Midnight In Madrid

FIFTY-FOUR

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 16 5:49 P.M.

Under the city, Jean-Claude worked with care to remove the final stones and bricks that blocked his access to a chamber under the Calle Serrano. He worked by hand, Mahoud and Samy with him. One by one, the last bricks and rocks gave way. The old plaster and mortar crumbled. They hammered with muffled tools and opened a hole that was wide enough to crawl through. Then Samy, the smallest of them, hoisted himself up, crawled forward, and pulled his way through to the other side.

He was three feet off the ground and did a playful tumble forward. His hands hit the soft dirt. He rolled once and came up on his feet smiling. His side of the wall was in darkness, however. So Mahoud handed him one of the flashlights.

“What do you see?” Jean-Claude asked in Arabic.

“I see a massive explosion that will bring misery to Western imperialists,” he said.

All three of them laughed. This was an eerie, dark place. But this wasn’t much different from the time they had burrowed under other blocks in this same city to break into the museum several weeks ago. Do anything long enough and you get good at it. The old rule of thumb applied to this also, amateur terrorists tunneling under a city to get what they wanted.

A pack of New Age moles, that’s what they were.

Subversives in the old meaning of the word, burrowing underneath the established order. Old Moles, as Marx had once suggested. The small cell of self-motivated, independent jihadists thought of themselves in heroic, romantic terms. They were the substance of the work, the destiny, and the future of persecuted Islamic people in Europe and the saviors of their people, all rolled into one five-piece unit.

Despite betrayal, despite the failure of their culture to adapt to the modern age, these amateur warriors saw themselves making headway. Jean-Claude had read Marx and had pulled some phrases from him.

“We are like a desert stream,” he liked to tell his young warriors, “a stream that has been diverted from its course and has plunged into the depths below the sands. And now we reappear, sparkling and gurgling, in an unexpected place.”

They knocked away a few more stones and were indeed in a place where no one expected them to be. They were sixteen feet under the basement of the US Embassy. Their plans were right on target and so was their physical position.