The Holy Bullet (12 page)

He read the names written on the paper, turned to a computer installed on a small square table, and pressed the keys that made the first name appear. Solomon Silvander Keys, the victim’s complete name. After he pressed the Enter key, detailed information appeared on the monitor with the certificate of autopsy attached, and many other facts of little relevance to Barnes and his agents. What Davids wanted from this procedure was to know the location of the victim, which appeared immediately in the lower right screen, number 13. Since the count was made starting from the top and left to right, we know that the thirteenth door Davids is heading toward, or Dr. Davids, we should say, is in the bottom row on the left side.

The doctor opened the square steel door and slid out the rack he found inside, where the corpse was lying stretched out, inert. A container that held Solomon Keys’s life of eighty-seven years. The tone of the skin, noticeably ashy, was a result of the temperature to which the body was subjected, interrupting completely the decomposition, but giving him a cadaverous, supernatural, vampiric look. If three of the men hadn’t been used to dealing with the most revolting scenes, they might have doubled over with fear or vomited their guts out, as we see Jerome Staughton doing at this moment into a blue plastic bucket.

“Go outside, Staughton,” Barnes ordered. He had no time for his subordinate’s weakness.

Staughton went gladly, with no desire to be heroic. Barnes knew perfectly the strengths and weaknesses of those who served him and what they could tolerate. Otherwise he would’ve made him stay there for the entire observation. Staughton was good at other things, as he’d already proved in the bathroom at Amsterdam Centraal. To observe and deduce, summarize and process facts. Yes, no one could compete with Jerome Staughton in analysis.

A serious Barnes looked at the body. Totally naked of clothes and prejudices, sanctified by death. There were two entrance wounds corresponding to the police report, one in the chest and the other exactly in the center of his head, brown, lifeless, since even the blood loses vitality.

“Do you have the ballistics report?” Barnes asked without taking his eyes off the body of the old member of the agency.

“Yes, wait a minute,” the doctor answered, reluctantly returning to the small table, where he looked at the monitor. “Nine millimeter.”

“Nine millimeter,” Barnes repeated. “Of course. It had to be.” He continued looking at the corpse. “Were all of them killed with the same gun?”

He couldn’t take his eyes from the body. He knew that one day it could be him stretched out on another gurney in some other morgue, with a bullet in the head and wrinkles cut with age, if he made it to Solomon Keys’s age. Solomon’s world didn’t exist anymore—the time when people trusted strangers who came out of nowhere suddenly, manipulating them at their will, paying generously for information, eliminating those who had to be, and avoiding risks to those who took care of that. Today things were more dangerous, the criminals much more intelligent, cautious, always two steps ahead of the intelligence services, and never thinking twice. Besides, double or triple or totally invented lives, as in his time, didn’t make sense now. Everything was done at a distance on the Internet or other wireless technology. The demand was much greater. Communications were encoded, and millions of dollars required to validate or decode a message, with no certainty it was trustworthy. That was one of the reasons the company opted for surveillance on everyone, not just those who might be considered suspicious, since in reality they have no idea who is or isn’t. After an information scan in which the supercomputer uses key words such as “president,” “attack,” “bomb,” “United States of America,” “menace,” “gas,” among others on a long list, via Internet, audio, and video, from time to time they manage to catch someone. No, Barnes wouldn’t make it to Solomon Keys’s eighty-seven years, nowhere close. The shot to the temple was practically guaranteed. Hence the compassionate look he gave the deceased old man.

“Yes. All with the same gun,” the doctor concluded.

“I want to see the other two,” Barnes demanded.

More fast finger movement on the keyboard, and the information appeared on the computer screen. Doors 15 and 16 held the bodies of the English couple. Davids went to 15 first and slid out the rack to reveal . . . no body.

“This is unexpected,” Davids uttered, paralyzed with surprise.

“Are you sure this is the right one?” Barnes asked.

“It’s what the computer says,” the doctor informed him.

He opened 16. Nothing.

“Fuck,” Barnes swore. “Do you see this?” He whirled around to ask Thompson.

Irritated, impatient, Barnes started opening all the refrigerated compartments and sliding out the racks.

“Hey,” the doctor protested.

“Keep quiet,” Thompson warned, also opening the compartments and reading the tag attached to each corpse’s toe.

Thirteen corpses later, some compartments empty, they still hadn’t found a sign of the English couple. They reviewed the list, and everything seemed to be in order with the rest.

“Who could have taken them away?” Barnes asked the doctor.

“No one. The bodies aren’t even prepared for transfer yet.”

“And when will that be? Who takes them?”

“In this case, since they’re foreigners, the family or a representative of their country of origin, but always accompanied by a family member.”

“Could there be an error? Could they already have been handed over and the information not yet entered in the computer?” Thompson wanted to know.

“It seems strange to me, but I’m going to find out,” Davids informed him, much friendlier now than in the beginning. It was the morbidity of the situation. Irony. Irony.

He picked up a telephone attached to the wall next to the entrance door and punched three numbers, an internal extension. Three seconds later he started a conversation in his nasal Dutch that ended with violently slamming down the receiver, leaving it dancing on the end of the cord.

“He’s coming,” he explained.

“Who?” Barnes and Thompson asked.

“The boss. Dr. Vanderbilt,” he explained.
“Zoon van een wijfje”
—son of a bitch.

The reasons for his blasphemies were his own, of no interest to us, nor to Barnes, Thompson, or Staughton, who came in white as a cauliflower, cleaning his mouth with a cloth handkerchief and covering his nose with it.

“Everything is sterilized. It doesn’t smell of anything,” Davids pointed out, fed up with all the interruptions. They were going to set his work back. Staughton paid no attention to the remark. He looked at the open doors of the gigantic refrigerated bay and the thirteen corpses slid out from the compartments. He looked at Thompson curiously. The latter, seeing him, turned his eyes away.

“Don’t ask,” he advised.

Meanwhile, the doctor, who must have been the previously mentioned Vanderbilt, Dr. Davids’s boss, came in. He was wearing a blue suit with an indigo tie underneath his open white gown. His posture radiated confidence and arrogance. He cut short the “
Goede nacht, heren
”—Good evening, gentlemen—upon seeing the macabre spectacle. It looked like someone wanted to buy bodies, or parts of them.

“Davids, sluit alles, nu
,” he shouted at Davids, the equivalent of ordering him to close up all the shit, without the profanity, but inherent in the tone he used. “What’s going on, gentlemen? Are you trying to screw things up?” he offered in a joking tone.

Barnes gestured to Thompson to place himself in Davids’s path and keep him from carrying out his chief ’s order.

“Stop there, Davids,” Barnes said. “Nobody is touching anything in here until you tell me where the two missing corpses are.”

“But what’s going on, gentlemen? Where do you think you are? In your own country? Here you don’t give orders about anything,” Vanderbilt made clear, abandoning his conciliatory tone.

“This American was murdered in your country in this city. If you knew how important he is for the United States, you’d think twice. If we were able to get to Baghdad in three weeks, we can easily get here in three days.”

“Okay, okay. You needn’t get all worked up. Besides, you’re under Dutch jurisdiction. That body isn’t going anywhere unless I give the authorization.”

He’s put us in our place
, Barnes thought.

“Very well. Where are the corpses of the English couple?” he asked.

“They’ve been reclaimed. They’re on their way to London at this very moment.”

“It’s not in the computer,” Davids told him, surprised.

“Because I haven’t put it in. I just did the transfer forty-five minutes ago.”

“Who took the bodies?” Barnes’s voice cut through sharply. Something had gotten away from him. What?

“A family member.”

“Name,” Barnes demanded.

“He knows perfectly well that the matter is under investigation and secret—”

“The name.” This time he shouted to leave no doubt about who was giving orders here.

Dr. Vanderbilt went to the computer and entered several codes and other input. An instant later he turned the monitor so they could see the name. His face was unfriendly, but it didn’t matter. What was done was done.

Barnes approached the monitor and read the information. Staughton and Thompson did the same.

“What?” an astonished Staughton exclaimed.

“Son of a bitch,” Geoffrey Barnes swore, not wanting to believe the name he read.

G
od, whose only begotten Son, who with his life, death, and resurrection obtained for us the gift of eternal life, grant us, who celebrate these mysteries of the Holy Rosary, follow Him and attain what He promises. For Christ our Lord,” the priest recited.

“Amen,” the believers responded.

So the service was celebrated in the great chapel of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where the largest incensory in the world, the
botafumeiro
, hangs motionless, without incense but commanding the greatest respect. For seven hundred years they have followed the tradition of using the great incensory, not this one, which is a little less than a hundred and fifty years old, but others, the idea being to purify the surroundings spiritually, although, in regard to smells, it was an effective means of repelling the odor that emanated from the pilgrims, after hundreds and thousands of miles of pilgrimage for their faith.

Marius Ferris had spent the entire day here attending all the rituals of the daily liturgy. He had visited Jacob’s Crypt, where the remains of the apostle lie. He remained kneeling in prayer for more than an hour in the narrow place, ignoring the passersby who approached that place below the altar, with its entrance through a narrow door that opened onto some even narrower stairs. Marius Ferris had continued to pray to Santiago the Greater, kneeling on the prie-dieu, with his eyes shut, forehead contracted, feeling every word he offered. From time to time a tear formed under his eyelid and ran down his cheek to evaporate.

Now he was sitting in the nave, listening to Father Clemente’s last words, while night had fallen for over an hour already. A few dozen faithful were scattered among the pews, old and bent over, just come from their jobs or business, grateful for the grace obtained or probably asking new favors or substituting more recent ones for old ones, like a service provided from above to someone who knows how to negotiate.

In the last row sat a young man in a black suit, and anyone who had noticed him during the day would never guess Marius Ferris was the reason for his presence. Just the opposite. The way he walked around the cathedral, avoiding the crypt when the priest was praying earnestly, would have convinced the most suspicious that we were dealing with a historian or a passionate admirer of sacred art. He’d lingered in different corners, appreciating some of the relics open to view, not all, since a day, even a lifetime, wasn’t enough for that. He paid special attention to a gold crucifix, originally from the year 874, that contained, it was believed, a piece of the True Cross on which Christ was crucified. Is there really a piece of the wood in it? He had reflected on this for several long minutes for lack of any other interest and place to go, but had ended up concluding that, even if such provenance were confirmed, an object didn’t become holy merely because it subjected Christ to death, causing him pain, torturing him for hours until the last breath.

Later he’d gone down into the crypt when it was empty and analyzed the narrow place. Three small, latticework doors, the middle one guarding the silver sarcophagus with the sacred relics, the bones of Jacob, at the end of a small passage with a floor covered in black-and-white mosaic. The other doors guarded the mortal remains of two of Santiago the Greater’s disciples, San Teodoro and San Atanasio, gathered together with those of their master in life and death.

This personal pilgrimage over, done more out of obligation than to avoid the task assigned to him, he’d gone to sit in the last row where he had remained since Mass began.

“In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” Father Clemente intoned, raising his right hand over his head when he said “Father” and over each shoulder when he said “Son” and “Holy Spirit.” “Go in peace, and may the Lord be with you.”

Another celebration of the Eucharist was over, the fifth he’d attended today. It was time to end his martyrdom and begin that of others. Things were going well on the various fronts of the operation.

He saw Marius Ferris walking toward the priest, who was heading toward the sacristy, but didn’t attempt to get up. It wasn’t time. His instructions were specific.

“Don Clemente,” Marius Ferris greeted him in a quiet voice, in accord with the sacred place.

The other, also with white hair, stopped and examined him. That face was not unfamiliar. But the white hair . . .

“Marius?” he asked a little doubtfully.