The Hidden Assassins

23

Seville-Wednesday, 7th June 2006, 16.30 hrs

Marisa left her apartment. It was hot, easily over forty degrees, and the perfect time for her to work in her studio. Her tight mulatto skin yearned to sweat freely. Out in the street she walked in the sun and breathed in the desert air. The streets were empty. She stumbled on the cobbles of Calle Bustos Tavera until her eyes got used to the sudden shade. She turned up the alleyway to the courtyard. The light at the end was blinding. The sun had sucked out even the edges of the buildings beyond the arch. She shivered a little at the sensation she always had walking down this tunnel.

At the end, where the huge cobbles turned pewtery on the threshold, she stopped. The courtyard should have been empty at this hour. Instinct told her that someone was there. She saw Ines, halfway down the steps leading to the entrance of her studio.

Rage shuddered through her and bunched up behind her flat chest. This fatuous middle-class bitch now wanted to infect the sanctity of her work place with the received opinions of her bourgeois upbringing, with the soulless rant of her consumer needs, with her self-righteous smugness of 'being thin'. Marisa stepped back into the full darkness of the tunnel.

In turning back to go up the stairs to the studio, Ines revealed the lowest welts on the backs of her thighs. These people deserve each other, thought Marisa. They wander through life with total belief in their brilliant control of the reality around them, without ever seeing the iridescence of the illusory bubble in which they float. They might as well be dead.

Marisa suppressed the temptation to run up the steps, beat the wretched woman senseless, throw her down the stairs, break her skull open and discover the smallness within. My God, she hated these people, grown from tradition, sporting their fancy names-Ines Conde de fucking Tejada-surname and title rolled into one.

Ines reached the top of the steps, put her handbag down, tugged open the neck and drew out a blackhandled knife. Now this was interesting. Had the bitch come to kill her? Maybe the skinny-legged cow had some cojones after all. Ines scored something on the front door of the studio, stepped back and jutted her chin at her work. She put the knife back in the bag and walked down the steps. Marisa backed away, snarling, and retreated to her apartment for an hour. By the time she returned the courtyard was empty, the heat more intense. She ran up the stairs to see Ines's message. Scored into the door was the predictable word: PUTA. Whore.

It was time this was over, she thought. She couldn't have the bitch turning up at her place of work. The news of Gamero's suicide had so disconcerted Falcon he'd left Curado with barely another word. Now, as he drove across town, ideas occurred to him and he called Curado on his mobile.

'Have you heard of someone called Ricardo Gamero?'

'Should I?' he asked. 'Was he at Informaticalidad?'

Maybe that had been too lurid an idea.

'I want you to do something for me, David,' said Falcon. 'I want you to call your old friend at Informaticalidad-Marco…?'

'Marco Barreda.'

'I want you to tell Marco Barreda that you had a visit from the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios, Javier Falcon. The same cop who's investigating the Seville bombing. I want you to tell him what we discussed in a "thought you'd like to know" sort of way. Nothing sensational, just matter of fact. And tell him what my last question to you was.'

'About Ricardo Gamero?'

'Exactly.'

The Medico Forense was already up the ladder, carrying out his preliminary examination of Ricardo Gamero's body, as Falcon arrived on the crime scene. There was no doubt that he was dead. The CGI agent who'd found him, Paco Molero, had checked for a pulse. Even if Gamero had survived jumping off his window ledge with a rope tied around his neck, he would not have lived for long. On the floor were twelve empty trays of paracetamol. Even if they'd got him to hospital and pumped his stomach, he would probably have remained in a coma and died of liver failure within forty-eight hours. This was not attention seeking. This was an experienced policeman making sure. His apartment had been locked and chained. His bedroom door was also locked, with a chair tilted under the handle.

Falcon shook Inspector Jefe Barros's hand.

'I'm sorry, Ramon. I'm very sorry,' said Falcon, who'd never lost anybody from his squad, but knew that it would be terrible.

Two paramedics manoeuvred the body on to the ladder and pulled it up through the bedroom window. They laid him out on his living-room floor while the forensics went through the bedroom. Falcon asked the instructing judge for permission to search the body.

Gamero was wearing suit trousers and a shirt. He had a wallet in one pocket, loose change in another. As Falcon turned the body to check the back pockets, the head lolled with sickening flexibility. There was a ticket to the Archaeological Museum in the right-hand back pocket. Falcon showed it to Inspector Jefe Barros, who couldn't get rid of the dismay in his face. The ticket had today's date on it.

'He's a citizen of Seville,' said Falcon. 'He doesn't need to buy a ticket to get into this museum.'

'Maybe he didn't want to show his ID,' said Barros. 'Stay anonymous.'

'Was that where he met his informers?'

'They're taught not to follow a routine.'

'I'd like to talk to the agent who found him-Paco Molero?'

'Of course,' said Barros, nodding. 'They were good friends.'

Paco was sitting at the kitchen table with his face in his hands. Falcon touched him on the shoulder, introduced himself. Paco's eyes were red.

'Were you worried about Ricardo?'

'There's been no time for that,' said Paco. 'Obviously he was upset, because he believed he'd lost one of his best sources in the mosque.'

'Did you know his source?'

'I've seen him, but I didn't know him,' said Molero. 'Ricardo asked me to come with him a few times, to check his back-just a routine precaution to make sure he wasn't being watched or followed.'

'Did he leave the office at all today, apart from going to lunch?'

'No. He went out at one thirty. He was due back two hours later. When he hadn't showed by four thirty, and his mobile was turned off, Inspector Jefe Barros sent me over here to find out what had happened.'

'What time did you find him?'

'I was here by ten to five, so maybe just gone five o'clock.'

'Tell me what happened yesterday…after the bombing.'

'We were all at work when it happened. We called our sources to arrange meetings. Ricardo couldn't get through to Botin. Then we were told not to leave the office, so we drafted up-to-date reports from what our sources had told us the last time we'd seen them. Lunch was brought in. We weren't released to go home until after 10 p.m.'

'Were you aware of any pressure on Ricardo, apart from the usual work stress?'

'Apart from the unusual work stress, you mean?'

'Why unusual?'

'We were being investigated, Inspector Jefe,' said Molero. 'We wouldn't be much of an antiterrorist outfit if we didn't know when our own department was being investigated.'

'How long have you known about this?'

'We reckon it probably started around the end of January.'

'What happened?'

'Nothing…just a change in attitude, or atmosphere…'

'Did you suspect each other?'

'No, we had total trust in each other and a belief in what we were doing,' said Molero. 'And I would say that, out of the four of us handling Islamic terrorist threats, Ricardo was the most committed.'

'Because he was religious?'

'You've had time to do some homework,' said Molero.

'I just met his source's partner, who happened to be an old school friend of Ricardo's.'

'Esperanza,' said Molero, nodding. 'They were at school and university together. She was going to become a nun before she met Ricardo.'

'Did they ever get together?'

'No. Ricardo was never interested in her.'

'Did he have a girlfriend?'

'Not that I know of.'

'Esperanza told me that the relationship Ricardo had with his source was based on a mutual respect for each other's religion.'

'Religion had something to do with it,' said Molero. 'But they were both against fanaticism, too. Ricardo had a special understanding of fanatics.'

'Why?'

'Because he'd been one himself,' said Molero and Falcon nodded him on. 'He believed that it came from a profound desire to be good, which interacted with a deep concern and constant worry about evil. That was where the hatred came from.'

'Hatred?'

'The fanatic, in his deep desire for goodness, is in constant fear of evil. He begins to see evil all around him. In what we think of as harmless decadence, the fanatic sees the insidious encroachment of evil. He begins to worry about everybody who is not pursuing good with the same zeal as himself. After a while he tires of the pathetic weakness of others and his perception shifts. He no longer sees them as misguided fools, but rather as ministers of the devil, which is when he starts to hate them. From that moment he becomes a dangerous person, because then he is someone receptive to extreme ideas.

'Ricardo had long conversations with Botin, who described a fundamental difference between Catholicism and Islam, which was The Book. The Koran is a direct transcription of the Word of God by the Prophet Mohammed. The word Koran means "recitation". It is not like our Bible, a series of narratives laid down by remarkable men. It is the actual Word of God as taken down by the prophet. Ricardo used to ask us to imagine what that would be like to a fanatic. The Book was not the inspired writing of gifted human beings, but the Word of God. In his desperation for goodness, and his fear of evil, the fanatic penetrates deeper and deeper into the Word. He seeks "better", more exactingly good interpretations of the Word. He works his way out, by degrees, to the extremes. That was Ricardo's strength. He'd been a fanatic himself, so he could give us an insight into the minds that we were up against.'

'But he wasn't a fanatic any more?' said Falcon.

'He said he'd once reached the point where he'd begun to look down on his fellow human beings and not just found them lacking but thought them subhuman in some way. It was a form of intense religious arrogance. He realized that once you've reached the point where you don't regard all humans as equals, then killing them becomes less of a problem.'

'And had he reached that point?'

'He'd been pulled back from it by a priest.'

'Do you know who this priest was?'

'He died of cancer last September.'

'That must have been a blow.'

'I suppose it must have been. He didn't talk to me about it. I think that was too personal for office consumption,' said Molero. 'He worked harder. He became a man with a mission.'

'And what was that mission?'

'To stop a terrorist attack before it happened, rather than helping to catch the perpetrators after a lot of people have been killed,' said Molero. 'In fact, last July was a bad time for Ricardo. The London bombings affected him very badly and then at the end of the month his priest was diagnosed with cancer. Six weeks later he was dead.'

'Why did the London bombings affect him like that?'

'He was disturbed by the bombers' profile: young, middle-class British citizens, some with small children, and all with family ties. They weren't loners. That was when he became focused on the nature of fanaticism. He developed his theories, bouncing ideas off one friend, the dying priest, and the other, the convert to Islam.'

'So, he would have taken this explosion as a personal failure.'

'That, and the fact that it also took the life of Miguel Botin, with whom he'd developed a very close relationship.'

'He'd just applied a second time for a bugging order.'

'We thought the refusal of the first was strange. Since the London bombings, we've been told to look for the slightest change of…inflexion in a community. And there was plenty going on in that mosque to justify a bug being placed there-according to Ricardo's source, anyway.'

'Do you think it had something to do with the department being under investigation?'

'Ricardo did. We didn't see the logic of it. We just thought he was angry at being turned down. You know how it is: your brain plays tricks and you see conspiracies wherever you look.'

'He had a ticket in his back pocket for the Archaeological Museum, which he must have visited in his lunch break today,' said Falcon. 'Any thoughts about that?'

'Apart from the fact that he didn't have to buy a ticket, no.'

'Would that be significant?' asked Falcon. 'Was he the sort of person who would leave something like that as a sign?'

'I think you're reading too much into it.'

'He met somebody in his lunch break and then killed himself,' said Falcon. 'His mind wasn't made up before the meeting; why would you bother to go if you were planning to kill yourself? So something happened during this meeting to tip him over the edge, to make him believe, perhaps with his mind in an emotional turmoil, that he was in some way responsible.'

'I can't think who that person could be, or what they could possibly have said to him,' said Molero.

'What church did his friend the priest belong to?'

'It's close. That's why he took this apartment,' said Molero. 'San Marcos.'

'Did he still attend that church, even after the priest's death?'

'I don't know,' said Molero. 'We didn't see much of each other outside the office. I only know about San Marcos because I offered to go with him to his priest's funeral Mass.' To understand why Gamero had committed suicide they needed to talk to the person he'd met in the Archaeological Museum. Falcon asked Barros to find out from the rest of the antiterrorism squad if they'd seen Gamero with anybody they didn't recognize. He also wanted all names and telephone numbers from Gamero's office line, and in the meantime they'd check his mobile and the fixed line in his apartment. Barros gave him the mobile numbers of the other two officers in the antiterrorism squad and left with Paco Molero. The instructing judge signed off the levantamiento del cadaver and Gamero's body was removed. Falcon and the two forensics, Felipe and Jorge, began a detailed search of the apartment.

'We know he committed suicide,' said Felipe. 'All the doors were locked from the inside and the prints on the water glass next to the paracetamol trays match the body's. So what are we looking for?'

'Anything that might give us a lead to the person he met in his lunch break,' said Falcon. 'A business card, a scribbled number or an address, a note of a meeting…'

Falcon sat at the table in the kitchen with Gamero's wallet and the museum ticket. The tendons of his hands rippled under the cloudy membrane of the latex gloves. He felt sure that there were connections to be made out there, which he was just missing. Every lead they were pursuing failed to unfold into the greater narrative of what was going on. There were movements, like seismic aftershocks, that brought about casualties such as Ricardo Gamero, a man dedicated to his work and admired by his colleagues, who'd seen…what? His responsibility, or was it just the recognition of his failure?

He teased out the contents of Gamero's wallet: money, credit cards, ID, receipts, restaurant cards, ATM extracts-the usual. Falcon called Serrano and asked him to get the name and number of the priest of the San Marcos church. He went back to the wallet, turning over the cards and receipts, thinking that Gamero was a man who was used to a high level of secrecy in his life. Vital phone numbers would not be written down or stored in his mobile but either memorized or encoded in some way. He wouldn't have, or couldn't have, made contact with the person he saw in the museum on the day of the bomb. His department was being watched and they were all being kept in the office. He could have called at night after they were released from work. He would probably have used a public phone. The only chance was that he might not have remembered an infrequently used mobile number. He turned over the last ATM extract in the wallet. Nothing. He thumped the table.

'Have you got anything out there?' asked Falcon.

'Nothing,' said Jorge. 'The guy's in the CGI, he's not going to leave anything hanging around unless he wants us to find it.'

A call came through from Cristina Ferrera. She gave him the name and number of another Spanish convert, who would normally have been in the mosque at that time in the morning but had gone to Granada on the Monday evening. He was now back in Seville. His name was Jose Duran.

A few minutes later Serrano called with the name and number of the priest of the San Marcos church. Falcon told him to stop what he was doing and come to Calle Butron, pick up Gamero's ID and take it to the Archaeological Museum, where he should ask the ticket sellers and security guards if they remembered seeing Gamero and anybody he might have met.

The priest couldn't see him until after evening Mass at about 9 p.m. It was already 6.30. Falcon couldn't believe the time; the day almost gone and no significant breakthrough. He called Jose Duran, who was in the city centre. They agreed to meet in the Cafe Alicantina Vilar, a big, crowded pasteleria in the centre.

Serrano still hadn't showed up. Falcon left the ID with Felipe and decided it was quicker to walk to the pasteleria than get stuck in evening traffic. As he walked he put a call through to Ramirez and gave him a quick report on Ricardo Gamero, and told him he'd stolen Serrano for a few hours.

'We're not getting anywhere with these fucking electricians,' said Ramirez. 'All this manpower to find something that doesn't exist.'

'They do exist, Jose Luis,' said Falcon. 'They just don't exist in the form we expect them to.'

'The whole world knows we're looking for them and they haven't come forward. To me that means they're sinister.'

'Not everybody is a perfect citizen. They might be frightened. They probably don't want to get involved. They couldn't care less. They might be implicated,' said Falcon. 'So we have to find them, because they are the link from the mosque to the outside world. We have to find out how they fit into this scenario. There were three of them, for God's sake. Somebody, somewhere, knows something.'

'We need a breakthrough,' said Ramirez. 'Everybody's making breakthroughs except us.'

'You found the biggest breakthrough of all, Jose Luis-the Peugeot Partner and its contents. We have to keep up the pressure and then things will start to give way,' said Falcon. 'And what are all these other breakthroughs?'

'Elvira's called a meeting for 8 a.m. tomorrow. He can't talk until then, but it's international. The web's spreading wider by the hour.'

'That's the way these things go now,' said Falcon. 'Remember London? They were rounding up suspects in Pakistan inside a week. But I tell you, Jose Luis, there's something homegrown about this, too. The intelligence services are equipped to deal with all that worldwide web of international terrorism. What we do is find out what happened on our patch. Have you read the file on the unidentified body found at the dump on Monday morning?'

'Fuck, no.'

'Perez wrote a report on it and there's an autopsy in there, too. Read it tonight. We'll talk about it tomorrow.'

The waiter brought him a coffee and some sort of sticky pastry envelope with pus-coloured goo inside. He needed sugar. He had to wait half an hour for Jose Duran, in which time he took calls from Pablo of the CNI, Mark Flowers from the US Consulate, Manuela, Comisario Elvira and Cristina Ferrera. He turned his mobile off. Too many of them wanted to see him tonight and he had no more time to give.

Jose Duran was pale and emaciated, with hair plastered close to his head, round glasses and a fluffy beard. Deodorant was a stranger to his body and it was still 40°C outside. Falcon ordered him a camomile tea. Duran listened to Falcon's introduction and twizzled his beard into a point on his chin. He breathed on his glasses and wiped them clean with his shirt tail. He sipped his tea and gave Falcon his own introduction. He'd been to the mosque every day of last week. He'd seen Hammad and Saoudi talking to the Imam in his office on Tuesday, 30th May. He hadn't heard their conversation. He'd seen the council inspectors on Friday, 2nd June.

'They must have been from Health and Safety, because they looked at everything: water, drains, electricity. They even looked at the quality of the doors…something to do with fire,' said Duran. 'They told the Imam he was going to have to get a new fuse box, but he didn't have to do anything until they issued their report and then he had fifteen days to put it right.'

'And the fuse box blew on Saturday night?' said Falcon.

'That's what the Imam told us on Sunday morning.'

'Do you know when he called the electricians?'

'On the Sunday morning after prayers.'

'How do you know that?'

'I was in his office.'

'How did he find their number?'

'Miguel Botin gave it to him.'

'Miguel Botin gave the Imam the number of the electricians?'

'No. He reminded the Imam of the card he'd given him earlier. The Imam started to search the papers on his desk, and Miguel gave him another card and told him that there was a mobile number he could call any time.'

'And that was when the Imam called the electricians?'

'Isn't this sort of detail just a bit ludicrous in the light of…?'

'You've no idea how crucial this detail is, Jose. Just tell me.'

'The Imam called them on his mobile. They said they'd come round on Monday morning and take a look and tell him how much it was going to cost. I mean, that's what I assume from the questions the Imam was asking.'

'And you were there on Monday morning?'

'The guy turned up at eight thirty, took a look at the fuse box-'

'The guy was Spanish?'

'Yes.'

'Description?'

'There was nothing to describe,' said Duran, searching amongst the empty tables and chairs. 'He was an average guy, about 1.75 metres tall. Not heavy, but not thin either. Dark hair with a side parting. No facial hair. There was nothing particular about him. I'm sorry.'

'You don't have to try to tell me everything now, but think about it. Call me if anything occurs to you,' said Falcon, giving him his card. 'Did the guy say hello to Miguel Botin?'

Duran blinked. He had to think about that.

'I'm not sure that Miguel was there at that point.'

'And later, when he turned up with the other guys?'

'That's right, he needed help. The Imam wanted a socket in the storeroom and he had to cut a channel from the nearest junction box which was in the Imam's office,' said Duran. 'Miguel was with him in the office. I presume they said hello.'

'What about the other guys, the labourers-were they Spanish, too?'

'No. They spoke Spanish, but they weren't Spaniards. They were from those Eastern bloc countries. You know, Romania or Moldavia, one of those places.'

'Descriptions?'

'Don't ask me that,' said Duran, running his hands down his face in frustration.

'Think about them, Jose,' said Falcon. 'Call me. It's important. And have you got the Imam's mobile phone number?'