Midnight In Madrid

FORTY-ONE

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 11, 7:45 A.M.

Alex rose the next morning at 7:00 a.m.

There was a health club nearby affiliated with the hotel. She pulled on a sweatshirt, shorts, and sneakers and was out of her room by 7:15, walking quickly though the streets of the waking Spanish capital. She was in the pool by 7:35. Without stopping, she did thirty laps before returning to the Ritz.

She felt good.

She ordered breakfast from room service and opened her computer. She threw off her gym clothes and donned a hotel robe. When breakfast arrived, she took both her breakfast and her laptop on the balcony. She loved the view of the city in the morning, even with its dull smoggy haze filtering sunlight onto the old buildings, modern apartment houses, trees, and busy streets.

She opened her laptop and set to work.

Email. Messages. A bunch from home. One from Ben that made her laugh. His first term at law school was about to begin. He was anxious to get started.

She thought of phoning him but remembered it was the middle of the night. He might not have minded, but she didn’t anyway.

Another email from Joseph Collins. He said one of his employees would be in Spain during the week of September 18. Could the employee come by for a conversation, he asked. Things in Venezuela were heating up.

Alex wrote back and said that was fine, but she didn’t know when the current assignment would end. She would most likely be at the Ritz in Madrid, and Collin’s rep should look for her there.

Then business. She switched into her secure email account, the one she used for work. There was some stuff from Treasury pertaining to her current assignment. Synopses of other ongoing investigations in the United States that might have links to her own. She scanned them and found nothing that fixed her attention. There was one from her boss, Mike Gamburian, in DC asking for a few sentences of an update on the case. A small progress report.

Well, she could give him a small progress report because the progress was small. How’s that, Mike? She sent him an update, but made it politer than she might have wished.

Then there were a few emails from the others who had been at the meeting at the embassy, the one in which she had been introduced to The Pietà of Malta. The black bird, as everyone now had taken to calling it.

LeMaitre, the Frenchman, had sent her a few links having to do with terror cases in France. Then there was something from Essen at Interpol, which she read. His stuff seemed to be consistently closest to the mark, but still there was nothing that she pegged as important.

Then she sighed.

There was another email from Floyd Connelly at US Customs.

Mr. Empty message, she now thought of him as. How the heck did the man keep his job in this day of mandatory computer literacy? She wondered what political hack had given him his job and was still protecting him.

She opened the message and looked at it.

Subject: Pietà of Malta

Date: Fri, 10 September 2009 12:47:01-0400

From: “Connelly_F” ‹Floyd_Connelly@USACustoms.org› Add Mobile Alert

To: “A_LaDuca” ‹A_Laduca@usdt.prv.org›

Once again, the text was jaybird naked. What was he trying to communicate?

Anything?

This was the third blank she had drawn from him. She sighed again. She clicked on Reply and wrote as diplomatically as possible.

Subject: Pietà of Malta

Date: Fri, 10 September 2009 12:47:01-0400

From: “A_LaDuca” ‹A_Laduca@usdt.prv.org

To: “Connelly_F” ‹Floyd_Connelly@USACustoms.org› Add Mobile Alert

Hey, Floyd…I don’t mind communication, but empty messages are not my thing.;-) Nothing’s coming though, my friend. Do you have anything interesting? If so, please be sure to attach properly or if it’s easier, call me on my cell phone. Okay? I’m always happy to hear from you if you have something. Alex LaDuca

Then she hit Send and off into cyberspace went her message.

This Connelly guy was a piece of work, no?

Floyd, Floyd, a message in a void.

She needed a nickname for him, she mused, as she sipped her morning coffee and spread some delicious Spanish marmalade on toast. What would it be, the nickname?

“Pretty Boy” or “Pink”?

Well, not to be mean, but certainly not the former.

The latter? Pink?

Then she had it. The perfect nickname for him in her mind: Gutman. As in the Sidney Greenstreet character in The Maltese Falcon.

Connelly was Gutman. She laughed. Who was she? Samanatha Spade? Well, she’d been called worse. In fact, she liked the notion. She laughed again. Might as well have some small measure of fun with this nerve-racking pressure. She realized she was getting a little punch drunk with all this terror stuff, with the mounting demands to connect with The Pietà of Malta.

She went to Colonel Pendraza’s attachments. More vile stuff. More attempted terror in Spain. She speed-read six files. Again, nothing.

She clicked out of email. She glanced at her watch. It was almost 9:00 a.m. She finished breakfast. Enough nonsense, she told herself. Keep moving.

She went to various websites and studied her options for getting from Madrid to Geneva without using airplanes. Yes, she could rent a car, but she didn’t feel like driving. She went to a site for the European rail system and figured her next move. She would take an overnight train from Madrid. She could book a sleeping compartment and at least have a comfortable night. Well, that might be perfect. Or as close to perfect as she could hope for.

The train offered her anonymity plus a little bit of adventure. Strangers on a Train, Murder on the Orient Express. Why not? She thought of a couple of old European gems. Closely Watched Trains. The Sleeping Car Murders. She laughed.

She looked at the schedule. The train she wanted would depart from Madrid the next night and get her just north of Barcelona to the Spanish city Figueras by the following morning.

Then she could transfer to Montpellier in the south of France near Marseilles and follow that with another transfer to one of the zippy French TGV’s, trains de grande vitesse. She would be in Geneva by the next afternoon and, she reasoned, would be able to check into the hotel by four.

She knew Geneva reasonably well from previous visits.

Okay, perfect. Traveling with a firearm was a pain, but this way she could make the best of it. She used a credit card to secure a reservation. She had a prepaid card in pseudonym for just such purposes. She would buy the hard copy of the ticket from a machine. No passport or ID checks. Perfect, again.

This was what traveling soft was all about. It frightened her that she had become so good at it. She went back to email.

Nothing new.

She finished with the laptop and closed it. She dressed in comfortable clothes for the day. Snug blue jeans of a very light cotton. A yellow T-shirt and a navy blue windbreaker. Just enough upper body coverage to conceal her weapon if she chose to carry it, which she did.

By 10:00 she was downstairs at the front entrance to the Ritz, bringing her laptop with her.

Peter Chang was already there, standing beside a maroon Jaguar. He was in a sharp Hugo Boss suit and open-collared shirt with wraparound shades. A Cantonese James Bond. Peter was chatting amiably in Spanish with the doormen. The doormen had allowed him to park in a Prohibido Estacionar zone to wait for her. Alex wondered what the maroon Jag had to do with Chinese socialism but lodged no questions or complaints. It was a beauty of a car.

Peter spotted her immediately but didn’t even break a smile. He opened the car door for her, politely waving the doormen away from the assignment. Moments later they were out into traffic and on their way to the bank.