Midnight in Madrid (28 page)

ROSANATO, VILLA MALAFORTUNATA, ITALY, SEPTEMBER 16, 7:24 P.M.

T
hey touched down at the landing field in Italy less than an hour later. The field was small and serviced private planes only. It was adjacent to the much larger Genoa airport. The terminal was small, and they walked through customs with barely a nod from the Italians at each of their passports.

Then they were in a parking area. It was past nine in the evening and they walked to a van. Rizzo was already there, having connected earlier with Federov’s driver, a young Italian kid with a distinct northern accent. Alex pegged him as a Genovese, but wasn’t sure.

They piled into the van, the driver, Rizzo, Federov, and Alex, and one of the bodyguards, Dmitri, who came along. The driver also had some sandwiches in a box, with some more bottles of water.

“It’s not far from here,” Federov said. “The house where we are going.”

“Are you taking some precautions?” Alex asked. “About being followed?”

“Of course,” Federov said.

Federov gave the Italian kid a nod and they took off. They were on a motorway within a few minutes. The sandwiches were passed around with the water. They were lifesavers at this point. They hit a village that had a surprising amount of activity for the hour. But it was very late summer, so the Italians were enjoying evenings in their cafes, dining, laughing, and drinking.

Minutes later the van rolled to a halt in front of a public garage, part of a gas station. The garage appeared to be closed, but when the driver of the van honked twice, a large door came up noisily and automatically.

The van rolled in. Federov instructed everyone to get out and move quickly. He led them to a BMW SUV, a big overpowered Black Mariah of a vehicle that had a new driver and its engine running. The group quickly jumped into the SUV, all except for Federov’s bodyguard Dmitri, who jumped into a second car by himself, a compact Fiat. Obviously, the bodyguard knew the directions and grudgingly, Alex had to admire the efficiency of Federov’s team, even in retirement.

Another door rolled upward in the rear of the garage.

Dmitri hit the gas on the Fiat with a sharp jerk and rolled out first, followed quickly by the SUV. Federov sat up front, his broad shoulders more than filling the seat. The new driver, another Italian kid in a white open-collared shirt and a cigarette over his ear, floored it.

Alex was in the backseat sitting in the middle between Rizzo and Peter. Out they rolled into the darkness.

They went through some side streets with the driver following the first car closely but constantly checking the rearview mirror. But there were no other cars behind them, and they seemed to be traveling cleanly.

No watchers, no shadows. At one point they passed a police vehicle but it gave them no notice. There was no traffic. The driver drove fast but smoothly. Half a moon was shining on northern Italy. They hit one of the older highways that meandered upward along the shore and then along cliffs where the guardrails had been badly dented from years of haphazard driving. At one point on a curve, there was a section that had been knocked out by a car that hadn’t quite navigated the turn, either through fog, Alex guessed, or the fog of beverage. But then they were racing down a hill again.

Federov broke out a pack of his inevitable cigarettes, lit one, and offered the pack around the car. Everyone declined except the driver, who lit his smoke from his boss’s. Peter made a point of lowering his window by a quarter.

Within fifteen minutes, they were off the motorway and onto a narrow back road. They cut through several residential neighborhoods. New houses, very middle class. No one spoke. The driver had one of those new European sky radio stations that was playing bouncing European pop which fit the occasion as well as anything. Alex liked the music.

Then they went down a final street and Alex could see that the bodyguard in the lead car, Dmitri, had pulled to a stop in front of a house. Dmitri stepped out of his car, and Alex saw he was holding a pistol and waiting.

But there was no reason for alarm. She saw no one else, and she knew he was just doing his job, providing cover. The SUV rolled into the driveway of a house that had its lights on.

The driver hit his horn once and cut his lights into darkness. The downstairs lights in the house went off. Federov raised his meaty left hand to indicate that everyone in the van should remain quiet and still as a precaution. Alex’s lateral vision caught sight of Dmitri standing in the driveway, his gun still drawn, his arm at his side, also smoking a cigarette, watching the house.

Then the driver flashed his lights twice.

From within the house, the downstairs lights flashed twice in response.

“Okay,” Federov said.

The car doors opened, and they all slid out, Alex exiting on the side of Peter who offered her a hand, which she accepted.

They walked up the front path to the house. The door opened and they went inside. The place was furnished with surprising comfort. They were met by another Russian who must have been six and a half feet tall. He wore a black leather jacket despite the warmth of the evening and went by the name of Grisha. Grisha wore a nine millimeter automatic on his right hip. Alex counted him as another one of Federov’s transplanted hoods from Ukraine. When he nodded to Alex and shook her hand, he nearly crushed it. And he was on his best behavior.

“How’s Ahmet today?” Federov asked in Russian, which Alex followed easily.

“Better,” Grisha answered, whatever that meant. He didn’t expand.

“He doesn’t have a telephone does he?” Federov asked.

“No, sir.”

“Does he take walks?”

“No, sir. Not unattended.”

“What does he talk about?”

“Not much, sir.”

“Good,” Federov said. “Does he have a weapon at all?”

“Just a knife. Makes him feel safe.”

They both laughed.

“Should I take it away from him?” the guard asked.

“Don’t bother,” Federov said. “Any little boy can play with a knife. Maybe he’ll cut his wrists later and solve a problem for us.”

Dmitri thought this was funny. So did Federov. Rizzo rolled his eyes.

Another man, whom Federov addressed as Ramiz was waiting for them in the living room. He was a small man in his fifties with a sharp intelligent face. Alex took one look and knew he wasn’t there for his muscle, so he must have been there for another reason. She soon learned: he was a Federov employee who served as an interpreter in Arabic.

Ramiz sprang to his feet, respectfully and fearfully, when he saw Federov. He joined in the group. They walked to some steps and went upstairs. They headed to what was the master bedroom suite of the new house, Grisha leading the way.

He pushed open a door without knocking, and the whole group walked in.

The room had a claustrophobic and condemned feel. It smelled of sweat, cigarettes, and some spice that she couldn’t place, maybe curry. Alex saw a frightened man on a bed, skin of mocha hue, unshaven for several days. This was Ahmet. He was dressed in jeans and a sports shirt. He had a paring knife by his side. Nothing special, just the type of thing that a chef might use to chop celery.

“Get up,” Federov ordered.

The man was pale and as jittery as a frightened cat. He couldn’t take his eyes off Alex when the visitors arrived and surrounded him.

“Hello, Ahmet,” Federov said in English.

Ahmet nodded and continued to stare at Alex. First at her breasts, then at her face.

“We’re going to talk about what happened,” Federov said. “You’re going to sit at that table over there and you’re going to tell us everything you know, everything you’ve done.”

Ramiz jumped in, translating into Arabic. As Ramiz spoke, Alex glanced to her right. There was an oblong table, large enough to seat twelve, the type that might be used for conferences. It was so big that it might have overpowered the room, except a wall had been taken down with sledge hammers—a huge gaping gash—and the hole led into the next room.

There was some back and forth in Arabic between the hostage and Ramiz, who blurted out several things quickly. He spoke with great animation and shook his head in Alex’s direction. He indicated that he had issues with Alex being there.

“What’s his problem?” Federov asked. “Doesn’t he know he’s not allowed to have problems?”

Ramiz turned back to Federov. Ramiz spoke with a very precise brand of English, almost too perfect, as if he had been educated at British schools, same as Peter.

“Signor Ahmet has informed us,” Ramiz said evenly, “that he feels he is being mistreated here. He further adds, and I quote directly here, that he refuses to speak at all in front of this woman.”

“Why not?” Federov asked.

The hostage must have understood the question because he offered several utterances in Arabic. Ramiz gave it a moment, as if he were trying to add some delicacy to it. Then he translated.

“Ahmet says he has no desire, sir,” Ramiz said, “to be put on display for one of your cheap filthy whores.”

Alex blinked. So did Rizzo. Federov nodded pensively. A second passed, during which the prisoner appeared as if he thought he had scored an important point.

In one movement, Federov pulled back his enormous fist and blasted Ahmet in the side of the face. He held him in place with one hand and then delivered a second blow right after the first. Same location.

Never in Alex’s life had she seen such a pair of devastating punches thrown by a bare hand. She had gone to prize fights a couple of times with friends in Los Angeles, had sat close to the ring, and had seen the fists land. She had been at hockey games when players had squared off right on the other side of the glass. But she had never seen a one-two punch like this.

The force of the blows crunched into the side of the man’s face with hard cracking sounds. Federov let go of Ahmet after the second hit. The man flew over backward onto the bed and bounced. He landed hard against the wall then dropped onto the mattress like a sack of potatoes. Federov’s long arms followed him, picking him up, holding him, and walloping him in the gut, and then slamming him backward against the bed and the wall a second time, leaving a pale bloodstain on the wall.

Peter and Rizzo tried to intervene, but not very hard and not very successfully. Alex knew better. Ahmet was cowering now, yelling in terrified Arabic. Federov grabbed him again, by his shirt and by his throat, ripping his clothing as he pulled him upward. Then Federov dragged him across the room. He slammed him down on a hardback chair at the table.

“My guests are personal friends!” he roared in English. “They have come a long way. The lady is a personal friend in particular and works for the government of the United States of America. Not only will you talk to her, but you will answer any question that she asks.”

The man sat there stunned for a moment, listening to Ramiz’s translation.

“Is all this clear?” Federov bellowed.

The Arab nodded, now in fear for his life. He was bleeding from the corner of his eye and a massive welt had already emerged over his cheekbone.

“Tell him to apologize!” Federov said to his translator. “Now!” Ramiz relayed the request.

“Yuri. It’s all right,” Alex said.

But the Russian was blind with rage.

Cowering, Ahmet said his only word of English for the evening, looking at Alex. “Sorry,” he said. There was blood in his mouth. He sputtered. Part of a tooth came out.

Peter reached in his pocket, found a handkerchief, and tossed it to Ahmet. Ahmet gave him a trembling nod of thanks.

They all settled in at the table. Alex sat between Peter and Rizzo. The hostage had Ramiz to his right and Federov to his left, in case he needed to be encouraged to talk again. There were several empty chairs.

In a surreal touch, Dmitri—all seventy-four inches tall of him—appeared again with a tray. He spread bottles of water around the table, a bowl of fruit, and some chips.

Federov lit one of his cigarettes, waved the match to extinguish it, and threw the match to the floor. He turned back to Ramiz.

“Tell him to speak Italian,” Federov said. “I understand it some. Two of my guests,” he added, meaning Alex and Rizzo, “are fluent.”

Ramiz brought the prisoner up to speed.

Peter leaned to Alex and whispered, “You’re my lifeline on this one. I don’t understand any Italian.”

“I’ll fill you in afterward,” she said. Rizzo gave a slight nod to the two of them also, underscoring that he was working the same side of the street. Federov stared at Ahmet, barely appeased. The trip had been long and the prisoner finally began to talk.

VILLA MALAFORTUNATA, ITALY, SEPTEMBER 16, 10:18 P.M.

H
is name was Ahmet Lazzari, he said, switching into Italian. He was a Turk by way of Sicily. His parents had been laborers, his father a bricklayer, his mother a picker in a vineyard. More recently, he and his brother had moved to Genoa, where they had found occasional work on the docks. Eventually, they had worked for one of Federov’s shipping companies.

His accent was thick and guttural.

He talks like a goat
, Federov had warned back in Geneva. Alex wasn’t so sure of that, but Ahmet did have the breath of one.

All of Federov’s business had come out of Odessa, Alex knew, but his bases of operation had expanded heavily into the Middle East and the Mediterranean. He thought of himself as a poor man’s Aristotle Onassis, with the ships but without the ex-first-lady wife who could give him the big time social and political clout and solve problems for him.

As Ahmet began, Alex quietly brought a notepad and pen out of her purse. Peter sat with his arms folded, elbows on the table. Rizzo sat next to her on the other side, his arms folded across his chest, his facial expression a tight scowl.

Ahmet Lazzari had a stricken look as he launched into his story. He had a prison pallor about him and behaved at times like a stray dog, not knowing whether he was going to be fed or whipped. But he had worked for Federov’s companies since 2001, he said, as a warehouseman first, then as a deck hand, and eventually as a member of a crew on the outbound freighters. He’d been clear of trouble for the entire time of his employment, up until about two months ago.

“That’s when hell broke loose,” he said. “That’s when we made some mistakes, my brother, Hassan, and me. Bad mistakes. I regret them.”

His eyes darted to Federov and then around the table. Hell breaking loose, he explained next, was when he, his brother, the shipping company, and a ship known as
El Fuguero
—Liberian registry—all came together under the same unlucky star.

Ahmet and Hassan had worked together for several years, each one watching the other’s back, working intermittently as merchant seamen for various companies. They were in Genoa two months earlier when the
Fuguero
was signing on crew. They signed on together. The bursar and much of the staff were Arabs, many Libyan, a few Saudis. The brothers had Sicilian names and Italian passports but were Arabs. So they got special treatment and were hired.

Two nights before sailing, the purser, a man named Abdul, approached them in a café near the docks. He wanted to put an offer to them, Ahmet recalled, something that would earn them some extra money. Ahmet had drawn his attention because he was an Arab and because he had experience working in shipyards and knew how to weld the inner structure of a ship. So would they be interested in listening? And would they be able to keep their mouths shut if they said no.

The brothers looked at each other and didn’t think too much about it. Extra money was important, whatever the job, so they said yes. It had to do with taking some panels off the wall and sealing some material back in. The brothers looked at each other and laughed.

“Half the boats in the Mediterranean are running drugs,” Ahmet said to the table full of his visitors. “The other half are running guns. People in suits in offices are getting rich. Men who have yachts and seven mistresses. So why shouldn’t we get some crumbs from the rich guys’ table?”

So they agreed.

Two nights later they were aboard the ship. It had been cleared of local crew. The brothers were asked to go into the bursar’s office with an array of tools and take out one of the panels on the wall. They did so. Behind it was a hollow area, about a meter wide and half a meter deep. It was perfect for storage. They left the new hole in the wall open and reported back to Abdul.

Abdul came in and inspected their work. He was pleased. The panel lay on the floor with the bolts that had held it. There wasn’t much of a mess and nothing had been damaged. The brothers had done good work.

“Next, we were told to go below decks until summoned back,” Ahmet said. “When we came back down below, the atmosphere on the ship had changed. The crew was gone, almost all of it. In their place, there were some Middle Eastern guys. They had the scarves. Dark glasses. They looked like Egyptians, and they looked like they wanted trouble. They all had Uzi’s. They didn’t bother us, but they knew we were welders.”

“We understood that this was when a delivery was made,” Ahmet said. “They didn’t want us seeing whoever got on and off.”

“We sat in the ship’s kitchen, my brother, Hassan, and me,” Ahmet said. “We opened a bottle of wine and smoked cigarettes. It must have been less than an hour. One of the gunman came for us. He spoke to us in Arabic and told us we could go back upstairs and finish our work. He asked us if we had more cigarettes, so we gave him a pack. We wanted him to be our friend, you know?”

He searched the table nervously and looked for some interaction from his audience. None was forthcoming.

“We went back upstairs and Abdul was standing there. He was looking into our secret compartment. There was a bag in it. A sack. Rough material, like burlap. The type of thing tools are kept in. He motioned with his head at the hiding place. ‘Close it up now!’ he said to us. So we did. We put the steel plating back in place and used an automatic drill to put the bolts back. He didn’t let us look in the bag. We had no idea.”

He drew a breath. Alex interrupted him.

“Ahmet,” she said. “What was the exact date that we’re talking about?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Try harder than that, if you will.”

After some consultation he claimed it was June the twenty-first of this year. Or thereabouts. He wasn’t certain.

“Why is the exact date important?” Federov asked.

“Dates are always important,” Alex said.

She thanked the Arab and he continued.

“Abdul paid us in cash. So we had some fun with the money in port. Liquor. Women.”

“Well, that’s not a strict Muslim lifestyle now, is it?” Rizzo chipped in.

Ahmet hung his head a little. He had no idea who Rizzo was and didn’t know whether to spit or salute. He did neither. “No,” he said. “Would have saved us all a lot of trouble if we’d been strict,” he said, “but we weren’t.”

Federov made a motion with his hand that suggested Ahmet should move the story along. He did. He said they sailed in two days as scheduled, and everything was fine on board. Then after two days at sea, his brother came to him. Hassan had purchased this little electronic tracking device, he said. It had only cost twenty euros. But Hassan had this bold idea. He was going to go into the compartment and slip it into whatever was in the bag. Then they could follow the bag to its ultimate destination.

“For what purpose?” Alex asked. “To steal it back or to blackmail the recipient?”

“I didn’t want to go along with this,” Ahmet said. “It was my brother’s idea. Hassan’s. Completely.”

“That’s nice, but it’s not what I asked,” she said.

“Blackmail,” he said.

“It turned out that he and his brother were stealing from my cargo too,” Federov said with bitterness, staring at his prisoner. “They’d break into shipping containers and skim merchandise. They’d smuggle it off the ships and fence it, then the insurance companies would come back to me. Prosecutors in Italy brought charges of fraud against two of my companies two years ago.”

“As for these brothers creating problems for me…,” Federov continued, “we’re going to discuss it later in the evening.”

“My brother’s idea,” Ahmet said again. “It wasn’t me. It was my brother,” Ahmet said. “We have an expression in Sicily,” he said. “
A cani tintu catina curta
. For a bad dog, a short leash. Hassan should have been on a very short leash.”

“But you went along with all of it,” said Alex, first in English and then in Italian. “Doesn’t that make you equally guilty? And apparently you had been doing this sort of thing for years.”

“Exactly,” Federov said.

Ahmet looked very ill at ease with the notion, and Federov looked vindicated. Rizzo glanced at his watch. Not that he was going anywhere. But fatigue was starting to take a toll on all of them. “Let’s get on with it,” he said.

“We waited until we had access to the purser’s office,” Ahmet said. “We went in one night. We had a shipmate give him too much to drink.” He paused, looked at Alex as if he couldn’t decide whether to elaborate, then decided to go with it. “There were some women on the ship. Women who worked the freighters in the area. There was a Dutch girl. We made sure she kept him busy one night. We had a whole warning system. She was to signal us if Abdul left his suite.”

“Wasn’t his office locked at night?” Alex asked. “I would think it would have been.”

Ahmet managed a rare laugh. “That was the beauty of it,” he said. “The Dutch girl helped us steal the keys too. You know, when he had his pants off. And just overnight so we could get in and out. It worked perfectly.”

“Brilliant,” said Alex, watching him sweat and noting where his brilliance had landed him.

From there, according to Ahmet’s recollection, it was all smooth sailing. Ahmet did the work on the compartment, and Hassam helped with the tools and watched the door. They were both shocked when they got to the burlap bag and opened it.

“We thought it was drugs. Heroin or cocaine. It was a white substance in individual bricks. But both of us had worked light construction and demolition in Sicily. So when we examined it, we knew it was explosives.”

“What?” Alex murmured, looking up from her notes.

“Top of the line stuff. The type the Americans use in Iraq. The type they’re always using and then getting used against them. Chemicals,” he said. He made an expansive gesture with his large dirty hands. “Boom!” he said.

If it was an attempt to add levity to the evening and win new friends, it failed miserably.

Alex put down her pen and leaned back. She took a minute to re-track Ahmet’s testimony so far and summarize everything in English for Peter. There had been a whole skein of loose logic that had been hanging together with a few strings. And now the strings were being pulled into place and the logic was emerging.

Ahmet sat on the hot seat and continued to dab at his cheek. He was obviously in considerable pain. Alex guessed that Federov’s first punch had fractured the Arab’s cheekbone and the second punch had redesigned it.

“I did some further checking on things this afternoon before I left Rome,” Rizzo then announced slowly. He spoke English so as to conveniently include everyone except Ahmet. “This man has a long police record in Italy. So did his brother. I ran background computer checks on both of them, then cross-referenced his activities with other investigations involving the national police in Italy. One detail that came immediately to the surface was where Ahmet had worked recently. Aboard
El Fuguero
. This was a ship that was on our list as a possible conduit for some explosives that were stolen from an Iraqi military supply depot after the American invasion. Our intelligence tells us the cache was broken up several times and shipped to the West. Through Cyprus and Sardinia. That’s consistent with this ship.”

“And consistent with this man’s story,” Peter said.

“Exactly what
type
of explosives?” Alex asked.

“HMX combined with RDX,” Rizzo said. “We think they can be traced directly to a warehouse in Iraq and to a manufacturer in Serbia.”

There was an echo somewhere in Alex’s memory of the substance. She put it on hold for later when she was back with her laptop. “How much of this HMX are we talking about?” she asked.

“About ten kilos. Or twenty pounds.”

She turned back to Ahmet and asked in Italian. “And that’s the size of the shipment you saw?” she asked.

“It was about ten kilos,” he said. “Ten bricks.”

“And so you put a honing device on it,” she said.

He nodded.

“Where was it taken ashore from
El Fuguero?
” she asked.

“In Barcelona,” he said.

“So we know that the explosives entered Spain?” she said. “We know that for a fact?”

“Yes,” Ahmet said. Rizzo was nodding at the same time.

“And what was the date of that?”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“July twentieth or twenty-first,” Rizzo said. “The ship was only in port two days. That’s when it came ashore.”

“Forgive me for a naive question, but exactly how did it get through port security?” Alex asked.

Ahmet snorted. “For a few dollars, anyone can disembark anything,” he said.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

From there it continued its journey, Ahmet said. Probably by private car, but who knew? His brother tracked it via the homing device, then used a public computer in a café to get the coordinates of the location. One thing led to another. He established the place where the stash was being held. Then he traveled to Madrid.

“Madrid?” she asked.

“Madrid.”

“And how did your brother make contact with the people who were holding the explosives?”

“The coordinates were very precise,” Ahmet said. “My brother knew all the ways to do those computer things. So he tracked it to a building and—”

“Do you know what building?”

“No. Hassan did all of this.”

“Did he tell you anything about the building?”

“No. I was never even in Spain.”

“Please, go on,” Alex said.

“My brother kept the house under surveillance for a few days. Figured out who was going in and out. He narrowed it down. Ended up leaving a note on the Vespa of a man who was his target. He guessed right. My brother left a phone number and went back to France. We have relatives in Marseilles. He suggested a meeting there.”

Ahmet’s voice tailed off.

“And?” she asked.

“Apparently, Hassan overstepped,” Federov said, almost happily. “When he arrived to pick up his baksheesh, his tender young throat got caught in some piano wire.”