Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

The safe thing would be to scurry back to his room and request reinforcements, or at least the delivery of a firearm.

But Dr. Corwin had not been tasked with playing it safe. He had been tasked with finding Ettore Majorana and his lost research before the Ascendants.

“Hey, boss,” the porter on the stoop across the street shouted in broken English. “Have a good day!”

Dr. Corwin hesitated, then walked over to him. “What’s your name?” he asked in Spanish, a language he had learned over the years and perfected on a research sabbatical in Granada.

“Carlos. You speak Spanish?”

“Si, and my name is James Corwin. I appreciated your help earlier. Say, did you see a blond man in a white linen suit enter the hotel just a few minutes ago?”

Carlos spat. “That son of a bitch told me to get a job and stop bothering people. As if he knows anything about me or this city.”

Dr. Corwin smiled to himself. “I wonder, my friend, if you’d be open to a little work for me today.”

Carlos jumped up from the stoop. “Si, primo. What do you have in mind?”

“Do you have any friends nearby looking for work?” Dr. Corwin said casually, then lowered his voice. “Maybe a few who look as handy with their fists as you do?”

The porter grinned and cracked his knuckles.

With Hans close on his heels, Dr. Corwin decided to walk rather than wait for a taxi. According to the map of the Old City in his pocket, if he cut through an alley off the square with the imposing stone church looming at the end of the street, the curandero’s house was only three blocks away. He would make better time on foot.

Though his Society sources had told him the Casa San Márquez was the closest hotel, he passed two others on the way. Granted, they looked quite new, and researching Cartagena from afar was a difficult proposition. But it made him suspicious of his sources. After talking to Waylan Taylor, Hans had surely gathered the name and location of the curandero. Had Hans used the same logic and booked a room in the same hotel—or had someone told him where Dr. Corwin was staying?

The Old Town was a traveler’s smorgasbord of grand promenades and cobbled alleys, pastel colonial buildings, Baroque churches, and sixteenth-century mansions with trim work that looked fashioned by Renaissance masters. Lush courtyards dripping with secrets lurked behind crumbling stone walls, saturated with the rich aroma of gardenia and passion fruit vines. The proud buildings conjured up images of men on horseback with swords at their hips, courting women in bright dresses leaning over their balconies. It was a place where the past felt more alive than the present.

A place built on fever dreams of gold and adventure, wealth and beauty, slavery and genocide.

Dr. Corwin let his subconscious absorb the city as he canvassed his surroundings, watching for signs of the enemy, as a barrage of thoughts and concerns crowded his mind. He was ashamed he had lost the file on Ettore in Asheville, but it was not a disaster. He had absorbed the information he needed on the drive down from New York, and the Ascendants already had as much—or more—intelligence on the Italian physicist.

The more he considered the substance of Ettore’s theories, the more intrigued he became. While the foundation of quantum theory had been laid fifty years ago, the standard model of particle interaction was a mess. No one was close to marrying macro and micro physics. Ettore’s model of an infinite tower was so elegant and simple, and it predated the newly developed string theory by decades. The Italian’s original calculations had not worked out . . . but what if there was something to it?

Despite Ettore’s obscurity, it was undisputed that he was a genius on the level of the very best minds in history. If he was truly alive after all this time, and had worked on perfecting his theories and developing new ones, and the research was still out there somewhere…

It was an incredibly tantalizing proposition. Even a small insight into a universal law of physics could change the world.

No one accosted Dr. Corwin as he hustled down a cobblestone street of contiguous three-story residences, built crooked to maximize shade and shorten a marauding invader’s line of fire. The plaster-covered stone facades were painted with warm shades of lavender, mustard, and teal. Tropical foliage overflowed from baskets and pots on the balconies, spilling through the balustrades and climbing the walls to perfume the air.

It was late afternoon. Sweat poured down his back from the heat of the walk. According to the researchers, Alvaro Muñoz had retired some years ago. Before leaving the airport, Dr. Corwin had called the psychiatrist himself to arrange a meeting. The request had been an honest one: Dr. Corwin was a physicist who had talked to Waylan Taylor and was looking to pick the former curandero’s brain on a few matters, given his unique perspective.

As Dr. Corwin knocked on a lime-green door set within a recessed archway, a pushcart vendor passed by, bell tinkling, hawking mango juice and ceviche served with fried plantains. Dr. Corwin salivated at the prospect. He had not had time to eat and was an hour early for the meeting. Worried that Hans would appear at any moment, Dr. Corwin was relieved beyond measure when a wiry bald man fitting Alvaro’s description opened the door.

“Si?” the man asked. His ocher skin tone and teardrop eyes spoke to an indigenous heritage.

Dr. Corwin extended a hand and introduced himself in Spanish. “I apologize for the early arrival. I found myself in the neighborhood and thought I’d try you.”

Alvaro had a mischievous twinkle in his eye that Dr. Corwin wasn’t sure how to judge. “But of course. Please come in. Your Spanish is quite excellent, by the way.”

The curandero-psychiatrist ushered him through a narrow house cluttered with books, papers, Native American art, and bric-a-brac from around South America. French doors