The Armageddon Protocol

NINE

Harry returned from the pharmacy with a bag full of bandages and drugs, and was met at the top of the stairs with the aroma of frying vegetables, paprika and rosemary. He stepped into the kitchen to find a young woman steeping saffron in some warm water, her serious face partially obscured by the clouds of steam emanating from the pans on the cooker.

She looked up at him, startled and grabbed a long kitchen knife in self-defence. “Get back!”

“Easy! It’s just me — Harry. I’m here with Lucia.”

She took a closer look and then lowered the knife as she saw the pharmacy bag and the blood on the slashed arm of his suit jacket. “I’m sorry… Lucia told me about what happened,” she said. “I thought you might have been the man who killed Pablo. Lucia is very shaken up. I know she hadn’t known him very long, but when you find someone like that, with his throat…” she shivered and then her eyes fell on the wound on his arm once again.

Harry nodded and waved the paper bag at her and gave a hesitant smile. “I just went out for a few goodies to fix the wound.” He lifted his bloody arm for her to get a better look.

“I’m Marta Gomez, by the way,” she said quietly, and lifted a much-needed glass of wine to her lips. “Sorry to meet under such circumstances.”

Harry’s eyes danced over the bewildering array of ingredients on the worktop. “Coffee and toast would have done the job,” he said with a hesitant smile.

“I’m a chef, Harry,” she said, removing the steeped saffron from the warm water. “I have more ingredients in here than the local market. I’m sure you won’t say no to a quick omelette.”

“Not at all. Where’s Lucia?”

Before Marta could reply, Lucia stepped into the kitchen wearing nothing but two towels — a large, fluffy white one around her body and a red one wrapped around her hair. “Hola, Harry. I’m glad you’re back safe.”

“Hi, yes…” Harry said, unsure where to look.

Marta snatched an olive from the salad and turned on her heel, walking over to the frying pan. After checking the eggs she moved to her right and blocked Harry’s view of the kitchen door and the receding figure of Lucia Serrano. “You want a drink?”

He watched her stir the saffron in and pour a large glass of white wine. “Why not? I see you keep a well-stocked drinks cabinet.”

“A simple Galician albariño,” she said, pouring a second glass and pushing it across the counter to him.

He took a sip. The wine tasted as good as it looked.

Lucia returned to the kitchen. The glamorous red dress was gone, replaced by a pair of Marta’s jeans and a thick, white pullover. She had tied her hair back into a bun and not replaced the makeup that the shower had washed away.

Marta served the omelette on two plates and finished her wine. “I’m going for a shower now. It’s been a long day. Help yourselves.”

Harry watched her leave the room and he took a greedy forkful of the eggs. “Pretty good. You should have something too.”

“I’m not hungry.”

He watched her now. She looked sad, and frightened and without saying another word she moved closer to him and tipped her head to one side as she studied the knife wound on his arm. “Let me clean your wound before we eat. It looks bad.”

“It’s nothing,” he said quickly. “Just a graze. I was lucky.”

“It still needs cleaning — even if you think you’re a lucky man.”

“You make your own luck, don’t you think?”

She shrugged her shoulders as she washed her hands in the running water over the sink. Then she unpacked the bag from the pharmacy and laid out the items he had bought — saline, gauze pads, sterile bandage. “If that’s true, then I certainly don’t know how to make luck. Take your shirt off.”

From his position sitting at the breakfast bar, he looked up at the Spanish woman as she drew closer to him with a bowl of clean water. She soaked the gauze in the water as he removed the shirt, and then she began to dab at the wound. The blade had sliced cleanly across the surface of the extensor digitorum muscle and was less than two inches in length and around half a centimetre in depth.

After she cleaned the wound with the water, she dipped some more gauze in the saline solution and Harry flinched as she dabbed it on the cut. “Don’t be a baby,” she said in a whisper. He could feel her eyes on him as she concentrated on cleaning the wound.

She patted the graze clean with a dry towel and then wrapped the sterile bandage around his upper arm. “I’m all done. You can put your shirt on.”

“If you say so,” he said, and reached for the blood-stained white shirt now hanging over the back of one of the chairs.

It was then that she began to relax a little, and pulled the omelette toward her, taking a few bites and even a small sip of the white wine Lucia had left on the table. “Is all this really happening to me?”

Harry nodded. “Looks like it, but I bet we can get out of it.”

“You bet? So says the gambler.”

Slowly he buttoned the shirt up. “I enjoy taking risks sometimes.”

“You sound arrogant. Are you good at what you do?”

Harry thought about what she had said for a moment. “Here, watch this.”

He pulled a deck of cards from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and shuffled them for a minute. Then he handed them to Lucia. “Shuffle them like I just did.”

“I can’t shuffle cards like that,” she said. “That was like a magician or something.”

“Not magic — I just spend a lot of time around cards. Just shuffle them.”

She gave them another shuffle.

“And now cut them wherever you want,” he said. He saw some life in her eyes for the first time tonight, and was happy her mind had been taken off the subject of Pablo Reyes.

Lucia did as he said and cut the deck roughly in half and now two small piles of cards were sitting on the table face down.

“All right,” he said quietly, and tapped his finger on one of the piles. “Just by looking at the fourth card down in this pile, I can tell you what the fourth card down in the other pile is.”

“Impossible.”

Harry counted four cards off the top of the first pile. Without touching the other pile, he looked at the card and placed it back down. “The fourth card down in the other pile is the Queen of Hearts.”

“Show me.”

Harry counted four cards off the second, untouched pile and flipped over the fourth card to reveal the Queen of Hearts.

Lucia smiled. “How did you do that?”

Harry felt good when he saw the smile. “When you spend as much time with cards as I do, you learn all their secrets.”

“It was luck — do it again.”

“Luck? What are the chances of that?”

“1.92 percent,” she said immediately.

She noticed the look on his face and explained. “One in fifty-two — simple. I’m a physicist, remember.”

Marta returned from the shower and watched as Harry repeated the trick, having Lucia shuffle the cards and then he correctly guessed the fourth card down was the Ace of Diamonds.

“Tell me how you do it!” Marta said.

“Maybe later.”

Lucia sighed. “At least I tell you how I do my tricks!”

“It’s called the power of four.”

“It’s called too late for silly tricks,” Marta said. “I’m going to bed. You can stay if you want. There’s a spare room and a couch.”

She left the room and Lucia got up and walked to the other side of the small kitchen. Harry watched her as she finished her wine and sighed before raiding the fridge for a beer. She opened one for him and walked it over to him. Watching the way she moved whisked his memory back to when they had first met. He closed his eyes and his mind drifted back.

It had been a long time since they had broken up and separated. So long, in fact, that he couldn’t really remember how it had all gone so wrong. When they’d met at Oxford as undergrads everything had seemed so perfect — sharing wine on the banks of the Cherwell in Christ Church Meadow, laughing at jokes as tourists drifted past on punts… watching the cricket on the other side of the river just a stone’s throw from where Roger Bannister made history with his four minute mile. It all felt so distant, it was as if he was recalling someone else’s life.

But it was his life all right, and a damned good chapter of it. They had quickly grown close and his memories of those days were among his happiest, and yet something had gone wrong, something intangible that both of them felt, and before their time in the city was over they had drifted apart. She stayed in Oxford to work on her doctorate, while Harry’s recruitment to the army meant a move to Sandhurst. After that, they rarely spoke and then one day she called him to say it was over.

He snapped out of the memory. “I always liked Mahou,” he said, giving the condensation running down the beer bottle an appreciative glance.

“I see your small-talk hasn’t improved over the years.”

He let out a sad laugh and lowered his head for a moment. His head still bowed slightly, he glanced up at her through his eyebrows. “I always struggled with that.”

She was silent for a while, and pretended to watch the muted news. Then she spoke, her voice low in the silence. “We should look at Pablo’s book.”

They ate as they looked through the little book again, sitting side by side in a strange kitchen in an unknown apartment. Pulled back together after nearly two decades apart in the grimmest of circumstances.

As they ate, Harry felt himself slowly recovering from the chase, and the beer was helping to dull the ache in his arm from the knife wound. As they relaxed, they were able to increase their focus on the discovery they had made back in Pablo’s apartment.

“Is something bothering you, Harry?” Lucia asked, her face a gentle orange in the low light.

“Is it that obvious?” he asked.

She smiled. “Sorry, have I insulted your poker face?”

“I was just thinking that there were six numbers in our little clue, weren’t there?”

She nodded and took another sip of the wine. “Yes, six. So what?”

“This might be me barking up the wrong tree, but traditionally six numbers are used to create grid references in maps.”

“Maps?”

“Exactly.”

“Of course!” she said, and for the second time that evening the hint of a smile appeared on her face. Harry saw his idea had awoken something inside her. “Locations on maps are pinpointed using Cartesian coordinates. It was first used in the way we know it today by the French philosopher Descartes in the mid 17th Century. Without it Newton couldn’t have done his work in calculus — it’s extremely…” she began to trail off.

“Lucia?”

“It’s an extremely important development in our society and the most common form of these coordinates today is the six number system, although eight or more can be used. Let me have another look at the numbers.” She set down her fork and looked at the numbers again.

After a few moments, she ate more of the omelette and turned to Harry, who was now waiting expectant as he nonchalantly chewed his dinner. “Have you got an iPhone?” she said. “Mine is back at the apartment.”

“Of course.”

“Get Google Maps up and type in exactly what I tell you.”

Harry fumbled through his pocket and pulled Google Maps up on his phone. “Ready.”

“Okay — so here are the numbers converted into coordinates — 40 24 49N, 3 41 31W. Got it?”

“Uh-huh.” He pushed the enter button and then smiled in recognition of something.

“What is it?”

“You were right — I think — look!”

He handed her the phone and Lucia nodded her head and smiled. The little red balloon on Google Maps was planted firmly in the middle of the Museo del Prado — the Prado Museum — just a couple of kilometres south of Reyes’s apartment.

Lucia pushed her plate away and got up from the table. “We have to get there at once. We can use Marta’s scooter.”

Harry nodded in agreement. “What are waiting for?”

And with that they were gone.