Floyd said he was sure, and he couldn’t stop talking.
“See, there’s a further rumor that a load of explosives came through Madrid, then moved on. Got sent up to France, and some of the local towel-heads are planning to blow up some railroad bridges or something in Provence in time for the fall tourist season. Anyway, just to make sure nothing’s going to blow up locally in Spain, we’ve put all the big time targets on alert. Some places are being checked by the bomb-sniffing dogs. I’ve got emails up the wazoo on all of this. That’s what I’m going to show you. I’ve downloaded them into my laptop. Once everything’s clear we all get to go home. What do you think?”
Alex wasn’t sure what to think. She felt a frown forming on her brow along with the incredulity that went with it. “That’s fine if it’s true,” Alex said, “but if the investigation is over, I need to hear that from my boss.”
“Who’s your boss?”
“Mike Gamburian at Treasury in Washington.”
“Don’t know him. Call him and ask.”
“The protocol is that he should call me.”
“Well, do it that way if you want,” he laughed. “You can probably squeeze a few days of vacation out of this if you do it that way. Me, I can’t wait to get home. How many bullfights can you go to in this city? You watch a bullfight and you know who’s gonna win, anyway.” Connelly ran from sentence to sentence like a reckless driver sailing through a string of stop signs. “I’ve got some more information on this too. Names, addresses. Laptop. Why don’t you come over tonight, and I’ll boot it up and run through it. That’s if you’re not busy.”
“Is this a business request or a social one, Floyd?” she asked.
“Little of both,” he said after a pause. “I’m at the Hotel de Cataluña. That’s over by-Wait a minute. You said you were out of town?”
“Flights are only about ninety minutes,” she said. Travel time from Genoa and Geneva were identical. “I can be there by this evening. And I’ll meet you in the lobby, not your room,” she said. “We can talk there.”
“Oh, all right, all right. Be a good girl if that’s how you want to be,” he said in a deafening bellow. “I’m an old guy, you know. There’s not much you have to fear from me.”
“What time?” she asked.
“Let’s do it late,” he said. “I’ve got a dinner with one of my sources. You know how Spain is. They don’t eat lunch till five p.m., then dinner at ten. I should be back to the hotel by eleven thirty or midnight.”
“I’ll be in the lobby at eleven thirty,” she said. “Okay?”
“That’s fine,” he said.
She rang off, highly skeptical, shaking her head. “What a-,” she mused.
And then for several minutes, she sat in the room alone.
Was Floyd blowing smoke, or did he actually have something? If he had something, how? She was dubious about everything he was saying, yet she had now committed to go visit him that night.
She went back to her laptop, shifting gears now, trying to assimilate the story that Ahmet had told the previous evening.
She went back into the attachments that she had downloaded from Colonel Pendraza. She quickly pegged to points of reference, material she had read before. This, she realized, was why Ahmet’s account rang a distant bell.
She reread,
Item: Noted in passing, al-Qaeda leaders have frequently threatened to strike again in Europe in audio and video warnings. Antiterror experts within the Policia Nacional said recently that the pace of the warnings has picked up in recent weeks. Associated item: Intercepted al-Qaeda documents have indicated activities of small sleeper cells within Spain, intent on acting independently but with major force.
She did a web search on the missing explosives. Within another few minutes, more pay dirt. From the Washington Post, she had another piece of the story:
Iraqi Explosives Missing, UN Is Told
US Disputes Timing of Loss of Munitions Sealed by Inspectors at Weapons Facility By Colum Lynch and Bradley Graham Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, October 26, 2004; Page A18 UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 25-The UN’s nuclear watchdog agency reported Monday that massive quantities of high explosives at an Iraqi weapons facility have disappeared, including some material under UN seal because of its potential use to detonate a nuclear bomb. UN and Iraqi officials indicated the explosives were lost while the country was under US occupation. But US officials suggested that the munitions may have disappeared before the US-led forces established full control over the country. They said a search of the facility by US troops shortly after the fall of Baghdad last year turned up no evidence of the explosives.
She fired off an email to Mike Gamburian’s office in Washington asking if he could send her any files on the case. No immediate response, so she closed down her laptop.
Half an hour later, she met Peter in the lobby of the hotel, as well as Rizzo and Federov. In an expansive mood, perhaps on a personal high after ordering a murder the previous night, Federov offered another of his private jets to take Peter and Alex back to Madrid. Gian Antonio Rizzo would return to Rome via commercial flight. Federov stayed in Genoa to shore up any damage done by the late Ahmet and his even-later brother.
FIFTY-NINE
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 17
The irony: The HDX and the RDX were powerful enough to bring down an urban block. And yet there was no danger of them going off accidentally. They lacked fuses and detonators. Nonetheless, Jean-Claude worked carefully to get them into their proper position.
It had taken three trips through the tunnels, caverns, and crawl spaces under Madrid to get the whole cargo of ten one-kilo bricks of explosives to where he wanted them. But here, now, in the middle of the night, he finally had them in place.
At one stretch under the city, the narrowest crawl space, Jean-Claude relied on Samy to move the explosives along. Samy’s shoulders were narrow. And he was flexible, like an eel. In some of the crawl spaces rocks had crumbled and bits of mortar had created little cave-ins. The passageways were increasingly dangerous. And there was always the chance of a big cave-in. Anyone caught in one would die. There was no mechanism for rescue, only martyrdom, which wasn’t a bad thing either.
They had assembled six bricks of explosives in the sub-chamber under the embassy. But getting the explosives in had become increasingly difficult. The narrow walls and tunnels just felt like they wanted to collapse sometime soon. Well, Jean-Claude reasoned, soon enough everything would turn to dust. He himself was already making plans to leave Madrid soon after the big blast. As for his confederates, no one would know who they had been or where to find them. They would disappear easily back into the fabric of the city.
In the end, the final four bricks of explosives had been placed on a small panel, and the panel had been tied to a rope. Jean-Claude teed up the parcel from one side and Samy pulled it through the crawlspace. Samy then waited for a few hours, listening to music on an MP3 player under the embassy.
Jean-Claude had heard from the merchant in the Rastro, Madrid’s flea market, who had fuses and detonators. His devices were ready. Once they were secured, and once Samy arranged things right, the big surprise could be set off under the embassy. He would use a timer that would time the attack for midmorning. The block would be rubble within seconds, and every living thing-Americans, Spaniards who worked there, casual passers-by-would die in the conflagration, no concessions to humanity whatsoever.
So he was thinking, 10:00 a.m. might be good. A twelve-hour timer would be perfect. The hour was near to visit Farooq.
SIXTY