Balance of Power

position the players to its own advantage. Which was exactly why Serrador had asked for her. With one shooting, Ramirez and his group had managed to gain control of both the White House and Spanish tourism.

“As for the next step,” Ramirez said, “how is that coming, Carlos?”

The black-haired young banker leaned forward. He placed his cigar in the ashtray and folded his hands on the table. “As you know, the lower and middle classes have been hurt very seriously by the recent employment cutbacks. In the past six months, Banquero Cedro has restricted loans so that our partners in this operation”—he indicated the other men at the table—“as well as other businesspeople, have been forced to raise consumer prices nearly seven percent. At the same time they’ve cut back production so that there has been an eight-percent drop in trade of Spanish goods throughout Europe. The workers have been hit hard although, thus far, we haven’t curtailed their credit. We’ve been extraordinarily generous, in fact. We’ve been extending credit to repay old debts. Of course, only some of that money goes to relieve debt. People make new purchases, assuming that credit will be available to them again. As a result, interest on loans has compounded to levels eighteen percent higher than they were at this time last year.”

Ramirez smiled. “In conjunction with a fall in tourism, the financial blow will be severe when that credit is not made available.”

“It will be extremely severe,” said Carlos. “The people will be so deeply in debt they will agree to anything to be out of it.”

“But the blow is one you’re certain you can control,” said Alfonso.

“Absolutely,” Carlos replied. “Thanks to cash reserves and credit with the World Bank and other institutions, the money supply at my bank and at most others will remain sound. The economy will be relatively unaffected at the top.” He grinned. “It’s like the plague of blood which befell Egypt in the Old Testament. It did not affect those who had been forewarned and had filled their jugs and cisterns with fresh water.”

Ramirez sat back. He drew long and contentedly on his cigar. “This is excellent, gentlemen. And once everything is in place, our task is simply to maintain the pressure until the middle and lower classes buckle. Until the Basques and the Castilians, the Andalusians and the Galicians acknowledge that Spain belongs to the people of Catalonia. And when they do, when the prime minister is forced to call for new elections, we will be ready.” His small, dark eyes moved from face to face before settling on the leather binder before him. “Ready with our new constitution — ready for a new Spain.”

The other men nodded their approval. Miguel and Rodrigo applauded lightly. Ramirez felt the weight of history past and history yet to come on his shoulders, and it felt good.

He was unaware of a disheveled man who sat an eighth of a mile away with a different sense of history on his shoulders — and a much different weapon at his disposal.

FOUR

Monday, 7.15 P.M. Madrid, Spain

Aideen was still sitting in the leather couch when Comisario Diego Fernandez arrived. He was a man of medium height and build. He was clean-shaven with a ruddy complexion and carefully trimmed goatee. His black hair was longish but neat and he peered out carefully from behind gold-rimmed spectacles. He wore black leather gloves, black suede shoes, and a black trenchcoat. Beneath the open coat was a dark gray business suit.

An aide shut the door behind him. When it had clicked shut, the inspector bowed politely to Aideen.

“Our deepest sympathy and apologies for your loss,” he said. His voice was deep, the English accent thick. “If there’s anything I or my department can do to help you, please ask.”

“Thank you, Inspector,” Aideen said.

“Be assured that the resources of the entire Madrid metropolitan police department as well as other government offices will be applied to finding whoever was responsible for this atrocious act.”

Aideen looked up at the police inspector. He couldn’t be talking to her. The police department couldn’t be looking for the killer of someone she knew. The TV announcements and newspaper headlines wouldn’t be about a person she had been dressing with in a hotel room just an hour before. Though she had lived through the killing and seen Martha’s body on the street, the experience didn’t seem real. Aideen was so accustomed to changing things — rewinding a tape to see something she’d missed or erasing computer data she didn’t need — that the irreversibility of this seemed impossible.

But in her brain Aideen knew that it had happened. And that it was irreversible. After being brought here, she’d called the hotel and briefed Darrell McCaskey. McCaskey had said he would inform Op-Center. He’d seemed surprisingly unshocked — or maybe Darrell was always that collected. Aideen didn’t know him well enough to say. Then she’d sat here trying to tell herself that the shooting was a random act of terrorism and not a hit. After all, it wasn’t the same as in Tijuana two years earlier when her friend Odin Gutierrez Rico had literally been blasted to death by four gunmen with assault rifles. Rico was the director of criminal trials in Baja California. He was a public figure who had regularly received death threats and had continued to defy the nation’s drug traffickers. His death was a tragic loss but not a surprise. It was a very public statement that the prosecution of drug dealers would not be tolerated by the underworld.

Martha was here with a cover story known only to a handful of government officials. She had come to Madrid to help Deputy Serrador work out a plan to keep his own people, the Basques, from joining with the equally nationalistic Catalonians in an effort to break away from Spain. The Basque uprisings in the 1980s had been sporadic enough to fail but violent enough to be remembered. Martha and Serrador both believed that an organized revolt by two of the nation’s five major ethnic groups — especially if those groups were well armed and better prepared than in the 1980s — would not only be enormously destructive but would have a good chance of succeeding.

If this were an assassination, if Martha had been the target, it meant that there was a leak in the system somewhere. And if there were a leak then the peace process was in serious danger. It was a cruel irony that only a short time before, Martha had been insisting that nothing must be allowed to interfere with the talks.

You know what’s at stake….

Then, of course, Martha had been worried about Aideen’s overreaction in the street.

If only that had been our worst roadblock, Aideen thought. We sweat the details and end up missing the big picture—

“Senorita?” the inspector said.

Aideen blinked. “Yes?”

“Are you all right?”

Aideen had been looking past Comisario Fernandez, at the dark windows. But she focused on the inspector now. He was still standing a few feet away, smiling down at her.

“Yes, I’m fine,” she said. “I’m very sorry, Inspector. I was thinking about my friend.”

“I understand,” the inspector replied quietly. “If it would not be too much for you, might I ask you a few questions?”

“Of course,” she replied. She’d been slumping forward but now she sat up in the chair. “First, Inspector, would you mind telling me if the surveillance cameras told you anything?”

“Unfortunately, they did not,” the inspector said. “The gunman was standing just out of range.”

“He knew what that range was?”

“Apparently, he did,” the inspector admitted. “Unfortunately, it will take us a while to find out everyone who had access to that information — and to interrogate them all.”

“I understand,” Aideen said.

The inspector drew a small, yellow notebook from his coat pocket. The smile faded as he studied some notes and slipped a pen from the spiral binder. When he was finished reading he looked at Aideen.

“Did you and your companion come to Madrid for pleasure?” the inspector asked.

“Yes. Yes, we did.”

“You informed the guard at the gate that you came to the Congreso de los Diputados for a personal tour.”

“That’s right.”