The Lost Testament

54

The Englishman had not been a popular choice within the ranks of P2 when he was selected as its new head, not least because he wasn’t Italian and didn’t speak the language. But he’d taken the reins just over three years earlier when an internal revolt, a battle for control, had almost wrecked the lodge, a revolt that he had resolved in one short afternoon. He’d travelled out to Milan unannounced and personally executed the five ringleaders with his bare hands, using a baseball bat on four of the men and a knife on the last one, the man who’d started it. He had taken a long time to die and it had been very messy.

After that, nobody had ever questioned his competence or fitness for the job, and certainly not his ruthlessness.

Having completed the call to the cleric in Rome, the Englishman opened his small briefcase on the café table in front of him and took out the list of names and numbers, the annex to the document he had been instrumental in compiling. He needed to decide who would be the most appropriate person for him to activate in Spain’s capital city.

What he required now was not just some hired thug who would be able to kill Anum Husani — that would be easy enough — but somebody who could first track down the man and recover the relic, and then eliminate Husani. And that, the Englishman knew, wouldn’t be easy; not in a city of well over three million people, with more than double that number in the entire metropolitan area, and especially not when the only clues he had to go on were two credit card transactions that had taken place the previous day. Not to mention that Husani could have taken a flight out of Madrid by now, or possibly even out of Spain.

But, actually, he doubted that was the case. He believed that Husani had chosen Madrid deliberately. It was the third largest city in Western Europe, after London and Berlin, and had the largest metropolitan area after London and Paris. And because of Spain’s Moorish heritage, people bearing an Arabic appearance were not an unusual sight there.

And there were probably other reasons as well. If he was trying to sell the parchment — and that was the only scenario that made any sense — then the most likely potential buyers would be the museums and well-heeled collectors of Western Europe.

What the Englishman was expecting, at almost any moment, was some kind of a news item or press release on the Internet that would alert potential purchasers to the existence of the relic. Tracing the origin of such a posting probably wouldn’t help to track down Husani, because if he had any sense he would travel somewhere in the city that was well away from the hotel where he was staying and use a cyber café there. And so far Husani had proved that he certainly wasn’t stupid.

But if he were to sell the relic, his press release, or whatever medium he decided he was going to use to describe the parchment, would have to include some means of communicating with him — an email address, a mobile phone number, or even a physical location, probably in a public place — and once that information was available, it would only be a matter of time before they found him.