Midnight in Madrid Read online

  NOEL HYND

  MIDNIGHT IN MADRID

  Also by Noel Hynd

  The Russian Trilogy

  1| Conspiracy in Kiev

  ZONDERVAN

  Midnight in Madrid

  Copyright © 2009 by Noel Hynd

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  ePub Edition JULY 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-56310-5

  Requests for information should be addressed to:

  Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hynd, Noel.

  Midnight in Madrid / Noel Hynd.

  p. cm.—(The Russian trilogy ; bk. 2)

  ISBN 978-0-310-27872-6 (pbk.)

  1. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation--Officials and employees—Fiction. 2. Antiquities—Fiction. 3. Conspiracies—Fiction. 4. Robbery—Fiction. 5. Madrid

  (Spain)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.Y54M53 2008

  813'.54—dc22 2008049745

  * * *

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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  Edited by Andy Meisenheimer and Alison Roth

  For Patrick and Kathleen Hildreth

  and

  Emily, Sarah, and Molly

  Contents

  Also by Noel Hynd

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTY-THREE

  SIXTY-FOUR

  SIXTY-FIVE

  SIXTY-SIX

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  SIXTY-NINE

  SEVENTY

  SEVENTY-ONE

  SEVENTY-TWO

  SEVENTY-THREE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Publisher

  Share Your Thoughts

  “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.
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  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 Citroën 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 Citroën 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.