“You didn’t ask him to kill Connelly, did you? I know you didn’t ask me to.”
“Ha! No. Why? Do you think I did?”
“A lot of things cross my mind,” she said. “Our black bird isn’t the most normal case.”
“What case is?” he asked. “Are you the normal working girl from Treasury? Is Peter the normal Chinaman from Shanghai? Lighten up, LaDuca. There is no normal. If something were normal, it would be abnormal, which would make it suspicious.”
“Even if you didn’t order it, I’m wondering if Peter freelanced it,” she said. “His interests in this case coincide with ours, but they’re not perfectly compatible.”
“Oh,” McKinnon said dismissively, “I doubt that he did. But if he pushed old Floyd out of the lousy window, so what, really? Floyd was a liability. Senior moments, twenty-four seven. And that hotel he was staying at. It wasn’t the Four Seasons; it was more like a One Season. Bad publicity, my buttcrack! They probably won’t even bother to get their fence fixed. They’re going to parlay the publicity and sell out all summer to the tourists from Kansas. They’ll probably open a café in the alley and name a drink after Floyd. They’ll call it ‘The Dead American’ and put a couple of little skewers through it.”
“Mark, would you come down to earth?”
But Mark didn’t. “I’ve got this theory, you see,” McKinnon continued. “More than a theory, really. An analysis of what’s been going down. Floyd was the leak in the room at the embassy, you see. We know that. In the room and for many months dating back. He’s the one who nearly got you killed by letting go with inside information and not securing either his computer or his phone. He’d get soused and pop off at the hotel bar about why he was in Madrid. Used to trade info for sex. Did you know that? Did you know he mentioned your name a couple of weeks back to some bad people. Did you know that he used to play golf with a cranky old dinosaur of an arms dealer in Switzerland named Tissot, who payrolled a mistress for him, and set up a bank account for him?”
“Is that true?” she asked.
McKinnon laughed. “You Treasury eggheads might dislike all us Agency people, Alex,” he said, “but we do know a thing or two. Connelly was a health hazard to all of us. So I’m not bawling my eyes out this morning. It’s pretty clear that Floyd was finally set up. Outlived his usefulness to the opposition and in fact had turned into a liability for them as well as us. He bought half a recent bill of goods from someone, but his good information was laced with the bad stuff. And yet he stumbled across enough solid stuff so that he decided to play Clark Kent out of the hotel window. I say, good riddance! He got killed instead of you getting killed. So even if Peter freelanced, so what?”
“Maybe nothing, unless you’re Connelly’s family back home.”
“Floyd had a big government insurance policy. It actually will save the taxpayers some money. Maybe his wife had him pushed. I hear she’s not that upset, a bit of a merry widow. It’s as if she won the lottery, you know, and she doesn’t have to be worried about a wandering husband any more.”
“You disgust me sometimes, Mark. That’s a human life you’re talking about.”
“What else is on your mind, LaDuca? You carry yourself well, but you can be a pain in the neck.”
They stopped walking. He glanced at the palace and continued before she could say anything.
“Hell of a building, isn’t it, the palace? But you know what? They should chainsaw that palace into condos and make some money with the way the economy is crashing. I don’t care much for the Spaniards, truth be known. They invented the auto-da-fé here, you know. What’s the old jingle? What a day, what a day, for an auto-da-fé.”
“This ‘Jean-Claude al-Masri’,” she said. “You know about him?”
“We have some of the same sources, so yes. Of course I do. A potential suspect. Marvelous. Whoop dee do.”
“Are the Spanish police going to bring him in?” she asked.
“Hell, no.”
“Why not?”
“The Spanish police are involved in the black fricking bird, not in the plot against the embassy.”
“What?”
“This is the twenty-first century. We handle these things directly.”
“Give me a break.”
“No, LaDuca, you give us one and don’t exceed your assignment here. These things take care of themselves when we’re lucky,” he said.
“What are you doing behind my back?” she asked. “I need some help with this, Mark, and you’re not coming across with it.”
“The world is imperfect, but we just discussed that.”
“What about the embassy?” she asked.
“What about it?”
“I’m told it’s in stand-down today,” she said. “Being searched roof to basement.”
“Who told you that?” he asked.
“Colonel Pendraza.”
“He’s kind of sweet on you, the old guy, isn’t he? Feeds you tidbits so he can hang out with a girl a third his age. You know, I think he’d like to get you in bed at least once. It would kind of cap his career, if you want to give it some sympathetic thought.”
“At least he acts professionally.”
“Okay,” he said. “Touché. And he’s only two and a half times your age. Listen, Madrid is in Spain, Spain is in Europe, Mercury is in retrograde, I’m in a good mood, and the embassy is in stand-down, yes, as are several dozen other locations around Madrid. We make sure the premises are clean and then we triple the security on anything or anyone coming in.”
“What about underneath the embassy?”
“What? The sewers?”
“Has anyone considered that the embassy could be accessed from underneath?”
“Pretty miniscule, the possibilities.”
“So was flying a pair of planes into the World Trade Center.”
McKinnon was silent. Then, still in Spanish, “But for the dual sake of both argument and personal irritation, I’ll give you a minute to convince me,” he said.
“This in an old city, one set of walls and ruins on top of another,” Alex said. “Same as Rome, London, Paris, Vienna. Ever see The Third Man? Ever see Ocean’s Thirteen? Ever read about Dien Bien Phu where the Viet Cong came up out of underground tunnels to blow the French out of Indochina? You had a tunnel under the Berlin Wall, and you got tunnels under the Tex-Mex borders in Arizona and Texas that you can drive small trucks through. And how about this? Did you read about the way the thieves got into the Museo Arqueológico to steal the bird the first time? There’s twelve centuries of stuff under our feet, Mark. They’re always finding Moorish walls and cellars in all those places, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that someone could be burrowing.”
“Even if you burrowed, you’d need a real wallop of explosives,” he said.
“Yes. Like HMX with RDX. That’s exactly what’s out there somewhere.”
“Uh huh. Look, it’s under control, LaDuca. Stick to your job, which is the stupid figurine. Now, what else do you want from me?”
“You’re head of the Agency in Europe. I could use some help examining the area around the embassy. The underground pathways and all.”
“What? You want to go looking for souvenirs of the Inquisition?”
“I want to be thorough.”
“Thorough!” he laughed. “Have you seen our budget this year?”
“How much does a search cost compared with the cost of if we miss something?”
“You’re good. I should send you before Congress and you can ask them that. Someday, they’re going to ask me why I do things the way I do, and I’m going to reply by asking them why they use a jet bomber to kill a couple of camels. Dialogue. Socratic method. You like it?”