The Hidden Assassins, Page 29

  The drive back home was eerily quiet. At nearly 10 p.m. the streets should have been alive and the bars full of people. A lot of places were closed. There was so little traffic Falcón went through the centre of town. Only a few young people had gathered in the Plaza del Museo under the trees. The mood was sombre and the narrow streets tense with anxiety.

  An investigation of his fridge revealed some cooked prawns and a fresh swordfish steak. He ate the prawns with mayonnaise while drinking a beer direct from the bottle. He fried up the fish, squeezed some lemon over it, poured himself a glass of white rioja and ate, his mind picking over the detail of the day. He went over the dialogue with Father Román. Had the priest been trying to avoid the sin of lying by omission, evasion and ducking the question? It felt like it. He poured himself another glass of white wine, pushed back his plate and folded his arms and had just started to contemplate the big event of the day—the suicide of Ricardo Gamero, when his first visitor arrived.

  Pablo had come on business. He refused a beer and they went into the study.

  ‘You mentioned Yacoub had some conditions before you fell asleep on the plane this morning,’ said Pablo.

  ‘The first condition is that he will only talk or deal with me,’ said Falcón. ‘He won’t meet any other agents, or take phone calls from anyone but me.’

  ‘That’s quite normal except, of course, you’ll be in different countries. I’ll talk you through the communication procedure later, but it won’t exactly be direct contact,’ said Pablo. ‘It puts you under a lot of pressure.’

  ‘He also says he’s not making a lifelong commitment,’ said Falcón.

  ‘That’s understandable,’ said Pablo. ‘But you know, spying can have an addictive effect on certain personalities.’

  ‘Like Juan,’ said Falcón. ‘He looks like a man with a few secrets. As if he’s running two families that don’t know about each other.’

  ‘He does. He has his wife and two kids and the CNI, and they don’t know anything about each other. Keep going with the conditions.’

  ‘Yacoub will not give us any information that could jeopardize the life of any of his family members,’ said Falcón.

  ‘That was to be expected,’ said Pablo. ‘But does he suspect any of his family members?’

  ‘He says not. But they’re all devout Muslims and they lead very different lives to him,’ said Falcón. ‘It could be that he finds out that they are closely involved or at some remove, but he will not be an instrument in their downfall if they are. These people have totally accepted him as one of their own and he won’t give them up.’

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Pablo.

  ‘My problem: Yacoub doesn’t have any training for this work.’

  ‘Most spies don’t. They just happen to be in a position where information comes their way.’

  ‘You make it sound easy.’

  ‘It’s only dangerous if you’re careless.’

  Falcón had to raise his concentration levels to take in Pablo’s briefing about the method of communication with Yacoub. He got him to boil it down to the basics, which were: they would communicate via email, using a secure website run by the CNI. Both Falcón and Diouri would have to load their computers with different encryption software. The emails would go to the CNI website to be decrypted and passed on. The CNI would obviously see all emails and make their recommendations for action. All Falcón had to do this evening was to call Yacoub and tell him to go to the shop in Rabat and pick up a couple of books. These books would give Yacoub all the information he needed. Falcón made the call and kept it short, saying he was tired.

  ‘We’ve got to get him working as soon as possible,’ said Pablo. ‘This whole thing is moving fast.’

  ‘What whole thing?’

  ‘The game, the plan, the operation,’ said Pablo.

  ‘We’re not sure which. All we know is that, since the bomb went off yesterday, the level of encrypted emails on the web has gone up fivefold.’

  ‘And how many of those encrypted emails can you read?’

  ‘Not many.’

  ‘So you haven’t cracked the code from the Koran found in the Peugeot Partner?’

  ‘Not yet. We’ve got the world’s best mathematicians working on it, though.’

  ‘What do the CNI make of Ricardo Gamero’s suicide?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘Inevitably we’re thinking that he was the mole,’ said Pablo. ‘But that’s just a theory. We’re trying to work up the logic around it.’

  ‘If he was the mole, from what I know about him, I’d find it hard to believe he was passing information to an Islamic terrorist movement.’

  ‘Right, but what about Miguel Botín? What do you know about him?’

  ‘That his brother was maimed in the Madrid train bombings, giving him good reason to be operating against Islamic terrorism,’ said Falcón. ‘That his girlfriend was a school friend of Gamero who remains a devout Catholic, having so far been reluctant to convert to Islam. And it was Botín who followed the Imam and took shots of Hammad and Saoudi and these other two mystery men, which he handed over to the CGI. He was also prompting Gamero to get the Imam’s office bugged. That’s about it.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound like a promising candidate as a terrorist, does he?’

  ‘Have you searched Botín’s apartment?’ asked Falcón.

  Pablo cradled his knee, nodded.

  ‘What did you find there?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘But you found something that makes you think Botín was acting for the terrorists while working for Gamero?’

  ‘This is what it’s like, Javier,’ said Pablo, shrugging. ‘The Hall of Mirrors. We constantly have to revise what we’re actually seeing.’

  ‘You found another heavily annotated copy of the Koran, didn’t you?’ said Falcón, sitting back, dazed. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘It means you cannot say a word about this conversation to anybody,’ said Pablo. ‘It means we have to get our counterintelligence up and running as soon as possible.’

  ‘But it also means that the terrorists, whoever they are, were letting Miguel Botín serve up information to the CGI that compromised the Imam, Hammad and Saoudi, along with whatever operation was being planned in the mosque.’

  ‘We’re still conducting our enquiries,’ said Pablo.

  ‘They were sacrificing them?’ asked Falcón, nauseated by his inability to think his way around this new development.

  ‘First of all, we live in an age of suicide bombing—there’s sacrifice for you,’ said Pablo. ‘And secondly, intelligence services all over the world have always had to sacrifice agents for the greater good of the mission. It’s nothing new.’

  ‘So this electrician, whose card Miguel Botín handed over to the Imam, was the agent of their destruction? The electrician was sent by Botín’s Islamic terrorist masters to bomb the building? That’s just fantastic.’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ said Pablo. ‘But as you know, not all suicide bombers realize that they are suicide bombers. Some have just been told to deliver a car, or leave a rucksack on a train. Botín had just been told to give an electrician’s card to the Imam. What we need to find out is who told him to do that.’

  ‘Are we wasting our time here?’ asked Falcón. ‘Is this whole investigation just a show, for whichever terrorist group decided to abort their mission and blow up any possible leads back to their network?’

  ‘We’re still very interested to find out what’s in the mosque,’ said Pablo. ‘And we’re very keen to get Yacoub up and running.’

  ‘And how do you know that Yacoub is approaching the right group, even?’ asked Falcón, exhausted and close to rage from frustration.

  ‘We have confidence in that because it has come from a reliable detainee and has also been verified by British agents on the ground in Rabat,’ said Pablo.

  ‘What group are we talking about?’

  ‘The GICM, Groupe Islamique de Combattants Maroca
ins, otherwise known as the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. They had links to the bombings in Casablanca, Madrid and London,’ said Pablo. ‘What we’re doing here is not something that was thought up yesterday as an idea worth trying, Javier. This represents months of intelligence work.’

  Pablo left soon after. Falcón was almost depressed by their exchange. All the man-hours put in by his squad were beginning to look like a waste of energy, and yet there were unnerving gaps in what Pablo had told him. It was as if each group involved in the investigation put most trust in the information that they themselves uncovered. So the CNI believed in the annotated Koran as the codebook, because of the example of the Book of Proof uncovered by British intelligence, and that coloured everything they looked at. The fact that the witness in the mosque, José Duran, had described the electrician and his labourers as a Spaniard and two Eastern bloc natives, who did not sound anything like Islamic terrorist operatives, held little water for Pablo. But then again, it had been local Spanish petty criminals who’d supplied the Madrid bombers with explosives, and what does it take to leave a bomb? A little care and a psychotic mind.

  After the press conference on TVE with Comisarios Lobo and Elvira, Juez Calderón had taken a taxi round to Canal Sur, where he was miked up and eased on to the set of a roundtable discussion about Islamic terrorism. He was the man of the hour and within moments the female chair of the programme had drawn him into the discussion. He controlled the rest of the programme with a combination of incisive and informed comment, humour, and a savage wit he reserved for so-called security specialists and terrorism pundits.

  Afterwards he was taken out to dinner by some executives from Canal Sur’s current affairs department and the female chair of the programme. They fed and flattered him for an hour and a half until he found himself alone with the female chair, who let it be known that this could continue in more comfortable surroundings. For once Calderón demurred. He was tired. There was another long day ahead of him and—the main reason—he was sure that Marisa was a better lay.

  Calderón sat in the middle seat in the back of the Canal Sur limousine. He felt like a hero. His mind was racing with endorphins after his TV performances. He had a sense of the world at his feet. Seville, as it flashed past in the night, began to feel small to him. He imagined what it must be like to be as high on success as this in a city like New York, where they really knew how to make a man feel important.

  The limousine dropped him off outside the San Marcos church at 12.45 a.m. and, for once, rather than take his usual little deviation around the back, he strode past the bars on the other side, hoping that friends of Inés would be drinking there who would stop him and congratulate him. He really had been exceptionally brilliant. The bars, however, were already closed. Calderón, in his heightened state, had failed to notice how quiet the city was.

  As he went up in the lift he knew that the only way he was going to sleep was after a strenuous, crazy fuck with Marisa, out on the balcony, in the hall, going down in the lift, out in the street. He felt so on top of the world he wanted everybody to see him performing.

  Marisa had watched the TV programmes in a state of insensate boredom. She could tell that the press conference revolved around Esteban, as all the questions from journalists were for him. She could also see that he was controlling the roundtable discussion, and even that the female chair was dying to get into his trousers, but the drivel that was being talked had reduced her to a vegetative state. Why do Westerners have to get so exercised about things and talk them to death, as if it’s going to be any help? Then it struck her. That was what irked her about Westerners. They always took things at face value, because that was what could be controlled, and what could be measured. They just served up their lies all round and then congratulated each other on ’their command of the situation’. That was why white people bored her. They had no interest beyond the surface. ‘What are you doing, sitting there all day, Marisa?’ had been the most frequently asked question she’d faced in America. And yet in Africa they’d never asked her that question—or any question, for that matter. Questioning existence didn’t help you live it.

  She looked down on Calderón’s arrival from her balcony. She saw his jaunty steps, his little preparations. When he said his usual: ‘It’s me,’ into her entry phone, she replied: ‘My hero.’

  He burst into her apartment like a showman, arms raised, waiting for the applause. He drew her to him and kissed her, pushing his tongue between the barrier of her teeth, which she did not like. Their kissing had only ever been lip deep.

  It wasn’t difficult to tell that he was still on the crest of the media wave. She let him drive her out on to the balcony, where they had sex. He looked up at the stars, holding on to her hips, imagining even greater glory. She participated by hanging on to the railings and making a suitable amount of noise.

  As soon as he was finished, he was rendered mentally and physically drained, like someone coming off a coke high. She managed to steer him to the bed and get his shoes off before he fell into a deep sleep at 1.15 a.m. She stood over him, smoking a cigarette, wondering if she’d be able to wake him in a couple of hours’ time.

  She washed herself in the bidet, closing her right eye to the smoke rising from the cigarette. She lay on the sofa and let time do what it was good at. At 3 a.m. she started trying to rouse him, but he was completely inert. She held a lighter to his foot. He writhed and kicked out. It took time to get him to come round. He had no idea where he was. She explained that he had to go home, he had an early start, he had to get changed.

  At 3.25 she called a taxi. She put his shoes on, got him standing, put his arms into his jacket and called the lift up to her floor. She stood outside with him, his head dropping and jerking off his chest and her shoulder. The taxi arrived just after 3.30. She put him in the back and instructed the driver to take him to Calle San Vicente. She said he was exhausted, that he was the leading judge in the Seville bombing, and that gave the driver a sense of mission. He waved away her € 10 note. For this man it was going to be free. The cab pulled away. Calderón had his head thrown back on the rear shelf. In the yellowish street lighting he looked as he would when dead. The whites of his eyes were just visible below the lids.

  At that time of the morning, with Seville as silent as a ghost city, there was no traffic and the cab arrived at Calle San Vicente in just under ten minutes. After much cajoling, the cab driver had to reach in and physically haul Calderón out into the street. He walked him to the front door of the building and asked him for his keys. The driver got the door open and realized he was going to have to go all the way. They crammed themselves into the hall.

  ‘Is there a light?’ asked the driver.

  Calderón slapped at the wall. Light burst into the hall and the ticking sound of a timer started up. The driver supported him up the stairs.

  ‘This one here,’ said Calderón, as they reached the first floor.

  The driver opened the apartment door, which was double locked, and returned the keys to Calderón.

  ‘Are you all right now?’ he asked, looking into the judge’s bleary eyes.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine now. I’ll be OK, thanks,’ he said.

  ‘You’re doing a great job,’ said the driver. ‘I saw you on the telly before I started my shift.’

  Calderón clapped him on the shoulder. The driver went down the stairs and the light in the hall went out with a loud snap. The cab started up and pulled away. Calderón rolled over the doorjamb into the apartment. The light was on in the kitchen. He shut the door, leaned back on it. Even in his exhausted state, with his eyelids as heavy as lead, his teeth clenched with irritation.

  25

  Seville—Thursday, 8th June 2006, 04.07 hrs

  Calderón came to with a start that thumped his head into the wall. His face was pressed against the wooden floor. The smell of polish was strong in his nose. His eyelids snapped open. He was instantly wide awake, as if danger was present and near. He was still
dressed as he had been all day. He couldn’t understand why he was lying in the corridor of his apartment. Had he been so exhausted that he’d slept where he fell? He checked his watch: just gone four o’clock. He’d only been out for ten minutes or so. He was mystified. He remembered coming into the apartment and the light being on in the kitchen. It was still on, but he was beyond it now, further into the flat, which appeared to be completely dark and cold from the air conditioning. He struggled to his feet, checked himself. He wasn’t hurt, hadn’t even banged his head. He must have slid down the wall.

  ‘Inés?’ he said out loud, puzzled by the kitchen light. Calderón stretched his shoulders back. He was stiff. He stepped into the rhomboid of light on the corridor floor. He saw the blood first, a huge, burgeoning crimson pool on the white marble. The colour of it under the bright white light was truly alarming. He stepped back as if expecting an intruder still to be there. He lowered himself and saw her through the chair and table. He knew immediately that she was dead. Her eyes were wide open, with not a scintilla of light in them.

  The blood had spread to the right side of the table and underneath it. It was viscous and seemed to be sucking at the chair and table legs. It was so horribly bright that it throbbed in his vision, as if there was still life in it. Calderón crawled on all fours round to the left of the table to where Inés’s feet lay, slack and pointed outwards in front of the sink. Her nightie was rucked up. His eyes travelled from her white legs, over her white cotton panties, beyond the waistband—and that was where the bruising started. He hadn’t seen it before. He’d had no idea his fists had accomplished such horrifically visible damage. And it was then that he thought he might have seen this before after all, because his whole body was suddenly consumed with a remembered panic that seemed to constrict his throat and cut off the blood supply to his brain. He reared back on his knees and held his head.

  He crawled back out of the kitchen and got to his feet in the corridor. He went swiftly out of the apartment, which required him to unlock the door. He hit the stair light, looked around and went back in. The light was still on in the kitchen. Inés was still lying there. The blood was now one floor tile’s width from the wooden floor of the corridor. He pressed the balls of his palms into his eye sockets and ripped them away, but it made no difference to the horror of what lay before him. He dropped to all fours again.