Left alone for a few moments while Nico went off to search the house, Ben wandered into the main room and glanced around. The furnishings were simple and rustic: a pitted slab table; an old pine dresser; some canvas chairs. A single large window looked out onto a terrace with a view of the high rocky mound, the church seeming to hang off the side of the lopsided precipice, just waiting to come sliding down to crush the whole village below. The table was littered with history books, papers and a laptop – the kind of things he could imagine a man like Cabeza insisting on bringing with him from home. Next to them was a glass of white wine, half finished and lukewarm to the touch. He walked over to the dresser and pulled open the middle drawer.
He could hear Nico calling Cabeza’s name in the background, sounding increasingly irritated.
Stepping back to the table, Ben touched the finger pad of the laptop and the sleeping machine sprang back into life. Whoever had been using it last, presumably Cabeza, had been looking at a website about the history and architecture of Montefrio. The photos on the site looked similar to the view from the window, except that they’d been taken in summer when the high rock was lush with greenery.
Between the images was a piece of text describing the origin of the church. As quickly as Ben learned that it was called the Iglesia de la Villa and had been built in 1486 on the site of a much older Moorish castle following the defeat of the Muslim kingdom of Granada by Christian armies, he shoved that knowledge to the remotest corner of his mind and minimized the webpage to click into the laptop’s email program.
‘Cabeza! Come on, man! It’s okay, it’s me!’ came Nico’s muffled voice from another room. Ben could have called out to him not to bother – Cabeza clearly wasn’t there – but he was too busy reading the email exchange he’d just found between the historian and Roger Forsyte. The messages dated back from the discussions arranging their meeting in Spain, all the way back to early December: the time when, according to what Simon Butler had told Ben in Southampton, Forsyte had salvaged the mysterious casket from the wreck of the Armada warship.
There was too much to take in all at once, and both men had been cautious not to give away secret information by email – in places the messages were as heavily coded as the encrypted papers that Forsyte had wanted Cabeza to decipher – but Ben caught veiled references to the land grant from Philip of Spain that Nico had mentioned, as well as to the Spanish secret agent it had been intended for.
‘I certainly would concur with you that revelations of this kind, even after five hundred years, could cause significant ripples,’ Cabeza had written sometime in January. ‘If even half the names on this list were truly involved in espionage, it is an incredible discovery.’
‘Ripples are precisely what I have in mind to cause,’ Forsyte had written back the same day. ‘The more significant the better.’
Ben was scrolling through to read more when Nico came running back into the room, red-faced with annoyance. ‘I can’t find the fucker anywhere,’ he announced.
Ben picked the wineglass up from the table. ‘You drink this stuff at room temperature?’ he asked.
Nico sipped from the glass and pulled a face. ‘No, the bottle’s in the refrigerator. What’s that got to do with—?’
‘It means that your man’s been gone for some time.’ Ben pointed out of the window at the church in the distance. ‘And I’d bet that’s where you’ll find him, taking a little sightseeing tour.’ He clicked back into the website Cabeza had been looking at, and showed Nico.
‘Ah, shit. I told him to stay here. I said not to go wandering about. He knows he’s in danger. But he kept talking about that damn church up there, said it was someplace he’d never visited before and wanted to see it. I told you he was kind of an oddball, didn’t I?’
Ben hesitated. A voice was screaming inside him to stop wasting time in this place. Brooke was out there somewhere. He couldn’t afford the slightest delay in searching for her. But he now knew he couldn’t do that without Nico’s help. And what if Cabeza knew something?
‘Let’s go and get him,’ he said.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The tallish, slightly stooped solitary figure making his way through the meandering village streets might have stood out somewhat in a crowd in his suede jacket, bright yellow trousers and rumpled pork pie hat, if there had been any crowds in Montefrio at this time of year. Not that the historian would have taken much notice of them, wrapped up as he was in his own thoughts, as he walked along with half an eye fixed on the Iglesia de la Villa whose bell tower was constantly visible over the rooftops.
Juan Fernando Cabeza was glad to be free again. He couldn’t have sat around in that poky La Catalina another minute, with nothing to do except stare at the few books he’d managed to bring from home and helpless against the recurring panic attacks that had been leaving him breathless and shaking every few hours since this whole ordeal had begun.
Every time he shut his eyes he could see the terrifying figure of the hit man César Cristo standing there about to shoot him to pieces with that huge gun. Never before had he come that close to death. It made him realise how profoundly attached he was to living.
But what kind of existence was it for him now, with his world turned inside out, unable to return home because of the threat against him from some obscure enemy, and having to obey the orders of some undereducated, rough-mannered Colombian policeman who’d arrived out of the blue and taken over his life? Admittedly, Nico Ramirez had saved him, and for that he was grateful – but at the same time this situation was just unendurable. What was going to happen to him?
‘I’m only a simple historian,’ he’d said to himself over and over, often out loud, as he lay wide awake in his bed at night. ‘What harm have I ever done to these people? Why can’t they just leave me alone?’
But he knew perfectly well what they wanted. For all that he’d led a sheltered, closeted life among his dusty old books, far away from the evils of the modern world, Cabeza was savvy enough about its ways to have been certain, right from the first shocked moments after Nico Ramirez had rescued him from the jaws of death, that this all had to do with the new project of Roger Forsyte’s that he’d become involved in. When he’d first heard the stunning news of Forsyte’s abduction on the car radio as Nico had been driving him to safety, then learned of the Englishman’s death from the TV here in Montefrio, it had only confirmed his certainty. The key to the whole thing lay in those documents, lost for so long at the bottom of the ocean in their watertight casket.
Roger Forsyte had always been secretive about his past life, but he’d dropped enough tiny hints in passing over the years they’d known each other for Cabeza to understand that, long before founding Neptune Marine Exploration, the Englishman had played some kind of role within military intelligence. Cabeza could only suppose that part of Forsyte’s training must have been in code-breaking, as by the time he’d first excitedly contacted him about his discovery back in December, he’d already deciphered enough of the documents’ hidden meaning to know how important they were.
‘Hot stuff’, he’d called it. And he hadn’t been kidding.
The detached, unemotionally scholarly part of Cabeza’s mind that wasn’t paralysed with terror regretted that he’d never be able to see the project through. Once Forsyte had let him see the precious documents his job would have been to cast his historian’s eye over them, help to break the last bits of code, translate the sixteenth-century Spanish into modern English and generally confirm Forsyte’s own initial findings. Once the work was complete, which Cabeza didn’t think would have taken very long, it would have been a simple matter of releasing the information to a stunned world. Hidden treasures were ten a penny; earth-shaking scandalous revelations about important historical figures were not. And there were fourteen of them here to expose.
The one document that Forsyte had been willing to show Cabeza a copy of prior to their meeting was the land grant awarded in June 1588 by King Philip of Spain.
Age and damp had eaten away at its edges, but otherwise it had been as miraculously preserved as the rest of the papers and was extremely valuable in its own right. Resplendent in crimson and gold, it bore the royal signature clearly at the bottom; above, as legible as the day it had been penned, was inscribed the name of the man the King had seen fit to reward with such a handsome gift. It was a name that Cabeza and every other historian for more than five hundred years had known well: a notorious one at that.
In his day, Sir Christopher Pennick had been a highly influential nobleman whose connections within both Parliament and the Court of Queen Elizabeth I had been virtually second to none. It had been said that he had the Queen’s ear on many delicate matters of state policy, and only had to whisper into it to inform some of Her Majesty’s most key decisions. But Elizabeth’s trusted aide had also been a man with a dark secret.
At a time when the Church of Rome was about as accepted in England as Satan and to be Catholic was a serious impediment to one’s prospects, Sir Christopher had wisely revealed his own strong popish leanings to nobody except his wife Anne and a select circle of friends. But his secrecy ran deeper than even Anne knew: when her beloved husband wasn’t attending to matters at Court or hunting wild boar on his lands, which stretched from Hambledon to Winchester, he was active in a clandestine movement devoted to the restoration of the Roman Church in England.
When the undeclared Anglo–Spanish War of 1585 began, Sir Christopher and his associates realised that a Spanish victory would make their dream of a Catholic England possible. So, for the next three years, Pennick had used his high-level connections to feed valuable state secrets to the Spanish intelligence network that by the late 1580s had worked its tentacles deep into the British establishment. He quickly became a glittering asset to Spain, cultivating his own stable of dedicated agents within both Court and Parliament. For almost three years his treachery went completely undetected. It was little wonder, in hindsight, that such a valuable and clever agent had been so handsomely rewarded by King Philip.
By the summer of 1588, thanks in part to the efforts of Sir Christopher and his web of spies, the mass invasion of England by Spanish forces was finally ready to launch. But had the Armada managed to reach British shores, let alone achieved its dizzy goal of landing enough Spanish troops to take over the whole country and overthrow Queen Elizabeth’s rule, Pennick would still never have received his reward. Even as the massive invasion fleet was setting sail from Lisbon, an anonymous tip-off alerted Elizabeth’s notorious and feared spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, to Sir Christopher’s activities. Pennick was swiftly, secretly arrested for treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London, while Walsingham’s counterintelligence disinformation machine spread the temporary rumour that he’d been taken ill with smallpox.
The more gruesome historical accounts showed that Pennick had resisted even the most hideous and barbarous forms of torture devised by Walsingham’s men to make him reveal the names of his fellow intelligence agents. Burned, mutilated, his body pierced and broken on the rack, he kept his mouth shut to the end. By the time he died, his wife Anne wouldn’t have been able to recognise him. Meanwhile, the Armada was being repelled and soundly defeated by a combination of the Royal Navy and bad weather. It was a near-run thing, as close as England would ever again come to being invaded. When the Santa Teresa went down off the northwest coast of Catholic Ireland during that last-ditch attempt to find a safe port so far from home, the land grant Sir Christopher Pennick would never know about went to the bottom with her.
After his death, the traitor was dismembered and his body parts put on public display across London as an example to others. His widow Lady Anne Pennick, according to some historical sources heavily pregnant with their first child, fled England in heartbreak and disgrace, never to be seen again. As for Pennick’s network of Spanish agents in England, their names were a secret he carried with him to his grave.
Until now.
As Forsyte had known, and as Cabeza still knew, those very names were listed in code in the secret documents that had been aboard the Santa Teresa. It seemed ironic that in doing their bit to scupper the Armada, the Royal Navy had deprived the British Government of the most valuable piece of intelligence they could have hoped for during the war. The staggering line-up of Pennick’s treacherous allies in England included seven senior politicians, three high-ranking army officers, one rear admiral and one disgruntled lesser member of the royal family. Fourteen names in all, each of them very well known indeed to modern-day historians, not one of them ever even vaguely suspected of anything less than total allegiance to their country.
Yet there it was, black on white proof of their unspeakable treason, enough to have sent them to the Tower back in 1588 and still enough to cause shockwaves even now. The historical time bomb was set to explode. Forsyte had had it all planned: the media storm, the million-pound book deal, the eight-part TV documentary called ‘Hidden Traitors’.
What a splendid coup it would have been, Cabeza reflected wistfully as he ambled through the village. He’d been as impatient as Forsyte, though for slightly purer academic reasons, to witness the impact of their revelations.
But that would never happen now. Was it really possible that someone out there would commit murder to protect the secret of Sir Christopher’s treachery? Cabeza couldn’t understand it. All he knew was that Forsyte was dead and there were people out to get him, too. It was all a horrible mess and he was frightened and shaken and edgy, unable to sleep at night and with nothing to occupy him all day, sitting around at La Catalina with nothing to do but fret and feel sorry for himself.
So he was extremely relieved to be able to get out and pay a visit to the Iglesia de la Villa. Not his primary area of interest historically – or else he would surely have discovered it years ago, living just a few hours’ drive away – but he was convinced that an afternoon spent wandering around the church and the Moorish castle ruins around it would help him forget his troubles, if only for a little while.
He strolled on through the streets of Montefrio, pausing now and then to admire the walled gardens with their palm trees, pretty even in winter, the decorative balconies and street lamps and the old architecture, but never losing sight of the looming church tower which got steadily closer as he threaded his way through the dense maze of narrow streets.
By the time he’d reached the outskirts the houses had thinned out and the terrain had become rougher: rock and scrub on either side of the road, tree-dotted hills all around. Evening was falling, the temperature was dropping. Finding the church was taking much longer than he’d anticipated, and he knew that he faced a long walk home in darkness later. But there was no point in turning back now.
On the road out of the village he met nothing except the occasional car and a brown dog that was ambling along in the opposite direction. Cabeza mistrusted dogs and gave the animal a wide berth. Peering ahead through the falling dusk he thought he could see a sloping path that turned off the road to the left and seemed to lead up through the trees towards the church mound. He’d better hurry, or there’d be no daylight left.
As he walked towards the path his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of an approaching vehicle, and he looked up to see the lights of another car heading into the village. He stepped close to the side of the road to let it by. As it came past he caught a glimpse of the four men inside, all facing their windows as though looking for something. Must have lost their way, he thought to himself.
The moment the car had passed him it slowed to a crawl, its tyres crunching on the rough road. Its four occupants turned simultaneously to give him a lingering stare. Cabeza had often got hopelessly lost himself in strange places, and felt sympathy. He smiled and shrugged apologetically, as if to say ‘Sorry, can’t help you, I don’t live here.’
Nobody smiled back. The car kept on going. Cabeza turned his back on it and resumed his walk towards the path, now just a few yards away on his left. It looked heavy going, a
ll uphill except for a little dip after it left the road. He was glad that he kept himself reasonably fit.
Suddenly aware that he couldn’t hear the car any more, he glanced back and saw that it had stopped a little way farther up the road.
Cabeza thought nothing of it.
Not until the car’s engine revved hard, its wheels screeched and it came veering back in a tight U-turn, speeding towards him.
Cabeza’s heart flipped. For a second too long he stood gaping at the roaring car, then came to his senses and took off at a run. He reached the rocky path and sprinted up it. Heard the rasp of tyres behind him as the car slewed off the road and followed him up the path. There was no way he could outrun it.
Help! Visions of César Cristo loomed up nightmarishly all over again in his mind. It was them again. They’d found him. They were coming to kill him. And there was no Nico Ramirez to save him this time round.
But as he raced down the short dip before the slope rose again more steeply, he saw how narrow the gap between the trees was up ahead. Too narrow for a car. He went dashing between them, his feet pounding on rock and dirt as fast as he could make them go. Casting a frightened glance over his shoulder, he saw the car skid to a halt where the path narrowed. Yes! There was a chance. The distance between him and his pursuers was widening now.
Then the car doors swung open and the four men burst out of the vehicle. Cabeza saw the dark figures coming after him and let out a strangled moan of panic.
The path was steepening. In the failing light he could see the church bell tower looming through the trees. Just fifty yards, maybe sixty, and he’d reach it. Maybe there’d be somewhere up there to hide. Maybe there’d be people. The men couldn’t harm him if there were witnesses, could they? Could they?