Midnight in Madrid rt-2

by Noel Hynd

  She coughed again.

  Then she saw that there was one more small chamber where there was a light similar to hers. She managed a glance at the GPS. She knew that she was under the embassy. She heard footsteps.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  MADRID, SEPTEMBER 18, LATE EVENING

  M ahoud had been looking forward all day to a shower after working in the hot kitchen of an Ethiopian restaurant on the Calle de Montevideo. He had been jittery all day but had calmed as night had fallen and as midnight came and went. Perhaps the whole thing was just one tremendous mistake, he thought to himself. He still harbored his deep hatred of the United States and Western culture, but he was half-relieved that the big blast hadn’t happened.

  Once the bomb went off, nothing would ever be the same again. He would be frightened of every shadow and would jump at every knock on the door. Every day would be like this one, except worse. Planting the thing had been one thing, almost a challenge to see if it could be done. The actual detonation of it was something else, something secretly he hoped would never happen. But he couldn’t tell anyone that. He would have seemed like a traitor.

  He thought of all of this as he walked the final block to his home in the Arab quarter, past the closed fruit and produce stands that would open again at dawn. It was now past 11:00 p.m. and he was looking forward to bathing.

  But the end of the bombing mission had him spooked. Everything bothered him today. Well, at least he felt safe in his own neighborhood. As safe as one could be.

  He cautiously approached his doorway. He saw a problem, but not an unusual one. There was a vagrant asleep on the sidewalk, a slight man in an old coat that was too hot for this weather. But there were vagabundos all over this neighborhood. There had been one lying in this doorstep for a couple of weeks and no one did anything. And these bums wore everything they had all the time.

  Mahoud cut a wide berth around the downtrodden figure. Under Mahoud’s own coat, he had a kitchen paring knife, just in case of trouble.

  He stepped around the man and reached his doorway, noting in passing that this was a different bum tonight and the regular man was gone. Well, sic transit gloria in the world of hobos, he thought. Give a bum, take a bum. Maybe, he reasoned further, someone from the neighborhood had done a public service and set the other hobo on fire. Maybe that’s what he would do to this one, he thought.

  Images of flaming bodies made him think back to the explosives he had helped plant. He really did have mixed feelings about that charge going off. He really wondered if-

  Then he heard his name.

  “Mahoud?”

  A voice in the darkness spoke softly. He jumped.

  In his attention on the hobo, Mahoud had not even noticed a man sitting on the steps to the next building. He was a sturdy man but obviously way out of place in this neighborhood.

  The man had a foreign face. Asian, of some sort. Japanese. Chinese. Who could tell the difference, anyway?

  “Mahoud?” the man said again.

  Mahoud’s hands went to his knife and held it under the jacket. But the man held up his hands to show that they were empty and that he meant no harm.

  “Who are you?” Mahoud asked in Spanish.

  I ’m a friend of Jean-Claude,” Peter Chang answered in Spanish. “I bring you news.”

  Mahoud answered cautiously. “I don’t know any Jean-Claude,” he said.

  Peter Chang laughed. “Of course, you do, my friend,” he said. “Don’t be so frightened. Your entire group, you all are under my command. Don’t you think Jean-Claude has a commander? Do you think he was able to do everything by himself?”

  A pause as Mahoud considered it.

  “What is the news?” he finally asked.

  “Come closer,” Chang said.

  “Tell me from there,” Mahoud said, taking one step toward the doorway.

  “I’d rather not,” said Chang.

  “What is the news?” Mahoud repeated with insistence.

  “The news is that everyone will die tonight,” Peter Chang said.

  Mahoud flinched, wondering just how that was meant. Then there was a further explanation of the news. The vagrant had risen to his feet behind Mahoud and had slid out of his coat. The vagrant had slid, in fact, into his own true identity, that of Charles Wong. And Wong, like Chang, was there to conduct business.

  Wong slapped one hand across Mahoud’s face, holding a filthy rag to his mouth and his nose. Mahoud fought back with his elbow and tried to kick at the instep and shin of the man behind him. But Wong had two hands. The other one, in a glove, held a butcher’s knife with a blade that was ten inches long. It was the type that in the primitive regions of China was still used to slaughter chickens or pigs.

  With one sweeping gesture, Wong swept the blade of the knife into and across the throat of the third embassy bomber. The pain shot through Mahoud like an electrical current. He would have screamed, but his mouth was firmly covered, and the hacking, slashing sweep of the blade across his throat was so deep that his vocal chords were severed in addition to his cortical artery.

  Mahoud’s body jumped at first like a great fish on a line, then went slack and buckled. He felt himself drop hard to the sidewalk. Distantly, as he lay in agony dying, he listened to the quiet footsteps of the two men walking away. And he wondered for a final time why the big explosion had never happened.

  Several minutes later, Peter Chang moved quickly to a fourth location, accompanied by Wong and Ming. With little effort to conceal their faces, they arrived at the building where Jean-Claude lived in a rambling, cluttered four-room apartment.

  Chang and Wong took the front stairs and Ming went to the rear where, at a synchronized moment, he hoisted himself up to a second floor window via a gutter pipe from the roof.

  Here was the moment Peter had been waiting for. He wanted to savor it. Jean-Claude had been the instigator of the events that had left Yuan dead, and Chang had special plans for Jean-Claude.

  They would ambush Jean-Claude in his home. But killing him swiftly would be too good. They would tie him and sit him down. Chang would show him a picture of Lee Yuan, who had died in a cold, smoky mountain castle in Switzerland.

  In Peter’s mind, Jean-Claude would shake his head and deny knowledge of any man named Yuan.

  Chang, as it played out in his mind, would become animated.

  “This man’s name was Hun Sung Yuan. We knew him as Lee Yuan,” he would explain evenly. “Hun Sung Yuan was my friend. He was my mentor. He trained me when I entered the service of my government.”

  Jean-Claude would listen in terror.

  “Yuan was a boy during the Great Leap Forward,” Peter would explain. “He was five years old, and his family was sent to camps in the countryside for reeducation. Yuan’s parents were practicing Christians during the Cultural Revolution. Practicing religion was considered social turmoil. So they were held in a Beijing detention center for nearly a year as the Red Guard considered what charges to bring. Then Yuan’s parents were sent to a camp in the freezing northeast of China for reeducation instead. Yuan was sent to an orphanage. As an adult, he didn’t practice religion, but he had an interest in it. Christian items that may have been touched by a saint. Yuan was a fine man, but he had his superstitions. Which was his right.”

  Jean-Claude would continue to stare. Maybe he would kick. Maybe he would protest. But he would be gagged with duct tape, so his protests would find no ears.

  “As years went by,” Chang would explain, “Mr. Yuan became prosperous. And he wished to possess certain items. One was The Pieta of Malta. Mr. Yuan felt that he purchased the item very fairly. But through you and your people, it was not delivered to him. Instead, when he came to retrieve it, your associates murdered him. Do you think that was a wise thing to do?”

  Jean-Claude, rethinking his position on recent events, would shake his head.

  “You’re right,” Chang said. “It was not a wise thing to do.”

  And then Chang would take out
a long knife from under his suit jacket, a very sharp one normally used for trimming meat. He would let Jean-Claude stare at it with wide eyes while Ming and Wong approvingly watched their new master.

  Then Chang would reach slowly-because he wished to draw it out-to Jean-Claude’s left ear. And with a quick powerful slashing motion he would thrust the knife into his victim’s neck and slash hard from left to right, cutting the man’s throat.

  Then he would step back quickly and watch Jean-Claude begin to die in agony, even though no one had been gracious enough to be with Yuan in his final minutes. And then Peter would wash the knife off and take it with him. It would take a man about fifteen minutes to bleed to death after such an incident. And Peter needed to wrap things up and get out of the country quickly.

  So there was no time to waste.

  Except, this was only how Peter had planned it from the start.

  In the final execution, it didn’t go that way.

  When Peter, Ming, and Wong broke into Jean-Claude’s home, their victim wasn’t there.

  That changed everything.

  SIXTY-NINE

  MADRID, SEPTEMBER 18, 11:59 P.M.

  J ean-Claude was elsewhere, putting the final touches on the charge of explosives.

  Working alone in the narrow, cramped chamber under the American Embassy, he braced his flashlight between an old brick and a stone. Working with the low beam from the flashlight, he spread before him the ten different detonators from the pack he had purchased.

  He was taking no chances. He would use all of them. He only needed one to trigger the ten kilos of explosives he had spread in separate packets around the chamber. If just one ignited, chances are much of the block would implode.

  On the first Number Ten Delay switch, Jean-Claude used a pair of pliers to crush the end of a thin copper tube containing acid. There was no need to crush the end of the tube completely flat. All he needed to do was crush it sufficiently to break the glass vial, thereby releasing the liquid within. Then he removed and discarded the safety pin holding back the striker. Finally, he inserted the other end of the pencil detonator into a brick of explosives. His charges were good for twenty-four hours, meaning they would blow the next night around midnight, give or take.

  He repeated the procedure four more times. He then drew back and fought for his breath. The air was disappearing in this cramped hole. And he was sweating profusely. It occurred to him that if there were some sort of freak accident with the acid leaking too quickly into the explosives, he would be blown into oblivion. So, twenty-four-hour timer or not, it was wise to move as quickly as possible.

  There! Everything was set!

  Then something clattered in the small adjoining chamber. Jean-Claude froze.

  “What the-?”

  It wasn’t that unusual for rocks or pieces of concrete to crumble and fall, or for a rat to disturb something. But this sounded different. It sounded like a tool, a flashlight or something, dropping.

  His eyes went to the portal that led to the next chamber. He saw a flicker of a light waving. Good God, he was not alone!

  What the-!

  Then he heard something human. A cough! The cough of a woman!

  He left the detonators where they were, set to blast away within twenty-four hours. Angrily, suspiciously, he drew his gun from his belt.

  Whoever was in the next chamber sounded as if she was getting to her feet after somehow burrowing in.

  Well, he’d killed that busybody woman who had worked for the Metro, and he would kill again.

  Jean-Claude checked his pistol and readied it for a quick discharge. It was completely loaded. Whoever was there, he would cut them in half, no questions asked.

  He held his pistol aloft and went to the passageway where he could ambush his intruder.

  SEVENTY

  MADRID, SEPTEMBER 19, MIDNIGHT

  S omewhere in the back of her mind, Peter’s words floated like a ghost.

  A philosopher with a gun…

  Well, at least I’m a philosopher…

  On her feet in these strange chambers under the embassy, she thought her heart was going to burst from her chest. She drew her own weapon.

  …if you could have murdered Hitler and Stalin and avoided World War II, would that have-?

  The shadows shifted in the portal to the adjoining chamber, and she pointed her weapon in that direction. Out of instinct, she identified herself. “Hello? Hello? Police?!” she said.

  But the frame of a man quickly bolted into view in the doorway. The gunman gave her less than a second. She could see arms and legs and a head, a trim body and a half-crouch. One of the arms was extended and swung a gun in her direction, and everything she had ever learned at the target ranges in California and Washington kicked sharply into gear, and it was surely a beneficent God that had trained her to be such a good shot.

  As his arm swung into its final position to aim, Alex unloaded four staccato shots from her own pistol. The sound was deafening in the tiny dark chamber, followed quickly by the scream of the man she had hit four times, squarely in the midchest and then upward as he was propelled back until the final shot blew away his nose and the front part of his face.

  He managed to get one shot off, possibly two. There was a clatter of ricocheting bullets around the chamber, and something smacked her flashlight and took it from her hand.

  Then it was all very still, and the man was lying dead. Her lamp flickered.

  She examined the body where it lay in an impossibly twisted heap. She stared into the dead eyes, or what remained of them, since one was loose from its socket. She fought back the urge to throw up over what she had done, and her insides were set to explode. By force of old habit, her free hand found the stone pendant at her neck, and she whispered a few words to herself.

  She moved to where the man had been working, and with horror she looked at the mounds of explosives, detonators already set. She said another prayer.

  Out of instinct, she tried her cell phone. No reception. All she could do now, she hoped, was to get out and get the bomb people in here as soon as possible. She had no idea how much time she had…or didn’t have.

  She took the dead man’s torch. Its bulb was dimmer than hers and was wearing down. Suppressing a surge of horror, she returned to the fetid tunnel that had led her there.

  She pulled herself into the hole and prepared herself for the final crawl toward open space. As she crawled, edging along in the tight tunnel with mortar and sand coming down on her again, she was almost overtaken anew by the claustrophobic panic that had pursued her like a demon for this whole episode.

  But she kept telling herself, she had done this before, she could do it one final time. It was only twenty meters or so. As she proceeded, she took care to drag her feet and push carefully against the clutter and stones.

  Then, just as it had previously, more of the sandstone started to trickle down. One inch worth. Then two. OMG! This time it was closing up her passage.

  She moved forward with a jerk, trying to get some momentum. She got some.

  She slid forward another foot or two.

  Bad idea, bad idea! Bad idea.

  The worse idea you’ve ever had.

  Get out! Get out!

  This time, by moving forward too quickly, she had dislodged some heavier pieces. And they fell in her path, pinning her left arm.

  You’ve dug your own grave! No one will ever find you!

  You’re dead! You’re dead! You’re dead.

  A million and one thoughts pounded her at once.

  But one overpowered all the others. This time you’re dead. If the explosion doesn’t kill you, suffocation will.

  Robert, where are you? Robert, if I die will you greet me in heaven?

  She screamed. She screamed a second time.

  No human voice could hear.

  Oh, God, oh, God, Oh God in heaven, if you’re there, if you’re listening…!

  Please! Please, spare me. I do not want to die! Not her
e, not today. Not in this horrible, wretched place!

  As she managed to crawl a little bit farther forward, agony and ecstasy, heaven and hell, were all wrapped up in one. Her knees crunched over coarse gravel and sand. What was that? Glass? Something cut her knee. Low on her hip was her weapon but she wished she could have jettisoned it. No way she could reach it.

  Oh, my God, oh, my God! How foolish could she have possibly been?

  She screamed again. No answer. Just an echo of horror in her ears.

  The sweat poured off her.

  The moisture-the sewage mixed with underground condensation-was already seeping through her clothing. If Alex could survive the crushing claustrophobia of this time and place, she reasoned, she would never feel it again. That too went on her wish list. That, and seeing daylight again.

  And then, once again, for a final time, she felt the aging brick and cement walls narrowing on her. She tried to buoy her spirits. Sure, she could make it. Sure, she could get out of there.

  She tried to fight off the notion of death. Death was unimaginable in a place like this.

  The passage narrowed again, worse than it had been when she had come through. Her flashlight died. She was in complete darkness. She tried to go forward on her back.

  No go. She tried to calm herself.

  Okay, okay, okay.

  She would have to back up. Going forward made no sense. She put everything into her arms, pushed and pushed hard, and managed to go backward.

  There! Progress. She was moving.

  Then she heard it. The worst sound in creation. A rustling, crumbling, collapsing sound behind her. She could even feel it. A little cave-in. Sand and mortar drifting down, blocking her retreat.

  She pushed mightily, but now it was like a heavy car stuck in snow. She wasn’t going to go anywhere. She was stuck, stuck, stuck!