And they too were happy to be conduits for Jean-Claude’s cargo.
So when Jean-Claude dropped the cargo at the bakery, Samy personally stashed both bags in a locked area of a deep walk-in pantry in his bakery.
He was thrilled with what he had and happy to be part of Jean-Claude’s team and mission.
NINETEEN
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 7, 4:23 P.M.
As a warm afternoon faded in the Spanish capital, Alex opened her laptop on a table on her small balcony at the Ritz. She had a soft drink on ice and had changed out of her “meeting” clothes into more comfortable duds: shorts and a T-shirt, an outfit that made perfect sense in terms of relaxation, but too casual to wander around the starchy old Ritz or even this very dressy neighborhood.
She settled into a comfortable cushioned chair. Five floors below traffic rumbled along the Paseo del Prado, though the crescent in front of the Ritz was quiet.
As the computer booted, Alex’s gaze drifted out across the city. Madrid had been the capital of the Iberian Peninsula since the middle of the sixteenth century. She gazed over the ancient city and felt a surge of excitement and fascination. It would be nice, she told herself, to come back here someday with time to burn, time to enjoy at her own pace the museums, nightclubs, and sporting events. She would love to watch Real Madrid, the city’s world-class soccer team play a game at Estadio Santiago Bernabeu or catch a bullfight at Las Ventas, the world’s most famous bullring. She would like to come back here someday with someone she loved.
And then her thoughts tripped a mental landmine, one of sadness and longing, one of still painfully missing her fiancé, Robert, who had died early that year. The memories set off a wave of bittersweet loneliness within her, one she fought almost every day for at least a few moments. She knew what had happened in Kiev, but she hadn’t fully accepted it.
Alex looked at her watch. She sighed.
She clicked into her secure email and looked for anything that might have come in during the last few hours. Predictably, several of the men who had been at the meeting at the embassy had already checked in with her. Pierre LeMaitre of the French National Police had been the first, followed by Rolland Fitzgerald of Scotland Yard and Maurice Essen of Interpol. None of them had anything new for her.
Floyd Connelly of US Customs, the pudgy old Orson Welles look-alike, had sent an empty email. Alex wondered what to make of it, other than the notion that the man was quickly emerging as a blustery old fool. Somewhere he had a secretary who did his job for him.
She was about to exit the email when another note popped up from Fitzgerald at Scotland Yard. He had a brief file touching on anti-US terrorist activities in Spain and attached it for Alex’s consideration.
It was filled with rumors and conjectures, as well as a shopping list of predictably Islamic names and addresses of mosques. Nothing substantial. Nothing specific. Just a maze of nasty implications floating around, waiting to make sense or waiting to have some sense made of them. Stuff like that could be a gold mine. Or it could send her a hundred eighty degrees in the wrong direction. She finished but then scanned again to see if she had missed anything.
She had. Almost.
She found an email from her occasional employer in New York, Joseph Collins, who financed mission work in Latin America. It had been Collins who had bankrolled her visit earlier in the year.
Alex wrote back, telling him she was in Madrid on a new assignment. And she would, she promised, keep him informed.
She moved on. Time passed.
Her fingers went to work on the keyboard, and she fired back a response to the Englishman Rolland Fitzgerald, thanking him. At least the man was thinking. Then again, so was Alex.
As recently as 2004, she recalled, the deadliest terrorist attack in Europe had occurred in Madrid: ten synchronized blasts on trains, nearly two hundred killed, fourteen hundred wounded. Al-Qaeda had been responsible.
The victims on that infamous day had not necessarily been Americans, but the Spanish government and any members of humanity who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it further occurred to her, just from the perspective of her own employer, the multitude of targets within Spain linked to the United States: embassies, consulates, USO clubs that had been targeted in the past, and naval bases at Gibraltar and Barcelona. Then there was the massive US naval installation for the Sixth Fleet at Rota on the other side of the bay from Cádiz, west of Gibraltar. The facility was a Spanish base, but with a massive US presence.
Her thoughts teemed. And then suddenly, she was mentally maxed out, very much on overload.
She glanced at her watch: 7:16 in the evening.
If it was a quarter past seven in Madrid, it was the same number of minutes after 1:00 p.m. in the eastern United States. She still had some telephone credit cards, so what good were they if she didn’t use them?
She needed someone to talk to, so she dialed a number in northern Virginia and got her friend Ben on the line.
They talked. A lot. Alex put her feet up onto the railing of the balcony and pushed, leaning back in her chair, then rocking slowly. Time flew.
Almost an hour later, she hung up the line, her spirits lifted temporarily. But during the call, the sky had darkened a little with some clouds that had rolled in from the Pyrenees to the far north. The late afternoon had long since made its transition to evening now and she could see the computer screen better. In the distance, across a rooftop, a neon Tio Pepe sign, an ad for the largest selling sherry in the country, glowed bright red across the rooftop of a commercial building.
A second surge of homesickness was upon her, as were thoughts about Robert. She knew it was best to get out of the hotel room.
She packed up her laptop and took it with her. She went to the same café as she had frequented the previous evening, sat at the same table, and felt better for being out, even when she flipped open the laptop and reviewed museum documents until 10:30. Then she surfed the web for relaxation a bit, had a final Carlos Primero, a distinguished Spanish brandy, and shut down her computer in favor of her iPod.
Eventually, it was midnight. She walked back to the hotel, alone on busy sidewalks in a very safe neighborhood. When she reached her room, she was exhausted.
She made no pass at any further work. She showered and went to bed. In her dreams, she was an innocent young girl again, laughing in the company of her beloved parents, playing in the warm surf of Southern California. The strong hands that picked her up and tossed her around in the water belonged to her late father.
She slept beautifully. Not everyone that night was as fortunate.
TWENTY
GENEVA, SEPTEMBER 8, 2:12 A.M.
The evening after meeting Colonel Tissot, Stanislaw had gone to his home and packed. He had a car at his disposal with a fraudulent registration. He would get into the car the next morning and begin to drive. The autoroute would take him down through France, and he would make Barcelona within a day. Driving was more arduous than flying, but driving gave him the temporary anonymity he wanted.
He had done enough research on his prey to know that in reality, Alexandra LaDuca was not about to cavort with a man she hardly knew. But the local police in Spain wouldn’t know that. A death is a death is a death in the police ledgers, and he would be long out of the country under another false identity before the dead woman’s body was even cold.
He planned an early getaway from Geneva the next morning. Thus, he was soundly asleep by midnight and resting very comfortably when his eyes inexplicably came open in the middle of the night.