The Hidden Assassins

26

Seville-Thursday, 8th June 2006, 08.04 hrs

The classroom in the pre-school had been reglazed and new blinds put up. The air conditioners were already working full blast, which was the only way to keep the sulphurous stink of the corrupted bodies still in the destroyed apartment building at a bearable level. It was already past eight o'clock and still Comisario Elvira had not arrived. Everybody was tired, but there was a buzz of expectation in the room.

'Something's happened,' said Ramirez, 'and I've got the feeling it's something big. What do you think, Javier?'

Falcon couldn't speak.

'Where's Juez Calderon?' said Ramirez. 'That's what makes me think it's big. He's the man for the press conference.'

Falcon nodded, appalled to silence by what he'd seen down by the river. The door opened and Elvira came in and made his way to the blackboard at the far end of the room, followed by three men. Already present at the meeting were Pablo and Gregorio from the CNI, Inspector Jefe Ramon Barros and one of his senior officers from the antiterrorist squad of the CGI, and Falcon and Ramirez from the homicide squad. Elvira turned. His face was grim.

'There's no easy way to put this,' he said, 'so I'm just going to give you the facts. At around six o'clock this morning Juez Esteban Calderon was placed under arrest on suspicion of murdering his wife. Two patrolmen found him earlier this morning, attempting to dispose of his wife's body in the Guadalquivir. Given these circumstances, he will no longer be acting as the Juez de Instruccion in our investigation. It will also be impossible for our own homicide squad to conduct the murder enquiry, which will be carried out by these three officers from Madrid, led by Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita. Thank you.'

The three homicide officers from Madrid nodded and filed out of the room, stopping briefly to introduce themselves and shake hands with Falcon and Ramirez. The door closed. Elvira resumed the meeting. Ramirez stared at Falcon in a state of shock.

'We have decided to appoint a Juez de Instruccion from outside Seville,' said Elvira, 'and Juez Sergio del Rey is on his way down from Madrid now. On his arrival an announcement will be made to the press at a conference to be held in the Andalucian Parliament building and until that time I would ask you to keep this information to yourselves.

'Following the suicide yesterday of Ricardo Gamero of the CGI, there have been some major developments and the CNI will now explain these to us.'

Something had been sucked out of Elvira's face overnight. The staggering import of his announcements had left him haggard. He sat back in the teacher's chair, inanimate, with his chin resting on his fist, as if his head needed that sort of support to keep it in place. Pablo made his way to the front.

'Just prior to the suicide of the CGI agent, Ricardo Gamero, we had received information from British intelligence that they had successfully identified the other two men photographed by Gamero's source, Miguel Botin. These two men are of Afghan nationality, living in Rome. They were known to MI5 because they were arrested in London two weeks after the failed 21st July bombings and held for questioning under the Terrorism Act. They were released without being charged. The British were not able to establish what these men were doing in London at the time, other than that they were visiting family. The known addresses of these two men in Rome were raided by the Italian police last night and found to be empty. Their current whereabouts is unknown. What concerns us about these suspects is that they are believed to have connections to the high command of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and are believed by the British to have forged links with the GICM in Morocco. In the last year they are known to have visited the UK, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain and Morocco. All these countries are believed to have GICM sleeper cells. There is considerable intelligence work still to be done to ascertain Miguel Botin's role, Imam Abdelkrim Benaboura's relationship to these two men, and their involvement with what has happened here in Seville.

'After Ricardo Gamero's suicide we conducted a search of Miguel Botin's apartment and discovered a heavily annotated copy of the Koran which matches the edition found in the Peugeot Partner driven by Hammad and Saoudi. Large chunks of the notes are exact transcripts and we believe that this is a codebook. It is now thought that as each sleeper cell is activated they are issued with a new codebook, which they use until their mission is complete.

'The significance of finding this copy of the Koran in Miguel Botin's apartment is that it could mean that Ricardo Gamero's source was a double: working with the CGI and operating for a terrorist cell. This throws considerable confusion into the current investigation, because it would mean that the only intelligence Botin was communicating to Gamero was what his commanders wanted us to know. This would mean that Hammad and Saoudi, the two Afghans, and the Imam were all expendable.

'There is one final confusing detail about Botin's actions in this scenario. As you know, a great deal of manpower has been spent trying to find the fake council inspectors and the electricians. Inspector Jefe Falcon has found a witness who was in the mosque on the Sunday morning, after the fuse box blew on the Saturday night. This witness saw Botin give the electrician's card to the Imam, and he watched as the Imam called the number and made the appointment. Inspector Jefe Barros has informed us that this was not something sanctioned by him or anyone in his department. The CGI was still waiting for authorization to bug the mosque.

'We now have to examine the possibility that the council inspectors and the electricians were members of, or in the pay of, a terrorist cell. It could be-and we might only have a chance of verifying this when the forensics have reached the mosque-that the council inspectors laid a device to blow the fuse box and that the electricians were brought in to set a bomb that would wipe out the Imam, Hammad and Saoudi, and Botin himself.'

'There seems to be a break in the logic chain of that scenario,' said Barros. 'It might just be believable that Botin was the unwitting agent of their destruction, but I don't see any terrorist commander allowing that quantity of hexogen, brought into this country at what one imagines was considerable risk and expense, to be destroyed.'

'The electricians and council inspectors would constitute a type of terrorist cell we've never come across before, too,' said Falcon. 'The witness said they were a Spaniard and two Eastern Europeans.'

'And how does Ricardo Gamero's suicide fit into this scenario?' asked Barros.

'A profound sense of failure at his inability to prevent this atrocity,' said Pablo. 'We understand that he took his work very seriously.'

Silence, while everybody wrestled with the CNI's possible scenario. Falcon snapped out of his shocked state and burned with his theory that too much weight was being attached to the copy of the Koran as a codebook. But it was impossible to understand how two identical copies could have ended up in the Peugeot Partner and Botin's apartment.

'Why do you think this cell self-destructed?' asked Barros.

'We can only think that it was a spectacular diversionary tactic, to occupy our domestic investigating teams and all European intelligence services while they plan and carry out an attack elsewhere,' said Pablo. 'If Botin was a double agent, his terrorist masters would have known that the mosque was under suspicion. They fed that suspicion further by bringing in the hexogen and Hammad and Saoudi, two known logistics men. They then blew it up. They don't mind. They're all going to paradise, whether as successful bombers or magnificent decoys.'

'What about the Afghans?' asked Barros. 'They've been identified, but not exactly sacrificed.'

'Perhaps Botin intended the shot of the two Afghans to be interpreted by us as an indication of an attack planned for Italy. Botin supplied those photographs when he was a trusted CGI source.'

'So, another diversionary tactic?'

'The Italians, Danish and Belgians are all on red alert, as they were after the London bombings.'

'So this letter sent to the ABC with the Abdullah Azzam text and all the media references to MILA-was that all part of this grand diversion?' asked Barros, nearly enjoying himself at being able to finally needle the CNI, who had so humiliated him and his department.

'What we're working on now is the real target,' said Pablo. 'The Abdullah Azzam text and the idea of MILA are powerful tools of terror. They inspire fear in a population. We see this as part of the escalation of this particular brand of terrorism. We are fighting the equivalent of a mutating virus. No sooner do we find one cure than it adapts to it with renewed lethal strength. There is no model. Only after we have sustained attacks do we become aware of a modus operandi. The intelligence gathered from the hundreds of people interviewed after the Madrid and London bombings is no help to us now. We are not talking about an integrated organization with a defined structure, but more of a satellite organization with a fluid structure and total flexibility.'

'Are you sure you're not reading too much into the diversionary tactic?' said Elvira. 'After the Madrid bombings-'

'We're pretty sure that ETA provided the diversion which led to the devastating success of the Madrid bombings. We don't think it was a coincidence that, 120 kilometres southeast of Madrid, the Guardia Civil stopped a van driven by two ETA incompetents, and loaded with 536 kilos of titadine for delivery to Madrid; and on the same day, 500 kilometres away in Aviles, three Moroccan terrorists were taking delivery of the 100 kilos of Goma 2 Eco used on the Madrid trains,' said Pablo. 'British security forces and intelligence were focused on an attack on the G8 Summit in Edinburgh when suicide bombers blew themselves up on the London Underground.'

'All right, so there is a history of diversion,' said Elvira.

'And a diversion that is prepared to sacrifice 536 kilos of titadine,' said Pablo, looking pointedly at Barros.

'The reality,' said Elvira, 'is that we have no idea who we are dealing with most of the time. We call them al-Qaeda because it helps us to sleep at night, but we seem to have come up against a very pure form of terrorism whose "goal" is to attack our way of life and "decadent values" at whatever cost. There even seems to be competition between these disparate groups to think up and carry out the most devastating attack possible.'

'This is what we're concerned about here,' said Pablo, enthused by Elvira seeing his point of view. 'Are we experiencing a series of diversionary jabs prior to the main attack-something on the scale of the World Trade Center in New York?'

'What we need to know,' said Ramirez, tiring of all the conjecture, 'is where our investigation here, in Seville, should be heading.'

'There is no Juez de Instruccion until Sergio del Rey arrives from Madrid,' said Elvira. 'The Madrid CGI have been pulling in all contacts of Hammad and Saoudi for interviews, but so far they appear to have been operating alone. The Guardia Civil have successfully plotted the route taken by the Peugeot Partner from Madrid to the safe house near Valmojado, where it is believed they were keeping the hexogen. They are having difficulties plotting the route taken by the vehicle from Valmojado down to Seville. There are concerns that it diverted on its route.'

'Where was the last sighting of the Peugeot Partner?' asked Falcon.

'Heading south on the NIV/E5. It stopped at a service station near Valdepenas. The concern is that ninety kilometres later the road forks. The NIV continues to Cordoba and Seville, while the N323/E902 goes to Jaen and Granada. They are looking at both routes, but it's not easy to track a particular white van amongst the thousands on the roads. Their only chance is if the vehicle stopped and the two men got out so that someone could identify them, as happened at the service station near Valdepenas.'

'Which means there's a distinct possibility that there's more hexogen elsewhere,' said Pablo. 'Our job at the moment is to find out what connections Botin made, and we'll be speaking to his partner, Esperanza, this morning.'

'That's great,' said Ramirez. 'But what are we supposed to do? Keep searching for the non-existent electricians and council inspectors? We're looking like incompetents at the moment. Juez Calderon was doing a good job of protecting us from too much media attention. Now he's in a police cell. A CGI antiterrorist agent has committed suicide and his source could be a double agent. We're at crisis point here. Our squad can't just carry on as we were.'

'Until we receive forensic information from inside the mosque, there's not a lot else we can do,' said Falcon. 'We can go back to the congregation of the mosque and interview them about Miguel Botin, see what that throws up. But I believe we should keep hammering away at the electricians and council inspectors-who do exist. They have been seen. And if I understand the CNI correctly, the council inspectors created a pretext so that the electricians could plant a bomb. They are the perpetrators of this atrocity. We have to find them and the people who sent them. That, as the Grupo de Homicidios, is our goal.'

'But possibly one that you can only achieve through quality intelligence,' said Elvira. 'Are they part of an Islamic terrorist cell or not? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the history of Miguel Botin, who gave their card to the Imam.'

'And what about the Imam?' said Ramirez, not wanting to be thwarted. 'Where is he in all this? Has the CNI search of his apartment been completed? Can we have their findings? Has access to his history finally been granted to someone who's allowed to tell us?'

'We can't access it because we do not hold it,' said Pablo.

'Who does hold it?'

'The Americans.'

'Did you find a heavily annotated copy of that edition of the Koran in the Imam's apartment?' asked Falcon.

'No.'

'So you don't think he was in the loop?' said Ramirez.

'We don't know enough to be able to answer that question.'

The meeting broke up soon after that exchange. The CNI and CGI men left the pre-school together. Elvira asked Falcon to attend the press conference in the Andalucian Parliament building when the new judge arrived, to show a united front. Ramirez was waiting outside the classroom.

'I'm sorry for your loss, Javier,' he said, holding him by the shoulder and shaking his hand. 'I know you and Ines had grown apart, but…it's a terrible thing. I hope you didn't go to the crime scene.'

'I did,' said Falcon. 'I don't know what I was thinking. They told me over the phone that he'd been identified as Juez Calderon and that he'd been trying to dispose of a body. I don't know why…I just didn't think it would be Ines.'

'Did he do it?'

'I went to talk to him in the patrol car. All he said was: "I didn't do it."'

Ramirez shook his head. Denial was a very common psychological state for husbands when they murdered their wives.

'There's going to be a feeding frenzy,' said Ramirez. 'A lot of people have been waiting for this moment.'

'You know, Jose Luis, the worst thing…' said Falcon, struggling, 'was that she was very badly bruised over her torso, down her left side…and it was old bruising.'

'He'd been beating her?'

'Her face was completely clear.'

'You'd better take the riot squad with you into that press conference,' said Ramirez. 'They're going to go mad if they hear about that.'

'Ines came round to my house the other night,' said Falcon. 'She was behaving very strangely. I thought for a moment she wanted to get back with me, but now I think she was trying to tell me what was happening to her.'

'Did she seem in pain at all?' asked Ramirez, preferring to stick to the facts.

'She was swearing like I'd never heard her swear before and, yes, she did hold on to her side at one point,' said Falcon. 'She was furious with him for all his…'

'Yes, we know,' said Ramirez, who hadn't banked on this level of intimacy.

Falcon's eyes filled, his mind taking its grief in gulps. Ramirez squeezed his shoulder with his huge mahogany hand.

'We'd better start thinking about today,' said Falcon. 'Did you manage to read that file about the unidentified body found at the dump on Monday?'

'Not yet.'

'We don't get that many dead bodies in Seville,' said Falcon. 'And in my career I have never come across such a disfigured corpse, and poisoned with cyanide, too. And all this happens days before a bomb goes off in the city.'

'There doesn't have to be a connection,' said Ramirez, wary of letting himself in for more fruitless work.

'But before we get a ton of forensic information from the mosque, I'd like to see if there is one,' said Falcon. 'At least I'd like to identify the victim. It might open up another pathway into this situation.'

'Any pointers before I start reading?'

'The Medico Forense thought he was mid forties, long-haired, desk bound but tanned and didn't wear shoes very much. He had traces of hashish in his blood. There was also tattoo ink in the lymph nodes, which is the reason his hands were severed: they had tattoos on them, small ones, but presumably distinctive.'

'Sounds like a university type to me,' said Ramirez, who was suspicious of anybody with too much education. 'Post-graduate?'

'Or maybe a professor trying to recapture his youth?'

'Spanish?'

'Olive-skinned,' said Falcon. 'He'd had a hernia op. The Medico Forense removed the mesh. See if you can get a match for it, find the company that supplied it and to which hospital. Of course, he might have had it done abroad…'

'Do you want me to do this on my own?'

'Take Ferrera with you. She's done some work on this already,' said Falcon. 'Perez, Serrano and Baena can tour the construction sites of Seville, especially any with immigrant labour. Tell them they have to find the electricians.'

'Didn't I hear someone say that you were having a model made of this guy's head-the one from the dump?'

'The sculptor's a friend of the Medico Forense,' said Falcon. 'I'll follow that up.' 'You missed your session last night,' said Alicia Aguado.

'Something cropped up,' said Consuelo. 'Something very upsetting.'

'That's why we're here.'

'You told me to make sure I had a family member to look after me when I came home after my session on Tuesday evening,' said Consuelo. 'I asked my sister. She was there, but couldn't stay for long. We talked about the session. She could see that I was calm and so she left. Then yesterday afternoon she called me to check that I was still OK, and we chatted and she remembered something she'd meant to ask me about the night before. My new pool man.'

'Pool man?'

'He looks after the pool. He checks the pH levels, hoovers the bottom, skims the surface, cleans the…' said Consuelo, getting carried away on the detail.

'OK, Consuelo, I'm not going into the pool-cleaning business,' said Aguado.

'The point is, I don't have a new pool man,' said Consuelo. 'The same guy has been coming round every Thursday afternoon since I bought the house. I inherited him from the previous owners.'

'And what?'

Consuelo tried to swallow, but couldn't.

'My sister described him, and it was the same disgusting chulo from the Plaza del Pumarejo.'

'Very upsetting,' said Aguado. 'It unnerved you, I'm sure. So you called the police and stayed with your children. I can understand that.'

Silence. Consuelo was slumped to one side of the chair, as if she'd lost some stuffing.

'All right,' said Aguado. 'Tell me what you did, or did not do.'

'I didn't call the police.'

'Why not?'

'I was too embarrassed,' she said. 'I'd have to explain everything.'

'You could have just told them that an undesirable person was snooping around your home.'

'You probably don't know very much about the police,' said Consuelo. 'I was a murder suspect for a couple of weeks five years ago. What they put you through is not so different to what you're doing to me here. You start talking and they smell things. They know when people are hiding the shit in their lives. They see it every day. They'd ask a question like: "Do you think it possible that you know this person?" and what would happen? Especially in my fragile mental state.'

'I know you might find this difficult to believe, but to me this is a positive development,' said Aguado.

'It makes me feel like a failure,' said Consuelo. 'I don't know whether this person could be a danger to my children, and just because of my own shame I'm prepared to put them at risk.'

'But at least now I know that he's real,' said Aguado.

Silence from Consuelo, who hadn't considered this alarming possibility.

'Our minds have ways of correcting imbalances,' said Aguado. 'So, for instance, a powerful chief executive who controls thousands of people's lives may redress the balance by dreaming of being at school and the teacher telling him what to do. This is a very benign form of balancing things out. More aggressive forms exist. It's not unusual to find successful businessmen who visit a dominatrix in order to be tied up, rendered powerless and punished. A New York psychologist told me he had clients who went to nurseries where they could wear nappies and sit in oversized playpens. The danger comes with the uncertainty between the fantastic, the real and the illusory. The mind becomes confused and cannot differentiate, and then a breakdown can ensue, with possible lasting damage.'

'What you mean is, I've had the fantasy and I may take the next step and seek out the reality.'

'But at least you weren't describing an illusion to me,' said Aguado. 'Before your sister confirmed his existence, I wasn't sure how advanced you were. I told you not to allow yourself to be distracted on your way here because, if he was real, then the reality you were seeking was very dangerous for you…personally. This man has no idea of the nature of your problems. He has sensed some vulnerability and is probably just a predator.'

'He knows my name and that my husband is dead,' said Consuelo. 'Those two details came out when he accosted me on Monday night.'

'Then you really should talk to the police about it,' said Aguado. 'If they think you're strange, refer them to me.'

'Then they'll know I'm a lunatic and take no notice,' said Consuelo. 'There's been a bomb in Seville, and a rich bitch is worried about a chulo in her garden.'

'Try talking to them,' said Aguado. 'This man might assault or rape you.'

Silence.

'What are you doing now, Consuelo?'

'I'm looking at you.'

'And you're thinking…?'

'That I trust you more than I've trusted anyone in my life.'

'Anyone? Even your parents?'

'I loved my parents, but they knew nothing about me,' said Consuelo.

'So who have you trusted in your life?'

'I trusted an art dealer in Madrid for a bit, until he moved down here,' said Consuelo.

'Who else?' asked Aguado. 'What about Raul?'

'No, he didn't love me,' said Consuelo, 'and he lived in a closed-off world, trapped by his own misery. He didn't talk to me about his problems and I didn't reveal my own.'

'Was there anything between you and the art dealer?'

'No, our attraction was nothing remotely sexual or romantic.'

'What was it then?'

'We recognized that we were complicated people, with secrets we couldn't talk about. But he did once tell me that he'd killed a man.'

'That's not an easy thing to do,' said Aguado, sensing that they might be closer to the heart of the tangled knot than Consuelo suspected.

'We were drinking brandy in a bar on the Gran Via. I was depressed. I'd just told him everything about my abortions. He traded this secret of his, but he said it was an accident when, in fact, it was much more shameful than that.'

'More shameful than appearing in a pornographic movie to pay for an abortion?'

'Of course it was. He'd killed somebody for-'

Consuelo stopped as if she'd been knifed in the throat. The next word wouldn't come out. She could only cough up a croak as if there was a blade across her windpipe. A powerful shudder of emotion rippled through her. Aguado released her wrist, grabbed her by the arm to steady her. A strange sound came from Consuelo as she slid to the floor. It was something like an orgasmic cry, and, in fact, it was a release, but not one of pleasure. It was a cry of acute pain.

Aguado had not expected to reach this point so quickly in the treatment, but then the mind was an unpredictable organ. It threw things up all the time, vomited horrors into the consciousness and, this was the strange thing, sometimes the conscious mind could hurdle these terrible revelations, side-step them, leap across the sudden chasm. Other times it was scythed to the ground. Consuelo had just experienced the equivalent of being hit by a half-ton bull from behind. She ended up in the foetal position on the Afghan rug, squeaking, as if something enormous was trying to get out.