Out onto the floor they went.
The name of Lee Yuan did not come up again that evening.
Alex did not weave back into her hotel suite until well past 2:00 a.m.
FORTY-SIX
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 12, MORNING
On fewer hours of sleep than she might have preferred, Alex rose the next morning later than the previous day. It was almost nine when she opened her eyes. She checked her email, the personal account first.
There was something from Ben back in the States, which she opened first. Then she quickly switched into her secure account for Treasury. She wished to read everything in her Inbox before sending anything.
There was nothing from Floyd Connelly, who this morning was neither Pink nor Pretty Boy. She prowled through the latest links from her associates at Scotland Yard, Interpol, the Spanish and French police agencies, as well as Rizzo in Rome. Rizzo was in a newly explosive and churlish mood. He’d had DNA tests run on the tissue sample beneath his fingernails and was fuming that there had been no matches yet.
She scanned some new attachments from her contacts. Nothing good.
Hunched over the laptop in a T-shirt and navy track shorts, her dark hair hanging carelessly to the side of her face as she inclined over her work, she again looked more like a graduate student than a skilled investigator from the United States Department of Treasury. And a funny bit of doggerel rebounded from her own youth years ago. A phrase her mother used to say: A fool can ask more questions than a wise woman can answer.
So what was she this morning, Alex wondered in a little pang of self-criticism. A fool or a wise woman, dancing into the early morning hours at a Spanish tavern with an agent of Chinese state security whom she had just met a few days ago? Did a fast and loose social life fit her current mood and lifestyle?
Well, it had been most enjoyable. And Peter hadn’t made any move toward her at the end of the evening. Was she disappointed by that? The mood had loosened between them…
Hey! She said to herself. Reality check: you’re on duty! Behave!
The previous evening, Peter had revealed something of interest, something perhaps that he might have otherwise not wished to mention. Lee Yuan. Maybe it was something she could parlay.
She went back to the attachments from Colonel Pendraza. She had become adept at skimming them quickly. She worked her way through them.
Two Germans who belonged to neo-Nazi skinhead groups in Munich had been arrested in Luxembourg, charged with illegally selling to police informants twenty pounds of dynamite to be used against synagogues across Europe. Policia Nacional agents in Tunisia had arrested another neo-Nazi after he allegedly tried to purchase ingredients for deadly sarin nerve gas and C-4 plastic explosives from an Interpol undercover agent. A key tip had come from an Israeli born prostitute. Then a biggie: members of the Irish National Police had raided the Antrim county home of a former Provo and discovered an arsenal of more than 250,000 rounds of ammunition, fifty pipe bombs, and ten remote-control briefcase bombs. No longer useful for the conflict in Ireland, the old IRA gent was trying to move the stuff to the Middle East. Then there was something about the movement of HDX explosives from Iraq through Cyprus. Interpol had been on the case and had lost track of the HDX shipment there. The explosives may have moved east, they might still be in some mountain hideaway. Who knew until someone set them off? This dead-end tale gave way to two stories about the same “honor killing” of an Iraqi girl in Naples who had gotten pregnant by an Italian boy. The girl’s uncle had killed her before killing himself.
Alex blew out a long breath. But her fingers busied themselves at the keyboard again. Something had occurred to her while she was asleep, and she had now formulated her approach to it.
She went back to her secure email account and went to Mail. In the address box, she typed in a message in English to be sent to every person who had been at the embassy meeting five days previously.
Maybe, maybe, maybe…
Maybe by keeping her ears open and not getting too soused on the champagne, she had heard something of note.
In the course of my investigations concerning The Pietà of Malta, the name of “Lee Yuan” surfaced last evening. Has that name been in any way involved in any investigation in any of your records? I have reason to believe that “Yuan” (possibly a pseudonym) may also have been on the trail of our so-called black bird. Would you please run this name across your files and get back to me with a response as soon as possible? My information indicates that Yuan was a Chinese national and was very possibly traveling in Europe on a Chinese passport, perhaps diplomatic. Please note also, that, as the name is transliterated from the Chinese, there may be other variations to the spelling. I have obtained this name from a source I consider highly reliable, so I would appreciate your feedback as quickly as possible. Alex LaDuca Ritz, Madrid
She hit Send and leaned back from her laptop.
She sat quietly for several minutes and waited to see if there was any immediate response from anyone. There was none. She closed down the laptop. She felt her attention flag. She needed a break. She threw her swimsuit into a tote bag and hit the local gym again.
Weights and a swim.
Ninety minutes later, refreshed, she was back on the balcony, hammering at the keyboard of the laptop, and the wireless connection was trying to scan through more of the documents from the National Police. She continued to come up empty, however. And she knew there was nothing she could do now. She passed the afternoon in Madrid, walking, visiting some small stores, but preoccupied. She checked in on email several times during the day and while her associates gradually, one by one, acknowledged her inquiry, none had anything new to direct back to her.
Yuan’s name rang no immediate bells anywhere. She felt disappointment.
There was no reply at all from Floyd Connelly, whom she increasingly considered worse than useless, or from Essen at Interpol. Rizzo in Rome said he was shaking as many trees as possible and would see what he might have by the following morning. The French National Police had nothing on Yuan and neither did the two Spanish agencies.
Fair enough. Lee Yuan may have had no bearing on recent events after all. Or maybe, she wondered when her darkest notions took over, the whole story was a bit of concocted fiction. Maybe she was being played for a sucker by Peter and his sharp little gang of Sino-warriors.
She had the uncomfortable feeling of being a fool but didn’t know whose. In a final email dispatch of the evening, she sent to her museum contacts her tentative itinerary to Switzerland, CC-ing Mike in Washington. It was a debatable step, but she decided long ago that it would be better to have your peers recover your body than to just disappear forever.
When evening came, Alex grabbed a light dinner toward eight o’clock in a tapas bar. She had the inclination to phone Peter but knew that there was always the chance that one of their cell phones or even both were no longer secure. Since it was part of the overall plan to not reveal their association to any enemy, calls needed to be kept at a minimum
She arranged with the hotel for an evening check-out, finished the final details of packing, and went to the train station by 10:00 p.m. She boarded the train and found her private compartment. She was tired from the previous late night, so she eased into her bed with a couple of books. A final check of email came up empty.
The train, while fully boarded, stayed in the station for two hours before pulling out and hitting the open tracks. At this time she tried to settle in for sleep, carefully placing her loaded gun at her bedside.
Alex had not taken an overnight train for many years and had forgotten how tactile the cozy charm of the train was. The feel of the steel wheels on the rails had a comforting rhythm to it. It lulled her to sleep almost immediately.