wearing a pair of Eagle-1 polycarbonate sniper goggles, the kind US sharpshooters wear—and only when they’re lining up a target. She looked closer. He was wearing a ski mask. And there was some kind of black cable coming out of his shirt and going into some kind of walkie-talkie.

  What the hell . . . ?

  Ellen slammed on the brakes, propped up her bike and reached for something in one of the saddlebags, her heart pounding in her ears.

  He’s gonna shoot! I’ve got to stop him . . . !

  She was right. She watched as the soldier in black aimed the green tube of his rocket launcher up the street—right about the place where the satellite coordinates had led her.

  I’ve got to stop him . . . one way or the other . . .

  Just as he fiddled with the sight on his rocket launcher, she drew her pistol and lined up her shot.

  “Freeze! Hands in the air!” she yelled.

  He was unfazed. He settled the launcher on its target and reached around for the trigger. Ellen didn’t think twice. Two shots from her Beretta broke the small village’s silence. Cack! Cack! Only then did she take off her helmet, breathing in the mixture of gunpowder and salty sea air, to realize who she’d just shot. Blood from the muscular young man gushed out of the black assault SEAL uniform and pooled on the centuries-old cobblestone road.

  Holy shit! He’s one of ours!

  Her two shots were true. One punctured his neck, the other his kidney and lungs. Kill shots, both of them.

  At the end of the street, where the young SEAL had been aiming, she saw four dark silhouettes scrambling to pack up a backpack and take defensive positions. Three of them were men, and they were armed. The fourth was a woman with carrot-colored hair—a woman she recognized from the pictures she’d seen in Madrid. It was Julia Álvarez. Watson’s gunshots had tipped them off.

  She’d been trained to make split-second, life-and-death decisions, and now she wondered what her next move should be. She was alone and up against men who, according to military intelligence, were heavily armed, carrying a sophisticated electromagnetic weapon and had managed to kidnap a US agent and his wife.

  72

  I was a wreck.

  With the explosion at Santa María a Nova still fresh in my mind, now I was shaken by two nearby shots. I recognized their hollow cracks right away. And with them, a hidden figure dressed in black camouflage and squatting behind a truck fell to the ground in a heap.

  “Anvrep kragoj!” Waasfi yelled.

  “Shooter!” Dujok yelled, translating. “Hit the deck!”

  But he wasn’t referring to the motorcyclist standing in the middle of the road, a small pistol still smoking in her hand. He seemed more worried about the soldier they hadn’t seen on the ground.

  “Take cover!” Dujok yelled.

  I dove behind a blue car, trembling. “Wha . . . what’s happening?”

  “I . . . I have no idea!” Dujok said, uncharacteristically nervous and clutching his rifle.

  73

  Some five thousand miles from the Spanish coast, a supercomputer in the National Reconnaissance Office whirred dutifully as it analyzed information from the HMBB satellite.

  “Jesus Christ, they’ve shot S23!”

  S23 was Sergeant Odenwald’s code name. A single bead of nervous sweat ran down Michael Owen’s brow as he followed the operation from a monitor in the control room. Thank God the president didn’t have to see this . . . , he thought. A second later, the icon just below Odenwald’s name on-screen went from green to red. He was dead. The real-time news streaming in from Spain kept getting worse. The captain of the USS Texas had just slammed shut his computer after Owen told him via video conference that he wasn’t authorized to send in another team. Owen just didn’t want to risk it. The less I have to explain to Castle, the better.

  Meanwhile, Edgar Scott took off his glasses to wipe a tear with a tissue.

  “Sir,” the director of the NRO sniffled. It hadn’t been easy for him to keep his composure and lie to the president of the United States. “I really don’t mean to be out of line, but shouldn’t we have told the president everything we know?”

  “What do you mean everything?”

  “You know that magnetic discharge wasn’t the only one we detected in the last few hours,” he said, pointing at another signal on the giant monitor. “What all about all these minor ones? There have been discharges all over the world. Jerusalem. Arizona. The one in Noyon, France, last night was especially significant—”

  “It’s all under control, Dr. Scott. We don’t want another Church Crisis of 1999, do we?”

  Scott bit his lip. “That was a long time ago, sir . . .”

  What Owen called the Church Crisis brought back bad memories. That year, right about the time Nicholas Allen and Martin Faber had tried to steal the stone from Echmiadzin, a scientist at the National Center for Space Studies in Toulouse, France, who was studying images from an ERS satellite, discovered X emissions emanating from under six Gothic churches in northern France.

  The engineer, Michael Temoin, had
a run-in with his bosses after they ignored his findings. So he decided to investigate on his own—and almost made a mess of things. No one had told him he’d stumbled across information that was being used by a top-secret program to study energy emissions. His search took him to Amiens—the site of one of the six early Gothic cathedrals that had shown up on his images—where he unearthed a stone that he should never have seen without the permission of the Elijah project. And it put everyone in a bind. No one wanted an artifact that could have such serious scientific, historical and political repercussions becoming public knowledge. Luckily for Elijah, “climate change” wasn’t as much a buzz word in 1999, and the press largely ignored it.

  But the situation was different now. If a new, independent scientist showed a connection between energy emissions from those ancient beacons and a severe geological event—a euphemism for the end of the world—well, suffice it to say there would be ramifications. Big ones.

  “That will not happen again, do you understand me, Dr. Scott?” Owen said, putting the argument to rest. “The situation in 1999 caught us all by surprise. None of us imagined the August eclipse over France would have produced those kinds of anomalies . . . the ones Nostradamus predicted. What we did in Noyon is what we’re going to do here: We detect the signal, send in a team and secure the stone from under the crypt. Case closed.”

  “And you think we can cover this up just as easily?” Scott said, pointing at fresh information coming in from the HMBB satellite over Spain.

  Owen froze.

  “Wait. No. That can’t be . . .”

  Edgar Scott was quick to contradict him. “It is, sir. It certainly is . . .”

  The computer had triangulated the position of the shooter who’d killed agent S23 and taken a snapshot of the killer’s profile. It ran the image of the person in gray-and-white biker leathers through the NSA’s database and came up with a match. A picture, a name and a designation flashed on the screen.

  Michael Owen fell back into his chair.

  Ellen Elizabeth Watson.

  Office of the President. White House. Washington, DC.

  74

  I was paralyzed with fear.

  Still, somehow I gathered up the courage to peek around the car and look out into the street, where someone had clipped off two shots. Two minutes had passed without a third. And that, I figured, was at least a good sign.

  And that’s when I saw her.

  The biker was a woman. She slowly paced up the sidewalk by the Noela Theater with her hands in the air. And she was alone.

  “I’ve dropped my gun! Don’t shoot!” she yelled in perfect English that reverberated throughout the surrounding buildings. “I work for the Office of the President of the United States. I only want to talk to Julia Álvarez.”

  Hearing her say my name made something leap inside me. Did she say she worked for the president of the United States?

  “Just keep your hands in the air and don’t make any sudden movements, you got that?” Dujok said, poking the barrel of his rifle over the car’s hood.

  The woman nodded.

  He asked whether I knew this woman and I shook my head. She was an attractive brunette and I would have remembered seeing her before.

  “I can help you!” she yelled. “I know where Martin Faber is. I have the coordinates. I just want to make sure that Ms. Álvarez is all right and that you still have the stone that the Operation Elijah agents are searching for.”

  “What do you want with the stones?” Dujok shouted back.

  Ellen let a smile slip; the man confirmed it—they did have the adamants.

  With her hands still in the air, Ellen said, “I’m an aide to the president. And I know he has not authorized this operation. We’re on the same side here.”

  This time, Dujok was the one to smile. I could see something had just popped into his head. He left his cover and walked toward the woman with the barrel of his assault rifle pointed down.

  “If I can fill in the gaps about the Elijah project for the president, will you guarantee our safety until our mission is complete?”

  “Mission? What mission?” Watson said.

  “To get to Turkey, free Martin Faber and secure the adamants. That’s it.”

  “Only if I can go with you.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  Ellen Watson stretched out her hand and shook his. It was her best chance to get close to the adamants.

  “And you are . . . ?”

  “Artemi Ivanovich Dujok, baba sheikh of the ancient Melek Taus faith. We are the Yezidi.”

  “I’ve heard of your people . . .”

  “Well, now you’ll get to know the truth about us. C’mon, we’d better get moving.”

  75

  Who has any right to call God?

  Roger Castle kept turning over the question in his mind as he dialed New Mexico. He’d asked his secretary for a secure line and fifteen uninterrupted minutes to take care of a personal issue.

  And what in the world could any human say that would be even mildly interesting to God?

  He turned his chair to look out at the gardens behind the White House as the line rang. Someone picked up on the third ring.

  “Andrew? Is that you?”

  Andrew Bollinger’s name had been in the president’s address book for more than two decades, listed under the heading of “astronomers.” In fact, they’d been friends since college and even played college basketball together. Ever since they’d met in class in 1982, Castle was sure that the proud southern kid was going to be a genius in math and physics. And he was. Bollinger was one of those guys who, with a little luck and enough funding, could help his country put a man on Mars. Anyone who might have known the two men back in the day would have bet on Bollinger to be the next great “it” kid. And that’s the way it was until Castle entered politics. Bollinger got his doctorate in astrophysics by twenty-three and was heading up the Very Large Array Telescope (VLA) in Socorro, New Mexico, by twenty-seven. He helped put the VLA on the map after the movie Contact with Jodie Foster (although the center didn’t actually spend its days listening out for radio signals from extraterrestrials). Now it wasn’t just the philanthropists and communications companies who were paying the bills; tourists from all over lined up for guided tours and T-shirts in their gift shop. People from all walks of life are drawn to the promise of the VLA: to hear the “sounds” from deep space, from quasars and supernovas, to listen to the intrinsic radio signals that suns emit, and even to hear the message still being sent out by Voyager 2 from the other side of Neptune.

  So Castle couldn’t imagine a better person to talk to now that so many celestial questions were piling up in his head.

  “Andrew . . . Andrew Bollinger?” the president asked again, excited. Making a regular phone call to a friend was something of a treat for the president.

  “Oh my God, Roger? Roger! What’s going on, man?”

  “Hey, I’m just glad you remember an old teammate.”

  “How could I not? I get to see you on the news every night. How long has it been? Four, five years?”

  “At least. But it’s been too long, Andy.”

  “So tell me, what can I, a mere servant, do for the president of the United States? Don’t tell me it’s a national emergency.”

  Andrew spent too much time behind a computer not to joke around when he finally was able to sneak in some human contact.

  “Actually, I need to ask you something that requires your expertise.”

  “At your service, Mr. President. I know it must be important to finally be getting a call from you.”

  “It is . . . Do you remember White Bear?”

  The line went silent for a moment.

  “White Bear? The Hopi chief?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Sure I remember him. Who could forget after that surreal trip we made out to his reservation or wherever the hell it was we ended up. I heard he died a while ago, didn’t he?”

  “Yes
, years ago. Actually, it’s that trip I want to ask you about. I need you to go down memory lane with me for a minute . . .”

  How could they forget? How could either of them forget that radiant spring afternoon south of Carlsbad, hunting for a stone that speaks?

  White Bear had asked Castle and Bollinger to meet him at the crossroads of Routes 62 and 285, near the Mexican border, to show them his tribe’s most sacred treasure. Then-governor Castle had agreed to the meeting on one condition: that his most trusted scientist be allowed to go as well, someone who could help him understand the phenomenon. If there’s one thing Castle had learned in his political career it was to listen to his experts. They were his life insurance policy—they kept him from making mistakes in front of the voters and became the perfect scapegoats if he did screw up.

  White Bear agreed, but with a condition of his own: Castle and his friend would have to travel to their final destination wearing a blindfold and must swear never to speak of that visit to anyone else.

  Both sides agreed.

  In March, as the state offices slowed down for Holy Week, Castle and Bollinger went out to meet the Hopi. On Monday the thirteenth, the governor scribbled a quick note on his agenda, leaving his assistant the directions to the meeting site and a joke to call the national guard if they didn’t hear back from him in twenty-four hours.

  Not that the note would have been of any help. They changed cars three times. During the trip, White Bear reminded them that they must never say a word to anyone else about what they would see, telling them, “This is a sacred place. The white man is not welcome here.” Not that he needed to worry. After so many twists and turns, they’d never in a million years be able to find their way back.