by Noel Hynd
“I’ve heard that before and been sorry,” she said. “What are you telling me? You want me to help the Spaniards with a two-bit burglary?”
“This feels like more than ‘two-bit,’ Alex,” Gamburian said. “That’s why we want to assign you to it.”
“Give it to me straight, Mike,” she said. “There are hundreds of major art thefts every week all over the world. What’s different about this one.”
“The uniqueness of the piece,” he said. “And we’ve been picking up some rumors and theories about some small terror cells in Spain that are intent on big things. Art theft often finances major crime. So we’re on guard.”
“Got it,” she said.
“You worked with a man named Mark McKinnon earlier this year, right? He’s one of the top ‘Agency’ guys in Europe.”
“I know him,” she said without enthusiasm.
“He’s on top of this, or at least says he is,” Gamburian said. “He’s going to be in touch with you in Madrid. Once again, you’re the perfect person on the spot.”
“Your flattery is going to get me killed some day.”
“Better you than me.”
“I’m going to hang up on you, Mike. That way you won’t hear me cursing at you.”
“Oh, come on. Hear me out, okay?”
Already within her, there was a feeling of disappointment. She had been doing much thinking and soul searching in the last few weeks. Following her recent activities from the brutally hot jungles of Venezuela to the snowy streets of Ukraine, she wondered if she was already burned out from this type of work. A voice within her urged her toward a job, an assignment, that would combat poverty, disease, and hate, the things she felt were the challenges of the new century, and part of how she wanted to live out her Christian faith.
“I still get to go back to Venezuela, right, Mike? Unfinished business and all.”
“The Caracas assignment will happen down the road, Alex. But the US government needs to assign someone right away. Today. We got a request at the ambassadorial level. You’re in Spain already. You’re fluent in Spanish, you’ll charm the socks off the castizos in Madrid, and you do have a bit of a background in art history.”
“How did you remember that?”
“I didn’t. I have a memory like a sieve. But I’m looking at your c.v. Christian art courses for your Master’s at UCLA. Says it right here. So, listen,” he continued. “If you say yes, I’ll put you back on the active payroll as of yesterday morning. Instead of the money coming out of the ‘Head Case’ funds you’ll be back on active duty. What do you say?”
A child’s soccer ball with the Barcelona team logo rolled onto her blanket from nearby, pursued by a smiling five-year-old boy. Alex gave him a friendly smile and gently flicked the ball back to him with her bare foot.
She held her silence, just to let Mike twist a little in the wind.
“Still there?” Gamburian finally asked.
“Before I say yes, what exactly are you asking me to do?” Alex asked.
“At first, go to a meeting at the US Embassy. You’ll meet some of our covert people in Spain and some people from various other European police agencies. You’ll be the point person for the US government and our combined intelligence agencies while you help the Spanish government recover a piece of ancient Christian artwork. Please say yes soon: I want to go home and catch the end of the family barbeque. Spare ribs don’t wait forever.”
She turned and looked at the glittering Mediterranean, where tanned hard-bodied bathers romped, splashed, and laughed. She looked the other way, toward a busy promenade lined by small shops. On high white poles against a clear sky there flapped an array of flags from three dozen nations. The fresh salty air caressed her nostrils.
Europe really didn’t seem so awful.
A breeze swept across the beach. Something in the back of her mind reminded her of the grittiness of Washington in September, and on top of that, the tedium of some of the desk-bound investigatory work that would be on her desk. At least here she could call her own shots.
“I suppose I could handle Europe for a few more weeks, Mike,” she said.
“Excellent! We’ll book you into the Ritz in Madrid as a little perk,” he said, naming one of the best-and most expensive-hotels in the Spanish capital. “You’ll be comfortable there.”
“I suspect I will be,” she said.
“Do everyone a favor and take a soft route to get there,” he added. “Something that doesn’t leave a trail.”
In other words, she thought, don’t fly.
“Oh, and you’re going to need a new laptop. Do you want to shop for one and charge it to Treasury or should we deliver it to your hotel?”
“I’ll buy one new in Madrid,” she said. That way she could be sure it was never out of her sight from the time she acquired it. She could install her own software and security codes.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “This little artifact that went missing from the museum-it’s got some legend to it. There’ll be a curator in Madrid who will give you the full story.”
“What sort of legend?” Alex asked.
“People claim it’s got supernatural powers. Spiritual stuff. Nothing you need to take seriously, but it might be an angle on why someone swiped it.”
“I’ll call you from Madrid, Mike. Thanks.”
“Oh, and finally,” he said. “You’ll love this part. This missing piece? It’s called the Pieta of Malta. Do you like that, the Malta part? Shades of Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor? You know the old movie, right?”
“I grew up in California and went to UCLA, Mike. How can I not? Peter Lorre and fat old Sidney Greenstreet. No tuxedo for Bogie, no Sam at the piano, and no fake fez for Greenstreet, but what the heck?” she added. “And I’ve read as much Dashiell Hammett as anyone under thirty.”
“And no falcon, either,” Gamburian said. “But still kind of cool, huh?”
“Maybe a little. Depends on who ends up shooting at me this time.”
“Enjoy yourself, Alex,” he said. “Travel safe. And thanks.”
FIVE
SCHWARZENGEL GLACIER AND ZURICH, SWITZERLAND, SEPTEMBER 5
A late summer thaw had come to the mountains seven kilometers south of Saint Gallen. Drip by drip, trickle by trickle, the Schwarzengel Glacier had re-created itself, advancing and retreating, some of it so slowly that no one might have noticed other than the geologists who monitored the area. In this one remote spot, it was noticed only by those who took note of the changing snowscape and stared hard into the ice near Koizimfrau Ridge.
There, a heat wave had floated a glove up to the surface, one of those gloves with wool on the inside and leather on the outside, but with the fingers cut away. And then a dead Chinese national was found not far behind the glove.
Yuan was unmistakable. He was still big and strong, still wearing his parka, still bound in his tight head gear. Underneath his parka, among other layers of clothing, was a Euro Disney sweatshirt bought from a gift shop in Paris.
Donald Duck in French. The perfect absurd touch.
Yuan’s dark hair was still thick too. His right eye carried a star fracture to the pupil, damage that he probably sustained in his rough trip from the basement of the monastery to this isolated location. His blue leather Hermes wallet was zipped in the pocket of his navy parka.
The wallet contained a Swiss phone card, his health card, his social-insurance card, three credit cards issued in Hong Kong, and his international driver’s license, for which he’d had his picture taken two days before he left China.
His passport was there too, valid and issued in Beijing. It indicated that he was fifty-five years old and further revealed that he traveled on official Chinese government business.
Yuan wasn’t alone. The heat wave had been extreme.
Also found during the melt was a twenty-year-old man who had said goodbye to his wife and newborn baby in 1995, gone snowboarding in late spring,
and turned up now along with Yuan in the big thaw, his red hair still matted down on his forehead and a wedding ring still on his hand. And there was the Australian hiker, missing since 1977.
None of this by itself was unusual. The previous year, there were the two climbers who had remained roped together for more than thirty years, a man and a woman, their black leather boots still tied tight to their feet, their wooden skis still waxed and strapped to their backs. It had become part of the Alpine summer routine in this area, watching faces and corpses emerge from the big melt.
As always, the Swiss Gendarmerie Nationale was ready for the reappearance of the people who had been taken in by these mountains. They kept lists of those who were missing and waited for them to come forth.
That was the first unusual thing that the local police noticed about Yuan when his body had been found on the morning of September 5. Yuan’s name was not on any of the lists. The second thing they noticed was that there was no record of him being in Switzerland or anywhere in the European Union, diplomatic passport or not. Then a third thing: under his parka was a fully loaded semiautomatic, a Glock G18.
What the Glock had to do with snowboarding or mountaineering or hiking was anyone’s guess, but Lieutenant Rolf Hunsicker, who drew the investigation that would follow into Yuan’s death, spent little time on that question. After all, the dead Chinaman had obviously been killed somewhere else not that long ago and then dumped in a remote area.
That conjured up three questions which would vex Lieutenant Hunsicker until they were resolved.
Dumped: How? Why? And by whom?
The cantonal police sent Yuan’s remains by helicopter to a medical examiner’s office in Zurich. An autopsy was performed that same evening.
Cause of death, suffocation. From smoke. And that hadn’t happened out in the snow. There were also some strange bruises, and the funny configuration of the body when it had been found, as if it had been taken by helicopter to that place and then dumped from above. Well, stranger things have happened. But if they had a chopper, that also suggested that Yuan must have had some wealthy powerful enemies. Then again, almost everyone in Switzerland had wealthy, powerful enemies as well as wealthy, powerful friends.
Sometimes they even overlapped.
SIX
BARCELONA, SPAIN, SEPTEMBER 6, MORNING
A lex stood on a platform at Estacio de Sants in Barcelona, waiting for the train that would take her to Madrid. The station, built in the latter part of the twentieth century, was surprisingly modern, with none of the soaring vaults of the older Estacio de Francia, the next depot down the line. And the subterranean waiting platforms were new, clean, and functional, having been constructed for the high-speed line that went into operation in 2008. The “AVE,” La Alta Velocidad Espanola, the train that would take her to Madrid, was a marvel of modern rail technology. It glided smoothly into the station exactly on time at 10:16 a.m., looking like a beige spaceship.
She was playing along with Michael’s paranoia. No air travel, which could be easily traced. Instead, she had paid cash for her one-way ticket to Madrid and would travel across southwestern Europe with complete anonymity.
She wore a tan skirt and a blue blouse. She scanned the platform as the train pulled in. Any followers? From long habit, she always had one eye to her back. Nearby there was a group of couples, eight people in all, that appeared to be tourists. She cocked her ear. They were speaking French. Not far from them there was a trio of American college students, a boy and two girls. Backpackers. One had an Ohio State sweatshirt and another girl had a Chicago Cubs cap with a ponytail pulled through the back.
She stepped back from the crowd and let others board first. Then she moved quickly along the platform to the next car to see if anyone would follow. She was one of the last to board.
Good. No followers. Her back was clean.
The car was crowded. She walked toward the back of the train, intentionally passed her assigned seat, then turned back. Again, no followers. She took her reserved single seat by a window. With a slight lurch, the train pulled out of the station.
Train and airline trips often lent themselves to reflection for Alex. She would carry a book but tend to ignore it after an hour. Today, however, she would dial up on her iPod music appropriate to her mood and spend the voyage in thought.
She gazed out the window and, beyond the tracks, at the farms and fields of Catalonia, followed by Aragon, then Castille. She watched an unveiling of the whitewashed walls of elegant Spanish villas wreathed in bright bougainvillea. They basked in a sunshine that was so intense that Alex put her sunglasses on. Then she watched a scattered array of medieval castles, Islamic palaces, and Gothic cathedrals pass by, interspersed with smaller towns and cities that conjured up more old than new.
Sometimes the landscape was flat and barren. She conjured up images from the literature of Spain. Don Quixote, tilting at windmills on the plains of La Mancha, even though those plains were to the south of Madrid.
She sighed to herself.
To understand modern Spain, she knew, meant to understand the past. Having studied history well and spent time in Europe at several points in her life, she was no stranger to modern Spanish history. And Spain, like so many others, was a country and a people torn by civil war.
Beginning in 1923, the government was held in place by the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Following de Rivera’s overthrow, the Second Republic was declared in 1931, a coalition of the left and center. over the next five years, tensions rose in all parts of Spain.
On September 17, 1936, a nationalist-traditionalist rebellion began, igniting a civil war. General Francisco Franco assumed command of the insurgent nationalists. Franco’s supporters portrayed the conflict as a battle between Christian civilization on the one hand and communism and anarchy on the other. But on the other side, Republican sympathizers proclaimed the Civil War was a struggle between fascism and tyranny on Franco’s side and democracy and liberty on theirs. Many non-Spanish young, committed reformers, and communist revolutionaries joined the International Brigades to fight against Franco. Meanwhile, the troops of the International Brigades represented the largest foreign contingent of troops fighting for the Republicans. Thousands were from the United States.
Both Fascist Italy, under Benito Mussolini, and Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, sent troops, aircraft, tanks, and other weapons to support Franco and his army of nacionalistas. The Italian government provided the Corps of Volunteer Troops, Il Corpo Truppe Volontarie, and Germany sent the Condor Legion, El Legion Condor.
The Soviet Union backed the Republicans and sent Soviet “volunteers” who often piloted aircraft or operated tanks.
In October of 1936, Franco’s troops launched their first major assault on Madrid. The Republican government fled to Valencia. When Franco’s forces failed to take the capital in ground fighting, however, Franco bombarded the city relentlessly from the air, then withdrew.
Franco made another attempt to capture Madrid in January and February of 1937 but failed again. The city of Malaga was taken on February 8. On March 7 the German Condor Legion arrived in Spain; on April 26 the Legion massacred hundreds of Spaniards, including numerous women and children, at Guernica in the Basque countryside. The bombing was committed forever to notoriety in a stunning mural by Picasso that he began painting just fifteen days after the event.
On March 9, Franco’s army overran the city.
Less than three weeks later, with the help of pro-Franco forces inside the city, Madrid fell to the Nationalists. When the last of the Republican forces surrendered, Franco proclaimed victory in a radio speech aired on April 1.
Like most wars, this one was ugly. Tens of thousands of people had been executed, most killed by their countrymen. Atrocities were common. These included the aerial bombing of cities carried out on Franco’s behalf. In the early days of the war, more than fifty thousand people who were caught on the “wrong” side of the lines were murdered. Victims were
taken from their refugee camps or jails by armed people and shot outside of town. The corpses were abandoned or interred in graves dug by the victims themselves. Local police knew better than to intervene. Probably the most famous victim was the poet Federico Garcia Lorca.
Mass graves are still being unearthed today.
The Republican authorities arranged the evacuation of children. These Spanish War children were shipped to Britain, Belgium, the Soviet Union, other European countries, and Mexico. Those in western European countries returned to their families after the war, but many of those in the Soviet Union remained in Russia after the Iron Curtain descended.
Atrocities by the Republicans were known as Spain’s “red terror,” and among them were hundreds of attacks on Catholics. They were unspeakable in their cruelty. Nearly seven thousand clerics were killed. Thirteen bishops and more than four thousand diocesan priests were murdered. Nearly three hundred nuns were murdered. There were accounts of Catholics being forced to swallow rosary beads or being thrown down mine shafts, as well as priests being forced to dig their own graves before being buried alive.
Other actions on the Republican side were committed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. The crimes committed by the NKVD were even-handed-they butchered everyone. They carried out executions not only against Nationalists, but also against all those who did not share their Stalinist ideology, even if they were fighting on the Republican side.
After the end of the war, thousands of Republicans were imprisoned and at least thirty thousand were executed. Many others were put to forced labor, building railways, drying out swamps, digging canals, or constructing monuments to Franco. Hundreds of thousands of other Republicans fled abroad, especially to France and Mexico.
In all, there were about half a million deaths during the Spanish Civil War. Ten percent of all soldiers who fought were killed, including almost one thousand Americans, most of whom were buried in Spanish soil.
