“Lift that and you will find what you want,” Habib said.
The man in the crawl space lifted the canvas. Beneath the canvas was a pair of black duffel bags, new and sturdy, carefully wrapped in heavy transparent plastic. The man in the pit lifted the two bags and pushed them onto the floor of the barn.
Jean-Claude knelt down. From his pocket he drew a knife and with a click popped the blade forward. He cut open the transparent plastic and unzipped the first bag. He reached in. Within the bag were what appeared to be white bricks of some sort of plaster-style construction material. He pushed carefully through the whole bag and took an inventory. It was as expected. He opened the second bag and confirmed a similar inventory. He looked approvingly at what was before him.
“Will the owner of the barn not know this has been taken?” Jean-Claude asked.
Habib chuckled. “The owner of the barn does not know what was here. In truth, he does not know anything was here.”
“You are very cautious,” nodded Jean-Claude. “I like that.”
“Cautious and reckless at the same moment,” Habib said. “You could murder me and dump my body in that pit,” he said, indicating the hidden foundation, “and I wouldn’t be found for months. Maybe years.”
“How do you know we won’t?” Jean-Claude asked.
Habib shrugged. “I don’t,” he said.
The two gunmen were nervous. Habib smiled to the other two men, who did not return the kind gesture.
Jean-Claude zipped both bags closed and stood.
“As expected?” Habib asked. “The cargo?”
“Exactly.”
“You are pleased with the transaction?”
“Completely.”
For the first time that evening, Habib broke into a broad grin. “Then I am pleased too, my friend,” he said.
Jean-Claude returned the smile. He opened his arms to suggest an embrace. Habib stepped forward. Jean-Claude wrapped his powerful arms around the older Arab and locked him in a tight embrace. Jean-Claude then pushed back and tried to break apart. But Habib continued to hold him and became very serious, almost like a scold.
“Let me tell you something, my young compatriot,” he said. “I take one look at you, my friend, and I see a very smart but a very angry young man. About some things, I do not care. You can kill as many Western infidels as you wish. My only concern is that you do not get arrested with anything that could be traced to me.”
“Why would I get arrested?”
“Informers, snitches, and traitors are everywhere, even in our community!” Habib said. “People loyal to the Jews, to the Americans! Are you so foolish that you do not know that?”
“I’ve been careful. Extremely careful.”
“So far, yes. But already I hear rumors of what is afoot in Madrid. Already I hear stories that suggest that our organizations could be counterattacked by police and saboteurs in Switzerland and Spain.”
A moment passed. Habib released Jean-Claude.
“All right,” Jean-Claude finally said. “We need to keep moving.”
“Please help me reseal our hiding chamber,” said Habib.
Jean-Claude’s two assistants did much of the heavy lifting, piling farm equipment back into the storage area, then sealing it again. They covered the makeshift pit with hay. Then they left the barn, carrying the two duffels to which Habib had led them. They stashed the cargo in the trunk of their car.
Habib remained behind. Then the three travelers silently returned to their car. They drove it back to the main road and turned northward, the direction from which they had come. Jean-Claude rode in the back. Their mission now was to get as far away as quickly as possible, and this they did to perfection.
FOUR
BARCELONA, SPAIN, SEPTEMBER 4, LATE MORNING
Something told Alex LaDuca not to come out of the water. Her holiday in Spain was going so pleasantly, particularly following all the horrible events in Paris.
Some instinct told her that the vacation was about to come to a crashing end. But she finished swimming a few final strokes in the gentle surf, fifty meters from the beach and then turned leisurely to shore. The Platja de Barceloneta was a seductive place off the east coast of Spain, with smooth waves, soft sand, and the comforting warm water. The beach was a world-class one perched on the edge of Barcelona’s city limits. It was almost lunchtime. The sun was intensifying. The Mediterranean was as blue as the sky above it. A perfect day to go out and swim a mile, which is what she had just done.
She reached water that was waist deep. Then she was in knee-high water and waded toward shore, enjoying the caress of the water upon her legs. She was feeling good again, fit and athletic, her mind strong and straight, her body the same. She had even purchased a new bathing suit for this trip, a red Nike two-piece. Not one of those scanty two-piece jobs that barely covered anything, “three postage stamps” her girlfriend Laura back in Washington liked to call them. But her suit was a bold one, good for some modest sun bathing but also good for a thirty-minute swim.
Red, as a guy once said to her, as in “red hot.”
On this beach there were plenty of younger women who were there for the “top optional” experience, though these were mostly northern Europeans and a few North Americans. Alex wasn’t about to join them, but she didn’t have problems with it either. Maybe when her friend Ben teased her that she “had been in Europe too long” he had an amusing point.
Too long? she thought. Or not long enough? To Alex, Spain remained a fascinating if polarized place, a vibrant young democracy whose older generations had endured the Franco dictatorship and the strict moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Spain under the government of socialist Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero had become one of the most socially progressive countries in Europe. Today, the political right pulled one way in Spanish society and the left pulled in another. And then the Islamic population pulled in its own way.
The latter was a relatively new factor: More than five centuries earlier King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had expelled Muslims unwilling to convert to Christianity. Now, as part of the worldwide migration of people from third world to first world countries, Spain was subject to an inflow of illegal immigrants not unlike that affecting the United States.
When she reached ankle-deep water, she stepped between some children at play. She smiled to them and to the bronzed, bikini-clad au pair girls who attended them. Alex was starting to feel good about life again. On paper, she was still an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on loan to the US Department of Treasury. She was still on the payroll even as she walked on the beach.
Her employers back in the United States, both the FBI and Treasury, had been generous about a few weeks of paid leave. Even the bureaucrats who oversaw her assignments agreed that she could use the R-and-R, first from a personal tragedy in February and then from nearly being gunned down in the Paris Metro in May. Before that, there had been the attack on the US president in Kiev, during which Alex had personally had a hand in protecting the president. The system, all agreed, owed her.
She kept telling herself that had been the past, her professional triumph in Kiev, linked to a personal catastrophe. It had been what God intended, she told herself. She could do nothing about the past but could do much about her own future. Yet as a little bit of a spiritual nod to the past and the future, she wore around her neck a delicate gold chain that supported a stone pendant, slightly smaller than an American quarter.
The pendant was of stone and had praying hands carved into it. Months earlier, she had bought it from a girl in the remote mountain village of Barranco Lajoya in Venezuela to replace a small gold cross she had lost in Kiev. In Paris, the stone had shattered, but she took the pieces to a jeweler in Montparnasse and had the pieces reset with a gold-plated steel edge around it to secure it together. So there it still hung. As a piece of beach jewelry, it nicely set off her tan and her swimsuit. Worn on a dressy occasion with a suit, it was equally handsome.