Midnight in Madrid (22 page)

“Of what sort?” Wong asked.

“Maybe inner beliefs,” she said. “A personal creed or a set of morals or a code?”

“Like a religion?”

“Call it that if you like,” she said.

“You mean like Lee Yuan?” one of the younger two men said.

Alex wasn’t sure who had mentioned the name, but conversation at the table stopped cold. It was as if someone had fired a shot. Peter’s eyes widened slightly, as if to admonish whoever had crossed a line. And a line definitely had been crossed because both Wong and Ming, well lubricated as they were, had a regretful look to them.

“I’ve never heard that name before,” Alex said. “Who’s Lee Yuan?”

More of a pause. “Lee Yuan is why we’re here,” Peter said.

“Why’s that?” she asked. “I’m not following.”

Peter began to explain, obviously taking great care with his words.

“Lee Yuan was a wonderful man,” he said. “He was a mentor to the three of us. A mystic perhaps. A great teacher and friend. He recruited all three of us into the current positions we now hold.”

“I see.”

“We would not be where we are today,” Wong said, “if he had not handpicked and groomed us.”

“He is no longer with us,” Peter said. “He died recently. To honor him, his memory, his spirit, we are attempting to complete his final mission. There is a tradition. If a person perishes from this earth and an important part of his life’s work is left unfinished, those who held that person in high regard are honor bound to pick up the fallen standard and finish that task. Sometimes such things are very small. Other times the task is great and may take a lifetime. The three thousand mile march begins with a single step, after all.”

“That’s a noble tradition,” she said. “I can’t argue with it.”

“Thank you,” he said. “But that’s why I’m here, it’s why my associates are here. Lee Yuan was a spiritual man. So we wish to accompany his spirit down his chosen path.”

“So his soul can rest?” she asked.

“Think of it that way if you wish,” Peter said.

Peter’s eyes flicked away from Alex and onto the two other women at the table. The gesture was so quick that she would have missed it if she hadn’t been looking directly at him. But she caught it.

“That’s really all I can tell you for right now,” he said. “I won’t hide anything important from you. Maybe I’ll think of more later. Or on another day. But that’s all you need know for now.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He nodded. Then his serious expression gave way to a smile. The waiter returned and the conversation went back into Spanish. Orders for food were taken and another bottle of Moët replaced the dead one on the table.

Dinner was excellent. A live band started playing toward midnight, and the two younger Chinese agents pulled their partners out onto a small dance floor. Chang watched them go, turned back to Alex, smiled, and extended a hand to her. He motioned to where people were dancing.

“You have to be kidding. I haven’t danced for quite some time,” she said.

“Let’s change that now,” he said. “Please? I’d be honored.”

She drew a breath. The images of her personal tragedy flashed in front of her. She thought of Robert and thought of the discussions they’d had before he died. If anything happened to either of them, the other could go on and create a new life.

“Okay,” she finally said.

Out onto the floor they went.

The name of Lee Yuan did not come up again that evening.

Alex did not weave back into her hotel suite until well past 2:00 a.m.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 12, MORNING

O
n fewer hours of sleep than she might have preferred, Alex rose the next morning later than the previous day. It was almost nine when she opened her eyes. She checked her email, the personal account first.

There was something from Ben back in the States, which she opened first. Then she quickly switched into her secure account for Treasury. She wished to read everything in her Inbox before sending anything.

There was nothing from Floyd Connelly, who this morning was neither Pink nor Pretty Boy. She prowled through the latest links from her associates at Scotland Yard, Interpol, the Spanish and French police agencies, as well as Rizzo in Rome. Rizzo was in a newly explosive and churlish mood. He’d had DNA tests run on the tissue sample beneath his fingernails and was fuming that there had been no matches yet.

She scanned some new attachments from her contacts. Nothing good.

Hunched over the laptop in a T-shirt and navy track shorts, her dark hair hanging carelessly to the side of her face as she inclined over her work, she again looked more like a graduate student than a skilled investigator from the United States Department of Treasury. And a funny bit of doggerel rebounded from her own youth years ago. A phrase her mother used to say: A fool can ask more questions than a wise woman can answer.

So what was she this morning, Alex wondered in a little pang of self-criticism. A fool or a wise woman, dancing into the early morning hours at a Spanish tavern with an agent of Chinese state security whom she had just met a few days ago? Did a fast and loose social life fit her current mood and lifestyle?

Well, it
had
been most enjoyable. And Peter hadn’t made any move toward her at the end of the evening. Was she disappointed by that? The mood had loosened between them…

Hey!
She said to herself.
Reality check: you’re on duty! Behave!

The previous evening, Peter had revealed something of interest, something perhaps that he might have otherwise not wished to mention. Lee Yuan. Maybe it was something she could parlay.

She went back to the attachments from Colonel Pendraza. She had become adept at skimming them quickly. She worked her way through them.

Two Germans who belonged to neo-Nazi skinhead groups in Munich had been arrested in Luxembourg, charged with illegally selling to police informants twenty pounds of dynamite to be used against synagogues across Europe. Policia Nacional agents in Tunisia had arrested another neo-Nazi after he allegedly tried to purchase ingredients for deadly sarin nerve gas and C–4 plastic explosives from an Interpol undercover agent. A key tip had come from an Israeli born prostitute. Then a biggie: members of the Irish National Police had raided the Antrim county home of a former Provo and discovered an arsenal of more than 250,000 rounds of ammunition, fifty pipe bombs, and ten remote-control briefcase bombs. No longer useful for the conflict in Ireland, the old IRA gent was trying to move the stuff to the Middle East. Then there was something about the movement of HDX explosives from Iraq through Cyprus. Interpol had been on the case and had lost track of the HDX shipment there. The explosives may have moved east, they might still be in some mountain hideaway. Who knew until someone set them off? This dead-end tale gave way to two stories about the same “honor killing” of an Iraqi girl in Naples who had gotten pregnant by an Italian boy. The girl’s uncle had killed her before killing himself.

Alex blew out a long breath. But her fingers busied themselves at the keyboard again. Something had occurred to her while she was asleep, and she had now formulated her approach to it.

She went back to her secure email account and went to Mail. In the address box, she typed in a message in English to be sent to every person who had been at the embassy meeting five days previously.

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

Maybe by keeping her ears open and not getting too soused on the champagne, she had heard something of note.

She hit Send and leaned back from her laptop.

She sat quietly for several minutes and waited to see if there was any immediate response from anyone. There was none. She closed down the laptop. She felt her attention flag. She needed a break. She threw her swimsuit into a tote bag and hit the local gym again.

Weights and a swim.

Ninety minutes later, refreshed, she was back on the balcony, hammering at the keyboard of the laptop, and the wireless connection was trying to scan through more of the documents from the National Police. She continued to come up empty, however. And she knew there was nothing she could do now. She passed the afternoon in Madrid, walking, visiting some small stores, but preoccupied. She checked in on email several times during the day and while her associates gradually, one by one, acknowledged her inquiry, none had anything new to direct back to her.

Yuan’s name rang no immediate bells anywhere. She felt disappointment.

There was no reply at all from Floyd Connelly, whom she increasingly considered worse than useless, or from Essen at Interpol. Rizzo in Rome said he was shaking as many trees as possible and would see what he might have by the following morning. The French National Police had nothing on Yuan and neither did the two Spanish agencies.

Fair enough. Lee Yuan may have had no bearing on recent events after all. Or maybe, she wondered when her darkest notions took over, the whole story was a bit of concocted fiction. Maybe she was being played for a sucker by Peter and his sharp little gang of Sino-warriors.

She had the uncomfortable feeling of being a fool but didn’t know whose. In a final email dispatch of the evening, she sent to her museum contacts her tentative itinerary to Switzerland, CC-ing Mike in Washington. It was a debatable step, but she decided long ago that it would be better to have your peers recover your body than to just disappear forever.

When evening came, Alex grabbed a light dinner toward eight o’clock in a tapas bar. She had the inclination to phone Peter but knew that there was always the chance that one of their cell phones or even both were no longer secure. Since it was part of the overall plan to not reveal their association to any enemy, calls needed to be kept at a minimum

She arranged with the hotel for an evening check-out, finished the final details of packing, and went to the train station by 10:00 p.m. She boarded the train and found her private compartment. She was tired from the previous late night, so she eased into her bed with a couple of books. A final check of email came up empty.

The train, while fully boarded, stayed in the station for two hours before pulling out and hitting the open tracks. At this time she tried to settle in for sleep, carefully placing her loaded gun at her bedside.

Alex had not taken an overnight train for many years and had forgotten how tactile the cozy charm of the train was. The feel of the steel wheels on the rails had a comforting rhythm to it. It lulled her to sleep almost immediately.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 12, AFTERNOON

T
hat same afternoon, Jean-Claude was down in his tunnel again. And he could barely conceal his delight at what he saw. The blast had blown a perfectly sized hole in the debris. It had cleared a route to the other side of the Calle Juan Bravo.

The pathway was dirty. It was musty and dusty and ankle deep in water. But he managed to crawl through it. Then, scanning ahead, pointing his flashlight, he could see that the pathway continued for maybe another thirty meters before encountering another wall. He examined his new location and realized that he was still working in a closely parallel path to those taken by Metro workers, electrical workers, or telephone technicians. There were several old power grids and telephone junctions along this route.

Well, the chamber had been cleared. His people were ready to work again.

Jean-Claude retraced his steps, went back, and reassembled his small underground army.

Within another two hours he had his team of subversives reassembled and went back to work. This time they were punching through some old bricks to enter a corridor that would run parallel to the Metro tracks.

Jean-Claude felt wonderful. Everything was falling into place perfectly. Now for the next step. He needed that set of detonators for the big blast. He had already placed his order. He would go back to see the man in his neighborhood named Farooq who could acquire such things.

Farooq’s name was promising. It meant “one who distinguishes truth from falsehood.” Maybe it was why everyone trusted him.

Allah be praised.

MADRID TO GENEVA, SEPTEMBER 12–13, EN ROUTE/OVERNIGHT

I
n the middle of the night, as the train wheels rumbled beneath Alex, the sharp sound of someone trying the doorknob to her compartment jolted her awake. She sat upright, her weapon pointed toward the door.

She kept still and said nothing, feeling her heart pounding. The doorknob continued to rattle from a strong, insistent hand on the other side.

Then she heard sounds from the other side of the door. A man’s voice. Very angry. The man spoke French. The door thumped. It sounded like he had put his shoulder to it.

Alex scurried to her feet and peered through the peephole. The hallway was dimly lit, but she could see a man and a woman, lurching.

The attempt at entry stopped, followed by a brief but noisy hallway discussion in heavily accented Midi French.

It was an obscene accusatory argument. They were drunk and obviously at the wrong door.

From what she could catch of the dialogue, it sounded like the drunken husband was finally wandering back to his own compartment after falling asleep elsewhere on the train. His wife had waited up for him.

Or something.

Alex smirked slightly. But for good measure, she kept her gun trained at the door in case this was some sort of cover for a sudden break-in. And she moved away from the door in case anyone suddenly fired a bullet through it.

When it was quiet again, she went to the door, pistol aloft in her right hand, and opened it slowly. The corridor was empty.

She returned to bed and slept.

The next morning she arrived in Figueras, the final stop in Spain. The day was warm and sunny, a pleasant late summer day in Europe. She was dressed casually, light jeans and a T-shirt, dark glasses, her gun in her purse this time, right next to her US passport.

She connected in the Figueras station with the train that would take her to Montpellier in France. There was no longer a stop for customs. After a ninety-minute trip, she then changed trains again in Montpellier for the Train de Grande Vitesse, which would speed her to Geneva.

She sat in a coach car next to a Frenchman who was a banker out of Dijon. He initiated the conversation and presented her with a business card. They spoke French. He was intrigued when she said that she was American and intrigued a second time when she said that she worked for the United States Department of Treasury.

Instinct again. She had a funny sense about him, maybe that he had been waiting for her. But the conversation went nowhere.

He nodded and went back to his reading. A few minutes later, his cell phone rang. The conversation was brief. Then he closed the phone and turned to her.

“I’m going to be changing seats,” he said.

She nodded and rose, stepping to the aisle.

“Would you like the window?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Take it,” he said. “You might prefer it. And my associate likes the aisle.”

He stepped past her with infinite courtesy. He turned and disappeared toward the rear of the train. Alex slid back in and sat down. She slid to the window, waited, and made sure her weapon was accessible under her jacket. She kept her hand near it. With her other hand, she flipped open a mirror from a makeup case. She positioned it and herself so that she could see anyone approaching from the train cars ahead of her, while watching the rear via the mirror.

She knew something was up. A minute passed and she spotted a heavy-set balding man approaching her row from behind. He was in his mid-forties and built like a brick outhouse. She had seen him once before in her life, at the meeting at the embassy.

Maurice Essen of Interpol, the Swiss-German who was a representative of the International Criminal Police Organization. He stopped at her row and glanced to her, indicating the open seat.

“Is this seat free?” he asked in very good English.

“I believe it’s yours, Maurice,” she said.

He smiled graciously. He sat down.

“If you’ve gone to this effort to follow me so you could speak in person,” she said in low tones barely audible above the sound of the train, “you must have something pretty good.”

“That or I believe
you
do,” he said. “I flew to Montpellier this morning so I could take this train so we could talk in person,” he said.

“About what?” Alex asked.

“An open case before Interpol and the Swiss federal police,” he said. “Lee Yuan.”

“I might have known.”

He continued in English. “The Swiss police retrieved Yuan’s body from a glacier a few weeks ago,” Essen began. “The government of China took an immediate interest in it. The Chinese had apparently sent one of their top young agents to retrieve the body, a charming fortyish man who traveled under the passport of John Sun. Sending someone to retrieve a corpse is
not
normal procedure for the Chinese. They normally ask for corpses of their nationals to be disposed of efficiently at the local level. A nice, cozy crematorium usually. So the request to ice the body and hold it was highly unusual.”

“So this Yuan fellow had to have been important,” Alex said.

“And there was nothing normal about this John Sun, either, the fellow who came and got the body out of the country as fast as possible. Sun had a diplomatic passport to cut through some red tape. Not everyone travels on one of those, not even Chinese body-snatchers.”

Alex listened in silence, assimilating as many details as quickly as she could, trying to picture the scene that had unfurled in Zurich.

“Now, the behavior of the Chinese was
so
unusual,” Essen continued, “that it drew the attention of both the Swiss Gendarmerie Nationale as well as the local cantonal police in Zurich. So they shadowed this John Sun. They had two-man teams on him twenty-four seven while he was in the Zurich area. They even went to the trouble to shoot some surveillance photos on the street.”

Essen reached to an inside jacket pocket. He pulled out a trio of surveillance pictures and showed them to Alex.

The pictures told her what she had already surmised. John Sun was Peter Chang. Or maybe Peter Chang was John Sun. Or maybe it was an equation that she hadn’t quite mastered yet. But the surveillance photos confirmed to her that she and Maurice Essen were discussing the same man. She was certain.

“Ever seen him?” Essen asked.

“I’m not sure,” she lied.

For several seconds she stared blankly and coldly at the image of the man she had danced with until 2:00 a.m. two nights earlier, whose arms had held her, and who had given her a friendly platonic kiss on each cheek in the lobby of the Ritz when he had escorted her back to the hotel.

“I really can’t say,” she said.

“Of course not,” Essen said. “Well, to use an expression I once learned in America, he’s a slippery SOB, this John Sun, so I hope you’re not helping him if you want our help. In Switzerland he apparently ‘made’ his watchers, an experienced counterterror team, and slipped them. He went in and out of a department store on the Hilden-strasse in Zurich. Or at least he went in because no one saw him come out. It was there that he vanished.”

“Why are you interested in him?” she asked. “From what you’ve said, he didn’t break any laws. Not yet by your accounts, anyway.”

“Our initial focus had been more upon Yuan than his custodian,” Essen said. “What exactly had Yuan been up to in Switzerland that would land him in a glacier with lungs filled with smoke? So the Swiss tried to determine who Yuan had been and what his mission had entailed. An informer told them that Yuan had been in Europe to effect a transfer of cash for some bill of goods. The Swiss police hadn’t known whether it was drugs, weapons, or maybe jewelry. The informer hadn’t known. There was plenty of speculation to go around, and it went in several unsubstantiated directions.”

Conspicuously absent so far, Alex noted, was any mention of the high-ticket
Pietà of Malta
. But her own theories were starting to emerge. And on the subject of theories, the Swiss police had some fairly sinister ones about John Sun.

“Two atypical murders in Geneva took place within twenty-four hours of Sun’s disappearance from Zurich,” Essen said. “One victim was an old crook named Laurent Tissot, a Swiss. The other was a man known as Stanislaw Jurjeznicz, a Pole. Sun somehow had moved about the country like a phantom. Just as his surveillance team had not known anyone who could disappear so quickly, they had never seen a diplomat who could have slipped in and out so fast. So when they ran a check on his passport, they discovered it was one of those mysterious ‘Made in China’ specials. It dead-ended into the Beijing computers. The passport was real but the owner wasn’t. Not quite, anyway. And the two dead men in Geneva—the Swiss national and the Polish national, both with ties to the underworld—had links to a shady deal gone sour. The Swiss then went through all their street surveillance cameras in the significant parts of Geneva, including bank ATMs, and connected ‘Sun’ with the time and place. That, in turn, connected Sun to Yuan and possibly to two murders.”

“With respect,” Alex said, “what you’re presenting is a highly circumstantial case.”

“That’s right,” Essen said politely. “So, I’ll ask you again, maybe as a hypothetical, do you think you might have seen or encountered the individual we know as John Sun?”

“I see a lot of people every day,” she said. “Nothing stands out.”

“This man would stand out. Of course,” Essen said with a slight sigh, a tiny decent into anger as he answered, “keep something in mind. We have established that the Switzer and the Pole knew each other, did business with each other, based on the accounts of respected informants. So any information you can give us in return, particularly on the whereabouts of ‘Sun’ would be of infinite interest, particularly if he can be located on Swiss soil where he can be brought in for questioning. We consider Sun highly dangerous. This is evident, in consideration of the deaths of the Pole and the Switzer.”

“I understand,” she said. “If there’s a time at which I can help you with this, I’ll be pleased to do so.”

“Of course,” Essen said. “Good day, Ms. Alex. We’ll appreciate your cooperation in the future.”

“Of course,” she said.

Essen rose, gave her a curt old-world bow, and returned in the direction he had come. The seat next to her remained empty.

She stared for several minutes out the window as the landscape of southeastern France flew by. There were moments in life—messages, acquisitions of knowledge—that were made up of too much stuff to be digested whole.

This was one. Or maybe this was several of them, all jammed together. Eventually, she steepled her fingers before her and thought deeply. Just in terms of Peter, which way should she proceed? What if Peter had murdered two men in Switzerland to cover his own crimes or something even more devious?

Alert him that Interpol was on his trail?

Alert Interpol that Peter would be joining her in Geneva?

Run the whole thing past Mark McKinnon, hope he was sober enough to make a correct decision, and proceed on his instructions?

Every potential step had something right with it and something wrong with it.

To alert Interpol was to betray Peter, who had saved her life.

To ignore Interpol was to betray the working relationship she sought to develop for this and future cases. Did professional loyalties trump personal gratitude? Or was it the other way around?

Alex pondered.

Do nothing? Always an option for the fainthearted or the unduly cautious. But doing nothing was sometimes the wisest route. She brooded.

Reality check. Back to Square One: her assignment was
The Pietà of Malta
, its recovery, and any issues attendant to its theft. Who could help her more? Peter? Or Interpol?

A question like that should have been a slam dunk. But instead, she had no answer. She had the funny sense of not knowing Peter Chang at all, or maybe knowing him all too well. She wasn’t sure which.

T
he train arrived exactly on time in Geneva in mid-afternoon. As planned, she checked into the Grand Hotel de Roubaix in Geneva as late afternoon was fading into evening. She had dinner at the hotel, went out for a walk, returned, bolted her door, and did a final check for email.

Finally she made a decision.

No bolt of lightning would illuminate the whereabouts of
The Pietà of Malta
, no magical key would put everything in perspective. But now there was a crucial new piece to the puzzle.

She went back to her computer. She typed an email to both Mark McKinnon in Europe and her boss Mike Gamburian back in Washington, inquiring by name about Laurent Tissot and Stanislaw Jurjeznicz. She wrote:

She felt clever and compromised at the same time. Like Peter on the subject of Yuan and perhaps on the subject of
The Pietà of Malta
, she had not exactly told a lie. She had instead declined to tell the complete truth.

She waited for a few minutes. She found a cognac in the hotel’s overpriced minibar, and poured herself a double.

Then the email account flashed again with an incoming message. Something back fast from Gamburian, who must have been at the tail end of a long business day. No hits on the Pole, but there was some preliminary stuff on Tissot. After a stint in the Swiss Army, he was a career shady character, but mostly an arms merchant. Tissot was not an outright crook, but usually in the gray area of the law and the dark gray area of ethics and morality. Gamburian finished,