Chapter 2 #3
While the others took twenty minutes to adjust the piece, Alejandro needed less than five. He clenched his teeth, adjusted the cannon's elevation screw with his own calloused hands, and, without hesitation, pulled the firing cord.
The roar of the bronze cannon shook the foundations of Montju?c, blanketing the yard in a dense cloud of black powder smoke.
The generals raised their spyglasses. The iron ball crossed the sky in a perfect mathematical curve, cutting through the wind and falling like a bolt of lightning exactly at the center of the barge's main mast, splitting the vessel in two and sending it straight to the bottom of the sea.
A single shot. An impossible hit.
The stunned silence of the stands broke under the enthusiastic applause of a marshal of the Crown. There, before Spain's military elite, Alejandro de La Vega was no longer a nobody from the mud.
From that day on, word spread through the salons of Barcelona and reached the ears of the court in Madrid: the Royal Academy had hatched a monster of military engineering. The peasant from Castile was, officially, a prodigy.
Months passed, and Alejandro's reputation as the Academy's sharpest mind only grew. Yet by the end of that year, Barcelona's military routine was shattered by a wave of silent panic that swept through the high nobility.
Valuable items began disappearing from within the Governor's Palace and the generals' official residences.
First it was a colonel's genuine gold pocket watch; the following night, diamond cufflinks; then an emerald brooch belonging to one of the ladies of the Madrid court.
The royal guard searched the quarters of every servant, and dozens of humble subjects were thrown into the dungeons on suspicion of theft.
The cadets were assigned to assist in the investigation. Alejandro spent days searching carriages and mapping the guards' routes. Search here, investigate there — and no one discovered a thing. There were no forced locks, no broken windows. The thief seemed like a ghost passing through walls.
Already frustrated and on the verge of giving up on the case, the officers ordered a thorough new sweep of the catacombs of the Montju?c fortress, fearing the objects might be hidden underground. Alejandro led the detachment to the same underground wing he had inspected months before.
Passing the deep isolation cell, he saw the same young man, El Gato, lying calmly on the stone floor, hands behind his head, whistling a popular tune.
Seeing Alejandro, the boy sat up quickly. With a swift, almost invisible flick of the wrist, he tossed a gleaming object through the iron bars.
Alejandro caught it purely by instinct. When he opened his hand, the cadet's blood ran cold. It was the emerald brooch belonging to the lady of the court — the epicenter of the scandal that had turned the city upside down.
"I think the generals up there are looking for this, aren't they, doctor?" said El Gato, with that same insolent smile.
Alejandro looked at the brooch, then at the heavy, untouched chains on the cell door. It was impossible.
"How did this get in here?" Alejandro whispered, moving closer to the bars and glancing around to make sure the other soldiers weren't listening. "You're locked in maximum security!"
The boy gave a low laugh and pointed to the stone arch Alejandro had once stopped him from bringing down.
"Remember when you taught me how the water flowed through there? I studied your physics, captain. I found out that if I push the side block of that duct you had sealed off, it opens a perfect passage that comes out right in the palace's private gardens. I slip out through the gap,
grab whatever glitters in the fat men's drawers, and come back to my cell before the guard changes over. It's the perfect alibi. No one ever suspects the prisoner locked in the dungeon."
Alejandro frowned, impressed but incredulous.
"If you have a perfect escape route to the palace and the streets of Barcelona, why the devil do you always come back to this damp cell, Mateo? Why not run for it once and for all?"
El Gato's insolent smile vanished for a brief second, replaced by a mature seriousness in his dark eyes. He swallowed and leaned closer to the bars, speaking even lower:
"If I run, captain, I become a hunted man with wanted posters all over Catalonia. The guards would watch the slum I came from. My mother's old, coughing up blood in bed with no money for the doctor. This way, I slip out in the shadows, rob the gold watches off generals who have money to spare,
leave a handful of coins under her door to pay for medicine, and come back to my hiding place. In here I've got a roof, three rations a day, and the best alibi in the world. Where else would I find a safe as secure as my own cell? Besides...
watching those powdered faces up there panic without knowing who robbed them — that's priceless."
Alejandro was stunned. The ghost thief who had humiliated all of Catalonia's security wasn't acting out of pure greed; he was acting out of desperate loyalty to his own mother and a surgical mockery of the system that had condemned him.
"Keep your head down, Mateo," Alejandro whispered before stepping away. "Because next time you slip out, I might not be here to look away."