MADRID, SEPTEMBER 7, MID-AFTERNOON

Finally, after a half hour’s wait, Jean-Claude thought he heard something outside. Then he knew he did. The sound of a car engine. Diesel, rattling to a stop.

Friend or enemy, he didn’t know.

Under his shirt, he gripped his gun.

Then, almost on cue, Jean-Claude could tell from Ceila’s reaction who was present. She quickly pulled on a robe and her headwear. To be caught this way by her husband might result in a thrashing and she knew it. She also picked up the child and carried him to another room. Within a few more seconds the garage doors swung wide open.

It was Basheer. His taxi was parked outside. It was an old blue Mercedes Benz, an elderly 300D workhorse of a vehicle.

Jean-Claude stepped from the back of Mahoud’s car. He walked to the street and embraced Basheer. Both men looked around. They saw nothing that didn’t fit within the neighborhood. Old men sitting at the café a few doors down, mothers keeping watch on children. Many parked cars, but only ones they recognized.

Mahoud made a hand gesture from across the street. All clear. He had seen nothing amiss.

Jean-Claude gave a head gesture to Basheer. Basheer helped him retrieve one duffel bag, Jean-Claude carried the other. They loaded them quickly into the trunk of Basheer’s Benz and took off. Mahoud remained behind, moved his own car back to the street, closed and locked the garage, and departed.

They drove across the city to another destination, a pastry shop operated by a Muslim couple named Samy and Tamar.

Samy and Tamar were a likeable young couple in their twenties who operated a pastry shop in El Rastro, a neighborhood named after the Sunday market held within its bounds. The quarter lay within the triangle formed by the La Latina Metro stop, Puerta de Toledo, and Glorieta de Embajadores and was in the larger neighborhood of Lavapiés, an artsy, bohemian section of Madrid. In medieval times, Lavapiés had been the Moorish and Jewish quarter located outside the city walls. The neighborhood has retained an outsider character with visible immigrant communities from Morocco, sub-Saharan Africa, and India. Samy and Tamar enjoyed living there. They had many friends and liked to sit in the cafés until late at night, laughing, drinking tea, telling jokes, and watching sports on television.

Lavapiés was undergoing a process of gentrification as more and more cafés, bars, and galleries opened every day. Samy and Tamar had many friends who worked for the government and even several friends who were British or American. Sometimes this created odd situations as both Samy and Tamar would rail against American and English “colonialism” throughout the world. Yet never, even in their bitterest diatribes, did their friends ever feel the two young Muslims were railing against them. The hatred wasn’t personal, it was political.

Samy and Tamar had been recruited into Jean-Claude’s cell two months earlier. They too hated America deeply for what they felt Americans had done to Muslim people worldwide. This, despite the fact that Tamar loved to dress Western in public, with skirts above her knees, and liked American movies and music. Fortunately, her husband permitted it, within reason. So they lived happily together.

And they too were happy to be conduits for Jean-Claude’s cargo.

So when Jean-Claude dropped the cargo at the bakery, Samy personally stashed both bags in a locked area of a deep walk-in pantry in his bakery.

He was thrilled with what he had and happy to be part of Jean-Claude’s team and mission.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 7, 4:23 P.M.

As a warm afternoon faded in the Spanish capital, Alex opened her laptop on a table on her small balcony at the Ritz. She had a soft drink on ice and had changed out of her “meeting” clothes into more comfortable duds: shorts and a T-shirt, an outfit that made perfect sense in terms of relaxation, but too casual to wander around the starchy old Ritz or even this very dressy neighborhood.

She settled into a comfortable cushioned chair. Five floors below traffic rumbled along the Paseo del Prado, though the crescent in front of the Ritz was quiet.

As the computer booted, Alex’s gaze drifted out across the city. Madrid had been the capital of the Iberian Peninsula since the middle of the sixteenth century. She gazed over the ancient city and felt a surge of excitement and fascination. It would be nice, she told herself, to come back here someday with time to burn, time to enjoy at her own pace the museums, nightclubs, and sporting events. She would love to watch Real Madrid, the city’s world-class soccer team play a game at Estadio Santiago Bernabeu or catch a bullfight at Las Ventas, the world’s most famous bullring. She would like to come back here someday with someone she loved.

And then her thoughts tripped a mental landmine, one of sadness and longing, one of still painfully missing her fiancé, Robert, who had died early that year. The memories set off a wave of bittersweet loneliness within her, one she fought almost every day for at least a few moments. She knew what had happened in Kiev, but she hadn’t fully accepted it.

Alex looked at her watch. She sighed.

She clicked into her secure email and looked for anything that might have come in during the last few hours. Predictably, several of the men who had been at the meeting at the embassy had already checked in with her. Pierre LeMaitre of the French National Police had been the first, followed by Rolland Fitzgerald of Scotland Yard and Maurice Essen of Interpol. None of them had anything new for her.

Floyd Connelly of US Customs, the pudgy old Orson Welles look-alike, had sent an empty email. Alex wondered what to make of it, other than the notion that the man was quickly emerging as a blustery old fool. Somewhere he had a secretary who did his job for him.

She was about to exit the email when another note popped up from Fitzgerald at Scotland Yard. He had a brief file touching on anti-US terrorist activities in Spain and attached it for Alex’s consideration.

It was filled with rumors and conjectures, as well as a shopping list of predictably Islamic names and addresses of mosques. Nothing substantial. Nothing specific. Just a maze of nasty implications floating around, waiting to make sense or waiting to have some sense made of them. Stuff like that could be a gold mine. Or it could send her a hundred eighty degrees in the wrong direction. She finished but then scanned again to see if she had missed anything.

She had. Almost.

She found an email from her occasional employer in New York, Joseph Collins, who financed mission work in Latin America. It had been Collins who had bankrolled her visit earlier in the year.

Alex wrote back, telling him she was in Madrid on a new assignment. And she would, she promised, keep him informed.

She moved on. Time passed.

Her fingers went to work on the keyboard, and she fired back a response to the Englishman Rolland Fitzgerald, thanking him. At least the man was thinking. Then again, so was Alex.

As recently as 2004, she recalled, the deadliest terrorist attack in Europe had occurred in Madrid: ten synchronized blasts on trains, nearly two hundred killed, fourteen hundred wounded. Al-Qaeda had been responsible.

The victims on that infamous day had not necessarily been Americans, but the Spanish government and any members of humanity who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it further occurred to her, just from the perspective of her own employer, the multitude of targets within Spain linked to the United States: embassies, consulates, USO clubs that had been targeted in the past, and naval bases at Gibraltar and Barcelona. Then there was the massive US naval installation for the Sixth Fleet at Rota on the other side of the bay from Cádiz, west of Gibraltar. The facility was a Spanish base, but with a massive US presence.