Good question. She didn’t have an answer. Not tonight, anyway.
Her eyelids flagged. She was confused, afraid, paranoid, and tired. She scanned the list of messages.
Anything of interest?
No. Nothing.
She shut down the laptop and crashed into bed.
She worked Peter Chang over in her mind. She wondered if he was somehow playing both sides of the street, having sold his credibility to the CIA in Rome. Was he now serving up peanuts in return for a chubby annual stipend on the tab of the American taxpayers? Had he successfully hustled Mark McKinnon, who was looking increasingly burned out and unprofessional?
And was Peter now hustling her? For business reasons? Personal reasons? Something about him set off alarms.
After a few unsettled minutes, Alex drifted off to sleep. She slept surprisingly soundly, more out of fatigue than peace of mind.
FORTY-ONE
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 11, 7:45 A.M.
Alex rose the next morning at 7:00 a.m.
There was a health club nearby affiliated with the hotel. She pulled on a sweatshirt, shorts, and sneakers and was out of her room by 7:15, walking quickly though the streets of the waking Spanish capital. She was in the pool by 7:35. Without stopping, she did thirty laps before returning to the Ritz.
She felt good.
She ordered breakfast from room service and opened her computer. She threw off her gym clothes and donned a hotel robe. When breakfast arrived, she took both her breakfast and her laptop on the balcony. She loved the view of the city in the morning, even with its dull smoggy haze filtering sunlight onto the old buildings, modern apartment houses, trees, and busy streets.
She opened her laptop and set to work.
Email. Messages. A bunch from home. One from Ben that made her laugh. His first term at law school was about to begin. He was anxious to get started.
She thought of phoning him but remembered it was the middle of the night. He might not have minded, but she didn’t anyway.
Another email from Joseph Collins. He said one of his employees would be in Spain during the week of September 18. Could the employee come by for a conversation, he asked. Things in Venezuela were heating up.
Alex wrote back and said that was fine, but she didn’t know when the current assignment would end. She would most likely be at the Ritz in Madrid, and Collin’s rep should look for her there.
Then business. She switched into her secure email account, the one she used for work. There was some stuff from Treasury pertaining to her current assignment. Synopses of other ongoing investigations in the United States that might have links to her own. She scanned them and found nothing that fixed her attention. There was one from her boss, Mike Gamburian, in DC asking for a few sentences of an update on the case. A small progress report.
Well, she could give him a small progress report because the progress was small. How’s that, Mike? She sent him an update, but made it politer than she might have wished.
Then there were a few emails from the others who had been at the meeting at the embassy, the one in which she had been introduced to
LeMaitre, the Frenchman, had sent her a few links having to do with terror cases in France. Then there was something from Essen at Interpol, which she read. His stuff seemed to be consistently closest to the mark, but still there was nothing that she pegged as important.
Then she sighed.
There was another email from Floyd Connelly at US Customs.
Mr. Empty message, she now thought of him as. How the heck did the man keep his job in this day of mandatory computer literacy? She wondered what political hack had given him his job and was still protecting him.
She opened the message and looked at it.
Subject: Pieta of Malta
Date: Fri, 10 September 2009 12:47:01-0400
From: “Connelly_F” ‹[email protected]› Add Mobile Alert
To: “A_LaDuca” ‹[email protected]›
Once again, the text was jaybird naked. What was he trying to communicate?
Anything?
This was the third blank she had drawn from him. She sighed again. She clicked on Reply and wrote as diplomatically as possible.
Subject: Pieta of Malta
Date: Fri, 10 September 2009 12:47:01-0400
From: “A_LaDuca” ‹[email protected]
To: “Connelly_F” ‹[email protected]› Add Mobile Alert
Hey, Floyd…I don’t mind communication, but empty messages are not my thing.;-) Nothing’s coming though, my friend. Do you have anything interesting? If so, please be sure to attach properly or if it’s easier, call me on my cell phone. Okay? I’m always happy to hear from you if you have something. Alex LaDuca
Then she hit Send and off into cyberspace went her message.
This Connelly guy was a piece of work, no?
Floyd, Floyd, a message in a void.
She needed a nickname for him, she mused, as she sipped her morning coffee and spread some delicious Spanish marmalade on toast. What would it be, the nickname?
“Pretty Boy” or “Pink”?
Well, not to be mean, but certainly not the former.
The latter? Pink?
Then she had it. The perfect nickname for him in her mind:
Connelly was Gutman. She laughed. Who was she? Samanatha Spade? Well, she’d been called worse. In fact, she liked the notion. She laughed again. Might as well have some small measure of fun with this nerve-racking pressure. She realized she was getting a little punch drunk with all this terror stuff, with the mounting demands to connect with
She went to Colonel Pendraza’s attachments. More vile stuff. More attempted terror in Spain. She speed-read six files. Again, nothing.
She clicked out of email. She glanced at her watch. It was almost 9:00 a.m. She finished breakfast. Enough nonsense, she told herself. Keep moving.
She went to various websites and studied her options for getting from Madrid to Geneva without using airplanes. Yes, she could rent a car, but she didn’t feel like driving. She went to a site for the European rail system and figured her next move. She would take an overnight train from Madrid. She could book a sleeping
