The Armageddon Protocol

SIX

“You really think this book has something to do with Pablo’s research?”

“I don’t know, but it’s worth a try. Don’t you think it’s odd this is the only book not on science in the entire room?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. He was studying art remember — restoration and history.”

“Yes, but all his art research is in his study, like I said. This is different — this is his sitting room and exclusively about science.” He opened the small book and saw an inscription on the first page: To Andrej Liška: The Man Who Saved the World.

“Who the hell is Andrej Liška?” Harry asked.

“I don’t know exactly…” Lucia said. “But Pablo used to go for walks in the Sierra de Guadarrama sometimes, and he told me he was sometimes meeting an old friend. Perhaps it is the same man. He said they could talk together for hours, but I never met him. I wondered if he was another physicist, but I have never heard of him.”

Harry began to flick through the rest of the old tattered paperback. Seconds later something soon caught his eye — highlighted text. “Wait a minute.”

“What is it?” Lucia asked.

“I’m not sure, but I think it’s our first clue — look — some of the words have been highlighted.”

He showed her one of the pages where two short consecutive sentences were underlined — Experto crede: aliquid amplius invenies in silvis, quam in libris. Ligna et lapides docebunt te, quod a magistris audire non possis. The first sentence was also highlighted with bright pink fluorescent ink, and silvis underlined twice. In the margin Pablo had translated the word into English — woods.

“What does it mean?”

“My Latin is a little rusty,” said Harry, recalling his days at Harrow, “but unless I’m very much mistaken, it literally means believe the expert, you will find more in the woods than in the books — trees and stones shall teach thee, that thou may not be able to hear from their masters.”

“I asked what it meant, Harry.”

“Just what I said — I suppose it was the only way Pablo could think of concealing his research findings. Maybe this Andrej Liška character knows what all this means? After all, Pablo inscribed the book to him.”

She nodded. “And look — there — another highlighted word.”

Harry looked down at the bottom of the page where Lucia was pointing at the word oculis that was also highlighted with the pink pen. “It means eyes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, neither do I. Finding more in the woods than the books I can work with, but why draw our attention to the word eyes like this?”

Lucia took the book from Harry’s hands and flicked through it again. “Look here — Pablo highlighted another single word.”

“Pulchritudo — it means beauty. There must be more in there — go through it again.”

“Yes — another one here on page thirty-one — est.”

“That means ‘is’.”

Lucia glanced at him for a moment. “I know that much, Harry. Spanish is my mother tongue.”

“Of course, forgive me.”

Harry asked for the book back and went through it again more closely under the light of the little lamp on the stand beside Reyes’s leather wing chair. “Another two here on pages forty and forty-one — et and aspicientis which mean and and observer, respectively.”

“So we have eyes, beauty, is, and observer,” Lucia said. “I think I know what he was trying to say.”

“Me too — look here on page forty-nine — in — means the same in Latin as it does in English — so we have “and beauty is in the eyes of the observer, or beholder as the English proverb goes.”

“The same in Spanish — la belleza está en el ojo del espectador.”

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder — what was he trying to tell us?”

Harry searched his mind. It was a common proverb, and the message it delivered was obvious enough, but what could it possibly have to do with Pablo Reyes’s research?

For the first time, Lucia sounded hopeful. “So you think this is definitely linked to his research?”

“Maybe — what do you think?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I only knew him for a few months. He was a very private and suspicious man. He was secretive about his old career and research in physics. If he really was researching something dangerous, it wouldn’t surprise me if he hid it with the intention of it never being found again, believe me.”

Harry paced the large room and considered what it all meant. He thought about how frightened the old man must have been to go to such lengths to hide his findings. All he had left to the world were a few highlighted words in a small book containing a thousand year-old text written by a Cistercian monk, and if it was supposed to be helpful it was failing in a big way. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder… without any other context it could mean any one of a million things.

“I don’t believe that he would want his research never to be found,” Harry said. “No way would he waste years of his life like this. He obviously knew someone was after him and decided to hide his research findings — this was the only way he knew how. If only we knew what he had discovered.”

“That’s a big if.”

“For now we have to assume whoever killed Pablo never got what they wanted because they didn’t find this book, and so they’re going to try again to find out its location. It’s up to us to find it first.”

“I agree, but why are these words so important?”

“Wait a minute,” Harry said, “maybe it’s not the words that are important but the numbers?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look — we know the words add up to a simple Latin sentence — et pulchritudo in oculis aspicientis est — right?”

“Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What are you getting at?”

“They didn’t come in that order though. Starting at the front of the book and working to the back, as you normally read a book, they read oculis pulchritudo est et aspicientis in, and that doesn’t make any sense in Latin at all. If you think about it, Pablo could have found the words he used on any number of pages in this book, so I think the significance of them is the pages they were on.” Harry flicked back through the book, stopping on the pages with the highlighted numbers. “The pages are 3, 24, 31, 40, 41 and 49, and these correspond exactly to the nonsense sentence, but if you rearrange the words so the sentence makes sense, then the sequence changes to 40, 24, 49, 3, 41, and 31.”

“You mean like a code or something?”

“Exactly — did Pablo have a safe or anything like that?”

“Of course — it’s behind that picture.”

Lucia pointed to an original Matisse charcoal from the late 1940s. It was a metre to the left of a large reproduction of a 15th Century map of Italy.

“His safe is behind that?” Harry couldn’t believe the killer had overlooked it, but then hiding safes behind pictures was so clichéd perhaps he had dismissed it as too obvious.

Lucia nodded her head. “Why?”

“It sold through an auction house I know, that’s all.”

“Yes, he bought it at Bonham’s many years ago.”

Harry gently took the Matisse off the wall and laid it on the leather sofa. As Lucia had said, behind it was a compact safe — a steel Burton Standard with an electronic combination lock that Harry was familiar with from his days working in MI6. He quickly tapped in the numbers from the book and tried to open the door.

“Well?” Lucia asked.

“Nothing. Whatever they are, they’re not the combination to this safe.”

Lucia sighed.

“Don’t worry — we’ll work it out, but we need to work fast. Whoever’s holding the police back won’t wait forever — plus the killer could return at any moment.”

“You think?”

“Like I said — they were looking for this,” he held up the small book. “Perhaps Pablo left them something easier to find that has led them on a wild goose chase. When they find out they’re going to come back again so we need to work fast.”

Harry paced the room again, stopping once or twice to peer through the curtains. A team of armed officers was snaking up the pavement and entering the apartment block. “Looks like we have company,” he said.

“The police?”

“And CNI I would guess — they’ll be in here in seconds. Damn it!” He turned and saw the old framed map of Italy on the adjacent wall. For a few seconds he said nothing, and didn’t move a muscle. It couldn’t be, could it?

“Harry, what is it?” asked Lucia.

More silence.

“Harry!”

The man appeared from the shadows of the hallway, lunging forward with a boning knife he’d snatched from the side. It still had meat on it from the meal Pablo had been preparing when he was attacked. He simultaneously swung his left arm back to strike Lucia in the face and brought the knife slicing down through the air towards Harry’s chest.

The Englishman raised his arm to block the wound but the blade slashed deep into his forearm. The blow to Lucia knocked her off her feet and sent her flying back onto the leather chair while the point of the knife missed Harry’s body by millimetres.

The former soldier’s training kicked in without thinking about it, and before he knew what had happened he’d returned fire with a heavy knife-hand strike and smashed the blade from the man’s hand. It clattered onto the floor butt-first. With the handle now wedged into a small gap in the floorboards the blade of the knife was sticking up into the room like a steel stalagmite.

As Lucia staggered back to her feet, the man spun around with the reactions of a ninja, striking Harry in the chest with a sharp palm strike and knocking the breath from his body. In the same move he brought his other hand around and back-slapped Lucia to the floor behind him once again.

Harry fell back onto the knife, stopping himself from getting impaled on it by pushing out his left arm and landing on his elbow a few inches from the sparkling blade. He knew he had to get away but before he could move the man launched himself toward the former spy, slammed his boot down on Harry’s chest and started to push him down onto the knife’s lethal meat-covered blade.

Harry felt the tip of the knife prick into his back as he fought like the devil to stay alive. All the weight of his body plus the force of the man’s boot pushing him down was now supported by his left arm as he used his right arm to twist the assassin’s ankle and push him away. He felt his elbow crunching down into the floorboards and the tip of the knife driving further into his skin.

Lucia was screaming, unsure what to do, but then she picked up a vase from the bookshelf and brought it crashing down on the man’s skull. The killer grunted in pain and collapsed to the floor at Harry’s side, giving the former soldier all the time he needed to spring away from the blade and get to his feet.

He wrenched the knife out of the floorboards and moved toward the man, but then the lights went out and they were plunged into darkness.

Lucia screamed again, and they both heard the assassin scramble to his feet and melt into the shadows of the apartment.

“They’ve cut the power,” Harry said, cursing the timing of it. “They’re about to raid the apartment. Bugger it!”

Then the front door burst open and a heartbeat later an anti-terror squad burst in from the hall and surged into the apartment. They were geared up with night vision scopes and assault rifles.

A wild cacophony of screams in Spanish ordered everyone to get on the floor and put their hands behind their heads, but then a muzzle flash in the darkness lit the room for half a second — just long enough to see one of the policemen collapse to the floor.