Death Mask

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.

“Some serious piece of code. Some seriously serious piece of code. The virus overloaded the system resources, then created a surge back into the battery. That’s not an easy thing.”

“So we’re up against someone who knows what they’re doing—IP masking, making computers burn up...”

“Yep, we’re not talking spotty teenagers in their bedroom, that’s for sure.”

“Is there anything you can do?”

He looked at the sorry state of the battery. “This thing’s fried, but there’s always something that can be done if you’re resourceful enough,” he said, fishing inside his laptop bag for a small device that he connected to her phone. “I’m going to make an image of your phone—basically clone it—and see if I can trick the code into thinking it’s your phone that’s trying to access the file, not my laptop. It could take me a while, but sooner or later I’ll crack it.”

“Unfortunately, time’s the one thing I don’t have.”

“This is personal now. Trust me. I’ll get you what you need. There’s something I can tell you right now, though.”

“What’s that?”

“You were watching a recording. It wasn’t a video chat.”

5 (#u1c5f033e-aa37-5642-bed7-bc2054a075c0)

21:05—Valladolid

Plaza Mayor was already a hive of early-morning activity, bustling with tourists and locals when Annja reached Valladolid.

Even with the steady hubbub, the huge plaza still felt like a wide-open space in the claustrophobic Old Town. The city wasn’t what she’d been hoping to find, even if she wasn’t entirely sure what that had been. The buildings might not have been as thoroughly modern as many of the cities she’d visited around the world—all glass, concrete and steel—but everything here was still far too new to be hiding any ancient secrets. Almost all of the buildings appeared to have been built in the past hundred and fifty years. There was absolutely nothing amid all of the banks, gift shops, cafés and restaurants that could have been standing even two hundred years after Torquemada’s death, never mind the early days of the Inquisition.

Annja slammed down the kickstand and parked the bike up. She walked around the outskirts of the plaza, taking a closer look at each building, but no matter how desperately she willed it, she found nothing of interest. Feeling her mood darkening, she realized she hadn’t eaten all day. She didn’t want to stop the search, not when time was so short, but she wasn’t going to be any use to Garin if she starved herself, so she went inside the nearest café and ordered a coffee and a Caesar salad. It would be enough to keep her going.

There were a dozen metal tables and chairs outside the café, so she picked one and, like a tourist, stretched out her legs to ease the cramped muscles and soak up the sun while she waited for her meal. On any other day, she could have happily wasted a couple of hours just drinking in the ambience, but today wasn’t a day like any other. Today she had a job to do. She pulled out her phone and called Roux. She knew he’d be in the air. All she wanted to do was leave a voice mail he could check as he landed. Her message was to the point. “I’m in Valladolid. Following leads I picked up at Ávila. Everything points to this place being central to Torquemada’s tale. I’m not sure what I’m looking for. I’m just hoping I’ll recognize it when I see it.” She killed the call.

A flyer on the table caught her eye. She picked it up. The flyer showed the same image as the billboard outside a theater on the opposite side of the square—a woman dressed in nothing but black underwear, smoking a cigarette from a long holder, obviously advertising some kind of burlesque show. It seemed out of place among the restrained buildings. It took Annja a moment to realize that the woman was actually a man. That brought a smile to her lips; clearly things weren’t always what they seemed to be. There was a good lesson there. First impressions could be deceptive. She flipped the leaflet over and read the small blurb that explained the show was taking place at the Teatro Zorrilla.

“It’s very good, even if you can’t speak Spanish.” Annja looked up to see a waitress clearing plates from one of the neighboring tables. She was surprised that the waitress spoke to her in English until she realized she must have overheard at least part of the message she left for Roux.

“I’m afraid I’m not going to be around long enough to take in a show.”

“Ah, that’s a shame.”

The girl smiled and started back toward the door, balancing a tray of dirty cups.

“I know this might seem like a stupid question,” Annja said. “But I don’t suppose you know where the Convent of San Francisco used to be?”

The girl shrugged. “Sorry. Was it around here?”

“I was really hoping so, but I can’t see anything to even suggest where it might have been.”

“Well, it depends how old it is. Most of the buildings around the plaza were built in the 1800s, I think, and some of it is more modern than that. A lot of the old buildings that were here before that were demolished to make way for the new. There’s some kind of plaque on the theater—one of those historic-landmark things—but I can’t remember what it says. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. Thanks, anyway,” Annja said. “I’ll go take a look.”

The theater was closed, its front doors locked and everything inside dark. Even the box office. The plaque was on the wall beside the main door. It detailed how the Zorrilla had been built on the original site of the Convent of San Francisco.

A dead end, Annja thought miserably, realizing how much time she’d wasted only to reach a standstill.

She was already three hours down and all she had to show for it was a burlesque theater built on the site of an old convent. That wasn’t going to help Garin.

Or was it?

That very much depended upon what had happened to the convent and whether the theater had been constructed in its place or on top of its partial remains. She’d seen enough buildings that had been built directly on top of previous ones to know that there was a chance the foundations and any lower levels might—just might—have survived beneath the new one. There was an entire city beneath Chicago, for instance, not that you could access it. Annja had no guarantee that there was anything of the convent left, not even a few broken stones. There was a chance, though, and in the absence of any other leads, she was going to take it and hope the old builders had simply chosen to bury the convent, or the cellars and mausoleum level at least, rather than waste time and resources demolishing it. Hell, it was even possible the lower levels had been used in the construction of the theater’s foundations, but she doubted she’d be that lucky. Given the way her day had been going thus far, the place had probably burned to the ground.

Hammering on the front door brought no response.