Midnight in Madrid rt-2

by Noel Hynd

  “Should I clear it with the Guardia Civil?” she asked.

  “If you want to waste your time, certainly,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Two police technicians were removing the spikes from the corpse, working by hand. Alex fought against a feeling of sickness. She stepped back from the work that was being done. Her eyes wandered, then did a double take.

  Peter Chang stood on the opposite side of the street. He was in a suit with a computer bag on his shoulder.

  “Excuse me,” she said to Colonel Pendraza.

  Pendraza nodded. Alex moved through the crowd and crossed the street. She found a different Peter Chang than she had ever seen before. Peter’s fine suit was torn in two places. He had a small welt across his cheek and another across his forehead. No blood, just the evidence of combat.

  “Peter, what are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Same as you, I suppose,” he said. “Let’s move,” he said. “I want to get away from here.”

  “I’m not leaving just yet,” she said.

  “Well, I’d like to get off this block before the police seal it up.”

  She looked at the rips in his clothing and the gash to his temple. “What’s going on?” she asked. “You were in a fight of some sort?”

  “Yeah, I was.”

  “Heck of a coincidence, you should be here,” she said suspiciously, suddenly wary of him. “Every time I see you after dark, someone winds up dead.”

  “Yeah. Midnight in Madrid. Not healthy. Someone always gets killed.”

  “Why are you here?” she pressed. “And what happened to you?”

  “I was supposed to meet him,” he said, motioning to Connelly. “I got a call.”

  “From Connelly? Why would he call you? How did he even know you.”

  “He didn’t. I got a call from my own people.”

  “Who? Your government? Guojia Anquan Bu. Your Ministry of State Security?”

  “That’s them,” Peter said, speaking rapidly. “And Mark McKinnon called them. Do I have to remind you, he works with them when it suits common purposes.”

  “Peter…?”

  “Come on along,” he said. “Talk to me.” He took her arm forcefully, and they moved several paces away.

  She sharply pulled her arm away. “Don’t force me along. I don’t like that!”

  “I need to be out of here,” he said.

  “Why? What happened here?” she demanded.

  “Connelly came back here with a woman about an hour ago. I asked the hotel staff. He expected to get lucky, and my guess is she let her friends in. That, or the friends were waiting. Lurking maybe. Either in the hall or in his room.”

  Alex shuddered. She looked carefully at his clothing.

  “I arrived at his suite and the door was unlatched,” Peter said. “I pushed it open and ran smack into them. They must have just shoved him out the window.”

  She was having trouble believing him. This was John Sun speaking, suddenly.

  “They charged right into me. I tried to grab them and bring them down, but there were three of them. Speaking Arabic, by the way, in case that drops you a hint of any sort. There was a scuffle. They got the first hits in, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor.”

  Alex knew that Peter could take out three people easily; he could take out ten people. And he was armed. This wasn’t adding up.

  “I didn’t know what happened,” he said. “I went in, saw the open window, and looked down. Then I got out of there fast,” he said. “I didn’t have time to look around. I just grabbed his laptop and his notebooks,” he said. “That’s all I could get.”

  “You did what?”

  He motioned to the cache he had in the computer bag. “You want the Spanish police looking at this stuff?” he asked. “Might as well have the contents published in El Mundo.”

  “You could have stayed for the police,” she said. He started to move down the block and she followed, with both reluctance and persistence.

  “Oh, sure! After what you told me about the Swiss? And bloody Interpol? I have to get out of this country,” he said. “My picture is all over the hotel security cameras, and they’ll be going through them tonight. Count on that.”

  Peter was still moving, looking around, highly nervous, highly agitated.

  “Uh oh,” he said. “Look at this. The cops are setting a ring around this place. Look. There are cops on each end of the block.”

  “That’s normal,” she said.

  “Not good for me, Alex,” he said. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  She looked at Peter, and something clicked in having to do with his trepidation of the Spanish police. It seemed so obvious that she realized that she had been suppressing it since the first time she saw him in this place tonight.

  Peter had killed Connelly. His face was battered and his suit was torn because the chunky failing old Yalie had put up the fight of his life. Peter had beaten her to Connelly because Connelly had something to tell her that reflected unfavorably on Peter. Peter, in short, was a double agent of the most treacherous sort. He couldn’t be trusted any more than she could throw him. Peter was the most dangerous liar she had ever met in her life with a spirited competition in progress for second place.

  An entire kaleidoscope of deceit opened before her as she gazed at him, new vistas in every direction, forming and reforming in endless patterns of duplicity.

  He must have sensed what she felt because he raised his eyes, looked at her, and became colder than ever.

  “Look,” he said. “Talk to Mark McKinnon if you can ever get him on the phone. It’s obvious all those explosives are in Madrid. Connelly heard from an informer that there was going to be an attack on the embassy. Right now it’s been shut down, the embassy. There’s a US Marine bomb squad going through with dogs and radio detectors.”

  “Why do you know that and I don’t?”

  “Because I talked to McKinnon and you haven’t,” Peter said. “He was going to give us the details. Mark asked me to get over here, obviously Connelly wanted to see you. It’s pretty clear that he was set up. Connelly bought half a bill of goods from someone, but his good information was laced with the bad stuff. But he stumbled across enough solid stuff so that he took a pavement dive from a hundred feet up.”

  Peter continued to glance around nervously. As he spoke to Alex, his eyes frequently went over her shoulder, back to the death scene.

  Again, Peter’s hands were moving quickly. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a leather billfold. From it, he pulled a small laminated card, the size, shape, and texture of an American driver’s license.

  “Keep this for me,” he said. “Keep this until I ask for it back. Please! It’s critical.”

  She looked at it. It was his Swiss consular ID. Well, it wasn’t Peter Chang’s; it was John Sun’s.

  She stared at it and looked back up. “This links you to a couple of murders, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “I honestly didn’t want to believe that about you,” she said. “That you were capable of that.”

  “Aren’t we all, under the right circumstances?”

  “It’s not a situation I ever hope to be in again,” she said.

  “Nor I,” he said. “But as long as you or I carry a weapon and are sworn to protect ourselves, innocent people, and our countries’ interests, the possibility will be there.”

  “Maybe you just seem a little too enthusiastic about it,” she said. “Killing people.”

  “And maybe someday you’ll hesitate too long and wish you hadn’t,” he answered.

  There was loud conversation from the group of police across the street. She looked back down to the John Sun ID that she held in her hand.

  “Why are you giving this to me?”

  “Because I trust you to do the right thing,” he said. “And I don’t want to have to walk past the police with it. Not here, not tonight. If they stop me and fin
d me with two IDs, I’m going to be answering questions for ten years. All right?”

  “All right,” she said, taking it.

  “Who’s the old fascist over there?” he asked. “The one everyone is sucking up to?”

  She glanced. “That’s Colonel Pendraza. Policia Nacional.”

  “Yes. Of course. He knows who I am,” Peter said softly. “I need to get out of here,” he said again.

  “Is there really going to be an attack on the US Embassy?” she asked.

  “I’m told the information is solid.”

  “Who’s the information from?”

  “Chinese and American sources,” he said. “And I never told you this, but there’s some British thrown in. Some MI6.”

  “How did that get into the mix?” she asked.

  “When the explosives were sold out of Cyprus, the British were within a day of seizing them. They made arrests anyway. Two of the men arrested told the same story: that money had come from Spain, money raised by a museum theft, and now the value was returning to Spain in bombs and bodies.”

  “If I can ask a dumb question, why are the Brits being so generous with you?”

  He spread his hands. “Hong Kong, lady, remember? I’m one of the ‘good’ yellow people. Isn’t that how it works? I’m ‘Western,’ so I can be trusted.”

  “Do the Spanish police know there may be an attack on our embassy?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why aren’t we telling them?”

  “Same reason I’m working this case,” he said. “We’re trying to take care of things unofficially. Is that so difficult?”

  “We could use their help,” Alex said. “All I’ve got to do is cross the street and talk to the colonel.”

  “Don’t bother,” he said softly. “In fact, that would be very unwise.”

  “Why?”

  “Alex, do you have a gun?”

  “You know I do. We just discussed-”

  “Are you allowed to use it?”

  “In self-defense. And in defense of anyone I deem fit. Even you.”

  “I’m honored. But that’s where we’re different,” he said. “And it’s another reason I’m still here.”

  “I just lost you.”

  “If Mark needs someone taken out, hit, killed, he can’t ask you or even one of his CIA lackeys to do it. Not without special permission. And for that he has to go back to Washington, and the request has to go to an intelligence committee, and after a week or a month or a year he might get a go-ahead. And he might not.”

  Two uniformed Madrid police approached them. They seemed to be looking cross-eyed at Peter, but they kept going.

  “But if Mark asks me to do it, or my team,” Peter said, “and it coincides with our interests, well, it gets done, doesn’t it? No questions asked, or more to the point, no answers needed to be given.”

  “Oh, Lord,” she said with a shudder.

  “Someone has to get the dirty work done,” he said.

  “Sometimes I’d prefer to be back at a desk in Washington, dealing with financial squabbles.”

  “But instead you’re out here,” Peter said. “On the front lines. Where it’s more exciting.”

  “And where I feel more compromised,” she said.

  He laughed slightly. “Let me ask you,” he said, “if you could have stopped the September 11 attacks on America by personally shooting every one of the hijackers, would you have done it? If you could have murdered Hitler and Stalin and avoided World War II, would that have been worth two bullets to end the lives of two thoroughly evil and godless men?”

  “I would have looked for some other way to-”

  “That wasn’t the question,” he said. “And I think I know your answer.”

  She snapped back defensively, the flash of police beacons still illuminating the streets with harsh staccato lights. “What are you?” she asked. “A philosopher with an Uzi?”

  “Everything is a situation.”

  “Have a nice night,” she said coolly.

  Alex turned away in growing distaste.

  “And you also,” he answered.

  She glanced to the opposite side of the street, trying to sort out her thoughts. She noticed that Colonel Pendraza had disappeared. She turned back to talk to Peter again, maybe to voice some uselessly argumentative tract about violence and murder breeding more violence and murder until it bred even more violence and murder. Or maybe she’d just ask him straight up if there had really been three young Arabs or if he had defenestrated blustery old Connelly himself, and if so, on whose orders.

  But by then, with her mind teeming with questions and paranoia, Peter was gone too.

  She looked in every direction.

  No Peter Chang.

  Like the Swiss police a few weeks earlier, she had never before encountered a man who could disappear into thin air so quickly and efficiently.

  She left the block and retreated to a quiet doorway. She pulled out her cell phone and called Mark McKinnon. She reached him and reported what she had seen, what she knew. An attack on the US Embassy in Madrid was perhaps imminent.

  Quietly, McKinnon took the information from her. He promised to alert embassy security immediately. But beyond that, he offered nothing in return and rang off.

  From talking to McKinnon, she had the same sense as talking to a wall.

  She pondered not returning to the Ritz that night. She felt vulnerable. So she found a late bar, stayed there for a few drinks, and pondered checking into a different hotel. Then she decided not to.

  Instead, she returned to the Ritz and entered her room with her pistol drawn. She searched it thoroughly, found no intruder or evidence of an intrusion, and threw all the bolts on the door.

  Then, riding the worst wave of paranoia in her life, she eventually dummied up pillows from the closet to resemble her body and put them under the blankets in the bedroom.

  She turned around the living room sofa and slept there, facing the door and the locked balcony. She kept the pistol at arm’s length.

  Sleep, what there would be of it, did not come easily.

  SIXTY-THREE

  MADRID, SEPTEMBER 18

  T he next morning, Alex obtained her necessary permits and keys from the Policia Nacional as well as the City Police. She also placed a second call to Mark McKinnon and demanded an urgent meeting with him late that afternoon. He resisted at first, then relented. He asked that she find her way to a bench in a busy downtown area on the Calle de Bailen, across the street from the Palacio Real, the royal palace where the king no longer lived but where state functions were held. The meeting time was set for the window between 4:00 p.m. and 4:15.

  Alex traveled there by buses, three of them, a roundabout route. She got off the first bus quickly, reversed her path down a busy street, then caught the second and the third. Each time, she jumped off abruptly just before the vehicle was to pull out of a stop, each time watching to see if anyone followed. The only other American at the meeting involving the pieta’s theft had gone out a tenth-floor window, probably not voluntarily. One could never be too careful.

  She found the designated bench in the shadow of the Grand Palacio. Across the street was the Cathedral of the Virgin of Almudena, patroness of Madrid. Alex’s eyes swept the block for danger. She saw none, but her insides were as jittery as a half-dozen frightened cats. She didn’t see McKinnon, either.

  The security code with McKinnon: if she felt she had been followed, she would be reading a newspaper. If she was sure she was clean, no newspaper open. She felt secure. She sat down on the bench at a bus stop with a copy of El Mundo folded neatly across her lap. She picked up on the activities of passers-by. She noted footwear. She was wary of anyone with concealed hands. She carried her pistol in a holster on her hip.

  She asked herself: How fast could she have her gun out and ready?

  One second? Two?

  She drew a breath, then let it go. It was 4:00 p.m. Then six minutes past four. Where
was McKinnon?

  A homeless man approached her. He engaged her in a pointless conversation and eventually asked for money. She gave him two euros, and he went about his way, replaced immediately by a twenty-something couple holding hands, smooching, and not saying a thing as they seemed to wait for a bus.

  Then the man took out a cell phone, made a call, and the two of them turned to walk away. There needed to be nothing to it, but linked to the homeless man, the events were consecutive, overlapping by seconds, as if the three of them were one of McKinnon’s pavement mini-teams, the first man pegging the prey, the couple keeping watch while Mark approached from somewhere. And, thinking back, the homeless man hadn’t had a homeless stench.

  Or was she imagining things, she asked herself. She glanced at her watch.

  Ten after. The heck with the pavement teams, maybe Mark was blowing her off with a no-show. She held her seat on the bench across from the palace. She watched the guards. The palace was magnificent, built to impress, just like Versailles, just like Buckingham Palace, just like Donald Trump’s home in Florida.

  She tried to settle herself.

  She turned her attention to the cathedral. The history gene within her reminded her of the Roman Catholic Church’s centuries of influence in Spain, from the pilgrims in the first ten centuries after Christ, through the Inquisition, through the Franco regime, and more subtly, into the present day. Her eyes drifted thoughtfully over the architecture, a gray neoclassic facade that echoed the architecture of the Palacio Real across the street. The pairing of the two buildings, the similarity in their feel and appearance, had been intended to emphasize the Church’s relationship with the Crown.

  Four fifteen. She glanced at her cell phone. No calls. No alert involving Jean-Claude. Typical in this line of work. One never knew what was going on. Never.

  She grew restless. Her back started to cramp. She stood up and strolled the block. A raging paranoia was rolling in on her, a sense that something big had been missed.

  She came back to the bench. She felt eyes on her. She kept looking over her shoulder as she walked. The smooching young couple reappeared, hand in hand. The lovebirds stayed a constant half-block away from her.