Midnight in Madrid (14 page)

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 10, 12:01 A.M.

A
lex emerged from the bar alone and stopped on the sidewalk outside. The neighborhood was busy.

She looked both ways. She checked the street for vans or suspicious cars. The area was a minefield of things she didn’t like. Groups hanging around talking, single men, couples smooching in doorways, people sitting at outdoor tables that overflowed from other bars. Any single one of these groups, or any single person within them, could be transformed into a lethal adversary at any moment.

Her insides were so tightly coiled that she saw the whole architecture of the neighborhood in terms of menace. The traffic flowed the wrong way, approaching her from behind, meaning anyone could follow. She guessed that might have been by design.

“Okay,” she said to herself in a whisper. “Move!”

Far to her left, almost half a block away now, she saw her two cops, a duet of green uniforms moving at a quick pace.

Well, no turning back now. She walked briskly. Get this over fast. Make this your own type of smash and grab. No nonsense permitted. God bless Rizzo and his ice pick.

She felt in her jacket pocket and found the pick. She clutched it and felt her sweaty palm on it. She crossed one street corner. So far so good.

Now, once again: Where is Rizzo? She threw a sideways glance over her shoulder and didn’t see him. Where was he? She looked again.

Come on Gian Antonio. Don’t be slow about this. Timing is everything.

She continued walking. A second street corner crossing.

Okay, two thirds of the way there. So far so good. She was still alive. She tried to steady her pace. She knew Rizzo had to be back there somewhere. He
had
to be.

Far up ahead she could see the end of the block. She knew she needed to turn the corner to follow…She quickstepped her pace, got there, and did a quick evasive maneuver. She went out into the street, so as not to be too close to the building. She wished Rizzo would close ranks with her.

Where was he? How could she have lost him? Unlike the busier main street, the side street was quiet. Up ahead a parked car with Guardia Civil markings waited, as per the plan.

On the side street, windows were barred and grates were down against the night and the people who populated it.

In her gut she had the same feeling she had had in Kiev before all hell had broken loose. Was it an animal sense by now, an instinct telling her that danger lurked somewhere? Or was it just a survival skill, telling her to play the game carefully?

Then she could see the cruiser clearly. One of the men in uniform stood leaning against the front hood, near the tire, his arms folded, watching her approach. The other stood by the rear trunk. He was several years younger than the man in front. No nametags. No ranks. Like the rest of the evening, these guys didn’t look right. It wasn’t just that her radar was beeping now, the alarm sirens were raging.

She stopped short, about twenty feet in front of them.

“Buenas noches,”
she said. She would handle this in Spanish.

“Buenas noches,”
one of them answered. They almost laughed.

“La pietà,”
she asked.
“¿Dónde está?”

They both smiled. Something was off with their smiles too.

“In the trunk,” they said. The man in uniform at the rear of the car stepped away, several paces, very carefully. By now she knew, this was no ordinary transaction.

Where is Rizzo!

She didn’t want to turn. She knew better than to take her eyes off two players in a quasi-criminal transaction.

“Be a gentleman. Open the trunk for me and bring it here,” she said.

“Come get it,” one of them said.

“No. I’ve come this far. The final few paces are up to you.”

Her hand remained on the pick. But she felt naked. They had guns!

Where is Rizzo!

Then she heard footsteps behind her. Comforting ones. That had to be him, didn’t it? She felt eyes on her back. She felt a presence, maybe twenty feet behind her.

There was a moment of standoff.

“I brought a friend,” she said, still in Spanish.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” the man to her left said.

“Just give me the pietà if you have it,” she said.

There was another moment of hot sweaty standoff. Five seconds that played out like a month. She cocked her head slightly and glanced behind her to see where Rizzo was, angling so that her eyes were only away from these two creeps for a millisecond.

No Rizzo. Actually, she saw where he wasn’t. But she could see a man she had never seen in her life before. An Asian, sharply dressed in a dark suit. Midthirties. Handsome. Killer-good-looks handsome.

Now it all made sense. She had been trapped and set up. She turned back toward the car. There was movement behind her, as if the Asian were jockeying for a better angle. She watched the men in front of her and saw something strange in their eyes too.

She was certain: the three of them were together and she had waltzed into their trap.

Then she read the look of the men in front of her. Their hands were moving slowly toward their weapons. She would have fled, but quick movements are suicidal during a crossfire.

In front of her, both of the uniformed men reached for their sidearms. And a voice came from behind her. The Asian screamed out in English.

“Alex! Get down! Get down! Get down!”

She saw the guns come up in the hands of the men in front of her. Big, mean, automatic pistols. Urban warfare stuff.

The two men spread out quickly to their sides to get a better angle on her pursuer. She was right in the middle. Her mind was so filled with pounding blood, fear, and danger that her instincts took over. She knew that if she moved to the left or the right, she would be in the line of fire from the Guardia Civil and if she stayed upright she could be shot in the back.

So she went down, hitting the pavement hard as the gunfire broke out all around her. She ducked and threw her arms and hands over her upper torso and her head. She waited to feel the impact of a slug and the searing pain that would hit her.

The gunshots resonated with a terrifying sound. The ammunition sailed all around her. In a vision that would play out in her mind forever, just like the dark bloody visions of earlier this year in Kiev, she saw the younger Guardia Civil man take a shot in the center of the chest.

The shot propelled him backward against the car, where the force of his recoiling body kept him stationary for several seconds even though his own weapon had flown from his hand and into the air. A second shot from behind her hit him and threw him sprawling onto the hood of the car, where he remained.

In the same instant, the second Guardia Civil man, the older one, fired at the man behind Alex. He got off a barrage of shots from his automatic pistol. Some of them flew directly over her prone body at the Asian. But he must have missed with every one of them because the shots from behind her kept coming in return.

Four, five, six of them. Several of the bullets impacted across the Guardia Civil man’s chest. He reeled and spun. But the final shot from behind Alex was the coup de grace. It hit the man square in the center of the face.

Alex, cringing, unable to pull her gaze away, had an excellent view. The final bullet blew away the left side of the man’s skull. The hat flew away, as did a bloody mass of brain and pulp. The body spun wildly, spasmed, tumbled over the rear trunk of the car, and rolled wildly into the Calle de la Paz.

Two dozen shots must have been fired, all in the space of a few seconds. Everything was quiet for a moment. Then Alex heard the footsteps from behind approaching her.

Alex turned her head, gasping for breath, a hot sweat soaking her, convinced that the death that she had evaded in Kiev would now find her on a Madrid sidewalk several minutes past midnight on a warm summer night.

She slowly rose with her hands against the sidewalk. Her eyes widened at the vision behind her. Bathed by the light from a streetlamp, the gunman behind her stepped forward. There was a pistol at the end of each arm.

The vision was surreal. He had carried the weapons much as he had fired them, with a precision and carriage that was almost inhuman. No wonder he had been able to fire off so many rounds at once. He had been firing with two weapons at once. But the accuracy had been as astonishing as the speed. He stood no more than twenty feet from her. And now a revised realization. He wasn’t with the fake cops at all.

Yet before him now, she was helpless. Sweat poured off her.

“Go ahead,” she said, reverting to English.

He gave a nod. “I will,” he said. He spoke perfect English.

Run
, she thought. But to where? She didn’t stand a chance.

She saw him raise both weapons and take several paces forward. He stood now no more than five feet away from her. The guns came up. She looked him in the eye.

“What’s in your pocket?” he asked.

“An ice pick.”

He looked bemused. “Why? Is it snowing?”

She said nothing.

“Don’t make a move,” he advised. “Stay there.”

Both guns came up. First the left. He fired once. Then the right. He fired a second time.

She felt no impact. Why was she still alive? She turned to the fallen men in Civil Guard uniforms. He had fired a final shot into the heart of each of the prostrate bodies. Hardly necessary, but a gory punctuation point to the killings.

“They were sent to kill you,” he said in English that was almost too perfect.

“What?”

“They were sent to kill you.”

“The pietà?” she asked. “In the trunk of the car?”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “They don’t have it. The trunk was open to stuff you into it.”

He used his left hand to train one pistol on the trunk of the car and he fired several shots. Alex heard the bullets smash into the car. Then there was an explosion that propelled her several feet along the sidewalk and into a sprawling tumble. She looked back and the police car was in flames. Whatever had been in the trunk had exploded and had ignited the gasoline as well. The cruiser was an inferno.

She stared at it in disbelief, then jerked her head back to the gunman before her.

“Next time, be more careful,” he said. “I only want to rescue you once. You’d do best to get out of here fast.”

With movements that were quick and proficient, almost catlike, he tucked his pistols under his jacket. He turned and walked briskly away, not looking back. She heard sirens in the distance, drawing closer. She gathered herself and climbed to her feet. She felt some tearing to her jeans where her knee had hit the ground hard. One of her elbows was bleeding also.

The gunman was already gone. She couldn’t believe how quickly he had disappeared. She turned toward the darker end of the block and fled. Halfway back to the hotel, she found a taxi and took it the rest of the way.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 10, 2:23 A.M.

C
olonel Carlos Pendraza of the Spanish Policia Nacional stood with his arms at his side on the Calle de Balsa and methodically looked at the carnage before him. A dignified man, ill-at-ease to overt manifestations of temper, he surveyed the scene and quietly seethed.

Another horrendous high profile crime on the streets of Madrid. He could tell in an instant that the two men dead in Guardia Civil uniforms were not Spaniards. Not true Spaniards anyway. It was just another example of the international
gentuza
—the riffraff—bringing their discontent to Spain.

When would it end? he wondered. With what would it end? Certainly the leftists in the government weren’t going to do anything to suppress this stuff. He felt a deep disgust, a deep rage, and a deep helplessness.

And he also felt a sharp echo from the past.

As a young police officer in 1973, Pendraza had been part of the police detail that had protected a man named Carrero Blanco, Franco’s hard-line prime minister and the man seen as Franco’s most likely successor.

But within six months of being named prime minister, Carrero Blanco was assassinated in Madrid by four members of ETA, a Basque separatist organization that was still dangerous in this new century.

To murder Blanco, the ETA had placed close to two hundred pounds of explosives in a tunnel they had excavated under the street. Then they had set off a blast by remote control while Blanco rode from his home to a Roman Catholic Mass. Blanco had traveled in a specially built armored Dodge Dart. Pendraza had been in the second car following the Dart and had been badly injured by broken glass and hugely traumatized by the events of the day.

The blast catapulted Blanco’s vehicle over the church it was approaching. It landed on a second-floor balcony on the other side of the street. In a macabre touch, its twisted remains remained to this day on display, part of a grim memorial at the Spanish army museum. The explosion only took place about a half block from the United States Embassy.

Henry Kissinger, then the US Secretary of State during the Nixon administration, had been visiting Spain at the time. Had Kissinger been Catholic, not Jewish, Kissinger might easily have been in the car with Carrero Blanco at the time, and the ETA would have taken out a US cabinet member as well as their own prime minister.

This incident was the origin of the modern widespread practice of sealing manholes when a high profile procession is to take place.

This assassination, dubbed
Operación Ogro
by those who carried it out, was in retaliation for the execution of five political opponents by the regime and was applauded by many opponents of Franco’s regime.

In his first speech to the Spanish parliament in February 1974, Carrero Blanco’s successor promised many reforms including the right to form political associations. Though he was denounced by hardliners within the regime, the transition had begun, and it never ceased to gnaw at Pendraza that Blanco’s murder rewarded the purposes of those who had killed him.

But the incident hadn’t ended there either. One of the ETA members who had assassinated Carrero Blanco, a man known only by his nom de guerre,
Argala
, was himself assassinated by a car bomb in the south of France five years later. The killers this time were a Spanish far-right group organized from inside the navy, assisted by neo-fascists from France and Italy.

Argala, was the only one who could identify the mysterious man who handed to ETA Carrero Blanco’s schedule and itinerary. According to a former member of the Spanish army who participated in the bombing against Argala, the explosives that killed Argala came from an American military base, either stolen or “donated to a good cause.”

This morning, Pendraza had been sleeping soundly with his wife of twenty-six years beside him when his phone had rung to report the shootings on the Calla de la Bolsa. Ripped from a peaceful sleep only half an hour earlier, he now stared forward. Pendraza had had more than enough of the scenes that lay before him. He wondered again where it would all end. Why couldn’t Spain remain the sweet isolated place he had known as a young man? At age fifty-seven, he felt as if he were a hundred.

Behind him, on the other side of the police lines, a crowd gathered. Police had strung crime-scene tape everywhere. Technicians doing their jobs. A couple of ambulances were present to take away the dead, and there were more police cars than Pendraza cared to count, not even including the unmarked ones.

Pendraza’s brown eyes slid uneasily over the death scene. He felt his blood pressure rising.

These days in Spain, he raged to himself, he heard and read a lot of foolish things. A lot of revisions of history. But more than ever, Pendraza felt that the late, great
Caudillo
, General Franco, had saved this great country, and for that matter
la civilización español
, from the unwashed Bolshevik hordes. Spain would have turned into Poland or Cuba if the reds and the pinkos had had their way. And today it was no different.

He looked at what had happened on the street, then turned in anger, and went back to his car. Now he was officially involved in this. So officially or unofficially, whoever had been a part of this was going to pay. That was a promise he made to himself, and to the spirit of Franco.