Death Mask. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ was just sent a link to a video chat. Garin was on the other end. There was a clock strapped to his chest and a bomb under his chair. He was in a bad way. Beaten bloody.”

      “Couldn’t happen to a nicer chap.”

      “This is serious,” she said. “In less than twenty-four hours that clock hits zero and the bomb detonates, taking Garin with it. That’s the threat.”

      “I assume this is a kidnapping? So what do they want?”

      She heard him moving around the château, talking with her as he made his way to his study.

      “They’re asking for the Mask of Torquemada,” she said. It came out in a more matter-of-fact way than she’d expected. Everyone knew who Torquemada was—a Dominican zealot who rose up to become the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, rabidly anti-Semitic, the scourge of the Moors—but in all the stories she’d heard of his vile purge, there had never been anything about a mask.

      “Good luck with that,” Roux said dismissively. “It’s been missing for more years than I can remember.”

      “So there is a mask. But you were there, weren’t you? You and Garin.”

      “I may have been,” Roux said, not giving anything away. “But I had other things on my mind than a mad Dominican obsessed with religious purity. I’d already had a lifetime of that. I was in France. It’s not like we had CNN giving us hourly updates as the atrocities rolled on, but yes, you heard things, obviously. It was easy to throw accusations around, and you know the old adages about mud sticking, no smoke without fire. People were willing to believe anything if it meant they were safe from the worst of it, that it couldn’t happen to them. Torquemada was a Christian zealot. He was the driving force behind maybe as many as two hundred thousand Jews fleeing Spain. His priests encouraged another fifty thousand to convert to Christianity. Though I use the term encouraged in its most liberal sense.”

      “And the mask?”

      “If it ever existed, buried with him.”

      “So we’re just talking about a little tomb-robbing here. I guess I can deal with that. Wouldn’t be the first time. Where’s he buried? Do we know?” She had already forwarded the email to Roux, along with the link.

      “Yes. It’s a matter of public record. Unfortunately, his grave was ransacked only a couple of years before the Inquisition was disbanded.” Meaning the task had already become exponentially more difficult than she’d thought it would be in the matter of a few seconds. “They took everything in the tomb. Burned his bones, mask, everything destroyed in an auto-da-fé. An act of faith.” He fell silent and she knew he was waiting for her, giving her the chance to respond and draw her own conclusions.

      “Okay. Well... If it was destroyed, then that’s a death sentence for Garin, so I’m going to ignore that option for now and assume that the mask was stolen and is still intact. People are greedy. If it was worth something, someone might have taken it.” She took the old man’s silence as agreement. “Where was he buried?” It was a starting point. Nothing more than that. But it was better than sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike. Five hundred years was a long time, but Annja hoped the normal logic of a search would hold true: the best place to start looking for something that had been lost was the last place it had been seen.

      “The Monastery of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Ávila,” he said. “I’ll join you there as soon as I can, but first I think I shall pay a visit to Seville.”

      “What has Seville got, apart from a barber and some oranges?”

      The old man chuckled down the long-distance line. “It’s where so much of it began, my dear. As you say, for want of a better place, why not start at the beginning? Seville is where the first of these so-called acts of faith of the Inquisition took place in a particularly grisly sacrifice. Six people were burned alive.”

      “That’s barbaric.” The history of the Inquisition was fascinating in and of itself, but she’d never considered it for the show. There were plenty of human monsters from that time, without the need to invent others for public edification. Using religion and ethnicity as a means of population control turned her stomach. It didn’t matter if it was five hundred years ago in Spain, sixty years ago in Germany or twenty years ago in Rwanda. Genocide was one of the few horrors that didn’t lessen with time.

      “Yes, it was. Just as all forms of human sacrifice are,” Roux agreed. There was a pause. He was obviously thinking. “I won’t touch down for at least three hours, even if I get airborne in the next thirty minutes. I’ll contact you as soon as I land. In the meantime, I’ll make a call. Garin isn’t the only one with a little black book. I know a guy...he might be able to pinpoint the IP address from the webcam. See if we can’t find a source. You look at finding the mask, I’ll try to find Garin—hopefully, we’ll meet somewhere in the middle. Twenty-four hours is a long time.”

      “In politics, maybe. In kidnap and ransom? I’m not so sure.”

      “Just concentrate on getting to Ávila. I’ll give my guy your details and have him meet you there.” Roux hung up without waiting for her response. There was no “good luck.” He was all business, which was exactly what she needed from him right now. There wasn’t a moment to lose. She pillaged the hotel room of anything useful, throwing a change of clothes into a backpack, then zipped herself into her motorbike leathers and headed down to the hotel’s underground garage.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ