Midnight in Madrid rt-2 Page 4

In the ensuing decades, Spain remained a closed corner of Europe, a nation that had once had an empire and great artists like Goya, Velasquez, and Picasso, but which had also turned inward from the outside world. It was not until the 1950s, when the United States was seeking allies in the fight against communism, that Spain rejoined a Western alliance. Control of the Straits of Gibraltar and permission to place American air bases in Spain were no small part of the equation.

  And now after seven decades, feelings in Spain have not completely healed. In late 2007, Spain finally passed a law that families wanting to unearth bodies of relatives killed during the Spanish Civil War should now receive full cooperation from the state. And the government mandated that every province in the country must remove remaining monuments to Franco.

  As the train sped for Madrid, however, Alex’s mind flickered from the distant past to her own personal events of a more recent coinage. Her fiance, a member of the United State Secret Service, had been killed recently in the line of duty. She remained angry and unsettled with God at the events that had befallen her. Deep down, she had not yet learned how to forgive the people or forces that had caused Robert’s death. In terms of what she now wanted from life, she remained undecided.

  Like this very mission. Why accept it? Then again, why not?

  Soft route, indeed.

  Outside in the distance, she saw a small church and churchyard and for a fleeting half a minute, she could see a funeral in progress. She was somehow touched by the feelings of sympathy, empathy, and sorrow for the people gathered there.

  It was a rural ceremony. It brought to mind a memory of her own, when she was a little girl, visiting her mother’s childhood home in Mexico. Her grandmother’s health had been failing for two or three years. But during this summer, when Alex was nine, her grandmother had suddenly started to run a high fever. Overnight, her breathing became difficult. The family wanted to move her to the hospital, but the nearest facility was a hundred miles away.

  “Tu abuela se esta murienda,” her mother explained. Your grandmother is dying.

  “No. Ella no puede,” Alex answered, in denial. No! She can’t!

  Alex went to her grandmother’s bedside. She placed her hand on the old woman’s, then upon her forehead as her eyes welled with tears.

  “Por favor,” Alex cried. “Don’t leave us.”

  Her abuela managed a weak smile. Across three generations, they spoke to each other in Spanish, in the accents of Oxipalta, where the old woman had lived as a girl.

  “Remember, Alex, there is a purpose to everything, a time for everything. The Creator has seen to that. Many years ago, I was young and strong. But now I am tired. I must rest. It’s what God intended.”

  By her bedside was a small white paper bag with sand in it. The sand supported a small candle.

  “Be my little angel,” Alex’s grandmother had said. “Light the luminaria for me. Through the light of the luminaria, my Lord Jesus will find me.”

  Alex sobbed and kissed her grandmother. She told her how much she loved her. She fumbled with some matches and lit the luminaria. Her grandmother smiled, closed her eyes, and never spoke again.

  Alex’s mother sat by the bed. A few hours later, the old woman passed away.

  The next day, Alex sat by the open coffin. A young priest from the local parish said Mass in Spanish. Afterward, the family and the priest buried abuela in the camposanto by the churchyard. They laid her to rest next to her husband, who had died ten years earlier.

  It was Alex’s first brush with death, the first time she had tried to comprehend it. But in Alex’s mind and in her heart, another luminaria had been lit, one of faith, and it still burned.

  It was like that with Robert, her late fiance, too, Alex realized. The luminaria, the simple candle, still burned. But it hadn’t receded in memory as much as her grandmother’s, and the flame had been lit much more recently. And yet, in the same way, Alex had moved on.

  What alternative was there, really?

  The final two hours of the trip passed uneventfully. Her seat companion was a gray-haired Spanish woman twice her age who was deeply engrossed in a novella. For a while, Alex gamed on her iPod, with only a casual eye on the scenery. Eventually, the train passed a glorious castle about forty minutes outside of Madrid, then through the surprisingly third world shanties of gypsies that ringed the city. Then it pulled into Madrid Atocha at quarter to three. She disembarked. Here too the station was surprisingly modern, the original nineteenth-century one serving as a kind of trainless winter garden. Gradually the familiar faces from the train disappeared into the crowds at the station and ceased to be a part of her day.

  She took a taxi to the hotel, which was only about fifteen minutes away. “The Prado,” the driver said as they passed the famous museum, although she had visited it many times on previous visits. As they approached a fountain with a figure of Neptune, they turned onto a crescent with a little park in the middle called the Plaza de la Lealtad and pulled up in front of the Ritz, a building that looked to be straight out of Paris.

  “The stock exchange is on the other side of the square,” the taxi driver said. “Maybe not a coincidence,” he added with a laugh. “No poor people here.”

  The Ritz had been Madrid’s most prestigious hotel since it opened at the beginning of the twentieth century. King Alphonso XIII, grandfather of the current King Juan Carlos II, invested his personal money into its construction. Alex had stayed there once before, about five years earlier.

  The lobby was grand and immaculate. A fortuitous error had taken place in booking, and she was bumped up from a single room to a small suite. The suite not lacking for comfort, from king-sized beds to plush carpets, to reading chairs, two phones, Internet connection, and an antique desk. She opened a pair of twin windows to view the city, even though the air-conditioning was humming quietly and efficiently.

  Okay. She was in Madrid. Now what?

  SEVEN

  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.

  EIGHT

  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 cafe and tuned into several conversations around her, that she was already thinking in Spanish.

  NINE

  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 cafes, 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, Senores?” he asked in Spanish.

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

  “Ciudadano frances,” 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.

  TEN

  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 t
he old city were illuminated. The many open-front cafes 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 Pieta of Malta remains in our possession?”