Midnight in Madrid (5 page)

Okay. She was in Madrid. Now what?

ZURICH, SEPTEMBER 6

T
he autopsy had just concluded in Zurich when a representative of the Consulate of the Republic of China arrived at the headquarters of the cantonal police. The man entered the building and approached the receptionist at the front desk very quietly. She only knew he was there when she looked up and jumped slightly, seeing a handsome but unsmiling face and dark eyes looking down at her.

“Hello,” he said, with great courtesy. “I’m John Sun. I’m here to visit the body of the unfortunate Lee Yuan.” He was immaculately dressed and infinitely polite. He spoke enough German to get by. He also spoke excellent English. And, with a big gracious smile, he exuded more charm in a minute than most men can muster in a lifetime. All the women in the office noticed. He was there, he said, to identify and claim the body. He had his Swiss government issued ID, standard issue for foreign diplomats in the country. No one looked at it too carefully.

The receptionist passed him along to a policeman who worked the records room. The policeman had studied in England for a year, so the language was a convenient fit. Sun got on well with his Swiss contact.

The visitor had a business card in English, Chinese, and German, as well as his consular ID. His documents confirmed his name as John Sun.

Sun joined some of the ladies for their lunch break. He hung around the police installation waiting for the release of the corpse. One of the younger women, a single blonde girl named Hana, remarked—blurted out, actually, in Sun’s presence—that Sun looked very much like the sexy Chinese movie star Jet Li, who had killed about a hundred guys. Li had also, she said, bedded many beautiful ladies in dozens of films from Hong Kong to Hollywood.

The visitor expressed embarrassment over such flattery. He insisted that his own life was much more prosaic. Back home in China, before joining his nation’s foreign service, he said, he had been a teacher and a gymnast.

That afternoon, Hana brought up a picture of Jet Li on her workstation computer via the Internet. She said she’d love to take him home, cook for him, and “seduce him with European culture and keep him all to myself.”

The other women crowded around, admired the picture, and agreed. After that, they referred to Johnny Sun as their “movie star.”

As a movie star in Zurich, however, he had a short run. He appeared only one more time, early that same evening to manage the shipping of Yuan’s remains “back to his family in China.” Sun was again infinitely courteous and thanked everyone at police headquarters. He wore a black suit and a funereal black tie for the pickup of the deceased. He arrived with his own vehicle and two Chinese helpers for the occasion.

Hana made an attempt to turn her school-girl fantasy into reality. Cornering him alone for a moment, she invited him to dinner at her place, he could pick the day.

He declined with grace and regret. His immediate responsibility, he said, would be to accompany the body of Yuan back to China. They—he and the corpse—would be leaving within a few hours.

So John Sun disappeared as abruptly as he had appeared. It was a strange irony: they hadn’t known much more of John Sun than Lee Yuan, and they both had vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

“The mysterious East,” one of the women said.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 6, EVENING

A
t the front desk of the Ritz, Alex inquired about where to buy a new laptop. She knew there would be no shortage of expensive stores nearby, which catered to wealthy tourists and business people traveling on someone else’s tab. In Madrid, being a late city even by European standards, there was an array of shops open near the hotel in the early evening. The concierge at the hotel provided her with the address of the best.

She went back to her room and threw on a pair of jeans and some comfortable walking shoes. To anyone observing her, she might have looked like a graduate student on summer holiday. In actuality, the anxiety of being back on the job was setting in, and she was already entertaining premonitions of danger, made worse by the persistent memories of the events of the previous months.

She also wished, for example, that she were carrying a weapon. She hated to use it and knew that violence leads only to more violence. Yet she had no illusions about the world and the evil of some of the people in it. Sometimes guns and physical force, lamentable as they were, were as much a part of life as food, water, and air. There wasn’t much she could do about it.

She made her computer purchase within a half hour of leaving the hotel. Her clerk was a young
Madrileno
who was fascinated with her and couldn’t tell her nationality until she presented her passport as identification with her credit card.

He had visited London and New York, he told her, and began speaking very good English. He wished to practice it, so she indulged him by conducting the final parts of the transaction in English.

She took her new purchase back to the hotel. She booted it and started to download the proper software. The procedure would take several hours. So she left the computer and went out again for a walk. She was alone in a city she had loved very much in brief visits as a student many years previously. And her hotel—bless her bosses and the American taxpayers who were underwriting this back in Washington—was excellent.

After her computer was properly set up, Alex caught up with some evening sightseeing. Then, toward eleven, she had a light dinner and a half bottle of Rioja at a quiet little place two blocks from the hotel, one where she could find a quiet table in a corner, watch the endlessly interesting street scene, and not be bothered by anyone.

Might as well enjoy it, she told herself. She was already back in the government harness and as usual had no idea where that might lead. She would attend the next day’s meeting, take a conscientious assessment of the museum theft, and see what she wanted to do next.

It wasn’t all bad, she told herself. She was back to work and felt much better about it than she had expected she would. She was glad she had taken this assignment and noticed, as she sat in the café and tuned into several conversations around her, that she was already thinking in Spanish.

BARCELONA, SEPTEMBER 6, LATE EVENING

I
n the hours after picking up their cargo from Habib, Jean-Claude and his two assistants had driven northward past Naples, then the next day continued past Rome. Driving and sleeping in shifts, they eventually had driven past Pisa and Florence until they arrived at the massive shipyards of Genoa.

There they had waited until the proper ship was ready for them. The ship was a freighter named
El Fuguero,
a Portuguese merchant vessel that flew a Liberian flag. Their secret cargo remained in twenty separate packets, each weighing about five kilos, or ten pounds. For good measure, Jean-Claude had repacked them in fresh luggage purchased at an Italian department store along the route to Genoa. Jean-Claude’s henchmen then left the ship, but Jean-Claude, using his French passport, bought passage in one of the steamer’s inexpensive staterooms.

The next morning,
El Fuguero
hoisted anchor and sailed westward from Genoa. It was the twenty-ninth of August. It made a stop in Corsica and then another in Marseilles, where it docked for two days. There the crew enjoyed the run of the sunny old port, the bars, the cafés, the gambling parlors, and, in particular, the international brothels.

Jean-Claude had struck up friendships with a few of the crew members along the way and accompanied them on their lusty evening exploits while in port, particularly the fleshier locations. He boldly informed his new friends that he was a professional teacher with a job waiting for him to teach language in October in Brooklyn, New York. But he also cited his affection for the fresh sea breezes of the Mediterranean and wanted to enjoy a brief holiday before flying to America.

Then, after two evenings in Marseilles, the ship hoisted anchor again and sailed southward through a stretch of the western Mediterranean that was busy with cruise ships, merchant vessels, and private yachts chartered by wealthy men and the women who, for a price, loved them.

El Fuguero
was never far from the coast of mainland Europe. It passed the distant mountains of the Pyrenees, the border between France and Spain, and ultimately entered Spanish territorial waters. It easily navigated the tricky currents off Cap de Creus on the Spanish coast and came within fifteen knots of Barcelona. There it stopped and dropped anchor in a peaceful but ever-changing sea, swept by sun and wind.

It was the evening of September 4.
El Fuguero
waited. So did its clandestine cargo, and so did Jean-Claude, a much appreciated passenger, who was gracious to all and raised the suspicions of none.

On the evening of September 6, a berth opened unexpectedly in the commercial shipyard in Barcelona.
El Fuguero
sailed into the harbor with the late evening high tide and docked. An hour later, Jean-Claude disembarked like any other tourist or citizen of the European Union. He had both duffel bags slung over his left shoulder and held his passport in his right hand.

As he walked past Spanish customs, he nodded amiably to inspection officers who nodded back to him.

“You care to check my bags,
Señores
?” he asked in Spanish.

“¿Ciudadano español?”
asked one of the officers. Spanish citizen?

“Ciudadano francés,”
he said in return. He indicated his French passport if they wished to check it.

The officers shook their heads, waving him on. Two minutes later, Jean-Claude spotted a driver who was there at the docks to meet him.

The driver was a young man named Mahoud who was a Spanish citizen, and whom Jean-Claude had recruited earlier in the year into a tiny little cell of self-styled terrorists in Madrid. Mahoud was an auto mechanic by trade. He had a sixth grade education.

Jean-Claude greeted Mahoud with an embrace. Then he shoved his two duffels into the backseat of Mahoud’s car and slid in after them. He eased back and lit a cigarette as the car began to move.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, SEPTEMBER 7, TWO MINUTES PAST MIDNIGHT

T
he sunshine of the early summer afternoon that had warmed the streets of Geneva faded to dusk and then to darkness. Shortly past 8:00 p.m. the streetlights of the old city were illuminated. The many open-front cafés at lakeside were alive with the clinks of glasses and tableware, punctuating conversations in many languages.

Bankers and businessmen finally relaxed for the day, savoring what they might have accomplished or anticipating their next move for tomorrow. As best they could, they kicked back with their guests, the tourists, the idle rich, the occasional film star, and the university students. As the evening grew later, they swapped advice and attempted seductions. Some would succeed, others would fail.

The high spirits had not penetrated a secure sprawling apartment in a modern building two blocks away. There, the aging Colonel Laurent Tissot of the Swiss army sat at an ornate nineteenth-century desk before his visitor. Two in-progress packs of American cigarettes lay on the colonel’s desk. A cloud of smoke gave the air within the apartment a cancerous, bluish haze.

Tissot was a short man with a slight moustache, a high forehead, and an immense bald head. Though Tissot still professed a high rank within the Swiss military, it had been years since he had worn a uniform. Tonight he wore a dark brown suit with a neat white shirt open at the collar. The suit had been elegant once, but that time had long passed. In that way, Tissot’s attire matched the furnishings of the flat, as well as the business at hand.

Seated in a chair across from Colonel Tissot’s desk was a second man, richly muscled beneath casual clothing. He was a Polish national known as Stanislaw, trim, very tall, and sturdy. He had wide shoulders, closely cropped blond hair, and blue eyes.

The room was quiet, aside from the rumble of traffic that rose from the narrow rue Ausnette outside. Tissot closed a file that the second man had brought to him and looked up.

They spoke in English, the shared language in which they were most fluent. “And so?” Tissot said, moving the brief meeting toward a conclusion. “The
Pietà of Malta
remains in our possession?”

“That’s what my report says.”

“Well done,” said Colonel Tissot.

He closed the folder and rose from his desk. He walked across the room to a fireplace that bore a gas grate. Tissot knelt and gently laid the file in the fireplace. He used a cedar match to ignite the file, then turned on the gas with a key at the side of the hearth. With an abrupt whoosh, the entire file erupted in flames.

A careful, precise man, Tissot stood before the fireplace and watched the file disintegrate into a harmless gray powder.

He turned and walked back to his desk.

“So now it’s the Americans,” said the colonel with exasperation. “Now
they
plan to send someone?”

Stanislaw nodded and pondered the point. “The result will be the same.”

“I know,” Tissot said. “Fools,” he muttered.

But while his lips passed a single word, volumes passed in his mind. He was midway through his eighth decade of life. He had been brought up in a world that had possessed its standards of good and evil, right and wrong. The colonel had tenaciously held those standards and still lived by them. Yet the world was a different place now. He dimly recognized a new world social order, and he did not like it. So he battled against it.

Colonel Tissot withdrew a thin file from his antique desk. He handed it to Stanislaw. The file was in English. Stanislaw scanned it.

“The American they will probably send is very young and highly inexperienced,” Colonel Tissot said, reverting to English. “That is what my contacts in Spain have advised me. Foolish, foolish. But the Americans are invariably foolish.”

Stanislaw raised an eyebrow. He reached to the back page of the file with his scarred left hand. He withdrew a photograph of the subject. For a moment, Tissot’s gaze settled on the scar, and he remembered its origin. A decade earlier, in a drunken rage over a woman, Stanislaw had attempted to kill a man with his bare hands. In trying to defend himself, the other man had shoved a knife through Stanislaw’s right palm. Stanislaw had pulled it out by himself and used it to slit the victim’s throat.

Afterward, he had bandaged the hand with a bar towel, sutured the wound by himself, and refused any subsequent medical attention.

Stanislaw glanced at a series of surveillance photographs.

“The pictures are less than ten days old,” Tissot said. “Good to know who the enemy is, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It is.” He glanced at the pictures for a few final seconds.

Then he placed the photos back in the rear of the file and closed it. He leaned back in his chair.

“You’ll take care of this?” Tissot asked.

Stanislaw gazed off for a moment. “Americans are naïve and undisciplined. The men when they travel sneak off to brothels. The women have sexual liaisons with strangers that they would dare not have back in America.” The Pole’s eyes twinkled. “The agent will be found dead of a gunshot with evidence suggesting that sort of immoral behavior.”

Tissot raised an eyebrow in approval and nodded.

“You will have the first opportunity. Act upon it immediately, if you please. A backup team in Spain has already been engaged, but I would prefer not to use them.”

Stanislaw nodded. “I expect no difficulties,” he said.

Colonel Tissot leaned back in his own chair. He rubbed his tired eyes.

“Nor do I,” he said. “Take the file with you. Burn it after you’ve memorized it. And do not make any mistakes. There is no room for mistakes.”