The Armageddon Protocol

SIXTEEN

Lucia turned to see a man dart out of the shadows and run towards Harry. She knew immediately in her heart it was the man who had killed Pablo — the man who had attacked them in the apartment and fled across the rooftops after shooting at the police. Now he had stalked them to the Prado and wanted his revenge… and the NAND chip.

She stared at Harry, but the Englishman didn’t flinch. He slipped the NAND chip inside his pocket square and readied himself for the fight, but when the killer collided with him both men smashed back into the painting with a heavy grunt and the fighting began.

Lucia screamed and stepped back in horror as the man wrestled Harry to the floor and began pummelling his head and chest with a vicious salvo of blows from his black gloved hands.

After struggling for a few moments, Harry brought his knee up into the man’s groin and smashed him hard where it counted most. The man grunted in pain and recoiled instinctively, giving Harry enough time to bring his legs up and force his opponent away with his boots.

The man staggered backwards and tripped over his own legs as he went, cracking the back of his skull on the edge of the table and collapsing in a heap in the shadows beneath it.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Harry said. “And you need to call Marta and tell her that her apartment is compromised. They must have followed us to the Prado from there — she’s in real danger, Lucia. She has to get out!”

Harry threw her his phone and Lucia made the call as they sprinted through the museum. “She’s all right,” she said as she passed the phone back. “She’s alive!”

“Thank God.”

“I told her to get away and stay with family.”

“Good.”

They sprinted through the shadows of the museum’s corridors and galleries, and when they reached the entrance they saw the crumpled body of Miguel on the steps. “Ay, dios mío!” Lucia reached down to help him, but Harry placed a firm hand on her shoulder and stopped her.

“He’s dead, Lucia. I’m sorry.” As he spoke, he gently pulled the dead man’s gun from his holster and checked the magazine. Although some visitors objected to viewing art and artefacts under armed guard, the Prado’s guards had been equipped with firearms for some time, and Harry knew it was a grim opportunity, but his training meant he had no problem taking the weapon.

“He’s coming!” Lucia said. “Look!”

She pointed across the foyer where the assassin was pounding toward them. He had wrenched the puukko knife out of the painting and was now carrying it in his gloved hand.

“Time to go,” Harry said.

“What’s happening to me?” Lucia said, looking into his eyes. “I was happy a few hours ago, and now it’s like I’m in hell.”

“I promise when all this is over I’ll take you to Paradise, but for now, we’re running.”

They burst through the entrance door on the north side of the building and after the gentle, moderated heat of the museum, the cold air smacked their faces and stung their lungs. Harry scanned the area for other threats — expecting the assassin to have an accomplice — or at the very least for some kind of police presence, but there was nothing.

The night was still except for the gentle thrum of the occasional traffic coasting along the Calle de Felipe IV on its way toward the Fountain of Neptune roundabout. For that, at least, he was grateful, but the sight of Miguel lying dead in the foyer was more than enough to remind him about how much danger they were in. The Spanish police were already chasing them for the murders of Pablo Reyes, Vidal and the murdered police officers back at the apartment, their only hope of not being blamed for Miguel’s death too was if the museum’s CCTV footage exposed the real killer.

“Come on!” Lucia said. “We have to get away from here.”

Harry checked his pockets to make sure his iPhone and the NAND chip were still safe, and with that done they jogged down the steps and sprinted toward the street where they had parked the Vespa. The bronze face of the Francisco Goya statue looked down at them impassively as Lucia climbed on board the scooter and kickstarted it.

“Maybe we need a car,” Harry said. “I can steal one.”

“No time, and too dangerous.”

“But we’ll be safer.”

“Get on and stop arguing!” she screamed. “It’s my city and I say we go on this!”

Harry looked over his shoulder as the assassin sprinted across the small car park and began to run up the stone steps toward the Goya statue. He was now holding a gun in his right hand, and Harry knew this meant at least one other security guard was lying dead back there.

The man fired. The bullet hit the kerb and ricocheted into the night with a gentle ping and a cloud of concrete plaster.

“You’ve convinced me,” Harry said and leaped on the back of the Vespa. He linked his arms around Lucia’s waist just as she swerved the moped out in the street.

As they raced into the night, he turned to see a black Roketa skid into view. The man who was hunting them down was driving it toward them like a demon.

Lucia looked in the mirror. “That looks like Miguel’s bike. He must have taken the keys when he killed him… bastardo!”

In her anger, she turned the accelerator on the handlebar and the Vespa increased to its top speed of nearly sixty miles per hour. In a car this was a gentle speed, but on the back of a scooter weaving in and out of the traffic in the middle of the night Harry thought it felt like a white-knuckle ride.

The killer fired on them and almost blew out their rear tire. Lucia swerved to avoid a second bullet and quickly brought it under control, impressing Harry who now turned to see their pursuer rapidly gaining on them. As Lucia deftly navigated the Vespa along the boulevard, Harry fired on the assassin with the security guard’s gun to return the favor. With two shots he blew out the headlight and destroyed his front tire. The Roketa skidded wildly in a shower of sparks as the rider fought to bring it under control, which he did, and responded by increasing speed and driving on the rim, regardless.

“We need to lose them, Lucia!”

“You think?”

Harry held on tight around Lucia’s waist as he tried to keep his balance on the speeding bike and take another shot. The man pursuing them fired again, and this time the bullet pinged off the rear licence plate with a loud ricochet. “That was too close for comfort,” he said.

“We can lose him down here.”

“Thank God for that!” Harry yelled, still holding onto her waist for his life.

“I can do this… I know this area. Hold on.”

She swerved off the Paseo del Prado and into the twisting side streets of the Centro district. This was the oldest part of the city, inhabited since the Moorish occupation of Spain when Muhammad I, the emir of Córdoba settled the area. He had established a fort on the banks of the east bank of the Manzanares over a thousand years ago during the ninth century, back in a very different world.

Now, Lucia Serrano was pushing the Vespa to its limits as she zoomed out the western edge of Centro and hit the traffic on the Calle de Bailén next to the world-famous Royal Palace of Madrid. This was the location of Muhammad’s fort, but tonight his Moorish army was replaced by the more prosaic scene of taxis shuttling people back and forth through the traffic.

As she jumped through the lights at the Calle Mayor and raced the Vespa toward the river, the man fired another shot at them. The bullet punctured the rear tire and sent shredded rubber flying out like confetti behind them. Lucia struggled to control the moped for a few seconds but then adjusted to the different feel of it. She pushed on at the tip of a shower of sparks bursting over the street as the wheel rim grinded against the tarmac.

Keen not to lose sight of his prey, the assassin also jumped the lights but wasn’t as lucky as Harry and Lucia. A taxi clipped his rear tire in a screech of burning rubber and angry horn-blowing, sending the Roketa spinning around in a perfect circle of three hundred and sixty degrees.

For a few seconds Harry thought the assassin was going to get out of it, but then another car, a heavier black SUV slammed into him and knocked him clean off the bike. He watched over his shoulder as the Roketa skidded across the road in a shower of orange sparks and smashed into the kerb. Its rider clambered to his feet and staggered off into the shadows.

“It’s over… for now,” he said. “Now we need a cheap hotel where we can check in no questions asked. Our faces are all over the news, remember. Tonight we have the distinction of being Spain’s most wanted.”

“Don’t worry, I know just the place.”

Lucia drove around the Jardines del Campo del Moro in between the river and the palace and turned the bike east again. Wordless now, and without a single glance back at Harry, she drive the battered Vespa back into Centro and down a narrow cobblestone lane lined with parked cars and other scooters.

Climbing off the dying moped, she looked at Harry and then pointed at a delapidated building squeezed in between two bars. “Bienvenido al Hostel Goya,” she said with an embarrassed smile. “I stayed here for a few days when I first got to Madrid.”

Harry regarded the neon green and pink graffiti with interest and shrugged his shoulders. “If we can get a room without any questions, then we’re sorted.”

“We can.”

And less than five minutes later they were in an economy double room with a view of a grimy inner courtyard. Harry wasn’t interested in the view, and seconds after closing and locking their door behind them he was carefully taking the NAND chip out of his silk pocket square and pulling his iPhone out of his pocket.

“What are you doing?” Lucia asked.

“I’m going to put this chip into my phone and see what all this is about.”

A few moments later, they were scrolling through a long list of files. “What are we looking for?”

“Hard to say — most of these are just personal snapshots by the looks of it.”

Lucia looked down at the images and saw one of the two of them standing side by side on a balcony in Barcelona. Before she could get upset, the pictures turned into word documents — all blank apart from one which contained a long line of numbers and letters.

“A code of some sort,” Harry said and continued to scroll through the information. “Nothing too explosive here.”

“That one,” she said, tapping the screen with her fingernail. “This is a movie.”

“And it’s called Armageddon IV,” Harry said anxiously.

They exchanged a glance and then Harry opened the file.

Without knowing they had done it, both of them had sat down on the bed beside each other as they watched the video on Pablo’s NAND chip. They stared hard as they tried to comprehend what they were seeing, and then they both worked it out at the same time.

“Es una bandada de pájaros,” Lucia said gently, still not understanding.

“Yes, a flock of birds,” Harry added, equally perplexed.

The birds looked like carrion crows. Perhaps two dozen of them circled in a graceful arc high in a sky the color of lead. As their glossy lampblack feathers reflected what weak winter light was on offer, their hoarse cry filled the silence. Now, swooping and climbing in the cold air they flew in unison once again, and then without warning all of them stopped flying and fell out of the frame like black stones.

“What the hell?” Harry said.

“Why would they all fall like that?” Lucia asked. “Is it possible they all died at the same time?”

Harry shook his head. “I don’t think so. Something killed them and Pablo knew what that was. He’s trying to tell us something — but what?”

“I don’t like this, Harry. It’s starting to frighten me. First poor Pablo is murdered in cold blood while I am in the shower… and now he leaves us clues leading to this horrible video. Turn it off… I’ve seen enough.”

Harry went to hit the stop button when the screen flicked onto some static, and then another image appeared.

“Wait a minute — there’s something else on here.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know… it looks like CCTV footage of some kind of lab.”

They were seeing a number of men and women in white lab coats working in a large, busy lab — testing, sorting, ordering, writing things down. One of them approached a sterile glove box and inserted his hands into the nylon gloves, but the interior of the box was obscured by the man’s body.

“What the hell are they doing?” Lucia asked.

“And more to the point, why is the footage on this… wait — something’s happening.”

They watched in disbelief as the people in the room began moving all at once — and all for the exit. Within seconds it turned into a stampede as everyone piled into the doorway. Some got through, but others were trapped behind in the crush. Then, without any warning, those they could still see in the lab suddenly stopped, stared up into the sky and collapsed all at once.

Lucia gasped and covered her mouth “What just happened, Harry?”

“I don’t know, but I think they’re dead — the same as the birds.”

“If we knew where this happened we might at least have a chance!”

“Wait — rewind the film and look here.”

They rewound the film to the first segment with the carrion crows. Harry pointed into the top right hand of the screen just above where the birds had dropped from the sky, and Lucia gasped. “I think that’s our chance.”

They were looking at the smallest sliver of sky above a gray rooftop and in the corner was the unmistakable shape of the top of the Eiffel tower.

“Paris!” Lucia said.

“Correct, and more than that — this view is from the east, and really close as well — no more than half a mile at the most. Whoever filmed this panned the camera around as they followed the birds and just clipped the top of the tower.”

“So we know where we have to go,” she said, untying her hair and shaking it out. “But how do we get there? We couldn’t use the Vespa even if it wasn’t wrecked.”

“Just leave that to me,” Harry said, and loosened his tie. He walked over to the bedside lamp and weighed it in his hand before putting it back down and turning to Lucia. “Is there a coat hanger in that wardrobe?”

Lucia looked inside and nodded her head, confused. “Yes. Why?”

“Let’s get out of here.”