groups.
Iraq also received massive external financial support from the Gulf states and assistance through loan programs from the US. The White House and State Department pressured the Export-Import Bank to provide Iraq with financing, to enhance its credit standing, and to enable it to obtain loans from other international financial institutions. The US Agriculture Department provided taxpayer-guaranteed loans for purchases of American commodities, to the satisfaction of US grain exporters. As the war ground onward, chewing up close to a million casualties on both sides, North American agribusiness profited handsomely.
The United States formally restored relations with Iraq in November 1984, the time of Donald Rumsfeld’s more than convivial meeting with Saddam Hussein. But the US had begun, several years earlier, to provide Iraq with clandestine intelligence and military support, in secret and contrary to America’s official neutrality, in accordance with policy directives from the White House.
Among the materials received by Saddam Hussein’s military was a seven-ton shipment of HDX and RDX, brokered by the Central Intelligence Agency, from a factory in Serbia. The explosives were delivered pursuant to the National Security Study Memorandum of March 1982.
The explosives were stored at a weapons complex at Al Qaqaa, about thirty miles south of Baghdad. Over the course of the next six years, much of the supply was used by Saddam Hussein’s soldiers against Iraq’s enemies- Iran and internal dissident tribes-and gradually depleted. But not
Unobstructed, thieves entered the Al Qaqaa warehouses and removed the entire two tons. Half of it was trucked to a pro-al-Qaeda terrorist training camp near the city of Mir Ali in Pakistan. The other half, sitting in the back of a single diesel truck, arrived in Damascus, Syria, two weeks after it had been looted from the old storage facility.
In Damascus, a mix of German and Italian converts to Islam, and Arab and Turkish immigrants coalesced in an extremist cell at a radical mosque. They divided the shipment again. Half of it went to an Egyptian imam who directed an Arabic-language school in Cairo. The other half, in bulk now no larger in size than an old fashioned steamer trunk, was trucked to Beirut where, under the cover of night, it was packed into the aft hull of a speedboat.
It went next to Cyprus, where, acting on tips from the CIA, Greek and Turkish police raided several cells of radical Islamists looking for the explosives. The raids came at a time when authorities in southern Europe were increasingly worried about the threat from al-Qaeda in the Magreb, an Algerian-dominated network that had pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. A radical Muslim named Ayman al-Zawahiri, considered deputy leader of the broader al-Qaeda movement, had recently issued a videotaped statement repeating his exhortations to the North African group to strike European countries.
But the Greek and German police didn’t find the explosives.
They didn’t find them because the shipment never came on shore in Cyprus. Rather, according to CIA informants, it went into an industrial packing crate that was marked as a factory refrigeration unit and packed into a different ship. And from there, conveyed by homegrown European radicals now, it went to Brindisi in the south of Italy.
There local gangsters hid it in a picturesque white-walled old monastery within an olive grove, without knowing-or wanting to know-what they were hiding.
By now, according to Italian police, control over the shipment was held by a local radical Muslim named Habib, who ran an Islamic school in Naples. Habib was constantly under surveillance but never made a slip. Rumor had it that he had stashed the explosives in a farmhouse somewhere outside of Naples. But police never were able to locate it.
Several weeks passed. Surveillance on Habib was dropped due to lack of results.
Police who had been attempting to track the shipment went on to other assignments. And there the trail ended for everyone involved with the case.
Until now, she reasoned, when the late Ahmet and the even later Hassan, had tracked the next part of the explosives’ journey and linked it to a Jean-Claude al-Masri who had formed his own terror cell in Madrid.
Because of the black bird, she realized. Because, as she had learned, art theft frequently finances crime or terror. Because of The Pieta of Malta, the explosives had now made their way to Madrid. Because of the theft of the pieta, because a dead Chinese collector had come up out of the snow, all these events had followed.
The thieves had stolen it from the museum to raise money to buy explosives from anti-Western sources. But then the brokers had burned the purchaser and not delivered, either out of greed, stupidity, or the desire to capitalize even more.
That misstep had brought Peter into the case.
She closed down her computer, closed her eyes for the rest of the flight, and tried not to hear Federov’s two gunshots for the hundredth time.
Peter and Alex disembarked in Madrid by three in the afternoon. Alex checked back into the Ritz, a smaller accommodation this time, by 4:00. Peter stayed at El Mirablau.
Settled in by 5:00 in the afternoon, Alex went to email yet again and now heard from her Roman buddy, Rizzo. The DNA samples had come back from the skin that Rizzo had scratched in the nightclub from the face of his assailant.
The DNA had finally triggered a match.
The match named a Frenchman of Algerian heritage named Jean-Claude al-Masri. The latter had a small-time police record in three European countries and an address in Madrid.
The Policia Nacional had already been asked to pick him up.
SIXTY-ONE
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 17, LATE AFTERNOON
On a cluttered back street next to the Rastro, in the rear of a small locked store, Jean- Claude stood in a closed room and obtained the final ingredients for mass homicide.
His detonators were in a small bag on the counter.
The old Arab named Farooq motioned to it when the younger man came in the door. The proprietor also held a pistol in his hand the entire time as Jean-Claude made the pickup, just in case. He hated the sight of such people and sometimes hated himself for having to deal with them.
But Jean-Claude caused no trouble.
He gathered the detonators and pushed them into a backpack. He gave the old man a smile, went out the door, and prepared to head home.
The Metro was giving him the creeps today, and he also had some hotel business to attend to. He had even pulled his Vespa out of storage for the occasion.
SIXTY-TWO
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 17, LATE EVENING
