The Armageddon Protocol

FOURTEEN

For a few moments there was silence between them, and then Harry was aware of the sound of Lucia’s breath, close to him in the long empty corridor. His mind was still trying to make sense of everything that had happened since she crashed his impromptu dinner date with Anaïs — four murders and an illegal trip to the Prado — but now they were racing toward the Woods at last.

El Bosco.

He couldn’t deny this was the sort of excitement he had missed since quitting MI6 and devoting his life to burning out on the casino circuit, but part of him had already moved on and gotten used to his new life. It had been several years since he had worked in intelligence and up until a couple of hours ago he had thought his days of car chases and hidden clues were finished forever.

But now this.

This night — an old Spanish flame whom he hadn’t seen for so long — looking at him with her brown eyes, expectant of something, but also scared of something maybe, he thought. Was she lying to him? It was hard to tell.

“Tonight is the worst night of my life,” Lucia said as they rushed along the corridor.

“Tonight is not forever, Lucia,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”

She seemed genuine, but years of training and experience as an army officer and MI6 agent had taught him a great deal, and much of his SIS work had taken him onto the streets. There, he’d had to think fast, and make judgements about the character of those he was working with, but this was different. This woman he knew and yet didn’t know. She seemed to be telling the truth, but he had learnt a long time ago never to believe anything until it was over. “We’ll be at the Woods soon enough,” he said.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Harry,” Lucia said, staring into his eyes for an explanation.

“Woods, or in Italian, Bosco,” Harry repeated, more softly, reducing his voice to a whisper filled with urgency. “They call him El Bosco.”

“Who is El Bosco?”

Harriet spoke up, her voice rising from the iPhone in Harry’s hand. “El Bosco is the Spanish nickname for Hieronymus Bosch.”

“The artist?” Lucia asked.

Harry smiled. “And I’m betting that this is what Pablo was referencing when he wrote we would find more in the woods than in the books — he meant we would find the answer not in the woods, but in The Woods, or El Bosco.”

“Are his paintings here in the Prado?”

“You’re Spanish and you ask me that?”

Lucia shrugged her shoulders. “I grew up on the streets of Seville, Harry, and I devote my life to physics. I don’t know the first thing about art. Do you think a knowledge of fine art helps you eat when you sleep in a storm drain?”

“I’m sorry.” Harry was contrite. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

He watched the faint outline of a grin appear on her face. “Apology accepted,” she said, and touched his arm. “You haven’t really hurt me, don’t worry.”

With these words, Harry could feel himself being taken back to Berlin, sitting in a small café opposite the last person who had uttered this to him. Her name was Anna Maurer, a German double agent working in the BND, the German equivalent of MI6 or the CIA. She was also working for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service and reporting regularly back to its Moscow headquarters in the Yasenovo District.

Harry had struggled to refrain from his usual modus operandi, and after a few tense meetings with her, in which he passed her disinformation aimed at disrupting certain Russian espionage operations in London, he had taken her away for a long weekend on the Austrian ski slopes, and slept with her after one of his standard seductions — champagne, chocolates and an open fire. This was easy because she believed her status as a double agent had not yet been compromised, but Harry had worked it out soon enough.

That morning in the cold café seemed like yesterday, but it was years ago. He put down his coffee cup and looked into her face. She looked scared. “I know,” he’d said.

“You know what?” she said, playing for time. She knew what he knew. People in her game always knew.

“I know you’re passing information to Moscow.”

“How?” Her response was calm and straight — businesslike.

“Your meetings with the SVR contact. I followed you.”

“You didn’t trust me?”

“There is no such thing as trust, Anna. You know that.”

“Only a temporary suspension of cynicism — isn’t that what you once told me, Harry?”

“Did I? I can’t recall.”

“Do my people know?” she asked, referring to the Germans.

“Not yet.”

Neither of them spoke for a long time. Outside the people walked along the Kanstraße in the drizzle, holding umbrellas and handkerchiefs. A tram rattled by. Both of them knew there would be no more ski lodges.

“It’s all right for you,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re rich. You don’t have to get your hands dirty.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean there is a big difference between a gentleman officer working in intelligence, and a poor, working-class girl in the BND. I have family commitments. Some people pay more than others.”

“You sold out your country, and could have caused a lot of problems back in my country as well.”

“Could?”

“You were being fed lies, Anna. Everything you passed to the Russians was rubbish.”

Another long pause. He could see she was thinking fast. “I thought you loved me,” she finally said.

“It’s over, Anna.”

“You’re going to tell them about me?”

“Of course. But I’ll give you one day’s head start.”

“That is considerate.”

“Naturally.”

“You haven’t really hurt me,” she said. “I can live with it.”

He watched her walk out into the rain and fade into the crowd and he never saw her again.

That was then, and this was now, as his father often used to say, and now meant standing in Madrid’s Museo del Prado searching for something that Pablo Reyes had hidden — something so important that the professor had gone to insane lengths to hide it and stop it falling into the wrong hands.

Now, at last, he thought he finally knew what Pablo had been trying to tell them — it had become clear a few moments ago just before his mind had drifted back to Anna Maurer, but now that part of his past had subsided, and left his mind clear to focus on the here and now.

Lucia struggled to keep up with him as he pounded down the corridor toward the Bosch collection. “But you still haven’t told me if his paintings are in this museum!”

“I’m sorry?” he said, startled from his thoughts by the sudden sound of Lucia’s voice.

“You said Bosch had many paintings, and I asked if any of them were in this museum?”

“Sorry — my mind was elsewhere,” he said. “Some of his paintings are here, including his most famous of all — and close enough to be in the same coordinates Pablo left in the Epistola.”

Once again Lucia looked at him with expectation, but Harry’s mind was too occupied with the thought of what Pablo had been trying to hide from the world. He raced through everything he knew about Bosch, and what its relevance could possibly be in terms of something that so frightened a physicist that eventually it took him to an early grave.

“Why Bosch, Hattie?”

“Why Bosch? Hieronymous Bosch — a mystery who never wrote anything about either himself or any of his works, and as a result less is known about him or his paintings than almost any other artist in renaissance history.”

Pablo would have picked him, wouldn’t he? Harry thought with a sigh.

So why Bosch? Was it because of the man or the art? He needed his sister more than ever right now. He knew Harriet had made it her business to learn as much about art history as was prudent given she made her living running an auction house, not to mention personally investing and trading in art. The fact she could have afforded a piece by the Dutch renaissance master once again reminded him of his background — a past he fought hard to deny and forget.

“It’s pretty obvious what picture your clue is referring to, right?” Harriet said.

“It is,” Harry said firmly.

Lucia looked up at him. “And what’s that?”

“The most mysterious painting ever made by man — the Garden of Earthly Delights, and according to this map it’s in the next room.”

Lucia stepped into the adjoining room with Harry close at her side. They were now standing in a slightly larger room with a table in the center of the floor. The table itself happened to be a work of art by Hieronymus Bosch, but the table, like everything else in this space, including Bruegel’s magnificent Triumph of Death, was overshadowed by the large painting fixed to the wall at the far end of the room.

It was breathtaking, and stole her attention the moment she entered the darkened room, illuminated only by the gentle glow of the security lighting and fire escape signs. She moved closer until the image filled even her periphery. Lucia realized she had almost stopped breathing as she stared at The Garden of Earthly Delights.

It felt like the painting was a magnet, pulling her closer, and without realizing it she stepped forward yet again, her eyes fixed on the wild, complicated image in front of her. She had only ever seen photos of it before, and was struck by how large it was in real life as her eyes crawled all over it, desperately trying to take it all in.

And how much there was to take in. The enormous work of art was divided into three panels, two slim images either side of a much larger painting, and together they constituted a startling and terrifying triptych that had been mystifying experts for centuries.

“I’ve never see this painting before, not in the flesh, so to speak,” Harry said in wonder.

“Bloody heathen,” his sister said.

The reverse of the painting was rendered in grisaille, or monochrome, on wooden panels that folded in to encase the art, and featured a distant God staring down at his creation of the world, but that was not the main attraction — which now stared the two of them in the face in all its intriguing and horrifying complexity.

And in the flesh was about the right way to describe it, Lucia considered. The image was overflowing with naked bodies, and their meaning had been open to interpretation for the five hundred years since its creation. “What’s it about?” she asked.

Harriet said, “The orthodox explanation is that the image is a straight-forward depiction of the fall of man — a doctrinal warning on the dangers of yielding to life’s wicked temptations — but the staggering complexity of its symbolism makes the work much harder to interpret than many would like.”

“It’s creeping me out,” said Lucia.

“You’re not the first,” Harriet replied. “The painting has caused many divisions.”

“Is it a warning of some kind?” Harry said.

“Maybe, maybe not. The fundamental disagreement surrounds that enigmatic central panel. While most believe it’s a warning, there are others who think it’s not a monition of the terrors to come if man gives in to temptation, but a nostalgic portrayal of a lost paradise, inhabited and enjoyed by man in his prelapsarian condition.”

Harry turned to Lucia. “And yet again, that is exactly what I was going to say.”

“Sure.”

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” Harriet said.

A look of awe crossed Lucia’s face. “It’s magnificent, but so unsettling.”

Harriet agreed. “And no one even knows what it means. To me, that’s the most amazing thing of all.”

“If this is what Pablo was leading us to, I still don’t understand,” Harry said. He was leaning into the right-hand panel, and studying a small scene of grotesque depravity involving torture and humiliation he didn’t realize existed in renaissance art. “This is really out there.”

Harriet nodded and took another sip of her coffee. “I know what you mean. Many people over the years have claimed he might have been high on drugs when he painted it, others say he was just hundreds of years ahead of his time. If this Pablo was trying to send you a message encoded within the painting itself then he couldn’t have chosen a more difficult and ambiguous piece of art. Experts have argued about the symbolism in The Garden of Earthly Delight for centuries, and no one has ever convinced anyone else of their theories.”

Lucia sighed. “So why send us here?”

Harry took a deep breath and moved closer. “I don’t know. I’m sure of one thing though — this is where we are supposed to be. His reference to the woods can only point to El Bosco — and this is his most famous work. He couldn’t be referring to any other piece.”

“I can’t disagree with that,” Lucia said, still mesmerised by the lurid art in front of her. “It’s bewitching. He was thinking of this painting when he wrote those words, I just know it.”

“But where does that get us?” Harry asked.

“It gets us precisely where we are,” Harriet said with a weary sigh. “…standing in front of an enormous Flemish renaissance triptych without a clue.”