Todor took his hand away and leaned closer, nose to nose with this cabrón. “Again,” he said calmly. “We know the woman is here. Tell us which room.”
Behind the clerk’s shoulder, Mendoza held the iPad used to track their targets to this nondescript hotel along Pink Street in the Cais do Sodre district. The establishment was one in a row of such hostelries, all with peeling paint, broken stucco, and rickety ironwork balconies, all overlooking a slew of smoky bars and underground clubs, most closed for the holiday.
Unfortunately, while the GPS tracker had identified this hotel, it had failed to pinpoint where in this building his targets had holed up. Thus it required some judicious questioning. His team had locked down the lobby, not that there was much traffic in the lobby or the street outside. He had dragged the clerk into the back office and showed him a photo of Mara Silviera.
“I . . . I do not know her,” the clerk gasped out again, sticking to the same story. “I truly don’t. I just came on shift this morning.”
Todor grabbed his next finger.
“Please, please, no.”
Before he could yank it, one of his men burst into the office. He dragged a terrified young maid with him, clutching her by the scruff of her neck, a pistol pressed into her side.
“Familiares, she knows where the witch is hiding.”
With a shake of her neck, the man forced her to repeat what she knew.
Todor looked toward the ceiling.
Four flights up.
He returned his attention to the clerk and pulled a hunting knife from his boot.
The man’s eyes got huge, showing white all around. “No, sir, no. I have a wife . . . children . . .”
He slowly silenced those pleas with a slice across the clerk’s throat.
A muffled gunshot sounded behind him. He heard a body fall.
The Inquisitor General had been strict in his commands.
No witnesses.
Still, Todor never took his gaze from the clerk’s eyes. While Todor might not be able to appreciate the pain of that cut, he understood the agony in the man’s face, as life and all its promises died with one last rattled breath.
Todor cleaned his knife on the clerk’s shirt, sheathed the blade, and turned to his men.
“Maleficos non patieris vivere,” he intoned.
Nods met him all around, the command well understood.
Suffer not a witch to live.
2:58 P.M.
C’mon, Mara, hurry . . .
Carly was down on one knee, wrapping cords and seating them into pockets in the black case on the floor. A dozen solid-state hard drives protruded from padded spaces inside it. While Carly unhooked and stored the cables, Mara had begun the process to shut down the Xénese device and send Eve into a slumbering state. Mara insisted that they had to wait for the completion of the music subroutine.
If interrupted, Eve could be irreparably damaged.
Carly knew the Xénese device held Mara’s only copy of her program. Nothing else had the capacity to house the unique consciousness seeded into the glowing sphere. If they were to ever discover what the first incarnation of Eve knew about the murder of her mother and the others, they needed this program intact.
Still . . .
“Speed it up, Mara.”
“Subroutine’s done.”
Her friend yanked the USB-C cable from her laptop and tossed it over. As Carly wound it up, Mara pressed her thumb to the fingerprint scanner on the laptop—then began typing furiously.
“What are you doing?”
“Abort code. To freeze Eve in place.” Mara suddenly swore, reverting to her native tongue. “Aborto de calamar . . .”
Carly hid a smile as she closed the case of hard drives with a snap. She had studied Mara’s Galician dialect, as a way of getting closer to her friend. They sometimes spoke it in public to keep their conversations private. The phrase—a local curse—roughly translated as you’re an aborted squid. It seemed a weird way of telling someone off, but Carly was oddly charmed by the phrase—and even more by the wielder of that curse.
“What’s wrong?” Carly asked.
“You try typing a twenty-character alphanumeric password that’s case-sensitive when you’re panicking. I have to start over.”
“Take a breath. You can—”
The door crashed open behind Mara. The shattered frame showered splinters across the room. A huge shape barreled inside. His arms reached for Mara as her friend twisted around with a gasp.
Carly lunged from the floor, swinging the titanium case up by its handle. She slammed the heavily loaded valise into the attacker’s elbows, knocking his arms wide and throwing him off-balance.
As more men poured in behind the first, she grabbed Mara and retreated to the open window. A graffiti-scoured fire escape offered the only other way out. She shouldered Mara over the windowsill, sending them both crashing onto the iron balcony outside.
A tiny white saucer shattered under her elbow. On the balcony above, a black cat hissed and spat at the sudden intrusion.
Using the metal valise as a shield, she urged Mara down the rickety stairs. Arms shot out the window. Fingers snatched at Carly and latched on to the case’s handle. With her free hand, she grabbed and lashed out with a shard of the broken saucer, slicing across the attacker’s knuckles.
A sharp cry, and she was free. She followed after Mara, skipping steps, leaping from balcony to balcony down the fire escape. The pair all but tumbled headlong toward the street.
A gunshot rang out above. A round sparked from an iron balustrade near her ear. She ducked, heard someone shout angrily in Spanish, clearly scolding the shooter.
Must want us alive . . .
She stared at the back of her fleet-footed friend and revised this assumption.
No, they wanted Mara alive.
The two finally reached the bottommost balcony. Mara unlatched a ladder and sent it rattling down to a narrow alley behind the hotel.
“Go, go, go . . .” Carly pressed, picturing men racing after them or circling around from the front.
They slid down the ladder. Once in the alley, they fled around a corner and to the nearest street. Across the roadway, Christmas music echoed up the steps of a squalid underground bar, adding an absurd sound track to their escape.
“Taxi . . .” Mara panted and pointed to the left where a cab was parked.
They raced toward it, seeing no other cars on the street this holiday afternoon. A man was about to climb into the lone cab.
Mara reached him, grabbing for the open door. “Senhor, por favor.”
The man must have read the desperation on their faces and stepped back, allowing them to pile inside. “Feliz Natal,” he wished them as he pushed the door shut.
The taxi started down the street, heading away from the hotel.
Relieved, Carly sagged in the seat, hugging the case on her lap. Next to her, Mara stared out the back window, her expression worried and scared. Carly felt the same, well aware of what they’d abandoned in the wake of their escape.
“It couldn’t be helped,” Carly said, trying to console her.
Mara murmured as she settled back around, “What have we done?”
3:06 P.M.
Todor sat on his haunches and admired the glass-and-metal sphere cradled in a cushioned box. It was only half the prize he had hoped to collect here, but it would have to do for now.
Behind him, Mendoza was examining the laptop, judging how safe it was to move what they had secured. The rest of his team had spread out, trying to nab the two women before they escaped the district.
While he waited for the others to report in, Todor returned his attention to the device on the floor. From its tiny windows, a bright azure glow emanated from within, as if a piece of the sky had been captured inside. He had to admit there was a certain beauty to its design, to its outward appearance.
But he refused to be deceived.
“Ipse enim Satanas transfigurat se in angelum lucis,” he whispered to the sphere, quoting from the Second Epistle to the Corinthians.
Mendoza let out a small gasp of amazement.
Todor rose and joined the team’s technician. “What is it?”
The team’s tech stepped back from the laptop and ran a palm over his oiled black hair. “What’s been created is simply maravilloso. Just look.”
Todor bent his tall frame to peer at the laptop screen. The sight revealed a verdant forest, its flowering bower carpeted by dewy ferns. Sunlight glistened off every leaf and petal. A gentle breeze stirred the thin branches of a berry-laden bush. It was so perfectly rendered, he could almost smell the perfume wafting from that garden.
It’s like peeking into a corner of Eden.
And this garden was not empty.
A naked woman stirred in the center of it all. One palm rested on a mossy boulder as she bent down and gently plucked a blackberry from a bush. She held it up to the sunlight, before bringing it to her perfect lips. Her eyes drifted closed, as if to better savor the taste. As she did so, his gaze traveled over her sculpted form, her skin a shade of dark mocha, her breasts unabashedly bared.
“From what I was able to discern,” Mendoza said, “they named her Eve.”
Of course.