The Armageddon Protocol

ELEVEN

Harry Bane felt the cold air rush into his lungs as Lucia accelerated the Vespa along the side street and swerved out into the boulevard. “We need to find out what’s at those coordinates before whoever killed Pablo!” he yelled over Lucia’s shoulder. He tightened his arms around her waist as she weaved the moped in and out of the Madrid traffic which bustled all around them. “And I think we might need some help.”

“Like who?” she yelled over her shoulder.

Before he could say anything, she swerved the Vespa into a large park and drove along one of the footpaths. It was lined with horse chestnut trees and wound away into the dark ahead of them. He wondered if this was a good idea.

Known to Madrileños simply as El Retiro, the full name of the park was Parque del Buen Retiro, or park of the pleasant retreat, and belonged exclusively to the Spanish monarchy from its establishment in the late 16th Century until 1868 when it became public property. Its 350 acres were centred on a large artificial lake and an enormous monument to King Alfonso XII, which Harry and Lucia were now zooming past on their way to the main boulevard of the park — the Paseo República de Cuba, a wide footpath lined with dozens more chestnut trees stretching seven hundred metres in length and dividing the park in two.

Lucia swung right onto another wide footpath, this time the Paseo Paraguay, and now they were almost driving due west. She drove the Vespa right through the middle of a formal ornamental garden and then burst out of the park and back into reality again, only this time on the Calle Felipe IV, a smart, broad road lined with the square terracotta façade of the Royal Spanish Academy, and then beyond that the east gardens of the Prado Museum.

Lucia killed the engine and they coasted to a standstill under some trees in the Academy. “We should leave this here,” she said, parking it in the middle of a line of at least fifteen other scooters. “No one will find it here — where’s the best place to hide a tree, right?”

He smiled. “Good idea — but how the hell are we going to get into the Prado without breaking in? It’s after midnight.”

“This is not a problem if you are Lucia Serrano,” she said, and flashed him a sad, but mischievous smile.

They ran into the grounds of the museum and Lucia headed straight for the biggest entrance she could see.

“What the hell are you doing?” Harry asked. “I can probably get us in easily enough — but we need somewhere a little quieter than a main entrance.”

“Have faith, Harry — stay here.”

He watched her climb the steps and a few moments later a man in his thirties approached the door. The man studied her face, offered a half smile and opened the door. The two of them spoke for a minute and then Lucia waved for Harry to join her.

“This is Miguel,” Lucia said. “We were engaged to be married last year until he cheated on me. But I forgave him because he introduced me to Pablo.”

Miguel smiled awkwardly.

“Good evening, Miguel,” Harry said.

“He used to let me into the museum some nights and we would look at the art together.”

“Look at the art?”

Lucia looked at Harry. “He has helpfully decided to let us look at the art tonight.”

Harry smiled. “How kind of you, Miguel.”

Miguel didn’t look so happy. “She says she will tell my boss about our fun in the museum and show him some of the photos. I have no choice.”

“We rarely do in life, old man,” said Harry, patting him on the shoulder and walking past him into the vast museum. When they were safely inside, he turned to Lucia. “What about the other guards?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Miguel says they will be no problem. Most of them do the same thing.”

“Great,” he said, and pulled out his iPhone. “Let’s have a look at these coordinates again. I’m sure Pablo is leading us to something very important.”

Lucia followed Harry as he walked quickly along the corridor. His head was bowed down as he looked at the small screen of his iPhone and the coordinates Pablo had left in the book. “We’re getting closer.”

Lucia knew she had to hurry. She couldn’t stop thinking about Pablo, and the terrible thing that had happened to him. But she knew she was strong enough to get herself through this nightmare. She might be a highly-respected scientist on the outside, but inside she wore the scars of a troubled and dangerous past, carved into her when she was young and living on the streets of Seville. She had run away from home when she was still young, leaving her abusive and alcoholic father. He was a failed entrepreneur-turned-embezzler who drank himself to death with nothing but the memory of his failed marriage and the sunset view of the Gulf of Cadiz for company.

Life on the streets had been tough. The city was ancient, inhabited since Phoenician times three thousand years ago. It was also sublimely beautiful with examples of Moorish and Gothic architecture and everything in between. But Lucia Serrano knew a different city from the one that amazed the legions of tourists coming every year to see the cathedral and the Alcázar.

Her Seville life was in the other half, the half made of the back alleys and seasonal sex workers flocking in like swallows from Brazil and north Africa. The city tried hard to hide its dark side, its sex clubs and crimes zones, crawling with preying pickpockets and abused chica.

In time she herself almost turned to this, but there was a difference between Lucia and the other girls, and that was her intelligence. She had always known she was different, and when she was at school she’d excelled at maths and physics to the point she quickly became the top of every class and amazed her teachers with her equation-solving abilities, which seemed almost to be intuitive in their execution. But with her genius came trouble, and her incapacity to submit to authority and follow instruction soon made her an outcast, and her grades began to drop, not climb.

She left school with nothing, walking out before her exams, and soon after left home for life on the streets where she developed a hardened attitude to the inequalities of life that she swore she would never forget. But her life changed forever the day she sprayed graffiti on the side of the university. This was no ordinary graffiti, but the Riemann zeta function.

Part of the Riemann Hypothesis, this was a one hundred and fifty-five year-old unprovable mathematical conjecture. Lucia thought it would be funny to spray this on the side of the Physics department — to express how unfair and degraded this world was, where a woman with her knowledge could so easily find herself eating fast food out of bins every night. But all that ended when a professor there took her under his wing, and within a few short months she had gone from back streets to universities.

But that was then, and this was now. Now she was walking along a corridor with a man she had known in another life, in a frantic search for her lover’s mysterious research.

Staring at his phone one last time, the tall Englishman stopped in front of a series of three large panels painted by Sandro Botticelli in the 1480s.

“Botticelli?” Harry asked, almost of himself.

Lucia stood beside him and sighed. “You think this is where Pablo was sending us?”

Harry nodded. “I don’t think he was trying to send us, or anyone else, anywhere. I think he was trying to conceal something that only this mysterious Andrej Liška would be able to find. That’s why he left this trail of breadcrumbs. So yeah, this part of the museum is the right location for sure — the coordinates he encoded in the pages of the Epistola are for around here, and the only painting in here with any reference to woods or forests is this one — or all three of them, at least.”

“They’re beautiful, but I don’t see what they could have to do with his research. What are they?”

Before she had even finished talking, Harry had taken his phone out again and was making a Skype call.

“Who are you calling?”

“The CEO of Bonham’s. They’re an auction house.”

“Bonham’s?” Lucia said, taking a step back. “I know who Bonham’s are, Harry — I told you Pablo bought his painting there. They’re one of the most famous auction houses on the planet!”

“Are they indeed?”

“Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonham’s — are there any others?”

He shrugged. “Means nothing to me… come on Hattie, wake up!”

“And this Hattie will be able to help us?”

“She knows more about art and antiquities than most experts have forgotten.”

“How do you know her?”

“She’s my twin sister.”

Lucia took a step back, astonished. “You never told me you had a sister! Wait a minute — your family business is Bonham’s?”

Harry nodded reluctantly. “Guilty as charged.”

“But they’re one of the biggest auction houses on Earth. I saw a television program about them once. It’s the oldest in the world.”

“Not quite. Sotherby’s beat us to it by eleven years.”

“But your name is Bane.”

“Bonham was my grandmother’s maiden name. The business came down to us from that part of the family.”

“Ah…well, I’m impressed.”

“I’m not,” Harry said bluntly, and cursed as the phone kept on ringing. “After my father’s death, my sister took it all over. Personally I couldn’t give a damn about art. That upset Dad. He expected me to follow him into it. When I joined the army he didn’t talk to me for a year. When I left the army and joined MI6 he didn’t talk to me for two years, and when I dropped out of that and became a professional gambler he never talked to me again.”

“What about Hattie — does she talk to you?”

He nodded and smiled. “Yes… unfortunately.”

“You don't get on?”

“Yes and no — we’re twins. Come on Hattie!”

Then Harriet Bane answered the phone. After a few moments of waiting and then a few more of muttering and cursing, he flipped the phone around and pointed it at the panels. Lucia saw a dark silhouette of a woman with messy hair on the other end of the call.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” the woman said.

“Of course, but I need your help.”

The silhouette rubbed her face and sighed. “Finally doing something useful with your life?”

“Lucia, meet my sister Harriet, Harriet meet Lucia Serrano.”

“Oh, just get on with it, Harry. I only just got back to London after a twelve hour flight from Tokyo.”

“Then blow us away with your greatness Hattie,” he said sarcastically. “What are these?”

A few seconds passed while Harriet took in the grainy image on the Skype call, and then she spoke. “Botticelli. They’re the Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, tempera on panel. Quite priceless of course, and an absolute masterpiece of renaissance art.”

As his sister spoke, Harry stood back and surveyed the three large panels. Then Harriet sighed again and continued. “There are actually four, but the fourth is in a private collection.”

“Not yours, is it?” Harry joked.

“No,” came the humorless reply. “Can I go to bed now?”

“Not yet, like I said — we need your help.”

“I know that, Harry. The only time you ever call is when you need my help.”

“Not this again.”

“What trouble are you in this time?”

“We don’t know. We were left a clue by a dead man to come and see this painting.” Harry explained the situation to his sister, including the strange Latin clues Pablo had left behind in the Epistola.

“So what does any of this mean?” Harriet asked, her voice thin now as the signal cracked up a little.

Harry sighed. “Search me.”

“Maybe the clue is an anagram of Botticelli or something?” Lucia said.

Harriet sighed. She sounded weary. “If this Pablo was hiding something as dangerous as you suggest, do you really think he would protect its location with a simple anagram?”

Lucia looked offended. “Of course not — he wasn’t stupid.”

Harry swept his hair back and took a deep breath. “Right. So we know it’s going to be more complicated than that. This isn’t a childish game — but why direct us to this painting?” He stepped back and stared at the large panels from a different perspective. “I’m stuck and it looks like I’m really going to need your help, sis.”

“Fine,” Harriet said, checking her watch. “Then let’s get on with it and stop pratting about.”