Rogue Angel 52: Death Mask (2 page)

1

24:00
—Madrid

The drumming vibration of her cell phone on the nightstand dragged Annja Creed out of sleep. For a moment the noise had been part of the surreal landscape of her imagination, but as she opened her eyes she completely forgot what she’d been dreaming. Annja had been in Valencia for a week working on a piece on gargoyles for
Chasing History’s Monsters
, and now she was in Madrid, recharging her batteries. There was nothing like the mix of modernity and history as a backdrop for a little R & R. She looked at the alarm clock and saw it was ungodly early, for a vacation day. Who in their right mind would be calling? Then she realized it was probably Doug Morrell, completely forgetting she’d booked the next few days off. Her producer could be a pain when she was overseas, always wanting an update, querying her expense claim or just reminding her the show needed to be
sexy
. That was the nature of the beast, after all. Sexy television. Sexy history. Sexy monsters. Sexy claims of links between the two. She’d just turned the latest segment in. Doug could wait. She rolled over and closed her eyes again, but a second and a third call came in quick succession.

She gave in and picked up.

“What do you want, Doug? It’s the middle of the night.”

That wasn’t quite true. The morning sun filtered through the too-thin hotel curtains, picking out the cigarette-smoke discolorations on the fabric.

It wasn’t Doug. “Check your email. Click on the link. I will wait,” the voice said. She couldn’t place it.

“Who is this?” Annja heard another voice in the background but couldn’t catch what was being said. The line went dead. She checked her recent calls, but the number had been blocked. Annja pushed the covers back and sat up. It was almost seven, and the cleaners were already moving around outside her room, no doubt wishing she’d go down for breakfast so they could do their jobs.

She got out of bed reluctantly and headed through to the bathroom. She’d check her email, but not before taking a hot shower to help wake her up.

When she emerged, one towel wrapped around her and another making a turban around her wet hair, she crossed the floor to her laptop on the dressing table and powered it up.

She had a single new email.

The subject line said Urgent, and the sender was Garin Braden.

But it hadn’t been Garin’s voice on the phone.

If you want to see Mr. Braden alive again, follow this link.

Annja clicked.

A window opened on her screen and a few seconds later the image resolved into what looked like a live video feed. The sole image on the screen was a digital clock that read 23:52:27. It took her a couple seconds to realize it was counting backward from 24:00:00.

“Hello, Annja, so glad you could finally join us,” a voice said. It sounded different through the tinny speakers than it had on the phone. There was no sign of the male speaker on the screen.“Time is precious. You have already wasted seven and a half minutes of it.”

Wasted?

She didn’t know what was going on, and the steaming-hot water had only dragged her so far from sleep. “Stop messing around, Garin. I’m tired and in no mood for your stupid jokes.”

The camera zoomed out, gradually revealing that the clock was in the middle of a man’s chest. He was slumped in a chair, his hands tied behind his back. He was breathing, but he was bloodied and bruised, and Annja couldn’t tell if he was conscious. Wires ran from the clock to a box beneath the chair he was tied to. Water was thrown from off camera, soaking his blood-streaked shirt. The man lifted his head slowly, staring at the camera through one swollen eye. His mouth was smeared with red. Still, he was immediately recognizable.

“Garin!” Annja said, his name catching in her throat.

His eyes didn’t seem to register his name or Annja’s voice. He was dazed and confused and clearly had no idea what was going on.

“What do you want?” Annja asked.

“I like that,” said the off-camera voice. “Straight down to business. No pretense of bargaining. No bluster or demands that I let him go. We can work together, Miss Creed.”

“What do you want?” Annja repeated.

“The Mask of Torquemada.”

“The what?” She knew exactly what the voice had said, and had a good idea what it had meant. But that didn’t mean she’d be able to meet this person’s demands.

“Do you really want to waste time pretending you don’t know what I am talking about, Miss Creed?” the voice said. “Nine minutes. Ticktock. Ticktock. The more time you waste now, the less you will have to save your friend. Find the mask or your friend dies. Is that incentive enough for you? Twenty-three hours, fifty-one minutes.”

“You can’t expect me to find something that’s been lost for centuries in a single day. That’s impossible.”

“You better hope not, for Mr. Braden’s sake.”

“This is insane! I don’t have the first idea where to start looking...or what I’m even looking for. You can’t just say ‘Find it.’ I’m not a miracle worker!”

“Well, there’s one man here who is desperately hoping you are, Miss Creed. His life depends upon it. I will call you again in a few hours to see how you’re getting on. Godspeed, Annja Creed. Ticktock. Ticktock.” The camera zoomed in to focus on the clock in the middle of Garin’s chest, then panned up to his face. “Just in case you need reminding.”

Annja couldn’t look away.

Garin looked at her with dead eyes.

She wondered if he had been drugged or just beaten so badly he couldn’t focus.

His head slumped forward again. This time it stayed down.

Annja watched as the clock ticked down another minute. She had less than a day to save Garin, with no idea where to begin, no clue as to where he might be. Normally there was one man she’d turn to if she needed technology to help her find someone—Garin. He wasn’t going to be able to help her now.

She continued to stare at the screen, trying to learn as much as she could about the place he was being held, but there was precious little to be gleaned from it. The light was artificial, the walls behind him were bare brick. It could have been, quite literally, anywhere in the world.

Another minute passed by and she knew she had to do something; anything.

She’d wasted ten minutes of his life already.

Ticktock. Ticktock.

2

23:45
—Madrid

“Annja? As much as I adore you, my dear, I adore my sleep much
more
.”

“This is work,” Annja said.

“A four-letter word,” Roux said. She could imagine the smile playing across his lips as he grumbled. He could be a crank at the best of times. “And not one of the more amusing ones.”

“Have you heard from Garin?”

“Not recently. Last week. Why?”

“I was just sent a link to a video chat. Garin was on the other end. There was a clock strapped to his chest and a bomb under his chair. He was in a bad way. Beaten bloody.”

“Couldn’t happen to a nicer chap.”

“This is serious,” she said. “In less than twenty-four hours that clock hits zero and the bomb detonates, taking Garin with it. That’s the threat.”

“I assume this is a kidnapping? So what do they want?”

She heard him moving around the château, talking with her as he made his way to his study.

“They’re asking for the Mask of Torquemada,” she said. It came out in a more matter-of-fact way than she’d expected. Everyone knew who Torquemada was—a Dominican zealot who rose up to become the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, rabidly anti-Semitic, the scourge of the Moors—but in all the stories she’d heard of his vile purge, there had never been anything about a mask.

“Good luck with that,” Roux said dismissively. “It’s been missing for more years than I can remember.”

“So there
is
a mask. But you were there, weren’t you? You and Garin.”

“I may have been,” Roux said, not giving anything away. “But I had other things on my mind than a mad Dominican obsessed with religious purity. I’d already had a lifetime of that. I was in France. It’s not like we had CNN giving us hourly updates as the atrocities rolled on, but yes, you heard things, obviously. It was easy to throw accusations around, and you know the old adages about mud sticking, no smoke without fire. People were willing to believe anything if it meant they were safe from the worst of it, that it couldn’t happen to them. Torquemada was a Christian zealot. He was the driving force behind maybe as many as two hundred thousand Jews fleeing Spain. His priests
encouraged
another fifty thousand to convert to Christianity. Though I use the term
encouraged
in its most liberal sense.”

“And the mask?”

“If it ever existed, buried with him.”

“So we’re just talking about a little tomb-robbing here. I guess I can deal with that. Wouldn’t be the first time. Where’s he buried? Do we know?” She had already forwarded the email to Roux, along with the link.

“Yes. It’s a matter of public record. Unfortunately, his grave was ransacked only a couple of years before the Inquisition was disbanded.” Meaning the task had already become exponentially more difficult than she’d thought it would be in the matter of a few seconds. “They took everything in the tomb. Burned his bones, mask, everything destroyed in an auto-da-fé. An act of faith.” He fell silent and she knew he was waiting for her, giving her the chance to respond and draw her own conclusions.

“Okay. Well... If it was destroyed, then that’s a death sentence for Garin, so I’m going to ignore that option for now and assume that the mask was stolen and is still intact. People are greedy. If it was worth something, someone might have taken it.” She took the old man’s silence as agreement. “Where was he buried?” It was a starting point. Nothing more than that. But it was better than sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike. Five hundred years was a long time, but Annja hoped the normal logic of a search would hold true: the best place to start looking for something that had been lost was the last place it had been seen.

“The Monastery of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Ávila,” he said. “I’ll join you there as soon as I can, but first I think I shall pay a visit to Seville.”

“What has Seville got, apart from a barber and some oranges?”

The old man chuckled down the long-distance line. “It’s where so much of it began, my dear. As you say, for want of a better place, why not start at the beginning? Seville is where the first of these so-called acts of faith of the Inquisition took place in a particularly grisly sacrifice. Six people were burned alive.”

“That’s barbaric.” The history of the Inquisition was fascinating in and of itself, but she’d never considered it for the show. There were plenty of human monsters from that time, without the need to invent others for public edification. Using religion and ethnicity as a means of population control turned her stomach. It didn’t matter if it was five hundred years ago in Spain, sixty years ago in Germany or twenty years ago in Rwanda. Genocide was one of the few horrors that didn’t lessen with time.

“Yes, it was. Just as all forms of human sacrifice are,” Roux agreed. There was a pause. He was obviously thinking. “I won’t touch down for at least three hours, even if I get airborne in the next thirty minutes. I’ll contact you as soon as I land. In the meantime, I’ll make a call. Garin isn’t the only one with a little black book. I know a guy...he might be able to pinpoint the IP address from the webcam. See if we can’t find a source. You look at finding the mask, I’ll try to find Garin—hopefully, we’ll meet somewhere in the middle. Twenty-four hours is a long time.”

“In politics, maybe. In kidnap and ransom? I’m not so sure.”

“Just concentrate on getting to Ávila. I’ll give my guy your details and have him meet you there.” Roux hung up without waiting for her response. There was no “good luck.” He was all business, which was exactly what she needed from him right now. There wasn’t a moment to lose. She pillaged the hotel room of anything useful, throwing a change of clothes into a backpack, then zipped herself into her motorbike leathers and headed down to the hotel’s underground garage.

The Triumph Rocket III Roadster was where she’d left it.

It was a beast of a machine. She loved it. Annja slipped her bag from her shoulder and stowed it inside one of the panniers, then straddled the bike. It was bigger and heavier than she was used to, but the Roadster had so much pent-up power as she gunned the engine, she couldn’t help but grin at the thrill when it roared to life beneath her. There were perks to being a celebrity of sorts: companies bent over backward in exchange for a little publicity. She was a great ad for the bike. As Doug said, there was something inherently powerful about a great bike and a leather-clad rider. He would have called it sexy. She liked to think of it as iconic. Giving the Roadster up when she left Spain was going to be tough. She intended to hit the open road and see as much of the countryside as she could before then.

The bike roared up the ramp and out of the garage, banking sharply as she took the turn into the street. She was strong, but still, the muscles in her shoulders and forearms tightened as she leaned to keep the bike upright. She opened up the throttle, slipping into the early-morning city traffic. In a car, the congestion would have been a problem, bumper-to-bumper impatient drivers trying to cut in and out of lanes. But even though the Roadster was designed for the open road, it was maneuverable enough to weave in and out of the snarl of vehicles.

She accelerated ahead of the traffic jam, hitting the lights just as they changed from red to green, and left the line of cars trailing in her wake. They couldn’t match the bike’s speed in these conditions.

A few minutes later, she was more than a mile outside of the city, but the road ahead was blocked by a pair of trucks struggling uphill side by side, slowly losing momentum as the incline increased, neither one prepared to slow down or change lanes in case they couldn’t make it to the top of the hill. A snake of frustrated drivers had built up behind them.

Annja didn’t have time to waste.

She leaned to the left, letting her weight steer the bike into the narrow space between the lanes, and raced toward the gap between the two trucks. Drivers vented their frustration at her gambit, but that voice and its damned “ticktock, ticktock” was all she could hear. Annja twisted the throttle hard. Her grip tightened as she leaned forward, and the rush of air battered her. Still, she accelerated, surging past the barely moving cars. A chorus of horns bade her farewell as she disappeared between the trucks, her shoulder blades inches from the high-paneled sides of both. The huge vehicles drifted closer together as she sped between them.

She caught a glimpse of one of the drivers in his wing mirror. There was no mistaking the panic in his eyes. She grinned, but realized there was no way he’d be able to see the expression through her helmet’s black visor, which, all things considered, was probably for the best. He veered away suddenly, widening the gap for Annja, who surged ahead of the trucks and into the freedom of the open road.

She hit a hundred and thirty-six miles an hour in a few seconds, topping out the engine. The landscape blurred in her peripheral vision. Annja kept her head down. Speed limits didn’t matter. She’d take the ticket, if the cops could keep up with her. Ticktock. Ticktock. It was just her and the road, but she didn’t have time to enjoy it. She only had eyes for the dashed line leading all the way to the horizon.

She could feel the heat of the engine through the leathers on the inside of her right leg by the time she pulled up outside the high stone walls of the Royal Monastery of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Ávila.

She’d ridden as if the devil was on her tail.

The journey hadn’t even taken an hour.

She checked her phone. There was a message from Roux’s hacker giving her the name of a café—Giorgio’s—and instructions to meet her there in forty-five minutes. The message was fifteen minutes old. That gave her half an hour to unlock the secrets of the Grand Inquisitor’s shrine.

Ticktock.