Never mind the fact that they might have killed her. The gunman who had covered her back had dispatched these two men with an unholy precision.
One half of one man’s head had been hammered away by bullets and the remaining eye socket was hollow. The other man’s face had been completely smashed in by gunfire so horribly that Alex wondered whether it had been done intentionally to make identification difficult, or pathologically out of some unknown vengeance.
“These were the two men in police uniform?” Pendraza said. “To the extent that you can recognize them.”
Rizzo looked at the corpse that had half a head remaining. His eyes slid back to Alex. He gave her a nod.
“I agree,” she said. “That’s one. Not much question really if you picked up the bodies at the scene of the shooting. Any identification yet?” she asked.
“No,” Colonel Pendraza said. “They weren’t police; you know that. Exactly who they were and why you were targeted, we don’t know. I can only assume it has something to do with the pietà, but you’ve been in this line of work. It could have been left over business from something else.”
“Possibly,” she said.
“We’ll do DNA and fingerprints to the extent possible,” the colonel said. “Dental isn’t possible because the oral cavities have been destroyed. We have some bullet fragments. Those might tell us something. Anything else here?” he asked. “Either of you? Any thoughts at all?”
“Just the machinelike precision of the shooter,” Alex said. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. And I’m not sure I will again.”
“Unless it saves your life again,” Rizzo added. “Good Lord.”
“Unless it saves my life,” she said, “yes. Point well taken.”
“And then there’s the picture that begins to emerge,” Alex said. “Two men posing as police officers, another two in the bar, along with a woman. Whoever we’re dealing with begins to look like part of a fairly extensive organization. And then there’s the actual museum thieves who probably were none of these people.”
“I like the way you think,” Pendraza said. “I agree with you.”
Colonel Pendraza motioned to a lab technician, a young woman in blue scrubs. She rezipped the bags, then summoned more help from the next office. The team at the morgue would return the bodies back to the deep freeze.
THIRTY-FOUR
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 10, EARLY AFTERNOON
Alex moved quietly through the lobby of the Ritz and took the elevator up. The hallway on the fifth floor was quiet. A maid was working with a vacuum cleaner in a room two away from hers. The maid gave Alex a polite nod as Alex passed.
Alex came to her own door, paused out of caution, listened, heard nothing from within, and swiped her room card in the slot. She pushed the door forward. The door was still moving when Alex saw two legs lazily folded, belonging to a man in a suit sitting on her sofa.
“LaDuca!” roared out a booming male voice. “Finally! About time you got here!”
American, with slightly mid-Atlantic Coast inflections. It was a voice that she recognized instantly. She pushed the door the rest of the way open, reaching by instinct for her new weapon at the same time. The legs unfolded and shifted toward her. She stepped forward without closing the door, her pistol aloft and pointed.
The man looked at her. The man’s hands were in plain sight, holding no weapon.
“Oh, honestly, Alex. Don’t be overly dramatic.” Mark McKinnon, the CIA’s chief honcho assigned to western Europe, whom she had most recently worked with in the ragged aftermath of Kiev.
McKinnon gave her a smile. There was a bottle of Bushmill’s Irish whiskey on the table in front of him, with a bucket of ice and a bottle of water. There was a glass in his hand. He seemed more relaxed than he should have been, but it was Bushmill’s Eighteen Year Old. The good stuff relaxes a man real fast.
But someone else was in the room too, and that someone was behind the door.
She stepped away but was not quick enough. From the other side of the door came a lithe, agile man of about six feet. He had his hand on her pistol like a velvet hammer, quickly turning her hand upward against the thumb, removing the pistol quickly, and taking it from her. He did all this with such a deft touch that he managed to not hurt her at all, much like a parent removing a dangerous toy from a child’s possession.
Then with a leg, before she could say anything, he pushed the door shut and they stood eye to eye.
“Hello again,” he said. No smile. No emotion.
“Come on in, LaDuca! Have a drink with us!” boomed McKinnon, finally standing. “And relax, would you? It’s about time you formally met Peter Chang. Peter’s come all the way from Peking. I know you’ve seen him before, and I think you’re going to like working with him. Know what? My guess is that you already do!”
Peter Chang smiled very slightly. Then it was gone again.
Up close, he had movie star good looks. An Asian Adonis in a fine suit with a classic Western tie and a light blue shirt. His eyes were dark and sharp, his stature strong but nimble. His hair was perfect. Werewolf of London, she found herself thinking.
Peter gave his head a slight nod. He checked her pistol for ammunition and safety catch, and, with a little showboating Jackie Chan-style move, flipped it around in his hand so that the barrel was pointing away from her.
“Nice piece,” he said. “New acquisition? You didn’t have it last night.”
“If I had,” she said, “I might have used it.”
“That would not have been good,” he said. “If you had tried, one of us wouldn’t be here right now.”
Then he returned the weapon to her, still loaded.
“My apologies if I scared you last night,” he said.
His English was impeccable, just like his marksmanship had been. He could have worked on Saville Row as a tailor or at Claridge’s as a hotel manager.
Her nerves settled slightly. She took back her Browning, then took McKinnon up on his invitation and sat down. It was, after all, her room, even if the taxpayers were footing the bill.
“So, LaDuca,” said McKinnon, as Alex found a place in a comfortable chair. “How are you enjoying your visit to Spain…so far?”
“I’ve been here in Spain before,” she said. “More than once. There was a tax case back in 2004. The FBI sent me because they needed someone who spoke Spanish and French.”
“So you know your way around?” he asked.
“As I said, business a few times. And that’s aside from the trip I made when I was a college student.”
Chang sat quietly, his eyes set upon her like a pair of compass needles pointing north.
“Yeah, I guess those were the days,” McKinnon said. “College years. I remember them myself.”
“Prewar Berlin and the rest, huh?” she said. “Marlene Dietrich in the clubs, right?”
“Ouch! That was nasty.”
“So is finding you here. The lobby wouldn’t work for you to wait?”
Chang followed the repartee back and forth.
“No, it wouldn’t,” McKinnon said. “Not with Peter at my side, not with the security cameras all over the bloody place, and not with a couple of Madrid cops-who weren’t Madrid cops-shot dead last night. What a bloody mess. And anyway, what’s the point of our agency having master keys to every hotel in Madrid if we don’t use them from time to time?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“Oh, I’m sure you do,” he said. “And by the way, your file did say you were here on the 2004 tax case and that you did visit Malaga with a boyfriend named Damien in 1997. Damien later went into the military, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t. I haven’t seen him for more than a decade. So why don’t you tell me something else I don’t know, like what you’re doing here and what’s going on, at least from your jaded end of things. Who were the people in the cop uniforms and who jabbed a needle into my partner last night?”