“Go ahead.”
That was all he needed.
“Watchman” was ruggedly built, from the Piedmont region of northern Italy. He stashed the walkie-talkie in the pocket of his bomber jacket and walked briskly toward his objective. In a few seconds he was there, coming to a stop at the red light. He made certain that no one else was in the immediate vicinity of the evangelist. A perfect opportunity. And so, standing shoulder to shoulder with the priest, the Watchman took the liberty of addressing the stranger in perfect Italian.
“A beautiful day, isn’t it?”
Baldi was surprised. He nodded his head, smiling indifferently, while he tried to ignore the stranger, whose eyes were fixed on the other side of the street. It was the last thing he did before the man with the shaved head, impeccably dressed in Armani, pulled out a short pistol equipped with a silencer from his jacket and stuck it in Baldi’s ribs.
“If you move, I’ll fire right here,” he whispered.
The evangelist was outraged. He hadn’t even seen the pistol, but he could visualize the barrel of the gun pressing against his guts. He had never had a gun pointed at him and found himself paralyzed by a cold, irrational terror.
“You are . . . You are mistaken,” he whispered in an awkward Spanish. “I have no money.”
“I don’t want your money, Father.”
“But . . . But if I have no—”
“You are Father Giuseppe Baldi, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” the Third Evangelist stammered.
“Then there’s no mistake to talk about.”
Even before Watchman had finished speaking, the van had pulled up to the traffic light. One hard shove and the priest fell forward into the van. Then two strong arms dragged him all the way in and pushed him to the back of the vehicle.
“And now I hope you behave yourself. We don’t want to hurt you.”
“Who are you? What do you want with me?”
Baldi babbled the two phrases in Italian. His pulse was racing, and his forearms were slightly bruised. He was beginning to understand that he had been taken hostage.
“Someone wants to see you.”
The man who had stuck the pistol in his gut was now sitting next to the driver and staring at the priest through the rearview mirror.
“Don’t try anything stupid, Father. We have several hours to go before we arrive at our destination.”
“Several hours? Where are we going?”
“To a place where we can talk, my dear Saint Luke.”
Baldi feared for his life.
Those men had not taken him hostage by mistake: they knew who he was. And what was worse: in order to know where he was, they must have followed him from Rome. The question was why.
One poke in the arm, and he lost consciousness. They had injected him with ten milligrams of Valium, the dosage indicated to keep someone asleep for the next five hours.
With darkness falling, the Ford Transit had already left the highway around Bilbao, turning onto Route A-68 in the direction of Burgos, and from there onto Route 1 heading to Santo Tomé del Puerto, climbing into the mountains toward Somosierra. There they picked up Route 110, which took them to Segovia, where the kidnappers purchased gas at a service station next to the Roman aqueduct and then continued on the secondary road to Zamarramala, turning off before they arrived.
The clock on the dashboard read seven minutes past ten when the car pulled up next to a stone cross, a mere twenty feet away from one of Spain’s most unusual medieval churches. The driver cut the engine. Two long strokes of light from the car’s high beams advised the building’s occupants that the guest for whom they had been waiting had just arrived.
SIXTY-FIVE
VENICE BEACH
Jennifer Narody answered the door on the third ring. She had a hard time imagining who could be looking for her so insistently at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. She threw on her white silk robe, smoothed back her hair, and hurriedly threaded her way across her disorganized living room. Glancing through her front door peephole, she saw a thin young man, some thirty years old, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and standing impatiently on the other side of the door. She had never seen him before.
“Miss Narody?” Her visitor formulated his question the second he could feel her eyes watching him.
“Yes. What do you want?”
“I’m not sure how to explain . . .” Upon hearing the annoyance in her voice, he hesitated for a second. “My name is Carlos Albert, and I am working with the FBI on an investigation in which you could possibly be of some assistance.”
“The FBI?”
“I know it sounds absurd, but does the name ‘The Lady in Blue’ mean anything to you?”
Jennifer did not move.
“What did you just say?”
“I came here to ask you about the Lady in Blue, Miss Narody. And about something that has come into your possession, and which I believe you ought to put in my hands.”
Carlos had decided to play all his cards, including whatever tricks the angel in the red shoes might have provided him with. He had actually gotten permission from the FBI officers to let him interview Jennifer alone. That took some doing, but he had finally convinced them that it would be in their interest for him to do so. It would be far less obvious in her eyes, and less threatening, for a foreign journalist to be seeking any relevant information to recover a manuscript actually stolen in Madrid than for the FBI to be grilling her.
Jennifer looked at him suspiciously.
“Who gave you my address? It’s not in the phone book,” she added.
“Look, Miss Narody, I need to talk to you about something important. I came here all the way from Spain for one reason only: to see this manuscript. Your psychiatrist called the National Library a few days ago asking about the Lady in Blue, which is what led me to you. May I come in?”
Jennifer opened the door.
The woman who let him enter her house was an unconventional beauty. Despite the fact that she had just gotten out of bed and had circles under her eyes, she was someone who radiated harmony. She had dark features, with a tan that lent her a bronze cast; she had a fine figure and a friendly face, with thick lips and prominent cheekbones. Her living room was full of souvenirs from Italy—a shiny, metallic Leaning Tower of Pisa paperweight; a collection of albums by Italian singers scattered on the floor in front of the stereo; and a huge aerial photo of the Coliseum covering the largest wall in the room. The various objects brought back memories for Carlos.
“Are you familiar with Italy, Ms. Narody?”
Jennifer smiled for the first time. Her visitor was examining a tiny bronze Venetian gondola that was sitting on top of the television.
“Absolutely. I lived in Rome for a time.”
“Really?”
“It’s a marvelous city. Do you know it?”
Carlos nodded. For the next few minutes they exchanged impressions regarding the warmth of character of the Italians, the ease with which any tourist can adjust to the chaos of the Roman traffic and the hurried pace of life there, and how much one could miss the food. The coincidence—yes, once again—of their knowing the same little restaurant near the Pantheon, called La Sagrestia, where they prepared the best pasta dishes in the city (“exclusively for Romans,” they joked). It turned out that this simple point of contact was enough to settle their conversation into a much more relaxed vein. Soon Jennifer had more or less forgotten Carlos’s reference to the FBI’s interest in the Lady in Blue. She invited him to have a seat.
“So,” she said, “would you care for some refreshment? A glass of water? A soda?”
Carlos shook his head. He was already contemplating how best to begin the battery of questions he had prepared for her, when Jennifer suddenly took charge of the conversation.
“Actually, while I have you here, perhaps you can help me to clear up a mystery.”
“What kind of mystery?” He turned to face her from the sofa.
“You’re Spa
nish, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, look: yesterday I received an envelope containing a very old manuscript written in your native tongue. I thought you could help me to translate it.”
His heart skipped a beat.
“A manuscript?”
“That’s right.” Jennifer lit a cigarette before she began to look for the envelope. “It should be around here somewhere. I thought about showing it to Doctor Meyers tomorrow, since she speaks some Spanish. But you’re a native and will understand it even better. You’ve fallen out of the sky!”
Carlos smiled to himself. “You could, in fact, say that.” When she walked over to him with a handful of old manuscript pages tied together by a thick piece of twine, the journalist knew right away that this was it. Saints in heaven! He had covered more than six thousand miles just to hold those pages in his hands. The angel in the red shoes was right: the woman sitting next to him held the secret in her hands without knowing it.
“Incredible!” He whistled. “Do you have any idea what this is?”
“Obviously not, which is why I’m asking you.”
The awestruck journalist took the bundle in his hands. It required some effort at first to get used to the baroque script, full of arabesques, but soon he was reading effortlessly: “Memorial Dedicated to His Holiness Pope Urban the Eighth, Relating the Conversions in New Mexico That Transpired During the Most Felicitous Period of His Administration and Pontificate, and Presented to His Holiness by Father Friar Alonso de Benavides of the Order of Our Father Saint Francis, Guardian of Said Conversions, the 12th of February 1634.” Attached to the document on a thin strip of onion paper was a more recent inscription in red ink: “Mss. Res. 5062.”
“This document,” Carlos said when he had finished, “was removed from the steel-lined vault at the National Library in Madrid a few days ago. It is because of this document that I am working with the FBI, to recover it and return it to where it belongs.”
Jennifer Narody tried to contain her surprise.
“I didn’t steal it!” she said in her defense. “If I had, would I have shown it to you so quickly?”
Carlos shrugged his shoulders.
“All well and good. The only thing I know is that, given that the body of evidence is right here in your house, it is going to be difficult to justify the possession of a rare book stolen from a library in Madrid.”
“A stolen item? But—”
“The Criminal Activities Division of the Spanish Police and the Anti-Sect Squad notified Interpol when they became afraid that this text”—and here he slapped the manuscript with his palm—“had been taken illegally from my country. And here it is in plain sight, so they knew what they were talking about.”
Jennifer became alarmed.
“And why is an Anti-Sect Squad investigating such an old document?”
“They suspected a group of fanatics were involved. Sometimes this type of group takes an interest in a book or a work of art for the strangest reasons. In fact, the person who entered the library took only this document, and whoever it was could have taken many other, much more valuable works.”
“Hold on a minute!” she cut in. “I deserve an explanation, Mister . . .”
“. . . Albert. Carlos Albert.”
“Mister Albert: you asked me about the Lady in Blue. What does she have to do with this book?”
“Everything!” Carlos smiled. “This document explains what happened to the Lady in Blue, and how Sister María Jesús de Ágreda was able to be in two places at once, appearing as far away as New Mexico, at the beginning of the seventeenth century.”
“Sister María Jesús de Ágreda!”
Jennifer did not pronounce the woman’s difficult name as well as the Spaniard sitting across from her, but she instantly knew who the woman was.
“You know about her?”
“Of course! Her, and Friar Alonso de Benavides, and Philip the Fourth . . . I have watched them. I’ve spent days watching them.”
“Watching them?”
Jennifer understood her visitor’s perplexity.
“Mister Albert,” she said, “although it may be difficult for you to believe, the knowledge that I have of Benavides and of what transpired in New Mexico has come to me through my dreams.”
“At this point, Miss Narody, nothing is too difficult for me to believe,” Carlos replied.
“I swear to you, I never heard of Benavides before this, nor did I ever read a book that mentioned him. I had no interest in the history of my country, nor that of the Native Americans. But I believe that my genes predisposed me to it. My psychiatrist believes it is a ‘genetic memory.’ ”
“Right. But she has no idea why you have those dreams. She didn’t want to talk to me about it, and I had the sense that she was pretty lost.”
“Well . . . There are a few things I never told her. Mostly having to do with how those dreams related to my last job.”
“Where did you work?”
Jennifer frowned.
“What makes you think I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t tell Doctor Meyers?”
“Perhaps if I explain how I arrived here, what I lived through before I met her, that will encourage you to tell me. Do you believe in random occurrences?”
That morning, while Jennifer prepared two cups of coffee and toast with blueberry jam, her visitor told her everything: from the snowstorm that led him to Ágreda to the powerful impression he had when looking at Sister María Jesús’s face inside a glass display case where her body was miraculously preserved at the monastery that she herself had founded. When he told Jennifer how a tiny medal with Veronica’s image of the “Holy Face” had led him onto a road rich with surprises, and then how that chain had been returned to its legitimate owner on the plane that carried him to Los Angeles, Jennifer was struck by something. A small detail which, in that context, could not be mere chance: while she was in Rome, she had seen a similar medal.
It was when she was in the “dream chamber” at Vatican Radio. Her first day on the job there, after being transferred from Fort Meade by an agent of INSCOM working out of Rome, she remembered having seen the chain, during her inaugural session, hanging around the neck of her instructor, Albert Ferrell. And it was—it had to be—identical to the one the Spaniard had held in his hands.
“Do you know something?” she said at last. “I don’t believe in random occurrences either.”
Carlos was beaming. He knew that, once again, something—or someone—had made the road ahead smoother. Jennifer Narody, comfortably situated on her favorite sofa, recounted the last part of a history in which both of them, in some extraordinary manner, had already played a part.
“Until a short time ago I held the rank of lieutenant in the United States Army. I worked in the Intelligence Division,” she said. “My work was associated with the area known as ‘psychic espionage,’ which was limited to people with specific extrasensory abilities. As you can imagine, our activities were highly secret.”
Carlos nodded.
“During the last two years I worked out of Rome to participate in a project whose goal was to explore the borderline powers of the human mind. Psychic abilities, such as the transmission of thought or remote vision by means of people trained in clairvoyance. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Perfectly.”
Carlos was still astonished. He had heard about this type of project on various occasions. He had even read in Mysteries about a certain “Psychic War” between the old Soviet Union and the United States. But he never thought he would meet someone involved in such a program.
“During the Reagan administration,” Jennifer went on, “my team attempted to emulate the achievements of the Russians, who were able to spy on far-flung military installations with the help of persons with psychic abilities. They formed an army of astral travelers who could fly toward their objectives. But, unfortunately, the greater part of these experiments failed. Simply put, they co
uld not control the experiments at will. Our commanding officer was discharged.”
“And when did you enter the scene?”
“In the mideighties. The psychic espionage project was never completely shut down because, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we knew that the Russians would continue their experiments. They secretly continued working with those borderline powers. What is more, the Russians had sold some of their psychic discoveries to other governments.”
“I see.”
“To top it all off, we had a limited budget, so that the institute where I worked, INSCOM, decided to go into business with a discreet ally who was interested in the same subjects.”
“An ally?”
“Yes, the Vatican.”
Carlos shook his head.
“Don’t be surprised. The Vatican has been investigating questions for centuries that we’ve only taken an interest in during the last few decades. Consider, for example, that they were the ones who coined the term ‘bilocation’ to refer to astral voyages. Church records are full of such cases. The Curia was interested to know the psychic mechanisms that provoked such out-of-body experiences, and we came to an acceptable agreement: they’d provide the historical documentation, and we’d provide the technology that would allow them to reproduce such states.”
“What kind of technology?”
Jennifer paused for a moment to finish her last piece of toast. She felt as though she was being liberated from a great weight, as if this conversation were the therapy she had needed ever since she left Italy. Carlos continued to watch her closely, observing her every gesture.
“The institute I worked for,” she continued, “sent one of our men to Rome, to Vatican Radio. He was a sound engineer who had worked in Virginia. Before my arrival he was already aware of the fact that certain types of sacred music aided the psychic doubling of the body. He definitely wore one of the medals that you were talking about.”
“And only by means of music could they . . .”
“Music wasn’t the important thing. The crucial element was the vibratory frequency of a particular sound. That was what provoked the brain to act in a determined manner, making intense psychic experiences possible.”
The Lady in Blue Page 29
