Death Mask

by Alex Archer

  It took her a moment to realize she was speaking to Garin’s kidnapper, the voice from the video feed. The fact that he knew where she was located was unnerving, to say the least. Were they watching her? Using satellites to track her like Garin had in the past? GPS on her phone? She glanced back inside the cool confines of the church. The woman had returned to her devotions and had absolutely no interest in Annja. There was a priest in the chancel now, lighting candles. Assuming it hadn’t been the priest himself, there was no sign of the person she’d heard in the catacombs.

  “It’s rather a plain church, don’t you think?”

  She glanced around, looking for someone who stood out, someone who was obviously watching her, who had a phone to his ear. The street was quiet. She couldn’t see anyone. But they knew where she was.

  “Is this a social call?” she asked, still looking up and down the street.

  “No. Definitely not. I like to think of it as incentivizing.” He laughed. It wasn’t a maniacal sound, not the mwahahaha of a cartoon villain. It was filled with genuine mirth. In the background, she heard a cry of pain. Garin. Why were they doing this to him? Why torture him? If he knew where the mask was, he would have told them. He wasn’t a hero. There was only one thing Garin Braden valued above and beyond the possession of beautiful things, and that was self-preservation. He would have given them what they wanted if he thought it would buy his freedom. Once he knew he was safe, then he’d figure out how to get it back. That was the kind of man he was.

  “There’s someone here who wants to talk to you,” the voice said.

  There was a pause. A second. Two. It felt like forever.

  A weak and mumbling voice spoke. “Don’t do it...don’t give them what they want. Even if you find it...” It was Garin. The phone was snatched away before he could finish speaking. The next thing she heard was a grunt and the sound of flesh slapping flesh.

  “Garin!” Annja called, unable to stop herself.

  “You’ve wasted four hours, Miss Creed. Ticktock. Ticktock. Don’t waste any more.” The kidnapper killed the connection.

  Annja looked around again, phone still pressed to her ear.

  She tried to think. Yes, they knew where she was, but she couldn’t see anyone watching her. There was no obvious tail. Her first thought when the phone rang had been that they were close, maybe even behind the light in the catacombs, but there was no proof, only paranoia. Her phone hadn’t worked down there, which meant the kidnapper’s couldn’t, either. It was much more likely they were using the same kind of technology that Garin would have. They had her phone number. Maybe they had a way of monitoring her SIM? She thought about pulling the battery out of the phone, but she needed to stay in contract with the old man.

  She called Roux.

  He answered on the third ring. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “I went on a little trip. Underground.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Maybe. The old Convent of San Francisco is gone, but the builders got lazy. They just leveled the land out and built over the old foundations. I found a way down into the catacombs. In among all of the tombs of the sisters and the good Christian servants of the Inquisition, I found a single sarcophagus that was out of place. It was marked Morisco.”

  “Interesting. A Moorish grave hidden in the heart of a Christian shrine.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m assuming you opened it?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “No bones. No body.”

  “It was empty?”

  “I didn’t say that. There was a key inside.”

  “A key? That seems like a lot of trouble to hide a key, don’t you think?”

  “I do. Which makes it important. I don’t know what it opens or why it was hidden, or even who did the hiding, but I’ll work it out. That’s what I do. How about you?”

  “If you check your texts you’ll find a picture of a preliminary sketch by Goya. Like your key, it has been hidden away, this time in the archives of a gallery here. It’s a drawing of a mask. I’m sure it’s the one we’re looking for. I’m also sure it was drawn from life.”

  “Which would be proof that the mask exists.”

  “Or at least existed,” he agreed.

  “Well, it’s a start.”

  “Indeed it is. The other thing that makes me think I’m on to something here is the fact that I’m being followed.”

  Annja felt the fine hairs on the nape of her neck prickle.

  It was one thing for the kidnappers to know where she was and what she was doing, but they were keeping tabs on Roux, too? That meant they knew about them, how they worked. Knowing their enemy, knowing how they’d act and react, gave them a distinct advantage over Annja and the old man.

  “Funny you should say that,” she said.

  “Are you being followed?”

  “As good as. I just had a call from the kidnappers. They knew where I was. Pretty much described the church I’d just walked out of.” She looked back at the woman who was still kneeling in prayer, but it was the reredos that caught her attention, an ornate altarpiece depicting Saint James killing Moors. The image was enough to trigger a thought inside her head. The sarcophagus, and by extension the key, was a Moorish relic hidden away beneath a Christian church. What if that was the clue itself?

  She was going to have to think about that. And she wasn’t going to risk saying it over an unsecure phone line, not if the kidnappers were as tech-savvy as she feared.

  “Don’t tell me where you’re going,” she said. “Don’t tell me what you’re planning to do next.”

  “You think we’ve got unwanted ears listening in?”

  “It’s not worth the risk.”

  She pictured him nodding. “Look after yourself, kiddo.”

  “I always do,” she said, hanging up.

  She already had an idea fermenting inside her brain.

  The curator back in Ávila had said that Torquemada had founded a church here in Valladolid. That had to be her next port of call.

  Annja crossed the city to find the church. Without a map it wasn’t easy, as Valladolid was a city seemingly constructed on the foundations of faith, with spires every few streets denoting yet another place of worship. It was like looking for a particularly sanctified needle in an already consecrated haystack. But after fifteen minutes of driving around and several stuttering conversations with helpful locals, she found herself standing outside the incredible building, wondering how she could possibly have taken so long to find it. The great Gothic frontage was imposing. It wasn’t difficult to imagine how the people of Valladolid would have reacted to its construction at the time: with awe. The church was built to the glory of God.

  She was glad she hadn’t come straight here, even though it was a more logical starting point for her search. She wouldn’t have discovered the key if she had, and there was no way of telling how important that key might turn out to be before the day had run its course.

  Annja retrieved the flashlight from her panniers. She wasn’t going to pass up the chance to take a look at what lay beneath this church if the opportunity arose.

  There were more than a dozen people milling around inside, most of whom appeared to be tourists rather than worshippers. Beside a box inviting donations, several piles of leaflets provided information for visitors in a variety of languages. Annja skimmed the English one. It was crammed with tiny print and facts about the church and other religious buildings in the area. As she pocketed it, her attention was captured by an information board that gave a brief history of the church.

  The first line sent a shiver up her spine.

  She was wasting her time.

  The San Pablo church had indeed been commissioned by Torquemada, but not Tomás. She could have
screamed in frustration. This church was founded by Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor’s uncle.

  She was already looking in the wrong place.

  She felt like banging her head against a brick wall.

  But she didn’t stop reading. Hoping. She didn’t want to give up. She closed her fist around the key. The information board went on to explain how the facade, the final element of the church, hadn’t been completed until the year 1500, even though the cardinal had died in 1468.

  It seemed like an easy mistake for someone unfamiliar with the two men to make, but the curator must have known better, surely? He wouldn’t have simply assumed the familial name meant the same man was behind the construction. Annja stared at the information, absorbing it, thinking, and made a connection; the building was completed two years after the Inquisitor’s death.

  The same year that his tomb had been broken into for the first time.

  Perhaps there was a connection, after all.

  Just not the obvious one.

  When she read that the church had been built on the ruins of a Moorish palace, abandoned and destroyed after the town had been taken from the Moors, it was hard not to see parallels with the Moorish sarcophagus hidden beneath what had once been a Christian convent. A church on top of a Moorish palace. A convent on top of a Moorish sarcophagus. One thing on top of another, or one thing hiding beneath another, depending on how you looked at it.

  Other than that, the display offered little more than a floor plan of the church.

  There was nothing to indicate where the entrance to any crypt might lie.

  Now Annja was convinced that if there was anything to be found here, it would lie beneath this Christian building, down in the ruins of the old Moorish palace, assuming the builders had built upon the foundations of that place as they had with the theater on the other side of the city.

  It didn’t take long to find an area that had been sectioned off by red velvet rope. It wasn’t exactly high security. A priest was busy placing fresh candles in sconces close by. She would have to wait for him to finish what he was doing before she could slip under the rope and disappear down into the crypts. In the meantime, she decided to take a proper look around, just in case there was something she’d missed.

  The transept displayed two paintings by Bartolomé de Cárdenas. According to a small plaque on the wall, he had died in Valladolid in 1628. No direct link with either of the Torquemadas, but what was interesting was the fact that one of the paintings depicted the Conversion of Saint Paul. Cardinal Torquemada was a defender of the conversos in Valladolid—Jews who had adopted the Christian faith rather than be forced to leave Spain. Paul of Tarsus was a Jew who converted. More connections, more hints and clues. Her gut instinct was that she was looking in all the right places, but it was hard to know what was actually relevant and what was a case of her making connections where none existed.

  The church included several side chapels, according to the floor plan. One was the funerary chapel of Alonso de Burgos, who had died in 1499. The date was so close to the death of the inquisitor that it had to be worth investigating while she waited for the priest to finish with his candles. It offered no immediate revelations from the outside. She stepped through the arch into the chapel proper. Although there were no doors between it and the body of the church, it was markedly quieter. The archway was obviously acting as some kind of baffle, which meant sound would almost certainly not travel out of here, either. That could prove useful if she had to hide.

  There didn’t seem to be anything of great interest inside the chapel, so Annja took a moment to check out the picture Roux had sent.

  The sketch certainly looked as if it could be the mask they were looking for. The additional detail of the ribbon suggested that the artist might actually have seen the artifact. Of course, it was possible he had just used his imagination in deciding how the mask might be fastened around the Grand Inquisitor’s head. There was no way of knowing if Goya had in fact seen the mask, or even confronted a figure wearing it, during his studies. But if he had, that meant she was looking at as near-perfect a rendition of it as she could possibly have hoped. That made it feel more real to her.

  She pocketed the phone again.

  The moment of peace gave her the opportunity to examine the key properly, as well. She held it in one hand and rubbed the ancient metal between the thumb and forefinger of the other. A few flakes of rust fell away, but no more than that. It was in incredible condition, almost perfectly preserved. It was hard to imagine it could be as much as five hundred years old. She could feel the weight of history in it as the key stretched across her palm, extending beyond the width of her hand. It was sturdy, not delicate, but it was also beautifully crafted. Judging from its size and weight, the key was designed to fit a heavy-duty lock. What did that lock protect? Something valuable, surely? Something the world wasn’t intended to discover by chance. The key represented a secret. There would have been a few who protected that secret through the years, but they must all be dead now. What was that secret? The Mask of Torquemada? She wasn’t sure that artifact, no matter how compelling a treasure for someone like her, was actually valuable enough to warrant such extreme measures—a Moorish grave in a Christian crypt, a Moorish palace beneath a Christian church? That had to be about more than just a mask. But if that was true, then she was just wasting time chasing it, wasn’t she? This was all about the mask. It had to be.

  Annja was about to leave the chapel when she noticed an inconsistency in the design on the wall. She would have dismissed it, but she realized that the repeated pattern in the mosaic matched that of the bow of the key—latticework entwined around a crucifix. And then it struck her: it was a combination of Moorish and Christian design. She was in the right place. It wasn’t a design she’d encountered elsewhere.

  It tied the key and the chapel together.

  She ran her fingers over the distortion.

  The crucifix in one repetition of the pattern was missing, replaced by something that looked, on closer inspection, like an arched doorway. There was a chance it was a flaw in the design, maybe a problem in the manufacture or a mistake made by whoever had assembled the mosaic, but that changed nothing. The pattern on the key was the pattern in the floor.

  She ran her eyes around the room, searching for a repetition of the error somewhere in case it had been deliberately mirrored. There was nothing.

  Annja squatted down, putting the distorted design at eye level.

  She placed the tip of a fingernail against the arch. The surface was softer than she’d expected. She had mistakenly assumed that the image had been part of the tile, but as she teased away at the arch, she discovered that it was the accumulated dirt and grime of centuries that had built up in a hollow, perhaps even a hole inside the tile.

  That got her heart pumping.

  Annja brushed at the dirt, scraping it away until it became an obvious indentation in the ceramic. She felt in her pocket, searching for something thin and sharp that she could use to dig it out. She found her bike’s ignition keys; they’d do the trick. After a minute of careful work, scraping away at the grime around the hole, it was obvious that it was actually large enough to allow the old key she’d found in the Moorish coffin to slide inside.

  She took a deep breath and turned the key slowly, gently, trying not to force the mechanism, which had rusted with age.

  The key turned.

  She heard a click from behind the wall.

  A panel of the wall had been released. It had widened a crack. Annja worked it open carefully. Finally, the crack was large enough for her to walk through, though she had to stoop.

  She turned on her flashlight, shining the beam into the darkness beyond.

  8

  19:50—Seville

  Mateo didn’t break pattern. He turned through a series of lefts, circlin
g around his original position, just to be sure that the car behind them really was on their tail.

  The old man noticed a tattoo on the back of Mateo’s hand.

  He hadn’t noticed it before, but now that he had, he couldn’t help but be intrigued by it.

  His instinct was to ask what it meant, but given the fact they were being followed, and escaping their pursuers was very much dependent upon Mateo’s concentration and driving skills, distracting him with questions didn’t feel particularly smart. It wasn’t as if a remark about his tattoo couldn’t wait a few moments, after all.

  Instead, he watched the driver through the rearview mirror, well aware that his eyes kept darting up to meet the old man’s gaze.

  Roux didn’t like being followed.

  He decided to force a confrontation, rather than risk his pursuer tagging along to whatever discovery was next. Of course, the easiest option was just to give them the slip, but easier wasn’t anywhere near as effective. Or permanent. “We’re going to make an unscheduled stop, Mateo.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Indeed I am. Things could get a little interesting if I’m right about our tail.”

  “I like interesting.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Turn in here,” Roux said, directing Mateo into a dead end. The driver did as he was told, no questions asked.

  Roux looked behind them again. The other car had followed them. So much for the benefit of the doubt, Roux thought bitterly. Roux checked for the reassuring shape of the gun inside his jacket. It was always a last resort, but when options were quickly whittled down by circumstance, it was always better to have the choice than not.

  “This will be fine,” he said. “Stay in the car. You don’t have to get involved in this.” Mateo nodded and pulled over. On cue, the other car stopped, riding their tailgate.

  Roux climbed out of the car.

  He started to walk toward the other vehicle as four men emerged, their eyes firmly fixed on him. They were keyed up, on edge, ready for action. Not a good sign. He stood his ground, not moving beyond the length of his own car.