She thanked the Arab and he continued.
“Abdul paid us in cash. So we had some fun with the money in port. Liquor. Women.”
“Well, that’s not a strict Muslim lifestyle now, is it?” Rizzo chipped in.
Ahmet hung his head a little. He had no idea who Rizzo was and didn’t know whether to spit or salute. He did neither. “No,” he said. “Would have saved us all a lot of trouble if we’d been strict,” he said, “but we weren’t.”
Federov made a motion with his hand that suggested Ahmet should move the story along. He did. He said they sailed in two days as scheduled, and everything was fine on board. Then after two days at sea, his brother came to him. Hassan had purchased this little electronic tracking device, he said. It had only cost twenty euros. But Hassan had this bold idea. He was going to go into the compartment and slip it into whatever was in the bag. Then they could follow the bag to its ultimate destination.
“For what purpose?” Alex asked. “To steal it back or to blackmail the recipient?”
“I didn’t want to go along with this,” Ahmet said. “It was my brother’s idea. Hassan’s. Completely.”
“That’s nice, but it’s not what I asked,” she said.
“Blackmail,” he said.
“It turned out that he and his brother were stealing from my cargo too,” Federov said with bitterness, staring at his prisoner. “They’d break into shipping containers and skim merchandise. They’d smuggle it off the ships and fence it, then the insurance companies would come back to me. Prosecutors in Italy brought charges of fraud against two of my companies two years ago.”
“As for these brothers creating problems for me…,” Federov continued, “we’re going to discuss it later in the evening.”
“My brother’s idea,” Ahmet said again. “It wasn’t me. It was my brother,” Ahmet said. “We have an expression in Sicily,” he said. “
“But you went along with all of it,” said Alex, first in English and then in Italian. “Doesn’t that make you equally guilty? And apparently you had been doing this sort of thing for years.”
“Exactly,” Federov said.
Ahmet looked very ill at ease with the notion, and Federov looked vindicated. Rizzo glanced at his watch. Not that he was going anywhere. But fatigue was starting to take a toll on all of them. “Let’s get on with it,” he said.
“We waited until we had access to the purser’s office,” Ahmet said. “We went in one night. We had a shipmate give him too much to drink.” He paused, looked at Alex as if he couldn’t decide whether to elaborate, then decided to go with it. “There were some women on the ship. Women who worked the freighters in the area. There was a Dutch girl. We made sure she kept him busy one night. We had a whole warning system. She was to signal us if Abdul left his suite.”
“Wasn’t his office locked at night?” Alex asked. “I would think it would have been.”
Ahmet managed a rare laugh. “That was the beauty of it,” he said. “The Dutch girl helped us steal the keys too. You know, when he had his pants off. And just overnight so we could get in and out. It worked perfectly.”
“Brilliant,” said Alex, watching him sweat and noting where his brilliance had landed him.
From there, according to Ahmet’s recollection, it was all smooth sailing. Ahmet did the work on the compartment, and Hassam helped with the tools and watched the door. They were both shocked when they got to the burlap bag and opened it.
“We thought it was drugs. Heroin or cocaine. It was a white substance in individual bricks. But both of us had worked light construction and demolition in Sicily. So when we examined it, we knew it was explosives.”
“What?” Alex murmured, looking up from her notes.
“Top of the line stuff. The type the Americans use in Iraq. The type they’re always using and then getting used against them. Chemicals,” he said. He made an expansive gesture with his large dirty hands. “Boom!” he said.
If it was an attempt to add levity to the evening and win new friends, it failed miserably.
Alex put down her pen and leaned back. She took a minute to re-track Ahmet’s testimony so far and summarize everything in English for Peter. There had been a whole skein of loose logic that had been hanging together with a few strings. And now the strings were being pulled into place and the logic was emerging.
Ahmet sat on the hot seat and continued to dab at his cheek. He was obviously in considerable pain. Alex guessed that Federov’s first punch had fractured the Arab’s cheekbone and the second punch had redesigned it.
“I did some further checking on things this afternoon before I left Rome,” Rizzo then announced slowly. He spoke English so as to conveniently include everyone except Ahmet. “This man has a long police record in Italy. So did his brother. I ran background computer checks on both of them, then cross-referenced his activities with other investigations involving the national police in Italy. One detail that came immediately to the surface was where Ahmet had worked recently. Aboard El Fuguero. This was a ship that was on our list as a possible conduit for some explosives that were stolen from an Iraqi military supply depot after the American invasion. Our intelligence tells us the cache was broken up several times and shipped to the West. Through Cyprus and Sardinia. That’s consistent with this ship.”
“And consistent with this man’s story,” Peter said.
“Exactly what
“HMX combined with RDX,” Rizzo said. “We think they can be traced directly to a warehouse in Iraq and to a manufacturer in Serbia.”
There was an echo somewhere in Alex’s memory of the substance. She put it on hold for later when she was back with her laptop. “How much of this HMX are we talking about?” she asked.
“About ten kilos. Or twenty pounds.”
She turned back to Ahmet and asked in Italian. “And that’s the size of the shipment you saw?” she asked.
“It was about ten kilos,” he said. “Ten bricks.”
“And so you put a honing device on it,” she said.
He nodded.
“Where was it taken ashore from El Fuguero?” she asked.
“In Barcelona,” he said.
“So we know that the explosives entered Spain?” she said. “We know that for a fact?”
“Yes,” Ahmet said. Rizzo was nodding at the same time.
“And what was the date of that?”
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“July twentieth or twenty-first,” Rizzo said. “The ship was only in port two days. That’s when it came ashore.”
“Forgive me for a naive question, but exactly how did it get through port security?” Alex asked.
Ahmet snorted. “For a few dollars, anyone can disembark anything,” he said.
“Yes, of course,” she said.
From there it continued its journey, Ahmet said. Probably by private car, but who knew? His brother tracked it via the homing device, then used a public computer in a cafe to get the coordinates of the location. One thing led to another. He established the place where the stash was being held. Then he traveled to Madrid.
“Madrid?” she asked.
“Madrid.”
“And how did your brother make contact with the people who were holding the explosives?”
“The coordinates were very precise,” Ahmet said. “My brother knew all the ways to do those computer things. So he tracked it to a building and-”
“Do you know what building?”
“No. Hassan did all of this.”
“Did he tell you anything about the building?”
“No. I was never even in Spain.”
“Please, go on,” Alex said.
“My brother kept the house under surveillance for a few days. Figured out who was going in and out. He
