Origin

They opened just far enough to allow him to glimpse the problem.

Strangely, the outer door handles had been bound shut by a loop of wire—a string of beads wrapped around the handles from the outside. Díaz’s confusion deepened when he realized the pattern of the beads was quite familiar to him, as it would be to any good Spanish Catholic.

Is that a rosary?

Using all of his force, Díaz heaved his aching body into the doors again, but the string of beads refused to break. He stared again through the narrow opening, baffled both by the presence of a rosary and also by his inability to break it.

“¿Hola?” he shouted through the doors. “¡¿Hay alguien?!”

Silence.

Through the slit in the doors, Díaz could make out a high concrete wall and a deserted service alley. Chances were slim that anyone would be coming by to remove the loop. Seeing no other option, he grabbed his handgun from the holster beneath his blazer. He cocked the weapon and extended the barrel through the doorway slit. He pressed the muzzle into the string of rosary beads.

I’m firing a bullet into a holy rosary? Qué Dios me perdone.

The remaining pieces of the crucifix bobbed up and down before Díaz’s eyes.

He pulled the trigger.

The gunshot thundered in the cement landing, and the doors flew open. The rosary shattered, and Díaz lurched forward, staggering out into the empty alley as rosary beads bounced across the pavement all around him.

The assassin in white was gone.

A hundred meters away, Admiral Luis Ávila sat in silence in the backseat of the black Renault that now accelerated away from the museum.

The tensile strength of the Vectran fiber on which Ávila had strung the rosary beads had done its job, delaying his pursuers just long enough.

And now I am gone.

As Ávila’s car sped northwest along the meandering Nervión River and disappeared among the fast-moving cars on the Avenida Abandoibarra, Admiral Ávila finally permitted himself to exhale.

His mission tonight could not have gone any more smoothly.

In his mind, he began to hear the joyful strains of the Oriamendi hymn—its age-old lyrics once sung in bloody battle right here in Bilbao. ¡Por Dios, por la Patria y el Rey! Ávila sang in his mind. For God, for Country, and King!

The battle cry had long since been forgotten … but the war had just begun.

CHAPTER 22

MADRID’S PALACIO REAL is Europe’s largest royal palace as well as one of its most stunning architectural fusions of Classical and Baroque styles. Built on the site of a ninth-century Moorish castle, the palace’s three-story facade of columns spans the entire five-hundred-foot width of the sprawling Plaza de la Armería on which it sits. The interior is a mind-boggling labyrinth of 3,418 rooms that wind through almost a million and a half square feet of floor space. The salons, bedrooms, and hallways are adorned with a collection of priceless religious art, including masterpieces by Velázquez, Goya, and Rubens.

For generations, the palace had been the private residence of Spanish kings and queens. Now, however, it was used primarily for state functions, with the royal family taking residence in the more casual and secluded Palacio de la Zarzuela outside the city.

In recent months, however, Madrid’s formal palace had become the permanent home for Crown Prince Julián—the forty-two-year-old future king of Spain—who had moved into the palace at the behest of his handlers, who wanted Julián to “be more visible to the country” during this somber period prior to his eventual coronation.

Prince Julián’s father, the current king, had been bedridden for months with a terminal illness. As the fading king’s mental faculties eroded, the palace had begun the slow transfer of power, preparing the prince to ascend to the throne once his father passed. With a shift in leadership now imminent, Spaniards had turned their eyes to Crown Prince Julián, with a single question on their minds:

What kind of ruler will he turn out to be?

Prince Julián had always been a discreet and cautious child, having borne the weight of his eventual sovereignty since boyhood. Julián’s mother had died from preterm complications while carrying her second child, and the king, to the surprise of many, had chosen never to remarry, leaving Julián the lone successor to the Spanish throne.

An heir with no spare, the UK tabloids coldly called the prince.

Because Julián had matured under the wing of his deeply conservative father, most traditionalist Spaniards believed he would continue their kings’ austere tradition of preserving the dignity of the Spanish crown through maintaining established conventions, celebrating ritual, and above all, remaining ever reverential to Spain’s rich Catholic history.