Balance of Power o-5

by Tom Clancy

  “Señor Sanchez is now at the airport in Madrid,” Ramirez said. He was using the name the killer had assumed for this mission. “He will reach Bilbao in one hour. I will ring the factory and have one of my familia drivers meet him there. And then, as planned, he will be brought out to the yacht.”

  “For a short stay, I trust,” one of the men said anxiously.

  “For a very short stay,” Ramirez replied. “When Señor Sanchez arrives I will go on deck and pay him.” He patted his vest pocket, where he had an envelope stuffed with international currency. “He will not see anyone else so there is no way he can ever betray you.”

  “Why would he?” asked the man.

  “Extortion, Alfonso,” Ramirez explained. “Men like Sanchez, former soldiers who have come into money, tend to live lavishly, only for the day. When they run out of money, sometimes they come back and ask for more.”

  “And if he does?” asked Alfonso. “How will you protect yourself?”

  Ramirez smiled. “One of my men was present with a video camera. If Sanchez betrays me, the tape will find its way into the hands of the police. But enough of what could be. Here is what will be. After Sanchez has been paid he will be escorted back to the airport and will leave the country until the investigation has been closed, as agreed.”

  “What of the driver in Madrid?” asked another of the men. “Is he leaving Spain as well?”

  “No,” said Ramirez. “The driver works for Deputy Serrador. He wants very much to rise so he will be silent. And the car used by the killers has already been left at a garage for dismantling.” Ramirez drew contentedly on his cigar. “Trust me, my dear Miguel. Everything has been thought out very carefully. This action will not be traced to us.”

  “I trust you,” sniffed the man. “But I’m still not certain we can trust Serrador. He is a Basque.”

  “The killer is also a Basque and he did as he was instructed,” said Ramirez. “Deputy Serrador will also do as he was told, Carlos. He is ambitious.”

  “Then he is an ambitious Basque. But he is still a Basque.”

  Ramirez smiled again. “Deputy Serrador does not wish to be a spokesman for the fishermen, shepherds, and miners forever. He wants to lead them.”

  “He can lead them over the Pyrenees into France,” said Carlos. “I won’t miss any of them.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” said Ramirez, “but then who would fish, herd, and mine? The bank managers and accountants who work for you, Carlos? The reporters who work for Rodrigo’s newspapers or Alfonso’s television stations? The pilots who work for Miguel’s airline?”

  The other men smiled, shrugged, or nodded. Carlos flushed and acceded with a gracious nod of his head.

  “That’s enough about our curious bedfellow,” said Ramirez. “The important thing is that America’s emissary has been slain. The United States will have no idea who did it or why, but they will be extremely wary about becoming involved in local politics. Deputy Serrador will caution them further when he meets with the rest of the contingent later this evening. He’ll assure them that the police are doing everything they can to apprehend the killer, but that the prevention of further incidents cannot be guaranteed. Not in such troubled times.”

  Carlos nodded. He turned to Miguel. “And how is your part going?”

  “Very well,” said the portly, silver-haired airline executive. “The discount air fares from the United States to Portugal, Italy, France, and Greece have proven extremely popular. Travel to Madrid and Barcelona is down eleven and eight percent respectively from the levels of last year. Hotels, restaurants, and car services are feeling the loss. The ripple effect has hurt many local businesses.”

  “And revenues will fall even further,” Ramirez said, “when the American public is told that the slain woman was a tourist and that this was a random shooting.”

  Ramirez drew on his cigar and smiled. He was particularly proud of that part of the plan. The United States government could never expose the identity of the dead woman. She had come from an intelligence and crisis management center, not from the State Department. Nor could the United States reveal the fact that she had gone to Madrid to meet with a powerful deputy who feared a new civil war. If Europe ever learned that an American representative of this type had been scheduled to meet with Serrador, America would be suspected of trying to position the players to its own advantage. Which was exactly why Serrador had asked for her. With one shooting, Ramirez and his group had managed to gain control of both the White House and Spanish tourism.

  “As for the next step,” Ramirez said, “how is that coming, Carlos?”

  The black-haired young banker leaned forward. He placed his cigar in the ashtray and folded his hands on the table. “As you know, the lower and middle classes have been hurt very seriously by the recent employment cutbacks. In the past six months, Banquero Cedro has restricted loans so that our partners in this operation”—he indicated the other men at the table—“as well as other businesspeople, have been forced to raise consumer prices nearly seven percent. At the same time they’ve cut back production so that there has been an eight-percent drop in trade of Spanish goods throughout Europe. The workers have been hit hard although, thus far, we haven’t curtailed their credit. We’ve been extraordinarily generous, in fact. We’ve been extending credit to repay old debts. Of course, only some of that money goes to relieve debt. People make new purchases, assuming that credit will be available to them again. As a result, interest on loans has compounded to levels eighteen percent higher than they were at this time last year.”

  Ramirez smiled. “In conjunction with a fall in tourism, the financial blow will be severe when that credit is not made available.”

  “It will be extremely severe,” said Carlos. “The people will be so deeply in debt they will agree to anything to be out of it.”

  “But the blow is one you’re certain you can control,” said Alfonso.

  “Absolutely,” Carlos replied. “Thanks to cash reserves and credit with the World Bank and other institutions, the money supply at my bank and at most others will remain sound. The economy will be relatively unaffected at the top.” He grinned. “It’s like the plague of blood which befell Egypt in the Old Testament. It did not affect those who had been forewarned and had filled their jugs and cisterns with fresh water.”

  Ramirez sat back. He drew long and contentedly on his cigar. “This is excellent, gentlemen. And once everything is in place, our task is simply to maintain the pressure until the middle and lower classes buckle. Until the Basques and the Castilians, the Andalusians and the Galicians acknowledge that Spain belongs to the people of Catalonia. And when they do, when the prime minister is forced to call for new elections, we will be ready.” His small, dark eyes moved from face to face before settling on the leather binder before him. “Ready with our new constitution — ready for a new Spain.”

  The other men nodded their approval. Miguel and Rodrigo applauded lightly. Ramirez felt the weight of history past and history yet to come on his shoulders, and it felt good.

  He was unaware of a disheveled man who sat an eighth of a mile away with a different sense of history on his shoulders — and a much different weapon at his disposal.

  FOUR

  Monday, 7.15 P.M. Madrid, Spain

  Aideen was still sitting in the leather couch when Comisario Diego Fernandez arrived. He was a man of medium height and build. He was clean-shaven with a ruddy complexion and carefully trimmed goatee. His black hair was longish but neat and he peered out carefully from behind gold-rimmed spectacles. He wore black leather gloves, black suede shoes, and a black trenchcoat. Beneath the open coat was a dark gray business suit.

  An aide shut the door behind him. When it had clicked shut, the inspector bowed politely to Aideen.

  “Our deepest sympathy and apologies for your loss,” he said. His voice was deep, the English accent thick. “If there’s anything I or my department can do to help you, please ask.”

  “Th
ank you, Inspector,” Aideen said.

  “Be assured that the resources of the entire Madrid metropolitan police department as well as other government offices will be applied to finding whoever was responsible for this atrocious act.”

  Aideen looked up at the police inspector. He couldn’t be talking to her. The police department couldn’t be looking for the killer of someone she knew. The TV announcements and newspaper headlines wouldn’t be about a person she had been dressing with in a hotel room just an hour before. Though she had lived through the killing and seen Martha’s body on the street, the experience didn’t seem real. Aideen was so accustomed to changing things — rewinding a tape to see something she’d missed or erasing computer data she didn’t need — that the irreversibility of this seemed impossible.

  But in her brain Aideen knew that it had happened. And that it was irreversible. After being brought here, she’d called the hotel and briefed Darrell McCaskey. McCaskey had said he would inform Op-Center. He’d seemed surprisingly unshocked — or maybe Darrell was always that collected. Aideen didn’t know him well enough to say. Then she’d sat here trying to tell herself that the shooting was a random act of terrorism and not a hit. After all, it wasn’t the same as in Tijuana two years earlier when her friend Odin Gutierrez Rico had literally been blasted to death by four gunmen with assault rifles. Rico was the director of criminal trials in Baja California. He was a public figure who had regularly received death threats and had continued to defy the nation’s drug traffickers. His death was a tragic loss but not a surprise. It was a very public statement that the prosecution of drug dealers would not be tolerated by the underworld.

  Martha was here with a cover story known only to a handful of government officials. She had come to Madrid to help Deputy Serrador work out a plan to keep his own people, the Basques, from joining with the equally nationalistic Catalonians in an effort to break away from Spain. The Basque uprisings in the 1980s had been sporadic enough to fail but violent enough to be remembered. Martha and Serrador both believed that an organized revolt by two of the nation’s five major ethnic groups — especially if those groups were well armed and better prepared than in the 1980s — would not only be enormously destructive but would have a good chance of succeeding.

  If this were an assassination, if Martha had been the target, it meant that there was a leak in the system somewhere. And if there were a leak then the peace process was in serious danger. It was a cruel irony that only a short time before, Martha had been insisting that nothing must be allowed to interfere with the talks.

  You know what’s at stake….

  Then, of course, Martha had been worried about Aideen’s overreaction in the street.

  If only that had been our worst roadblock, Aideen thought. We sweat the details and end up missing the big picture—

  “Senorita?” the inspector said.

  Aideen blinked. “Yes?”

  “Are you all right?”

  Aideen had been looking past Comisario Fernandez, at the dark windows. But she focused on the inspector now. He was still standing a few feet away, smiling down at her.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” she said. “I’m very sorry, Inspector. I was thinking about my friend.”

  “I understand,” the inspector replied quietly. “If it would not be too much for you, might I ask you a few questions?”

  “Of course,” she replied. She’d been slumping forward but now she sat up in the chair. “First, Inspector, would you mind telling me if the surveillance cameras told you anything?”

  “Unfortunately, they did not,” the inspector said. “The gunman was standing just out of range.”

  “He knew what that range was?”

  “Apparently, he did,” the inspector admitted. “Unfortunately, it will take us a while to find out everyone who had access to that information — and to interrogate them all.”

  “I understand,” Aideen said.

  The inspector drew a small, yellow notebook from his coat pocket. The smile faded as he studied some notes and slipped a pen from the spiral binder. When he was finished reading he looked at Aideen.

  “Did you and your companion come to Madrid for pleasure?” the inspector asked.

  “Yes. Yes, we did.”

  “You informed the guard at the gate that you came to the Congreso de los Diputados for a personal tour.”

  “That’s right.”

  “This tour was arranged by whom?”

  “I don’t know,” said Aideen.

  “Oh?”

  “My companion set it up through a friend back in the States,” Aideen informed him.

  “Would you be able to provide me with the name of this friend?” the inspector asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” Aideen replied. “I don’t know who it was. My coming on this trip was rather last-minute.”

  “Possibly it was a coworker who arranged it,” he suggested. “Or else a neighbor? A local politician?”

  “I don’t know,” Aideen insisted. “I’m sorry, Inspector, but it wasn’t something I thought I’d need to know.”

  The inspector stared at her for a long moment. Then he lowered his eyes slowly and wrote her answers in his notebook.

  Aideen didn’t think that he believed her; that was what she got from the disapproving turn of his mouth and the stern knot of flesh between his eyebrows. And she hated stonewalling the investigation. But until she heard otherwise from Darrell McCaskey or Deputy Serrador, she had no choice but to continue to play this by the cover story.

  Comisario Fernandez turned slowly and thoughtfully to a fresh page of the notebook. “Did you see the man who attacked you?”

  “I didn’t see his face,” she said. “He fired a flash picture just before he reached for his weapon.”

  “Did you smell any cologne? Aftershave?”

  “No.”

  “Did you notice the camera? The make?”

  “No,” she said. “I wasn’t close enough — and then there was the flash. I only saw his clothes.”

  “Aha,” he said. He stepped forward eagerly. “Can you tell me what they looked like?”

  Aideen took a long breath. She shut her eyes. “He was wearing a tight denim jacket and a baseball cap. A dark blue or black cap, worn with the brim in front. He had on loose khaki trousers and black shoes. I want to say that he was a young man, though I can’t be entirely certain.”

  “What gave you that impression?”

  Aideen opened her eyes. “There was something about the way he stood,” she replied. “His feet planted wide, his shoulders squared, his head held erect. Very strong, very poised.”

  “You’ve seen this look before?” the inspector asked.

  “Yes,” Aideen replied. The killer had reminded her of a Striker, though of course she couldn’t say that. “Where I went to college there was ROTC,” she lied. “Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. The killer had the bearing of a soldier. Or at least someone who was skilled in handling firearms.”

  The inspector made an entry in his notebook. “Did the gunman say anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “Did he shout anything — a slogan or a threat?”

  “No.”

  “Did you notice the kind of weapon he used?”

  “I’m sorry, I did not. It was a handgun of some kind.”

  “A revolver?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she lied. It was an automatic. But she didn’t want the inspector to know that she knew enough to tell the difference.

  “Did he pause between shots?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Was it loud?”

  “Not very,” Aideen said. “It was surprisingly quiet.” The gun had been silenced but she didn’t want to let him know that she knew that.

  “It was probably silenced,” the inspector said. “Did you see the getaway car?”

  “Yes,” Aideen said. “It was a black sedan. I don’t know what kind.”

  “Was it clean or dirty?”

&
nbsp; “Average.”

  “Where did it come from?” the inspector asked.

  “I believe it was waiting for the killer down the street,” Aideen said.

  “About how far?”

  “Maybe twenty or thirty yards,” Aideen said. “It seemed to creep up along the curb a few seconds before the man opened fire.”

  “Did any of the shots come from the car?”

  “I don’t think so,” she replied. “The only flashes I saw came from the one gun.”

  “You were behind the other victim, the postman, for part of the attack. You were very conscientiously attending to his wound. You might have missed a second gunman.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I was only behind him at the very end. Tell me — how is the gentleman? Will he recover?”

  “Sadly, señorita, he has died.”

  Aideen glanced down. “I’m sorry.”

  “You did everything you could to help him,” the inspector said. “There is nothing you should regret.”

  “Nothing,” she muttered, “except moving in that direction. Did he have a family?”

  “Sí,” said the inspector. “Señor Suarez supported a wife, a baby son, and a mother.”

  Aideen felt her temples grow tight as fresh tears formed behind her eyes. Not only had she failed to do anything to help Martha, but her instincts to draw the gunman’s fire had cost an innocent man his life. In retrospect, she should have jumped toward Martha. Maybe she could have put her body between the gunman and Martha or tried to pull the wounded woman behind the goddamn sentry booth. She should have done anything but what she’d done.

  “Would you like a glass of water?” the inspector asked.