by Noel Hynd
She went back to her secure email account and went to Mail. In the address box, she typed in a message in English to be sent to every person who had been at the embassy meeting five days previously.
Maybe, maybe, maybe…
Maybe by keeping her ears open and not getting too soused on the champagne, she had heard something of note.
In the course of my investigations concerning The Pieta of Malta, the name of “Lee Yuan” surfaced last evening. Has that name been in any way involved in any investigation in any of your records? I have reason to believe that “Yuan” (possibly a pseudonym) may also have been on the trail of our so-called black bird. Would you please run this name across your files and get back to me with a response as soon as possible? My information indicates that Yuan was a Chinese national and was very possibly traveling in Europe on a Chinese passport, perhaps diplomatic.
Please note also, that, as the name is transliterated from the Chinese, there may be other variations to the spelling. I have obtained this name from a source I consider highly reliable, so I would appreciate your feedback as quickly as possible.
Alex LaDuca
Ritz, Madrid
She hit Send and leaned back from her laptop.
She sat quietly for several minutes and waited to see if there was any immediate response from anyone. There was none. She closed down the laptop. She felt her attention flag. She needed a break. She threw her swimsuit into a tote bag and hit the local gym again.
Weights and a swim.
Ninety minutes later, refreshed, she was back on the balcony, hammering at the keyboard of the laptop, and the wireless connection was trying to scan through more of the documents from the National Police. She continued to come up empty, however. And she knew there was nothing she could do now. She passed the afternoon in Madrid, walking, visiting some small stores, but preoccupied. She checked in on email several times during the day and while her associates gradually, one by one, acknowledged her inquiry, none had anything new to direct back to her.
Yuan’s name rang no immediate bells anywhere. She felt disappointment.
There was no reply at all from Floyd Connelly, whom she increasingly considered worse than useless, or from Essen at Interpol. Rizzo in Rome said he was shaking as many trees as possible and would see what he might have by the following morning. The French National Police had nothing on Yuan and neither did the two Spanish agencies.
Fair enough. Lee Yuan may have had no bearing on recent events after all. Or maybe, she wondered when her darkest notions took over, the whole story was a bit of concocted fiction. Maybe she was being played for a sucker by Peter and his sharp little gang of Sino-warriors.
She had the uncomfortable feeling of being a fool but didn’t know whose. In a final email dispatch of the evening, she sent to her museum contacts her tentative itinerary to Switzerland, CC-ing Mike in Washington. It was a debatable step, but she decided long ago that it would be better to have your peers recover your body than to just disappear forever.
When evening came, Alex grabbed a light dinner toward eight o’clock in a tapas bar. She had the inclination to phone Peter but knew that there was always the chance that one of their cell phones or even both were no longer secure. Since it was part of the overall plan to not reveal their association to any enemy, calls needed to be kept at a minimum
She arranged with the hotel for an evening check-out, finished the final details of packing, and went to the train station by 10:00 p.m. She boarded the train and found her private compartment. She was tired from the previous late night, so she eased into her bed with a couple of books. A final check of email came up empty.
The train, while fully boarded, stayed in the station for two hours before pulling out and hitting the open tracks. At this time she tried to settle in for sleep, carefully placing her loaded gun at her bedside.
Alex had not taken an overnight train for many years and had forgotten how tactile the cozy charm of the train was. The feel of the steel wheels on the rails had a comforting rhythm to it. It lulled her to sleep almost immediately.
FORTY-SEVEN
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 12, AFTERNOON
T hat same afternoon, Jean-Claude was down in his tunnel again. And he could barely conceal his delight at what he saw. The blast had blown a perfectly sized hole in the debris. It had cleared a route to the other side of the Calle Juan Bravo.
The pathway was dirty. It was musty and dusty and ankle deep in water. But he managed to crawl through it. Then, scanning ahead, pointing his flashlight, he could see that the pathway continued for maybe another thirty meters before encountering another wall. He examined his new location and realized that he was still working in a closely parallel path to those taken by Metro workers, electrical workers, or telephone technicians. There were several old power grids and telephone junctions along this route.
Well, the chamber had been cleared. His people were ready to work again.
Jean-Claude retraced his steps, went back, and reassembled his small underground army.
Within another two hours he had his team of subversives reassembled and went back to work. This time they were punching through some old bricks to enter a corridor that would run parallel to the Metro tracks.
Jean-Claude felt wonderful. Everything was falling into place perfectly. Now for the next step. He needed that set of detonators for the big blast. He had already placed his order. He would go back to see the man in his neighborhood named Farooq who could acquire such things.
Farooq’s name was promising. It meant “one who distinguishes truth from falsehood.” Maybe it was why everyone trusted him.
Allah be praised.
FORTY-EIGHT
MADRID TO GENEVA, SEPTEMBER 12-13, EN ROUTE/OVERNIGHT
I n the middle of the night, as the train wheels rumbled beneath Alex, the sharp sound of someone trying the doorknob to her compartment jolted her awake. She sat upright, her weapon pointed toward the door.
She kept still and said nothing, feeling her heart pounding. The doorknob continued to rattle from a strong, insistent hand on the other side.
Then she heard sounds from the other side of the door. A man’s voice. Very angry. The man spoke French. The door thumped. It sounded like he had put his shoulder to it.
Alex scurried to her feet and peered through the peephole. The hallway was dimly lit, but she could see a man and a woman, lurching.
The attempt at entry stopped, followed by a brief but noisy hallway discussion in heavily accented Midi French.
It was an obscene accusatory argument. They were drunk and obviously at the wrong door.
From what she could catch of the dialogue, it sounded like the drunken husband was finally wandering back to his own compartment after falling asleep elsewhere on the train. His wife had waited up for him.
Or something.
Alex smirked slightly. But for good measure, she kept her gun trained at the door in case this was some sort of cover for a sudden break-in. And she moved away from the door in case anyone suddenly fired a bullet through it.
When it was quiet again, she went to the door, pistol aloft in her right hand, and opened it slowly. The corridor was empty.
She returned to bed and slept.
The next morning she arrived in Figueras, the final stop in Spain. The day was warm and sunny, a pleasant late summer day in Europe. She was dressed casually, light jeans and a T-shirt, dark glasses, her gun in her purse this time, right next to her US passport.
She connected in the Figueras station with the train that would take her to Montpellier in France. There was no longer a stop for customs. After a ninety-minute trip, she then changed trains again in Montpellier for the Train de Grande Vitesse, which would speed her to Geneva.
She sat in a coach car next to a Frenchman who was a banker out of Dijon. He initiated the conversation and presented her with a business card. They spoke French. He was intrigued when she said that she was American and intrigued a second time when she said th
at she worked for the United States Department of Treasury.
Instinct again. She had a funny sense about him, maybe that he had been waiting for her. But the conversation went nowhere.
He nodded and went back to his reading. A few minutes later, his cell phone rang. The conversation was brief. Then he closed the phone and turned to her.
“I’m going to be changing seats,” he said.
She nodded and rose, stepping to the aisle.
“Would you like the window?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Take it,” he said. “You might prefer it. And my associate likes the aisle.”
He stepped past her with infinite courtesy. He turned and disappeared toward the rear of the train. Alex slid back in and sat down. She slid to the window, waited, and made sure her weapon was accessible under her jacket. She kept her hand near it. With her other hand, she flipped open a mirror from a makeup case. She positioned it and herself so that she could see anyone approaching from the train cars ahead of her, while watching the rear via the mirror.
She knew something was up. A minute passed and she spotted a heavy-set balding man approaching her row from behind. He was in his mid-forties and built like a brick outhouse. She had seen him once before in her life, at the meeting at the embassy.
Maurice Essen of Interpol, the Swiss-German who was a representative of the International Criminal Police Organization. He stopped at her row and glanced to her, indicating the open seat.
“Is this seat free?” he asked in very good English.
“I believe it’s yours, Maurice,” she said.
He smiled graciously. He sat down.
“If you’ve gone to this effort to follow me so you could speak in person,” she said in low tones barely audible above the sound of the train, “you must have something pretty good.”
“That or I believe you do,” he said. “I flew to Montpellier this morning so I could take this train so we could talk in person,” he said.
“About what?” Alex asked.
“An open case before Interpol and the Swiss federal police,” he said. “Lee Yuan.”
“I might have known.”
He continued in English. “The Swiss police retrieved Yuan’s body from a glacier a few weeks ago,” Essen began. “The government of China took an immediate interest in it. The Chinese had apparently sent one of their top young agents to retrieve the body, a charming fortyish man who traveled under the passport of John Sun. Sending someone to retrieve a corpse is not normal procedure for the Chinese. They normally ask for corpses of their nationals to be disposed of efficiently at the local level. A nice, cozy crematorium usually. So the request to ice the body and hold it was highly unusual.”
“So this Yuan fellow had to have been important,” Alex said.
“And there was nothing normal about this John Sun, either, the fellow who came and got the body out of the country as fast as possible. Sun had a diplomatic passport to cut through some red tape. Not everyone travels on one of those, not even Chinese body-snatchers.”
Alex listened in silence, assimilating as many details as quickly as she could, trying to picture the scene that had unfurled in Zurich.
“Now, the behavior of the Chinese was so unusual,” Essen continued, “that it drew the attention of both the Swiss Gendarmerie Nationale as well as the local cantonal police in Zurich. So they shadowed this John Sun. They had two-man teams on him twenty-four seven while he was in the Zurich area. They even went to the trouble to shoot some surveillance photos on the street.”
Essen reached to an inside jacket pocket. He pulled out a trio of surveillance pictures and showed them to Alex.
The pictures told her what she had already surmised. John Sun was Peter Chang. Or maybe Peter Chang was John Sun. Or maybe it was an equation that she hadn’t quite mastered yet. But the surveillance photos confirmed to her that she and Maurice Essen were discussing the same man. She was certain.
“Ever seen him?” Essen asked.
“I’m not sure,” she lied.
For several seconds she stared blankly and coldly at the image of the man she had danced with until 2:00 a.m. two nights earlier, whose arms had held her, and who had given her a friendly platonic kiss on each cheek in the lobby of the Ritz when he had escorted her back to the hotel.
“I really can’t say,” she said.
“Of course not,” Essen said. “Well, to use an expression I once learned in America, he’s a slippery SOB, this John Sun, so I hope you’re not helping him if you want our help. In Switzerland he apparently ‘made’ his watchers, an experienced counterterror team, and slipped them. He went in and out of a department store on the Hilden-strasse in Zurich. Or at least he went in because no one saw him come out. It was there that he vanished.”
“Why are you interested in him?” she asked. “From what you’ve said, he didn’t break any laws. Not yet by your accounts, anyway.”
“Our initial focus had been more upon Yuan than his custodian,” Essen said. “What exactly had Yuan been up to in Switzerland that would land him in a glacier with lungs filled with smoke? So the Swiss tried to determine who Yuan had been and what his mission had entailed. An informer told them that Yuan had been in Europe to effect a transfer of cash for some bill of goods. The Swiss police hadn’t known whether it was drugs, weapons, or maybe jewelry. The informer hadn’t known. There was plenty of speculation to go around, and it went in several unsubstantiated directions.”
Conspicuously absent so far, Alex noted, was any mention of the high-ticket Pieta of Malta. But her own theories were starting to emerge. And on the subject of theories, the Swiss police had some fairly sinister ones about John Sun.
“Two atypical murders in Geneva took place within twenty-four hours of Sun’s disappearance from Zurich,” Essen said. “One victim was an old crook named Laurent Tissot, a Swiss. The other was a man known as Stanislaw Jurjeznicz, a Pole. Sun somehow had moved about the country like a phantom. Just as his surveillance team had not known anyone who could disappear so quickly, they had never seen a diplomat who could have slipped in and out so fast. So when they ran a check on his passport, they discovered it was one of those mysterious ‘Made in China’ specials. It dead-ended into the Beijing computers. The passport was real but the owner wasn’t. Not quite, anyway. And the two dead men in Geneva-the Swiss national and the Polish national, both with ties to the underworld-had links to a shady deal gone sour. The Swiss then went through all their street surveillance cameras in the significant parts of Geneva, including bank ATMs, and connected ‘Sun’ with the time and place. That, in turn, connected Sun to Yuan and possibly to two murders.”
“With respect,” Alex said, “what you’re presenting is a highly circumstantial case.”
“That’s right,” Essen said politely. “So, I’ll ask you again, maybe as a hypothetical, do you think you might have seen or encountered the individual we know as John Sun?”
“I see a lot of people every day,” she said. “Nothing stands out.”
“This man would stand out. Of course,” Essen said with a slight sigh, a tiny decent into anger as he answered, “keep something in mind. We have established that the Switzer and the Pole knew each other, did business with each other, based on the accounts of respected informants. So any information you can give us in return, particularly on the whereabouts of ‘Sun’ would be of infinite interest, particularly if he can be located on Swiss soil where he can be brought in for questioning. We consider Sun highly dangerous. This is evident, in consideration of the deaths of the Pole and the Switzer.”
“I understand,” she said. “If there’s a time at which I can help you with this, I’ll be pleased to do so.”
“Of course,” Essen said. “Good day, Ms. Alex. We’ll appreciate your cooperation in the future.”
“Of course,” she said.
Essen rose, gave her a curt old-world bow, and returned in the direction he had come. The seat next to her
remained empty.
She stared for several minutes out the window as the landscape of southeastern France flew by. There were moments in life-messages, acquisitions of knowledge-that were made up of too much stuff to be digested whole.
This was one. Or maybe this was several of them, all jammed together. Eventually, she steepled her fingers before her and thought deeply. Just in terms of Peter, which way should she proceed? What if Peter had murdered two men in Switzerland to cover his own crimes or something even more devious?
Alert him that Interpol was on his trail?
Alert Interpol that Peter would be joining her in Geneva?
Run the whole thing past Mark McKinnon, hope he was sober enough to make a correct decision, and proceed on his instructions?
Every potential step had something right with it and something wrong with it.
To alert Interpol was to betray Peter, who had saved her life.
To ignore Interpol was to betray the working relationship she sought to develop for this and future cases. Did professional loyalties trump personal gratitude? Or was it the other way around?
Alex pondered.
Do nothing? Always an option for the fainthearted or the unduly cautious. But doing nothing was sometimes the wisest route. She brooded.
Reality check. Back to Square One: her assignment was The Pieta of Malta, its recovery, and any issues attendant to its theft. Who could help her more? Peter? Or Interpol?
A question like that should have been a slam dunk. But instead, she had no answer. She had the funny sense of not knowing Peter Chang at all, or maybe knowing him all too well. She wasn’t sure which.
T he train arrived exactly on time in Geneva in mid-afternoon. As planned, she checked into the Grand Hotel de Roubaix in Geneva as late afternoon was fading into evening. She had dinner at the hotel, went out for a walk, returned, bolted her door, and did a final check for email.
