Midnight in Madrid rt-2 Read online

  Midnight in Madrid

  ( Russian trilogy - 2 )

  Noel Hynd

  Midnight in Madrid

  Noel Hynd

  “Then the bird doesn’t belong to any of you?” Spade asked.

  “Belong?” the fat man said jovially. “Well, sir, you might say it belonged to the King of Spain, but…an article of that value that has passed from hand to hand…is clearly the property of whoever can get a hold of it.”

  Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

  Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.

  Cervantes, Don Quixote

  ONE

  ST. GALLEN, SWITZERLAND, AUGUST 15

  Lee Yuan had always been a bit of a mystic. Always had been and always would be. He saw things where other people didn’t, believed things that other people laughed at. But his friends and peers accepted him for what he was, a product of his background, and his experience.

  Right now, however, Lee Yuan was halfway around the world and completely out of luck. It was not a healthy equation for examining fading artifacts in the dungeons of an ancient stone monastery. It was not a healthy equation for anything.

  Worse, Lee Yuan felt as if he were freezing to death. His hands worked as quickly as possible. His only light was that from a kerosene lantern, lit with a small acetylene torch. There was a little heat from the torch, but still, his fingers were nearly frostbitten. He had traveled far. This was where he had been told he would find it.

  On a bench built in the sixteenth century, he sorted through artifacts, bits and pieces of ancient times, stuffed together in a decrepit old wooden box. The box was the size of a child’s coffin. It had probably been built for that purpose, constructed by hands that had been dead for many centuries.

  Monks had lived in this dwelling since the fourteen hundreds. Who knew what else, what treasures and torments from other ages, were sealed in these gloomy walls?

  Well, there was only one treasure that Yuan sought.

  Only one that anyone sought here.

  He worked with bare fingertips that could no longer feel anything. Wool and leather covered his palms as well as much of the rest of his body; even his head was wrapped against the cold. He couldn’t hear anything.

  But he had needed dexterity in his fingertips.

  First they had stung like the devil, the fingertips. But now, nothing. He had long since zoned out the pain, but frostbite was another matter. He reasoned he could only sift through these items for another two minutes before he would endanger the flesh of his fingers. Once the flesh had frozen, the feeling would never return. He had seen Sherpa guides who had come back from Tibet and Mongolia with gnarled, disfigured hands that extended only to the first knuckles.

  An ivory box. A hand-carved crucifix, Italian in origin. Maybe two and a half centuries old. His brain assimilated: from the reign of one of the Clements or Innocents.

  Clement the Fifth.

  Innocent the Seventh.

  Roman popes from the Holy See. The Bishops of Rome.

  French Anti-popes from Avignon. The self-indulgent pretenders.

  Gregory the Eighth.

  Ignatius the Righteous.

  A tremendous shiver overtook Yuan and shook him violently. His spine ached.

  Yuan the Frozen.

  How much colder could it get? His hands trembled. His fingers worked quickly.

  Bone. The bone of a man or woman. All flesh long gone. It looked like a wrist bone.

  A small gold cross, probably German, judging by the inscription that was not entirely worn away.

  Yuan had been on this search for five weeks since leaving Hong Kong. Why had he ever agreed to this? Others could have come in his place to retrieve the artifact. He was forty-seven years old and probably not even the most qualified man that his employer could have sent. Sure, he was highly educated in Western culture, fluent in Mandarin, English, and French, deeply knowledgeable in the traditions of the Holy Roman Church, an expert on their strange procedures.

  Send a younger man next time.

  He continued to sift through the contents of the box.

  A ceramic pot. A small replica of the Virgin. Splinters of wood from other objects.

  The True Cross? Sure. Why not? If every splinter that Westerners had claimed to be from the True Cross were authentic, an entire mansion could be built from the splinters. What else in the box?

  A small urn, probably for burning incense. Some metal chips. Tiny broken crosses. Broken into small pieces, much like Yuan’s hopes.

  Would this trip never end, this journey into oblivion?

  From somewhere a voice spoke to him, almost an epiphany. Careful what you wish for.

  He wished he were back home in Asia. He thought of his wife. He wondered if she was faithful to him. He wondered how long, if he didn’t return, before she took up with another man. He wondered about the younger men whom he had trained and worked with. Would they laugh at him in this final quest? Or would they come after him to bring him home?

  His eyes assessed the final contents of the box.

  A few coins. Fragments of jewelry. Little pieces of nothing.

  Nothing. Nothing at all to justify this long trek and search. And certainly nothing mystical. Now he realized that he had been scammed. He should have demanded delivery of his prize in Zurich, or Geneva, or some sane place! Not the monastery where the filthy thieves claimed it had been hidden!

  What next?

  His fingers could take it no more. The numbness was spreading. A bad sign. He held his fingers near his acetylene torch, almost touching the flame. He could smell the flesh thawing, or thought he could, then burning, then sudden pain. The feeling was back.

  He pulled on the heavy gloves that hung at his side. No time for anything except to escape. He turned. He trudged across the small chamber to the base of the spiral stone stairs that had led him down to this claustrophobic place. If hell had frozen over, surely this was it.

  He held up the lantern. He looked upward to a blackness that he hadn’t anticipated. He took five labored steps upward and saw what had happened. The old wooden door-his only exit-had closed. And not on its own.

  Where had his two sentries gone? His lookouts?

  He put his shoulder to the door. He pushed against the aged wooden beams. But someone had bolted the door from the other side, probably the perverse old monk with the scar across the back of his hand who had led him down into this place.

  He knocked furiously at the door. Then he kicked it. He called out. He cursed violently.

  But he realized that he was a captive and probably no one even heard his screams. No one would come back for him for days, maybe weeks.

  There was only one possible escape. He poured the remaining kerosene from his lamp against the lower section of the door and used his acetylene torch to try to burn it.

  Lots of smoke. Not much fire.

  He coughed violently. Then he realized that he had done exactly what his adversaries had hoped he would do. He would asphyxiate himself in an attempt to escape.

  His kerosene ran out. With a final pathetic flicker, so did his torch.

  Darkness descended with unwelcome speed. Then darkness embraced everything.

  Not just darkness. Blackness.

  Yuan was smart enough to know: light was not something he would ever see again. He settled in. So did death’s messenger in a place like this: the bitter Alpine cold.

  His mortal end arrived with astonishing ease.

  TWO

  NAPLES, ITALY, AUGUST 26

  On a Saturday evening, Jean-Claude al-Masri stepped out of the passenger side of a Citroen in front of an Islamic school in Naples. He closed the car door behind him and surveyed the
block. He noted a man waiting for him, a man twice his age, seated on the front steps of the school.

  After establishing eye contact, Jean-Claude returned a very slight smile. They had negotiated earlier. He then glanced back to the Citroen and two others stepped out.

  The man on the front steps rose to greet the arrivals. The visitors were expected.

  The Islamic school was operated by a rotund, personally engaging man named Habib, an Islamic militant from the Baluchistan region of Pakistan. Habib was the gentleman who waited in greeting on this evening.

  Habib was not a professional educator. While he was trained as a chemist, he had also been a merchant in Cairo several years earlier, selling everything from dried meat to television sets to small weapons, such as knives and handguns. Black market, white market, gray market. It didn’t matter. These days, however, police across western Europe suspected Habib of being a liaison with radical homegrown Muslim cells in Europe. There wasn’t a significant police agency from Athens to London that didn’t have a dossier on him. And among those same radical Islamic groups, he wasn’t just suspected of being a liaison. He was known to be one of the best.

  Jean-Claude was a French citizen of Algerian origin. He had grown up in both France and Algeria, hauled around as one of seven children by an itinerant French father and illiterate Bedouin mother. Jean-Claude had bolted from his family at age sixteen and went to work as an underground laborer at the Tirek Amesmessa gold mines in southwest Algeria close to the border of Mali in north Africa. The experience toughened him and educated him to the mean unyielding ways of the world, as well as the use of demolitions and an ability to navigate through narrow underground passageways. It also incubated within him a burning hatred of the better-off people of the world; those whose fingers, wrists, ears, and other body parts glittered with the gold that came out of the earth at such an extortionate physical cost to those who worked in the mines.

  After he turned twenty, Jean-Claude moved to Algiers where he fell into a life of prosperous petty crime. He worked as a burglar, a freelance hold-up man, and a break-in specialist. He drifted further under the influence of Islamic radicalism, as it was angrily preached in the mosques he attended in the afternoon and the cafes he frequented in the evenings.

  Jean-Claude wasn’t a theoretician and wasn’t an intellectual. But what he sometimes lacked in intelligence he made up for in viciousness and anger. He learned his way around and beneath the old city of Algiers, the back alleys, the unknown side passageways through the stinking slums and the fetid subterranean routes used for centuries by traders in narcotics and human flesh. He relished these dark, unseen corridors of a barely visible world in a way that only an embittered ex-miner could. He gained some weight, some muscle, and some added meanness and social resentment.

  In Algiers also, he cheerfully murdered his first two men. His victims were an English pimp, whose stable included a Tunisian girl he was sweet on, and an Israeli gem merchant, whose diamonds Jean-Claude coveted. The second murder evolved from a nighttime break-in- avec -stick-up gone bad. The slayings took place within ten days of each other, and in their aftermath, Jean-Claude saw fit to buy an off-the-books passage across the Mediterranean to France.

  The Tunisian girl went with him but stayed only a few weeks. More importantly, he fenced a dozen beautiful diamonds with an obese Dutch middleman who knew better than to ask questions. Jean-Claude stayed in Toulouse for two years, continuing his same lifestyle and perfecting the occasional burglary or nighttime smash-and-grab. Then he moved on to Madrid, the Spanish capital, in 2006 when some plainclothes French police appeared in his neighborhood, asking nosy questions.

  So now he was in his late twenties as he stood before Habib on a warm Italian summer evening. In Madrid over the last few years, he had acquired all the personal components that made him attractive to the radical Islamic movement in Spain: a raging sense of anger, a desire to do something grand for the cause, and a talent for theft and murder.

  A few months earlier a Saudi man had been brought to him by acquaintances. The man had no name and was shown great deference by Jean-Claude’s friends. The man outlined a small, simple, but highly ambitious plan for an operation in Spain, one for which some knowledgeable people felt Jean-Claude would be perfect.

  Would Jean-Claude be interested in considering such an operation, even if it might end in martyrdom? Surprisingly to everyone, including himself, Jean-Claude said yes. He was brimming with self-confidence these days, so the idea that the operation wouldn’t end in success never occurred to him.

  And so here he was this evening before Habib. He had no interest in Habib’s school, its students, or any aspects of formal education. The school, located in a decaying gray building that had once been a bakery, was in a section of Naples known as Little Egypt. The neighborhood was home to a growing number of Arab immigrants from the Middle East.

  Jean-Claude’s arrival at Habib’s school was at 8:00 p.m., exactly as promised. He was a tall wiry man, Jean-Claude, an inch over six feet, mocha-complexioned, and stronger than he looked. He carried a small attache case. As he moved toward the entrance to the school, he was accompanied closely by the two other men. The latter were both larger and heavyset.

  Habib greeted his visitors in Arabic on the uneven brick steps to the school. Jean-Claude’s two backups uttered little in any language. They kept their jittery eyes on the surroundings.

  “It is very good of you to be here,” Habib said. “My blessings upon you and Allah’s blessings upon you. Come. Let us discuss things.”

  Habib produced a key that undid a drop bolt to the aging wooden door. Beyond this outer door there was an entrance foyer with heavy plate-glass walls. Then there was a second door. This one was made of very thick glass, steel reinforced and locked electronically, like a gate to a vault.

  Habib unlocked this second door by a combination that he had memorized. As he did this, he shielded his hands from view.

  Once the door opened, Habib brought his new contacts into the building. He brought his guests down a long hallway within the center of the first floor. A large gray cat seemed ready to greet Habib but then scurried out of the way at the sight of the visitors.

  Habib led his guests into a small room, the principal’s office. Habib drew the blinds and illuminated a small desk lamp.

  “Well, welcome,” he said again. “You’ve traveled far?”

  “Far enough,” said Jean-Claude.

  “Of course,” Habib said. “Of course.”

  Habib and his school had frequently been at odds with Italian educational authorities. The government saw Habib’s institution as pushing its own Islamic agenda and not meeting the state standards of the Italian Ministry of Education. Arabic and Koranic schools in Italy were known as gateways of radicalization for European Muslims. Habib’s school was not accredited by the Italian education authorities, and yet three hundred students, mostly the sons and daughters of Egyptian and Syrian immigrants, attended it.

  But Habib was also a local hero within his community. Bearded and devout, sometimes genial, sometimes edgy, he projected, overall, a generous grandfatherly image to the families who sent their children to his school. He charged low tuition to working people, and nothing to those who couldn’t afford it. He had also become the target of local fascist groups who denounced Islamic immigration in general-Habib in particular-and Italy’s new secular laws, which to them seemed to give traditional Roman Catholicism a legal backseat to the faith of the unwashed and newly arrived. He was very much a contradiction. He was a gentle man, but he often drew violence. He had been a merchant for much of his life, and yet he was trained at the university level as a chemist. He was a scholar, but he also dealt with thugs. He was suspicious of everyone, yet trusting of too many individuals. Who knew where his real loyalties actually lay?

  Jean-Claude sat quietly with the attache case now across his lap.

  “So?” Habib said eventually. “We are here to conduct business?”

&n
bsp; “We are,” Jean-Claude answered. “But time matters to me. So we should proceed.”

  Jean-Claude placed the attache case on the table. Habib eyed it warily, its latches facing him.

  “If you wouldn’t mind, perhaps you could open it,” Habib suggested.

  Jean-Claude gave a little snort of amusement. “Of course,” he said.

  Jean-Claude unlatched it with two loud clicks. Then he turned it back toward Habib.

  Habib’s eyes widened. Within the case were several bricks of cash, mostly euros but a significant concentration of American dollars as well, fifties and hundreds, bound together with rubber bands. There were some smaller packets of Swiss francs.

  “Count it,” said Jean-Claude.

  “With pleasure, I shall.”

  Habib flicked quickly through the money, calculating as he counted, coming out with a sum equivalent to almost sixty thousand American dollars.

  Finally, Habib smiled. “Very well. Very close to the proper amount, giving consideration to the current rates of exchange. So you have made yourself a purchase,” he said. “It is an honor. But…,” he said, raising his gray eyebrows in exaggerated surprise, “something perplexes me. May I inquire upon a point?”

  Jean-Claude fixed him with a chilly glare, then nodded.

  “A few short weeks ago,” Habib posed, “when we negotiated a price, you stated that you had acquired a piece of art that you were engaged in selling. And yet the price I demanded was considerably higher than what you stood to receive upon that sale. We had quite an argument, if I recall. Yet you arrive here today on an afternoon’s notice with everything that I asked for. That suggests that other funds have come from other sources, which further suggests the involvement of others beyond our immediate circle. As you might imagine, that alarms me.”

  Jean-Claude’s tone was flat. “It shouldn’t,” he said.