by mike Evans
“John . . . no!”
He scrambled to his feet and came to her side. She handed him the iPad. “I went to the newsfeed,” she said, pointing. “Look!”
Winters scanned the screen and saw a picture of the San Juan de la Peña monastery. Below it were the words “Monje Asesinado.”
“What is this?”
Sophia closed her eyes. “Just scroll down the page,” she said, gesturing with her hand. “I don’t want to see it again but you need to look.”
Winters moved the cursor down the page and cringed as more images appeared. The back of a crushed skull. A bloody rock. The lifeless face . . . of Brother José Gris.
“That’s awful,” Winters groaned.
“He was murdered!” Sophia blurted. She drew her knees to her chest and clutched them with both hands. “Who would do such a thing?”
“What does this say?” Winters asked, pointing to the screen.
“Scroll past the pictures,” she said, “and hand it to me.”
Winters gave her the iPad and her eyes skimmed over the article. “They think the murder was part of a theft,” she said. “Something valuable was stolen from the monastery. One of the other monks reports seeing a couple flee the scene. A man and a woman.” Her eyes widened. “John, they think we did it.”
“Okay,” he said, reaching for her. “Come here, it’s okay.”
She dropped the iPad and fell into his arms.
Tejada ran a finger across the archival plastic that encased the pages.
“This is all Rivera was able to come away with,” Molina said. “He didn’t anticipate the man—”
“We pay him to anticipate,” Tejada replied. “This couple. They’re the two at the museum in Seville?”
“I compared the description Rivera gave me with the photographs. They match.”
“What do we know about them?”
“The woman is Sophia Conte. She lives here in Barcelona. Historian. Genealogist. Divorced.”
“You’ve searched her home.”
“Yes,” Molina nodded. “Nothing suspicious.”
“And the man?”
“No ID on him yet. Almost impossible without a face.”
“I’ve come to trust that nothing is impossible with you, Carlos. Where are they now?”
“Rivera lost them.”
Tejada’s eyes darkened. “Then lose him.”
“Done.”
“Notify me when you pick up their trail.”
“What do you want me to do with that?” Molina said, pointing to the pages in Tejada’s hand.
“I will take care of them,” Tejada responded.
When Molina was gone, Tejada collapsed in the chair behind the desk and and scanned the pages again. What were these ancient puzzle pieces he had before him? He didn’t know, but he was certain they were the very thing Abaddon was talking about. And whatever they were, the rest must be found and destroyed.
As for the people who now possessed them, Abaddon would demand they be destroyed as well. There was no question about that, and in the past he wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But now, things seemed different and eliminating these two was no longer a casual matter. How is this any different from the others, he wondered. And when did he start caring?
“Señor Tejada?” a voice said from the office intercom.
Tejada reached to the left and pressed a button on the phone. “Yes?”
“Señorita Winters to see you?”
Tejada opened the desk drawer and swept the pages inside. “Send her in,” he said and he pushed the drawer closed.
A moment later, the door opened and Maria appeared.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she said.
“Not at all.” Tejada rose to his feet. “How are you?”
“Better,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about—”
“Please, sit down.” He gestured toward a chair in front of the desk. “Would you care for something? Water, perhaps? Or coffee?”
“No, thank you,” Maria said as she took a seat. “I can’t stay long.” Her usual smile was missing. “I’ve been thinking about what you said . . . about Elena’s remains and a memorial. I wondered, since there’s no family, if the best thing to do might be to have her cremated.”
“Of course.” Tejada nodded. “I will take care of that at once.”
“Okay. Thank you.” She gripped the edge of the armrest of the chair.
Tejada seemed to notice. “Is something else troubling you?”
“Where are you with the investigation?”
“I’m afraid I’ve heard nothing more. I can contact the team right now if you—”
“No.” She held up her hand in a dismissive gesture. “I suppose we may never know for sure what happened. Whether it was an accident or not.”
Tejada leaned forward and propped his elbows on the desktop. “Why would we consider that it was something other than an accident?”
“I don’t know,” she said as she shrugged. “I’m probably overreacting.” She looked at him a moment, then continued. “Anyway, the two reports you asked for are being proofread right now. You should have them in the morning.” She stood and put out her hand.
He stared at it a moment before he realized she wanted him to shake it.
“You’ve been very kind to me,” she said.
Tejada rose and took her hand in his. “Why does this sound like good-bye?”
“It’s not,” she said, looking him in the eye. “In fact, I wondered if your offer to let me use your home as a retreat was still open.”
Tejada was stunned and unaccumstomed to being caught completely off guard. “Of course,” he said, recovering quickly. “Please call me when you’re ready and I will send a car for you.”
“I think I can find my way,” she replied, then she turned toward the door and was gone.
After she left, Tejada moved to the window and stared out at the campus below, thinking of what had just transpired.
Did Abaddon know the temptation he faced after all?
Did he know that Tejada was capable of falling in love?
“But if he knows,” Tejada whispered to himself, “Maria will be in serious danger.” He ran his hand over his face. “And there is nothing I can do to save her.”
Maria took a cab back from Catalonia and waited on the sidewalk until it drove away. As it disappeared around the next corner, she took the phone from her jacket pocket and called Donleavy in San Francisco. She listened to it ring as she hurried up the brightly lit sidewalk.
“It’s me,” she said when Donleavy answered.
“Did you plant the bugs?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “But I had to put them under the armrest of a chair.”
“A chair?” Donleavy wasn’t pleased. “I told you to put it someplace where it wouldn’t be found.”
“I did the best I could do,” Maria retorted. “He didn’t give me much choice. He steered me to a chair near the desk.”
“What about the desk?”
“The chair was too far away. It would have been too obvious to stick one under the desk.”
“Okay,” he said, much calmer than before. “We’ll have to work with it. What about the house?”
“I’m going there tomorrow.”
“Go ahead and use your laptop to activate the one in his office. I sent you the program—”
“I got it.” She stepped into the doorway of a closed shop. “You still haven’t heard from my dad?”
“No,” he replied sharply. “And it’s ticking me off. He’s supposed to stay in touch with me.”
“Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around. Listen, thanks for getting back to me—and helping me with this.”
“Your old man is probably going to kill me.”
“Then don’t tell him.”
“Well, you know that’s not happening.”
“Right now, all that matters is that I get something on—”
Donleavy cut her off. �
��Don’t say his name out loud.”
“Sorry.”
“The first piece of condemning evidence that comes through, you’re outta there. That was our deal, right?”
“Believe me, I don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to.”
“Okay. If you hear from your dad, tell him to call me. I have some information for him.”
“Are you sure he’s here in Spain? I mean, it just doesn’t make sense that he wouldn’t let me know—although I guess he’d assume I’ve gone home by now. You think he’s in trouble?”
“No, I think he’s just being a jerk.”
“Well, there’s that.”
“Hang in there,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Maria ended the call and returned the phone to her pocket, then started back toward the apartment complex. There was a bug to activate and more Internet searches to complete. That would keep her busy until tomorrow.
And tomorrow was as far ahead as she could think.
Winters stood at the end of the bed and watched Sophia stir in her sleep. Light was just beginning to filter through the thin shade. It was time for her to wake up. They couldn’t stay much longer, but he hadn’t wanted to leave so early that they aroused the suspicions of the innkeeper. He had already shown too much interest when Winters had gone down for coffee without Sophia. Not being able to speak Basque had paid off.
Winters put Sophia’s cup on the nightstand but still didn’t wake her. It had taken nearly two hours last night to reassure her that they had not caused Brother José’s death. After that she had slept only fitfully, while Winters sat in the uncomfortable chair, trying to determine their next move.
Sophia had won on one point. He would not take her back to Barcelona. Until he knew who was after the journal she would be safer with him. Father Padillo could probably give them a clue, but Winters didn’t want to drag him into it.
The trouble seemed to have started at the museum with the overly-aggressive guard. In Toledo, they were watched from the building across from the church. And the car that followed them apparently belonged to the killer.
But this was more than just one guy determined to get his hands on the journal. Several people were involved. Even a network. And what were they going to do with it? What was so important about it that they were willing to kill for it?
Experience told Winters the only logical answer was money. And even that didn’t quite fit. He wondered just how much this journal could be worth.
Certainly the whole journal was worth more than just a part of it. And Winters now had most of it. But that wasn’t what had kept him up all night.
It had been no surprise to the attacker that he and Sophia were in the room at the monastery with the journal. He must have been the “monk” who went digging in the garden when Winters and Sophia arrived. Which meant he’d known they were coming and the likelihood they’d be allowed to see the journal.
But how? Who knew they were on this quest besides old Vespucci, the even older Jacobo, and Father Padillo? All of them were protective of the journal, so why would they tell anyone? Unless they were coerced.
“Do you have a plan, Agent Winters?” Sophia asked from her place on the bed.
Winters looked up to see her propped against the pillow, coffee cup in hand. “No,” he replied. “I’m afraid I do not.”
“Good,” she said, “because I do.”
“Okay. Let’s hear it.”
“‘Hear’ is the important word.” She paused to take a sip of coffee. “You must hear me out before you tell me it cannot be done.”
“Not the best way to start this conversation,” Winters said. “But go ahead.”
Her eyes took on their familiar brightness. “What I read in the journal last night, before we saw the news about the monk . . .”
“Yeah?”
“You remember the group of Jewish businessmen who financed Señor Columbus?”
“Right.”
“When he returned from his first voyage he met with them and then he met separately with—and this is exactly the way he wrote it—‘with Simon Vega, my kinsman.’”
“Wait—he was related to one of the Jewish guys?” Winters’ eyes were wide with surprise. “So he was Jewish.”
Sophia nodded eagerly. “That is the first straightforward admission he makes. Then he goes on about a discussion they had—he and Vega—about the blood moon he saw the night they first landed, and he says that Simon Vega told him they were in the midst of a lunar tetrad, a series of eclipses, coinciding with the Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles.” She gestured toward the journal they’d left on the dresser. “According to what he wrote, Vega sent him to a rabbi—a Moses ben Jacob Cordovero in Cordoba—and he told him about Jacob ben Isaac, who prophesied in 2 BC that after the destruction of Jerusalem and a fifteen-hundred-year period of persecution, a new land would rise from the sea.” She smiled at Winters. “It would rise in the year of the blood moon.”
Winters could have listened to her talk about this all day, but he wasn’t sure they had even an hour. “I’m lovin’ this,” he said. “But we have to be thinking about getting out of here. So far I’m not hearing a plan.”
“I am coming to that,” Sophia said. “Just hear me out.” She took another sip of coffee and continued. “In the journal, he says that an evil one will rise to power when the four levels converge—”
Winters looked puzzled. “What four levels?”
“A series of four consecutive lunar eclipses occurring on the Jewish holidays of Passover and the Feast of the Tabernacles. He said that at that time, the righteous one will defeat the evil one who opposes the fulfillment of the prophecy about a land rising up from the sea.”
“Okay, I get that,” Winters said. “Opposition arose to Columbus’ efforts to discover the New World—that land—because he was this ‘righteous one.’”
Sophia nodded. “I think that is what he is saying.”
“Huh,” Winters grunted. “The man had an ego the size of Montana. Did he think the group in Barcelona—the ones who resisted him—did he think they were the Antichrist?”
“I do not know. That was all he wrote except for some symbols at the end that I cannot decipher.”
Winters moved from the chair and took a seat at the edge of the bed beside her. “This is all great,” he said, “but we need to figure out where to go next and what to do with the journal before pseudo-monk in the junk car tracks us down.”
“I think I have the answer to both of those problems,” she said. “I had to give you the background first.”
“Sophia—”
“We must go to Jerusalem,” she interrupted.
Winters’ chin dropped. “You mean now?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t—”
“I have a friend there.”
“Of course you do, but—”
“His name is Jacob Hirsch. He is a professor at Hebrew University. His specialty is the history of Judaism.”
“I’m not following you, Sophia.”
She placed a hand on his arm. “We can find shelter with Jacob and we can turn the journal over to him for safekeeping. Now that I’ve been able to think it through, I realize it belongs to the Jewish people, John. It is part of their heritage, not ours.”
It made a bizarre kind of sense, but Winters still shook his head. “I’ve taken you as far as I can on this,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. There are too many unknowns.”
“I told you last night that I will not hold you responsible for my safety.”
“And I told you it doesn’t work that way. I won’t watch another woman I care about be destroyed by some terrorist with a fanatical religious agenda. I won’t do it!”
Sophia’s eyes were wide, as well they should be. He had just shouted into her face something he’d never said to another human being. But she didn’t step back and instead said quietly, “No, John, you did not tell me that.”
Winters turned away b
ut she tugged at his arm.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what happened to your wife.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“I think it has everything to do with it. And I think if you do not let it out, you will be in more danger than I will ever be.”
Winters forced a grin. “That’s it,” he said. “You’ve been lying to me all this time. You are a psychiatrist.”
“Do not do that,” she said. “Do not make a joke of it. Not this time.”
He pulled away from her and stumbled to the door—where he stopped. He could run away. Or he could face the thing that was tearing him up inside.
Winters looked back at her. “My wife died in the 9/11 attacks,” he said. “In New York.” Sophia didn’t flinch. He kept going. “She was in the second tower, trapped above the crash site. I kept my old flip phone—the one she left the message on.”
“From the tower? That day?”
“Yeah.”
“You have kept a piece of her.”
Tears filled his eyes and ran down his cheeks. “A voice message,” he said shaking his head. “That’s all I have left of her.”
He placed his arm on the door and pressed his forehead against it. This was a bad idea, digging this up now—no matter how compassionate Sophia might be. It felt as raw as it did back then, as torturous as it was the day she died. That’s why he’d buried it deep inside.
“I am sorry, John,” Sophia said softly.
“Me, too,” he replied.
He pulled himself from the door, ready to get Sophia out of there before he lost her too. But when he turned to face her he saw she was weeping too.
“How did you survive?”
“I had a daughter to raise,” he explained. “That’s how I survived. That and not thinking about it.”
“Except for her phone message.”
“Yeah. There’s that. I listen to it every September eleventh, just to hear her voice.”
“Do you want to tell me what she—”
“She said, ‘I’m sure you’ve heard the news.’ She was trying to sound so calm, but I could hear in her voice how scared she was. The plane had hit a number of floors below them and they’d tried to go down the stairs but the heat and smoke were too much.” Winters’ own voice broke. “She was still—I mean, she was sitting there at her desk, hoping firefighters could get the fire out and they could get down—and she was saying, ‘Maybe you should get Maria from school so she doesn’t hear about this from someone else.’”
