The Lady in Blue

by Javier Sierra

  “And you? Why did you go to Italy?”

  “They sent me to Rome to work with the leader of a weird group that called him the ‘First Evangelist.’ ”

  “The ‘First Evangelist’?”

  “It was of course a code name. Once I had settled into work, in a room identical to the one we had at Fort Meade, they used me like a guinea pig. The evangelist was attempting to project me to another era in time with the new sounds that they had synthesized.”

  “To the past?”

  “Yes, but nothing came of it. I submitted to fifty-minute sessions in which they exposed me to nerve-racking sounds. If nothing positive happened in the lab, at night it would be even worse: I would have nightmares full of geometric figures dancing in my head until I grew dizzy. Colors and voices overwhelmed me and I was having a hard time sleeping. I was losing weight from the trauma. I was like a television station with a defective antenna: I couldn’t pick up a good signal.”

  “And they didn’t tell you why they wanted to send you to the past?”

  “They did. I didn’t understand it at the time, but now it makes sense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They wanted to decipher the contents of a lost document containing instructions for the physical projection of persons through sound.”

  “Physical projections? In flesh and blood?”

  Jennifer’s eyes confirmed the importance of that detail.

  “It seems a woman pulled it off in the seventeenth century.”

  “The Lady in Blue.”

  “Exactly. But neither the Vatican nor our government could figure out how. And that document evidently contained the keys to doing it. It was written by a Franciscan, for the king of Spain.”

  “And the document,” Carlos said in a whisper, “is right here.”

  “Yes. It’s incredible, isn’t it?”

  “Did you dream of it?”

  “Yes, I dreamed of the man writing it. I suppose that in Los Angeles, far from the laboratories, my brain tried to ‘adjust the signal’ on its own and finally managed to do it once I was outside the fixed deadlines of the experts in Rome.”

  “And why have they sent you a document you cannot even read?”

  “You’d know that better than I. Or the woman in the red shoes you met on the airplane. She sent you here to recover it, didn’t she?”

  SIXTY-SIX

  SEGOVIA, SPAIN

  The Sanctuary of Vera Cruz, its silhouette plunged in darkness, stood out against the distant mosaic of Segovia’s streetlights. Even the Alcázar, the impregnable fortress that looms over the city, could not detract from the mystery of that rare dodecagonal building. The sanctuary is distinct from all the buildings surrounding it, and different from almost every other European church: no other edifice in the Old World was constructed with a perimeter of twelve walls arranged in exactly the same fashion as that of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

  In the utter darkness surrounding the building, only a thin thread of light slipping out from its western door hinted at the presence of anyone inside.

  “Let’s get a move on, Watchman. We’re running late.”

  A pair of bulky shadows carried the inert body of the evangelist into the church. Feeling their way, they walked past the nearly invisible medieval frescos with their portraits of Knights Templar and Crusaders, and sought out the steep stairway that led to the church’s holiest enclosure. It was an edicule, a small room concealed inside the enormous column that was the building’s main support. The Sanctuary of Vera Cruz hardly resembles a church: it is, in fact, a martyrium, a chapel designed to evoke the death and resurrection of Christ. And the inner room is the sanctum sanctorum of Vera Cruz.

  The two gorillas lay Giuseppe Baldi down on the flagstones, careful to avoid hitting his head against the altar that dominated the room. An eccentric couple stood by, waiting for him: a man in a white tunic and a woman dressed in black, wearing red shoes.

  “You’re late,” the man said.

  His reproach bounced off the bare walls and mocked the darkness. The shadow smoking a cigarette offered an excuse.

  “The bird took longer than we had counted on.”

  “Well, you got him. That’s all that matters. Now leave us alone.”

  The van driver bowed as he withdrew. Seconds later, the sound of metal scraping against metal in the back of the church announced the bolting of Vera Cruz’s main door. The man wearing the white hood leaned over the prone Baldi and attempted to awaken him.

  The Third Evangelist came around slowly.

  The first thing he felt was a current running from his head downward. Then his heart sped up and, with the surge of blood to his head, his temples began to pound. Finally, the priest was able to open his eyes. Everything looked fuzzy and indistinct. Everything, that is, except the red shoes he had seen once before, somewhere else.

  A second later, Baldi was sitting up.

  “Where am I?” he asked shakily.

  “In Segovia.”

  The hooded man’s voice was firm, in contrast to his own. Even so, Baldi could detect a certain familiarity of tone.

  “Who are you? What do you want from me?” he demanded.

  “To hold on to you for a while, Father. Nothing more. Time enough for the plan to be executed without interference.”

  “What plan?”

  “You have already found out too much in too short a time. And should you achieve your goal too soon, you would spoil our mission.”

  “Your mission? Who the hell are you?”

  “Don’t get worked up, Father. You know me. And I’m not going to do you any harm.”

  The man wearing the white tunic pushed back the hood covering his face, revealing the unmistakable face of Albert Ferrell.

  “Dottore Alberto!” Baldi almost fell over he was so surprised.

  “I believe you also had occasion to cross paths in Rome with my companion, isn’t that so?” Ferrell said, laughing. He gazed at the beautiful woman who stood next to him.

  “In Saint Peter’s! That’s right!” Giuseppe Baldi blurted out. “You are the woman in the photo, the one who told me to pay attention to the signs. The woman wearing the red shoes!”

  Staring at her with a look on his face that suggested he was having a hard time believing what he was seeing, he added, “I know what sort of being you are.”

  “So much the better,” she said in a soft Neapolitan accent. “Then you’ll understand what we have done.”

  “And what is that?” Saint Luke asked. He had calmed down a little and was staring at Ferrell now. “From what I understand, you were sent to Rome by the American government in order to develop the technical aspect of Chronovision. In which capacity you . . .”

  “You’re confusing two different things, Father. She and I, and the men who brought you here, work together. There are many of us. Hundreds. But we have no bosses in either the Pentagon or the Vatican.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will shortly,” he promised. “We work very closely with a very ancient group that calls itself the Ordo Sanctae Imaginis. The Order of the Sacred Image. We are the legitimate custodians of churches such as this all over Europe, which have guarded important relics of Christ. You are now in our domain. But let me explain that over the course of centuries we have also kept a secret with terrible implications for Christianity. A secret that, had it been revealed in the past, at the wrong moment, would have destroyed the entire Church. Nevertheless, it is now time for it to emerge.”

  The woman took the initiative.

  “You, Father, with your work on Chronovision, were very close to discovering it, which is why we brought you here. So that we could be certain you will not reveal it without our controlling when and how you do so.”

  “The Order of the Sacred Image?” Baldi’s brain, and his pulse, were accelerating by the minute. “You were the ones who placed the explosives in the column supporting Veronica’s statue!”

>   “Come on! Do you think there is any reason for someone of our nature to go around planting bombs?”

  “Of your nature?” Baldi still felt traces of the sedative, but he was beginning to understand. His eyes were still blurry as he directed his attention to Ferrell, and asked, “Are you trying to tell me that you two are angels?”

  Even he thought the question was odd. Despite his strict theological training and all his preparations to face transcendental reality directly, Baldi resisted the idea that someone as mundane as Albert Ferrell could have so sublime an origin. That was not what he had learned from Father Tejada in Bilbao.

  “My name is María Coronel, Father. Thirty years ago I became an angel.”

  The second part of her statement slipped right past the Benedictine. He preferred to go on the attack.

  “And you placed the bombs in Saint Peter’s.”

  “No, Father,” she replied, without losing her cool. “The bombs were the work of our enemies, persons inside the Church who desired to strike a blow at our most sacred symbol, with the sole intention of leading us into a trap, and capturing us.”

  “They wanted to capture you?”

  “There’s something I should tell you, Father: Veronica herself holds the key to this matter. Are you familiar with this medal?”

  From one of the pockets in her dress María removed a necklace, whose pendant bore the face of Jesus engraved on a cloth. Veronica’s veil. A representation of a relic whose name, The Veronica, is in itself a cryptogram, for Veronica was not originally a woman’s name, but derives from the Latin vera icon, or true image. Baldi gave it his full attention.

  “You have studied history,” María Coronel continued. “You know that the pillar of Saint Veronica was built by orders of the Pope in order to shelter the relic of the Holy Face. The other three pillars supporting the dome of Saint Peter’s contain Saint Andrew’s skull, a piece of the Holy Cross, and the lance that pierced Our Savior’s side. All of them false relics. And yet the Holy Face is indeed the portrait of Christ, mysteriously imprinted on a piece of cloth.”

  “Everyone knows that story.”

  “The Templars who built this church,” Ferrell interjected, “were in on the secret and protected it as well.”

  “What secret?”

  “That is what I wanted to explain to you, Father.” María’s beauty was radiant, and perhaps that was why Baldi felt short of breath. “Clement the Seventh, in the sixteenth century, was the first to realize that the Veronica was imprinted in the same miraculous manner as the cloak worn by the Indian Juan Diego in Mexico in 1531. At that time no one knew anything about light waves, and they decided to call the two relics (acheiropoiétos), a Greek term that refers to images not made by human hand.”

  “You mean that you are protecting the secret of how these images are formed?”

  “Let me finish,” María said calmly. “The Holy Shroud of Turin, the ‘Holy Face,’ and the Cloak of Guadalupe all have the same source. They were created by the radiation waves emitted by a very particular class of ‘infiltrators,’ beings who are half human and half divine. Jesus was one of them. Those of us who belong to this lineage continue to journey over the face of the earth. The energy invested in those objects, which we ourselves emit, is the same energy that altered the photograph you recovered this morning in the Swiss Guard’s office.”

  “How do you know that . . .”

  “The walls have ears, Father.”

  “And what does this have to do with me?”

  “Quite a lot.”

  “So who planned the attack against the pedestal of Saint Veronica?” the Third Evangelist asked nervously. “And why?”

  “Our enemies wanted to force us to make an appearance, the better to take us out of circulation. But they failed.”

  “And who are they?”

  “The same ones you work for, the very ones who are trying to take Chronovision out of your hands. Have you already forgotten why you were called to Rome?” María directed a cold stare in the priest’s direction. “Our enemies are yours as well, Father Baldi. The same who for centuries have pursued people like Ferrell and myself, while they attempt to exploit our energy.”

  The Benedictine did not respond.

  María Coronel then began to unfold an amazing tale for Giuseppe Baldi. It was the tale of her family and her origins. A fable that retold the very book of Genesis where it was explained how God’s angels slept with the daughters of men, who then gave birth to creatures with dual natures, children half-human and half-divine. Humanity, as she explained it to him, was born from this mixture, and since then, little by little, certain families engendered creatures with extraordinary powers, closer to angels than to their biological mothers. Many of them discovered only later that the energy they radiated was capable of changing life around them; that they emitted a certain type of energy powerful enough to kill, an invisible force that was at the same time capable of transforming them into pure energy and which led them to undergo experiences as prodigious as bilocation, the gift of predicting the future, or even the ability to enter the psyche of normal humans and alter it.

  “My family, Father,” María clarified, “belongs to one of those. Sister María Jesús de Ágreda was in fact named María Coronel, the same name as mine. That was what society called her before she changed her name upon taking religious vows. She died consumed by her own energy. And there were others like her: in the fourteenth century, yet another woman named María Coronel suffered the same raptures. Her body has remained uncorrupted in the Royal Convent of San Inés in Seville, after she was hounded to death by the Castilian king Peter the Cruel.”

  “You said that persons like yourself are pursued . . .”

  “Yes. The Church of Rome very quickly discovered our caste’s potential, and they decided to exploit it to their own advantage.”

  “How?”

  “Take, for example, the case of Sister María Luisa de la Ascensión, better known as the ‘Nun of Carrión,’ who experienced bilocations to many different parts of the world. She, too, was the daughter of angels. She went to Assisi to visit the tomb of Saint Francis; to Madrid to be present at the death of Philip the Third; in Japan she comforted the Franciscan martyr Friar Juan de Santamaría in battles against the pagans; she visited the Spanish ships returning from America, when they feared assault from the British pirates; and she was even seen spreading the Gospel in the midst of more than one tribe in the western lands of New Mexico. All of that without ever leaving the province of Palencia.”

  “And how could anyone exploit a gift such as this, María?”

  “By chance, during a number of her ‘leaps,’ Sister María Luisa was mistaken for an apparition of Our Lady. When the Holy Office discovered the effect she had on the pagan population, they instructed her so that she might pass for the Virgin. Her work was of great assistance in establishing the Catholic religion in many parts of the new territories.”

  “Impossible!” Baldi objected, each time with less conviction.

  “No, Father. It is possible. And this is where you come into the game.”

  It was Albert Ferrell’s turn to speak.

  “There were persons like ourselves who, over time, learned to master the ability to be in two places at once. They discovered that bilocation was associated with certain classes of musical vibration, and they decided to prevent the Church from being able to control the secret. So we devised a plan: by letting this secret knowledge circulate freely, we would prevent Rome from using us for its ends. We would put an end to its persecution and its centuries-old fraud.”

  “And did you get that far?”

  Ferrell chose not to respond.

  “Our first move was to place this technique in Robert Monroe’s hands. He is the sound engineer I spoke to you about in Rome. He possessed a certain natural propensity for astral voyages and for ‘channeling,’ so we decided to help him. We thought that if Monroe developed the technique of astral voyages, which is one of our
‘angelic’ skills, perhaps he would come to the conclusion that humanity had been tricked over the course of centuries by false apparitions, and he would release us from this servitude.”

  “Why did you choose him and not someone else?”

  “The right temporal lobe in his brain was very sensitive. That lobe is the ‘antenna’ of our brain, and his was extremely receptive. It was easy for us to enter his dreams and lead him where we wanted him to go. We were looking for a man of the twentieth century who could systematize what Friar Alonso de Benavides, three centuries before, had scribbled in the margins of the Memorial that we stole from the National Library.”

  “And why did you steal that book?”

  María Coronel walked over to Father Baldi and gave him a piercing glance.

  “We offered to buy it, but we were turned down. So we decided to take it on loan. They never let anyone study the manuscript; for all intents and purposes it was being held hostage. What we needed was someone—not one of us—who could discover it and make its contents known. And yet the Church, through one of its many tentacles, always prevented its contents from coming to light. Luckily, they never managed to have the book sent to Rome.”

  “I still don’t understand what you were trying to do,” Baldi said. He was short of breath. “Why did you want to go public with what was in the book?”

  “Actually,” Ferrell continued, “we stole the book so that what was in it could be revealed, along with the existence of Chronovision, and INSCOM’s attempts to create a division of ‘astral spies.’ What we were trying to do was to have one person pull the whole story together and then explain that the Virgin never visited New Mexico. That what the Indians saw were nuns, of an angelic nature, members of our species, using precise techniques. That they were the ones who really appeared, and that everything else was part of a conspiracy to maintain a primitive faith based on manipulation.”

  “What person could do this?”

  “First we tried to convince Luigi Corso. In addition to being Saint Matthew on your project, and being well versed in the technical advances in sound as applied to bilocations, he was a writer.”