Death Mask. Alex Archer

      Annja clicked.

      A window opened on her screen and a few seconds later the image resolved into what looked like a live video feed. The sole image on the screen was a digital clock that read 23:52:27. It took her a couple seconds to realize it was counting backward from 24:00:00.

      “Hello, Annja, so glad you could finally join us,” a voice said. It sounded different through the tinny speakers than it had on the phone. There was no sign of the male speaker on the screen.“Time is precious. You have already wasted seven and a half minutes of it.”

      Wasted?

      She didn’t know what was going on, and the steaming-hot water had only dragged her so far from sleep. “Stop messing around, Garin. I’m tired and in no mood for your stupid jokes.”

      The camera zoomed out, gradually revealing that the clock was in the middle of a man’s chest. He was slumped in a chair, his hands tied behind his back. He was breathing, but he was bloodied and bruised, and Annja couldn’t tell if he was conscious. Wires ran from the clock to a box beneath the chair he was tied to. Water was thrown from off camera, soaking his blood-streaked shirt. The man lifted his head slowly, staring at the camera through one swollen eye. His mouth was smeared with red. Still, he was immediately recognizable.

      “Garin!” Annja said, his name catching in her throat.

      His eyes didn’t seem to register his name or Annja’s voice. He was dazed and confused and clearly had no idea what was going on.

      “What do you want?” Annja asked.

      “I like that,” said the off-camera voice. “Straight down to business. No pretense of bargaining. No bluster or demands that I let him go. We can work together, Miss Creed.”

      “What do you want?” Annja repeated.

      “The Mask of Torquemada.”

      “The what?” She knew exactly what the voice had said, and had a good idea what it had meant. But that didn’t mean she’d be able to meet this person’s demands.

      “Do you really want to waste time pretending you don’t know what I am talking about, Miss Creed?” the voice said. “Nine minutes. Ticktock. Ticktock. The more time you waste now, the less you will have to save your friend. Find the mask or your friend dies. Is that incentive enough for you? Twenty-three hours, fifty-one minutes.”

      “You can’t expect me to find something that’s been lost for centuries in a single day. That’s impossible.”

      “You better hope not, for Mr. Braden’s sake.”

      “This is insane! I don’t have the first idea where to start looking...or what I’m even looking for. You can’t just say ‘Find it.’ I’m not a miracle worker!”

      “Well, there’s one man here who is desperately hoping you are, Miss Creed. His life depends upon it. I will call you again in a few hours to see how you’re getting on. Godspeed, Annja Creed. Ticktock. Ticktock.” The camera zoomed in to focus on the clock in the middle of Garin’s chest, then panned up to his face. “Just in case you need reminding.”

      Annja couldn’t look away.

      Garin looked at her with dead eyes.

      She wondered if he had been drugged or just beaten so badly he couldn’t focus.

      His head slumped forward again. This time it stayed down.

      Annja watched as the clock ticked down another minute. She had less than a day to save Garin, with no idea where to begin, no clue as to where he might be. Normally there was one man she’d turn to if she needed technology to help her find someone—Garin. He wasn’t going to be able to help her now.

      She continued to stare at the screen, trying to learn as much as she could about the place he was being held, but there was precious little to be gleaned from it. The light was artificial, the walls behind him were bare brick. It could have been, quite literally, anywhere in the world.

      Another minute passed by and she knew she had to do something; anything.

      She’d wasted ten minutes of his life already.

      Ticktock. Ticktock.

       2

      23:45—Madrid

      “Annja? As much as I adore you, my dear, I adore my sleep much more.”

      “This is work,” Annja said.

      “A four-letter word,” Roux said. She could imagine the smile playing across his lips as he grumbled. He could be a crank at the best of times. “And not one of the more amusing ones.”

      “Have you heard from Garin?”

      “Not recently. Last week. Why?”

      “I was just sent a link to a video chat. Garin was on the other end. There was a clock strapped to his chest and a bomb under his chair. He was in a bad way. Beaten bloody.”

      “Couldn’t happen to a nicer chap.”

      “This is serious,” she said. “In less than twenty-four hours that clock hits zero and the bomb detonates, taking Garin with it. That’s the threat.”

      “I assume this is a kidnapping? So what do they want?”

      She heard him moving around the château, talking with her as he made his way to his study.

      “They’re asking for the Mask of Torquemada,” she said. It came out in a more matter-of-fact way than she’d expected. Everyone knew who Torquemada was—a Dominican zealot who rose up to become the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, rabidly anti-Semitic, the scourge of the Moors—but in all the stories she’d heard of his vile purge, there had never been anything about a mask.

      “Good luck with that,” Roux said dismissively. “It’s been missing for more years than I can remember.”

      “So there is a mask. But you were there, weren’t you? You and Garin.”

      “I may have been,” Roux said, not giving anything away. “But I had other things on my mind than a mad Dominican obsessed with religious purity. I’d already had a lifetime of that. I was in France. It’s not like we had CNN giving us hourly updates as the atrocities rolled on, but yes, you heard things, obviously. It was easy to throw accusations around, and you know the old adages about mud sticking, no smoke without fire. People were willing to believe anything if it meant they were safe from the worst of it, that it couldn’t happen to them. Torquemada was a Christian zealot. He was the driving force behind maybe as many as two hundred thousand Jews fleeing Spain. His priests encouraged another fifty thousand to convert to Christianity. Though I use the term encouraged in its most liberal sense.”

      “And the mask?”

      “If it ever existed, buried with him.”

      “So we’re just talking about a little tomb-robbing here. I guess I can deal with that. Wouldn’t be the first time. Where’s he buried? Do we know?” She had already forwarded the email to Roux, along with the link.

      “Yes. It’s a matter of public record. Unfortunately, his grave was ransacked only a couple of years before the Inquisition was disbanded.” Meaning the task had already become exponentially more difficult than she’d thought it would be in the matter of a few seconds. “They took everything in the tomb. Burned his bones, mask, everything destroyed in an auto-da-fé. An act of faith.” He fell silent and she knew he was waiting for her, giving her the chance to respond and draw her own conclusions.

      “Okay.