"What of the driver in Madrid?" asked another of the
men. "Is he leaving Spain as well?"
"No," said Ramirez. "The driver works for
Deputy Serrador. He wants very much to rise so
he will be silent. And the car used by the killers has
already been left at a garage for dismantling."
Ramirez drew contentedly on his cigar. "Trust
me, my dear Miguel. Everything has been thought out
very carefully. This action will not be traced to us."
"I trust you," sniffed the man. "But I'm still not
certain we can trust Serrador. He is a
Basque."
"The killer is also a Basque and he did as he
was
BALANCE OF POWER 39
instructed," said Ramirez. "Deputy Serrador
will also do as he was told, Carlos. He is
ambitious."
"Then he is an ambitious Basque. But he is
still a Basque."
Ramirez smiled again. "Deputy Serrador
does not wish to be a spokesman for the fishermen,
shepherds, and miners forever. He wants to lead them."
"He can lead them over the Pyrenees into France,"
said Carlos. "I won't miss any of
them."
"I wouldn't either," said Ramirez, "but then who, would
fish, herd, and mine? The bank managers and
accountants who work for you, Carlos? The reporters
who work for Rodrigo's newspapers or
Alfonso's television stations? The pilots who
work for Miguel's airline?"
The other men smiled, shrugged, or nodded. Carlos
flushed and acceded with a gracious nod of his head.
"That's enough about our curious bedfellow," said
Ramirez. "The important thing is that
America's emissary has been slain. The
United States will have no idea who did it or
why, but they will be extremely wary about becoming
involved in local politics. Deputy
Serrador will caution them further when he meets with the
rest of the contingent later this evening. He'll assure
them that the police are doing everything they can
to apprehend the killer, but that the prevention of further
incidents cannot be guaranteed. Not in such troubled
times."
Carlos nodded. He turned to Miguel. "And how
is your part going?"
"Very well," said the portly, silver-haired
airline executive. "The discount air
fares from the United
40 OP-CEMTER
States to Portugal, Italy, France, and
Greece have proven extremely popular.
Travel to Madrid and Barcelona is down
eleven and eight percent respectively from the
levels of last year. Hotels, restaurants, and
car services are feeling the loss. The ripple
effect has hurt many local businesses."
"And revenues will fall even further," Ramirez
said, " 'when the American public is told that the
slain woman was a tourist and that this was a random
shooting."
Ramirez drew on his cigar and smiled. He was
particularly proud of that part of the plan. The United
States government could never expose the identity of the
dead woman. She had come from an intelligence and
crisis management center, not from the State
Department. Nor could the United States reveal the
fact that she had gone to Madrid to meet with a powerful
deputy who feared a new civil war. If
Europe ever learned that an American
representative of this type had been scheduled
to meet with Serrador, America would be suspected
of trying to position the players to its own
advantage. Which was exactly why Serrador had
asked for her. With one shooting, Ramirez and his
group had managed to gain control of both the White
House and Spanish tourism.
"As for the next step," Ramirez said, "how is that
coming, Carlos?"
The black-haired young banker leaned forward. He
placed his cigar in the ashtray and folded his hands on
the table. "As you know, the lower and middle classes have
been hurt very seriously by the recent employment
cutbacks. In the past six months, Ban
BALANCE OF POWER 41
quero Cedro has restricted loans so that our
partners in this operation"-he indicated the other men at
the table-"as well as other businesspeople, have been
forced to raise consumer prices nearly seven
percent. At the same time they've cut back
production so that there has been an eight-percent
drop in trade of Spanish goods throughout Europe.
The workers have been hit hard although, thus far, we
haven't curtailed their credit. We've been
extraordinarily generous, in fact. We've been
extending credit to repay old debts. Of course,
only some of that money goes to relieve debt. People
make new purchases, assuming that credit
will be available to them again. As a result, interest
on loans has compounded to levels eighteen percent
higher than they were at this time last year."
Ramirez smiled. "In conjunction with a fall in
tourism, the financial blow will be severe when that
credit is not made available."
"It will be extremely severe," said Carlos. "The
people will be so deeply in debt they will agree to anything
to be out of it."
"But the blow is one you're certain you can control,"
said Alfonso.
"Absolutely," Carlos replied. "Thanks
to cash reserves and credit with the World Bank and other
institutions, the money supply at my bank and at
most others will remain sound. The economy will be
relatively unaffected at the top." He
grinned. "It's like the plague of blood which befell
Egypt in the Old Testament. It did not affect
those who had been forewarned and had filled their jugs and
cisterns with fresh water."
42 OP-CENTER
Ramirez sat back. He drew long and
contentedly on his cigar. "This is excellent,
gentlemen. And once everything is in place, our
task is simply to maintain the pressure
until the middle and lower classes buckle.
Until the Basques and the Castilians, the
Andalusians and the Galicians acknowledge that
Spain belongs to the people of Catalonia. And when they
do, when the prime minister is forced to call for new
elections, we will be ready." His small, dark
eyes moved from face to face before settling on the
leather binder before him. "Ready with our new
constitution-ready for a new Spain."
The other men nodded their approval. Miguel and
Rodrigo applauded lightly. Ramirez felt
the weight of history past and history yet to come on
his shoulders, and it felt good.
He was unaware of a disheveled man who sat an
eighth of a mile away with a different sense of
history on his shoulders-and a much different weapon at
his disposal.
ATX-UL1024 FOUR
ATX-UL0 Monday, 7:15 p.m. Madrid,
Spain
Aideen was still sitting in the leather couch when
Comisario
Diego Femandez arrived. He was a man of
medium height and build. He was clean-shaven with a
ruddy complexion and carefully trimmed goatee.
His black hair was longish but neat and he
peered out carefully from behind gold-rimmed
spectacles. He wore black leather gloves,
black suede shoes, and a black trenchcoat. Beneath
the open coat was a dark gray business suit.
An aide shut the door behind him. When it had
clicked shut, the inspector bowed politely
to Aideen.
"Our deepest sympathy and apologies for your
loss," he said. His voice was deep, the English
accent thick. "If there's anything I or my
department can do to help you, please ask."
" "Thank you. Inspector,"" Aideen said.
"Be assured that the resources of the entire
Madrid metropolitan police department as
well as other government offices will be applied
to finding whoever was responsible for this atrocious
act."
Aideen looked up at the police inspector.
He couldn't be talking to her. The police department
44 OP-CENTER
couldn't be looking for the killer of someone she knew.
The TV announcements and newspaper headlines
wouldn't be about a person she had been dressing with in
a hotel room just an hour before. Though she had
lived through the killing and seen Martha's body
on the street, the experience didn't seem real.
Aideen was so accustomed to changing things-rewinding a
tape to see something she'd missed or erasing computer
data she didn't need-that the irreversibility of this
seemed impossible.
But in her brain Aideen knew that it
had
happened. And that it was irreversible. After being brought
here, she'd called the hotel and briefed Darrell
McCaskey. McCaskey had said he would inform
Op-Center. He'd seemed surprisingly
unshocked-or maybe Darrell was always that
collected. Aideen didn't know him well enough
to say. Then she'd sat here trying to tell herself that the
shooting was a random act of terrorism and not a hit.
After all, it wasn't the same as in Tijuana
two years earlier when her friend Odin Gutierrez
Rico had literally been blasted to death by four
gunmen with assault rifles. Rico was the
director of criminal trials in Baja
California. He was a public figure who had
regularly received death threats and had continued to defy
the nation's drug traffickers. His death was a
tragic loss but not a surprise. It was a very
public statement that the prosecution of drug
dealers would not be tolerated by the underworld.
Martha was here with a cover story known only to a handful
of government officials. She had come to Madrid
to help Deputy Serrador work out a plan to keep
his own people, the Basques, from joining with
BALANCE OF POWER 45
the equally nationalistic Catalonians in an effort
to break away from Spain. The Basque uprisings in
the 1980's had been sporadic enough to fail but
violent enough to be remembered. Martha and Serrador
both believed that an organized revolt by two of the
nation's five major ethnic groups-especially if
those groups were well armed and better prepared than in
the 1980's-would not only be enormously
destructive but would have a good chance of succeeding.
If this were an assassination, if Martha had been the
target, it meant that there was a leak in the system
somewhere. And if there were a leak then the peace process
was in serious danger. It was a cruel irony that
only a short time before, Martha had been insisting that
nothing must be allowed to interfere with the talks.
You know what's at stake. . . .
Then, of course, Martha had been worried about
Aideen's overreaction in the street.
If only that had been our worst
roadblock,
Aideen thought.
We sweat the details and end up missing the big
picture-
"Senorita?"
the inspector said.
Aideen blinked. "Yes?"
"Are you all right?"
Aideen had been looking past Comisario Femandez,
at the dark windows. But she focused on the
inspector now. He was still standing a few feet
away, smiling down at her.
"Yes, I'm fine," she said. "I'm very sorry,
Inspector. I was thinking about my friend."
"I understand," the inspector replied quietly.
"If it
46 OP-CENTER
would not be too much for you, might I ask you a few
questions?"
"Of course," she replied. She'd been slumping
forward but now she sat up in the chair. "First,
Inspector, would you mind telling me if the
surveillance cameras told you anything?"
"Unfortunately, they did not," the inspector said.
"The gunman was standing just out of range."
"He knew what that range was?"
"Apparently, he did," the inspector admitted.
"Unfortunately, it will take us a while to find out
everyone who had access to that information-and to interrogate
them all."
"I understand," Aideen said.
The inspector drew a small, yellow notebook
from his coat pocket. The smile faded as he
studied some notes and slipped a pen from the spiral
binder. When he was finished reading he looked at
Aideen.
"Did you and your companion come to Madrid for
pleasure?"'" the inspector asked.
"Yes. Yes, we did."
"You informed the guard at the gate that you came to the
Congreso de los Diputados for a personal
tour."
"That's right."
"This tour was arranged by whom?"
"I don't know," said Aideen.
"Oh?"
States," Aideen informed him.
"Would you be able to provide me with the name of this
friend?"'" the inspector asked.
"I'm afraid not," Aideen replied. "I
don't know
BALANCE OF POWER 47
who it was. My coming on this trip was rather
lastminute."
"Possibly it was a coworker who arranged it," he
suggested. "Or else a neighbor? A local
politician?"
"I don't know," Aideen insisted. "I'm
sorry. Inspector, but it wasn't something I thought
I'd need to know."
The inspector stared at her for a long moment. Then
he lowered his eyes slowly and wrote her answers in
his notebook.
Aideen didn't think that he believed her; that was
what she got from the disapproving turn of his mouth and the
stern knot of flesh between his eyebrows. And she hated
stonewalling the investigation. But until she heard
otherwise from Darrell McCaskey or Deputy
Serrador, she had no choice but to continue to play
this by the cover story.
Comisario Femandez turned slowly and th
oughtfully to a
fresh page of the notebook. "Did you see the man
who attacked you?"
"I didn't see his face," she said.
"He fired a flash picture just before he reached for
his weapon."
"Did you smell any cologne? Aftershave?"
"No."
"Did you notice the camera? The make?"
"No," she said. "I wasn't close enough-and then
there was the flash. I only saw his clothes."
"Aha," he said. He stepped forward eagerly.
"Can you tell me what they looked like?"
Aideen took a long breath. She shut her eyes.
"He was wearing a tight denim jacket and a
baseball cap. A dark blue or black cap,
worn with the brim in front.
48 OP-CENTER
He had on loose khaki trousers and black
shoes. I want to say that he was a young man, though
I can't be entirely certain."
"What gave you that impression?"
Aideen opened her eyes. "There was something about the
way he stood," she replied. "His feet
planted wide, his shoulders squared, his head held
erect. Very strong, very poised."
"You've seen this look before?" the inspector asked.
"Yes," Aideen replied. The killer had
reminded her of a Striker, though of course
she couldn't say that. "Where I went to college there
was ROTC," she lied. "Reserve Officers"
Training Corps. The killer had the bearing of a
soldier. Or at least someone who was skilled in
handling firearms."
The inspector made an entry in his notebook.
" 'Did the gunman say anything to you?"
"No."
"Did he shout anything-a slogan or a threat?"
"No."
"Did you notice the kind of weapon he used?"
"I'm sorry, I did not. It was a handgun of some
kind."
"A revolver?"
"I wouldn't know," she lied. It was an
automatic. But she didn't want the inspector
to know that she knew enough to tell the difference.
"Did he pause between shots?"
"I believe so."
"Was it loud?"
"Not very," Aideen said. "It was surprisingly
BALANCE OF POWER 49
quiet." The gun had been silenced but she didn't
want to let him know that she knew that.
"It was probably silenced," the inspector
said. "Did you see the getaway car?"
"Yes," Aideen said. "It was a black sedan.
I don't know what kind."
"Was it clean or dirty?"
"Average."
"Where did it come from?" the inspector asked.
"I believe it was waiting for the killer down the
street," Aideen said.
"About how far?"
"Maybe twenty or thirty yards," Aideen said.