by Noel Hynd
“Very funny,” Rizzo said.
“You’re lucky it wasn’t worse,” she said.
“You don’t know half of what was going on,” Rizzo said.
“I’m not sure I want to,” the doctor said good-naturedly.
Rizzo winced as the doctor examined the head wound with latexed fingers. “Am I going to be able to recite Greek poetry from memory after a shot to the head like that?” he said, his tone becoming mildly flirtatious.
“Could you recite it before?” she asked, sniffing out the old joke.
“No.”
“Then you won’t be able to now,” she said, withdrawing her hands. “But the injury is clean and the X-rays didn’t reveal a fracture. Your AIDS test from the needle came back negative too. You’re lucky. Again.”
“X-rays of my head revealed nothing,” Rizzo said, glancing to Alex. “How do you like that?” Colonel Pendraza snorted slightly.
“Do you still have the headache?” the doctor asked.
“No.”
“Be honest.”
“Okay, I still have it,” he said.
“You probably will for a few days,” Dr. Morin said. She looked back to Alex and the colonel. “Senor Rizzo has a mild concussion also. There’s going to be some discomfort to that.”
Rizzo looked back to the doctor. “Tell them what they gave me in the needle,” he said. “These are my work associates.”
“An injectable form of flunitrazepam,” the doctor said. “Powerful sedative. In America it’s often used as a veterinary medicine for horses.”
“A Mickey Finn with a needle,” Rizzo said. “It’s also one of those ‘date rape’ drugs.” He cursed his assailants and again swore speedy vengeance upon them. The colonel gave a shrug that conveyed the notion that if Rizzo unofficially took out a couple of street felons, it would be a civic improvement.
Rizzo paused, then looked at Alex. “What happened on the street?” he asked. “Did you get that bloody pieta?”
“No.”
“ No?”
A glance to Colonel Pendraza from Alex. Pendraza lowered his gaze.
“It was an attempted ambush,” Alex said. “Fortunately there was an extra gun in play and it covered my back. So I’m here to tell about it.”
“Extra gun?” Rizzo asked, squinting. “What extra gun? Who?”
“We don’t even know. When you’re discharged, we’ll give you access to what we know.”
“I’m ready to go now,” Rizzo said. “What do you think, doc? Can I be on my way?”
“I can’t keep you here,” she said, placing a fresh bandage on the wound and then stepping back from the patient. “But I’d like to. At least for a day or two for observation.”
“Two days? Forget it.” Rizzo said.
“It’s your choice if you want to check yourself out. I can’t stop you, but I’d advise against it. If a blood vessel broke suddenly in your brain, you’d be dead before an ambulance could get you here.”
“And if one breaks while I’m here, I’ll be dead before the nurse can get in from the coffee machine,” he said. “I can sign myself out?”
“If you wish to,” she said. “And again, I emphatically advise against it.”
“Thank you. Show me where to sign,” Rizzo said.
He got to his feet but was unsteady. Alex reached forward and extended a hand.
“You really want to check yourself out?” Dr. Morin asked.
“Bloody right, I do,” Rizzo snapped. “The coffee here this morning was unbearable. I think they were trying to poison me.”
Half an hour later, Colonel Pendraza, Alex, Rizzo, and their armed escorts were back on the street in front of the hospital. They climbed into the colonel’s car, Rizzo sitting up front riding shotgun, Colonel Pendraza again in the rear with Alex.
Rizzo continued his diatribe. It was difficult to tell for whom he had the greater anger, the men in the bar who had assaulted him or the hospital staff that had treated him.
Nonetheless, another twenty minutes of weaving through morning traffic in Madrid and they pulled up at the side entrance to a nondescript brick building on the outskirts of the city, about two blocks from the Plaza de Toros de las Ventas, where the great bullfights were held.
The building was set between a dental office and a Chinese restaurant, on a busy narrow street that was cluttered with traffic. With no external marking other than a small sign, this was the office of the medical examiner for the Policia Nacional.
The car doors opened. Pendraza jumped out and walked at a quick pace, a phalanx of bodyguards around him, Alex, and the unsteady Rizzo.
A few minutes later, the three of them stood over two steel slabs where a pair of male bodies in red canvas bags were set forth for their examination.
Alex winced. Pendraza and Rizzo stood stony faced.
The wounds had been stitched shut and the dried blood had been cleansed away. But the gunshots had smashed into the heads, necks, and upper chests, ripping away flesh and pounding the bones of the recipients. Each corpse was missing part of the skull. Each man had been shot through the heart and neck. Alex had seen many corpses in her life. Too many, in fact, and the events of Kiev came rushing back to her as she looked at these. And yet these, in their own way, were particularly horrifying.
Never mind the fact that they might have killed her. The gunman who had covered her back had dispatched these two men with an unholy precision.
One half of one man’s head had been hammered away by bullets and the remaining eye socket was hollow. The other man’s face had been completely smashed in by gunfire so horribly that Alex wondered whether it had been done intentionally to make identification difficult, or pathologically out of some unknown vengeance.
“These were the two men in police uniform?” Pendraza said. “To the extent that you can recognize them.”
Rizzo looked at the corpse that had half a head remaining. His eyes slid back to Alex. He gave her a nod.
“I agree,” she said. “That’s one. Not much question really if you picked up the bodies at the scene of the shooting. Any identification yet?” she asked.
“No,” Colonel Pendraza said. “They weren’t police; you know that. Exactly who they were and why you were targeted, we don’t know. I can only assume it has something to do with the pieta, but you’ve been in this line of work. It could have been left over business from something else.”
“Possibly,” she said.
“We’ll do DNA and fingerprints to the extent possible,” the colonel said. “Dental isn’t possible because the oral cavities have been destroyed. We have some bullet fragments. Those might tell us something. Anything else here?” he asked. “Either of you? Any thoughts at all?”
“Just the machinelike precision of the shooter,” Alex said. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. And I’m not sure I will again.”
“Unless it saves your life again,” Rizzo added. “Good Lord.”
“Unless it saves my life,” she said, “yes. Point well taken.”
“And then there’s the picture that begins to emerge,” Alex said. “Two men posing as police officers, another two in the bar, along with a woman. Whoever we’re dealing with begins to look like part of a fairly extensive organization. And then there’s the actual museum thieves who probably were none of these people.”
“I like the way you think,” Pendraza said. “I agree with you.”
Colonel Pendraza motioned to a lab technician, a young woman in blue scrubs. She rezipped the bags, then summoned more help from the next office. The team at the morgue would return the bodies back to the deep freeze.
THIRTY-FOUR
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 10, EARLY AFTERNOON
A lex moved quietly through the lobby of the Ritz and took the elevator up. The hallway on the fifth floor was quiet. A maid was working with a vacuum cleaner in a room two away from hers. The maid gave Alex a polite nod as Alex passed.
Alex came to her own door, paused out of cautio
n, listened, heard nothing from within, and swiped her room card in the slot. She pushed the door forward. The door was still moving when Alex saw two legs lazily folded, belonging to a man in a suit sitting on her sofa.
“LaDuca!” roared out a booming male voice. “Finally! About time you got here!”
American, with slightly mid-Atlantic Coast inflections. It was a voice that she recognized instantly. She pushed the door the rest of the way open, reaching by instinct for her new weapon at the same time. The legs unfolded and shifted toward her. She stepped forward without closing the door, her pistol aloft and pointed.
The man looked at her. The man’s hands were in plain sight, holding no weapon.
“Oh, honestly, Alex. Don’t be overly dramatic.” Mark McKinnon, the CIA’s chief honcho assigned to western Europe, whom she had most recently worked with in the ragged aftermath of Kiev.
McKinnon gave her a smile. There was a bottle of Bushmill’s Irish whiskey on the table in front of him, with a bucket of ice and a bottle of water. There was a glass in his hand. He seemed more relaxed than he should have been, but it was Bushmill’s Eighteen Year Old. The good stuff relaxes a man real fast.
But someone else was in the room too, and that someone was behind the door.
She stepped away but was not quick enough. From the other side of the door came a lithe, agile man of about six feet. He had his hand on her pistol like a velvet hammer, quickly turning her hand upward against the thumb, removing the pistol quickly, and taking it from her. He did all this with such a deft touch that he managed to not hurt her at all, much like a parent removing a dangerous toy from a child’s possession.
Then with a leg, before she could say anything, he pushed the door shut and they stood eye to eye.
“Hello again,” he said. No smile. No emotion.
“Come on in, LaDuca! Have a drink with us!” boomed McKinnon, finally standing. “And relax, would you? It’s about time you formally met Peter Chang. Peter’s come all the way from Peking. I know you’ve seen him before, and I think you’re going to like working with him. Know what? My guess is that you already do!”
Peter Chang smiled very slightly. Then it was gone again.
Up close, he had movie star good looks. An Asian Adonis in a fine suit with a classic Western tie and a light blue shirt. His eyes were dark and sharp, his stature strong but nimble. His hair was perfect. Werewolf of London, she found herself thinking.
Peter gave his head a slight nod. He checked her pistol for ammunition and safety catch, and, with a little showboating Jackie Chan-style move, flipped it around in his hand so that the barrel was pointing away from her.
“Nice piece,” he said. “New acquisition? You didn’t have it last night.”
“If I had,” she said, “I might have used it.”
“That would not have been good,” he said. “If you had tried, one of us wouldn’t be here right now.”
Then he returned the weapon to her, still loaded.
“My apologies if I scared you last night,” he said.
His English was impeccable, just like his marksmanship had been. He could have worked on Saville Row as a tailor or at Claridge’s as a hotel manager.
Her nerves settled slightly. She took back her Browning, then took McKinnon up on his invitation and sat down. It was, after all, her room, even if the taxpayers were footing the bill.
“So, LaDuca,” said McKinnon, as Alex found a place in a comfortable chair. “How are you enjoying your visit to Spain…so far?”
“I’ve been here in Spain before,” she said. “More than once. There was a tax case back in 2004. The FBI sent me because they needed someone who spoke Spanish and French.”
“So you know your way around?” he asked.
“As I said, business a few times. And that’s aside from the trip I made when I was a college student.”
Chang sat quietly, his eyes set upon her like a pair of compass needles pointing north.
“Yeah, I guess those were the days,” McKinnon said. “College years. I remember them myself.”
“Prewar Berlin and the rest, huh?” she said. “Marlene Dietrich in the clubs, right?”
“Ouch! That was nasty.”
“So is finding you here. The lobby wouldn’t work for you to wait?”
Chang followed the repartee back and forth.
“No, it wouldn’t,” McKinnon said. “Not with Peter at my side, not with the security cameras all over the bloody place, and not with a couple of Madrid cops-who weren’t Madrid cops-shot dead last night. What a bloody mess. And anyway, what’s the point of our agency having master keys to every hotel in Madrid if we don’t use them from time to time?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“Oh, I’m sure you do,” he said. “And by the way, your file did say you were here on the 2004 tax case and that you did visit Malaga with a boyfriend named Damien in 1997. Damien later went into the military, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t. I haven’t seen him for more than a decade. So why don’t you tell me something else I don’t know, like what you’re doing here and what’s going on, at least from your jaded end of things. Who were the people in the cop uniforms and who jabbed a needle into my partner last night?”
“Bullfight fans. Tourists. The opposition. Liberal Democrats. How should I know? That’s partly what we’re gathered here so happily to discover.”
There was also some bottled water on the coffee table in front of her. She made sure the cap was still factory-sealed, then opened it and poured some into a glass.
“Can I interest you in a whiskey?” he asked. “It’s already on your room-service bill, so I might as well offer you a drink.”
“Maybe later,” she said. “Maybe I’ll need a drink after I hear what you have to say.”
McKinnon laughed. “Spain is a funny place,” he mused. “The present is all caught up with the past, and the past is something most people don’t want to talk about. Yet it keeps repeating itself, doesn’t it? When I was a young case officer in Madrid back in the 1980s, Reagan visited. Are you old enough to remember him?”
She was, of course. “No, Mark,” she said, “but I studied him in history class. Same as Washington, Lincoln, and Elvis Presley.”
But McKinnon was on verbal cruise control. All accelerator and no brakes.
“Reagan visited,” he continued, “and after a bourbon or two, got away from his script. The president made an uncalled for remark about how it was too bad that the Americans who fought in the International Brigades had fought for the ‘ wrong side.’ They fought against Franco, in other words, instead of being on the side of Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, and the long and wonderful tradition of fascism and anti-Semitism in this hot, unwashed country. Well, you can imagine how that went over. The Spanish Left organized a ceremony of desagravio. Do you know what that is, LaDuca?”
“It means ‘atonement’ in English,” she said. “Except I also know from my time here before that there’s a strange Spanish ceremony called a desagravio that can be made on behalf of someone else who may not feel apologetic at all.”
“Exactly,” McKinnon said, punctuating the air with a finger. “You got it. In this case, the unrepentant one was President Reagan. The so-called atonement ceremony took place in the Plaza Colon. You know, that square where they got a statue of Columbus?”
“Hence the name of the square,” she said. But if McKinnon got the dig, he wasn’t letting it show.
“Remember, this was 1986,” he said. “There were still a number of broken-down old brigadistas alive, people who had fought against Franco in the 1930s. I was sent to keep an eye on the event. The Plaza Colon was hung with the old flag of the Spanish Republicans, a genuinely ugly, meaningless old rag with vertical purple, white, and red stripes. It looked like a cheap beach towel from a gas station giveaway. Anyway, the old anthem was played, one of those surprisingly bouncy ‘workers’ paradise jingles’ from the early days of Bolshevism, before the whole
cause of Communism was thoroughly discredited. The main speaker was a man named Enrique Lister. Fifty years earlier as a young Communist, Lister had been one of the more effective self-taught generals of the Republican Army that fought against Franco. If I remember correctly, and there’s a chance I don’t because my brain has begun its voyage into the sunset, the ceremony took place in an auditorium under the plaza. I was in this highly uncomfortable seat, admiring the beauty of all the Spanish wives. Anyway, it wasn’t an important event, really. Nothing happened except a bunch of decrepit old lefties blew off some steam about Reagan and America. But I had a real sense of history, you know what I mean? A feeling that I was watching a final curtain call from a long-passed age. And yet, know what? All those old polarized elements from Spanish society? There’re still around today.”
“Quite correct. I’ve seen a bit of that recently,” Alex said, thinking of Colonel Pendraza.
McKinnon poured himself another whiskey. “You’ll see a lot more before you’re safely out of here,” he said. “Count on that!”
The bottle was down about four fingers. Chang didn’t have a glass going. McKinnon sipped some water also. Alex was about to interrupt, but McKinnon appeared as if he were about to add something. She rarely interrupted men when they were drinking because they frequently said too much, later to their displeasure.
“I had the same feeling around the same era here in Spain when I attended a lecture at a Catholic school by a man named Serrano Suner,” McKinnon continued. “Ever heard of Suner?”
Alex shook her head. “No,” she said. “Don’t know the name.”
“That’s because you’re too young. What are you now, Alex? Mid thirties?”
“Same as last time you saw me which was two months ago,” she said. “Plus you know I’m twenty-nine if you just read my c.v.”
“Peter?” he asked, looking to the other guest, almost surprising him. “ Suner? Name set off any alarms for you?”
For the first time, Chang spoke. “Suner was Franco’s brother-in-law, wasn’t he?” Chang answered.
“Exactly,” McKinnon answered. “Bright fellow, you are. And you’re the same age as Alex, I’d guess.”
