The Armageddon Protocol

FOUR

For a moment Harry wondered what the joke was, but the look in Lucia’s frightened eyes told him there was nothing funny about the situation. He studied the anguish on her face and was suddenly aware that the other people in the bar were staring hard at the two of them.

“Come with me,” he said, and gently steered her away from their prying eyes.

They stepped out of the casino and he looked into her eyes once again. She was still flustered and the expression of fear on her face was impossible to misjudge. As he watched her, she kept looking over his shoulder at the busy street as if she were searching the traffic for an imminent threat.

He sighed and searched his pockets for a cigarette, an automatic reaction to the rise in adrenalin. Iraq’s Rumaila oil fields had taught him how cigarettes calmed nerves. “First, are you certain he’s dead?”

Lucia raised her bloody hands to her face and swept her hair from her face. “It’s true — I swear it! You have to believe me.”

Behind Harry, a car horn blared loudly and Lucia jumped back and gasped. “Mierda!” she said, and mumbled a few words in Spanish.

Harry Bane had seen enough people under pressure to know Lucia Serrano was either telling the truth or she was the best damned actor he’d ever seen. He decided to go with the story and give her a chance. “How was he killed?”

“I don’t know — I came home from work early and he was fine. I took a shower and when I came out he was dead on the floor with his throat cut…” she began to sob and break down once again.

“All right, how long ago was this?”

“Just a few moments ago. The apartment is very close to here.”

“Does anyone else know about this?”

She nodded her head. “I came straight to you, but one of the neighbor’s said he was going to call the police.”

“Then we have to hurry.”

Rafael Ruiz awoke with a start. He sat up in the bed and fumbled at the telephone. He almost knocked it over onto the floor, but caught it just before the ringing woke his wife. Being woken in the middle of the night was never very popular with her, but she tolerated it because she knew that was the fate of a security official’s wife, especially the wife of a senior CNI officer.

He knew the sacrifices she had made, but at least her job as a photographer meant she could lay in. The Centro Nacional de Inteligencia was the Spanish equivalent of MI5 or the FBI. Originally formed in 1935, but curtailed because of the Spanish Civil War, the latest manifestation of the Spanish Secret Service was formed in 2002 and was headquartered in the Moncloa-Aravaca district in the west of Madrid.

As was the case with so many of his colleagues, most of Ruiz’s career had been spent focussed on the traditional hotspots in Spanish foreign policy — North Africa and South America, but this latest assignment was very different.

Ruiz rubbed his eyes and moved the phone to his ear. “What is it?” He kept his voice low.

The voice on the other end was calm but commanding, and he recognised it at once as that of Inspector Jefe Cristina Fernandez, the head of Madrid’s Municipal Police Force. “Good evening, Rafael.”

“Cristina — hello. Why are you calling me at this hour?”

“Someone called a murder in — a bungled apartment robbery — and I was asleep too, if it makes it any easier.”

Ruiz sighed. “An apartment murder? That’s your world, not mine.”

“When they ran the address through our database they realized it was flagged. That’s why they woke me.”

Ruiz straightened up and took a long breath. “Flagged?”

“A little note telling us that anything to do with the place is CNI.”

“The address?”

Cristina Fernandez casually read out the details. “You recognize it?”

“It sounds familiar — the name?”

“Reyes.”

“That’s right — I think he’s on some kind of watchlist. Is he the victim?”

“No, a neighbor was killed by a man who later broke into Reyes’s apartment. According to another neighbor the killer exited the apartment a few minutes later.”

Ruiz was now wide awake and officially hooked. “When was this?”

“A few moments ago.”

“I see. I don’t want the police on the scene until our people are there.”

“I understand… that’s the purpose of the flag.”

Ruiz was suddenly very anxious. He had placed Reyes on a watchlist a few days ago due to the nature of his online research. It was above Ruiz’s paygrade to understand exactly what that research was, only that his superiors had told him it had grave consequences for the future of humanity.

They had also told him that there were other agencies just as interested in the work of Señor Reyes as they were, and Ruiz was tasked with not only monitoring Reyes’s research but also ensuring it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Tonight was starting to look like he might have failed on both counts, something he knew his superiors would not tolerate.

“Seal the road off and put an armed response team together.”

“Of course.”

“And meet me at the address,” he snapped. “I’m on my way. Get some officers outside that building immediately — no one is to go into that apartment until I am on the scene.”

He climbed out of bed and padded across the dark room to his clothes, which he had hung over the back of a chair less than an hour ago. Rafael was a tall, lean man, with short black hair, grey now at the temples, and dark brown eyes, usually covered by contact lenses but in tonight’s rush they were hidden behind a pair of Versace tortoise shell glasses his wife had picked out for him last Christmas in Barceolona. He threaded his tie through his collar, picked up his jacket and kissed his wife.

“These late nights are killing you, Rafa,” whispered his wife. She kept her eyes closed and pushed down further into the bedsheets. “The CNI will put you in an early grave.”

“Go back to sleep, querida,” Ruiz replied, and kissed her again. It’s not the CNI I’m worried about… he thought as he closed the bedroom door gently behind him and made his way downstairs.

Moments later he was locking his front door behind him and climbing into the 1955 duck-egg blue Giuletta Spider in his garage. It was a convertible, and the roof was still down from last night, and seconds later he was racing through the streets of La Moraleja and crossing the city on his way to Pablo Reyes’s address on the other side of town.

His salary alone could never have elevated him to La Moraleja, but there were others who paid him a high price in return for absolute loyalty. As he raced the Spider past the pool houses and palm-tree lined tennis courts he took none of this for granted. Rafael Ruiz was one of four boys raised by a single mother in Carabanchel in the city’s south-west. It had a well-earned reputation as one of the poorest and most deprived areas of the city.

There were certain ways out of poverty, but tonight was no time for reminiscence and nostalgia. Tonight his mind raced with the dozens of possible scenarios that could have played out in Reyes’s apartment. Perhaps the old man had been killed too — or even worse, kidnapped. The thought of what might happen if the professor’s work fell into the wrong hands filled Ruiz with a sense of deep dread, and he put the thought from his mind by flooring the accelerator and speeding into the night.

At the same time Ruiz was racing the Spider toward the scene of the crime, Cristina Fernandez was hurriedly getting dressed and running a brush through her long brown hair. An emergency was an emergency but she was still a professional, after all. She lived alone, except for Alberto, her ginger Kurilian Bobtail cat, left to her by an old aunt two years ago. Alberto watched her with his usual detached indifference as she unlocked her front door and slipped out into the street where she parked her car — an alpine white BMW 3 Series F30.

Seconds later she was roaring down the street and pointing the BMW’s nose south. She lived in Alcobendas, a small city to the north of Madrid and not far from Ruiz’s La Moraleja. Years ago, Alcobendas was a blue collar town with high levels of deprivation and low real estate prices, which Cristina bought into when she was new to the CNI. Recently the area had undergone the same magical transformation seen in so many suburbs across Spain, and she had benefited accordingly as the price of her small apartment had gone into the troposphere.

Now in her early forties and keeping a fixed eye on promotion, she was ready to move on. She had sacrificed everything for her career — a string of casual boyfriends over the years had left her single, childless and middle-aged, but all that mattered to her was the job. She loved her life, and never dwelt on the things she couldn’t conquer.

She raced the compact BMW through the emptying night streets of northern Madrid. She had to get to Reyes’s apartment as fast as possible. She pushed her foot down on the throttle and accelerated to seventy miles per hour.