Midnight In Madrid

FORTY-EIGHT

MADRID TO GENEVA, SEPTEMBER 12-13, EN ROUTE/OVERNIGHT

In the middle of the night, as the train wheels rumbled beneath Alex, the sharp sound of someone trying the doorknob to her compartment jolted her awake. She sat upright, her weapon pointed toward the door.

She kept still and said nothing, feeling her heart pounding. The doorknob continued to rattle from a strong, insistent hand on the other side.

Then she heard sounds from the other side of the door. A man’s voice. Very angry. The man spoke French. The door thumped. It sounded like he had put his shoulder to it.

Alex scurried to her feet and peered through the peephole. The hallway was dimly lit, but she could see a man and a woman, lurching.

The attempt at entry stopped, followed by a brief but noisy hallway discussion in heavily accented Midi French.

It was an obscene accusatory argument. They were drunk and obviously at the wrong door.

From what she could catch of the dialogue, it sounded like the drunken husband was finally wandering back to his own compartment after falling asleep elsewhere on the train. His wife had waited up for him.

Or something.

Alex smirked slightly. But for good measure, she kept her gun trained at the door in case this was some sort of cover for a sudden break-in. And she moved away from the door in case anyone suddenly fired a bullet through it.

When it was quiet again, she went to the door, pistol aloft in her right hand, and opened it slowly. The corridor was empty.

She returned to bed and slept.

The next morning she arrived in Figueras, the final stop in Spain. The day was warm and sunny, a pleasant late summer day in Europe. She was dressed casually, light jeans and a T-shirt, dark glasses, her gun in her purse this time, right next to her US passport.

She connected in the Figueras station with the train that would take her to Montpellier in France. There was no longer a stop for customs. After a ninety-minute trip, she then changed trains again in Montpellier for the Train de Grande Vitesse, which would speed her to Geneva.

She sat in a coach car next to a Frenchman who was a banker out of Dijon. He initiated the conversation and presented her with a business card. They spoke French. He was intrigued when she said that she was American and intrigued a second time when she said that she worked for the United States Department of Treasury.

Instinct again. She had a funny sense about him, maybe that he had been waiting for her. But the conversation went nowhere.

He nodded and went back to his reading. A few minutes later, his cell phone rang. The conversation was brief. Then he closed the phone and turned to her.

“I’m going to be changing seats,” he said.

She nodded and rose, stepping to the aisle.

“Would you like the window?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Take it,” he said. “You might prefer it. And my associate likes the aisle.”

He stepped past her with infinite courtesy. He turned and disappeared toward the rear of the train. Alex slid back in and sat down. She slid to the window, waited, and made sure her weapon was accessible under her jacket. She kept her hand near it. With her other hand, she flipped open a mirror from a makeup case. She positioned it and herself so that she could see anyone approaching from the train cars ahead of her, while watching the rear via the mirror.

She knew something was up. A minute passed and she spotted a heavy-set balding man approaching her row from behind. He was in his mid-forties and built like a brick outhouse. She had seen him once before in her life, at the meeting at the embassy.

Maurice Essen of Interpol, the Swiss-German who was a representative of the International Criminal Police Organization. He stopped at her row and glanced to her, indicating the open seat.

“Is this seat free?” he asked in very good English.

“I believe it’s yours, Maurice,” she said.

He smiled graciously. He sat down.

“If you’ve gone to this effort to follow me so you could speak in person,” she said in low tones barely audible above the sound of the train, “you must have something pretty good.”

“That or I believe you do,” he said. “I flew to Montpellier this morning so I could take this train so we could talk in person,” he said.

“About what?” Alex asked.

“An open case before Interpol and the Swiss federal police,” he said. “Lee Yuan.”

“I might have known.”

He continued in English. “The Swiss police retrieved Yuan’s body from a glacier a few weeks ago,” Essen began. “The government of China took an immediate interest in it. The Chinese had apparently sent one of their top young agents to retrieve the body, a charming fortyish man who traveled under the passport of John Sun. Sending someone to retrieve a corpse is not normal procedure for the Chinese. They normally ask for corpses of their nationals to be disposed of efficiently at the local level. A nice, cozy crematorium usually. So the request to ice the body and hold it was highly unusual.”

“So this Yuan fellow had to have been important,” Alex said.

“And there was nothing normal about this John Sun, either, the fellow who came and got the body out of the country as fast as possible. Sun had a diplomatic passport to cut through some red tape. Not everyone travels on one of those, not even Chinese body-snatchers.”

Alex listened in silence, assimilating as many details as quickly as she could, trying to picture the scene that had unfurled in Zurich.

“Now, the behavior of the Chinese was so unusual,” Essen continued, “that it drew the attention of both the Swiss Gendarmerie Nationale as well as the local cantonal police in Zurich. So they shadowed this John Sun. They had two-man teams on him twenty-four seven while he was in the Zurich area. They even went to the trouble to shoot some surveillance photos on the street.”

Essen reached to an inside jacket pocket. He pulled out a trio of surveillance pictures and showed them to Alex.

The pictures told her what she had already surmised. John Sun was Peter Chang. Or maybe Peter Chang was John Sun. Or maybe it was an equation that she hadn’t quite mastered yet. But the surveillance photos confirmed to her that she and Maurice Essen were discussing the same man. She was certain.

“Ever seen him?” Essen asked.

“I’m not sure,” she lied.

For several seconds she stared blankly and coldly at the image of the man she had danced with until 2:00 a.m. two nights earlier, whose arms had held her, and who had given her a friendly platonic kiss on each cheek in the lobby of the Ritz when he had escorted her back to the hotel.

“I really can’t say,” she said.

“Of course not,” Essen said. “Well, to use an expression I once learned in America, he’s a slippery SOB, this John Sun, so I hope you’re not helping him if you want our help. In Switzerland he apparently ‘made’ his watchers, an experienced counterterror team, and slipped them. He went in and out of a department store on the Hilden-strasse in Zurich. Or at least he went in because no one saw him come out. It was there that he vanished.”

“Why are you interested in him?” she asked. “From what you’ve said, he didn’t break any laws. Not yet by your accounts, anyway.”

“Our initial focus had been more upon Yuan than his custodian,” Essen said. “What exactly had Yuan been up to in Switzerland that would land him in a glacier with lungs filled with smoke? So the Swiss tried to determine who Yuan had been and what his mission had entailed. An informer told them that Yuan had been in Europe to effect a transfer of cash for some bill of goods. The Swiss police hadn’t known whether it was drugs, weapons, or maybe jewelry. The informer hadn’t known. There was plenty of speculation to go around, and it went in several unsubstantiated directions.”

Conspicuously absent so far, Alex noted, was any mention of the high-ticket Pietà of Malta. But her own theories were starting to emerge. And on the subject of theories, the Swiss police had some fairly sinister ones about John Sun.

“Two atypical murders in Geneva took place within twenty-four hours of Sun’s disappearance from Zurich,” Essen said. “One victim was an old crook named Laurent Tissot, a Swiss. The other was a man known as Stanislaw Jurjeznicz, a Pole. Sun somehow had moved about the country like a phantom. Just as his surveillance team had not known anyone who could disappear so quickly, they had never seen a diplomat who could have slipped in and out so fast. So when they ran a check on his passport, they discovered it was one of those mysterious ‘Made in China’ specials. It dead-ended into the Beijing computers. The passport was real but the owner wasn’t. Not quite, anyway. And the two dead men in Geneva-the Swiss national and the Polish national, both with ties to the underworld-had links to a shady deal gone sour. The Swiss then went through all their street surveillance cameras in the significant parts of Geneva, including bank ATMs, and connected ‘Sun’ with the time and place. That, in turn, connected Sun to Yuan and possibly to two murders.”

“With respect,” Alex said, “what you’re presenting is a highly circumstantial case.”

“That’s right,” Essen said politely. “So, I’ll ask you again, maybe as a hypothetical, do you think you might have seen or encountered the individual we know as John Sun?”

“I see a lot of people every day,” she said. “Nothing stands out.”

“This man would stand out. Of course,” Essen said with a slight sigh, a tiny decent into anger as he answered, “keep something in mind. We have established that the Switzer and the Pole knew each other, did business with each other, based on the accounts of respected informants. So any information you can give us in return, particularly on the whereabouts of ‘Sun’ would be of infinite interest, particularly if he can be located on Swiss soil where he can be brought in for questioning. We consider Sun highly dangerous. This is evident, in consideration of the deaths of the Pole and the Switzer.”

“I understand,” she said. “If there’s a time at which I can help you with this, I’ll be pleased to do so.”

“Of course,” Essen said. “Good day, Ms. Alex. We’ll appreciate your cooperation in the future.”

“Of course,” she said.

Essen rose, gave her a curt old-world bow, and returned in the direction he had come. The seat next to her remained empty.

She stared for several minutes out the window as the landscape of southeastern France flew by. There were moments in life-messages, acquisitions of knowledge-that were made up of too much stuff to be digested whole.

This was one. Or maybe this was several of them, all jammed together. Eventually, she steepled her fingers before her and thought deeply. Just in terms of Peter, which way should she proceed? What if Peter had murdered two men in Switzerland to cover his own crimes or something even more devious?

Alert him that Interpol was on his trail?

Alert Interpol that Peter would be joining her in Geneva?

Run the whole thing past Mark McKinnon, hope he was sober enough to make a correct decision, and proceed on his instructions?

Every potential step had something right with it and something wrong with it.

To alert Interpol was to betray Peter, who had saved her life.

To ignore Interpol was to betray the working relationship she sought to develop for this and future cases. Did professional loyalties trump personal gratitude? Or was it the other way around?

Alex pondered.

Do nothing? Always an option for the fainthearted or the unduly cautious. But doing nothing was sometimes the wisest route. She brooded.

Reality check. Back to Square One: her assignment was The Pietà of Malta, its recovery, and any issues attendant to its theft. Who could help her more? Peter? Or Interpol?

A question like that should have been a slam dunk. But instead, she had no answer. She had the funny sense of not knowing Peter Chang at all, or maybe knowing him all too well. She wasn’t sure which.

The train arrived exactly on time in Geneva in mid-afternoon. As planned, she checked into the Grand Hotel de Roubaix in Geneva as late afternoon was fading into evening. She had dinner at the hotel, went out for a walk, returned, bolted her door, and did a final check for email.

Finally she made a decision.

No bolt of lightning would illuminate the whereabouts of The Pietà of Malta, no magical key would put everything in perspective. But now there was a crucial new piece to the puzzle.

She went back to her computer. She typed an email to both Mark McKinnon in Europe and her boss Mike Gamburian back in Washington, inquiring by name about Laurent Tissot and Stanislaw Jurjeznicz. She wrote:

I don’t know. It might be nothing, but I’d appreciate anything you have on either of these two. Their names have surfaced. Alex. Geneva

She felt clever and compromised at the same time. Like Peter on the subject of Yuan and perhaps on the subject of The Pietà of Malta, she had not exactly told a lie. She had instead declined to tell the complete truth.

She waited for a few minutes. She found a cognac in the hotel’s overpriced minibar, and poured herself a double.

Then the email account flashed again with an incoming message. Something back fast from Gamburian, who must have been at the tail end of a long business day. No hits on the Pole, but there was some preliminary stuff on Tissot. After a stint in the Swiss Army, he was a career shady character, but mostly an arms merchant. Tissot was not an outright crook, but usually in the gray area of the law and the dark gray area of ethics and morality. Gamburian finished,

More details to follow,

I’ll try to boot up an entire file tomorrow a.m. in DC. Cheers, stay safe.

She wrote back and thanked him. But now she was exhausted. Absolutely and positively. She shut down her laptop, made sure the door to her room was bolted, set up her weapon again, and settled into bed, her mind still teeming, trying to factor a dead arms dealer into the mix but not quite able. Not yet, anyway.

After several minutes, she realized not only that she was still awake, but she hadn’t even managed to close her eyes. She was staring at the dark ceiling, watching the play of shadows and light from the curtained window, and conscious of some distant movement in the adjoining hotel room, on the other side of her closet.

She opened up her iPod. She channeled into some light classical music, which did help her relax. Then, as sleep crept up on her, and as she was on the verge of dropping off into its soft embrace, more events and theories interconnected.

And another startling realization was upon her; as she worked scenarios in reverse and tried to distill inner truths from what she had been told, she had another answer.

Somehow, Peter had connected either Tissot, Stanislaw, Lee Yuan, or the pietà itself to Yuri Federov, the man she was in Geneva to find. Possibly he had done this through the computers of the man he had killed. She remembered Peter boasting about how he had broken into their database. Or possibly he had done this through other means. But from there, Peter-the name she continued to think of him as-went to Mark McKinnon, her CIA guy, with whom he had worked before.

Peter needed a way of accessing Federov. But why?

McKinnon, she theorized, had gone to the State Department and Alex’s c.v. had spun off a link to Federov. So McKinnon had contacted her boss, Mike Gamburian, and her phone had rung on a Barcelona beach. Conveniently, she was still in Europe. Hence, very late at night in a Geneva hotel room, she had the answer to a question: How had Peter known that she was assigned to the case before she did?

Well, it was a thesis, at least. It made sense. And then she realized, so did something else. Yuri Federov must have been in a position to know something about the pietà’s disappearance. Otherwise, finding him wouldn’t have been so critical.

It all made a tidy little bundle. And the tidy little bundle was part of a massive mess. Several people were already dead, the perps were still out there, and who knew what the motivation of the theft had been, where the money had gone, and-almost least important now-who knew where the lamentation was?

Well, she would put all this to Peter when she saw him and see what he had to say about it. She even had a bargaining chip: Interpol was on his tail, and he might not even know.

Then she found something new to worry about. Maybe Interpol had nailed him already when he had crossed the border into Switzerland, even though he had probably changed passports. Maybe she was on her own again. And maybe she was now under Interpol surveillance. She might have to work the department-store routine herself.

She blew out a long sigh. A third cognac helped. Her eyelids came together. It was past two thirty in the morning. The bed was finally comfortable. So, for a short while, she slept.