Flight of the Raven (2 page)

She was just putting her dinner dishes into a sink full of sudsy water when the phone rang. Bradley Fitzpatrick, her immediate superior, was on the other end of the line.

“Julie, am I glad you’re home!”

The clipped delivery told her it wasn’t a social call. “What is it?”

“We need a fourth for bridge.”

“Deal out the cards. I’ll be there,” she said. Neither one of them played bridge, which was why they had selected it as a telephone code. It meant she was needed at the embassy on the double.

After easing back into her pumps and pulling on the jacket of her navy suit, she paused to catch the shoulder-length mass of her dark hair in a wide barrette. Damn, she thought, she probably should have washed it when she’d gotten home this afternoon. From the strained tone of Fitz’s voice, she suspected she might be on duty for the next twenty-four hours. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to pack a change of underwear and a few toilet articles in a tote bag.

Eduardo, the
portero,
glanced up from his post in the lobby as the elevator door groaned open. “So you changed your mind about going out, after all.” He looked pleased that she was taking his advice about enjoying herself more.

The stoop-shouldered man with the craggy visage was one of the reasons why Julie had moved into this particular building three years ago. Eduardo treated every one of his twenty-five tenants like family.

Julie smiled and nodded as though she were setting out on an evening of fun. “I may not be back tonight, so don’t wait up.”

“Have a good time,
señorita,
” he called.

As soon as she stepped out the door a grim expression captured her oval face. Her job in the political section of the embassy was monitoring terrorist activities. Fritz wouldn’t have called her unless something pretty serious had happened—like last year when a restaurant near Torrejon Air Force Base had been bombed.

Her redbrick apartment building was only a fifteen-minute walk from the embassy, and she was tempted to make a beeline for the closest gate. Yet, despite her anxiety, she walked a block north before heading back toward the American enclave. Security had been adamant lately about employees not taking the same route to and from work every day. If somebody hostile had been listening to her conversation with Fitz, he could be waiting up the block.

The thought brought back all the reasons she had decided months ago that this would be her last post with the State Department. She’d been with the service for eight years, and at first she’d relished the chance to experience other cultures firsthand. But her last tour in Moscow had been like living in an isolation bubble where every word spoken was overheard. Madrid was a paradise by comparison. In fact it was a plum assignment. But over the last few years American embassies all over the world had turned from glamorous outposts into handy targets for leftist and rightist militants.

The compact umbrella she’d forgotten in the bottom of her tote bag made the metal detector at the consulate entrance buzz. With an apology she handed the canvas carryall over to the marine guard for a quick inspection. By the time she’d finally keyed in the combination for the black metal gate that barred the entrance to the third floor, Bradley Fitzpatrick was pacing up and down her office.

“What kept you?” he demanded.

“The security drill.”

With his red hair, freckles, and stocky build, her boss hardly looked like a seasoned diplomat. But his unprepossessing exterior hid a sharp mind with enough political savvy to put him in the top echelons of the Foreign Service ranks. His rumpled brown suit and the tie loosened around his collar told Julie that he hadn’t been home at all since morning.

“What happened?” she asked.

Now that they were in the protected environment of the embassy, he got right to the point. “Another terrorist bombing. One of the taverns near the Plaza Mayor.”

“How do we figure in it?”

Fitz’s voice was grim. “The civil guard is withholding the details pending positive identification. But one of the bodies pulled from the rubble was carrying Dan Eisenberg’s wallet.”

Julie sank down into the padded cushion of her desk chair. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. The shock left her completely numb for a few seconds. Then tears started to well in her brown eyes. Ladies control themselves in front of others, a voice from her past reminded her sternly. With a fierce effort she held the drops back.

The man who’d broken the bad news studied her now chalk-white features from across the desk. Julie and Dan had been good friends ever since the lanky army captain had been assigned to the office down the hall six months ago. Fitz had even thought there might be a romance brewing, but Julie had deftly cooled down Eisenberg’s ardor into a more manageable relationship. Maybe it was because her tour had been coming to an end, he reflected, and she hadn’t seen any future in a romantic liaison.

Walking around the desk, he put a hand on her slender shoulder. Needing the comfort, Julie reached up and pressed her fingers over it. Her wide-set brown eyes avoided his, and her gently rounded lower lip was trembling. He knew she was struggling to rein in her emotions. He would help by giving her a job to focus on.

“Why Dan?” she asked, her voice quavering.

He shook his head. “It could just be a tragic coincidence. But we need to find out exactly what happened, who’s responsible, whether the tavern was a random target, or whether there was some specific motive.” His voice was businesslike now. “I’ve already been in touch with the police. But we’re getting pressure from Washington to have a report ready in the morning.”

“Give me a few minutes,” she told him, reaching for a tissue. “Then I’ll get on the phone to some of my contacts.” She paused and looked up at Fitz, tears still glistening in her eyes. “And I can also go through Dan’s things to see if there were any notes he left about what he was doing this evening.”

He sighed. “That leaves me free to make the identification at the morgue and call his family in New York.”

When Fitzpatrick reached the door, he turned back for a moment. Julie was sitting completely still, her face slightly averted. He was struck by how she looked in this moment of crisis. He’d always thought of her as sensitive and attractive but not beautiful. Tonight the unaccustomed pallor of her skin against the background of the dark curtains made her profile look like an antique cameo. Even now, her carriage and style spoke of wealth and culture, reminding him again of her privileged background. More than once he’d wondered how one of the wealthy Baltimore McLeans had gotten into this kind of business in the first place.

Not that she hadn’t done an excellent job here, he reminded himself. But she wasn’t detached enough. You had to know her well to see the symptoms of stress beneath her controlled exterior. Perhaps denying herself the conventional emotional outlets made things worse. He knew she’d already opted out of the service for a lower-key translator’s job back in D.C. Too bad this mess had to cloud her last couple of months here.

None of the calls Julie placed netted much immediate hard information. Although Madrid was a city that kept late hours, most government offices were already closed. Even her contacts at UPI and Reuters were of little help. A rumor that the ETA, the Basque separatist activists, would claim credit for the bombing was still unconfirmed. Whoever wanted that report in Washington wasn’t going to be happy with the dribble of facts she was able to collect.

Still feeling numb inside, she got up and crossed to the door. She wanted to put off going through Dan’s office, but she knew that it was probably the most constructive thing to do now.

The only way she could cope with the smiling picture of him and his parents on the bookshelf was to lay it facedown before starting to go through desk drawers full of manila folders neatly labeled with project names. She recognized most of them, but the one at the very back, labeled Foolery, piqued her interest. It turned out to be full of risqué cartoons and jokes that had been passed around the office. They must have appealed to Dan’s offbeat sense of humor, she thought, realizing with a painful stab that she was already thinking of him in the past tense.

Pulling out his appointment book, she flipped through the pages. His schedule, like her own, had been full of meetings with Spanish government officials, briefings for visiting U.S. dignitaries, and the long afternoon lunches where the Spanish habitually concluded a surprising number of business negotiations. Most of the entries were complete with names and phone numbers. But on a few scattered dates there was simply a capital
R
lightly penciled in the lower left-hand corner. Julie thumbed back through the previous six months and found they came in pairs—about twice every three weeks, but never on exactly the same days. One, she noticed, was for today—Wednesday, May 15. Another was for this Friday. The
R
‘s might designate the days he practiced on the rifle range out at Torrejon. Or maybe they indicated when his laundry was supposed to be returned from the Rodriguez cleaners. She had no way of knowing.

Closing the book, she went on to the other contents of the center desk drawer. Tucked in the back was a carved wooden box full of ticket stubs to the bullfights and other attractions Dan had enjoyed. She’d attended some of them with him, and again her emotions welled up at the thought of the friend she’d lost. She’d known that he’d wanted to be more than friends, but he settled for what she was willing to give to their relationship.

At the bottom of the pile was one ticket that was not torn in half. It was for the revival of a class Spanish play,
La Dama del Alba.
With Dan’s Spanish she couldn’t imagine him catching the subtlety of such a downbeat tragedy. Had someone given him the ticket? She glanced at the date. It was for this Friday. The day clicked in her mind. It matched one of the cryptic
R
‘s in the appointment book. Flipping through the pages, she matched a dozen
R
‘s to torn ticket stubs. They were all for obscure events in out-of-the-way places where you wouldn’t expect to see an American.

Her brow wrinkled. She’d thought she’d known Dan pretty well. But now she was wondering if he’d had a Spanish girlfriend on the side.

The door opened, and Fitzpatrick stuck his head inside. His abrupt reappearance made Julie jump.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“That’s okay. I could use a break,” she admitted, reaching around to massage the ache in her shoulder blades with her finger tips.

“Then how about coming back to my office for a cup of tea and some Oreo cookies I’ve stashed away for an emergency?”

Julie slipped the ticket she’d found into the pocket of her skirt.

“Find anything unusual?” Fitz asked.

Had she? She didn’t want to stir up anything if there was some perfectly innocent explanation for the tickets. “Not yet,” she answered, “but there are some phone numbers I’ll check out in the morning.”

“I hate to tell you, but it’s
already
two in the morning,” Fitz replied, “and neither one of us can go home till we get some kind of report on the wire back to Washington.”

* * *

H
OW UNFORTUNATE
that General Bogolubov had picked this week to inspect his field sites in Spain, Aleksei Iliyanovich Rozonov thought as he read over the night report and made notes for the general’s nine a.m. briefing. All hell had broken loose yesterday evening, and in the midst of it the general had arrived. Yet only the hand Aleksei unconsciously ran through his black hair betrayed his anxiety. The strong lines of his angular face might have been carved from stone.

The reports said a terrorist attack had destroyed a tavern near the venerable Plaza Mayor. Five people had been killed in the blast. One of them was an American army officer attached to the embassy. Another was a Russian KGB agent carrying a French passport that identified him as a wine merchant.

Aleksei shifted his almost six-foot frame in the desk chair that, even cranked to its full extension, never gave him quite enough leg room. The ironic humor of the San Jeronimo situation didn’t escape him. Somebody was going to have the very devil of a time explaining that “innocent victim” to the Spanish authorities if they figured out the Kremlin connection. As the cultural attaché, he was glad that it wouldn’t be in his official province.

Of course, he was on the senior KGB staff at the embassy, which did mean certain duties connected with the incident. The problem was, he was having trouble getting any hard information, and it wasn’t from lack of trying. He would have given a case of export-quality vodka to know what Kiril Ivanov was doing at the San Jeronimo last night.

Aleksei glanced at his watch and stood up. Bogolubov was obsessed with promptness, among other things. Taking his dark blue European-cut jacket from the coat tree in the corner, he shrugged into it and straightened his tie, noting with relief that even with his eyes half-closed he’d somehow managed to pick an ensemble that actually matched. The duty officer had rung his apartment at five in the morning. Aleksei had been at his desk not much more than a half hour later. But Bogolubov wasn’t going to be concerned with his lack of sleep, only his ability to do his job under pressure.

He and the general’s son, Leonid, had been in the same class at MGIMO, the foreign ministry’s diplomatic training school. Despite his father’s high connections, Leonid hadn’t done well, and the disappointed father had apparently blamed that failure on those who had excelled in the class. Although the hostility was discreetly hidden, Aleksei suspected that the general was waiting for him to make a mistake so he could pounce.

Carlotta, one of the Spanish secretaries employed in the cultural section, looked up with expressive dark eyes as he opened the office door. “I’ve fixed some coffee, strong and black the way you like it,” she said.

Despite the stress of the morning, he flashed her a quick smile that transformed his carefully disciplined countenance for just a moment. Carlotta took care of him well at the office, and she’d offered none too subtly to take care of him during off-hours as well. He could have used the human comfort, but it would have brought complications he couldn’t afford.