Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

Marketing?

Her phone number and a CrowdScope e-mail address were also given. It was a lot of information but didn’t really say much, but that was pretty common these days. Style over substance. Corporate clickbait.

It was eleven a.m. EST and Jack saw that Gavin was online back in Alexandria. He dialed Gavin’s direct number on his smartphone.

“Jack! I was just getting ready to shoot you a text. I read about the explosion in Barcelona. You weren’t anywhere near it, were you? The photos online looked pretty bad.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m calling.”

“You okay?”

“I’m fine. But a friend of mine was there and got killed.”

“Oh, jeez. I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sure you’ve got better things to do, but I wanted to ask you a favor.”

“Name it.”

“I’d like you to do a little digging into my friend for me. I’ll send over the contact information and some links. I’d like to know more about the company she was working for, and more important, see if you can find a connection between her and a guy named Sammler—last name, I’m sure, no first. Phone records, OSINT, whatever you can find out about this guy, and what he had to do with Renée.”

“What kind of connection should I be looking for? You think this Sammler guy is tied to the bombing somehow?”

“Not sure. But his name was the last thing she said before she died, so I figure he must be important to her, and maybe he might have an idea about what happened.”

“Sounds like you were nearly killed yourself.”

“Not really,” Jack lied.

“I’ll jump right on this. Things are pretty quiet around here right now. The whole team is still out on vacation, just like you. Even Gerry, so I’ve got time to kill.”

“Thanks, Gav. I really appreciate it.”

“Question for you. Did you see any CCTV cameras in the restaurant? What was its name?”

Jack chided himself. Why didn’t he think of that? Maybe the explosion rattled his skull harder than he realized.

“The name is L’avi.” He spelled it out. “And yes, I did see cameras. Three of them. It would be awesome if you could get your hands on those tapes. Might tell us everything we need to know.”

“Won’t be easy.”

“Any chance you can hack the restaurant’s computer and grab them?”

“Not if the computer has been blown to smithereens. And most likely, the videos are on digital cards or even actual digital tape if the system’s old enough. I’m guessing the local police have already recovered whatever survived the blast.”

“I’m betting the cops don’t have it. My guess is the CNI might—those are the people who interviewed me after the blast. I’ll be seeing my contact again tomorrow, I’m sure. I’ll see what I can do on my end.”

“I’ll call you if I find anything. Just watch yourself, okay?”

“You know it.”

Jack drained his clara as he put an e-mail together for Gavin with links to CrowdScope and everything else he could think of and sent it off. He sent another e-mail to Gerry, informing him he was extending his stay in Spain for a few more days but Gerry’s auto reply bounced back, informing Jack that Gerry wouldn’t be back in the office for another week. He took that as permission to hang around. He’d ask for forgiveness later, if needed.

Jack then remembered about extending his stay at his place—packing up and moving would be a pain in the butt. He shot a quick message through the Airbnb site and his landlord responded minutes later, telling Jack he was thrilled to extend his stay for another week. Jack paid for the extension online in advance then remembered to put his return airline ticket on hold.

He also thought about his mom, who was not only a world-class eye surgeon and ophthalmologist but also a heck of a psychic, as all good mothers were. She always seemed to know when he or one of his siblings was dancing on the edge of something that could hurt them. He dropped her a text telling her that he was far from the explosion she’d probably heard about on the news and that he was coming home soon. It was the kind of lie he could only pull off in a text because she would have seen right through him if he was standing in her presence.

Thank God for texting.

Satisfied he’d gotten a jump on things, he grabbed another clara from the fridge and dropped back in front of his computer. He’d only really glanced at the Brigada Catalan article and its brief references to other recent events connected to them. Since he had some time to kill, he decided to dig deeper. If Brigada Catalan was responsible for Renée’s death, he’d do everything he could to help Brossa track them down.

What the CNI agent didn’t realize was that if she wasn’t able or willing to deliver the justice that Renée deserved, he’d find a way to do it himself, one bullet at a time.

—

Two hours later, Jack shut his computer, his eyes watering from the river of facts about Catalonian independence he’d just been wading through. Gavin hadn’t called him back and he was hungry, so he decided on a hole-in-the-wall stand-up pizza joint around the corner for carryout.

He snagged up his apartment keys and headed out, still processing what he’d just read. The Catalonian independence movement was anything but monolithic. But it was pretty clear the source of the current troubles was Catalonia’s 2017 independence referendum, which passed by an overwhelming ninety percent of the vote—despite Madrid’s attempts to disrupt it. Madrid declared the whole thing illegal and jailed the offending members of the Generalitat—the local legislature—and the rest of the Catalonian independence politicians fled, including the president, seeking asylum abroad.

The officials in the European Union sided with Madrid against the Catalonian independence politicians. Brussels still had Brexit on its mind, not to mention the French Yellow Vests, the Italian Lega, Ireland’s Sinn Féin, and others, and wholly supported Madrid’s actions. This only fueled Catalonian frustrations. The EU constitution promised self-determination and, certainly, voting rights, and both appeared to be violated in equal measure by both Madrid’s heavy-handed actions and Brussels’s failure to recognize Catalonia’s claims.

According to what Jack read in the press, that’s when Brigada Catalan was born.

Of course, history was the context for all of this.

Catalonia had a distinct and separate national identity going back as far as the Roman era and the fifth-century Visigoth kings who succeeded them. They lost their independence and were absorbed into the Spanish empire by the Bourbon king Philip V, who conquered them in the beginning of the eighteenth century.

In the 1930s, under the Spanish Republic, Catalonia was granted increasing autonomy, but the Spanish Civil War ended that dream. Catalonia had been the heart of the resistance to Franco’s final overthrow of the Republican government in 1939. In revenge, the Fascist Franco regime suppressed their language and culture for decades.

Complicating everything else, Catalonia had always been the industrial heart of modern Spain and its most prosperous region. Consequently, Madrid had always taken a disproportionate share of its tax base from the region, another source of local resentment.

Since Franco’s death, Catalonian rights had been largely restored, and Català was now the primary language taught in its schools. Despite these reforms, Catalonian nationalists pressed for complete independence from Spain and the creation of an independent Catalonian state. Other regions in Spain, particularly the Basque, had expressed similar desires decades before and resorted to a bombing campaign that was ultimately subdued by Madrid.