Midnight in Madrid rt-2

by Noel Hynd

  “My brother!” snapped Ahmet.

  “You show me a happy Islamic fanatic,” growled Rizzo, “and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”

  Ahmet made a sudden openhanded lunge toward Rizzo, who started to laugh.

  Alex made a move away from the table, but it was Federov who once again reacted and intercepted. Ahmet’s chair retreated and tumbled to the floor and Federov, rising, slammed the Arab down hard onto the floor, breaking the legs of the chair as he threw Ahmet on top of it. Ahmet stayed on the floor and began sobbing. Federov kicked him.

  “That’s pretty much all of it,” Federov said, turning back to his guests. “Does it help?”

  Alex flipped her notebook shut. “I think it does,” she said. “And I think it will take me back to Madrid first thing tomorrow.”

  “Then we’re finished here,” Federov said.

  He turned to his guard at the door. “Take care of things, Grisha,” he said flatly. Ahmet started sobbing louder.

  A few minutes later, the group of visitors was back downstairs, moving toward the door, Dmitri preceding them as they stepped out into the night. There were still stars. The moon had traveled a great distance across the sky.

  Dmitri had drawn his pistol again and stood guard at the end of the driveway. Peter, Alex, Rizzo, and Federov moved toward the car under a bright night sky.

  When the group was almost to the car, the stillness in the heavy air was broken by the sound of a man shouting within the house. The voice came from the upstairs window, loud enough and frantic enough for Alex to glance upward in that direction.

  It was a loud voice and very frightened, intensity rising, speaking in Arabic. Obviously, Ahmet.

  Then there was single loud shot within the house. The voice ceased. The group moving to the SUV froze. A second shot followed. Rizzo’s eyes found Alex’s. Alex felt sick. They looked at Federov who at first said nothing. But he kept moving. As he opened the car door, he finally felt obliged to say something.

  “It’s my business. I’ll run it the way I always have,” he growled.

  “I’m assuming we weren’t supposed to hear that,” Alex said. “The execution was probably meant to happen after we left.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Oh, I don’t suppose it does,” Rizzo said. “How could it?”

  “Ahmet and his brother were stealing from me, stealing from the entire world. They had no honor, no backbone. Why should you care about such men? They were not your friends, they were your enemies.”

  “And you’re still a complete bastard, aren’t you?” said Alex. “I’d almost forgotten.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve done all of you a favor,” he said. “The world is better off without such people. Or do you think otherwise?”

  “Murder is murder,” Alex said.

  Federov shook his head. “And war is war,” Federov said. “I did you a service, and you get angry with me. Your government should give me a medal.”

  Alex didn’t answer. She slid back into the van. This time she took a backseat window and retreated into a corner. Peter turned to her.

  “Mr. Federov is right, Alex,” Peter said.

  “What? You agree with what he just did?”

  “I agree with what he just did.”

  “You’d have done the same thing?”

  “In one way or another, yes,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’re all paid to do? The world has front hallways and back alleys. We work in the back alleys. All of us.”

  She looked away, then back. “Sometimes I prefer not to,” she said.

  “Then why are you here tonight?” Peter asked.

  “Leave me alone, all right?”

  “Don’t have an answer to that, do you?”

  She glared back at him.

  “All right,” Peter said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

  Alex was suddenly quite exhausted, quite horrified, and didn’t have much to add.

  “A Russian can never trust Sicilians,” Federov finally muttered to anyone who would listen and when they were finally moving. “Except the dead ones. The dead ones don’t bother you.”

  It was almost a benediction.

  “That depends on who finds the body,” Rizzo answered, more amused than he should have been.

  Federov laughed. “No one’s gonna find that one.”

  No one said anything else for most of the time en route back toward Genoa. Alex closed her eyes and slept part of the way. In the moonlight, the van wove its way eastward on the winding motorway back to the city.

  The world is better off without such people.

  Federov’s words echoed in her mind with the same volume and impact as a pair of gunshots, and, for that matter, so did Peter’s.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  GENOA, ITALY, SEPTEMBER 17, AFTER MIDNIGHT

  A lex crashed into bed long after midnight but did not sleep well. The two gunshots that had killed Ahmet Lazzari replayed themselves endlessly in her head. She wondered what Federov’s people were doing with the body.

  Chopping it up? Dumping it at sea? Burying it in concrete?

  She tossed and turned all night. Then, out of sheer nerves and anxiety, and plagued by these dark images, she awakened at eight in the morning, reminded herself that she was still in Genoa and went directly to her laptop.

  There were more than two dozen messages. Personal in one account and business messages in the secure account. She scanned the list of senders. Two stood out. The first was from Mr. Collins in New York. He was sending someone as promised, the week of September 18.

  Yeah, fine, she answered. She was so slammed that she could barely think about it now. Who knew? Maybe she’d have to duck the guy.

  Then there was the second message. It was from “Gutman.” Floyd Connelly.

  She opened it. She was further surprised to find a full and complete message and then-triple play!-surprised a third time to read the contents.

  She stared at the message.

  Subject:

  Pieta of Malta

  Date:

  Fri, 14 September 2009 7:47:01-0400

  From:

  “Connelly_F” ‹Floyd_Connelly@USACustoms. org› Add Mobile Alert

  To:

  “A_LaDuca” ‹A_Laduca@usdt. prv. org›

  Alex,

  I have a major break in this case. Major information. Can you meet me late tonight in Madrid? Maybe around midnight? My hotel? Bottom of Form Floyd

  She stared at it for another moment. Was this utter nonsense or had the political hack bumbled into something? A revisionist thought snuck up on her in her fatigue. Connelly was brilliant: school, church, spy, and government establishment, complete with the Yale sheepskin. The dopey granddad guise was his deep cover, the game was Hide-in-Plain-Sight. What he kept hidden were his brains.

  No matter, she reasoned. She would have to follow up. The truth would drift to the surface like a waterlogged corpse. She went back to her notes and contact information that she had acquired on their first meeting. She had his phone and hotel info.

  She shook the cobwebs out of her head, ordered coffee and a light breakfast from the hotel dining room, and reached for her telephone. She punched in a number. After three rings a sleepy voice-in more ways than one-came on the line at the other end.

  Floyd Connelly.

  “Hello, Floyd,” she said. “This is Alex LaDuca. I received your email.”

  A few short beats and Floyd answered. “Oh. Alex. Why, how are you this morning?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m also not in Madrid right now.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Geneva,” she lied, in case there were listeners.

  “Switzerland?” he asked.

  “Not Wisconsin. Am I disturbing you?” she asked. “Waking you up?”

  He laughed. “I had to get up anyway, might as well be now,” he said. “You have a nice phone voice.”

  “As I said, I received your email. You have something on The Pieta of Malta? �
�

  He snorted. “I’ve got the whole case, that’s what I’ve got,” he said happily.

  “How could that be?” she asked.

  “Ha. A compilation of sources! Some help from Washington, some help locally from the Spanish fellas. I’ve been around a bit. Went to school with the former president, did you know that?”

  “I suspected,” she said.

  He paused. “I developed an underworld source here or there in Madrid. From hanging around the right places. People say things. They talk if you know how to get them to talk.”

  “Is this phone secure, Floyd?” she asked.

  “Yours? I wouldn’t know. Can’t tell from this end.”

  “I meant yours,” she said.

  “Hardly matters, does it?” he asked. “You know, a lot of people think I’m getting slow in my old age, but it’s not the case at all. I’ve got this case on a platter.”

  “Uh huh,” she said. She didn’t know whether to be infuriated that the case might be resolved without her or relieved if it was. Yet she knew things like this happened all the time.

  “Look, here’s the story,” Floyd said. “The pieta is gone. Disappeared in Switzerland. Either got destroyed or sold. Anyway, the point is that the baby Michelangelo got traded for some explosives or something. Might have been a three-way deal. Then-”

  “Floyd, are you sure this line is clear?”

  Floyd said he was sure, and he couldn’t stop talking.

  “See, there’s a further rumor that a load of explosives came through Madrid, then moved on. Got sent up to France, and some of the local towel-heads are planning to blow up some railroad bridges or something in Provence in time for the fall tourist season. Anyway, just to make sure nothing’s going to blow up locally in Spain, we’ve put all the big time targets on alert. Some places are being checked by the bomb-sniffing dogs. I’ve got emails up the wazoo on all of this. That’s what I’m going to show you. I’ve downloaded them into my laptop. Once everything’s clear we all get to go home. What do you think?”

  Alex wasn’t sure what to think. She felt a frown forming on her brow along with the incredulity that went with it. “That’s fine if it’s true,” Alex said, “but if the investigation is over, I need to hear that from my boss.”

  “Who’s your boss?”

  “Mike Gamburian at Treasury in Washington.”

  “Don’t know him. Call him and ask.”

  “The protocol is that he should call me.”

  “Well, do it that way if you want,” he laughed. “You can probably squeeze a few days of vacation out of this if you do it that way. Me, I can’t wait to get home. How many bullfights can you go to in this city? You watch a bullfight and you know who’s gonna win, anyway.” Connelly ran from sentence to sentence like a reckless driver sailing through a string of stop signs. “I’ve got some more information on this too. Names, addresses. Laptop. Why don’t you come over tonight, and I’ll boot it up and run through it. That’s if you’re not busy.”

  “Is this a business request or a social one, Floyd?” she asked.

  “Little of both,” he said after a pause. “I’m at the Hotel de Cataluna. That’s over by-Wait a minute. You said you were out of town?”

  “Flights are only about ninety minutes,” she said. Travel time from Genoa and Geneva were identical. “I can be there by this evening. And I’ll meet you in the lobby, not your room,” she said. “We can talk there.”

  “Oh, all right, all right. Be a good girl if that’s how you want to be,” he said in a deafening bellow. “I’m an old guy, you know. There’s not much you have to fear from me.”

  “What time?” she asked.

  “Let’s do it late,” he said. “I’ve got a dinner with one of my sources. You know how Spain is. They don’t eat lunch till five p.m., then dinner at ten. I should be back to the hotel by eleven thirty or midnight.”

  “I’ll be in the lobby at eleven thirty,” she said. “Okay?”

  “That’s fine,” he said.

  She rang off, highly skeptical, shaking her head. “What a-,” she mused.

  And then for several minutes, she sat in the room alone.

  Was Floyd blowing smoke, or did he actually have something? If he had something, how? She was dubious about everything he was saying, yet she had now committed to go visit him that night.

  She went back to her laptop, shifting gears now, trying to assimilate the story that Ahmet had told the previous evening.

  She went back into the attachments that she had downloaded from Colonel Pendraza. She quickly pegged to points of reference, material she had read before. This, she realized, was why Ahmet’s account rang a distant bell.

  She reread,

  Item: Noted in passing, al-Qaeda leaders have frequently threatened to strike again in Europe in audio and video warnings. Antiterror experts within the Policia Nacional said recently that the pace of the warnings has picked up in recent weeks.

  Associated item: Intercepted al-Qaeda documents have indicated activities of small sleeper cells within Spain, intent on acting independently but with major force.

  She did a web search on the missing explosives. Within another few minutes, more pay dirt. From the Washington Post, she had another piece of the story:

  Iraqi Explosives Missing, UN Is Told

  US Disputes Timing of Loss of Munitions Sealed by Inspectors at Weapons Facility

  By Colum Lynch and Bradley Graham

  Washington Post Staff Writers

  Tuesday, October 26, 2004; Page A18 UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 25-The UN’s nuclear watchdog agency reported Monday that massive quantities of high explosives at an Iraqi weapons facility have disappeared, including some material under UN seal because of its potential use to detonate a nuclear bomb.

  UN and Iraqi officials indicated the explosives were lost while the country was under US occupation. But US officials suggested that the munitions may have disappeared before the US-led forces established full control over the country. They said a search of the facility by US troops shortly after the fall of Baghdad last year turned up no evidence of the explosives.

  She fired off an email to Mike Gamburian’s office in Washington asking if he could send her any files on the case. No immediate response, so she closed down her laptop.

  Half an hour later, she met Peter in the lobby of the hotel, as well as Rizzo and Federov. In an expansive mood, perhaps on a personal high after ordering a murder the previous night, Federov offered another of his private jets to take Peter and Alex back to Madrid. Gian Antonio Rizzo would return to Rome via commercial flight. Federov stayed in Genoa to shore up any damage done by the late Ahmet and his even-later brother.

  FIFTY-NINE

  MADRID, SEPTEMBER 17

  T he irony: The HDX and the RDX were powerful enough to bring down an urban block. And yet there was no danger of them going off accidentally. They lacked fuses and detonators. Nonetheless, Jean-Claude worked carefully to get them into their proper position.

  It had taken three trips through the tunnels, caverns, and crawl spaces under Madrid to get the whole cargo of ten one-kilo bricks of explosives to where he wanted them. But here, now, in the middle of the night, he finally had them in place.

  At one stretch under the city, the narrowest crawl space, Jean-Claude relied on Samy to move the explosives along. Samy’s shoulders were narrow. And he was flexible, like an eel. In some of the crawl spaces rocks had crumbled and bits of mortar had created little cave-ins. The passageways were increasingly dangerous. And there was always the chance of a big cave-in. Anyone caught in one would die. There was no mechanism for rescue, only martyrdom, which wasn’t a bad thing either.

  They had assembled six bricks of explosives in the sub-chamber under the embassy. But getting the explosives in had become increasingly difficult. The narrow walls and tunnels just felt like they wanted to collapse sometime soon. Well, Jean-Claude reasoned, soon enough everything would turn to dust. He himself was already making plans to le
ave Madrid soon after the big blast. As for his confederates, no one would know who they had been or where to find them. They would disappear easily back into the fabric of the city.

  In the end, the final four bricks of explosives had been placed on a small panel, and the panel had been tied to a rope. Jean-Claude teed up the parcel from one side and Samy pulled it through the crawlspace. Samy then waited for a few hours, listening to music on an MP3 player under the embassy.

  Jean-Claude had heard from the merchant in the Rastro, Madrid’s flea market, who had fuses and detonators. His devices were ready. Once they were secured, and once Samy arranged things right, the big surprise could be set off under the embassy. He would use a timer that would time the attack for midmorning. The block would be rubble within seconds, and every living thing-Americans, Spaniards who worked there, casual passers-by-would die in the conflagration, no concessions to humanity whatsoever.

  So he was thinking, 10:00 a.m. might be good. A twelve-hour timer would be perfect. The hour was near to visit Farooq.

  SIXTY

  GENOA TO MADRID, SEPTEMBER 17, MID-AFTERNOON

  N ot surprisingly, Federov’s other jet was a thing of beauty: a Learjet 55 with a crew of four. The plane seated eight in addition to the crew, but she and Peter were the only passengers.

  Alex settled into a seat by herself in the rear. The aircraft took off from the same private field outside Genoa where she had arrived. She opened her computer and found a response from Mike Gamburian.

  It was a CIA file. She entered her security codes, held her breath as she waited for them to apply properly, then breathed easier as the files opened.

  Then she confronted additional pieces of the backstory.