Death Mask

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.

3

23:00—Ávila

Ávila, the City of Stones and Saints.

That was how the place was described in the tourist brochure Annja picked up from the dispenser just inside the monastery walls. Footsteps echoed deeper inside the medieval building. She thumbed through the leaflet. It was the standard tourist fodder, ready to guide her to all kinds of attractions inside the city. She was only interested in the monastery. She handed over five euros at the glass window and put the change in a tip jar for renovations. Annja couldn’t tell whether the look the young museum worker gave her was admiring or disapproving, but the way his eyes lingered was most certainly lacking piety.

She gave him a smile that raised the color in his cheeks and followed the sign that led inside.

The monastery consisted of two floors built over three cloisters, and according to the floor plan, the initial building had begun in 1482 but only been completed in 1493. She skipped through much of what came next, looking for the name Tomás de Torquemada. It would be too much to expect any kind of reference to a mask in the literature, but she found plenty of the usual tourist facts broken down for easy consumption. A simple engraving showed him in profile, bearing the familiar tonsure of a Dominican friar. He looked...ordinary. It was hard to believe she was looking at the man behind one of the most ruthless religious purges of all time. There were a few cursory details about the Inquisition and the fact that Torquemada had lived out his final days here, being buried within the grounds of the monastery five years after its completion.

Two elderly washerwomen busied themselves with mops, sluicing them across the stone floor of the cloister of Silencio. They worked in silence and Annja had no intention of making them uncomfortable by asking questions. She walked quickly across the wet floor, shrugging in apology to the women. There was no sign of anyone remotely official, which would have made asking questions easier. She worked her way slowly around the room, looking for any kind of visual clue in the decor.

“It’s quite plain compared to the Reyes cloister,” a man said behind her. She hadn’t heard his footsteps on the tiled floor.

Annja turned, expecting to come face-to-face with a monk. He wasn’t. Or at least he wasn’t dressed like one. He wore a lightweight charcoal suit with a matching shirt. “Sorry?”

“The Cloister of the King. You were looking at the ceiling?”

She glanced up at the vaulted Gothic-style ceiling above her, surprised that it hadn’t been the first thing to catch her attention when she entered the cloister.

“There was a beautiful mosaic in the dome, the work of a Mudéjar—a Moor who remained in Spain after the country began to be reclaimed for Christians—but it’s long gone now, I’m afraid. Lost to time and vandals. The Mudéjars kept their faith even though they couldn’t make their devotions publicly. Such a sad time for our country. Our great shame. And yes, I say that with no hint of irony, given who is buried next door.” He offered her a wry smile. “The word Mudéjar also refers to the style of architecture, but in this case the ceiling was the work of a single man, or so we have come to believe. Sadly, as I said, it has long since been lost. Of course, not all Moors remained faithful—many converted to Christianity. They were called Moriscos, but that was a title that came loaded with contempt and mistrust.”

So many Moors and Jews had been driven out of the country or forced to renounce their own faith under fear of death, and yet others were allowed to continue with their lives. But why? The cynical side of Annja wanted to say money. So often it came down to money. People bought their freedom with it. Was that what had happened all those years ago? The Mudéjars had paid off the Inquisition?

“Might I ask, are you planning on making a program about us?”

“Sorry?” she said again, running about three steps behind the man as he moved from subject to subject.

“You are Annja Creed, aren’t you? I may be speaking out of turn, but I rather hope you aren’t planning on featuring Friar Torquemada in an episode of your Chasing History’s Monsters. He was one, of course, but he was a very human one,” he said, holding out a hand. “Francesco Maffrici. I am the curator here.”

She smiled, shaking his hand. His palm was soft against hers. “No, no, this isn’t exactly work, more a personal interest.”

“Excellent, then anything I can do to help, I am at your service.”

“Well, obviously, I am interested in Torquemada, but not for the show.”

The man nodded, offering her a wry smile. “The man and the Inquisition. They provide our daily bread.”

“I can well imagine. Actually, I’m interested particularly in the Mask of Torquemada. I understand that it was buried with him?” She offered it as a question rather than a statement, inviting him to correct her.

“That rather depends on which version of the legend you want to believe.”

Annja was intrigued. Two legends meant a mystery. Not that she had time for one.

“It wasn’t uncommon for a death mask to be made to capture the features of the recently deceased. Generally they would use wax and plaster. And perhaps that was so with Torquemada, but then you have to ask yourself—why would something like that be buried with him? That’s not so much a legend as a rationalization. The second hypothesis suggests that a mask was cast in metal some time before his death so that others could act in his place while he was ill. It would have meant that anyone could have overseen the tortures of the Inquisition, making it clear that they were acting in his name. Of course, once he was dead there was no need for it. None of his successors found the need to follow his example. Perhaps they were not quite so driven to inspire fear or could more easily hide the delight they took in their work?”

“You think he enjoyed it?”

“Oh, absolutely. Without doubt. His interests lay far beyond driving non-Christians out of Spain. It might have begun that way, a means of driving Jews and Muslims out of our land, but it lit a fire in the dark places of his soul. In the earliest days of the Inquisition, the Moors and Jews were given the option to convert, which meant they were able to remain in the country as second-class citizens. Later, their conversion offered no protection. The Inquisition turned on them and on other minorities that were considered to be outside the teachings of the Bible.”

“If only they’d been the last ones to take that approach,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

“We never learn the lessons of the past, despite the threat of being doomed to repeat it,” he said. “But I suppose you know that as well as anyone.”

They both fell silent for a moment as they considered the wider implications of what they’d been saying. It was a comfortable silence, interrupted only by the clatter of metal buckets and the spilling of water. The two women seemed to bicker rapidly, but the words quickly turned to laughter and they set about mopping up again.

“We should leave them to it,” the curator said, turning his back on the women. “I have something interesting you might like to see.”

Maffrici led the way out of the cloister toward the church that stood inside the monastery walls. He opened the door for her to follow. Annja noticed he was wearing white gloves, and assumed he was being careful not to leave greasy fingerprints on the relics here. It was a good precaution, with so many enzymes secreted by even carefully washed human skin. Years and years of handling would damage just about anything, and why risk making a further impact?

Annja was only half listening as Maffrici talked her through the architecture of the building. Garin was still sitting in that chair somewhere, battered and bloody and needing her help...help that, right now, she was in no position to give. She needed help of her own to find the mask before the seconds ran out.

That meant being direct, even if it felt rude. “Is there any more you can tell me about the mask?”

“Not really. I’m afraid that there are no pictures of it, not even a drawing from the time, as far as I am aware.”

“But you are sure it was buried with his body?”

He nodded. “Assuming it actually existed, yes, but you know how it is—stories get passed down from generation to generation, records get lost. A lot of truth becomes legend, but much more legend becomes truth. What we believe has a tendency to change over the generations. There is almost always a kernel of truth at the core of any enduring story, but it is so much harder to identify it among the embellishments that come later.”

Annja tried to read between the lines. “Are you suggesting Torquemada might have not been as bad as he’s currently portrayed?”

“Quite the reverse, actually—that he was perhaps not as pious and devout as he is now remembered to be. For a man who was a scourge on nonbelievers and heretics, isn’t it peculiar that he carried what he believed to be the horn of a unicorn for protection?”

“No more crazy than the zealots who think they’re carrying a piece of the True Cross,” she said.

“Ah, perhaps not, but does a man wielding supernatural protections—the objects of witchcraft—strike you as someone who believes absolutely in the protection of his God?” The curator came to a halt. “His tomb was broken into in the 1830s, his bones removed and burned here, on this spot, mimicking an auto-da-fé, the kind of act of faith Torquemada would have ordered during his lifetime. It was something in the nature of poetic justice. The Inquisition had fallen out of favor and the people were no longer afraid of the Church in the way they had been for hundreds of years. So much of the monastery was destroyed thanks to those revolutionary hammers. Which is of course how we lost that wonderful Mudéjar ceiling.”

“And that was when the mask was removed?” Or more likely destroyed, she thought.

“There is no record of anything other than his remains having been removed from the tomb, but that was not the first time his rest had been disturbed.”

“The tomb had been broken into before?”

“Indeed, yes. Only a couple of years after his death, in fact. Records indicate that a ring was taken from the remains. It was recovered and returned to the corpse. The thief was given the same treatment as many of Torquemada’s own victims. Of course, that doesn’t mean something else wasn’t taken and never returned.”

Annja was already running the permutations in her head. If the mask had remained in the tomb until the 1830s, then it had almost certainly been destroyed in the desecration or fallen into the possession of some rich private collector with a penchant for the macabre. The latter possibility would only make the treasure hunt more difficult. Theft a few years after the dead man’s burial was preferable, since it meant there was much more time for the mask to have become lost and ultimately forgotten. But its chances of survival increased markedly if it had been stolen in the nineteenth century. The question was, where was it most likely to have gone next?

“There is a plaque,” the curator said. “Let me show you.”

The man led her through to what remained of Torquemada’s tomb. It was little more than a symbolic plaque.

“‘Here Lies the Reverend Tomás de Torquemada, One of the Holy Cross, the Inquisitor General. This House’s Founder. Died 1518, on 16 September,’” Annja translated from the Latin inscription.

“Very impressive,” said the curator. “It’s rare to find a—” he checked himself before saying woman “—person these days with a fair grasp of Latin.”

“I’m all about the dead languages.” She laughed, spotting another inscription on the wall. “They look great on the dating profiles.” That confused the poor guy for a moment, reminding her that they were communicating in what was obviously his second or even third language.

She mouthed the next words without actually making a sound. May This Plague of Heretics Pass.

“I don’t think he really wanted to be buried here. It was more of a political decision than anything else,” Maffrici said. “He was born in Valladolid and never really severed ties with the city. He established a tribunal for the Inquisition there and remained connected to the Convent of San Francisco until his dying day. The strange thing is...” He broke off suddenly, as if not sure he should be speculating so freely in front of her. Annja waited patiently while he considered whatever it was he was about to say—or not say.

“What is it?” she asked eventually, breaking into his private world.

“There’s a novel,” he said. “El hereje. The Heretic by Miguel Delibes, one of our most celebrated novelists. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? The inscription there reminds me of it. The book is set in Valladolid and describes something called the path of the heretic, or the pass. But that is not what I just realized...what...stopped me. I haven’t really thought about this before, but it has been staring me in the face for such a very long time.” He rubbed his white-gloved hands together as though in appreciation or greed. “The ceiling, the one that’s missing from the dome...that depicted Valladolid, too.”

“So what you’re saying is, in terms of Torquemada at least, all roads lead to Valladolid,” she said, grinning. It was too much for this all to be coincidence. Of course, there was no guarantee that the mask had been taken there, but there was a strong connection between this place, the Grand Inquisitor and the city of Valladolid. She checked her watch. She could make the ride in an hour, ignoring speed limits, but first she had to meet Roux’s hacker.

4

22:30—Ávila

Annja had to ask for directions to Giorgio’s. It wasn’t on the main drag, but rather tucked away on a quaint side street that, as she walked down it, gave her the distinct impression of time travel. Each step seemed to take her back a decade until she was somewhere around the fifteenth or sixteenth century, surrounded by amazing buildings that had withstood the Inquisition and the civil war and the ravages of change. Giorgio’s was one of those hip spots where the beautiful people went and made sure that everyone else knew just how hip it was.

Annja checked her reflection in the Roadster’s side mirror, the bike helmet in her hand, long hair spilling over bike leathers. She grinned. She certainly didn’t resemble some young, upwardly mobile stockbroker, or a woman in search of one.

She opened the door, and even before she’d taken her first step inside, she received a mixture of looks from the clientele that could have frozen a penguin on an ice floe. The women scowled in disapproval, sneering at the skintight leathers, while the men leaned forward, interested, engaged. She ignored both. She was used to being stared at. It was part of being a celebrity. Even if she wasn’t a big star, there was always someone on the street who would do a double take, obviously thinking, Aren’t you the woman from the TV show?

She scanned the room. There were at least a dozen guys sitting alone in different parts of the café. A few had shot a glance—or more than a glance—in her direction, but none of them had raised a hand in recognition. She didn’t hold any of their gazes, and it didn’t take long for most of them to look away, drawn back to their computer screens and cell phones. As she walked toward the counter at the far side of the café, she noticed that one man was still watching her. There was a paperback copy of Howard Fast’s Torquemada next to his untouched cappuccino. That was enough to convince Annja he was her guy.

She walked to his table and sat down.

“Annja,” the young man said. He didn’t rise to shake her hand. And unlike the rest of the men in the vicinity, he didn’t appear to be mentally stripping her leathers. “You made good time. I’m Oscar.”

She sat down across from him. He was barely old enough to be out of university, but when it came to tech wizardry it was a case of “the younger, the better” these days. His tousled, sun-bleached hair was stylishly unkempt. He fit in here far more than she did. His olive skin was offset against a white cotton shirt. Not that she was one to judge a book by its cover, but this kid was the polar opposite of every computer nerd she’d ever met. She didn’t know what to make of that, but Roux trusted him with Garin’s life. She knew that much.

“So, the old man said you needed to trace the source of a video stream, right? Shouldn’t be too difficult.” He held his hand out across the table. For a weird second she thought he was asking her to dance, but then she realized he wanted her phone. She handed it over. “You go order a drink,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She watched as he connected the phone to his laptop via USB cable. As soon as the jack went in, Oscar was lost in concentration. Stylish or not, he was definitely a tech nerd.

Annja ordered herself a latte from the barista. Drink in hand, she rejoined him at the table, but didn’t say a word. The meeting wasn’t about social niceties; it was about helping Garin, plain and simple. And in any case, the kid was absolutely oblivious to the rest of the world, his entire focus zoned down to the screen in front of him. The coffee was hot but good and went down creamy.

“Okay,” Oscar said after a few seconds, though he wasn’t talking to her. “Good. Yes. Okay...no. Not good.” He looked up at her across the top of the laptop. “Whoever wrote this code knows their stuff. And they’re determined to stay hidden. The signal is being bounced through half a dozen countries, via anonymous routers, and each connection in the chain is changing its IP addresses every minute or so. It’s not impossible to trace, but it’s not easy. For a start, it’s going to take time to crack the algorithm they’re using to cycle through IP addresses, so we can predict where they’re going to switch to next and keep the line open long enough to trace it all the way back to source.”

Annja had a decent idea what he was talking about, but there was a huge difference between a decent idea and the kind of understanding the hacker obviously had.

“But you can trace it?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Good. That’s all I needed to hear.”

His fingers moved quickly across the keyboard, picking out commands in rapid-fire succession, then pausing a beat as he waited for responses to come back to him.

Oscar swore under his breath, suddenly working faster.

“There’s a worm embedded in the file,” he said. “It’s trying to take over my system. It’s got the processor going crazy, and the core temp is rising. I think it’s trying to blow my battery. Ingenious bastard. Well, at least this is going to be fun now.”

He turned the machine slightly so Annja could see what was happening—not that she knew what she was looking at beyond a guy hammering out what seemed to be random letters on a keyboard.

“I’m just making sure I’ve got a backup of everything here. Assume the worst,” he said, but even as he spoke, streams of numbers and letters filled the screen, superimposed with picture after picture. The deepening furrow in the hacker’s brow worried her. So much for “shouldn’t be too difficult.”

He swore again and killed the Net connection, disabling the Wi-Fi. That didn’t slow the virus now that it was in his hard drive, and it continued chewing up data and spitting it out again, faster and faster until trying to focus on it hurt Annja’s eyes. The fan whined as the first faint whiff of smoke curled up from beneath the laptop.

Oscar acted quickly, closing the lid and flipping the machine over.

It took two hands to release the catch and pop the battery, but the second he did it heads turned, drawn by the stench of burning.

He dropped the battery, staring at the smoldering plastic housing as if his entire understanding of the world had just been betrayed.

“What the hell just happened?” Annja asked.