Gray glanced over, checking to see if the guy was joking by quoting Monty Python. But Kowalski’s face remained unreadable.
Ahead, a familiar figure stepped out from one of the side galleries, one of the Holy Office’s little chapels. Sister Beatrice leaned on her ebony cane with one hand and motioned them over. The nun still wore a simple belted gray robe and white bonnet, only donning a thick wool shawl against the chill of the winter day.
She led them through the archway into the more intimate space. The back wall held another cross of a tortured Christ, His face twisted and staring up toward Heaven. An austere wooden prayer bench lay below it with a single candle burning on its top shelf. Under that flickering glow a thick tome rested, bound in crimson leather and gold leaf.
Bailey stepped over to it. “This is what I wanted you to see. Sister Beatrice found it behind the kneeler, where it had likely fallen during the Crucible’s frantic exit.”
Gray noted the title. “It’s a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum.”
“The infamous Hammer of Witches,” Bailey acknowledged. “It was the Inquisition’s Bible. It was especially employed here, in this region of northern Spain where the Crucibulum survived the longest.”
Gray inspected the copy more closely, remembering such a book had been carried by the robed group who had ambushed the women at the university library.
Bailey voiced the question in his own mind. “Could this be the same book used during the murders in Coimbra?”
Gray ran the footage of that attack through his head. The image had been grainy, so there could be no way to know for sure. Unless . . .
He picked up the heavy copy, turned it over, and examined the back cover. A darker stain marred one corner of the leather. He brought the book to his nose and sniffed.
“What the hell are you doing?” Kowalski asked.
The nun made a small admonishing cluck with her tongue and waved a hand at the cross.
Kowalski hunched his shoulders. “Sorry. What the heck are you doing?”
Gray lowered the book. He pictured Carly’s mother, Dr. Carson, lunging and gouging fingers down the leader’s face, the same giant who had been confounding them. Her assault had knocked the tome onto the oil-drenched floor.
“Kerosene,” he said, pointing to the stain. “You can still smell it. This is the same book.”
He looked anew at this underground space.
The Key had been right about this location.
Gray frowned. “Whoever orchestrated the ambush in Portugal, the attack in Paris, they operated out of this place.”
“But where did they go?” Kowalski asked.
He returned his attention to Bailey. “Do your contacts have any idea?”
“No, but the enemy couldn’t have gone far in such a short time. Unfortunately, they’d have a lot of places to retreat to. The neighboring Pyrenees Mountains are littered with strongholds like this. Or they could have simply retreated to the home of one of their sympathizers.”
Gray stared upward, picturing the rich mansion overhead. “Or the two could be one and the same. Home and stronghold. Like here.”
“Great, then they could be anywhere,” Kowalski concluded sourly.
Bailey looked pained, guilty for having failed. “We have to find them . . . and soon.”
Gray understood. “Before they strike another city.”
“No.” Bailey stepped closer and lowered his voice. “It’s the other reason I brought you over here. I didn’t want Agent Zabala to overhear. I have to assume someone leaked our intel. Either purposefully or by accident.”
Gray suspected the same.
“So, I want to keep this as close to the chest as possible,” the priest said. “If the Key was right about this stronghold, then I have to assume the warning passed to me this past hour is just as valid.”
“What did they tell you?”
“That the Crucible is not planning another strike. At least not in the immediate future.”
“Then what are they doing?”
“They’re conducting a major sale. Today. Maybe in a few hours. Something that’s being orchestrated on the Dark Web. The vultures are already gathering.”
“But what are they selling?”
“I wager either their duplicate of the Xénese device . . . or maybe just the use of it. You pay a fee, pick a target, the Crucible executes that order.”
Gray considered all that had happened. “If so, you’re thinking that Paris was a proof of concept, demonstrating what the device could do.”
“I . . . I simply don’t know. I only know that what’s being planned next is something huge. That’s the word the Key used. Grandísimo.” Bailey glanced over to the cluster of agents and soldiers. “Though this mission failed, the raid shook up the Crucible’s plans, badly enough for this intel to reach my contacts. Right now, that’s the only advantage we have.”
“And you don’t know when this sale is taking place?”
“No. Only that the timetable got pushed back. Maybe because you and the others thwarted their efforts to destroy the nuclear plant.”
“Or maybe their copy of Mara’s device took longer to get back here.” Gray pictured the enemy aircraft trailing smoke, slowly losing altitude, settling toward the beleaguered city.
“Either way, we need to find out what they’re selling and the location. Especially where they’ve hidden their device.”
Gray suspected they were all the same place. He stared out across the vault. While this was certainly the location where everything had been planned and executed, he suspected this was only the staging ground. The true heart of the Crucible’s efforts lay elsewhere.
But where?
He looked down at the book in his hands, feeling its hefty weight. He remembered the priest’s choice of words in describing this tome: the Inquisition’s Bible. He knew such a copy would be valuable both for its rarity and for its significance to any family that possessed it, an old family loyal to the Crucible, that ancient sect of the Inquisition.
And what do such prideful families do with their precious Bibles?
Gray shifted the book into one arm and flipped the cover.
Ah, thank you, Charlotte . . .
If Dr. Carson hadn’t knocked the book out of the giant’s hand, they might never have found this clue. Again, Gray sensed that strange hand of fate stirring events around them. He shook off this feeling and read what was inked on the inside cover.
Inscribed there were a long list of names and dates, going back centuries, marking the families who had cherished this tome over the ages.
His eyes traveled down to the last name listed.
He stiffened as he read it.
Oh, no . . .
He turned to Father Bailey. “We’ve been wrong all along.”
3:10 P.M.
We must be ready.
Todor stalked across the snowy courtyard of the palatial estate. Half his face was slathered in ointment and covered in a massive bandage, hiding the worst of his burns. His hands were also wrapped. He had shaved his hair to the scalp, stripping away what the white-phosphorus fire hadn’t scorched. Though any other man would have been laid low by pain, God had seen fit to make him an unrelenting soldier.
Still, he knew how he must look.
Even a pair of massive Great Pyrenees, their fur as white as the mountain snow, shied from his path. They rose from warm patches where sunlight had heated the bricks to move out of his way, tails tucked low. The dogs belonged to the Inquisitor, raised from pups to guard flocks of sheep belonging to the household, mostly from wolves that prowled these mountaintops.
He remembered his boyhood terror of these wolf-haunted mountains. Once he had been cutting through the woods at dusk when he came upon a deer carcass savaged by a pack, the ripped body, the spread of entrails, the blood-soaked grass—then a chorus of howls surrounded him. He had fled home, never catching sight of them, likely never even being chased. Still, he had wet his pants by the time he reached his house, and even now, wolves still haunted his nightmares with their ghostly howls, the padding of their feet as they chased him through his dreams.
Reminded of this, he cast his gaze beyond the open gates as he headed toward the main keep. A spread of snowy peaks marched north toward the sea. In the distance, columns of smoke rose from the parish of Zugarramurdi, one of several hamlets that shared these highlands. His own village lay out there, but with his father dead, he had no reason to return.
This is my true home.
He gazed up at the massive estate, a veritable castle with red-tile roofs. A huge peaked tower housed a bell that once rang at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in nearby Galicia. The walls of the keep had been quarried from these same mountains, the stone blocks visible through crumbling breaks in the outer plaster, as if nothing could hide the true heart of this Pyrenees’s citadel.
The estate had been in the Inquisitor’s family for five centuries, going back to the time when Tomas de Torquemada had ruled the Spanish Inquisition with an iron fist.
Todor formed such a fist now, ripping loose a bandage.