Midnight In Madrid

SIXTY

GENOA TO MADRID, SEPTEMBER 17, MID-AFTERNOON

Not surprisingly, Federov’s other jet was a thing of beauty: a Learjet 55 with a crew of four. The plane seated eight in addition to the crew, but she and Peter were the only passengers.

Alex settled into a seat by herself in the rear. The aircraft took off from the same private field outside Genoa where she had arrived. She opened her computer and found a response from Mike Gamburian.

It was a CIA file. She entered her security codes, held her breath as she waited for them to apply properly, then breathed easier as the files opened.

Then she confronted additional pieces of the backstory.

The explosives that Ahmet had undoubtedly spoken of were a powdery plastic called HMX. They were combined with a similar substance named RDX and were manufactured in Serbia. They were some of the most powerful conventional explosives used by the world’s militaries.

Serbia, unlike Spain, was the one place in the world where HMX and RDX were manufactured. The path of the particular batch of explosives that would turn up in western Europe was a grim echo of the dark events of the last quarter century.

In the 1980s, the Iran-Iraq war was only one of a series of crises during an era of upheaval in the Middle East. There had been the revolution in Iran that deposed the Shah, the occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran by militant students, and the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan. There had been the invasion of the Great Mosque in Mecca by antiroyalist Islamists, and the bitter clan fighting among different factions of Syrians, Israelis, and Palestinians in Lebanon. All of these events and more had maintained the Middle East as the tinderbox of the modern world, ready to ignite larger conflagrations if any side overplayed its hand.

The Iran-Iraq War followed months of rising tension between the Iranian Islamic republic and secular nationalist Iraq. In mid-September 1980, Iraq under its new, young military dictator, Saddam Hussein, attacked Iran in the mistaken belief that internal Iranian political disarray would guarantee a quick victory. The gambit proved wrong.

The international community responded with UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire and for all member states to refrain from actions contributing in any way to the conflict’s continuation. The Soviet Union, opposing the war, cut off arms exports to Iran and to Iraq, its ally under a 1972 treaty.

The US had already ended previously massive military sales to Iran when the Shah had fallen in 1979. By 1980 the US had broken off diplomatic relations with Iran because of the Tehran embassy hostage crisis. Iraq ended ties with the US during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

So the US was officially neutral in the Iran-Iraq War, diplomatically recognized neither side, and maintained that it armed neither. Iran, however, depended on American weapons. Anywhere in the world, if there is a potential buyer of arms, there is always a potential seller. So Iran quickly acquired American arms through merchants from Israel, Europe, Asia, and South America.

Iraq had started the war with a large Soviet-supplied arsenal but needed additional weaponry as the conflict defied a quick resolution and wore on. Initially, Iraq advanced far into Iranian territory, but was driven back within months. By mid 1982, Iraq was on the defensive against Iranian human-wave attacks. The United States, having decided that an Iranian victory would not serve its regional interests, began quietly arming Saddam Hussein’s military in Iraq.

Negotiations already underway to upgrade US-Iraq relations were accelerated, high-level officials exchanged visits, and in February 1982, the State Department removed Iraq from its list of states supporting international terrorism. It had been included several years earlier because of ties with several Palestinian nationalist groups.

Iraq also received massive external financial support from the Gulf states and assistance through loan programs from the US. The White House and State Department pressured the Export-Import Bank to provide Iraq with financing, to enhance its credit standing, and to enable it to obtain loans from other international financial institutions. The US Agriculture Department provided taxpayer-guaranteed loans for purchases of American commodities, to the satisfaction of US grain exporters. As the war ground onward, chewing up close to a million casualties on both sides, North American agribusiness profited handsomely.

The United States formally restored relations with Iraq in November 1984, the time of Donald Rumsfeld’s more than convivial meeting with Saddam Hussein. But the US had begun, several years earlier, to provide Iraq with clandestine intelligence and military support, in secret and contrary to America’s official neutrality, in accordance with policy directives from the White House.

Among the materials received by Saddam Hussein’s military was a seven-ton shipment of HDX and RDX, brokered by the Central Intelligence Agency, from a factory in Serbia. The explosives were delivered pursuant to the National Security Study Memorandum of March 1982.

The explosives were stored at a weapons complex at Al Qaqaa, about thirty miles south of Baghdad. Over the course of the next six years, much of the supply was used by Saddam Hussein’s soldiers against Iraq’s enemies-Iran and internal dissident tribes-and gradually depleted. But not all of it was depleted. Another two tons remained over the course of the next fifteen years. And there it sat, much like the rest of Saddam Hussein’s massive stockpile of conventional weapons scattered across Iraq, when US forces swept across Iraq in March and April 2003. During the invasion, the Iraqi army abandoned the site. And no one in the American military received an order to secure it.

Unobstructed, thieves entered the Al Qaqaa warehouses and removed the entire two tons. Half of it was trucked to a pro-al-Qaeda terrorist training camp near the city of Mir Ali in Pakistan. The other half, sitting in the back of a single diesel truck, arrived in Damascus, Syria, two weeks after it had been looted from the old storage facility.

In Damascus, a mix of German and Italian converts to Islam, and Arab and Turkish immigrants coalesced in an extremist cell at a radical mosque. They divided the shipment again. Half of it went to an Egyptian imam who directed an Arabic-language school in Cairo. The other half, in bulk now no larger in size than an old fashioned steamer trunk, was trucked to Beirut where, under the cover of night, it was packed into the aft hull of a speedboat.

It went next to Cyprus, where, acting on tips from the CIA, Greek and Turkish police raided several cells of radical Islamists looking for the explosives. The raids came at a time when authorities in southern Europe were increasingly worried about the threat from al-Qaeda in the Magreb, an Algerian-dominated network that had pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. A radical Muslim named Ayman al-Zawahiri, considered deputy leader of the broader al-Qaeda movement, had recently issued a videotaped statement repeating his exhortations to the North African group to strike European countries.

But the Greek and German police didn’t find the explosives.

They didn’t find them because the shipment never came on shore in Cyprus. Rather, according to CIA informants, it went into an industrial packing crate that was marked as a factory refrigeration unit and packed into a different ship. And from there, conveyed by homegrown European radicals now, it went to Brindisi in the south of Italy.

There local gangsters hid it in a picturesque white-walled old monastery within an olive grove, without knowing-or wanting to know-what they were hiding.

By now, according to Italian police, control over the shipment was held by a local radical Muslim named Habib, who ran an Islamic school in Naples. Habib was constantly under surveillance but never made a slip. Rumor had it that he had stashed the explosives in a farmhouse somewhere outside of Naples. But police never were able to locate it.

Several weeks passed. Surveillance on Habib was dropped due to lack of results.

Police who had been attempting to track the shipment went on to other assignments. And there the trail ended for everyone involved with the case.

Until now, thought Alex.

Until now, she reasoned, when the late Ahmet and the even later Hassan, had tracked the next part of the explosives’ journey and linked it to a Jean-Claude al-Masri who had formed his own terror cell in Madrid.

But why now? she pondered. She leaned back in her seat and felt the bumpy hot air of a late Spanish summer buffet the aircraft. Suddenly she had it. She gazed out the window, her mind a warren of certainties, theses, and suspicions.

Because of the black bird, she realized. Because, as she had learned, art theft frequently finances crime or terror. Because of The Pietà of Malta, the explosives had now made their way to Madrid. Because of the theft of the pietà, because a dead Chinese collector had come up out of the snow, all these events had followed.

The thieves had stolen it from the museum to raise money to buy explosives from anti-Western sources. But then the brokers had burned the purchaser and not delivered, either out of greed, stupidity, or the desire to capitalize even more.

That misstep had brought Peter into the case.

She closed down her computer, closed her eyes for the rest of the flight, and tried not to hear Federov’s two gunshots for the hundredth time.

Peter and Alex disembarked in Madrid by three in the afternoon. Alex checked back into the Ritz, a smaller accommodation this time, by 4:00. Peter stayed at El Mirablau.

Settled in by 5:00 in the afternoon, Alex went to email yet again and now heard from her Roman buddy, Rizzo. The DNA samples had come back from the skin that Rizzo had scratched in the nightclub from the face of his assailant.

The DNA had finally triggered a match.

The match named a Frenchman of Algerian heritage named Jean-Claude al-Masri. The latter had a small-time police record in three European countries and an address in Madrid.

The Policia Nacional had already been asked to pick him up.