Midnight In Madrid

FIFTY-SEVEN

VILLA MALAFORTUNATA, ITALY, SEPTEMBER 16, 10:18 P.M.

His name was Ahmet Lazzari, he said, switching into Italian. He was a Turk by way of Sicily. His parents had been laborers, his father a bricklayer, his mother a picker in a vineyard. More recently, he and his brother had moved to Genoa, where they had found occasional work on the docks. Eventually, they had worked for one of Federov’s shipping companies.

His accent was thick and guttural.

He talks like a goat, Federov had warned back in Geneva. Alex wasn’t so sure of that, but Ahmet did have the breath of one.

All of Federov’s business had come out of Odessa, Alex knew, but his bases of operation had expanded heavily into the Middle East and the Mediterranean. He thought of himself as a poor man’s Aristotle Onassis, with the ships but without the ex-first-lady wife who could give him the big time social and political clout and solve problems for him.

As Ahmet began, Alex quietly brought a notepad and pen out of her purse. Peter sat with his arms folded, elbows on the table. Rizzo sat next to her on the other side, his arms folded across his chest, his facial expression a tight scowl.

Ahmet Lazzari had a stricken look as he launched into his story. He had a prison pallor about him and behaved at times like a stray dog, not knowing whether he was going to be fed or whipped. But he had worked for Federov’s companies since 2001, he said, as a warehouseman first, then as a deck hand, and eventually as a member of a crew on the outbound freighters. He’d been clear of trouble for the entire time of his employment, up until about two months ago.

“That’s when hell broke loose,” he said. “That’s when we made some mistakes, my brother, Hassan, and me. Bad mistakes. I regret them.”

His eyes darted to Federov and then around the table. Hell breaking loose, he explained next, was when he, his brother, the shipping company, and a ship known as El Fuguero-Liberian registry-all came together under the same unlucky star.

Ahmet and Hassan had worked together for several years, each one watching the other’s back, working intermittently as merchant seamen for various companies. They were in Genoa two months earlier when the Fuguero was signing on crew. They signed on together. The bursar and much of the staff were Arabs, many Libyan, a few Saudis. The brothers had Sicilian names and Italian passports but were Arabs. So they got special treatment and were hired.

Two nights before sailing, the purser, a man named Abdul, approached them in a café near the docks. He wanted to put an offer to them, Ahmet recalled, something that would earn them some extra money. Ahmet had drawn his attention because he was an Arab and because he had experience working in shipyards and knew how to weld the inner structure of a ship. So would they be interested in listening? And would they be able to keep their mouths shut if they said no.

The brothers looked at each other and didn’t think too much about it. Extra money was important, whatever the job, so they said yes. It had to do with taking some panels off the wall and sealing some material back in. The brothers looked at each other and laughed.

“Half the boats in the Mediterranean are running drugs,” Ahmet said to the table full of his visitors. “The other half are running guns. People in suits in offices are getting rich. Men who have yachts and seven mistresses. So why shouldn’t we get some crumbs from the rich guys’ table?”

So they agreed.

Two nights later they were aboard the ship. It had been cleared of local crew. The brothers were asked to go into the bursar’s office with an array of tools and take out one of the panels on the wall. They did so. Behind it was a hollow area, about a meter wide and half a meter deep. It was perfect for storage. They left the new hole in the wall open and reported back to Abdul.

Abdul came in and inspected their work. He was pleased. The panel lay on the floor with the bolts that had held it. There wasn’t much of a mess and nothing had been damaged. The brothers had done good work.

“Next, we were told to go below decks until summoned back,” Ahmet said. “When we came back down below, the atmosphere on the ship had changed. The crew was gone, almost all of it. In their place, there were some Middle Eastern guys. They had the scarves. Dark glasses. They looked like Egyptians, and they looked like they wanted trouble. They all had Uzi’s. They didn’t bother us, but they knew we were welders.”

“We understood that this was when a delivery was made,” Ahmet said. “They didn’t want us seeing whoever got on and off.”

“We sat in the ship’s kitchen, my brother, Hassan, and me,” Ahmet said. “We opened a bottle of wine and smoked cigarettes. It must have been less than an hour. One of the gunman came for us. He spoke to us in Arabic and told us we could go back upstairs and finish our work. He asked us if we had more cigarettes, so we gave him a pack. We wanted him to be our friend, you know?”

He searched the table nervously and looked for some interaction from his audience. None was forthcoming.

“We went back upstairs and Abdul was standing there. He was looking into our secret compartment. There was a bag in it. A sack. Rough material, like burlap. The type of thing tools are kept in. He motioned with his head at the hiding place. ‘Close it up now!’ he said to us. So we did. We put the steel plating back in place and used an automatic drill to put the bolts back. He didn’t let us look in the bag. We had no idea.”

He drew a breath. Alex interrupted him.

“Ahmet,” she said. “What was the exact date that we’re talking about?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Try harder than that, if you will.”

After some consultation he claimed it was June the twenty-first of this year. Or thereabouts. He wasn’t certain.

“Why is the exact date important?” Federov asked.

“Dates are always important,” Alex said.

She thanked the Arab and he continued.

“Abdul paid us in cash. So we had some fun with the money in port. Liquor. Women.”

“Well, that’s not a strict Muslim lifestyle now, is it?” Rizzo chipped in.

Ahmet hung his head a little. He had no idea who Rizzo was and didn’t know whether to spit or salute. He did neither. “No,” he said. “Would have saved us all a lot of trouble if we’d been strict,” he said, “but we weren’t.”

Federov made a motion with his hand that suggested Ahmet should move the story along. He did. He said they sailed in two days as scheduled, and everything was fine on board. Then after two days at sea, his brother came to him. Hassan had purchased this little electronic tracking device, he said. It had only cost twenty euros. But Hassan had this bold idea. He was going to go into the compartment and slip it into whatever was in the bag. Then they could follow the bag to its ultimate destination.

“For what purpose?” Alex asked. “To steal it back or to blackmail the recipient?”

“I didn’t want to go along with this,” Ahmet said. “It was my brother’s idea. Hassan’s. Completely.”

“That’s nice, but it’s not what I asked,” she said.

“Blackmail,” he said.

“It turned out that he and his brother were stealing from my cargo too,” Federov said with bitterness, staring at his prisoner. “They’d break into shipping containers and skim merchandise. They’d smuggle it off the ships and fence it, then the insurance companies would come back to me. Prosecutors in Italy brought charges of fraud against two of my companies two years ago.”

“As for these brothers creating problems for me…,” Federov continued, “we’re going to discuss it later in the evening.”

“My brother’s idea,” Ahmet said again. “It wasn’t me. It was my brother,” Ahmet said. “We have an expression in Sicily,” he said. “A cani tintu catina curta. For a bad dog, a short leash. Hassan should have been on a very short leash.”

“But you went along with all of it,” said Alex, first in English and then in Italian. “Doesn’t that make you equally guilty? And apparently you had been doing this sort of thing for years.”

“Exactly,” Federov said.

Ahmet looked very ill at ease with the notion, and Federov looked vindicated. Rizzo glanced at his watch. Not that he was going anywhere. But fatigue was starting to take a toll on all of them. “Let’s get on with it,” he said.

“We waited until we had access to the purser’s office,” Ahmet said. “We went in one night. We had a shipmate give him too much to drink.” He paused, looked at Alex as if he couldn’t decide whether to elaborate, then decided to go with it. “There were some women on the ship. Women who worked the freighters in the area. There was a Dutch girl. We made sure she kept him busy one night. We had a whole warning system. She was to signal us if Abdul left his suite.”

“Wasn’t his office locked at night?” Alex asked. “I would think it would have been.”

Ahmet managed a rare laugh. “That was the beauty of it,” he said. “The Dutch girl helped us steal the keys too. You know, when he had his pants off. And just overnight so we could get in and out. It worked perfectly.”

“Brilliant,” said Alex, watching him sweat and noting where his brilliance had landed him.

From there, according to Ahmet’s recollection, it was all smooth sailing. Ahmet did the work on the compartment, and Hassam helped with the tools and watched the door. They were both shocked when they got to the burlap bag and opened it.

“We thought it was drugs. Heroin or cocaine. It was a white substance in individual bricks. But both of us had worked light construction and demolition in Sicily. So when we examined it, we knew it was explosives.”

“What?” Alex murmured, looking up from her notes.

“Top of the line stuff. The type the Americans use in Iraq. The type they’re always using and then getting used against them. Chemicals,” he said. He made an expansive gesture with his large dirty hands. “Boom!” he said.

If it was an attempt to add levity to the evening and win new friends, it failed miserably.

Alex put down her pen and leaned back. She took a minute to re-track Ahmet’s testimony so far and summarize everything in English for Peter. There had been a whole skein of loose logic that had been hanging together with a few strings. And now the strings were being pulled into place and the logic was emerging.

Ahmet sat on the hot seat and continued to dab at his cheek. He was obviously in considerable pain. Alex guessed that Federov’s first punch had fractured the Arab’s cheekbone and the second punch had redesigned it.

“I did some further checking on things this afternoon before I left Rome,” Rizzo then announced slowly. He spoke English so as to conveniently include everyone except Ahmet. “This man has a long police record in Italy. So did his brother. I ran background computer checks on both of them, then cross-referenced his activities with other investigations involving the national police in Italy. One detail that came immediately to the surface was where Ahmet had worked recently. Aboard El Fuguero. This was a ship that was on our list as a possible conduit for some explosives that were stolen from an Iraqi military supply depot after the American invasion. Our intelligence tells us the cache was broken up several times and shipped to the West. Through Cyprus and Sardinia. That’s consistent with this ship.”

“And consistent with this man’s story,” Peter said.

“Exactly what type of explosives?” Alex asked.

“HMX combined with RDX,” Rizzo said. “We think they can be traced directly to a warehouse in Iraq and to a manufacturer in Serbia.”

There was an echo somewhere in Alex’s memory of the substance. She put it on hold for later when she was back with her laptop. “How much of this HMX are we talking about?” she asked.

“About ten kilos. Or twenty pounds.”

She turned back to Ahmet and asked in Italian. “And that’s the size of the shipment you saw?” she asked.

“It was about ten kilos,” he said. “Ten bricks.”

“And so you put a honing device on it,” she said.

He nodded.

“Where was it taken ashore from El Fuguero?” she asked.

“In Barcelona,” he said.

“So we know that the explosives entered Spain?” she said. “We know that for a fact?”

“Yes,” Ahmet said. Rizzo was nodding at the same time.

“And what was the date of that?”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“July twentieth or twenty-first,” Rizzo said. “The ship was only in port two days. That’s when it came ashore.”

“Forgive me for a naive question, but exactly how did it get through port security?” Alex asked.

Ahmet snorted. “For a few dollars, anyone can disembark anything,” he said.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

From there it continued its journey, Ahmet said. Probably by private car, but who knew? His brother tracked it via the homing device, then used a public computer in a café to get the coordinates of the location. One thing led to another. He established the place where the stash was being held. Then he traveled to Madrid.

“Madrid?” she asked.

“Madrid.”

“And how did your brother make contact with the people who were holding the explosives?”

“The coordinates were very precise,” Ahmet said. “My brother knew all the ways to do those computer things. So he tracked it to a building and-”

“Do you know what building?”

“No. Hassan did all of this.”

“Did he tell you anything about the building?”

“No. I was never even in Spain.”

“Please, go on,” Alex said.

“My brother kept the house under surveillance for a few days. Figured out who was going in and out. He narrowed it down. Ended up leaving a note on the Vespa of a man who was his target. He guessed right. My brother left a phone number and went back to France. We have relatives in Marseilles. He suggested a meeting there.”

Ahmet’s voice tailed off.

“And?” she asked.

“Apparently, Hassan overstepped,” Federov said, almost happily. “When he arrived to pick up his baksheesh, his tender young throat got caught in some piano wire.”

Ahmet gave an involuntary shudder.

“Nonetheless,” Alex said. “The explosives are still out there. Correct?”

“Correct. And worse,” Rizzo said. “I assume the tracker is gone.”

“Yes. It’s gone,” Ahmet said.

“These people are bloody amateurs!” Rizzo snapped with contempt, still in Italian. “The whole lot of them. No wonder they get killed or caught or both.”

“That’s my brother you’re talking about!” Ahmet said in Italian.

“Yes, of course it is,” Rizzo said. “Hard to tell which of you was dumber. You for being here tonight or him for getting decapitated.”

The tension on Ahmet’s face was suddenly great. And a sweat broke as he glared at Rizzo. Federov’s gaze was frozen on him, but Rizzo was still focused on payback for the needle in his backside.

“He wasn’t included very well when the brains were handed out, though, was he, your stupid dead brother? Imagine going to pick up a payoff and not bringing a backup. Typical Arab, really. Plenty of desire, plenty of firepower, but not much between the Muzzy ears. That’s why the ears ended up lying on the sidewalk, along with most of the head. Sort of like one of those pig’s or goat’s heads you see in a butcher’s window, revolving on the skewer.”

“My brother!” snapped Ahmet.

“You show me a happy Islamic fanatic,” growled Rizzo, “and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”

Ahmet made a sudden openhanded lunge toward Rizzo, who started to laugh.

Alex made a move away from the table, but it was Federov who once again reacted and intercepted. Ahmet’s chair retreated and tumbled to the floor and Federov, rising, slammed the Arab down hard onto the floor, breaking the legs of the chair as he threw Ahmet on top of it. Ahmet stayed on the floor and began sobbing. Federov kicked him.

“That’s pretty much all of it,” Federov said, turning back to his guests. “Does it help?”

Alex flipped her notebook shut. “I think it does,” she said. “And I think it will take me back to Madrid first thing tomorrow.”

“Then we’re finished here,” Federov said.

He turned to his guard at the door. “Take care of things, Grisha,” he said flatly. Ahmet started sobbing louder.

A few minutes later, the group of visitors was back downstairs, moving toward the door, Dmitri preceding them as they stepped out into the night. There were still stars. The moon had traveled a great distance across the sky.

Dmitri had drawn his pistol again and stood guard at the end of the driveway. Peter, Alex, Rizzo, and Federov moved toward the car under a bright night sky.

When the group was almost to the car, the stillness in the heavy air was broken by the sound of a man shouting within the house. The voice came from the upstairs window, loud enough and frantic enough for Alex to glance upward in that direction.

It was a loud voice and very frightened, intensity rising, speaking in Arabic. Obviously, Ahmet.

Then there was single loud shot within the house. The voice ceased. The group moving to the SUV froze. A second shot followed. Rizzo’s eyes found Alex’s. Alex felt sick. They looked at Federov who at first said nothing. But he kept moving. As he opened the car door, he finally felt obliged to say something.

“It’s my business. I’ll run it the way I always have,” he growled.

“I’m assuming we weren’t supposed to hear that,” Alex said. “The execution was probably meant to happen after we left.”

“Does it matter?”

“Oh, I don’t suppose it does,” Rizzo said. “How could it?”

“Ahmet and his brother were stealing from me, stealing from the entire world. They had no honor, no backbone. Why should you care about such men? They were not your friends, they were your enemies.”

“And you’re still a complete bastard, aren’t you?” said Alex. “I’d almost forgotten.”

He shrugged. “I’ve done all of you a favor,” he said. “The world is better off without such people. Or do you think otherwise?”

“Murder is murder,” Alex said.

Federov shook his head. “And war is war,” Federov said. “I did you a service, and you get angry with me. Your government should give me a medal.”

Alex didn’t answer. She slid back into the van. This time she took a backseat window and retreated into a corner. Peter turned to her.

“Mr. Federov is right, Alex,” Peter said.

“What? You agree with what he just did?”

“I agree with what he just did.”

“You’d have done the same thing?”

“In one way or another, yes,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’re all paid to do? The world has front hallways and back alleys. We work in the back alleys. All of us.”

She looked away, then back. “Sometimes I prefer not to,” she said.

“Then why are you here tonight?” Peter asked.

“Leave me alone, all right?”

“Don’t have an answer to that, do you?”

She glared back at him.

“All right,” Peter said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

Alex was suddenly quite exhausted, quite horrified, and didn’t have much to add.

“A Russian can never trust Sicilians,” Federov finally muttered to anyone who would listen and when they were finally moving. “Except the dead ones. The dead ones don’t bother you.”

It was almost a benediction.

“That depends on who finds the body,” Rizzo answered, more amused than he should have been.

Federov laughed. “No one’s gonna find that one.”

No one said anything else for most of the time en route back toward Genoa. Alex closed her eyes and slept part of the way. In the moonlight, the van wove its way eastward on the winding motorway back to the city.

The world is better off without such people.

Federov’s words echoed in her mind with the same volume and impact as a pair of gunshots, and, for that matter, so did Peter’s.