Midnight in Madrid (32 page)

Peter continued to glance around nervously. As he spoke to Alex, his eyes frequently went over her shoulder, back to the death scene.

Again, Peter’s hands were moving quickly. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a leather billfold. From it, he pulled a small laminated card, the size, shape, and texture of an American driver’s license.

“Keep this for me,” he said. “Keep this until I ask for it back. Please! It’s critical.”

She looked at it. It was his Swiss consular ID. Well, it wasn’t Peter Chang’s; it was John Sun’s.

She stared at it and looked back up. “This links you to a couple of murders, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“I honestly didn’t want to believe that about you,” she said. “That you were capable of that.”

“Aren’t we all, under the right circumstances?”

“It’s not a situation I ever hope to be in again,” she said.

“Nor I,” he said. “But as long as you or I carry a weapon and are sworn to protect ourselves, innocent people, and our countries’ interests, the possibility will be there.”

“Maybe you just seem a little too enthusiastic about it,” she said. “Killing people.”

“And maybe someday you’ll hesitate too long and wish you hadn’t,” he answered.

There was loud conversation from the group of police across the street. She looked back down to the John Sun ID that she held in her hand.

“Why are you giving this to me?”

“Because I trust you to do the right thing,” he said. “And I don’t want to have to walk past the police with it. Not here, not tonight. If they stop me and find me with two IDs, I’m going to be answering questions for ten years. All right?”

“All right,” she said, taking it.

“Who’s the old fascist over there?” he asked. “The one everyone is sucking up to?”

She glanced. “That’s Colonel Pendraza. Policia Nacional.”

“Yes. Of course. He knows who I am,” Peter said softly. “I need to get out of here,” he said again.

“Is there really going to be an attack on the US Embassy?” she asked.

“I’m told the information is solid.”

“Who’s the information from?”

“Chinese and American sources,” he said. “And I never told you this, but there’s some British thrown in. Some MI6.”

“How did that get into the mix?” she asked.

“When the explosives were sold out of Cyprus, the British were within a day of seizing them. They made arrests anyway. Two of the men arrested told the same story: that money had come from Spain, money raised by a museum theft, and now the value was returning to Spain in bombs and bodies.”

“If I can ask a dumb question, why are the Brits being so generous with you?”

He spread his hands. “Hong Kong, lady, remember? I’m one of the ‘good’ yellow people. Isn’t that how it works? I’m ‘Western,’ so I can be trusted.”

“Do the Spanish police know there may be an attack on our embassy?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then why aren’t we telling them?”

“Same reason I’m working this case,” he said. “We’re trying to take care of things unofficially. Is that so difficult?”

“We could use their help,” Alex said. “All I’ve got to do is cross the street and talk to the colonel.”

“Don’t bother,” he said softly. “In fact, that would be very unwise.”

“Why?”

“Alex, do you have a gun?”

“You know I do. We just discussed—”

“Are you allowed to use it?”

“In self-defense. And in defense of anyone I deem fit. Even you.”

“I’m honored. But that’s where we’re different,” he said. “And it’s another reason I’m still here.”

“I just lost you.”

“If Mark needs someone taken out, hit, killed, he can’t ask you or even one of his CIA lackeys to do it. Not without special permission. And for that he has to go back to Washington, and the request has to go to an intelligence committee, and after a week or a month or a year he
might
get a go-ahead. And he might not.”

Two uniformed Madrid police approached them. They seemed to be looking cross-eyed at Peter, but they kept going.

“But if Mark asks
me
to do it, or my team,” Peter said, “and it coincides with our interests, well, it gets done, doesn’t it? No questions asked, or more to the point, no answers needed to be given.”

“Oh, Lord,” she said with a shudder.

“Someone has to get the dirty work done,” he said.

“Sometimes I’d prefer to be back at a desk in Washington, dealing with financial squabbles.”

“But instead you’re out here,” Peter said. “On the front lines. Where it’s more exciting.”

“And where I feel more compromised,” she said.

He laughed slightly. “Let me ask you,” he said, “if you could have stopped the September 11 attacks on America by personally shooting every one of the hijackers, would you have done it? If you could have murdered Hitler and Stalin and avoided World War II, would that have been worth two bullets to end the lives of two thoroughly evil and godless men?”

“I would have looked for some other way to—”

“That wasn’t the question,” he said. “And I think I know your answer.”

She snapped back defensively, the flash of police beacons still illuminating the streets with harsh staccato lights. “What
are
you?” she asked. “A philosopher with an Uzi?”

“Everything is a situation.”

“Have a nice night,” she said coolly.

Alex turned away in growing distaste.

“And you also,” he answered.

She glanced to the opposite side of the street, trying to sort out her thoughts. She noticed that Colonel Pendraza had disappeared. She turned back to talk to Peter again, maybe to voice some uselessly argumentative tract about violence and murder breeding more violence and murder until it bred even more violence and murder. Or maybe she’d just ask him straight up if there had really been three young Arabs or if he had defenestrated blustery old Connelly himself, and if so, on whose orders.

But by then, with her mind teeming with questions and paranoia, Peter was gone too.

She looked in every direction.

No Peter Chang.

Like the Swiss police a few weeks earlier, she had never before encountered a man who could disappear into thin air so quickly and efficiently.

She left the block and retreated to a quiet doorway. She pulled out her cell phone and called Mark McKinnon. She reached him and reported what she had seen, what she knew. An attack on the US Embassy in Madrid was perhaps imminent.

Quietly, McKinnon took the information from her. He promised to alert embassy security immediately. But beyond that, he offered nothing in return and rang off.

From talking to McKinnon, she had the same sense as talking to a wall.

She pondered not returning to the Ritz that night. She felt vulnerable. So she found a late bar, stayed there for a few drinks, and pondered checking into a different hotel. Then she decided not to.

Instead, she returned to the Ritz and entered her room with her pistol drawn. She searched it thoroughly, found no intruder or evidence of an intrusion, and threw all the bolts on the door.

Then, riding the worst wave of paranoia in her life, she eventually dummied up pillows from the closet to resemble her body and put them under the blankets in the bedroom.

She turned around the living room sofa and slept there, facing the door and the locked balcony. She kept the pistol at arm’s length.

Sleep, what there would be of it, did not come easily.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 18

T
he next morning, Alex obtained her necessary permits and keys from the Policia Nacional as well as the City Police. She also placed a second call to Mark McKinnon and demanded an urgent meeting with him late that afternoon. He resisted at first, then relented. He asked that she find her way to a bench in a busy downtown area on the Calle de Bailén, across the street from the Palacio Real, the royal palace where the king no longer lived but where state functions were held. The meeting time was set for the window between 4:00 p.m. and 4:15.

Alex traveled there by buses, three of them, a roundabout route. She got off the first bus quickly, reversed her path down a busy street, then caught the second and the third. Each time, she jumped off abruptly just before the vehicle was to pull out of a stop, each time watching to see if anyone followed. The only other American at the meeting involving the pieta’s theft had gone out a tenth-floor window, probably not voluntarily. One could never be too careful.

She found the designated bench in the shadow of the Grand Palacio. Across the street was the Cathedral of the Virgin of Almudena, patroness of Madrid. Alex’s eyes swept the block for danger. She saw none, but her insides were as jittery as a half-dozen frightened cats. She didn’t see McKinnon, either.

The security code with McKinnon: if she felt she had been followed, she would be reading a newspaper. If she was sure she was clean, no newspaper open. She felt secure. She sat down on the bench at a bus stop with a copy of
El Mundo
folded neatly across her lap. She picked up on the activities of passers-by. She noted footwear. She was wary of anyone with concealed hands. She carried her pistol in a holster on her hip.

She asked herself: How fast could she have her gun out and ready?

One second? Two?

She drew a breath, then let it go. It was 4:00 p.m. Then six minutes past four. Where was McKinnon?

A homeless man approached her. He engaged her in a pointless conversation and eventually asked for money. She gave him two euros, and he went about his way, replaced immediately by a twenty-something couple holding hands, smooching, and not saying a thing as they seemed to wait for a bus.

Then the man took out a cell phone, made a call, and the two of them turned to walk away. There needed to be nothing to it, but linked to the homeless man, the events were consecutive, overlapping by seconds, as if the three of them were one of McKinnon’s pavement mini-teams, the first man pegging the prey, the couple keeping watch while Mark approached from somewhere. And, thinking back, the homeless man hadn’t had a homeless stench.

Or was she imagining things, she asked herself. She glanced at her watch.

Ten after. The heck with the pavement teams, maybe Mark was blowing her off with a no-show. She held her seat on the bench across from the palace. She watched the guards. The palace was magnificent, built to impress, just like Versailles, just like Buckingham Palace, just like Donald Trump’s home in Florida.

She tried to settle herself.

She turned her attention to the cathedral. The history gene within her reminded her of the Roman Catholic Church’s centuries of influence in Spain, from the pilgrims in the first ten centuries after Christ, through the Inquisition, through the Franco regime, and more subtly, into the present day. Her eyes drifted thoughtfully over the architecture, a gray neoclassic façade that echoed the architecture of the Palacio Real across the street. The pairing of the two buildings, the similarity in their feel and appearance, had been intended to emphasize the Church’s relationship with the Crown.

Four fifteen. She glanced at her cell phone. No calls. No alert involving Jean-Claude. Typical in this line of work. One never knew what was going on. Never.

She grew restless. Her back started to cramp. She stood up and strolled the block. A raging paranoia was rolling in on her, a sense that something big had been missed.

She came back to the bench. She felt eyes on her. She kept looking over her shoulder as she walked. The smooching young couple reappeared, hand in hand. The lovebirds stayed a constant half-block away from her.

Yeah, she had made them, all right. Now, with their reappearance, she knew Mark was imminent. So she remained seated. Four twenty. He was late. But sometimes late had no significance other than
late
.

The heat and humidity assaulted her. Rain clouds had formed. A few sprinkles came and went. Then, bingo. She saw a car stop quickly on the palace side of the street. Mark McKinnon jumped out. McKinnon was in a suit, a white shirt, and tie. She slid her gaze to her left and saw that the lovebirds turned tail immediately and departed. She noted the time. Four twenty-six.

She watched Mark and knew the drill with the vehicle. His car would circle the block while they met, and somewhere another car had probably put one or two bodyguards on the street.

She scanned the block nearby, more carefully than ever. There was an ill-dressed man looking through a souvenir stall, but not really looking. A man in a small truck with Madrid plates had pulled to the curb right behind her, stopping in contravention of all traffic rules, and was talking on his cell phone.

She doubted that McKinnon had more than two guns backing him up, but it barely mattered. Mark had already told her so much. This was one high-testosterone operation in progress today if Mark had this sort of entourage.

That, or she had imagined everything. But she didn’t think she had. This venue was like a fuse to a cherry bomb.

McKinnon jaywalked lazily toward her, stepping between angry drivers. Then he quickly jogged the rest of the way across the street and came to the bench where she sat.

“Hello, LaDuca,” he said. “What’s got your panties in a twist today?”

“I need to know a few things,” she said.

“We all do,” he answered. “What’s on your list? Then I’ll tell you what’s on mine.”

He sat. She stood. “Let’s walk,” she said.

“I’d prefer not to.”

“Let’s do it anyway.”

With a sigh, he acceded. He was up on his feet.

“Did you contact Peter yesterday and ask him to go see Floyd Connelly?” she asked as they moved.

“Distrustful, aren’t you? You’re checking up on Peter Chang.”

“That’s right. I am.”

“Peter’s your partner. What am I to think?”

“I’m being thorough. Could you answer my question?”

“Yes, I asked Peter to go over to see Connelly,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Why? Why
not
? That’s how I often do things if they’re important,” McKinnon snapped. “If I ask two people to do something, maybe one of them will get it done. You okay with that?—because I don’t care if you are or not.”

“You didn’t ask him to kill Connelly, did you? I know you didn’t ask me to.”

“Ha! No. Why? Do you think I did?”

“A lot of things cross my mind,” she said. “Our black bird isn’t the most normal case.”

“What case is?” he asked. “Are you the normal working girl from Treasury? Is Peter the normal Chinaman from Shanghai? Lighten up, LaDuca. There
is
no normal. If something were normal, it would be
abnormal
, which would make it suspicious.”

“Even if you didn’t order it, I’m wondering if Peter freelanced it,” she said. “His interests in this case coincide with ours, but they’re not perfectly compatible.”

“Oh,” McKinnon said dismissively, “I doubt that he did. But if he pushed old Floyd out of the lousy window, so what, really? Floyd was a liability. Senior moments, twenty-four seven. And that hotel he was staying at. It wasn’t the Four Seasons; it was more like a One Season. Bad publicity, my buttcrack! They probably won’t even bother to get their fence fixed. They’re going to parlay the publicity and sell out all summer to the tourists from Kansas. They’ll probably open a café in the alley and name a drink after Floyd. They’ll call it ‘The Dead American’ and put a couple of little skewers through it.”

“Mark, would you come down to earth?”

But Mark didn’t. “I’ve got this theory, you see,” McKinnon continued. “More than a theory, really. An analysis of what’s been going down. Floyd was the leak in the room at the embassy, you see. We
know
that. In the room and for many months dating back. He’s the one who nearly got you killed by letting go with inside information and not securing either his computer or his phone. He’d get soused and pop off at the hotel bar about why he was in Madrid. Used to trade info for sex. Did you know that? Did you know he mentioned your name a couple of weeks back to some bad people. Did you know that he used to play golf with a cranky old dinosaur of an arms dealer in Switzerland named Tissot, who payrolled a mistress for him, and set up a bank account for him?”

“Is that true?” she asked.

McKinnon laughed. “You Treasury eggheads might dislike all us Agency people, Alex,” he said, “but we do know a thing or two. Connelly was a health hazard to all of us. So I’m not bawling my eyes out this morning. It’s pretty clear that Floyd was finally set up. Outlived his usefulness to the opposition and in fact had turned into a liability for them as well as us. He bought half a recent bill of goods from someone, but his good information was laced with the bad stuff. And yet he stumbled across enough solid stuff so that he decided to play Clark Kent out of the hotel window. I say, good riddance! He got killed instead of you getting killed. So even if Peter freelanced, so what?”

“Maybe nothing, unless you’re Connelly’s family back home.”

“Floyd had a big government insurance policy. It actually will save the taxpayers some money. Maybe his wife had him pushed. I hear she’s not that upset, a bit of a merry widow. It’s as if she won the lottery, you know, and she doesn’t have to be worried about a wandering husband any more.”

“You disgust me sometimes, Mark. That’s a human life you’re talking about.”

“What else is on your mind, LaDuca? You carry yourself well, but you can be a pain in the neck.”

They stopped walking. He glanced at the palace and continued before she could say anything.

“Hell of a building, isn’t it, the palace? But you know what? They should chainsaw that palace into condos and make some money with the way the economy is crashing. I don’t care much for the Spaniards, truth be known. They invented the auto-da-fé here, you know. What’s the old jingle?
What a day, what a day, for an auto-da-fé
.”

“This ‘Jean-Claude al-Masri’,” she said. “You know about him?”

“We have some of the same sources, so yes. Of course I do. A potential suspect. Marvelous. Whoop dee do.”

“Are the Spanish police going to bring him in?” she asked.

“Hell, no.”

“Why not?”

“The Spanish police are involved in the black fricking bird, not in the plot against the embassy.”

“What?”

“This is the twenty-first century. We handle these things directly.”

“Give me a break.”

“No, LaDuca, you give us one and don’t exceed your assignment here. These things take care of themselves when we’re lucky,” he said.

“What are you doing behind my back?” she asked. “I need some help with this, Mark, and you’re not coming across with it.”

“The world is imperfect, but we just discussed that.”

“What about the embassy?” she asked.

“What about it?”

“I’m told it’s in stand-down today,” she said. “Being searched roof to basement.”

“Who told you that?” he asked.

“Colonel Pendraza.”

“He’s kind of sweet on you, the old guy, isn’t he? Feeds you tidbits so he can hang out with a girl a third his age. You know, I think he’d like to get you in bed at least once. It would kind of cap his career, if you want to give it some sympathetic thought.”

“At least he acts professionally.”

“Okay,” he said. “Touché. And he’s only two and a half times your age. Listen, Madrid is in Spain, Spain is in Europe, Mercury is in retrograde, I’m in a good mood, and the embassy is in stand-down, yes, as are several dozen other locations around Madrid. We make sure the premises are clean and then we triple the security on anything or anyone coming in.”

“What about underneath the embassy?”

“What? The sewers?”

“Has anyone considered that the embassy could be accessed from underneath?”

“Pretty miniscule, the possibilities.”

“So was flying a pair of planes into the World Trade Center.”

McKinnon was silent. Then, still in Spanish, “But for the dual sake of both argument and personal irritation, I’ll give you a minute to convince me,” he said.

“This in an old city, one set of walls and ruins on top of another,” Alex said. “Same as Rome, London, Paris, Vienna. Ever see
The Third Man?
Ever see
Ocean’s Thirteen?
Ever read about Dien Bien Phu where the Viet Cong came up out of underground tunnels to blow the French out of Indochina? You had a tunnel under the Berlin Wall, and you got tunnels under the Tex-Mex borders in Arizona and Texas that you can drive small trucks through. And how about this? Did you read about the way the thieves got into the Museo Arqueológico to steal the bird the first time? There’s twelve centuries of stuff under our feet, Mark. They’re always finding Moorish walls and cellars in all those places, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that someone could be burrowing.”

“Even if you burrowed, you’d need a real wallop of explosives,” he said.

“Yes. Like HMX with RDX. That’s exactly what’s out there somewhere.”

“Uh huh. Look, it’s
under control, LaDuca.
Stick to your job, which is the stupid figurine. Now, what else do you want from me?”

“You’re head of the Agency in Europe. I could use some help examining the area around the embassy. The underground pathways and all.”

“What? You want to go looking for souvenirs of the Inquisition?”

“I want to be thorough.”