The Hidden Assassins, Page 44

  ‘In that case, we must inform you that Tateb Hassani was suspected of terrorist offences, directly linked to the Seville bombing. His handwriting was on documents found in the destroyed mosque. You were therefore harbouring a terrorist, Don Eduardo. I think you know what that means regarding our investigation. So we would like you to accompany us down to the Jefatura and we will continue this interview under the terms of the antiterrorism—’

  ‘Now, Inspector Jefe, let’s not be too hasty,’ said Rivero, blood draining from his face. ‘You came here enquiring about the disappearance of Tateb Hassani. I have cooperated as best I can. Now you are changing the nature of your enquiry without giving me the opportunity to address the matter in this new light.’

  ‘We didn’t want to have to force your hand, Don Eduardo,’ said Falcón. ‘Let’s go back to why you entertained Tateb Hassani as your house guest for five days…’

  Rivero swallowed and braced himself against the desk for this next lap of the course.

  ‘He was helping us to formulate our immigration policy. He, like us, did not believe that Africa and Europe were compatible, or that Islam and Christianity could cohabit in harmony. His particular insights into the Arabic mind were extremely helpful to us. And, of course, his name and stature added weight to our cause.’

  ‘Despite the fact that he rarely visited his homeland, had spent his entire adult life in the USA and that he had to leave Columbia University under the cloud of a sexual harassment case, which cost him his apartment and all his savings?’ said Falcón.

  ‘Despite that,’ said Rivero. ‘His insights were invaluable.’

  ‘How much did Fuerza Andalucía pay him for this work?’

  Rivero stared into the desk, terrified by this burgeoning demand for more and more improvisation. How was he ever going to remember any of it? Fatigue got a foothold in his viscera. He viciously shrugged it off. He had to hang on, like a fatally wounded man he had to keep talking, to overwhelm any desire he might have to give up. The flaws were developing inside him. His shell had been weakening from the moment that DVD had come anonymously into his possession and he’d had to view the hideousness of his indiscretions. The cracks had spread further when Angel had come to see him. He had listened, his white mane of hair gone wild and his face battered by excessive alcohol, as Angel had told him how he’d saved him. The rumour had been rife, like a wildfire consuming the tinder-dry undergrowth, gathering strength to leap up into an enormous conflagration. Angel had saved him, but it had come at a price. The time had come to step down or be destroyed.

  That conversation with Angel had weakened him more than he knew. Over the days the flaws spread through him until every part of him was ruined. Every step now was a step down into the dark. Murder had come into his house and a desecration of the sanctity of the body. He could not think, after it had taken place, how such a thing could have happened to him in a matter of weeks. One moment brilliant and whole, the next corrupt, fractured, fissured beyond repair. He had to get a grip on himself. The centre must hold.

  ‘You must remember what you had to pay for such invaluable advice,’ said Falcón, who had been watching this immense struggle from the other side of the desk.

  ‘It was 5,000,’ said Rivero.

  ‘Was that with a cheque?’

  ‘No, cash.’

  ‘You paid him with black money?’

  ‘Even policemen know how this country works,’ said Rivero, acidly.

  ‘I must say, Don Eduardo, that I do admire your poise under these very stressful circumstances,’ said Falcón. ‘Had I been in your shoes and found out that the man I’d paid €5,000 for his advice on immigration had also been involved in a terrorist plot to take over two schools and a university faculty, I would be in a state of shock. That this man should also have been responsible for writing out those appalling instructions to kill schoolchildren, one by one, until their demands had been met would devastate me, if I were you.’

  ‘But then again, you are a politician,’ said Ramírez, smiling.

  Sweat was raking down his flanks, his stomach was embarking on a ferocious protest, his blood pressure was screaming in his ears, his heartbeat was so fast and tight that his breathing had shallowed, and his brain gasped for oxygen. And yet, he sat there, tapping the side of his nose, bracing himself against the desk.

  ‘I have to say,’ Rivero said, ‘that I cannot begin to think what this means.’

  ‘So, you had this dinner on Saturday night,’ said Falcón. ‘It wasn’t served, but was laid out as a buffet. How many people attended that dinner? So far, we have yourself and Agustín Cárdenas, but you’d hardly go to the trouble of a buffet for just two people, would you?’

  ‘Angel Zarrías was there as well,’ said Rivero, smoothly, thinking, yes, they could have Angel, he should go down with them, the little fucker. ‘I quite often have buffets on Saturday nights, so that the servants can go home and enjoy dinner with their families.’

  ‘What time did Angel arrive?’

  ‘He was here around 9.30, I think.’

  ‘And Agustín Cárdenas?’

  ‘About 10 p.m.’

  ‘Did he arrive with anybody else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was alone in the car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re saying there were only three people for dinner?’

  Rivero didn’t care about the lying any more. It was all lies. He stared into his desk and let them fall from his tongue, like gold coins worn to a slippery smoothness.

  ‘Yes. I quite often have a buffet and whoever turns up…turns up.’

  Falcón glanced at Ramírez, who shrugged at him, nodded him in for the kill.

  ‘Do you know one of your staff called Mario Gómez?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It was he who laid out the buffet in the next room on that Saturday night.’

  ‘That would be his job,’ said Rivero.

  ‘He told us that he’d served Tateb Hassani with at least one meal a day since he’d arrived in your house, up here in these rooms.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘He knew who Tateb Hassani was, and he saw you accompanying him upstairs to dinner with Angel Zarrías at 9.45 on Saturday night. Some hours later Tateb Hassani was poisoned with cyanide, horribly disfigured and driven from here, in Agustín Cárdenas’s car, to be dumped in a bin on Calle Boteros.’

  Rivero clasped his hands, drove them between his slim thighs and sobbed with his head dropped on to his chest. Released at last.

  36

  Seville—Friday, 9th June 2006, 01.45 hrs

  ‘Great news,’ said Elvira, sitting at his desk in his office in the Jefatura.

  ‘Nearly great news,’ said Falcón. ‘We didn’t manage to force Rivero into revealing the entire conspiracy. He only gave us two names. It’s quite possible that we can charge the three of them, but only with the murder of Tateb Hassani and not the planning of the bombing of the mosque.’

  ‘But now we can get a search warrant for Eduardo Rivero’s house and the Fuerza Andalucía offices,’ said Elvira. ‘We must be able to squeeze something out of those two places.’

  ‘But nothing in writing. You don’t draw this sort of stuff up in the minutes of a Fuerza Andalucía meeting,’ said Falcón. ‘We have a tenuous link between Angel Zarrías and Ricardo Gamero, but no proof of what they discussed in the Archaeological Museum. We have no idea of the connection of any of these men to the people who actually planted the bomb. Both José Luis and I think that there is a missing element to the conspiracy.’

  ‘A criminal element,’ added Ramírez.

  ‘We’re sure that Lucrecio Arenas and César Benito are in some way involved, but we couldn’t persuade Rivero to even give us their names,’ said Falcón. ‘They could be the “other half” of the conspiracy. Arenas put up Jesús Alarcón as a candidate for the leadership, so we assume that he is involved. But did Arenas and Benito make contact with the criminal element who planted the bom
b? We’re not sure we’ll ever find out who, or what, that missing element was.’

  ‘But you can put Rivero, Zarrías and Cárdenas under enormous pressure…’

  ‘Except that they know, with the clarity of selfpreservation, that all they have to do is keep their mouths shut and we’ll only be able to pin murder on one of them, and conspiring to murder on all three, but nothing more,’ said Falcón. ‘And as for Lucrecio Arenas, Jesús Alarcón and César Benito, we have no chance. Ferrera worked hard just to get that final sighting of Tateb Hassani. Once those few remaining employees left, the house was empty, which means we’ll have a job to place Arenas, Benito and Alarcón there…that is, assuming that they turned up for the killing.’

  ‘And if I was them, I’d have kept well away from that,’ said Ramírez.

  ‘The link to the bomb conspiracy is Tateb Hassani,’ said Elvira. ‘Work on the suspects until they reveal why Hassani had to be killed. Once they’ve admitted—’

  ‘If it was my life that depended on it,’ said Ramírez,

  ‘I’d just hold out.’

  ‘I can’t speak for Rivero and Cárdenas, but I know Angel Zarrías is very religious, with a deep faith— however misguided it might be. I’m sure he’ll even find it in himself to be absolved of all his sins,’ said Falcón. ‘Angel is urbane. He knows what’s tolerable in modern Spanish society, as far as expressing religious views is concerned. But I don’t think we’re talking about a mentality that’s any less fanatical than an Islamic jihadist’s.’

  ‘Rivero, Zarrías and Cárdenas are going to spend the night in the cells,’ said Elvira. ‘And we’ll see what tomorrow brings. You both have to get some sleep. We’ll have search warrants ready in the morning for all of their properties.’

  ‘I’m going to have to give my sister at least half an hour of my time,’ said Falcón. ‘Her partner has just been dragged out of bed and arrested in the middle of the night. There’s probably a hundred messages on my mobile already.’

  Cristina Ferrera slammed back into consciousness with dead-bolt certainty and sat upright in her bed, faintly swaying, as if moored by guy ropes in a wind. She only came awake like this if her maternal instinct had received a high-voltage neural alarm call. Despite the depth of the sleep she’d just abandoned, her lucidity was instantaneous; she knew that her children were neither in the apartment, nor in danger, but that something was very wrong.

  The street lighting showed that there was nobody in her room. She swung her legs out of bed and scanned the living room. Her handbag was no longer in the centre of the dining-room table. It had been moved to the corner. She toed the door open to the bedroom she’d made up for Fernando. The bed was empty. The pillow was dented, but the sheets had not been drawn back. She checked her watch. It was coming up to 4.30 a.m. Why would he have come here just to sleep for a few hours?

  She turned the light on over the dining-room table and wrenched open the neck of her large handbag. Her notebook was on top of her purse. She slapped it on the table. Nothing was missing, not even the € 15 in cash. She sat down as their conversation came back to her: Fernando badgering her for news. Her eyes drifted from her handbag to her notebook. Her notes were personal. She always kept two columns; one for the facts, the other for her thoughts and observations. The latter was not always tethered to the former and sometimes verged on the creative. She turned the notebook over. One of her observations jumped out at her from the page. It was alongside the names of the people who’d been seen by Mario Gómez going up with Tateb Hassani to the ‘last supper’. In her observation column she’d scribbled the only possible conclusion to all the enquiries she’d made: Fuerza Andalucía planted the bomb. No question mark. A bold statement, based on the facts she’d gathered.

  It was suddenly cold in the room, as if the air conditioning had found another gear. She swallowed against the rise of adrenaline. She headed for the bedroom, with the backs of her thighs trembling below the oversized T-shirt she wore in bed. She slapped the light on and opened the drawer of her dresser where she kept a vast tangle of knickers and bras. Her hand roved the drawer, again and again. She ripped it out and turned it over. She ripped out the other drawer and did the same. She thought she was going to faint with the quantity of chemicals her body was injecting into her system. Her gun was no longer there.

  This was too big for her to manage on her own. She was going to have to call her Inspector Jefe. She hit the speed-dial button, listened to the endless ringing tone and reminded herself to breathe. Falcón answered on the eighth ring. He’d been asleep for one and a half hours. She told him everything in three seconds flat. It went down the line like a massive file under compression software.

  ‘You’re going to have to tell me all that again, Cristina,’ he said, ‘and a little slower. Breathe. Close your eyes. Speak.’

  This time it came out in a thirty-second stream.

  ‘There’s only one person from Fuerza Andalucía who Fernando knows who isn’t currently in police custody and that’s Jesús Alarcón,’ said Falcón. ‘I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.’

  ‘But he’s going to kill him, Inspector Jefe,’ said Ferrera. ‘He’s going to kill him with my gun. Shouldn’t we…?’

  ‘If we send a patrol car round there he might get spooked and do just that,’ said Falcón. ‘My guess is that Fernando is going to want to tell him something first. Punish him before he tries to kill him.’

  ‘With a gun he doesn’t have to try very hard.’

  ‘The concept is easy, the reality takes a bit more,’ said Falcón. ‘Let’s hope he woke you up as he left your apartment. If he’s on foot he can’t be too far ahead of us.’

  Fernando squatted on his haunches next to some bins on the edge of the Parque María Luisa. Only his hands were in the light from the street lamps. He looked from the dark at the blue metal of the small .38 revolver. He turned it over, surprised at its weight. He’d only ever held toy guns, made from aluminium. The real thing had the heft of a much bigger tool, condensed into pure efficiency and portability.

  He emptied the bullets from the chambers of the revolver’s cylinder and put them in his pocket. He clicked the cylinder back into place. He was good with his hands. He played around with the weapon, getting used to its weight and the simple, lethal mechanisms. When he was confident with it, he counted the bullets back into the chambers. He was ready. He stood and did what he’d seen people do in the movies. He tucked it into the waistband in the small of his back and pulled the Fuerza Andalucía polo shirt, given to him by Jesús Alarcón, over the top.

  The wide Avenida that separated the park from the smart residential area of El Porvenir was empty. He knew where Jesús Alarcón lived because there’d been the offer of a room for as long as he wanted it. He hadn’t accepted it because he didn’t feel comfortable with their class differences.

  He stood in front of the huge, sliding metal gate of the house. A silver Mercedes was parked in front of the garage. If Fernando had known that it was worth twice as much as his destroyed apartment it would have stoked his fury even more. As it was, the malignancy growing inside him was too big to contain. His rib cage creaked against his endlessly extending outrage at what Jesús Alarcón had done. Not just the bombing, but the purpose with which he’d set out to make Fernando, whose family he had personally been responsible for destroying, his close friend. It was treachery and betrayal on a scale to which only a politician could have been impervious. Jesús Alarcón, with all his authentic concern and genuine sympathy, had been playing him like a fish.

  There was no traffic. The street in El Porvenir was empty. None of the people in these houses was ever up before dawn. Fernando called Alarcón on his mobile. It rang for some time and switched into the message service. He called Alarcón’s house phone and looked up at the window he imagined would be the master bedroom. Jesús and Mónica in some gargantuan bed, beneath high-quality linen, dressed in silk pyjamas. A faint glow appeared behind the curtains. Alarcón answered groggily.r />
  ‘Jesús, it’s me, Fernando. I’m sorry to call you so early. I’m here. Outside. I’ve been out all night. They threw me out of the hospital. I had nowhere to go. I need to talk to you. Can you come down? I’m…I’m desperate.’

  It was true. He was desperate. Desperate for revenge. He’d only ever heard tales of the monstrousness of this horrific emotion. He had not been prepared for the way it found every crevice of the body. His organs screamed for it. His bones howled with it. His joints ground with it. His blood seethed with it. It was so intolerable that he had to get it out of himself. He wanted stilts so that he could step over the gate, smash through the glass, reach into Alarcón’s bed and pluck out his beautiful wife and throw her to the ground, break her bones, dash out her brains, tread his sharpened stilt into her heart and then see what Jesús Alarcón made of that. Yes, he wanted to be enormous, to drive his arm into Alarcón’s home as if it was a doll’s house. He saw his hand ferreting around the bedrooms reaching for Alarcón’s small children, who would run squealing from his snatching hand. He wanted Alarcón to see them crushed and laid out under little sheets in front of the house.

  ‘I’m coming,’ said Alarcón. ‘No problem, Fernando.’ Had he known the hidden hunger behind the eyes staring through the bars of the gate, Jesús Alarcón would have stayed in his bed, called the police and begged for special forces.

  A light came on outside the front of the house. The door opened. Alarcón, in a silk dressing gown, pointed the remote at the gate. Fernando flinched, as if being shot at. The gate rumbled back on its rails. Fernando slipped through the gap and walked quickly up to the house. Alarcón had already turned back to the front door, holding out an arm, which he expected to fit around Fernando’s shoulders and welcome him into his home.

  Moths swirled around the porch light, maddened by the prospect of a greater darkness, which never materialized. Alarcón was still too groggy to recognize the level of intent moving up on him. He was astonished to feel a fistful of his dressing-gown collar grabbed from behind and the front door reeling away from him as Fernando, with the hardened strength of a manual worker, swung him round. Alarcón lost his footing and fell to his knees. Fernando yanked him backwards and trapped his head between his thighs. He had the gun out of his waistband. Alarcón reached back, grabbing at Fernando’s trousers and polo shirt. Fernando showed him the gun, poked the barrel into the socket of his eye so that Alarcón gasped with pain.