The Power Couple by Alex Berenson

Author:Alex Berenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

22

Barcelona

The Mossos had gone into high gear.

CC hadn’t apologized for the way he’d acted earlier. He’d done something better. He’d called his boss, explained that an American girl had been kidnapped, a professional job. The Mossos needed to pull video footage to find the kidnap car, ask for help from Madrid and the French police too.

Surveillance cameras revealed an obvious candidate for the suspect car, a black Toyota Camry that came down Carrer de Trafalgar at 12:55 a.m. and then returned seventeen minutes later. No surprise, the Camry’s back windows were heavily tinted. And the driver wore a hooded sweatshirt that shadowed his face. But the windows couldn’t hide the fact that the Camry’s back seat had been empty on its way to the alley behind Helado, full on the way back.

The windows couldn’t hide the license plate, either. With it, the Mossos tracked the Camry along the Avinguda Diagonal, which ran to the ring road west of the city and the highways that connected Barcelona with France and the rest of Spain.

But the trail ended there.

The modern superhighway between Barcelona and Madrid, the AP-2, was a toll road with plenty of cameras. So was the AP-7, which ran from the French border through Barcelona and down Spain’s east coast. But neither highway’s cameras had captured the Camry.

Xili told Rebecca the vanishing act shouldn’t surprise them. Most of Spain’s older highways were not toll roads and did not have surveillance. The most notable was the A-2, an upgraded version of the old Route Nacional from Madrid to Barcelona.

The Camry itself also looked to be a dead end. Spain had a serious car theft problem. And based on its body type, this Camry had been built between 2006 and 2011. That model was notoriously easy to steal. The national stolen car database showed thousands of thefts of Camrys from those years.

Worse, the plates didn’t belong to the car. They matched a Mini Cooper owned by a woman who lived north of Barcelona. She hadn’t reported them stolen. The Mossos had already sent an officer to talk to her. But she wasn’t home, and her car didn’t seem to be around.

Rebecca suspected that the Mini’s owner was on vacation, her car parked in an airport lot. Stealing a car from a garage was tricky. Gate cameras would catch every vehicle as it entered and left.

But stealing plates was easy. Find a car tucked in a corner. Preferably a small car tucked behind a bigger vehicle that hid it from cameras. Unscrew the plates. Toss them in your own car’s trunk and drive out.

The combination of stolen plates and a stolen car meant that finding the Camry was going to be tough. The Mossos had put an advisory notice—what American police called a BOLO, be on the lookout—for the Camry into their system. Any officer who saw the car was supposed to pull it over.

But Rebecca already knew they weren’t going to see it. It was in a garage somewhere. Or in a Madrid slum, unlocked, waiting to be stolen again.

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