Order of the Black Sun Box Set 7

by Preston William Child

  It was not so much the landmark she wished to visit, but to lay low in the little town that slept in its mighty shadow. Sax was an unassuming little place, full of history and ruinous buildings. At the same time modern life continued running through its veins. Madalina had once driven through there with Javier and remembered the isolated nature of the place, even at full functioning capacity.

  The accommodations there would be cheap, she guessed, so she could figure out a way to get hold of Javier to help them flee Spain. Even though her brother was a painfully straight arrow, she knew he would help her, regardless of his obvious disagreement with her choices. On the other hand, she knew the police must have gotten to him by now, and especially Dr. Sabian.

  He would be the first to look for her; she knew he wasn’t done with her. Madalina feared that nobody would ever believe that the respected shrink would be serving more sinister ends, so she’d kept her therapy sessions secret . . . mostly. All she’d ever told Javier was the superficial stuff he’d requested her to report on, but she knew he could detect anomalies in her behavior, even if he never said anything outright.

  I wonder if he knows? she thought as she stared at the steel tracks recessed between the concrete slabs of the platforms. If he knows more than he lead on . . . he’s smart enough to have seen what was really going on during my sessions, even when I denied it to myself. Her green eyes ran along the smooth edges of the tracks, following the double lines away from the station as far as she could until they turned into white fire in the glare of the declining sun. Madalina winced at the brightness in her eyes. Who knows how far I can follow these tracks, if I just keep going? I wish I could be like them—just meander and stretch—so that I could be in several places all at once. I would be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

  T the moment there was no way to get hold of Javier that would not betray her position. She had dumped her cell phone that same night, regrettably, and any e-mail correspondence would be tracked, no doubt. The problem was that she had no friends. There was nobody who would run such an errand for her—play messenger to reach her brother—and Javier’s friends would very likely turn her in. Or would they?

  “Come, Madi! Come, let’s go!” Raul shouted suddenly, roughly leaping from her lap to point out the oncoming train. “Let’s go see the castle!”

  “Alright, I’m coming.” She smiled, picking up their bags to board the train.

  “Hey, they are following us too,” he remarked, eagerly rushing to help her with his bag. Madalina smiled at his zest, but his words filled her with dread. A rush of adrenaline numbed her legs for a moment, and in her mind she envisioned her flight and her subsequent subjugation at the hands of the police. She dared ask, “Who is following us, Raul?”

  Happily he pointed at the train tracks on the other side of the train car. “The tracks, look! On one side we follow them to find our way, and on that side,” he pointed behind the car, “they follow us.”

  “Jesus, boy, my heart,” she mumbled in relief, and looked back at the signboard that identified her soon-to-be former sanctuary one last time.

  Castillo.

  9

  Caballo

  Capt. Sanchez drove home, flabbergasted by Javier Mantara’s confession earlier in his office. In his twenty-five years of service, the captain had never once heard such an accusation, and that included eleven years in Madrid’s Aluche district security section, a non-profit protection service he worked for after hours. Aluche served him up back alley abortions gone wrong, incestuous drug runners keeping the plunger in the family, brutal gang killings, and underground organ trafficking. It made him realize that the saints revered by the spiritually desperate offered no protection and that most who got to the bottom of the bottle would be better off using it to slit their own throats.

  As he turned into the highly fenced complex where he lived, he could not help but feel some truth lurking in Javier Mantara’s words. The captain was not well versed in the religion Javier spoke of, but he had heard of it before during a raid on a murder suspect’s house.

  Santeria, he thought to himself as he opened his car door and stepped out into the humid night. It has similar roots to Voodoo, that I know, but it also has a Catholic flavor, I think? Slowly, as he considered the tiny shards of recollection about that old case, Sanchez gradually began to find validity in Javier’s claim.

  He did not know the murder/kidnapping suspect personally; therefore he had to remain objective about the case. Sanchez took Javier’s warning into account, though, and as any diligent investigator would, he intended on at least looking into the young man’s accusation before continuing with his regular procedure.

  Even though his wife was busy preparing dinner, the house was relatively quiet. However, the neighbors had a hideous habit of watching football loud enough to deafen anyone in a five-block radius.

  “Hola, darling,” he said.

  “How was your day, Pedro?” She smiled, looking at his reflection in the kitchen window.

  Through the small maze of lobby meeting hallway and hallway meeting two doorways, he went straight for the fridge. Inside it was what beckoned Sanchez, and he suffered a mild scolding for the sake of that glass of jeropiga.

  “No drinking before dinner!” she reprimanded playfully.

  Sanchez slouched over and kissed her, begging in his best puppy-yelp, “Just one, por favor? I have a lot I have to research tonight and I’m going to need something to let me lose my troubles just a little. Por favor, Lira?”

  “One,” she yielded.

  “One,” he agreed.

  His mind was racing as he tried to remember the details of the old case, but finally he was more interested in the robust beauty of the Portuguese wine he had poured.

  “I promised a young man today that I would check something important out,” he said aloud as he strolled into his cramped living room to locate the house laptop. His wife heard her adorable husband babbling to an unseen guest in the other room, evoking a giggle from her.

  “Javier, just let me have some mother’s milk and I’ll get right to your weird little story, my friend.” The police captain’s thick fingers made quick work of his shirt buttons and soon after he sank onto the couch, wine glass aloft. A mediocre gut was released from his prim posture, dressed in a white vest that divided his uniform shirt. With a glorious sigh, he took pause to find himself, sipping at the sweet wine before opening the lid of the laptop.

  By the third glass he had downloaded several PDFs on the subject of Santeria. Although he was tipsy, the wine did not blunt the officer’s deductive powers at all. In fact, the alcohol loosened up his rigid logic a bit and allowed him to color outside the lines of the picture. His eyes raced across the countless lines of information as he mumbled the words that stood out to him.

  “Afro-Cuban in origins . . . okay . . . little different from Voodoo,” he muttered in the unhealthy light of the screen.

  His wife shook her head, amazed at his disobedience.

  “How many have you had, Pedro?” she asked. “Dinner is almost ready.”

  But he was deeply engrossed, whispering to himself about the religion, trying to find a connection between its practices and a shrink brainwashing a woman into becoming a witch. It sounded even more preposterous when he said it out loud, but his wife didn’t look as cynical as he had thought she would.

  “Interesting,” she said, looking impressed with his efforts.

  “Deals with the saints of Catholicism, right?” He took a sip of wine and kept reading over two different sites open on four tabs.

  She sat down, wringing the dishcloth between her hands as she looked up in thought.

  “I think so, but there is a twist, I think. Why are you . . .? Pedro, was there another homicide like the one in Madrid that time?” she sighed.

  “Nope. Well, yes, but not like you think.” He carried on reading aloud. “Uses a similar system, but slaves were forced to observe Catholic saints instead of their own . . . Orich
á . . .” Sanchez got stuck on the word. Clicking on one of the other pages he found something to elucidate. “Orichá. Here we go. These are the semi-divine beings, venerated as saints, which is where the name Santería originates from.”

  “Sounds exactly like Voodoo to me,” she scoffed. “It just comes from another part of the world and has other names for the spirits they use.”

  He looked at his wife. “Are you sure?”

  “Sí. I don’t know Santería that well, but I know Voodoo from my theology seminars.” She shrugged indifferently. “What you’re reading sounds like a sister-religion. Both use spirits to communicate with their god, each with their own aspects.”

  Nodding, he perused another tab’s information and read it under his breath. “They replaced the names of the beings they worship with the Catholic saints as not to be discovered practicing their own religion.” Sanchez shook his head. “It seems freedom is a lot of work. Not being free to worship your own god takes a lot of energy. People should leave other people alone and let them have their own gods and cultures, you know?” he said loud enough for her to hear him in the kitchen.

  From there she answered, “Says a descendant of the Spanish Inquisition.” He heard her laughing at the irony. “Our ancestors explored so many lands and forced many of those very tribes into forced religion. How awful that Spain is known for such organized barbarism.”

  Sanchez felt insulted. The tone of his voice conveyed his disapproval. “Well, I wasn’t there. I didn’t do those things. Their sins are not mine, no matter what the faith says.”

  “Oh, relax,” she smiled. “Don’t get riled up over something that doesn’t even pertain to you. You’re looking into something for a friend, no?”

  “Oh shit, yes!” he snapped out of his contemplative state. “I am supposed to find out if they have witchdoctors.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “This man wished me to believe that a well-known and respected psychiatrist or psychologist,” he waved away the confusion of the terms, “from Sagunto has been turning his sister into a witch. He says that he thinks this doctor was inducing trances in his sister by hypnosis and allowing spirits to possess her. Ghastly, don’t you think?”

  She looked taken aback where she stood. “It is ghastly! My God, are such things still the norm these days? Scary to think that they still try that stuff here and now.”

  “That is what I thought,” he replied, feeling way too relaxed to care that he was slurring his words a bit. “But you know, darling, you know . . . I don’t know why, because it doesn’t make sense, but I almost believe this young man. Something in my gut says that he is onto something.”

  “Well, keep looking,” she suggested. “Truth be told, I’m curious myself now.”

  He entered more keywords in the search bar, trying to type soberly. “And stop drinking so much!” she hollered from the kitchen, as if she could read his mind. He was about to give her a dismissive wave in the solitude of the living room, when he stumbled across a page that offered Santería terminology. The neat columns compelled him to scan the alien looking words and odd spellings for something useful. Suddenly his eyes grew wide. His discovery was so spot-on that he almost smashed the foot of the glass when he slammed it down.

  “Caballo? Cab-ba-cabballo? Caballo!” he stammered. “Lira! Lira! I found something that could stretch to Javier’s claim!” he exclaimed as she rushed in. He held up a hand to announce what he was reading. “They call them caballo!”

  “Horse?” she asked, looking perplexed. “Why horse?”

  “Listen, listen,” he said, “During a trance, people are possessed by these Orichá, to communicate, they say.” He looked up suspiciously. “But possession is not always for words, hey? Sometimes they are . . . .”

  “For deeds,” she completed his theory. “So you think this could be true?”

  “I do now. Look, I think this type of mumbo-jumbo is all horseshit, excuse the pun. But this, if he could induce trances in this woman, she could very well have been controlled and forced to commit that murder,” he declared.

  “Alright, I get what you’re saying, Pedro, but how do you prove that in a court of law? And how do you think it will look if a renowned police captain comes out with witchcraft as a motive for the murder?” his wife reminded him carefully. “You will lose your goddamn job if you say things like that in your report, not to mention what the public and the media will do with your reputation.”

  “I know, I know,” he moaned, grabbing at the empty glass with a look of abject defeat. “Unless I get proof from the horse’s mouth,” he said mysteriously.

  “Darling, seriously, enough with the wordplay now,” she said. “You can’t get proof of witchcraft from a medical professional, and if it’s true that he can do these things, what if he gets to you?”

  “He will not,” the well-quenched Sanchez professed. “I won’t let him know that I’m onto him. As head investigator and agent of the law, he is obligated to give me all records pertaining to his treatment of Madalina Mantara, Lira. And I will have another psychologist have a look at the hypnosis sessions so that they can tell me if anything was done unethically.”

  “Just be careful,” she warned. “Witchcraft is just nefarious psycho-sex, and very easy to fall prey to without even knowing it.”

  “Psycho-sex?” he asked, amused. His educated wife lifted her eyebrow, cradled his face snugly in her palms, and whispered, “The mindfuck.”

  10

  Bad News

  Dr. Nina Gould felt her chest burn, but she did not relent. The torment was almost unbearable and her lungs begged for respite by the time she reached Taylor’s Brae, but she couldn’t stop now. They were almost on her heel and she could never allow them to get to her, even if it killed her. Nina’s dark tresses rebelled against their elastic restraints and jabbed at her brow as perspiration inflamed her eyes. The inclines impaired her speed greatly, but she persisted on will alone for fear of their attack.

  “Oh my God,” she huffed so heavily that she thought her heart would burst. “Why did I leave my house tonight? Why the hell didn’t I listen to my gut feeling?” Finally Nina turned the corner, opting to take the way past Argyll Square to get into Albany Street.

  She could hear their voices now, taunting her, catching up quicker than she could flee. In the distance a glimmer of hope presented itself. The sight of the police station gave her renewed strength to make it there before disaster struck. Nina moaned out loud with every step she took to get away, but her knees were buckling dangerously.

  Don’t fall! her inner voice wailed in panic. Don’t fall, or you will rue it! Don’t let these ingrates get you! Think of Sam. Think of Purdue and Paddy. They will have to hear about what happened to you through some hospital or worse, morgue!

  “Get her!” a man shouted from behind Nina, a few feet from gaining on her. She kept her eye on the nearing sanctuary of the police station, but her lungs could not take another breath.

  So, were all those those Marlboro’s worth it? that bitchy voice of reason hounded her. Not now. Really, she countered, sucking up air like a drowning cat. How do you get yourself into these situations?

  Her muscular shape evaded the pack behind her as she found her second wind, psychologically forcing herself to sprint it out to make it to the cop shop before they could get to her. Nina’s eyes stung, blurring her vision, but a tall shape appeared and descended from the front steps onto the pavement where she was running for her life.

  “Mayor Tomlin!” she mouthed, but breath eluded her. Behind her the men cussed and slowed down as the mayor received the petite historian into his grasp. Nina went limp as he put the towel around her, but she stayed on her feet. One by one, the rest of the pack caught up to her, each getting a towel from the other officials.

  “Jaysus, Nina,” panted the man who chased her, “did you have jet fuel in your oatmeal this morning?” The sixty-four-year-old barrister bent over next to her. Nina smiled, but she couldn’t spea
k yet. She’d been smoking for too many years to recover quickly from something this strenuous. All around her the runners of the informal monthly Snail Trail race, promoted by the local Frail Care Society and St. Ignatius Council for the Elderly, gathered. They looked like heaving towel pimples on the straight, even road.

  “Well done, Dr. Gould,” Mavis huffed. She was a seventy-year-old retired schoolteacher, living in Oban since 1984, who enjoyed Nina’s adventures on historical excursions that she read about in high profile newspapers every now and then. “You bested us this time.”

  “Thanks Mavis,” Nina answered happily, feeling a charge of laughter build up. They treated her like a champion for outrunning them, people just about twice her age! But she enjoyed the company of the elderly, and the after parties at the pub were always a great night out. The historian accepted a few more pats on the back from the very people who should be proud of themselves for even keeping up to her instead.

  “H-hey, hey, Nina? Got a fag?” Harry, a sixty-nine-year-old smoker like herself, asked.

  “No, Harry,” she frowned. “Christ, give your lungs time to un-implode, will ya?”

  “I know,” he shrugged, “but I would kill for one right now.”

  Nina slipped the towel from her shoulders as she stood up straight. She pat Harry on the back, “I know, sir, I know. If I had one on me, we’d be sharing it.”

  “You are a terrible example, Dr. Gould,” the mayor chuckled.

  Burying her hand in her side, she took a cocky stance and raised her eyebrow at him. “You should be grateful that I even came out tonight, Mayor. I had a date with too much YouTube and a bottle of ale, but I made the effort of gracing you with my presence and beating the snot out of these pensioners, so . . . .”