His voice trailed off.
“Well?” the curator finally added in conclusion. “Need I say more?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 9, AFTERNOON
Jean-Claude stood at the intersection of the Calle de Maldonado and the Calle de Claudio Coello. He studied the street. In front of him was an upscale residential neighborhood, behind him more of the same. There was also a public square, trees, and traffic.
It was almost 3:00 p.m. There were more pedestrians than he could count, a steady bustle. Well, he reasoned, within crowds there was always anonymity as well as danger.
His eyes settled on the green-and-white face of a Starbuck’s coffee shop that had recently opened. For a moment, he was filled with rage. Was all of Europe going to be Americanized? Was the entire world? He stifled his rage, knowing he would have his day of reckoning within the next week or two. Out of force of habit, he adjusted the long sweatshirt that he wore. Under it was a small pistol, low caliber, Italian-made.
He walked south twenty meters until he came to the doorway of a small three-story building. There was an art gallery on the first floor and apartments above.
He pressed the door code. A buzzer sounded and a big door creaked open.
Jean-Claude stepped into the building. There were two men in the corridor, his accomplices, Samy and Mahoud. They waited on the main floor, a corridor that led up to expensive apartments but also to a small portal that led to the utility closest where the trash was assembled.
The two men stared at him. Then Samy nodded. Jean-Claude moved forward and Mahoud led him to the stairs that went to the basement. On the way down, they both picked up powerful battery-powered flashlights.
The basement was damp and dark, with spider webs, scattered pieces of garbage, and broken bottles. It stank of mildew and smelled of rats. They crossed the old floor. There were things left over from an exterminator’s kit.
“Aquí!” said Mahoud. Here!
Mahoud led Jean-Claude across the floor to an old stone wall.
“How old is the wall?” Jean-Claude asked.
The friend shrugged. How old was the foundation of European cities? From the time of James II? From the time of Torquemada? Mahoud shrugged. What difference did it make?
Mahoud had worked construction for much of his teen years back in the Middle East. He was powerfully built, which was one reason he had been recruited. He put his strong hands upon some stones and the stones started to move. The rocks were old and clammy and heavy, but they fit together in the wall like a Rubik’s cube of masonry.
Jean-Claude watched intently, then lent a hand himself. They removed a dozen rocks from the wall, then another dozen. Gradually a hole emerged at waist level, a hole big enough for a man to pull himself through.
Jean-Claude and Mahoud kept moving stones. After a few minutes, both men had broken a sweat. But the hole was four-by-four.
“Enough,” Mahoud said. “Come with me.”
Mahoud lifted himself up and pulled himself through. With a short jump, he landed on dirt on the other side. He turned and extended a hand as Jean-Claude came through the hole in the wall after him. They were now on a winding path that would lead them under the city.
With their torches casting long yellow beams in front of them, they hunched their shoulders low and followed a bizarre underground passageway that wove around and between the basements and sub-basements of the buildings on the street above them. Mahoud knew the route because he had discovered it himself, tipped off by another Spaniard born in the Middle East who bore no liking for the American presence in Spain.
The pathway was dirt, at times very narrow, at other times heavily strewn with the debris of many years. Rumors had it that some of these passageways dated all the way back to the Inquisition of the 1400s. Other rumors maintained that the passages had been active in the Civil War of the thirties, controlled largely by anti-Franco Republican forces who would emerge to the streets, take potshots at Franco’s soldiers, and disappear again during the final treacherous endgame at the fall of Madrid. But there were an equal number of stories about brutal subterranean ambushes by Franquistas.
Jean-Claude and Mahoud moved quickly. Above them, they could hear the distant rumblings of the city. They could smell the sewer. At times, they passed directly under thick floorboards of houses and shops and could even hear muffled voices.
Then eventually, they reached a dead end, or appeared to.
“This,” said Mahoud, “is the difficult part. My friend, if you’re claustrophobic…”
“I’m not…”
“Then we continue,” he said. “It’s about thirty meters. It’s filthy and it’s a crawl.”
Mahoud went to his knees and loosened about twenty bricks from the base of the wall. Mahoud pulled them out and built them into a neat pile.
“I’ll go first. Keep your arms extended at all times. Pull yourself along. There’s no glass or concrete. It will take us about ten minutes. Maybe more. In some areas the clearance is very low. In these areas you must push yourself along. I suggest going on your stomach but you could do it on your back.”
Mahoud went first, ahead of Jean-Claude by about ten meters. The crawl space was a nightmare of tightness and loose bricks. But Mahoud had been through here already and knew the parameters. They crawled under one house, had a little breathing room, and then crawled under a second. They pushed and prodded their flashlights along in front of them. Only someone driven by fanaticism would have attempted such a crawl. Only a fanatic would have made it.
When they came to an open space twelve minutes later, their limbs were creaky. But Mahoud had led his commander to a large passage, one that led to yet another chamber. They were now faced with another aging underground wall. Mahoud had already excavated a small hole in that, and he led Jean-Claude through that hole too. Then they came upon a stash of tools: hammers, crow bars, and various instruments of excavation.
“This is as far as I’ve progressed,” Mahoud said. “But if I have help, I can be under the United States Embassy within another week. You have all the explosives?”
“I have them,” Jean-Claude said. “But I need detonators. Then we’re in business,” Jean-Claude said. Despite the fact that he was dreading the reverse crawl back to the outlet to the street, he was pleased. He was, in fact, ecstatic.
There were only five members of their cell, and they had all the equipment and knowledge they needed. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
An hour later, Jean-Claude was back up on the Calle Maldonado, two and a half blocks north of the embassy. His clothes were filthy, but no one seemed to notice or care.
He walked across the street and looked in the direction of the American coffee shop. It was filled with wealthy foreigners, to his mind, packed with the cultural imperialists that he so hated.
If he had his way, he’d blow up the coffee shop too.
But first things first. This morning, Jean-Claude had received a message from a man named Lazzari, an Italian of Turkish descent. Lazzari had had something to do with the shipping of the explosives from Italy to Spain. And now Lazzari wanted some money to keep quiet.
So today, instead of blowing up the American coffee shop, Jean-Claude just glared at it, cursed everyone in it, and spat. It was unending, this war against the infidels. No wonder it had been going on for centuries.
TWENTY-EIGHT
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 9, EVENING
Wrapped in a plush white Ritz towel, Alex stood in front of the mirror at the sink in her hotel room. She was working on her hair with the hotel hairdryer when her cell phone rang in her bedroom. She clicked off the hairdryer. She looked up and the ringing stopped.