by Maden, Mike
“For a second there, I thought maybe it was you, but—”
He could barely hear her above the noise. He raised his voice. “Can I get you something to drink? The tapas here are unbelievable.”
“No, thanks.” She glanced around the room, clearly searching for someone, occasionally standing up on her tiptoes.
“Can’t find who you’re looking for?”
She turned back to Jack. “Sorry, I’m being rude. How have you been? You look great—put on a few pounds of muscle since I last saw you.”
“Yeah, hitting the weight room every now and then,” Jack said.
She touched his face, a familiar gesture. “The beard’s new. I like it.”
“Tell that to my mom.”
He wanted to tell her how gorgeous she looked, too—better than he remembered. But he knew that wasn’t going to go anywhere, and he wasn’t looking to seduce her. He was just genuinely glad to see her.
The pretty girl with the Bluetooth at the end of the bar seemed happy to see her, too. She kept glancing back and forth between her second cava and Moore.
“What are you up to these days?” Moore kept scanning the room and checking the door.
“Hendley Associates. A small, private-equity firm in Alexandria. You?”
“I’m a VP with a tech startup in California called CrowdScope.”
“Tech? I thought you’d be in finance.”
“I am, just the other side of it. It’s a fintech firm.”
“Sounds exciting. What happened to Wall Street?”
“Been there, done that.”
Jack’s Apple Watch beeped. “Oh, man. I gotta run.”
“Hot date?”
“No. Just the museum. I’ve got a timed entry. Any chance we could grab a drink later? Or maybe dinner?”
She turned back around and smiled at him. “Yeah, Jack. I’d really like that.” She reached into her purse and pulled out her business card. “Call me around seven. We’ll find a place to meet. Okay?”
“Perfect.” He glanced at the address and phone number, then pocketed it.
“How long are you in town for?”
Jack shrugged. “Leaving tomorrow.”
“Too bad.” Her smile faded. “I’ve missed you, Jack. I’m so glad we bumped into each other. What a crazy coincidence.”
Jack ignored the screeching voice of the catechism nun in his head telling him that there was no such thing as coincidences.
“Try the vermut here. And the tortilla. It’s fantastic—hell, everything is. Well, gotta run. I’ll call you later.”
“Make sure you do.” She threw another hug around his neck and kissed his bearded cheek. “Adéu.”
“Adéu.”
Jack gently pushed his way through the crowd of people, heading for the exit. He cast another glance at Moore at the bar, still searching for someone, and the Bluetooth blonde, still watching her. As he stepped through the doorway, a short, heavyset man about his age with shoulder-length hair and thick, Warby Parker tortoiseshell glasses bumped into him.
“Sorry, man,” he said to Jack as he passed.
“No hay problema, slick,” Jack muttered, thinking nothing of it.
Finally breaking through to the narrow street, Jack checked his watch. His online ticket would get him into the museum in five minutes, which was perfect timing.
A glance in the window of a small jewelry store across the narrow street gave Jack the nearest shot for quick surveillance detection. The only person who caught Jack’s eye in the glass was a guy about his size and age, with short-cropped blond hair, a long, crooked nose, square face, and deep-set hazel eyes. He also had a Bluetooth in his ear.
It was a lot of data to acquire in a short glance, but that was how Jack had been trained by John Clark, The Campus’s director of operations.
Like Jack, the man was catching a glimpse of him as well in the same glass, or so it seemed. They held each other’s gaze for less than the blink of an eye before the man turned casually away and headed south in the opposite direction. He was just another tourist on the phone, Jack supposed, but his mind registered the man’s strong, athletic gait as he turned a corner onto Passeig del Born.
Jack turned north and headed for the museum.
Three steps later, he was dead.
* * *
—
Or so he thought.
The concussive force from the blast inside L’avi had nowhere to go but out the front door and into the narrow street between the heavy stone walls in a rushing tidal wave of pressure. Shop windows shattered for a dozen yards in each direction.
The sound of the explosion was like a shotgun blast in Jack’s unprotected ears. The pressure from the detonation behind Jack was heavy enough to knock him forward, slamming his head into a wall, but he managed to stay on his feet.
He turned, dazed, and staggered back toward the direction of the explosion. Broken bodies lay in the narrow street in front. He didn’t stop to help them. They were dead.
Blood and shredded flesh spattered the wrecked doorway as he picked his way through the debris and into the restaurant. The ringing in his ears muted the anguished cries and moans of the few survivors. Jack’s limited emergency medical training under the watchful eye of Adara Sherman kicked in, but without a medical kit there wouldn’t be much he could do. He stepped around the wounded and the dead, pushing past overturned chairs and tables, desperately searching for Moore. His eyes finally fell on her crumpled form, one arm twisted unnaturally against the hinge of her elbow, her blouse torn away by the blast.
Jack fell down at her side, broken plates and glasses crunching beneath his weight. Her swollen face oozed blood from her nose, mouth, and ears. He laid a hand on her neck to check for a pulse, certain she was dead, but her bloodshot eyes suddenly startled awake. Jack nearly shouted for joy that she was still alive. Her swollen lips began to whisper.
“Babe, it’s me, Jack. Lie still. An ambulance will be here soon.”
Moore’s dimming eyes pleaded with Jack. She tugged on his shirtsleeve with the bloody fingers of her one unbroken hand. He leaned in close, his ear next to her mouth. He saw her eyes fluttering, and the whites suddenly showing. But with her last, ragged breath she managed to whisper a single word:
“Sammler.”
4
SOUTH PACIFIC
ON BOARD THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION NAVY SUBMARINE GLAZOV
Captain First Rank Nikolay Grinko read the notice a third time and swore.
It wasn’t a complicated instruction. Far from it. The extremely low frequency transmission (ELF) from the ZEVS transmitter near Murmansk was only capable of sending out minimal communications.
The ELF data rate was so low that submarine comms were limited to receiving messages only from Murmansk, and those were little more than “bell ringer” notices. The microscopic data rate had always seemed ironic to Grinko. The ZEVS transmitter was the most powerful in Europe. It required up to 14 megawatts of electricity fired through two sixty-kilometer-long antennas in order to generate an 82 Hz signal with a massive wavelength of 3,686 kilometers. Only China’s ELF transmitter—five times the size of New York City—was larger and more powerful.
The low data-transmission rate was the trade-off for the ZEVS’s capacity to send a signal through several hundred feet of polar ice or ocean water almost anywhere on the planet. The Glazov was currently submerged at 137 meters below the surface of the Pacific, deep enough to avoid any surface sonar detection from air or ships. A submarine like his only survived by remaining undetected. ELF was designed to help him remain so.
Unless, of course, the bell ringer message was telling him to surface and receive new instructions from a high-density satellite communication, which it was.
Grinko swore again.
“No mistake?”
“No, sir.”
Grinko searched the man’s eyes for any sign of doubt. There was none. He wasn’t surprised.
The senior enlisted man standing in front of him was utterly reliable, as were the rest of his crew. The information systems technician—Grinko still called them radiomen—didn’t write the new orders; he only delivered them.
“Thank you. Dismissed.”
The man quietly closed Grinko’s cabin door. Grinko couldn’t believe it. What was the point of changing position? The first test of the latest version VA-111 Shkval 3 (“Squall”) supercavitating torpedo had gone perfectly and, equally important, undetected by the opposition. It had taken all of his crew’s best efforts to avoid them to arrive on station.
Propelled by a solid-fuel rocket motor and a terminal guidance system, the new Shkval 3 had achieved underwater speeds approaching three hundred miles per hour and struck its target with a range in excess of twelve miles.
Keeping the weapon secret meant the Americans couldn’t develop defenses against it. Why risk being found now by moving? For what purpose?
Grinko rubbed his clean-shaven face, resigned to his fate. Submarine captains in the Pacific Fleet carried out orders from Vladivostok HQ, not the other way around. So be it. He picked up his phone and called his XO, issuing the order to redeploy to the new coordinates.
Grinko’s resignation turned to confidence. He was captain of one of his nation’s most advanced submarines, carrying some of its most potent weapons. Vladivostok was handing him another opportunity to demonstrate to the arrogant Americans that their dominance at sea was at an end.
5
BARCELONA, SPAIN
Who the hell was Sammler?
“Sammler” was the last thing she ever said, and last words mattered the most, Jack told himself as he gently closed Moore’s eyes. His hand hovered over her breathless mouth. He touched her lips.
A last good-bye.
Still wet with her blood and his skull pounding with a near-migraine headache, Jack glanced over at a middle-aged woman lying against the bar, whimpering in Spanish. Her eyes were shut against the blood oozing onto her face from a scalp wound and the stabbing pain of her injured left hand. Sirens screamed in the distance.
Jack dashed over to her side. He snatched up a handful of paper napkins from the floor and pressed them hard against her scalp wound. He took her one good hand and switched it for his.
“Su mano, empujar aquí,” he said. “No, not empujar. Sorry. I don’t know the word. Just . . . press hard.”
But the woman understood Jack’s middle-school Spanish well enough. She pressed her good hand hard against the makeshift bandage as Jack took her other hand and inspected it briefly before pulling out a large shard of glass from her palm. It bled, too, but not as badly as the scalp. Jack pulled another stack of napkins from a dispenser lying next to him, compressed it into her palm, and folded her hand into a fist.
“Hold this, tight, okay?” Jack said, as he turned around to see who else he could help, his clothes even bloodier now than they were a moment ago.
On the floor just a few feet away he saw Moore’s purse. A few cautious pedestrians crept into the wreckage of the restaurant, faces white with terror but eager to help. Ambulance sirens screamed just beyond the door.
As tires screeched to a halt outside, Jack reached down and picked up Moore’s purse, its contents scattered on the floor. He dug through the nearly empty purse looking for her smartphone, thinking that whoever this Sammler was, maybe he’d called her earlier or she had his contact information stored on her phone.
Spanish EMTs charged through the doors with medical gear in hand, followed by four local police, their uniforms marked GUÀRDIA URBANA.
One of the cops, bearded and burly, saw Jack standing in the middle of the carnage, rifling through Moore’s purse like a looter, and began shouting at him in Català.
Still dazed by the blast and numbed with grief, and with his ears ringing and a headache crushing his skull, Jack couldn’t make out a single word of what the cop was saying, but it wasn’t hard for him to figure out the guy was pissed.
More sirens blared outside and more tires screeched to a halt as even more police and EMTs arrived, charging through the broken doors.
Jack pointed at Moore’s corpse. “She’s my friend. I’m just looking for—”
But the big cop pulled his baton and charged at Jack, his eyes raging.
Jack dropped the purse but something in him snapped. His friend was dead and he’d nearly been killed. And now this asshole is calling me a thief. Jack squared up to take the guy down as the cop raised his baton.
“Parì!”—Stop! a woman’s voice called from behind.
The big bearded cop froze in mid-swing. He and Jack turned around to see a woman about his age in jeans and a leather jacket flashing a badge. Her shoulder-length hair was neat but not fashionable, and her small frame was trim like an athlete’s. Despite his headache, Jack saw the pistol in a shoulder rig beneath her coat. She barked another order at the cop towering over her. He argued with her, pointing his baton at Jack.
She turned toward Jack. “He says you’re a looter. Is that true?”
“No. I was looking for the phone of my friend . . .” Jack’s voice trailed off, his legs wobbly. He pointed at Moore’s corpse. Unexpectedly, tears welled in his eyes.
The woman with the badge softened, but only slightly. She took Jack by the elbow.
“Let’s go outside and get you checked out.”
* * *
—
Jack sat on the stone stairs of the back entrance to the big Gothic church, Santa Maria del Mar. He was just a hundred yards from the restaurant, facing a placeta—a small plaza. A uniformed EMT examined Jack’s eyes with a penlight under the watchful gaze of the woman with the badge. A police helicopter’s rotors hammered low overhead.
Hundreds of spectators had gathered in the area but had been pushed back behind yellow police tape and barricades. A local TV journalist stood among them, interviewing people claiming to be witnesses to the tragedy.
The plaza was filled with several ambulances and police vehicles, forming a staging area for medical treatment and a preliminary investigation of the blast. Jack saw police cars and vans marked from several departments—Mossos d’Esquadra, Guardia Civil, Policía Nacional—blue lights still flashing on most of them.
The EMT gave Jack one last cautious glance as he pocketed his penlight. “No headache?”
“No. I’m fine,” Jack said, lying.
The EMT’s eyes narrowed with disbelief. “Estàs segur? You are sure?” He scratched his thin beard tinged with gray.
“Yeah, really. Thanks.”
“I think it is best you go to hospital. Get X-rays, at least.”
“No, I’m good.”
“You know, it cost you no money for medicine here.”
“It’s not that. I just don’t want to go. I’m fine.”
“Then it is necessary for you to see a doctor when you get back to the States, vale?”
“I will. I promise.”
The EMT looked over at the woman and shrugged his reluctant approval, then dashed off with his medical kit to another victim.
“My name is Laia Brossa. I work for the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia—CNI, for short. That’s our version of the FBI and CIA, how you say, rolled into one. Who are you?”
Still seated on the steps, Jack stuck out his hand. She took it. “My name is Jack Ryan. Mucho gusto”—Nice to meet you.
“Igualmente.” Brossa pulled out her smartphone. “Do you mind if I record our conversation? It’s easier than taking notes.”
“Not at all.”
“And you said your friend Renée Moore was killed inside?”
Jack lowered his head and nodded.
“Yes.”
She patted his shoulder.
“I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Jack raised his head. “Yeah. Me, too.”
“She was an American as well?”
“Yes.”
“And how is it you survived the blast, Mr. Ryan?”
“I was outside. I had just left to go to the Picasso Museum. If I’d waited another thirty seconds, I’d probably be dead, too.”
“You are very lucky. And what brings you to Spain?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know why you’re asking me all of these questions.”
“Because it is my job.”
“Your job is to find out who killed my friend, and all of those other people.”
“We already know. It was a terror group called Brigada Catalan. They claimed responsibility just a few minutes ago on the Internet, while you were getting checked out.”
“I read about them in the news. They haven’t done anything like this before. Just a lot of talk, right?”
Brossa shrugged. “Every terrorist who kills talks a lot before they start killing, yes?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Jack glanced up at the flags hanging from several of the private terraces around the square. Most had patriotic gold flags with four red stripes—the official flag of Catalonia—but a few had the addition of a Cuban white star on a blue triangle—the flag of the independence movement. In the last few days, Jack had hardly seen any Spanish national flags here in Barcelona. In Madrid, just the opposite.
“But these Brigada Catalan people, they haven’t been violent, not like this. It’s a political movement, not a terrorist one, if I’m not mistaken,” Jack said.
“Until today,” Brossa said, surveying the flags. She muttered something in Català to herself. She turned back to Jack. “You are well read on Catalonian politics for an American. Quite unusual.”
“We’re not all idiots,” Jack said, instantly regretting the comment. Most Americans weren’t idiots. They just didn’t pay attention to other countries because their own country was so huge and had plenty of its own problems. And not every American double-majored in history and finance at an elite university like Georgetown.