by Mike Maden
“There are a lot of agencies around the world with detailed records of AQ membership. Have you passed this photo around to them?”
“Yes, it’s been sent out, but no luck yet. There is another possibility I’ve been playing around with.”
Brossa leaned in closer. “Perhaps BC isn’t behind this bombing at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been reading about the civil war, and you seem well read on current Spanish politics. There are pro-nationalist and pro-Franco groups that hate the idea of Catalonian independence and would certainly hate a group like BC.”
“And you think one of these groups might have set BC up for the bombing—even though BC claimed credit for it?”
“Anybody can post anything on social media these days.”
Jack waved the photo of Sorry Man. “Can I keep this?”
“Give it to your ‘private investigator’ and let me know what he finds.” Brossa stood, ending the meeting.
Jack stood as well. “And you’ll keep me posted on the burner phone?”
She smiled with the corner of her mouth and shrugged. “És clar—of course. We are helping each other, right?”
29
Brossa knocked on the tall open door of her supervisor, Gaspar Peña, twenty-five years her senior and a native of Madrid. He was a little round in the middle but it was well hidden by an expensively tailored suit, a gift from his new wife, half his age. Despite his reputation as a ladies’ man, he never treated Brossa with anything but paternal affection.
“Come in, Laia. And close the door behind you.”
He smiled and waved her in with his hand, pointing at the chair across from his desk. “I have good news.”
Peña came around to the front of his desk and sat on the corner as Brossa took a chair. She forced a smile beneath her dark-rimmed eyes.
“What’s the good news, sir?”
Peña held his grin for a moment longer. “The Guardia Civil has a credible lead on Brigada Catalan. They are planning a big meeting tomorrow to discuss future plans, and better still, we know exactly where they are meeting.”
Brossa brightened. “That’s fantastic news.”
“And it gets even better. The Guardia Civil will lead the assault—”
“But, sir, this is my case. I should be leading the raid.”
Peña flicked his hand in a dismissive way. “No, no, no. We’re going to let the door-breakers do their thing.”
Brossa jumped to her feet. “That’s not fair.”
“Laia. You understand politics, don’t you?” He gestured at the walls around them. “It’s no accident we were assigned temporary offices in this building. We were brought down to Barcelona to partner with Guardia Civil to help them deal with this independencia insanity. They provide the muscle, we provide the brains.”
“Is this because you’re trying to protect me?”
“No, not at all. You have the most important job. While those brutes are smashing the furniture, I need a calm, steady hand on the helm supervising the arrests and the crime scene investigation. If we are going to shut down these idiot separatists, we need solid convictions—not bodies on a coroner’s slab. We can’t afford to make any martyrs out of these killers. And we can’t afford to lose any courtroom trials because somebody wasn’t smart enough to collect evidence properly.” Peña’s fatherly smile widened. “Don’t you agree?”
Brossa’s jaw clenched. Spain was one of the last countries in Europe still struggling with women’s equality. On the surface everything was equal, but in reality, many people in the culture still held a paternalistic view of women and their roles in society. It wasn’t just the catalanes who were struggling for independence in Spain these days. But today wasn’t the day to fight back. Solving the case and bringing the criminals to justice was more important.
“Yes, of course. You know best about these things,” Brossa said. “But I’ll be kitted out anyway.”
Peña grinned ear to ear. “Excellent!”
He scrambled back behind his desk and pulled up a name on his computer. “I’ll put you in touch with Captain Asensio, the assault team leader. Call him and he’ll read you in to the details.” He glanced up from the keyboard, a worried expression on his face. “And not a word of this to anybody, yes? We don’t want anything to get out and spoil the party.”
I’m not an idiot. Brossa knew this news would be music to Jack’s ears but her loyalty was to her country, not pushy Americans, no matter how sincere—or handsome—they were. He would just have to wait until after the raid.
“No, sir. Not a word.” She stood. “And thank you for the opportunity to serve.”
“I have complete confidence in you, Laia. We all do. Someday, no doubt, you’ll be sitting behind my desk—perhaps even running the entire agency. But we build the house one brick at a time, yes?”
“Yes. One brick at a time,” she agreed as she headed for the door. And a brick against your thick macho skull, too. She smiled to herself as she closed the door behind her.
Now all she had to do was make last-minute arrangements to take care of her father while she was on the raid.
30
LONDON, ENGLAND
Mari Moon’s eyes watered.
She had marched through the open loft door and hit an invisible wall of pure stench. It was the rancid, unmistakable smell of rotting flesh, stale urine, and fecal material, the latter two in a molding, clumpy puddle on the floor just below the blackening feet. It stopped her in her tracks.
The naked corpse hung by the neck from one of the wooden beams supporting the low ceiling of the wide, open living area. The swollen face of the middle-aged body was pale green and marbled with its protruding eyes and tongue, both forced out by the gases arising from the feverishly working bacteria within. The rest of the corpse was increasingly green, tending toward brownish-black the farther down she looked, the blood pooling and darkest in the lower legs and feet.
Moon began taking short breaths through her mouth, shutting off her nose. She was an internal security investigator, not a cop, and certainly not a coroner.
“Agent Moon?” the man asked, approaching her, his steely blue eyes softening. He knew her only by the title and name she’d given on the phone, neither of which was true. He wore a stylish Brioni sport coat and Crockett & Jones loafers, she noted. Rather posh for a London detective. His poise and posture, along with the silver in his neatly trimmed hair and mustache, suggested confidence and experience. She would take advantage of both.
“Yes. I’m looking for DCI May.”
“That would be me.” He smiled. “Travis May. Pleasure.” They shook hands. He saw the pale color of her face. “My apologies for the unpleasant redolence.”
“We appreciate the sensitivity and speed with which you responded to the incident.”
“When we found his GCHQ credentials, I knew we had to contact you immediately.” His eyes narrowed. “National security and all of that.”
You have no idea, Moon thought. Dr. Stanley Hopkins was one of the most important researchers in one of the world’s most important intelligence agencies, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA. “Can you read me in, briefly?”
DCI May turned toward the corpse, his manicured hands clasped behind his back. “The residents across the hall reported a foul smell early this morning to the building superintendent, assuming it was a sewage line backing up somewhere.”
“I’ll need their names and contact information.”
“Of course.”
“Please continue.”
“As I was saying, they traced the odor to this apartment, opened the door, and you know the rest.”
“How long has Dr. Hopkins been dead, in your estimation?”
“Rigor has subsided, and judging by the lividity and the state of decomposition, we estimate four da
ys, possibly more.”
Moon nodded, thinking. Hopkins had been missing for five days. Alarm bells began ringing seventy-two hours after he failed to appear at two critical departmental meetings. The future of Britain’s cybersecurity rested on his shoulders. Or did.
May continued. “The corpse in the bedroom matches that timeline as well. We’ll have something more definitive for you once we get them back to the lab.”
“Another corpse? Who?”
“Joseph Okwi. A Ugandan national here illegally. Part of a male prostitution ring. He’s been arrested twice in the last three years. The SOCO”—scenes of crime officer—“believes it was a drug overdose.”
“And we can assume the two deaths are related?”
“I’ve seen it before. There’s a wedding ring on Dr. Hopkins’s hand. Something went wrong here with Mr. Okwi, Hopkins panics, doesn’t know what to do, instantly imagines the scandal, his wife—children, I suppose—and he’s overwhelmed at the prospects of trials, jail, shame. He isn’t the first person to take the easy way out.”
Moon glanced at the corpse. “I’m not sure I’d call that easy.”
“Yes, quite.”
“And the laptop?”
He nodded toward a large, imposing figure standing guard at a small desk where Hopkins’s laptop rested, unopened. “It’s in the custody of Sergeant Lavin. It hasn’t left his person since we spoke.”
Moon glanced back at the corpse. The iron-hard urgency set in her face faded for a moment. She knew Stanley Hopkins, his charming wife, Sally, and their three adorable young children. She had dined with them only just last month, celebrating Sally’s birthday. Stanley was indeed a brilliant mathematician on the far frontier of quantum cybersecurity. But he was obviously a devoted husband and father, too—something you can’t fake. Drugs, sex, and suicide just didn’t fit his profile.
“You just never know about people, do you?” DCI May said, reading her mind. “It’s a tragedy, certainly. You knew him?”
Moon stiffened, realizing her mask had slipped. “Who else in your department knows about any of this?”
“Myself, Sergeant Lavin, two SOCOs, two constables. Why?”
“Has any evidence or any material been removed from the loft?”
“Not yet.”
“My department is taking over, as a matter of national security. Top priority.”
DCI May’s genteel charm suddenly hardened into something else.
“This is our case, Ms. Moon. It’s simply not possible—”
“Commissioner Grimes will be in contact with you shortly to verify. I want you to gather up your people and vacate the premises immediately. I need you and your team to forget all of this, and to never discuss it with anybody or put any of it in writing under penalty of law. There was no Stanley Hopkins or Joseph Okwi. There was no forensic evidence and no laptop. There was no crime and no suicide. Am I clear?”
The muscle in May’s jaw clenched. “Perfectly.”
“Excellent. And one more thing.”
“Ma’am?”
“I was never here.”
31
BARCELONA, SPAIN
Jack called for a taxi—ride-hailing services like Uber were unavailable in the city. The driver was Colombian and spoke no English, but it wasn’t a problem. Jack showed him his apartment address on his phone and off they went.
The driver was friendly enough and tried to make conversation with Jack. As they made their way toward the old city, he slowed his Spanish down enough that Jack could actually understand him somewhat. The man was from Bogotá and had been living in Spain for seven years, and also that he had a wife and two small niñas at home.
The Colombian cursed as the traffic suddenly halted near the Plaça de Catalunya. It wasn’t hard to guess why. It was another protest, one of several that had erupted over the last month, drawing hundreds of thousands of citizens from all over the region.
The sidewalks were jammed with people, many of them wearing the white-starred red-and-yellow flags of Catalonian independence draped over their shoulders like capes. A lot of young people, Jack saw, but also parents pushing strollers or walking with their school-age kids. Scattered throughout were middle-aged folks and also senior citizens who ambled more slowly with their canes and patriotic hats.
The longer they sat there in the cab, the bigger the crowd became, all moving toward the historic plaza. Many carried handheld flags. A few waved banners proclaiming liberty and democracy or demanding free speech or the release of political prisoners. A few banners were anarchist, and fewer still flew the hammer and sickle.
Mostly people were laughing and talking excitedly. People were flowing through the streets past both sides of the taxi like a rock in the middle of a river. No one was angry or screaming. No fist pounding, no sloganeering, no lighting of Molotov cocktails. There was an incredibly positive energy in the air. Jack didn’t see or sense any rage or revolutionary impulse. If he didn’t know any better, he’d swear these people were headed to a sold-out FC Barcelona soccer match.
The taxi driver turned around. Jack didn’t need a Spanish dictionary to figure out what he was going to say.
“Yeah, I get it. Time to get out and walk.” Jack checked the meter and pulled out his wallet, glad that he’d stopped by an ATM on the way to breakfast with Brossa. He counted out enough bills to pay it along with a twenty-percent tip, though he’d been told that tipping taxis wasn’t necessary in Spain. He didn’t care. He was raised to respect working-class people and to show it by being generous whenever possible.
Jack opened the door carefully so as not to bang into one of the protesters streaming by. He leaned back into the taxi and thanked the driver, wishing him buena suerte, amigo because he was going to be stuck here for hours and was gonna need it.
Jack joined the crowd as tens of thousands of people flowed toward the grand square. He could see the armored riot police and their vehicles positioned on one end of the plaza. He’d read about earlier protests and some of them had turned violent because of hooligans trying to cause trouble. But today was different. Or so he hoped.
But a thought suddenly crossed Jack’s mind. With so many people crowding into the area, and traffic-jammed streets fronted by crowded restaurants, shops, and apartments, this would make one hell of a target for Brigada Catalan.
Jack wasn’t afraid of an explosion so much as the panicked response of several thousand people if a bomb was detonated. As much as he’d like to hang around and actually observe the unfolding of a mass democratic protest—he’d never witnessed anything like this in person—he thought better of it. Anything could go wrong, and usually did at times like these. The last thing Jack wanted was to get clubbed or pepper-sprayed by an anxious cop fearing for his life and just trying to do his duty. He decided to get back to his place.
He checked his phone and found out where the underground metro station entrance was and tried to move in that direction. He might as well have tried swimming up the Niagara Falls. The closer he got to the entrance, the more people he was bumping into and the more densely packed they became, which made them less likely to move out of his way. He almost got into a fight with a couple of guys who thought he was trying to cause trouble. The underground metro station was still a hundred feet ahead but its street-level exit was spewing out people like a gushing fire hydrant. He abandoned the idea of the metro altogether.
It was time to find the least crowded side streets and hoof it. Jack made it two blocks when his phone vibrated. He popped in his AirPods.
“Gav, how are you, buddy?”
Gavin’s hippo yawn roared in Jack’s ears.
“Oh, man, sorry about that. I missed my nap today.”
“Yeah, I hate it when that happens. What’s up?”
“I think I found your guy, Sorry Man. His name is Dylan Runtso. Actually, Dr. Dylan Runtso. He got his P
h.D. from Princeton in quantum physics. He was traveling under a fake name and passport so it took me a while to ID him, and like you said, he’s been scrubbed from the standard facial-recog databases. Sorry it took so long.”
“Are you kidding me? Nothing to apologize for. This is fantastic news. Once again, I bow to your genius.”
“Don’t start bending over yet—wait, that didn’t come out right. What I mean is, I don’t have much more than that. He has Special Access Program clearance, along with SSBI, ANACI, and a half-dozen other clearances I didn’t even know existed until today. He’s supposed to self-report when he travels abroad, but from what I can tell, the only international destination he listed was Toronto for a science conference.”
“Nothing for Spain?”
“Nada.”
“I saw what you just did there, hombre.”
“Had to try.”
“So, what’s he working on that he needs these uber-top-secret security clearances?”
“No idea. He was self-employed as a consultant—and you know how I feel about those guys. Mercenaries, as far as I’m concerned. Pick up some government expertise at a decent wage, then turn around and sell your contacts to the highest bidder.”
“Sounds like he used to work for our Rich Uncle.”
“Before becoming a consultant, he was with a project code-named RAPTURE.”
“What happened?”
“He resigned about a year ago. The Feds are keeping track of him, sort of.”
“He must be something special if he’s still on their radar. What’s RAPTURE all about?”
“No idea. I started tiptoeing around it and set off a few alarms. If I hadn’t VPN’d all over the place, I would have been the one who got the two a.m. visit from an NSA Q Group team instead of the dumb bastards at a fuzzy-fetish porn hub in Bucharest.”
