Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  “His son Lopo,” Jack said, staring. “The young man who brought the treasure to Port Royal from Portugal in the Black Swan.”

  “Now have a close look at one of those coins.”

  Costas reached down and picked one out. It was covered in a black patina, but the shape of the Star of David overstamp was unmistakable. It was the same mark they had found on the coins from the Schiedam, the mark that Jack was now certain was the merchant stamp of the Brandão family, the mark that had opened up the trail they were embarked on to find the greatest lost treasure of Christendom. Costas turned, his face creased in a smile behind his mask, and handed it over. “Here you go, Jack. Bingo.”

  * * *

  That evening, Jack walked back along the spit between the site of Port Royal and the international airport, intending to meet the car there that Jason was going to send after him to go on to their hotel. He had wanted half an hour alone to reflect on their discoveries and plan ahead for their trip to Bolivia the next day. Finding the Brandão warehouse had suddenly brought everything into sharp focus, solidifying what had until then been just speculation. The next step was a leap into the unknown, taking Maria’s revelations and going to the Cerro Rico, the Mountain of Riches, the main source of silver in the Spanish colonial period, including the coins that they had found on the shipwreck site in Cornwall and now at Port Royal itself. He was excited at the prospect, and also apprehensive. The mountain did not give up its silver lightly, and if the treasure they were seeking was also there, discovering it might present formidable challenges. And all the time they knew that agents of the Altamanus were on their trail, men such as the one Jason had encountered among the volunteers at Port Royal. It was essential that they keep their travel as secret as possible. When he and Costas flew out tomorrow, it would be in the IMU Embraer, and there would be no easy way for anyone without access to specialized equipment to monitor their route or work out their final destination.

  Ahead of him he could hear helicopters at the airport revving up, ready to take off before the storm rolled in. A distant flash of lightning streaked the sky to the east, and he felt the first drops of rain on his face. Perhaps delaying that car ride had not been such a great idea after all. Behind him he could see the flickering lights of the excavation, and the derrick on the barge that they had brought over the trench to pull out the airlifts and the other equipment. Jason had planned to leave the scaffolding in place, but he fully expected the trench to be filled by sediment if the storm swept over it. It would frustrate their plans to complete the excavation of that part of the site this season, but the infill of sediment would ensure that his extraordinary discoveries would remain protected and intact for the next year.

  With Little Joey’s video footage of the wreck, Jack was certain that he would be able to persuade the board of directors to allocate more resources and make it one of IMU’s flagship projects for the next season. Maurice had already been mapping out an excavation strategy for the site on land, and Jeremy and Rebecca had been talking at length with Jason about the most practical way to expose and raise the wreck. It promised to be a hugely exciting project, a complement to their work on the wreck off Cornwall, allowing Jack to look ahead in his own schedule and plan the next year in a way that had rarely been possible at this stage in a quest.

  He glanced back along the coastal road. They should all be coming along in the car, minus Costas and Jacob, who were planning to stay with Jason to help store away the electronic equipment and then hole up for the duration of the storm in a secure Second World War coastal defense bunker near the end of the spit. He turned back, the rain now driving in harder from the east, and saw the ominous blackness that marked the leading edge of the hurricane. Two men hunched over under their hoods walked by in the opposite direction, the only people he had seen since leaving the site, and then his phone chirped. He took it out, saw that Costas was messaging him and tapped it to respond, putting it on loudspeaker. “Costas? Can you hear me? What is it?”

  “Jack. The weather’s coming in, so I’ve only got a minute. You remember I put Little Joey back in to have a ferret around at the bow of the wreck?”

  “Any luck?”

  “Take a look at the video. See you tomorrow at the airport for the flight.”

  Jack clicked on the video link, turning his back to the rain. At first he saw only a black screen, the timer and data just visible at the top. Then Little Joey appeared, looking at him, blinking rapidly. He remembered that Lanowski had programmed a selfie shot into the robotic video sequence, just to make sure everyone knew who was taking it. The scene swiftly reverted to black again, with a scatter of white where the light was reflected by the silt in the water, and then the extraordinary image of the ship’s hull appeared behind that, a section of planking leading up to a longitudinal timber that marked the edge of the lower deck. Jack could clearly see the tumblehome of the hull, and the planks curving inward toward the bow. Suddenly Little Joey was in a maelstrom of silt, burrowing forward, only the nozzle of the water jet visible in the screen. Then, as he reversed the process and sucked away the silt, the massive oak stem post came into view, and above that something irregular and dark extending into the sediment. He repeated the jetting and vacuuming, then reversed the camera again, blinking suggestively and pointing with his pincer. The camera reverted to front view, and Jack saw what had been revealed.

  He could hardly believe his eyes. It was a figurehead in the shape of a swan, tarred black. The Black Swan. They had found Henry Avery’s ship. He froze the image and stared at the screen, shielding the phone from the rain, his mind racing. Avery had sailed the Black Swan from Tangier to Jamaica in 1684, and then she had disappeared, presumably into the hands of pirates. When he conducted his most infamous piratical adventures a decade later, it was in his ship the Fancy, but the Black Swan could have been used exactly as Jason had suggested, as a mother ship, and was fated to be off Port Royal on the day the earthquake struck.

  He pocketed the phone and walked quickly toward the airport, now visible only as lights in the darkness, his head hunched over. It was a truly astonishing find, a remarkable confluence of archaeology and history, and another piece of hard data on the trail they had been on since leaving Cornwall. He hoped Lanowski had given Little Joey an extra-large electronic biscuit. He would forward the video to Maria when he got out of the rain. He could hardly wait, and stepped up his pace.

  He had been too preoccupied with the screen to notice that the two men who had passed him had turned around and were now closing in on him from behind. The blow to his neck when it came caused instant numbness, and he fell heavily to his knees, toppling forward and hitting his forehead hard on the pavement. For a few moments he remained conscious, just enough to see the blood join the rivulets of rainwater in front of his eyes; then there was only blackness.

  16

  Jack awoke with a start, as he had done innumerable times since being hauled into this place, his head having lolled forward until the pain had become too much. The throbbing from having been knocked out the evening before had eased, but he still had no certainty how long he had been out cold or where he was. All he could tell from his hunger and thirst and from the sounds outside was that it had been a considerable time and that he was beside the sea. It was night, probably close to dawn, but with the full moon shining through the bars in the door, he had been able to get some sense of his surroundings. He eased himself into a better position, taking the weight of his body off his wrists, which were chained to the wall above his head, and feeling the circulation slowly return to his hands.

  For hours now he had endured this position, chained just low enough that he could squat on the cold flagstones, but high enough that he was continuously jolted awake by the pain in his wrists. He pressed his hands against the wall. The stone was damp, mildewed, and there was a smell of mold, as well as of blood. It might have been his own from the beating he had taken while being dragged in here, but at the moment he did not care. He was chi
lled and thirsty, but those feelings were subsumed by the constant need to shift his body, to avoid the aching, shooting pains that eventually made any position agony and rendered more than a few moments of sleep impossible. Whoever had positioned those chains knew exactly what they were doing.

  He heard movement outside, the jangling of keys, and suddenly the door creaked open. The man who stood silhouetted in the moonlight struck a match. “No electricity in here, of course,” he said, apparently to Jack. “Only candles, as always. We have no need to update to the methods of today, or to tamper with history. You of all people should appreciate that, yes? It is good to start on convivial terms, on terms of mutual appreciation. I know that you will be in agreement.”

  He went around the chamber lighting candles in holders on the walls, and then blew out the match and tossed it on the floor. Jack knew what was happening. The friendly voice, conspiratorial even, the disarming familiarity were tools of the trade for the experienced interrogator. He could see him more clearly now, a dapper, bearded man wearing a dark jacket and an open-necked shirt. Jack knew that even that was part of the ruse, that he needed to marshal all his remaining strength to be on his guard.

  “What do you want?” he said, gritting his teeth against the pain. “And get me out of these chains.”

  “Of course,” the man said. Jack could hear that he had a slight accent, Spanish or Portuguese. “Of course. We just need to go through some formalities.”

  “The only formality here is for you to release me,” Jack said. “And if you don’t, others who are searching for me will come and do it for you.”

  “You mean your friends? I rather think not.”

  “Where am I?”

  “There is no harm in you knowing; it may amuse you. A small island between Jamaica and the South American mainland. Privately owned, of course, and under no jurisdiction but our own, as it has been for hundreds of years. This building was constructed during the period of Portuguese rule in the seventeenth century. More precisely, it was built under the orders of the Inquisition. You came here by helicopter.”

  “So who the hell are you?” Jack exclaimed, wincing from the pain in his neck. “The Grand Inquisitor?”

  “Don’t affect ignorance, Dr. Howard, or be flippant. It does not become you. We know about Dr. Jeremy Haversham in Oxford and Dr. Maria de Montijo in Lisbon, about their prying and digging. We are the Altamanus, the Black Hand. We are the oldest soldiers of the Church, older even than the Knights of Malta or Jerusalem, or those who guard the Holy See in the Vatican. It is our sworn duty to recover the lost treasures of Christendom and bring them back within the fold of our order, where they belong. By any means necessary.”

  Jack shut his eyes for a moment. So it was true. He remembered Jason’s story of the semi-mythical offshore island, the one that even the pirates had feared. “So what is this place?” he asked. “A seventeenth-century version of a War on Terror rendition black site, only you’re the ones doing the terror?”

  “You are partly correct. In the early part of that century we allied ourselves with the Portuguese Inquisition, and infiltrated its ranks. Our greatest interest had always been the so-called Christian Jews of Spain, in what they might have concealed of the holy antiquities of Judaea, so after they had been expelled from Spain in 1492 and most had gone to Portugal, that became our main area of operations. But unlike the Inquisition, we were not anti-Semitic. We despised the Inquisition for perpetuating the weakness of the Church, for maintaining its continuous need to build on fear, to persecute those who did not follow its dogma. For the Altamanus, strength comes from recovering all that once made Christendom great, the symbols of power that will allow us to rebuild the Church as it was in the time of the first Christian emperors.”

  “You mean when the emperors hijacked the Church to make it serve their own needs,” Jack said. “When the Praetorian Guard became the so-called Altamanus, changed in name but unchanged in their allegiance to cruelty and despotism. Your objective is to militarize the Church.”

  “It is the will of God. We are the soldiers of the Lord.”

  “It’s a little hard to see any of that in the teachings of Jesus. To see a justification for what you are doing to me now.”

  “You asked about this place. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Inquisition weakened. A Portuguese priest who had been imprisoned for heresy, Father António Vieira, a sympathizer with the Christian Jews, had reported on the conditions of the prisons to the Holy See, and in 1674 the Pope suspended the tribunals. We redoubled our efforts, putting new men in place and ensuring that when the Inquisition returned seven years later, it was ruthless in its methods. But we also took matters into our own hands. If the courts in Portugal could be shut down at the whim of the Pope, then we would set up our own, somewhere on the far side of the world where no edict could impede our work.”

  “By court, I take it you mean torture chamber.” Jack had begun to identify the shapes he had been looking at in the flickering candlelight, various implements hanging from the walls, and beside the man a large wooden frame with cogged ratchets at either end. “What is all this, a film set, some kind of joke?”

  “It was no joke to the first prisoner we brought here, a converso Jewish boy called Lopo Rodrigues Brandão. In April of 1684, he had been sent on a secret mission by his father from Portugal to Port Royal in Jamaica. He was carrying money for their family, who lived in Port Royal, and a far more precious cargo that his father had brought from Tangier, something that had been in the possession of the Knights of Malta. The money was stolen by the English captain of the ship on which the boy had taken passage, the future pirate Henry Avery. The precious object was destined for a secret community in the Andes led by Father Vieira, who had become a kind of messianic figure for the Portuguese Jews and offered them a promised land.”

  “How do you know all this?” Jack asked.

  “Because the boy was taken from Port Royal just as you have been, and he told us.”

  “You mean he was tortured.”

  “He was persuaded.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Our methods were cruder then, less refined. We were still learning our way. But he was released, and continued to live as a merchant in Port Royal, thanking us for our mercy by giving us a share of his profits.”

  Jack nodded toward the apparatus in front of him. “So is that what you have in mind for me as well?”

  The man smiled, opening his arms expansively. “Come, Dr. Howard. We are friends. Would I do that to you? Of course, there are those of my colleagues who would, ratcheting it up, seeing which of the tendons in your hips or your shoulders would go first. Perhaps they will have their chance, if you do not cooperate with me. But as long as you and I are friends, I will keep them away. And anyway, for a man like you, what would be the point? We could break you on the rack or pull out your fingernails, and still you wouldn’t talk. You’ve faced death too many times to be afraid of that.”

  Jack shifted sideways, relieving the pressure on his hips. “This is getting tiresome. I need water.”

  “We know that physical torture is not the answer,” the man continued. “That is because we know how to break a man like you. We know where your weakness lies.” He took out his phone, tapped at it, and showed it to Jack. “Your weakness is that you are a father.”

  Jack squinted at the screen. It showed Rebecca kitting up by the seafront at Port Royal. It had been taken from out at sea, evidently with a telephoto lens. He remembered the boats they had seen navigating the channel on the way to and from Kingston Harbor, some of them fishing vessels, others cruisers and yachts. It had been impossible to carry out their diving unobserved, not that there had been any reason to do so. He felt his anger rise. “Enough games. Nobody threatens my daughter.”

  The man waved the phone. “My dear Dr. Howard, or may I call you Jack? Nobody is threatening your daughter. Not yet.”

  “I’ve asked you already. What do you want?�
��

  “You know exactly what we want. Three hundred and thirty years ago, we went up into the mountains and found Father Vieira’s followers. They called the place El Dorado, but all we saw was deprivation and hardship. We were like the Conquistadors again, like the Praetorian Guard. When we could not find Father Vieira or the treasure, we put them all to the sword and burned the place to the ground. We knew the boy could not have been lying, after what we put him through, so Father Vieira must have taken the treasure and concealed it in another place.”

  “And you expect me to tell you where?”

  The man lifted Jack’s head by the chin and forced it back against the wall, in the process revealing a tattoo of a black hand on his palm. He spoke close to Jack’s ear. “In the days of the Inquisition, all those in the condemned cells knew that we were not in the business of empty threats; they had all seen women and children as well as men tied to the stake in the town square, suffocating in the smoke of their own burning flesh, only losing consciousness after they had endured unimaginable pain and anguish. Think of that when you think of your daughter. Rebecca, isn’t it? I will return in one hour.”

  He released his grip, and Jack felt an excruciating pain in his neck. The man turned and walked toward the door. Jack shifted his body again. “I don’t know your name,” he said. “Friends should know each other by name.”

  The man turned. “It is of no consequence. But you know me as Dr. Hernandes, of the Lisbon St. Christopher Seminary.”

  “Then we are old friends,” Jack said. “I thought I recognized your voice. You called me at the IMU campus three days ago to warn me against carrying out further research on the coin.”

  “Old friends indeed. We knew the Star of David had been stamped on the coins that Lopo had taken to Port Royal for his father. We were on the trail ourselves and did not want you to carry out your own investigations, but then we realized that our best course of action was to let you lead us there. After all, you are the experts, and we have patience, having waited over three hundred years. And we never give up.”