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.
SIXTY-ONE
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 17, LATE AFTERNOON
On a cluttered back street next to the Rastro, in the rear of a small locked store, Jean-Claude stood in a closed room and obtained the final ingredients for mass homicide.
His detonators were in a small bag on the counter.
The old Arab named Farooq motioned to it when the younger man came in the door. The proprietor also held a pistol in his hand the entire time as Jean-Claude made the pickup, just in case. He hated the sight of such people and sometimes hated himself for having to deal with them.
But Jean-Claude caused no trouble.
He gathered the detonators and pushed them into a backpack. He gave the old man a smile, went out the door, and prepared to head home.
The Metro was giving him the creeps today, and he also had some hotel business to attend to. He had even pulled his Vespa out of storage for the occasion.
SIXTY-TWO
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 17, LATE EVENING
Alex paid her fare at the window of the taxi cab and stepped to the sidewalk on the Carrera de San Jerónimo. Across the street stood the Hotel de Cataluña. She tipped the driver generously and turned as he gave her an appreciative nod. It was only then that she noticed that there was some disorder, that something grievous had happened.
The hotel was a restored nineteenth-century building not far from the museum triangle. A thick, hot night gripped the city. Several meters from where Alex stepped onto the sidewalk, many of the patrons of the Café Giron, where intellectuals had gone to argue for generations, stood looking up into an alley. Several couples stood on the opposite side of the street, discussing what had happened. Their faces were contorted. They spoke in hushed tones. Two women jockeyed for a good view of what had happened, got one, then shielded their eyes and abruptly averted their gaze
Alex looked up, scanning the side of the building. She was staring at the back wall of the hotel where Floyd Connelly had said he was staying. There were human figures at several windows, people looking down, gawking at a spot where a knot of other people had gathered below in an alley. One woman on the third floor was holding her hands to her face in horror. A man poked his head out, looked down, and quickly looked away. Alex worked the side of the building with her gaze. There was a seventh floor window that was wide open with window drapes out and flapping gently. She recalled where Connelly said he was staying-habitation 734-and she knew that whatever he had to say to her wasn’t going to get said.
For good measure, hoping against hope, she tried Connelly’s cell number. His voice came on. Voice mail. She disconnected.
Alex crossed the street. She walked to an alley that led behind the hotel. In front of the alley was an ambulance and in front of the ambulance was a police car. Emergency vehicles, but no one seemed to be in much of a rush. The police weren’t setting much of a perimeter yet. They had that “just arrived” look.
She passed between two iron gates that led into an alley. The alley led to a place where garbage was stored and where service vehicles could enter the hotel’s service entrance. But the garbage and the vehicles didn’t matter right now.
A Vespa with a rider on it emerged from underneath of the hotel and with a whining whirring noise, accelerated as it climbed the driveway. The small knot of men who had gathered there, some in police uniforms, gave way to the bike and rider. Alex stepped back so the vehicle wouldn’t run over her toes.
The boundaries of the alley were marked by a high, old wrought-iron fence with spikes on the top. The spikes resembled old-fashioned spears. Part of the spiked railing had been torn from the rest of the fence. It was there that the knot of men were focused.
Alex pushed through the crowd. She could see partially what had brought everyone together. A man in a blue police uniform knelt over a bulky body that was sprawled in impossible directions. The body wore suit pants and a blue shirt with a necktie, but already the color combination had turned from the prosaic into the grotesque. Fragments of the victim’s skull, tufts of white hair caked with crimson fluid, were not far from the corpse. Other men stood awkwardly behind the policeman, peering through whatever inches of space were possible between bodies.
Alex worked her way to the edge of the small crowd and managed to slide her way to the front where she could get a good look at the corpse. A wave of nausea overtook her. She suppressed it. She had seen atrocities in her life-human beings torn apart by bullets in Venezuela, by a rocket attack in Ukraine-but this was the worst she had seen.
She looked at the fence, looked upward at the seventh floor window again, turned away, and looked back. It was all clear.
Connelly had come out of the window.
He had plunged from a hundred feet up and crashed into the fence full force when he’d come to earth. The spikes had torn into and through his upper body, ripped his neck apart, had taken off half his skull. Some of the spikes had impaled themselves in his upper chest. But the impact of the big man’s fall had taken out a section of the old iron fence and brought it to the concrete with him.
And so there he lay, dead as a crushed bug, his bodily fluids continuing to flow, not a breath of life left in him. He didn’t look like Orson Welles anymore, and he didn’t look like Gutman. He didn’t look like anything human.
For a moment, which turned into several moments, all Alex could do was stare. She stared and wondered what it was that he had wanted to tell her, what it was that he wanted to pass along. It must have been good because people don’t voluntarily go out windows when they’re waiting to share a secret with a lady. Not usually. It had to have been good unless it had been nothing.