Not here, not tonight. If they stop me and find me with two IDs, I’m going to be answering questions for ten years. All right?”
“All right,” she said, taking it.
“Who’s the old fascist over there?” he asked. “The one everyone is sucking up to?”
She glanced. “That’s Colonel Pendraza. Policia Nacional.”
“Yes. Of course. He knows who I am,” Peter said softly. “I need to get out of here,” he said again.
“Is there really going to be an attack on the US Embassy?” she asked.
“I’m told the information is solid.”
“Who’s the information from?”
“Chinese and American sources,” he said. “And I never told you this, but there’s some British thrown in. Some MI6.”
“How did that get into the mix?” she asked.
“When the explosives were sold out of Cyprus, the British were within a day of seizing them. They made arrests anyway. Two of the men arrested told the same story: that money had come from Spain, money raised by a museum theft, and now the value was returning to Spain in bombs and bodies.”
“If I can ask a dumb question, why are the Brits being so generous with you?”
He spread his hands. “Hong Kong, lady, remember? I’m one of the ‘good’ yellow people. Isn’t that how it works? I’m ‘Western,’ so I can be trusted.”
“Do the Spanish police know there may be an attack on our embassy?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then why aren’t we telling them?”
“Same reason I’m working this case,” he said. “We’re trying to take care of things unofficially. Is that so difficult?”
“We could use their help,” Alex said. “All I’ve got to do is cross the street and talk to the colonel.”
“Don’t bother,” he said softly. “In fact, that would be very unwise.”
“Why?”
“Alex, do you have a gun?”
“You know I do. We just discussed-”
“Are you allowed to use it?”
“In self-defense. And in defense of anyone I deem fit. Even you.”
“I’m honored. But that’s where we’re different,” he said. “And it’s another reason I’m still here.”
“I just lost you.”
“If Mark needs someone taken out, hit, killed, he can’t ask you or even one of his CIA lackeys to do it. Not without special permission. And for that he has to go back to Washington, and the request has to go to an intelligence committee, and after a week or a month or a year he might get a go-ahead. And he might not.”
Two uniformed Madrid police approached them. They seemed to be looking cross-eyed at Peter, but they kept going.
“But if Mark asks
“Oh, Lord,” she said with a shudder.
“Someone has to get the dirty work done,” he said.
“Sometimes I’d prefer to be back at a desk in Washington, dealing with financial squabbles.”
“But instead you’re out here,” Peter said. “On the front lines. Where it’s more exciting.”
“And where I feel more compromised,” she said.
He laughed slightly. “Let me ask you,” he said, “if you could have stopped the September 11 attacks on America by personally shooting every one of the hijackers, would you have done it? If you could have murdered Hitler and Stalin and avoided World War II, would that have been worth two bullets to end the lives of two thoroughly evil and godless men?”
“I would have looked for some other way to-”
“That wasn’t the question,” he said. “And I think I know your answer.”
She snapped back defensively, the flash of police beacons still illuminating the streets with harsh staccato lights. “What are you?” she asked. “A philosopher with an Uzi?”
“Everything is a situation.”
“Have a nice night,” she said coolly.
Alex turned away in growing distaste.
“And you also,” he answered.
She glanced to the opposite side of the street, trying to sort out her thoughts. She noticed that Colonel Pendraza had disappeared. She turned back to talk to Peter again, maybe to voice some uselessly argumentative tract about violence and murder breeding more violence and murder until it bred even more violence and murder. Or maybe she’d just ask him straight up if there had really been three young Arabs or if he had defenestrated blustery old Connelly himself, and if so, on whose orders.
But by then, with her mind teeming with questions and paranoia, Peter was gone too.
She looked in every direction.
No Peter Chang.
Like the Swiss police a few weeks earlier, she had never before encountered a man who could disappear into thin air so quickly and efficiently.
She left the block and retreated to a quiet doorway. She pulled out her cell phone and called Mark McKinnon. She reached him and reported what she had seen, what she knew. An attack on the US Embassy in Madrid was perhaps imminent.
Quietly, McKinnon took the information from her. He promised to alert embassy security immediately. But beyond that, he offered nothing in return and rang off.
From talking to McKinnon, she had the same sense as talking to a wall.
She pondered not returning to the Ritz that night. She felt vulnerable. So she found a late bar, stayed there for a few drinks, and pondered checking into a different hotel. Then she decided not to.
Instead, she returned to the Ritz and entered her room with her pistol drawn. She searched it thoroughly, found no intruder or evidence of an intrusion, and threw all the bolts on the door.
Then, riding the worst wave of paranoia in her life, she eventually dummied up pillows from the closet to resemble her body and put them under the blankets in the bedroom.
She turned around the living room sofa and slept there, facing the door and the locked balcony. She kept the pistol at arm’s length.
Sleep, what there would be of it, did not come easily.
SIXTY-THREE
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 18
The next morning, Alex obtained her necessary permits and keys from the Policia Nacional as well as the City Police. She also placed a second call to Mark McKinnon and demanded an urgent meeting with him late that afternoon. He resisted at first, then relented. He asked that she find her way to a bench in a busy downtown area on the Calle de Bailen, across the street from the Palacio Real, the royal palace where the king no longer lived but where state functions were held. The meeting time was set for the window between 4:00 p.m. and 4:15.
Alex traveled there by buses, three of them, a roundabout route. She got off the first bus quickly, reversed her path down a busy street, then caught the second and the third. Each time, she jumped off abruptly just before the vehicle was to pull out of a stop, each time watching to see if anyone followed. The only other American at the meeting involving the pieta’s theft had gone out a tenth-floor window, probably not voluntarily. One could never be
