FOUR
Aideen was still sitting in the leather couch when Comisario Diego Fernandez arrived. He was a man of medium height and build. He was clean-shaven with a ruddy complexion and carefully trimmed goatee. His black hair was longish but neat and he peered out carefully from behind gold-rimmed spectacles. He wore black leather gloves, black suede shoes, and a black trenchcoat. Beneath the open coat was a dark gray business suit.
An aide shut the door behind him. When it had clicked shut, the inspector bowed politely to Aideen.
“Our deepest sympathy and apologies for your loss,” he said. His voice was deep, the English accent thick. “If there’s anything I or my department can do to help you, please ask.”
“Thank you, Inspector,” Aideen said.
“Be assured that the resources of the entire Madrid metropolitan police department as well as other government offices will be applied to finding whoever was responsible for this atrocious act.”
Aideen looked up at the police inspector. He couldn’t be talking to her. The police department couldn’t be looking for the killer of someone she knew. The TV announcements and newspaper headlines wouldn’t be about a person she had been dressing with in a hotel room just an hour before. Though she had lived through the killing and seen Martha’s body on the street, the experience didn’t seem real. Aideen was so accustomed to changing things — rewinding a tape to see something she’d missed or erasing computer data she didn’t need — that the irreversibility of this seemed impossible.
But in her brain Aideen knew that it had happened. And that it was irreversible. After being brought here, she’d called the hotel and briefed Darrell McCaskey. McCaskey had said he would inform Op-Center. He’d seemed surprisingly unshocked — or maybe Darrell was always that collected. Aideen didn’t know him well enough to say. Then she’d sat here trying to tell herself that the shooting was a random act of terrorism and not a hit. After all, it wasn’t the same as in Tijuana two years earlier when her friend Odin Gutierrez Rico had literally been blasted to death by four gunmen with assault rifles. Rico was the director of criminal trials in Baja California. He was a public figure who had regularly received death threats and had continued to defy the nation’s drug traffickers. His death was a tragic loss but not a surprise. It was a very public statement that the prosecution of drug dealers would not be tolerated by the underworld.
Martha was here with a cover story known only to a handful of government officials. She had come to Madrid to help Deputy Serrador work out a plan to keep his own people, the Basques, from joining with the equally nationalistic Catalonians in an effort to break away from Spain. The Basque uprisings in the 1980s had been sporadic enough to fail but violent enough to be remembered. Martha and Serrador both believed that an organized revolt by two of the nation’s five major ethnic groups — especially if those groups were well armed and better prepared than in the 1980s — would not only be enormously destructive but would have a good chance of succeeding.
If this were an assassination, if Martha had been the target, it meant that there was a leak in the system somewhere. And if there were a leak then the peace process was in serious danger. It was a cruel irony that only a short time before, Martha had been insisting that nothing must be allowed to interfere with the talks.
You know what’s at stake….
Then, of course, Martha had been worried about Aideen’s overreaction in the street.
If only that had been our worst roadblock, Aideen thought. We sweat the details and end up missing the big picture—
“Senorita?” the inspector said.
Aideen blinked. “Yes?”
“Are you all right?”
Aideen had been looking past Comisario Fernandez, at the dark windows. But she focused on the inspector now. He was still standing a few feet away, smiling down at her.
“Yes, I’m fine,” she said. “I’m very sorry, Inspector. I was thinking about my friend.”
“I understand,” the inspector replied quietly. “If it would not be too much for you, might I ask you a few questions?”
“Of course,” she replied. She’d been slumping forward but now she sat up in the chair. “First, Inspector, would you mind telling me if the surveillance cameras told you anything?”
“Unfortunately, they did not,” the inspector said. “The gunman was standing just out of range.”
“He knew what that range was?”
“Apparently, he did,” the inspector admitted. “Unfortunately, it will take us a while to find out everyone who had access to that information — and to interrogate them all.”
“I understand,” Aideen said.
The inspector drew a small, yellow notebook from his coat pocket. The smile faded as he studied some notes and slipped a pen from the spiral binder. When he was finished reading he looked at Aideen.
“Did you and your companion come to Madrid for pleasure?” the inspector asked.
“Yes. Yes, we did.”
“You informed the guard at the gate that you came to the Congreso de los Diputados for a personal tour.”
“That’s right.”
“This tour was arranged by whom?”
“I don’t know,” said Aideen.
“Oh?”
“My companion set it up through a friend back in the States,” Aideen informed him.
“Would you be able to provide me with the name of this friend?” the inspector asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Aideen replied. “I don’t know who it was. My coming on this trip was rather last-minute.”
“Possibly it was a coworker who arranged it,” he suggested. “Or else a neighbor? A local politician?”
“I don’t know,” Aideen insisted. “I’m sorry, Inspector, but it wasn’t something I thought I’d need to know.”
The inspector stared at her for a long moment. Then he lowered his eyes slowly and wrote her answers in his notebook.
Aideen didn’t think that he believed her; that was what she got from the disapproving turn of his mouth and the stern knot of flesh between his eyebrows. And she hated stonewalling the investigation. But until she heard otherwise from Darrell McCaskey or Deputy Serrador, she had no choice but to continue to play this by the cover story.
Comisario Fernandez turned slowly and thoughtfully to a fresh page of the notebook. “Did you see the man who attacked you?”
“I didn’t see his face,” she said. “He fired a flash picture just before he reached for his weapon.”
“Did you smell any cologne? Aftershave?”
“No.”
“Did you notice the camera? The make?”
“No,” she said. “I wasn’t close enough — and then there was the flash. I only saw his clothes.”
“Aha,” he said. He stepped forward eagerly. “Can you tell me what they looked like?”
Aideen took a long breath. She shut her eyes. “He was wearing a tight denim jacket and a baseball cap. A dark blue or black cap, worn with the brim in front. He had on loose khaki trousers and black shoes. I want to say that he was a young man, though I can’t be entirely certain.”
“What gave you that impression?”
Aideen opened her eyes. “There was something about the way he stood,” she replied. “His feet planted wide, his shoulders squared, his head held erect. Very strong, very poised.”
“You’ve seen this look before?” the inspector asked.
“Yes,” Aideen replied. The killer had reminded her of a Striker, though of course she couldn’t say that. “Where I went to college there was ROTC,” she lied. “Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. The killer had the bearing of a soldier. Or at least someone who was skilled in handling firearms.”