“What time?” she asked.
“Let’s do it late,” he said. “I’ve got a dinner with one of my sources. You know how Spain is. They don’t eat lunch till five p.m., then dinner at ten. I should be back to the hotel by eleven thirty or midnight.”
“I’ll be in the lobby at eleven thirty,” she said. “Okay?”
“That’s fine,” he said.
She rang off, highly skeptical, shaking her head. “What a-,” she mused.
And then for several minutes, she sat in the room alone.
Was Floyd blowing smoke, or did he actually have something? If he had something, how? She was dubious about everything he was saying, yet she had now committed to go visit him that night.
She went back to her laptop, shifting gears now, trying to assimilate the story that Ahmet had told the previous evening.
She went back into the attachments that she had downloaded from Colonel Pendraza. She quickly pegged to points of reference, material she had read before. This, she realized, was why Ahmet’s account rang a distant bell.
She reread,
Item: Noted in passing, al-Qaeda leaders have frequently threatened to strike again in Europe in audio and video warnings. Antiterror experts within the Policia Nacional said recently that the pace of the warnings has picked up in recent weeks. Associated item: Intercepted al-Qaeda documents have indicated activities of small sleeper cells within Spain, intent on acting independently but with major force.
She did a web search on the missing explosives. Within another few minutes, more pay dirt. From the Washington Post, she had another piece of the story:
Iraqi Explosives Missing, UN Is Told
US Disputes Timing of Loss of Munitions Sealed by Inspectors at Weapons Facility By Colum Lynch and Bradley Graham Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, October 26, 2004; Page A18 UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 25-The UN’s nuclear watchdog agency reported Monday that massive quantities of high explosives at an Iraqi weapons facility have disappeared, including some material under UN seal because of its potential use to detonate a nuclear bomb. UN and Iraqi officials indicated the explosives were lost while the country was under US occupation. But US officials suggested that the munitions may have disappeared before the US-led forces established full control over the country. They said a search of the facility by US troops shortly after the fall of Baghdad last year turned up no evidence of the explosives.
She fired off an email to Mike Gamburian’s office in Washington asking if he could send her any files on the case. No immediate response, so she closed down her laptop.
Half an hour later, she met Peter in the lobby of the hotel, as well as Rizzo and Federov. In an expansive mood, perhaps on a personal high after ordering a murder the previous night, Federov offered another of his private jets to take Peter and Alex back to Madrid. Gian Antonio Rizzo would return to Rome via commercial flight. Federov stayed in Genoa to shore up any damage done by the late Ahmet and his even-later brother.
FIFTY-NINE
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 17
The irony: The HDX and the RDX were powerful enough to bring down an urban block. And yet there was no danger of them going off accidentally. They lacked fuses and detonators. Nonetheless, Jean-Claude worked carefully to get them into their proper position.
It had taken three trips through the tunnels, caverns, and crawl spaces under Madrid to get the whole cargo of ten one-kilo bricks of explosives to where he wanted them. But here, now, in the middle of the night, he finally had them in place.
At one stretch under the city, the narrowest crawl space, Jean-Claude relied on Samy to move the explosives along. Samy’s shoulders were narrow. And he was flexible, like an eel. In some of the crawl spaces rocks had crumbled and bits of mortar had created little cave-ins. The passageways were increasingly dangerous. And there was always the chance of a big cave-in. Anyone caught in one would die. There was no mechanism for rescue, only martyrdom, which wasn’t a bad thing either.
They had assembled six bricks of explosives in the sub-chamber under the embassy. But getting the explosives in had become increasingly difficult. The narrow walls and tunnels just felt like they wanted to collapse sometime soon. Well, Jean-Claude reasoned, soon enough everything would turn to dust. He himself was already making plans to leave Madrid soon after the big blast. As for his confederates, no one would know who they had been or where to find them. They would disappear easily back into the fabric of the city.
In the end, the final four bricks of explosives had been placed on a small panel, and the panel had been tied to a rope. Jean-Claude teed up the parcel from one side and Samy pulled it through the crawlspace. Samy then waited for a few hours, listening to music on an MP3 player under the embassy.
Jean-Claude had heard from the merchant in the Rastro, Madrid’s flea market, who had fuses and detonators. His devices were ready. Once they were secured, and once Samy arranged things right, the big surprise could be set off under the embassy. He would use a timer that would time the attack for midmorning. The block would be rubble within seconds, and every living thing-Americans, Spaniards who worked there, casual passers-by-would die in the conflagration, no concessions to humanity whatsoever.
So he was thinking, 10:00 a.m. might be good. A twelve-hour timer would be perfect. The hour was near to visit Farooq.
SIXTY
GENOA TO MADRID, SEPTEMBER 17, MID-AFTERNOON
Not surprisingly, Federov’s other jet was a thing of beauty: a Learjet 55 with a crew of four. The plane seated eight in addition to the crew, but she and Peter were the only passengers.
Alex settled into a seat by herself in the rear. The aircraft took off from the same private field outside Genoa where she had arrived. She opened her computer and found a response from Mike Gamburian.
It was a CIA file. She entered her security codes, held her breath as she waited for them to apply properly, then breathed easier as the files opened.
Then she confronted additional pieces of the backstory.
The explosives that Ahmet had undoubtedly spoken of were a powdery plastic called HMX. They were combined with a similar substance named RDX and were manufactured in Serbia. They were some of the most powerful conventional explosives used by the world’s militaries.
Serbia, unlike Spain, was the one place in the world where HMX and RDX were manufactured. The path of the particular batch of explosives that would turn up in western Europe was a grim echo of the dark events of the last quarter century.
In the 1980s, the Iran-Iraq war was only one of a series of crises during an era of upheaval in the Middle East. There had been the revolution in Iran that deposed the Shah, the occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran by militant students, and the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan. There had been the invasion of the Great Mosque in Mecca by antiroyalist Islamists, and the bitter clan fighting among different factions of Syrians, Israelis, and Palestinians in Lebanon. All of these events and more had maintained the Middle East as the tinderbox of the modern world, ready to ignite larger conflagrations if any side overplayed its hand.
The Iran-Iraq War followed months of rising tension between the Iranian Islamic republic and secular nationalist Iraq. In mid-September 1980, Iraq under its new, young military dictator, Saddam Hussein, attacked Iran in the mistaken belief that internal Iranian political disarray would guarantee a quick victory. The gambit proved wrong.
The international community responded with UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire and for all member states to refrain from actions contributing in any way to the conflict’s continuation. The Soviet Union, opposing the war, cut off arms exports to Iran and to Iraq, its ally under a 1972 treaty.