by Noel Hynd
The explosives that Ahmet had undoubtedly spoken of were a powdery plastic called HMX. They were combined with a similar substance named RDX and were manufactured in Serbia. They were some of the most powerful conventional explosives used by the world’s militaries.
Serbia, unlike Spain, was the one place in the world where HMX and RDX were manufactured. The path of the particular batch of explosives that would turn up in western Europe was a grim echo of the dark events of the last quarter century.
In the 1980s, the Iran-Iraq war was only one of a series of crises during an era of upheaval in the Middle East. There had been the revolution in Iran that deposed the Shah, the occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran by militant students, and the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan. There had been the invasion of the Great Mosque in Mecca by antiroyalist Islamists, and the bitter clan fighting among different factions of Syrians, Israelis, and Palestinians in Lebanon. All of these events and more had maintained the Middle East as the tinderbox of the modern world, ready to ignite larger conflagrations if any side overplayed its hand.
The Iran-Iraq War followed months of rising tension between the Iranian Islamic republic and secular nationalist Iraq. In mid-September 1980, Iraq under its new, young military dictator, Saddam Hussein, attacked Iran in the mistaken belief that internal Iranian political disarray would guarantee a quick victory. The gambit proved wrong.
The international community responded with UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire and for all member states to refrain from actions contributing in any way to the conflict’s continuation. The Soviet Union, opposing the war, cut off arms exports to Iran and to Iraq, its ally under a 1972 treaty.
The US had already ended previously massive military sales to Iran when the Shah had fallen in 1979. By 1980 the US had broken off diplomatic relations with Iran because of the Tehran embassy hostage crisis. Iraq ended ties with the US during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
So the US was officially neutral in the Iran-Iraq War, diplomatically recognized neither side, and maintained that it armed neither. Iran, however, depended on American weapons. Anywhere in the world, if there is a potential buyer of arms, there is always a potential seller. So Iran quickly acquired American arms through merchants from Israel, Europe, Asia, and South America.
Iraq had started the war with a large Soviet-supplied arsenal but needed additional weaponry as the conflict defied a quick resolution and wore on. Initially, Iraq advanced far into Iranian territory, but was driven back within months. By mid 1982, Iraq was on the defensive against Iranian human-wave attacks. The United States, having decided that an Iranian victory would not serve its regional interests, began quietly arming Saddam Hussein’s military in Iraq.
Negotiations already underway to upgrade US-Iraq relations were accelerated, high-level officials exchanged visits, and in February 1982, the State Department removed Iraq from its list of states supporting international terrorism. It had been included several years earlier because of ties with several Palestinian nationalist groups.
Iraq also received massive external financial support from the Gulf states and assistance through loan programs from the US. The White House and State Department pressured the Export-Import Bank to provide Iraq with financing, to enhance its credit standing, and to enable it to obtain loans from other international financial institutions. The US Agriculture Department provided taxpayer-guaranteed loans for purchases of American commodities, to the satisfaction of US grain exporters. As the war ground onward, chewing up close to a million casualties on both sides, North American agribusiness profited handsomely.
The United States formally restored relations with Iraq in November 1984, the time of Donald Rumsfeld’s more than convivial meeting with Saddam Hussein. But the US had begun, several years earlier, to provide Iraq with clandestine intelligence and military support, in secret and contrary to America’s official neutrality, in accordance with policy directives from the White House.
Among the materials received by Saddam Hussein’s military was a seven-ton shipment of HDX and RDX, brokered by the Central Intelligence Agency, from a factory in Serbia. The explosives were delivered pursuant to the National Security Study Memorandum of March
1982.
The explosives were stored at a weapons complex at Al Qaqaa, about thirty miles south of Baghdad. Over the course of the next six years, much of the supply was used by Saddam Hussein’s soldiers against Iraq’s enemies-Iran and internal dissident tribes-and gradually depleted. But not all of it was depleted. Another two tons remained over the course of the next fifteen years. And there it sat, much like the rest of Saddam Hussein’s massive stockpile of conventional weapons scattered across Iraq, when US forces swept across Iraq in March and April 2003. During the invasion, the Iraqi army abandoned the site. And no one in the American military received an order to secure it.
Unobstructed, thieves entered the Al Qaqaa warehouses and removed the entire two tons. Half of it was trucked to a pro-al-Qaeda terrorist training camp near the city of Mir Ali in Pakistan. The other half, sitting in the back of a single diesel truck, arrived in Damascus, Syria, two weeks after it had been looted from the old storage facility.
In Damascus, a mix of German and Italian converts to Islam, and Arab and Turkish immigrants coalesced in an extremist cell at a radical mosque. They divided the shipment again. Half of it went to an Egyptian imam who directed an Arabic-language school in Cairo. The other half, in bulk now no larger in size than an old fashioned steamer trunk, was trucked to Beirut where, under the cover of night, it was packed into the aft hull of a speedboat.
It went next to Cyprus, where, acting on tips from the CIA, Greek and Turkish police raided several cells of radical Islamists looking for the explosives. The raids came at a time when authorities in southern Europe were increasingly worried about the threat from al-Qaeda in the Magreb, an Algerian-dominated network that had pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. A radical Muslim named Ayman al-Zawahiri, considered deputy leader of the broader al-Qaeda movement, had recently issued a videotaped statement repeating his exhortations to the North African group to strike European countries.
But the Greek and German police didn’t find the explosives.
They didn’t find them because the shipment never came on shore in Cyprus. Rather, according to CIA informants, it went into an industrial packing crate that was marked as a factory refrigeration unit and packed into a different ship. And from there, conveyed by homegrown European radicals now, it went to Brindisi in the south of Italy.
There local gangsters hid it in a picturesque white-walled old monastery within an olive grove, without knowing-or wanting to know-what they were hiding.
By now, according to Italian police, control over the shipment was held by a local radical Muslim named Habib, who ran an Islamic school in Naples. Habib was constantly under surveillance but never made a slip. Rumor had it that he had stashed the explosives in a farmhouse somewhere outside of Naples. But police never were able to locate it.
Several weeks passed. Surveillance on Habib was dropped due to lack of results.
Police who had been attempting to track the shipment went on to other assignments. And there the trail ended for everyone involved with the case.
Until now, thought Alex.
Until now, she reasoned, when the late Ahmet and the even later Hassan, had tracked the next part of the explosives’ journey and linked it to a Jean-Claude al-Masri who had formed his own terror cell in Madrid.
But why now? she pondered. She leaned back in her seat and felt the bumpy hot air of a late Spanish summer buffet the aircraft. Suddenly she had it. She gazed out the window, her mind a warren of certainties, theses, and suspicions.
Because of the black bird, she realized. Because, as she had learned, art theft frequently finances crime or terror. Because of The Pieta of Malta, the explosives had now made their way to Madrid. Because of the theft of the pieta, because a dead Chinese collector had come
up out of the snow, all these events had followed.
The thieves had stolen it from the museum to raise money to buy explosives from anti-Western sources. But then the brokers had burned the purchaser and not delivered, either out of greed, stupidity, or the desire to capitalize even more.
That misstep had brought Peter into the case.
She closed down her computer, closed her eyes for the rest of the flight, and tried not to hear Federov’s two gunshots for the hundredth time.
Peter and Alex disembarked in Madrid by three in the afternoon. Alex checked back into the Ritz, a smaller accommodation this time, by 4:00. Peter stayed at El Mirablau.
Settled in by 5:00 in the afternoon, Alex went to email yet again and now heard from her Roman buddy, Rizzo. The DNA samples had come back from the skin that Rizzo had scratched in the nightclub from the face of his assailant.
The DNA had finally triggered a match.
The match named a Frenchman of Algerian heritage named Jean-Claude al-Masri. The latter had a small-time police record in three European countries and an address in Madrid.
The Policia Nacional had already been asked to pick him up.
SIXTY-ONE
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 17, LATE AFTERNOON
O n a cluttered back street next to the Rastro, in the rear of a small locked store, Jean-Claude stood in a closed room and obtained the final ingredients for mass homicide.
His detonators were in a small bag on the counter.
The old Arab named Farooq motioned to it when the younger man came in the door. The proprietor also held a pistol in his hand the entire time as Jean-Claude made the pickup, just in case. He hated the sight of such people and sometimes hated himself for having to deal with them.
But Jean-Claude caused no trouble.
He gathered the detonators and pushed them into a backpack. He gave the old man a smile, went out the door, and prepared to head home.
The Metro was giving him the creeps today, and he also had some hotel business to attend to. He had even pulled his Vespa out of storage for the occasion.
SIXTY-TWO
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 17, LATE EVENING
A lex paid her fare at the window of the taxi cab and stepped to the sidewalk on the Carrera de San Jeronimo. Across the street stood the Hotel de Cataluna. She tipped the driver generously and turned as he gave her an appreciative nod. It was only then that she noticed that there was some disorder, that something grievous had happened.
The hotel was a restored nineteenth-century building not far from the museum triangle. A thick, hot night gripped the city. Several meters from where Alex stepped onto the sidewalk, many of the patrons of the Cafe Giron, where intellectuals had gone to argue for generations, stood looking up into an alley. Several couples stood on the opposite side of the street, discussing what had happened. Their faces were contorted. They spoke in hushed tones. Two women jockeyed for a good view of what had happened, got one, then shielded their eyes and abruptly averted their gaze
Alex looked up, scanning the side of the building. She was staring at the back wall of the hotel where Floyd Connelly had said he was staying. There were human figures at several windows, people looking down, gawking at a spot where a knot of other people had gathered below in an alley. One woman on the third floor was holding her hands to her face in horror. A man poked his head out, looked down, and quickly looked away. Alex worked the side of the building with her gaze. There was a seventh floor window that was wide open with window drapes out and flapping gently. She recalled where Connelly said he was staying- habitation 734-and she knew that whatever he had to say to her wasn’t going to get said.
For good measure, hoping against hope, she tried Connelly’s cell number. His voice came on. Voice mail. She disconnected.
Alex crossed the street. She walked to an alley that led behind the hotel. In front of the alley was an ambulance and in front of the ambulance was a police car. Emergency vehicles, but no one seemed to be in much of a rush. The police weren’t setting much of a perimeter yet. They had that “just arrived” look.
She passed between two iron gates that led into an alley. The alley led to a place where garbage was stored and where service vehicles could enter the hotel’s service entrance. But the garbage and the vehicles didn’t matter right now.
A Vespa with a rider on it emerged from underneath of the hotel and with a whining whirring noise, accelerated as it climbed the driveway. The small knot of men who had gathered there, some in police uniforms, gave way to the bike and rider. Alex stepped back so the vehicle wouldn’t run over her toes.
The boundaries of the alley were marked by a high, old wrought-iron fence with spikes on the top. The spikes resembled old-fashioned spears. Part of the spiked railing had been torn from the rest of the fence. It was there that the knot of men were focused.
Alex pushed through the crowd. She could see partially what had brought everyone together. A man in a blue police uniform knelt over a bulky body that was sprawled in impossible directions. The body wore suit pants and a blue shirt with a necktie, but already the color combination had turned from the prosaic into the grotesque. Fragments of the victim’s skull, tufts of white hair caked with crimson fluid, were not far from the corpse. Other men stood awkwardly behind the policeman, peering through whatever inches of space were possible between bodies.
Alex worked her way to the edge of the small crowd and managed to slide her way to the front where she could get a good look at the corpse. A wave of nausea overtook her. She suppressed it. She had seen atrocities in her life-human beings torn apart by bullets in Venezuela, by a rocket attack in Ukraine-but this was the worst she had seen.
She looked at the fence, looked upward at the seventh floor window again, turned away, and looked back. It was all clear.
Connelly had come out of the window.
He had plunged from a hundred feet up and crashed into the fence full force when he’d come to earth. The spikes had torn into and through his upper body, ripped his neck apart, had taken off half his skull. Some of the spikes had impaled themselves in his upper chest. But the impact of the big man’s fall had taken out a section of the old iron fence and brought it to the concrete with him.
And so there he lay, dead as a crushed bug, his bodily fluids continuing to flow, not a breath of life left in him. He didn’t look like Orson Welles anymore, and he didn’t look like Gutman. He didn’t look like anything human.
For a moment, which turned into several moments, all Alex could do was stare. She stared and wondered what it was that he had wanted to tell her, what it was that he wanted to pass along. It must have been good because people don’t voluntarily go out windows when they’re waiting to share a secret with a lady. Not usually. It had to have been good unless it had been nothing.
A black vehicle pulled to the curb behind her, not far from the death scene. Alex recognized it. Bodyguards jumped out and opened the door for a man in the backseat. Colonel Pendraza of the National Police emerged. Her heart beat a little faster.
Pendraza’s security people stayed with him as he approached the death scene. The uniformed police present recognized him and gave way. Miguel, his lead bodyguard, seemed to be always on duty. He was standing point as the colonel moved toward the fallen body. Alex saw the flicker of recognition in Miguel’s eyes when he saw her.
Pendraza moved to the front and looked at the body. Alex gave him a few seconds, then walked toward him. One of the bodyguards intercepted her, raising a powerful arm to block her path.
“I need to see the colonel,” she said in Spanish. She spoke past the bodyguard who stopped her, and addressed Miguel.
Miguel turned to ask the colonel, who was a few feet away. The colonel glanced in Alex’s direction. He gave a nod. Alex moved past his bodyguards and into the small group that surrounded the corpse.
They too spoke Spanish. “Bad night,” she said.
Pendraza had seen his share of corpses in his career. “They’ve all been bad recent
ly, the nights,” he said. He paused. “American, right?” the colonel asked.
“Yes.”
“I recognize him,” the colonel said. “Or what’s left of him. The pieta again?”
“That would be my guess,” Alex said.
An electric drill went on with a screech. Emergency workers started to cut away the sections of the fence that had impaled the body. It sounded like dental work on steroids. Alex looked away. The workers were disengaging the spiked rails from the corpse, and to do that, they needed to cut away a small section of Connelly’s shoulder.
“It’s been a completely rotten day,” Colonel Pendraza said. “There was a woman murdered in the Metro a day or two ago. One of our track walkers. They only found the body this afternoon.”
“Where exactly?” Alex asked.
“It was up by the Calle Maldonado,” he said. “Nice neighborhood. What’s this city coming to?”
She thought about it. Then it hit her. “That’s not too far from the US Embassy,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“About a block away,” he said. “And there are a lot of embassies in the area. Not just yours. Don’t jump to conclusions.”
She tried to assimilate the information. “Where was the body found? In a Metro station?”
“No. In one of the underground tunnels.”
“What tunnels?”
“There’s a whole network of them,” he said. “Don’t worry. They’re old and they’re sealed. There’s no danger.”
“Can I have a look?”
His eyes narrowed. “At what?”
“The area where the body was found. The tunnels.”
“Why would you want to?”
“Because it’s near the US Embassy.”
“If you wish to,” he said. “Call my office in the morning. I’ll arrange a police permit and keys to some of the locked doors.”
