FORTY-SEVEN
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 12, AFTERNOON
That same afternoon, Jean-Claude was down in his tunnel again. And he could barely conceal his delight at what he saw. The blast had blown a perfectly sized hole in the debris. It had cleared a route to the other side of the Calle Juan Bravo.
The pathway was dirty. It was musty and dusty and ankle deep in water. But he managed to crawl through it. Then, scanning ahead, pointing his flashlight, he could see that the pathway continued for maybe another thirty meters before encountering another wall. He examined his new location and realized that he was still working in a closely parallel path to those taken by Metro workers, electrical workers, or telephone technicians. There were several old power grids and telephone junctions along this route.
Well, the chamber had been cleared. His people were ready to work again.
Jean-Claude retraced his steps, went back, and reassembled his small underground army.
Within another two hours he had his team of subversives reassembled and went back to work. This time they were punching through some old bricks to enter a corridor that would run parallel to the Metro tracks.
Jean-Claude felt wonderful. Everything was falling into place perfectly. Now for the next step. He needed that set of detonators for the big blast. He had already placed his order. He would go back to see the man in his neighborhood named Farooq who could acquire such things.
Farooq’s name was promising. It meant “one who distinguishes truth from falsehood.” Maybe it was why everyone trusted him.
Allah be praised.
FORTY-EIGHT
MADRID TO GENEVA, SEPTEMBER 12-13, EN ROUTE/OVERNIGHT
In the middle of the night, as the train wheels rumbled beneath Alex, the sharp sound of someone trying the doorknob to her compartment jolted her awake. She sat upright, her weapon pointed toward the door.
She kept still and said nothing, feeling her heart pounding. The doorknob continued to rattle from a strong, insistent hand on the other side.
Then she heard sounds from the other side of the door. A man’s voice. Very angry. The man spoke French. The door thumped. It sounded like he had put his shoulder to it.
Alex scurried to her feet and peered through the peephole. The hallway was dimly lit, but she could see a man and a woman, lurching.
The attempt at entry stopped, followed by a brief but noisy hallway discussion in heavily accented Midi French.
It was an obscene accusatory argument. They were drunk and obviously at the wrong door.
From what she could catch of the dialogue, it sounded like the drunken husband was finally wandering back to his own compartment after falling asleep elsewhere on the train. His wife had waited up for him.
Or something.
Alex smirked slightly. But for good measure, she kept her gun trained at the door in case this was some sort of cover for a sudden break-in. And she moved away from the door in case anyone suddenly fired a bullet through it.
When it was quiet again, she went to the door, pistol aloft in her right hand, and opened it slowly. The corridor was empty.
She returned to bed and slept.
The next morning she arrived in Figueras, the final stop in Spain. The day was warm and sunny, a pleasant late summer day in Europe. She was dressed casually, light jeans and a T-shirt, dark glasses, her gun in her purse this time, right next to her US passport.
She connected in the Figueras station with the train that would take her to Montpellier in France. There was no longer a stop for customs. After a ninety-minute trip, she then changed trains again in Montpellier for the Train de Grande Vitesse, which would speed her to Geneva.
She sat in a coach car next to a Frenchman who was a banker out of Dijon. He initiated the conversation and presented her with a business card. They spoke French. He was intrigued when she said that she was American and intrigued a second time when she said that she worked for the United States Department of Treasury.
Instinct again. She had a funny sense about him, maybe that he had been waiting for her. But the conversation went nowhere.
He nodded and went back to his reading. A few minutes later, his cell phone rang. The conversation was brief. Then he closed the phone and turned to her.
“I’m going to be changing seats,” he said.
She nodded and rose, stepping to the aisle.
“Would you like the window?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Take it,” he said. “You might prefer it. And my associate likes the aisle.”
He stepped past her with infinite courtesy. He turned and disappeared toward the rear of the train. Alex slid back in and sat down. She slid to the window, waited, and made sure her weapon was accessible under her jacket. She kept her hand near it. With her other hand, she flipped open a mirror from a makeup case. She positioned it and herself so that she could see anyone approaching from the train cars ahead of her, while watching the rear via the mirror.
She knew something was up. A minute passed and she spotted a heavy-set balding man approaching her row from behind. He was in his mid-forties and built like a brick outhouse. She had seen him once before in her life, at the meeting at the embassy.
Maurice Essen of Interpol, the Swiss-German who was a representative of the International Criminal Police Organization. He stopped at her row and glanced to her, indicating the open seat.
“Is this seat free?” he asked in very good English.
“I believe it’s yours, Maurice,” she said.
He smiled graciously. He sat down.
“If you’ve gone to this effort to follow me so you could speak in person,” she said in low tones barely audible above the sound of the train, “you must have something pretty good.”
“That or I believe you do,” he said. “I flew to Montpellier this morning so I could take this train so we could talk in person,” he said.
“About what?” Alex asked.
“An open case before Interpol and the Swiss federal police,” he said. “Lee Yuan.”
“I might have known.”
He continued in English. “The Swiss police retrieved Yuan’s body from a glacier a few weeks ago,” Essen began. “The government of China took an immediate interest in it. The Chinese had apparently sent one of their top young agents to retrieve the body, a charming fortyish man who traveled under the passport of John Sun. Sending someone to retrieve a corpse is not normal procedure for the Chinese. They normally ask for corpses of their nationals to be disposed of efficiently at the local level. A nice, cozy crematorium usually. So the request to ice the body and hold it was highly unusual.”
“So this Yuan fellow had to have been important,” Alex said.
“And there was nothing normal about this John Sun, either, the fellow who came and got the body out of the country as fast as possible. Sun had a diplomatic passport to cut through some red tape. Not everyone travels on one of those, not even Chinese body-snatchers.”
Alex listened in silence, assimilating as many details as quickly as she could, trying to picture the scene that had unfurled in Zurich.
“Now, the behavior of the Chinese was so unusual,” Essen continued, “that it drew the attention of both the Swiss Gendarmerie Nationale as well as the local cantonal police in Zurich. So they shadowed this John Sun. They had two-man teams on him twenty-four seven while he was in the Zurich area. They even went to the trouble to shoot some surveillance photos on the street.”
Essen reached to an inside jacket pocket. He pulled out a trio of surveillance pictures and showed them to Alex.
The pictures told her what she had already surmised. John Sun was Peter Chang. Or maybe Peter Chang was John Sun. Or maybe it was an equation that she hadn’t quite mastered yet. But the surveillance photos confirmed to her that she and Maurice Essen were discussing the same man. She was certain.