Midnight In Madrid

Two police technicians were removing the spikes from the corpse, working by hand. Alex fought against a feeling of sickness. She stepped back from the work that was being done. Her eyes wandered, then did a double take.

Peter Chang stood on the opposite side of the street. He was in a suit with a computer bag on his shoulder.

“Excuse me,” she said to Colonel Pendraza.

Pendraza nodded. Alex moved through the crowd and crossed the street. She found a different Peter Chang than she had ever seen before. Peter’s fine suit was torn in two places. He had a small welt across his cheek and another across his forehead. No blood, just the evidence of combat.

“Peter, what are you doing here?” she asked.

“Same as you, I suppose,” he said. “Let’s move,” he said. “I want to get away from here.”

“I’m not leaving just yet,” she said.

“Well, I’d like to get off this block before the police seal it up.”

She looked at the rips in his clothing and the gash to his temple. “What’s going on?” she asked. “You were in a fight of some sort?”

“Yeah, I was.”

“Heck of a coincidence, you should be here,” she said suspiciously, suddenly wary of him. “Every time I see you after dark, someone winds up dead.”

“Yeah. Midnight in Madrid. Not healthy. Someone always gets killed.”

“Why are you here?” she pressed. “And what happened to you?”

“I was supposed to meet him,” he said, motioning to Connelly. “I got a call.”

“From Connelly? Why would he call you? How did he even know you.”

“He didn’t. I got a call from my own people.”

“Who? Your government? Guojia Anquan Bu. Your Ministry of State Security?”

“That’s them,” Peter said, speaking rapidly. “And Mark McKinnon called them. Do I have to remind you, he works with them when it suits common purposes.”

“Peter…?”

“Come on along,” he said. “Talk to me.” He took her arm forcefully, and they moved several paces away.

She sharply pulled her arm away. “Don’t force me along. I don’t like that!”

“I need to be out of here,” he said.

“Why? What happened here?” she demanded.

“Connelly came back here with a woman about an hour ago. I asked the hotel staff. He expected to get lucky, and my guess is she let her friends in. That, or the friends were waiting. Lurking maybe. Either in the hall or in his room.”

Alex shuddered. She looked carefully at his clothing.

“I arrived at his suite and the door was unlatched,” Peter said. “I pushed it open and ran smack into them. They must have just shoved him out the window.”

She was having trouble believing him. This was John Sun speaking, suddenly.

“They charged right into me. I tried to grab them and bring them down, but there were three of them. Speaking Arabic, by the way, in case that drops you a hint of any sort. There was a scuffle. They got the first hits in, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor.”

Alex knew that Peter could take out three people easily; he could take out ten people. And he was armed. This wasn’t adding up.

“I didn’t know what happened,” he said. “I went in, saw the open window, and looked down. Then I got out of there fast,” he said. “I didn’t have time to look around. I just grabbed his laptop and his notebooks,” he said. “That’s all I could get.”

“You did what?”

He motioned to the cache he had in the computer bag. “You want the Spanish police looking at this stuff?” he asked. “Might as well have the contents published in El Mundo.”

“You could have stayed for the police,” she said. He started to move down the block and she followed, with both reluctance and persistence.

“Oh, sure! After what you told me about the Swiss? And bloody Interpol? I have to get out of this country,” he said. “My picture is all over the hotel security cameras, and they’ll be going through them tonight. Count on that.”

Peter was still moving, looking around, highly nervous, highly agitated.

“Uh oh,” he said. “Look at this. The cops are setting a ring around this place. Look. There are cops on each end of the block.”

“That’s normal,” she said.

“Not good for me, Alex,” he said. “Let’s just get out of here.”

She looked at Peter, and something clicked in having to do with his trepidation of the Spanish police. It seemed so obvious that she realized that she had been suppressing it since the first time she saw him in this place tonight.

Peter had killed Connelly. His face was battered and his suit was torn because the chunky failing old Yalie had put up the fight of his life. Peter had beaten her to Connelly because Connelly had something to tell her that reflected unfavorably on Peter. Peter, in short, was a double agent of the most treacherous sort. He couldn’t be trusted any more than she could throw him. Peter was the most dangerous liar she had ever met in her life with a spirited competition in progress for second place.

An entire kaleidoscope of deceit opened before her as she gazed at him, new vistas in every direction, forming and reforming in endless patterns of duplicity.

He must have sensed what she felt because he raised his eyes, looked at her, and became colder than ever.

“Look,” he said. “Talk to Mark McKinnon if you can ever get him on the phone. It’s obvious all those explosives are in Madrid. Connelly heard from an informer that there was going to be an attack on the embassy. Right now it’s been shut down, the embassy. There’s a US Marine bomb squad going through with dogs and radio detectors.”

“Why do you know that and I don’t?”

“Because I talked to McKinnon and you haven’t,” Peter said. “He was going to give us the details. Mark asked me to get over here, obviously Connelly wanted to see you. It’s pretty clear that he was set up. Connelly bought half a bill of goods from someone, but his good information was laced with the bad stuff. But he stumbled across enough solid stuff so that he took a pavement dive from a hundred feet up.”

Peter continued to glance around nervously. As he spoke to Alex, his eyes frequently went over her shoulder, back to the death scene.

Again, Peter’s hands were moving quickly. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a leather billfold. From it, he pulled a small laminated card, the size, shape, and texture of an American driver’s license.

“Keep this for me,” he said. “Keep this until I ask for it back. Please! It’s critical.”

She looked at it. It was his Swiss consular ID. Well, it wasn’t Peter Chang’s; it was John Sun’s.

She stared at it and looked back up. “This links you to a couple of murders, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“I honestly didn’t want to believe that about you,” she said. “That you were capable of that.”

“Aren’t we all, under the right circumstances?”

“It’s not a situation I ever hope to be in again,” she said.

“Nor I,” he said. “But as long as you or I carry a weapon and are sworn to protect ourselves, innocent people, and our countries’ interests, the possibility will be there.”

“Maybe you just seem a little too enthusiastic about it,” she said. “Killing people.”

“And maybe someday you’ll hesitate too long and wish you hadn’t,” he answered.

There was loud conversation from the group of police across the street. She looked back down to the John Sun ID that she held in her hand.

“Why are you giving this to me?”

“Because I trust you to do the right thing,” he said. “And I don’t want to have to walk past the police with it.