Midnight In Madrid

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.

The US had already ended previously massive military sales to Iran when the Shah had fallen in 1979. By 1980 the US had broken off diplomatic relations with Iran because of the Tehran embassy hostage crisis. Iraq ended ties with the US during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

So the US was officially neutral in the Iran-Iraq War, diplomatically recognized neither side, and maintained that it armed neither. Iran, however, depended on American weapons. Anywhere in the world, if there is a potential buyer of arms, there is always a potential seller. So Iran quickly acquired American arms through merchants from Israel, Europe, Asia, and South America.

Iraq had started the war with a large Soviet-supplied arsenal but needed additional weaponry as the conflict defied a quick resolution and wore on. Initially, Iraq advanced far into Iranian territory, but was driven back within months. By mid 1982, Iraq was on the defensive against Iranian human-wave attacks. The United States, having decided that an Iranian victory would not serve its regional interests, began quietly arming Saddam Hussein’s military in Iraq.

Negotiations already underway to upgrade US-Iraq relations were accelerated, high-level officials exchanged visits, and in February 1982, the State Department removed Iraq from its list of states supporting international terrorism. It had been included several years earlier because of ties with several Palestinian nationalist