LITMIR.BIZ

      PROLOGUE

      Nacional Parc Guell, outskirts of Barcelona, Spain

      With a faint snap, the thick limb of a towering beech tree tumbled down from the forest canopy and crashed at Angelica Rigo’s feet. More than a dozen other branches, all festooned with dark green leaves, lay in a growing mound at the base of the tree. Rigo, a thirty-year-old, ruddy-skinned woman wearing khaki shorts and a matching sleeveless top, wiped the sweat from her brow and checked her watch, then looked up at the handful of men trimming the other branches in the tree above her. She barked at them in Euskara, native tongue of the Basques.

      “Can’t you work any faster?”

      One of the men glanced down from his perch and waved his small, curved handsaw. “Let us use chain saws instead of these toys, and we’ll have this tree down three times as fast.”

      “And you’d be ten times as loud doing it,” Rigo countered, fighting back an urge to shout. “How many times do I have to tell you we need to do this quietly?”

      “You keep telling us that,” the other man called down, “but what is the point? We’re miles from anywhere. Who’s going to hear us except the birds and squirrels?”

      A few of the other men in the tree laughed lightly and murmured among themselves. Staring up at them, Rigo fumed. What had happened to the days when those who joined the movement could be counted on to work with dedication and without complaint? Why was it that she always found herself saddled with slackers and malcontents?

      “Just keep working!” she told the men. She hesitated a moment, then grudgingly added, “Have this tree down by sunset and there will be wine with rations tonight!”

      As expected, the promise of drink motivated the men, and they began to lay into their work with increased vigor. Rigo lit a cigarette as she watched them. They still needed to clear away another three beeches over the next two days to make the site ready. They would be cutting it close.

      Another limb soon tumbled to the ground. Rigo sidestepped it and moved away from the tree, her boots treading softly on the wild grass and trailing vines that carpeted the forest floor. They were in a remote corner of Nacional Parc Guell, a densely treed nature preserve ten miles northeast of Barcelona. The nearest hiking trails were half a day’s walk away, so there was little chance that anyone would stumble upon the group illegally falling the beeches. And because the trees were being taken down with minimal disturbance of the overhead canopy, it was just as unlikely that anyone flying overhead would be able to spot the small clearing being carved out of the woods. That would be important come Friday, when the plan was to be carried out.

      Rigo made her way through the trees, walking another twenty yards before coming to the edge of a steep-pitched slope that led to a broad, verdant valley. Blowing smoke from her cigarette, she stared out across the valley. Far off in the distance, barely visible through a faint afternoon haze, she could see the rising, honeycombed spires of La Sagrada Familia. The old church, designed more than a century before by infamous Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudi, was still unfinished, and Rigo saw a construction crane poised atop the highest spire like a gigantic metallic grasshopper. Provided the skies were clear on Friday, it would be easy to use the church as a frame of reference while drawing a bead on the intended target, the newly constructed Barcelona civic center, located a few miles southwest of the towers. The trajectory had already been calculated and would be assisted further by GPS readings from a surveillance drone; all that remained was to prepare the launch site and see to it that the FSAT-50 could be delivered on schedule without complications.

      Once she’d finished her cigarette, Rigo unclipped her cell phone and, for the third time in the past half hour, checked to make sure it was turned on. It was, and there were still no messages. The woman slipped the phone back in its holder and retreated from the edge of the forest. The mound of trimmed branches at the base of the beech tree was growing higher. Rigo called up a few words of encouragement to her men, then went to check on the other preparations. To her right, a dozen or more smaller saplings had already been flattened, creating a corridor that soon led the woman to the banks of the Avignon River. The river, extending all the way from the uppermost reaches of the Pyrenees, formed the easternmost border of the national park and eventually drained into the Mediterranean near the Barcelona suburb of Sardana. For most of its course, the river ran deep—as much as ninety feet in places—but here there was a fork, with some of the water diverting into a shallow lagoon. The lagoon was also fed by a mountain stream carrying high levels of iron, which gave the water a faintly reddish hue. Another five men stood knee-deep in the water at the lagoon’s edge, scooping out spadefuls of mud and pitching them up onto the embankment. The mud, like the water, was rich with iron and the color of sienna.

      “How goes it, Xavier?” Rigo called out to the man closest to her.

      “Slow,” called back Xavier Golato, a tall, broad-shouldered man with massive arms and a shaved head glistening with perspiration. “But we are making good progress.”

      “We’ll have one of the trees down by sunset,” Rigo told him. “I want to be able to cut the trunk into sections and use it for a ramp.”

      “We will be ready,” Golato assured the woman. “You’ll be able to lay the trunks below the waterline like you wanted.”

      “Excellent.”

      Golato took in Angelica’s voluptuous figure with a faintly salacious gaze. “I have a trunk of my own waiting for you later tonight,” he whispered suggestively.

      Angelica returned Golato’s gaze with one every bit as lecherous. “Just be careful not to cut it into sections first,” she taunted. “I’ll be wanting all of it.”

      The lovers’ suggestive banter was interrupted when they saw several of the men stop their shoveling and glance upstream to a fork in the river. Rigo followed their gaze and saw a boat entering the lagoon. Instinctively she reached for the 9 mm Walther pistol holstered on her right hip. She relaxed her grip, however, when she recognized the craft, a small, weathered fishing boat propelled by a pair of outboard motors. There were several men on the deck. One of them waved a greeting as the boat drew closer.

      “Looks like they brought company,” Golato murmured.

      Rigo nodded, eyes on a man’s body sprawled out across the foredeck. A few feet from the body was a woman, gagged and bound at the wrists and ankles. Even from this distance, Rigo could see that the woman was terrified. She could also see that the woman, like the dead man, was white.

      “Americans?”

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