Midnight In Madrid

SIXTY-EIGHT

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 18, LATE EVENING

Mahoud had been looking forward all day to a shower after working in the hot kitchen of an Ethiopian restaurant on the Calle de Montevideo. He had been jittery all day but had calmed as night had fallen and as midnight came and went. Perhaps the whole thing was just one tremendous mistake, he thought to himself. He still harbored his deep hatred of the United States and Western culture, but he was half-relieved that the big blast hadn’t happened.

Once the bomb went off, nothing would ever be the same again. He would be frightened of every shadow and would jump at every knock on the door. Every day would be like this one, except worse. Planting the thing had been one thing, almost a challenge to see if it could be done. The actual detonation of it was something else, something secretly he hoped would never happen. But he couldn’t tell anyone that. He would have seemed like a traitor.

He thought of all of this as he walked the final block to his home in the Arab quarter, past the closed fruit and produce stands that would open again at dawn. It was now past 11:00 p.m. and he was looking forward to bathing.

But the end of the bombing mission had him spooked. Everything bothered him today. Well, at least he felt safe in his own neighborhood. As safe as one could be.

He cautiously approached his doorway. He saw a problem, but not an unusual one. There was a vagrant asleep on the sidewalk, a slight man in an old coat that was too hot for this weather. But there were vagabundos all over this neighborhood. There had been one lying in this doorstep for a couple of weeks and no one did anything. And these bums wore everything they had all the time.

Mahoud cut a wide berth around the downtrodden figure. Under Mahoud’s own coat, he had a kitchen paring knife, just in case of trouble.

He stepped around the man and reached his doorway, noting in passing that this was a different bum tonight and the regular man was gone. Well, sic transit gloria in the world of hobos, he thought. Give a bum, take a bum. Maybe, he reasoned further, someone from the neighborhood had done a public service and set the other hobo on fire. Maybe that’s what he would do to this one, he thought.

Images of flaming bodies made him think back to the explosives he had helped plant. He really did have mixed feelings about that charge going off. He really wondered if-

Then he heard his name.

“Mahoud?”

A voice in the darkness spoke softly. He jumped.

In his attention on the hobo, Mahoud had not even noticed a man sitting on the steps to the next building. He was a sturdy man but obviously way out of place in this neighborhood.

The man had a foreign face. Asian, of some sort. Japanese. Chinese. Who could tell the difference, anyway?

“Mahoud?” the man said again.

Mahoud’s hands went to his knife and held it under the jacket. But the man held up his hands to show that they were empty and that he meant no harm.

“Who are you?” Mahoud asked in Spanish.

I’m a friend of Jean-Claude,” Peter Chang answered in Spanish. “I bring you news.”

Mahoud answered cautiously. “I don’t know any Jean-Claude,” he said.

Peter Chang laughed. “Of course, you do, my friend,” he said. “Don’t be so frightened. Your entire group, you all are under my command. Don’t you think Jean-Claude has a commander? Do you think he was able to do everything by himself?”

A pause as Mahoud considered it.

“What is the news?” he finally asked.

“Come closer,” Chang said.

“Tell me from there,” Mahoud said, taking one step toward the doorway.

“I’d rather not,” said Chang.

“What is the news?” Mahoud repeated with insistence.

“The news is that everyone will die tonight,” Peter Chang said.

Mahoud flinched, wondering just how that was meant. Then there was a further explanation of the news. The vagrant had risen to his feet behind Mahoud and had slid out of his coat. The vagrant had slid, in fact, into his own true identity, that of Charles Wong. And Wong, like Chang, was there to conduct business.

Wong slapped one hand across Mahoud’s face, holding a filthy rag to his mouth and his nose. Mahoud fought back with his elbow and tried to kick at the instep and shin of the man behind him. But Wong had two hands. The other one, in a glove, held a butcher’s knife with a blade that was ten inches long. It was the type that in the primitive regions of China was still used to slaughter chickens or pigs.

With one sweeping gesture, Wong swept the blade of the knife into and across the throat of the third embassy bomber. The pain shot through Mahoud like an electrical current. He would have screamed, but his mouth was firmly covered, and the hacking, slashing sweep of the blade across his throat was so deep that his vocal chords were severed in addition to his cortical artery.

Mahoud’s body jumped at first like a great fish on a line, then went slack and buckled. He felt himself drop hard to the sidewalk. Distantly, as he lay in agony dying, he listened to the quiet footsteps of the two men walking away. And he wondered for a final time why the big explosion had never happened.

Several minutes later, Peter Chang moved quickly to a fourth location, accompanied by Wong and Ming. With little effort to conceal their faces, they arrived at the building where Jean-Claude lived in a rambling, cluttered four-room apartment.

Chang and Wong took the front stairs and Ming went to the rear where, at a synchronized moment, he hoisted himself up to a second floor window via a gutter pipe from the roof.

Here was the moment Peter had been waiting for. He wanted to savor it. Jean-Claude had been the instigator of the events that had left Yuan dead, and Chang had special plans for Jean-Claude.

They would ambush Jean-Claude in his home. But killing him swiftly would be too good. They would tie him and sit him down. Chang would show him a picture of Lee Yuan, who had died in a cold, smoky mountain castle in Switzerland.

In Peter’s mind, Jean-Claude would shake his head and deny knowledge of any man named Yuan.

Chang, as it played out in his mind, would become animated.

“This man’s name was Hun Sung Yuan. We knew him as Lee Yuan,” he would explain evenly. “Hun Sung Yuan was my friend. He was my mentor. He trained me when I entered the service of my government.”

Jean-Claude would listen in terror.

“Yuan was a boy during the Great Leap Forward,” Peter would explain. “He was five years old, and his family was sent to camps in the countryside for reeducation. Yuan’s parents were practicing Christians during the Cultural Revolution. Practicing religion was considered social turmoil. So they were held in a Beijing detention center for nearly a year as the Red Guard considered what charges to bring. Then Yuan’s parents were sent to a camp in the freezing northeast of China for reeducation instead. Yuan was sent to an orphanage. As an adult, he didn’t practice religion, but he had an interest in it. Christian items that may have been touched by a saint. Yuan was a fine man, but he had his superstitions. Which was his right.”

Jean-Claude would continue to stare. Maybe he would kick. Maybe he would protest. But he would be gagged with duct tape, so his protests would find no ears.

“As years went by,” Chang would explain, “Mr. Yuan became prosperous. And he wished to possess certain items. One was The Pietà of Malta. Mr. Yuan felt that he purchased the item very fairly. But through you and your people, it was not delivered to him. Instead, when he came to retrieve it, your associates murdered him. Do you think that was a wise thing to do?”

Jean-Claude, rethinking his position on recent events, would shake his head.

“You’re right,” Chang said. “It was not a wise thing to do.”

And then Chang would take out a long knife from under his suit jacket, a very sharp one normally used for trimming meat. He would let Jean-Claude stare at it with wide eyes while Ming and Wong approvingly watched their new master.

Then Chang would reach slowly-because he wished to draw it out-to Jean-Claude’s left ear. And with a quick powerful slashing motion he would thrust the knife into his victim’s neck and slash hard from left to right, cutting the man’s throat.

Then he would step back quickly and watch Jean-Claude begin to die in agony, even though no one had been gracious enough to be with Yuan in his final minutes. And then Peter would wash the knife off and take it with him. It would take a man about fifteen minutes to bleed to death after such an incident. And Peter needed to wrap things up and get out of the country quickly.

So there was no time to waste.

Except, this was only how Peter had planned it from the start.

In the final execution, it didn’t go that way.

When Peter, Ming, and Wong broke into Jean-Claude’s home, their victim wasn’t there.

That changed everything.