As if moving through a dream, Langdon felt himself running to the TV camera and wrenching it skyward, pivoting the lens away from Edmond. Then he turned and looked through the tangle of fleeing guests toward the podium and his fallen friend, knowing for certain that Edmond was gone.

My God … I tried to alert you, Edmond, but Winston’s warning came too late.

Not far from Edmond’s body, on the floor, Langdon saw a Guardia agent crouched protectively over Ambra Vidal. Langdon hurried directly toward her, but the agent reacted on instinct—launching himself upward and outward, taking three long strides and driving his body into Langdon’s.

The guard’s shoulder crashed squarely into Langdon’s sternum, expelling every bit of air in Langdon’s lungs and sending a shock wave of pain through his body as he sailed backward through the air, landing hard on the artificial turf. Before he could even take a breath, powerful hands flipped him onto his stomach, twisted his left arm behind his back, and pressed an iron palm onto the back of his head, leaving Langdon totally immobilized with his left cheek squashed into the turf.

“You knew about this before it happened,” the guard shouted. “How are you involved!”

Twenty yards away, Guardia Real agent Rafa Díaz scrambled through throngs of fleeing guests and tried to reach the spot on the sidewall where he had seen the flash of a gunshot.

Ambra Vidal is safe, he assured himself, having seen his partner pull her to the floor and cover her body with his own. In addition, Díaz felt certain there was nothing to be done for the victim. Edmond Kirsch was dead before he hit the ground.

Eerily, Díaz noted, one of the guests appeared to have had advance warning of the attack, rushing the podium only an instant before the gunshot.

Whatever the reason, Díaz knew it could wait.

At the moment, he had only one task.

Apprehend the shooter.

As Díaz arrived at the site of the telltale flash, he found a slit in the fabric wall and plunged his hand through the opening, violently tearing the hole all the way down to the floor and clambering out of the dome into a maze of scaffolding.

To his left, the agent caught a glimpse of a figure—a tall man dressed in a white military uniform—sprinting toward the emergency exit at the far side of the enormous space. An instant later, the fleeing figure crashed through the door and disappeared.

Díaz gave pursuit, weaving through the electronics outside the dome and finally bursting through the door into a cement stairwell. He peered over the railing and saw the fugitive two floors below, spiraling downward at breakneck speed. Díaz raced after him, leaping five stairs at a time. Somewhere below, the exit door crashed open loudly and then slammed shut again.

He’s exited the building!

When Díaz reached the ground floor, he sprinted to the exit—a pair of double doors with horizontal push bars—and threw all of his weight into them. The doors, rather than flying open like those upstairs, moved only an inch and then jammed to a stop. Díaz’s body crashed into the wall of steel, and he landed in a heap, a searing pain erupting in his shoulder.

Shaken, he pulled himself up and tried the doors again.

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