Midnight in Madrid (34 page)

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 18, EVENING

T
he local police granted Alex permission and provided keys to the forgotten underground Madrid. The Policia Nacional offered her a backup, but she declined. She went by herself, stubborn and overconfident, bearing her weapon, a hand lantern, and a GPS compass that she had bought for the occasion.

She unlocked a creaking old door that led to an old service passage that was at the far end of the Metro stop at Nuñez de Balboa. She prayed she wouldn’t get lost in the subterranean labyrinth.

Carrying a lantern, she found herself wandering long-forgotten underground chambers that were unknown and unimaginable to the people of modern Madrid. Outside light disappeared quickly, and she relied on her lantern. There was movement around that was nonhuman. First she saw one rat, then she saw ten. First she had ample overhead clearance and then, as she neared the newer construction near the embassy, she had little. Then none.

She walked in a crouch. In her free hand, she carried a piece of chalk, marking passages as she went through them. She encountered stray cats, some alive, some dead. She came across a rat writhing in the agony of a poisonous death. Her nostrils were assaulted by the rancid odors of sewer leaks and the ground was wet and uneven under her feet.

It was cold. Then it was hot. Then it was cold again. An hour passed.

Then a second. She continued to prowl through the winding maze of underground tunnels, crawlspaces, and abandoned passageways that led toward the United States Embassy from the Metro stop at Nuñez de Balboa. As she moved, she constantly consulted her handheld GPS.

She felt as if she had stepped into a moonscape or a surreal bombed-out world of a future that had endured a nuclear catastrophe or a plague or maybe something even worse. She sidestepped old sewers and crossed dried-out viaducts. She passed mute walls that had once been basements, some of which even bore graffiti or artwork. Damaged structural supports sagged overhead, and water trickled in various filthy urban streams. There were old plaster walls, etched with names that appeared to be those of soldiers because many bore ranks before their names, and some had written prayers also. She wondered how many of the prayers had been answered or whether a single one of the names on the wall still belonged to someone living. She doubted it.

Alex recalled that during the bloody final days of the Civil War, troops massed underground and then came up out of manholes into the streets to kill their enemies or be killed by them. On other walls, legions of live insects fed on smaller insects.

She wandered through derelict bunkers where white plastery stalactites hung like daggers, and she crossed an obsolete rail track where no train had probably passed within the last century. At some points, the passages were peaceful, the way a crypt is peaceful, and at other times there was a stinking fetid squalor beyond comprehension, and she had to hold her hand to her mouth for fear of getting sick.

Her compass told her, however, that as she worked her way through the underground maze, she was indeed drawing closer to the area under the embassy, which meant that if she could access the area, anyone could.

More graffiti. Then a handful of murals, some of them pornographic, by artists no doubt long dead. Decrepit rungs that led nowhere marched upward on walls that had been truncated by newer construction. It was utterly silent in most places, and yet from time to time a cool wet breeze slapped her in the face, and she felt as if she were a frightened little girl exploring the basement of a haunted house.

Another mural, one of a man in prison. A mess of terra-cotta tiles. A quote from Cervantes in Spanish and a poem about tuberculosis written in black paint on yellow brick. Old shoes and bottles and newspapers emerged in the ray of her flashlight, and then another mural, a breathtaking rip-off of Dali’s
Melting Clock
.

Old steam pipes. Meter after meter of them. Sealed vaults in the walls. Bricked-over exits. A tipped-over rusting gurney. Pools of water, red with rust. Ghostly staircases that led into uneven walls of concrete or granite. Utter blackness, relieved only by her light.

Years ago, she had read T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
, and now as she prowled under a modern city, she thought of Eliot’s unreal metropolis where dread lurked in the shadows, terrible things emerged by the gleam of light, her shadow near midnight rose to meet her and where she saw fear in a handful of dust.

In another thirty minutes, she found the flashlight most recently discarded by Jean-Claude, outside a low crawlspace that led to a narrow tunnel. According to her GPS, the tunnel would lead the final few meters toward the embassy.

Alex looked at the flashlight. She knelt down and looked into the tunnel. Incredibly, there seemed to be light at the other end of it. The tunnel looked to be secure and wide enough for passage.

She picked up the flashlight. The bulb was dim but she could see.

Decision: go forward or head back? She had always learned to go forward. She decided to do something impetuous and stupid. She took off her jacket and knelt. The tunnel didn’t look too bad. She would crawl in.

Time to get dirty.

She got down on her stomach and leaned in, pushing her own flashlight ahead of her. And she entered the tunnel. A few seconds later, she was on a slow horizontal crawl through a wet partially man-made tunnel under the streets of Madrid. It was no one’s idea of fun.

She crawled her way through the passage for ten feet, then fifteen. Moving slowly. The walls then started to seize up around her.

Uh oh…The flashlight started to flicker. So that’s why it had been abandoned. The tunnel narrowed slightly.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Just so that she understood her options, she tried to move backward. Okay, a few paces. She could go either way.

Bad idea! Bad bad bad idea! Claustrophobia started to settle in.

She started to cough.

Oh, Lord, no!

The coughing stirred up dust and mortar, her eyes smarted. She coughed more.

She tried to back up.

She couldn’t.

She was stuck.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 18, EVENING

N
o more than three blocks away from Samy’s bistro, through the maze of streets in the Rastro, Basheer sat nervously in the living room of the small house he shared with his wife, Leila. He was watching the late sports on television and was particularly interested in a match of his adopted land Morocco against Cameroon.

Leila came out of the bedroom to see what he was watching. She was wearing only a linen robe that she normally wore around the house. When she saw her husband was viewing sports, she gave up on getting his attention.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she said softly. “Then let’s get into bed.”

Basheer grunted his approval. It made sense: first his favorite activity, then his second.

Leila went to the bathroom and started the water for her shower. Playfully, she stood in the doorway and slid out of her robe. Then she tossed her robe into the living room and stood naked before her husband, trying to interest him.

Her husband smiled but didn’t budge from the sports. “Later,” he said.

A minute passed. Maybe two.

Basheer heard a noise in the entrance hallway behind him, but the account of the game he wanted was seconds away. So he didn’t investigate. There were only friends in this building, anyway, so what could go wrong?

A few seconds later, he heard a creak behind him on the old floorboards. The creak finally caused him to turn and glance behind him. He did a double take and jumped from his chair.

A Chinese guy! Stealthy as a giant cat! How the——?

C
harles Ming stood with his arm extended, with a gun pointed forward.

Basheer opened his mouth to scream but never had the chance. Charles Ming squeezed the trigger hard three times. Three bullets slammed into Basheer’s chest before he had the chance to duck for cover or even scream. He hit the floor hard and in deep pain. He knew life was ebbing out of him, and all he could think of now was that this must have something to do with the bomb that didn’t go off.

Ming stepped over him and sent another bullet directly through his heart.

Ming looked at the linen robe on the floor. He heard the shower water running and knew how easy the end of this job would be. He stepped over the robe and walked to the bathroom door, which was half open.

He pushed it the rest of the way.

Behind a vinyl see-through shower curtain, he could see the body of a woman. She was young and a little plump, with black hair and very pale skin the color of a fish fillet. He studied her for a moment because he had never before seen a woman undressed without having to pay for it. He reasoned that her skin was pale because it never saw the sunshine. Unlike Western or Chinese women, she never wore a bikini or went to the beach.

But Ming made no special note of her. She was an assignment, same as her husband who was dead on the floor behind him. He gazed at her with curiosity for a few seconds. He wondered how long he could stare before she saw him.

He had his answer a few seconds later. She turned.

Her eyes went as wide as saucers. Then she screamed.

The sound of the scream pulled Ming out of his mini-reverie. He raised the pistol sharply and fired three shots into the woman’s body from a distance of five feet.

Her knees buckled, her body slammed against the back wall of the shower, and her voice went quiet like a television suddenly turned off. She dropped like a sack of potatoes, made a gurgling sound, and was still.

As a courtesy to the people downstairs, Ming stepped forward and turned off the water before he departed.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 18, EVENING

T
rapped in the claustrophobic hell of the small, rancid underground tunnel, Alex pushed with her arms. She prayed. Oh, she prayed! She almost prayed out loud, and she cursed herself for getting this far along. She stretched out her arms with every inch she could, dug her fingernails into the sandstone that formed the floor of the narrow passage, and she pulled with all the strength she could muster.

Nothing.

She tried again. There were tears forming in her eyes.

Nothing.

She tried a third and final time, pulling in her breath, trying to scrape through.

Nothing.

Then, something.

She groped along. She moved an inch. Then a few more inches. Then, ahead of her, a small trickle of sand and a mini cave-in.

She fought to suppress the panic. Once, years ago, she had read about miners who had been trapped in a cave-in. She felt in her gut the terror of their claustrophobic ordeal as water rose past their knees, their waists, their shoulders, their necks until they had only a few inches of breathing room at which time rescuers found them.

Well, that was them. This was her. She closed her eyes against the dust ahead of her and figured she was dead.

But she wasn’t. The dust had loosened the tight walls of the passage. She pushed the sandy dirt away and she started moving again, pushing the lantern forward with her head.

Then suddenly she could move a few inches at a time. Crawling on her stomach like an infantry soldier under live rounds, she was able to push several inches ahead at a time. Then her motion was unabated. She pushed forward with her knees and traveled several feet. The other end of the tunnel loomed in front of her.

Six feet. Then three. Then two and then her head nudged the lantern forward and it rolled forward and dropped with a clack. But she could still see the light of the lantern. And she could hear a sound of a person working.

Or something.

She reached the end of the tunnel with her hands. She dug in with her fingers and pulled herself free, the greatest feeling she had ever encountered in her life. And then she was on her feet, covered with dirt and crap and coughing and so delirious with joy over just being free and alive that she was almost oblivious to why she was in this damp, dark chamber and what she was looking for.

She coughed again.

Then she saw that there was one more small chamber where there was a light similar to hers. She managed a glance at the GPS. She knew that she was under the embassy. She heard footsteps.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 18, LATE EVENING

M
ahoud had been looking forward all day to a shower after working in the hot kitchen of an Ethiopian restaurant on the Calle de Montevideo. He had been jittery all day but had calmed as night had fallen and as midnight came and went. Perhaps the whole thing was just one tremendous mistake, he thought to himself. He still harbored his deep hatred of the United States and Western culture, but he was half-relieved that the big blast hadn’t happened.

Once the bomb went off, nothing would ever be the same again. He would be frightened of every shadow and would jump at every knock on the door. Every day would be like this one, except worse. Planting the thing had been one thing, almost a challenge to see if it could be done. The actual detonation of it was something else, something secretly he hoped would never happen. But he couldn’t tell anyone that. He would have seemed like a traitor.

He thought of all of this as he walked the final block to his home in the Arab quarter, past the closed fruit and produce stands that would open again at dawn. It was now past 11:00 p.m. and he
was
looking forward to bathing.

But the end of the bombing mission had him spooked. Everything bothered him today. Well, at least he felt safe in his own neighborhood. As safe as one could be.

He cautiously approached his doorway. He saw a problem, but not an unusual one. There was a vagrant asleep on the sidewalk, a slight man in an old coat that was too hot for this weather. But there were
vagabundos
all over this neighborhood. There had been one lying in this doorstep for a couple of weeks and no one did anything. And these bums wore everything they had all the time.

Mahoud cut a wide berth around the downtrodden figure. Under Mahoud’s own coat, he had a kitchen paring knife, just in case of trouble.

He stepped around the man and reached his doorway, noting in passing that this was a different bum tonight and the regular man was gone. Well, sic
transit gloria
in the world of hobos, he thought. Give a bum, take a bum. Maybe, he reasoned further, someone from the neighborhood had done a public service and set the other hobo on fire. Maybe that’s what he would do to this one, he thought.

Images of flaming bodies made him think back to the explosives he had helped plant. He really did have mixed feelings about that charge going off. He really wondered if—

Then he heard his name.

“Mahoud?”

A voice in the darkness spoke softly. He jumped.

In his attention on the hobo, Mahoud had not even noticed a man sitting on the steps to the next building. He was a sturdy man but obviously way out of place in this neighborhood.

The man had a foreign face. Asian, of some sort. Japanese. Chinese. Who could tell the difference, anyway?

“Mahoud?” the man said again.

Mahoud’s hands went to his knife and held it under the jacket. But the man held up his hands to show that they were empty and that he meant no harm.

“Who are you?” Mahoud asked in Spanish.

I
’m a friend of Jean-Claude,” Peter Chang answered in Spanish. “I bring you news.”

Mahoud answered cautiously. “I don’t know any Jean-Claude,” he said.

Peter Chang laughed. “Of course, you do, my friend,” he said. “Don’t be so frightened. Your entire group, you all are under
my
command. Don’t you think Jean-Claude has a commander? Do you think he was able to do everything by himself?”

A pause as Mahoud considered it.

“What is the news?” he finally asked.

“Come closer,” Chang said.

“Tell me from there,” Mahoud said, taking one step toward the doorway.

“I’d rather not,” said Chang.

“What is the news?” Mahoud repeated with insistence.

“The news is that everyone will die tonight,” Peter Chang said.

Mahoud flinched, wondering just how that was meant. Then there was a further explanation of the news. The vagrant had risen to his feet behind Mahoud and had slid out of his coat. The vagrant had slid, in fact, into his own true identity, that of Charles Wong. And Wong, like Chang, was there to conduct business.

Wong slapped one hand across Mahoud’s face, holding a filthy rag to his mouth and his nose. Mahoud fought back with his elbow and tried to kick at the instep and shin of the man behind him. But Wong had two hands. The other one, in a glove, held a butcher’s knife with a blade that was ten inches long. It was the type that in the primitive regions of China was still used to slaughter chickens or pigs.

With one sweeping gesture, Wong swept the blade of the knife into and across the throat of the third embassy bomber. The pain shot through Mahoud like an electrical current. He would have screamed, but his mouth was firmly covered, and the hacking, slashing sweep of the blade across his throat was so deep that his vocal chords were severed in addition to his cortical artery.

Mahoud’s body jumped at first like a great fish on a line, then went slack and buckled. He felt himself drop hard to the sidewalk. Distantly, as he lay in agony dying, he listened to the quiet footsteps of the two men walking away. And he wondered for a final time why the big explosion had never happened.

Several minutes later, Peter Chang moved quickly to a fourth location, accompanied by Wong and Ming. With little effort to conceal their faces, they arrived at the building where Jean-Claude lived in a rambling, cluttered four-room apartment.

Chang and Wong took the front stairs and Ming went to the rear where, at a synchronized moment, he hoisted himself up to a second floor window via a gutter pipe from the roof.

Here was the moment Peter had been waiting for. He wanted to savor it. Jean-Claude had been the instigator of the events that had left Yuan dead, and Chang had special plans for Jean-Claude.

They would ambush Jean-Claude in his home. But killing him swiftly would be too good. They would tie him and sit him down. Chang would show him a picture of Lee Yuan, who had died in a cold, smoky mountain castle in Switzerland.

In Peter’s mind, Jean-Claude would shake his head and deny knowledge of any man named Yuan.

Chang, as it played out in his mind, would become animated.

“This man’s name was Hun Sung Yuan. We knew him as Lee Yuan,” he would explain evenly. “Hun Sung Yuan was my friend. He was my mentor. He trained me when I entered the service of my government.”

Jean-Claude would listen in terror.

“Yuan was a boy during the Great Leap Forward,” Peter would explain. “He was five years old, and his family was sent to camps in the countryside for reeducation. Yuan’s parents were practicing Christians during the Cultural Revolution. Practicing religion was considered social turmoil. So they were held in a Beijing detention center for nearly a year as the Red Guard considered what charges to bring. Then Yuan’s parents were sent to a camp in the freezing northeast of China for reeducation instead. Yuan was sent to an orphanage. As an adult, he didn’t practice religion, but he had an interest in it. Christian items that may have been touched by a saint. Yuan was a fine man, but he had his superstitions. Which was his right.”

Jean-Claude would continue to stare. Maybe he would kick. Maybe he would protest. But he would be gagged with duct tape, so his protests would find no ears.

“As years went by,” Chang would explain, “Mr. Yuan became prosperous. And he wished to possess certain items. One was
The Pietà of Malta
. Mr. Yuan felt that he purchased the item very fairly. But through you and your people, it was not delivered to him. Instead, when he came to retrieve it, your associates murdered him. Do you think that was a wise thing to do?”

Jean-Claude, rethinking his position on recent events, would shake his head.

“You’re right,” Chang said. “It was not a wise thing to do.”

And then Chang would take out a long knife from under his suit jacket, a very sharp one normally used for trimming meat. He would let Jean-Claude stare at it with wide eyes while Ming and Wong approvingly watched their new master.

Then Chang would reach slowly—because he wished to draw it out—to Jean-Claude’s left ear. And with a quick powerful slashing motion he would thrust the knife into his victim’s neck and slash hard from left to right, cutting the man’s throat.

Then he would step back quickly and watch Jean-Claude begin to die in agony, even though no one had been gracious enough to be with Yuan in his final minutes. And then Peter would wash the knife off and take it with him. It would take a man about fifteen minutes to bleed to death after such an incident. And Peter needed to wrap things up and get out of the country quickly.

So there was no time to waste.

Except, this was only how Peter had planned it from the start.

In the final execution, it didn’t go that way.

When Peter, Ming, and Wong broke into Jean-Claude’s home, their victim wasn’t there.

That changed everything.