The Hidden Assassins

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 Falcon. '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 Andalucia 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 Andalucia meeting,' said Falcon. 'We have a tenuous link between Angel Zarrias 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 Jose Luis and I think that there is a missing element to the conspiracy.'

'A criminal element,' added Ramirez.

'We're sure that Lucrecio Arenas and Cesar Benito are in some way involved, but we couldn't persuade Rivero to even give us their names,' said Falcon. 'They could be the "other half" of the conspiracy. Arenas put up Jesus Alarcon 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 bomb? We're not sure we'll ever find out who, or what, that missing element was.'

'But you can put Rivero, Zarrias and Cardenas 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 Falcon. 'And as for Lucrecio Arenas, Jesus Alarcon and Cesar 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 Alarcon 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 Ramirez.

'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 Ramirez,

'I'd just hold out.'

'I can't speak for Rivero and Cardenas, but I know Angel Zarrias 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 Falcon. '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, Zarrias and Cardenas 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 Falcon. '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 Gomez 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 Andalucia 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. Falcon 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 Andalucia who Fernando knows who isn't currently in police custody and that's Jesus Alarcon,' said Falcon. '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 Falcon. '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 Falcon. '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 Maria 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 Andalucia polo shirt, given to him by Jesus Alarcon, over the top.

The wide Avenida that separated the park from the smart residential area of El Porvenir was empty. He knew where Jesus Alarcon 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 Jesus Alarcon 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. Jesus Alarcon, 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 Alarcon on his mobile. It rang for some time and switched into the message service. He called Alarcon's house phone and looked up at the window he imagined would be the master bedroom. Jesus and Monica in some gargantuan bed, beneath high-quality linen, dressed in silk pyjamas. A faint glow appeared behind the curtains. Alarcon answered groggily.

'Jesus, 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 Alarcon'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 Jesus Alarcon made of that. Yes, he wanted to be enormous, to drive his arm into Alarcon's home as if it was a doll's house. He saw his hand ferreting around the bedrooms reaching for Alarcon's small children, who would run squealing from his snatching hand. He wanted Alarcon to see them crushed and laid out under little sheets in front of the house.

'I'm coming,' said Alarcon. 'No problem, Fernando.' Had he known the hidden hunger behind the eyes staring through the bars of the gate, Jesus Alarcon 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. Alarcon, 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. Alarcon 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. Alarcon 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. Alarcon 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. Alarcon 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 Alarcon gasped with pain.

'You see that?' said Fernando. 'You see it, you little fucker?'

Alarcon was paralysed with fear. His voice, with his neck pulled taut, produced only a grunt. Fernando pushed the gun between Alarcon's lips, felt the barrel rattle across his teeth and sensed the steel mushing into the softness of his tongue.

'Feel it. Taste it. You know what it is now.'

He wrenched the gun out of his mouth, taking a chip of tooth with it. He jammed the barrel into the back of Alarcon's neck.

'Are you ready? Say your prayers, Jesus, because you're going to meet your namesake.'

Fernando pulled the trigger, the gun pressed hard against Alarcon's shaking neck. There was a dry click. A gasp from Alarcon and a stink rose up from behind him as he loosed his bowels into his pyjamas.

'That was for Gloria,' said Fernando. 'Now you know her fear.'

Fernando moved the gun round to Alarcon's temple, screwed it into the top of his sideburn so that Alarcon winced away from it. Another dry click and a sob from Alarcon.

'That was for my little Pedro,' said Fernando, coughing against the emotion rising in his throat. 'He didn't know fear. He was too young to know it. Too innocent. Now look at the gun, Jesus. You see the cylinder. Two empty chambers and four full ones. We're going upstairs now and you're going to watch me shoot your wife and two children, just so you know how it feels.'

'What are you doing, Fernando?' said Alarcon, finding his voice and his presence of mind, now that the rush of the initial onslaught was past. 'What the fuck are you doing?'

'You and your friends. You're all the same. There's no difference between you and any other politician. You're all liars, cheats and egomaniacs. I don't know how I fell for your stupid, fucking line. Jesus Alarcon, the man who will talk to you without cameras, without the photo opportunity, without his beautiful profile in mind.'

'What are you talking about, Fernando? What have I done? How have I lied and cheated?' said Alarcon, pleading.

'You killed my wife and child,' said Fernando. 'And then, because you needed me, you made me your friend.'

'How did I kill them?'

'I read it in the police notes. You were all in it. Rivero, Zarrias, Cardenas. You planted the bomb in the mosque. You killed my wife and son. You killed all those people. And for what?'

'Fernando?'

He looked up. A different voice from beyond the gate. Female. Not in his head. The blood was simmering in his brain, bubbling and popping in such arterial rage that he'd become confused.

'Gloria?' he said.

'It's me, Cristina,' she said. 'I'm here with Inspector Jefe Falcon. We want you to put the gun down, Fernando. This is not how you resolve things. You've misunderstood…'

'No, no. That is not true. I have finally understood only too well. You listen. You listen to my "friend", Jesus Alarcon.'

Fernando knelt down by the side of Alarcon and whispered harshly in his ear.

'I am not going to shoot you or your family on one condition,' he said. 'The condition is that you must tell them the truth. They're the cops. They know what the truth is. You're going to tell them the truth for the first time with your gilded politician's lips. Tell them how you planted the bomb and you will live to see the rest of this day. If you don't, I will shoot you and, when you are dead, I will go inside and find Monica and shoot her, too. Go on, tell them.'

Fernando stood up and prodded Alarcon in the neck with the gun. Alarcon cleared his throat.

'The truth,' said Fernando, 'or I'm sending you into the dark. Tell them.'

Alarcon crossed himself.

'He has asked me to tell you the truth about the bomb,' said Alarcon, his head hung on to his chest, his arms limp by his sides. 'If I fail to tell you the truth he says he will shoot me and then my wife. I can only tell you what I know, which may not be the whole truth, but only a part of it.'

Fernando stood back, arm straight. He rested the gun barrel on the crown of Alarcon's head.

'I had nothing to do with the planting of any bomb in that mosque, so help me God,' said Alarcon.