Death Mask

by Alex Archer

  “If only they’d been the last ones to take that approach,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

  “We never learn the lessons of the past, despite the threat of being doomed to repeat it,” he said. “But I suppose you know that as well as anyone.”

  They both fell silent for a moment as they considered the wider implications of what they’d been saying. It was a comfortable silence, interrupted only by the clatter of metal buckets and the spilling of water. The two women seemed to bicker rapidly, but the words quickly turned to laughter and they set about mopping up again.

  “We should leave them to it,” the curator said, turning his back on the women. “I have something interesting you might like to see.”

  Maffrici led the way out of the cloister toward the church that stood inside the monastery walls. He opened the door for her to follow. Annja noticed he was wearing white gloves, and assumed he was being careful not to leave greasy fingerprints on the relics here. It was a good precaution, with so many enzymes secreted by even carefully washed human skin. Years and years of handling would damage just about anything, and why risk making a further impact?

  Annja was only half listening as Maffrici talked her through the architecture of the building. Garin was still sitting in that chair somewhere, battered and bloody and needing her help...help that, right now, she was in no position to give. She needed help of her own to find the mask before the seconds ran out.

  That meant being direct, even if it felt rude. “Is there any more you can tell me about the mask?”

  “Not really. I’m afraid that there are no pictures of it, not even a drawing from the time, as far as I am aware.”

  “But you are sure it was buried with his body?”

  He nodded. “Assuming it actually existed, yes, but you know how it is—stories get passed down from generation to generation, records get lost. A lot of truth becomes legend, but much more legend becomes truth. What we believe has a tendency to change over the generations. There is almost always a kernel of truth at the core of any enduring story, but it is so much harder to identify it among the embellishments that come later.”

  Annja tried to read between the lines. “Are you suggesting Torquemada might have not been as bad as he’s currently portrayed?”

  “Quite the reverse, actually—that he was perhaps not as pious and devout as he is now remembered to be. For a man who was a scourge on nonbelievers and heretics, isn’t it peculiar that he carried what he believed to be the horn of a unicorn for protection?”

  “No more crazy than the zealots who think they’re carrying a piece of the True Cross,” she said.

  “Ah, perhaps not, but does a man wielding supernatural protections—the objects of witchcraft—strike you as someone who believes absolutely in the protection of his God?” The curator came to a halt. “His tomb was broken into in the 1830s, his bones removed and burned here, on this spot, mimicking an auto-da-fé, the kind of act of faith Torquemada would have ordered during his lifetime. It was something in the nature of poetic justice. The Inquisition had fallen out of favor and the people were no longer afraid of the Church in the way they had been for hundreds of years. So much of the monastery was destroyed thanks to those revolutionary hammers. Which is of course how we lost that wonderful Mudéjar ceiling.”

  “And that was when the mask was removed?” Or more likely destroyed, she thought.

  “There is no record of anything other than his remains having been removed from the tomb, but that was not the first time his rest had been disturbed.”

  “The tomb had been broken into before?”

  “Indeed, yes. Only a couple of years after his death, in fact. Records indicate that a ring was taken from the remains. It was recovered and returned to the corpse. The thief was given the same treatment as many of Torquemada’s own victims. Of course, that doesn’t mean something else wasn’t taken and never returned.”

  Annja was already running the permutations in her head. If the mask had remained in the tomb until the 1830s, then it had almost certainly been destroyed in the desecration or fallen into the possession of some rich private collector with a penchant for the macabre. The latter possibility would only make the treasure hunt more difficult. Theft a few years after the dead man’s burial was preferable, since it meant there was much more time for the mask to have become lost and ultimately forgotten. But its chances of survival increased markedly if it had been stolen in the nineteenth century. The question was, where was it most likely to have gone next?

  “There is a plaque,” the curator said. “Let me show you.”

  The man led her through to what remained of Torquemada’s tomb. It was little more than a symbolic plaque.

  “‘Here Lies the Reverend Tomás de Torquemada, One of the Holy Cross, the Inquisitor General. This House’s Founder. Died 1518, on 16 September,’” Annja translated from the Latin inscription.

  “Very impressive,” said the curator. “It’s rare to find a—” he checked himself before saying woman “—person these days with a fair grasp of Latin.”

  “I’m all about the dead languages.” She laughed, spotting another inscription on the wall. “They look great on the dating profiles.” That confused the poor guy for a moment, reminding her that they were communicating in what was obviously his second or even third language.

  She mouthed the next words without actually making a sound. May This Plague of Heretics Pass.

  “I don’t think he really wanted to be buried here. It was more of a political decision than anything else,” Maffrici said. “He was born in Valladolid and never really severed ties with the city. He established a tribunal for the Inquisition there and remained connected to the Convent of San Francisco until his dying day. The strange thing is...” He broke off suddenly, as if not sure he should be speculating so freely in front of her. Annja waited patiently while he considered whatever it was he was about to say—or not say.

  “What is it?” she asked eventually, breaking into his private world.

  “There’s a novel,” he said. “El hereje. The Heretic by Miguel Delibes, one of our most celebrated novelists. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? The inscription there reminds me of it. The book is set in Valladolid and describes something called the path of the heretic, or the pass. But that is not what I just realized...what...stopped me. I haven’t really thought about this before, but it has been staring me in the face for such a very long time.” He rubbed his white-gloved hands together as though in appreciation or greed. “The ceiling, the one that’s missing from the dome...that depicted Valladolid, too.”

  “So what you’re saying is, in terms of Torquemada at least, all roads lead to Valladolid,” she said, grinning. It was too much for this all to be coincidence. Of course, there was no guarantee that the mask had been taken there, but there was a strong connection between this place, the Grand Inquisitor and the city of Valladolid. She checked her watch. She could make the ride in an hour, ignoring speed limits, but first she had to meet Roux’s hacker.

  4

  22:30—Ávila

  Annja had to ask for directions to Giorgio’s. It wasn’t on the main drag, but rather tucked away on a quaint side street that, as she walked down it, gave her the distinct impression of time travel. Each step seemed to take her back a decade until she was somewhere around the fifteenth or sixteenth century, surrounded by amazing buildings that had withstood the Inquisition and the civil war and the ravages of change. Giorgio’s was one of those hip spots where the beautiful people went and made sure that everyone else knew just how hip it was.

  Annja checked her reflection in the Roadster’s side mirror, the bike helmet in her hand, long hair spilling over bike leathers. She grinned. She certainly didn’t resemble some young, upwardly mobile stockbroker, or a woman in search of one.

  She opened the door, and even before she’d
taken her first step inside, she received a mixture of looks from the clientele that could have frozen a penguin on an ice floe. The women scowled in disapproval, sneering at the skintight leathers, while the men leaned forward, interested, engaged. She ignored both. She was used to being stared at. It was part of being a celebrity. Even if she wasn’t a big star, there was always someone on the street who would do a double take, obviously thinking, Aren’t you the woman from the TV show?

  She scanned the room. There were at least a dozen guys sitting alone in different parts of the café. A few had shot a glance—or more than a glance—in her direction, but none of them had raised a hand in recognition. She didn’t hold any of their gazes, and it didn’t take long for most of them to look away, drawn back to their computer screens and cell phones. As she walked toward the counter at the far side of the café, she noticed that one man was still watching her. There was a paperback copy of Howard Fast’s Torquemada next to his untouched cappuccino. That was enough to convince Annja he was her guy.

  She walked to his table and sat down.

  “Annja,” the young man said. He didn’t rise to shake her hand. And unlike the rest of the men in the vicinity, he didn’t appear to be mentally stripping her leathers. “You made good time. I’m Oscar.”

  She sat down across from him. He was barely old enough to be out of university, but when it came to tech wizardry it was a case of “the younger, the better” these days. His tousled, sun-bleached hair was stylishly unkempt. He fit in here far more than she did. His olive skin was offset against a white cotton shirt. Not that she was one to judge a book by its cover, but this kid was the polar opposite of every computer nerd she’d ever met. She didn’t know what to make of that, but Roux trusted him with Garin’s life. She knew that much.

  “So, the old man said you needed to trace the source of a video stream, right? Shouldn’t be too difficult.” He held his hand out across the table. For a weird second she thought he was asking her to dance, but then she realized he wanted her phone. She handed it over. “You go order a drink,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She watched as he connected the phone to his laptop via USB cable. As soon as the jack went in, Oscar was lost in concentration. Stylish or not, he was definitely a tech nerd.

  Annja ordered herself a latte from the barista. Drink in hand, she rejoined him at the table, but didn’t say a word. The meeting wasn’t about social niceties; it was about helping Garin, plain and simple. And in any case, the kid was absolutely oblivious to the rest of the world, his entire focus zoned down to the screen in front of him. The coffee was hot but good and went down creamy.

  “Okay,” Oscar said after a few seconds, though he wasn’t talking to her. “Good. Yes. Okay...no. Not good.” He looked up at her across the top of the laptop. “Whoever wrote this code knows their stuff. And they’re determined to stay hidden. The signal is being bounced through half a dozen countries, via anonymous routers, and each connection in the chain is changing its IP addresses every minute or so. It’s not impossible to trace, but it’s not easy. For a start, it’s going to take time to crack the algorithm they’re using to cycle through IP addresses, so we can predict where they’re going to switch to next and keep the line open long enough to trace it all the way back to source.”

  Annja had a decent idea what he was talking about, but there was a huge difference between a decent idea and the kind of understanding the hacker obviously had.

  “But you can trace it?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Good. That’s all I needed to hear.”

  His fingers moved quickly across the keyboard, picking out commands in rapid-fire succession, then pausing a beat as he waited for responses to come back to him.

  Oscar swore under his breath, suddenly working faster.

  “There’s a worm embedded in the file,” he said. “It’s trying to take over my system. It’s got the processor going crazy, and the core temp is rising. I think it’s trying to blow my battery. Ingenious bastard. Well, at least this is going to be fun now.”

  He turned the machine slightly so Annja could see what was happening—not that she knew what she was looking at beyond a guy hammering out what seemed to be random letters on a keyboard.

  “I’m just making sure I’ve got a backup of everything here. Assume the worst,” he said, but even as he spoke, streams of numbers and letters filled the screen, superimposed with picture after picture. The deepening furrow in the hacker’s brow worried her. So much for “shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  He swore again and killed the Net connection, disabling the Wi-Fi. That didn’t slow the virus now that it was in his hard drive, and it continued chewing up data and spitting it out again, faster and faster until trying to focus on it hurt Annja’s eyes. The fan whined as the first faint whiff of smoke curled up from beneath the laptop.

  Oscar acted quickly, closing the lid and flipping the machine over.

  It took two hands to release the catch and pop the battery, but the second he did it heads turned, drawn by the stench of burning.

  He dropped the battery, staring at the smoldering plastic housing as if his entire understanding of the world had just been betrayed.

  “What the hell just happened?” Annja asked.

  “Some serious piece of code. Some seriously serious piece of code. The virus overloaded the system resources, then created a surge back into the battery. That’s not an easy thing.”

  “So we’re up against someone who knows what they’re doing—IP masking, making computers burn up...”

  “Yep, we’re not talking spotty teenagers in their bedroom, that’s for sure.”

  “Is there anything you can do?”

  He looked at the sorry state of the battery. “This thing’s fried, but there’s always something that can be done if you’re resourceful enough,” he said, fishing inside his laptop bag for a small device that he connected to her phone. “I’m going to make an image of your phone—basically clone it—and see if I can trick the code into thinking it’s your phone that’s trying to access the file, not my laptop. It could take me a while, but sooner or later I’ll crack it.”

  “Unfortunately, time’s the one thing I don’t have.”

  “This is personal now. Trust me. I’ll get you what you need. There’s something I can tell you right now, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You were watching a recording. It wasn’t a video chat.”

  5

  21:05—Valladolid

  Plaza Mayor was already a hive of early-morning activity, bustling with tourists and locals when Annja reached Valladolid.

  Even with the steady hubbub, the huge plaza still felt like a wide-open space in the claustrophobic Old Town. The city wasn’t what she’d been hoping to find, even if she wasn’t entirely sure what that had been. The buildings might not have been as thoroughly modern as many of the cities she’d visited around the world—all glass, concrete and steel—but everything here was still far too new to be hiding any ancient secrets. Almost all of the buildings appeared to have been built in the past hundred and fifty years. There was absolutely nothing amid all of the banks, gift shops, cafés and restaurants that could have been standing even two hundred years after Torquemada’s death, never mind the early days of the Inquisition.

  Annja slammed down the kickstand and parked the bike up. She walked around the outskirts of the plaza, taking a closer look at each building, but no matter how desperately she willed it, she found nothing of interest. Feeling her mood darkening, she realized she hadn’t eaten all day. She didn’t want to stop the search, not when time was so short, but she wasn’t going to be any use to Garin if she starved herself, so she went inside the nearest café and ordered a coffee and a Caesar salad. It would be enough to keep her going.

  There were a dozen metal tables
and chairs outside the café, so she picked one and, like a tourist, stretched out her legs to ease the cramped muscles and soak up the sun while she waited for her meal. On any other day, she could have happily wasted a couple of hours just drinking in the ambience, but today wasn’t a day like any other. Today she had a job to do. She pulled out her phone and called Roux. She knew he’d be in the air. All she wanted to do was leave a voice mail he could check as he landed. Her message was to the point. “I’m in Valladolid. Following leads I picked up at Ávila. Everything points to this place being central to Torquemada’s tale. I’m not sure what I’m looking for. I’m just hoping I’ll recognize it when I see it.” She killed the call.

  A flyer on the table caught her eye. She picked it up. The flyer showed the same image as the billboard outside a theater on the opposite side of the square—a woman dressed in nothing but black underwear, smoking a cigarette from a long holder, obviously advertising some kind of burlesque show. It seemed out of place among the restrained buildings. It took Annja a moment to realize that the woman was actually a man. That brought a smile to her lips; clearly things weren’t always what they seemed to be. There was a good lesson there. First impressions could be deceptive. She flipped the leaflet over and read the small blurb that explained the show was taking place at the Teatro Zorrilla.

  “It’s very good, even if you can’t speak Spanish.” Annja looked up to see a waitress clearing plates from one of the neighboring tables. She was surprised that the waitress spoke to her in English until she realized she must have overheard at least part of the message she left for Roux.

  “I’m afraid I’m not going to be around long enough to take in a show.”