Chapter 7
Recruitment in the Shadows of Montju?c
The alliance had been made official on paper, but its execution depended on men willing to burn in the desert.
With the coordinates secretly sent by the spy Jean-Luc Moreau in hand, Alejandro needed to raise an elite team immediately.
And his first stop was in the depths of Barcelona, in the dungeons of Montju?c, where the army hid the men society preferred to forget.
Don Luiz walked beside Alejandro through the damp corridors of the military prison, the torches making the shadows of the bars dance across the stone walls. The veteran captain kept his hand on the pommel of his sword, his gray gaze alert to every sound.
"Are you sure about this boy, Alejandro?" Luiz asked, his voice echoing in the silence of the dungeon. "A mission of this magnitude demands iron discipline. Bringing along a criminal could be our undoing before we even cross the Mediterranean."
"Trust me, my colonel," Alejandro answered, stopping in front of one of the deepest, darkest cells. "The manuals of Barcelona teach us to raise walls, but this man knows how to find the cracks in stone that our science overlooks."
From within the damp cell, a rhythmic tapping ceased.
A thin figure, moving with feline agility, stepped out of the shadows toward the iron bars.
It was Mateo, "El Gato." Using only a rusty nail and a dry piece of bone, the boy had been patiently scraping the mortar between two massive structural stones.
"If you apply weight there, captain," said Mateo, with an insolent smile that revealed white teeth against soot-stained skin, "the keystone gives way and the whole corridor comes down on your head. The engineer who designed this dungeon forgot to account for seawater seepage."
Don Luiz raised an eyebrow, grudgingly impressed by the prisoner's intuitive grasp of engineering. Mateo had no crest to his name, but he had the eye of a born sapper.
"Mateo," Alejandro called, stepping closer to the bars.
"Count Mendoza has signed your death sentence for the end of the week. But I can offer you a reprieve. There's an expedition leaving for Egypt. Bonaparte's Frenchmen are digging up ancient ruins full of mechanical traps and hidden passages.
I need someone who knows how to pick any lock and disarm any trigger in stone."
Mateo looked at the nail in his hand, then at Alejandro's spotless uniform. His crafty smile widened.
"Egypt? They say the sun's hot there, captain, but it sure burns less than the rope around my neck. If there's French gold to steal and locks to open, my shadow belongs to you."
Alejandro waved to the jailer, who opened the cell. Mateo shuffled out, adjusting a long Albacete dagger he'd kept hidden in his boot the whole time — a detail that drew a discreet smile from Don Luiz. "El Gato" was officially part of the group.
Alone, Don Luiz confided to Alejandro: "I'm impressed a vagabond could know so much about structures. But I've never heard you lie before — why did you lie to him about the reprieve?"
Alejandro said, smiling, that Mateo said that to everyone; he still didn't know whether the boy genuinely knew what he was talking about, or whether it was simply a way of showing off his intelligence.
What was curious was that it had been Mateo himself who first told him about it, during his very first inspection.
As for the gallows — Mateo stole to look after his mother.
The gallows would have been the end of him, and then who would look after her? He needed to be given a purpose.
Don Luiz kept his eyes on Mateo as the boy walked ahead with his cocky swagger. And he thought: God help us.
The Group Assembles: Aboard the H.M.S. Vanguard
Three days later, the British warship H.M.S. Vanguard cut through the dark waters of the Mediterranean under a moonless night, slipping past the naval blockade the French Republic was trying to enforce.
In the stuffy hold of the vessel, under the flickering light of an oil lantern, the team of specialists gathered around the chart table.
The tension in the room was almost palpable, reflecting the clash of forces that made up that improvised alliance.
On one side of the table, meticulously cleaning the mechanism of a long-range British-made rifle, sat Lieutenant Thomas Vance.
The English officer had an icy stare, a square jaw, and the typical arrogance of the Royal Navy.
To him, this search for biblical relics and the Rings of Sheba was foolish Church superstition.
"My only mission here is to make sure French rifles don't cut the route to India," Vance declared, his voice carrying a harsh British accent, without taking his eyes off his weapon.
"If the Corsican general thinks old stones and dead kings' rings will stop British lead, he's in for an unpleasant surprise."
"You speak with the arrogance of men who have forgotten the Creator, Lieutenant," came the mild but cutting voice of Father Bartolomeu from the other side of the table.
The Jesuit, dressed in his austere black cassock, kept an ancient leather codex firmly tucked under his arm. His eyes held the fanaticism of one who had spent his life investigating heresies in the Vatican's secret archives.
"Bonaparte isn't after gold. He's after the foundation of Solomon's mystical engineering. If the atheist Republic controls the Rings, the will of Europe's kings will be bent. Your science will be useless against the power that sleeps in those sands."
While the Englishman and the priest traded hostile glances, Mateo sat on a powder barrel in the back, picking his teeth with his dagger. With a quick flick of the wrist, he tossed a small silver object onto the table. The object rolled to a stop in front of the Jesuit.
It was the silver crucifix Father Bartolomeu had been wearing around his neck until two minutes earlier.
"The priest prays a lot, but takes poor care of his belongings," Mateo mocked, winking at Alejandro. "If I can lift God's protection off your chest without you noticing, imagine what I'll do with the French maps in Alexandria."
Don Luiz slammed his hand firmly on the table, ending the discussion and asserting the military authority the group needed.
"Enough of these games," the colonel ordered, staring fixedly at each of them.
"The spy Moreau has confirmed that the vanguard of Napoleon's savants has already begun secret excavations at the Temple of Taposiris Magna, west of Alexandria. We have less than forty-eight hours to land on the Egyptian coast, find our local guide,
and intercept the French before they breach the underground chamber."
Alejandro de La Vega stepped forward, opening the modified cartographic map with the spy's annotations. His brown eyes burned with the intensity of a man who knew all of Europe's fate was about to be decided in the sand.
"Vance will secure the perimeter with British lead. Father Bartolomeu will decipher the inscriptions. Mateo will clear the way through the shadows," Alejandro concluded, the impeccable bearing of a captain who united science with war.
"And we, colonel, will make sure Spanish engineering buries Napoleon's ambitions. Men, get ready. Alexandria is on the horizon."