The Hidden Assassins

12

Seville-Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 15.45 hrs

As Falcon pulled away, car rippling along the glass facade of the building, he put a call through to Mark Flowers, who was euphemistically known as a Communications Officer in the US Consulate in Seville. He was a CIA operative who, after 9/11, had been pulled out of retirement, posted to Madrid and transferred to Seville. Falcon had met him during an investigation back in 2002. They had stayed in touch, or rather Falcon had become one of Flowers' sources and, in return, received intelligence and a more direct and proactive line to the FBI.

'Returning your call, Mark,' said Falcon.

'We should talk.'

'Have you got anything for me?'

'Nothing. It came out of the blue. I'm working on stuff.'

'Can you get some information for me on a company called I4IT, that's Indianapolis Investment Interests Incorporated in Information Technology.'

'Sure,' said Flowers. 'When can we meet?'

'Tonight. Late. Our people want to "interview" me,' said Falcon. 'If you come afterwards you might be able to give me some advice.'

'Falcon hung up. The radio news gave its latest summary of events: a group called the Martires Islamicos para la Liberacion de Andalucia had called both TVE and RNE to claim responsibility for the attack. El Corte Ingles had been evacuated and there was a stampede in the Calle Tetuan because of a bomb scare. All roads out of Seville, especially the motorway south towards Jerez de la Frontera, were jammed with traffic.

Falcon had to resist the image of a vast dust cloud on the outskirts of Seville, thick with panicked cattle beneath.

As he drove back across the river his mobile vibrated; Ramirez wanting to know where he was.

'We've found somebody who's a regular at the mosque,' he said. 'He goes there every evening after work, for prayers. We'll see you in the pre-school.'

Falcon came into the barrio of El Cerezo from the north, to avoid any traffic around the hospital. In the pre-school he photocopied the lists of personnel from Informaticalidad and gave them to Ramirez with orders for two members of the squad to start interviewing the sales reps to see if they'd noticed anything. Ramirez introduced the Moroccan man, who was called Said Harrouch. He was a cook, born in 1958 in Larache in northern Morocco.

The demolition work was too loud for them to talk in any of the classrooms, none of which had any glass in the windows, so they moved to the man's apartment nearby. Harrouch's wife made them mint tea and they sat in a room facing away from the destroyed building.

'You're a cook for a manufacturing company in the Poligono Industrial Calonge,' said Ramirez. 'What hours do you work?'

'Seven in the morning until five in the afternoon,' he said. 'They let me go back home when they heard about the bomb.'

'Do you go to the mosque at a regular time?'

'I manage to get there some time between half past five and a quarter to six.'

'Every day?'

'On the weekends I go five times a day.'

'Do you just pray, or do you spend time there?'

'At the weekends there's tea and I'll sit around and talk.'

The man was calm. He sat back from the table with his hands clasped across his stomach. He blinked slowly with long lashes and no wariness of either policeman.

'How long have you lived in Seville?'

'Nearly sixteen years,' he said. 'I came over in 1990 to work on the Expo site. I never went back.'

'Do you like living here in this neighbourhood?'

'I preferred living in the old city,' he said. 'It was more like home.'

'How are the people here?'

'You mean the Spanish people?' he asked. 'They're all right, most of them. Some of them don't like so many of us Moroccans being here.'

'You don't have to be diplomatic,' said Ramirez. 'Tell us how it really is.'

'After the Madrid train bombings a lot of people are very suspicious of us,' said Harrouch. 'They might have been told that not every North African is a terrorist, but it doesn't help when there are so many of us about. The Imam has done his best to explain to local people that terrorism is a problem with an extreme minority, and that he himself does not agree with their radical interpretations of Islam, and does not approve of it in his mosque. It hasn't helped. They are still suspicious. I tell them that even in Morocco you would struggle to find anyone who actively approves of what these few fanatics are doing, but they don't believe us. Of course, if you go to a teahouse in Tangier you will hear people getting angry about what the Americans and the Israelis are doing. You will see protests on the streets about the plight of the Palestinians. But that is just talk and demonstration. It doesn't mean we're all about to strap bombs to our chests and go out and kill. Our own people were killed in the suicide bombings in Casablanca in May 2003 and Muslims died on those trains in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005, but they don't remember that.'

'That's the nature of terror, isn't it, Sr Harrouch?' said Falcon. 'The terrorist wants people to know that this can happen in any place, at any time, to anybody-Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. This seems to be the state we are in now, here in Seville. People can no longer feel safe in their homes. What we want to find out, as soon as possible, is: who wants us to be terrified or, if that's too difficult, why they want us to be terrified.'

'But, of course, everybody will assume it is us,' said Harrouch, putting his fingertips to his chest. 'As I left work this morning, I was insulted in the street by people who can only think in one way when they hear that a bomb has gone off.'

'On 11th March the government automatically thought it was ETA,' said Ramirez.

'We know that there are anti-Muslim groups,' said Falcon.

'We've all heard of VOMIT, for instance,' said Harrouch. Then, registering the policemen's surprise: 'We spend a lot of time on the internet. That's how we communicate with our families back in Morocco.'

'We only found out about it this morning,' said Falcon.

'But it isn't directed at you, is it?' said Harrouch. 'It's designed to show that Islam is a religion of hate, which is not true. We see VOMIT as just another way that the West has devised to set out to humiliate us.'

'But it isn't the West that has created that website,' said Ramirez. 'It's another fanatical minority within the West.'

'The fact is, Sr Harrouch, it's going to take time for us to reach the basement where the mosque was located,' said Falcon, drawing the discussion back to business. 'We're going to have to wait days for any forensic information from the site of the actual bomb. What we have to rely on, for the moment, is witness accounts. Who was seen going in and out of that building over the last seventy-two hours. So far we have had a sighting of two vehicles: a white Peugeot Partner with two Moroccan men, who were seen delivering cardboard boxes-'

'Of sugar,' said Harrouch, suddenly animated. 'I was there when they brought it in yesterday. It was sugar. It was clearly printed on the sides of the boxes. And they had plastic carrier bags of mint. It was for the tea.'

'Did you know those two men?' asked Ramirez. 'Had you seen them before?'

'No, I didn't know them,' he said. 'I'd never seen them before.'

'So who did know them? Who did they make contact with?'

'Imam Abdelkrim Benaboura.'

'What did they do with this sugar and mint?'

'They took it into the storeroom at the back of the mosque.'

'Were these men introduced to anybody?'

'No.'

'Do you know where they came from?' asked Falcon.

'Someone said they were from Madrid.'

'How long did they stay in the mosque talking to the Imam?'

'They were still there when I left at seven o'clock.'

'Could they have spent the night there?'

'It's possible. People have slept in the mosque before.'

'Do you remember when they arrived?' asked Ramirez.

'About ten minutes after I came in from work, so about a quarter to six.'

'Can you tell us exactly what they did?'

'They came in, each carrying a box with a carrier bag of mint on top. They asked for the Imam. He came out of his office and showed them the storeroom. They stowed the boxes and then went back outside and brought another two boxes in.'

'Then what?'

'They left.'

'Empty-handed?'

'I think so,' said Harrouch. 'But they came back a few minutes later. I think they went off to park their car. When they returned they went into the Imam's office and they hadn't come out again by the time I left.'

'Did you hear anything of their conversation?'

Harrouch shook his head. Falcon sensed the man's nausea at the endless questions about seemingly unimportant detail. Harrouch somehow felt he was compromising these two men, who he believed had just delivered sugar and nothing more. Falcon told him not to worry about the questions, they were asked only to see if they squared with other witness accounts.

'Did you hear any talk of other outsiders who'd turned up that morning?' asked Ramirez.

'Outsiders?'

'Workmen, delivery people…that sort of thing.'

'The electricians came at some stage. Something had gone wrong with the electrics on Saturday night. We were in the dark, with just candles, all Sunday and when I came in from work yesterday all the lights were back on. I don't know what happened or what work was done. You'll have to ask someone who was there in the morning.'

Ramirez asked him for some names and checked them off against the list of men given to Elvira by the Spanish woman, Esperanza. The first three names Harrouch gave him were on the list and therefore probably dead in the mosque. The fourth name lived in an apartment in a nearby street.

'How well do you know the Imam?'

'He's been with us nearly two years. He reads a lot. I've heard his apartment is full of books. But he still gives us as much of his time as he can,' said Harrouch. 'I told you he was not a radical. He never said anything that could be construed as extreme, and he even made his position clear on suicide bombing: that in his view the Koran did not regard it as permissible. And remember, there were Spanish converts to Islam in the mosque, who would not tolerate anything extreme so…'

'If he was preaching radical Islam to younger people,' said Ramirez, 'do you think you would know about it?'

'In a neighbourhood like this it wouldn't be possible to keep it secret.'

Apart from these two men who delivered the sugar and mint, have you ever seen the Imam with any other strangers? I mean people from out of town, or from abroad?'

'I saw him with Spanish people. He was very aware of the image of Islam in the light of what has been happening in the last few years. He made efforts to communicate with Catholic priests and spoke at their meetings to reassure them that not all North Africans were terrorists.'

'Do you know anything about his history?'

'He's Algerian originally. He arrived here from Tunis. He must have spent some time in Egypt, because he talked about it a lot and he's mentioned studying in Khartoum.'

'How did he learn Spanish?' asked Falcon. 'The countries you mention have either French, or English, as the alternative to Arabic.'

'He learnt it here. The converts taught him,' said Harrouch. 'He was a good linguist, he spoke quite a few-'

'What other languages?' asked Ramirez.

'German. He spoke German,' said Harrouch, who'd gone back on the defensive.

'Does that mean he'd spent time in Germany?' asked Ramirez.

'I suppose he did, but that doesn't have to mean anything,' said Harrouch. 'Just because the 9/11 bombers came from Hamburg, it doesn't mean that any Muslim who's been to Germany is also a radical. I hope you're not forgetting that it was the mosque that was bombed and there were more than ten people in it, and most of them were older men, with wives and children, and not young, radical, extreme bombmakers. I would say that we were the target of an attack…'

'All right, Sr Harrouch,' said Falcon, calming him. 'You should know that we're looking at all the possibilities. You mentioned VOMIT. Are you aware of any other anti-Muslim groups who you think would go to such extremes?'

'There were some very unpleasant demonstrations against the building of our mosque in Los Bermejales,' said Harrouch. 'Maybe you don't remember-they slaughtered a pig on the proposed site of the mosque back in May last year. There's a very vociferous protest group.'

'We know about them,' said Ramirez. 'We'll be taking a close look at their activities.'

'Did you ever feel that you were being watched, or under some kind of surveillance?' asked Falcon. 'Has anybody joined the mosque recently, who you didn't know or who, in your opinion, behaved strangely?'

'People are suspicious of us, but I don't think anybody was watching us.'

Ramirez checked the descriptions of the two men from the Peugeot Partner with the men Harrouch had seen bringing boxes into the mosque. Harrouch answered with his mind elsewhere. They got up to leave.

'Now I remember, there was something else that happened last week,' said Harrouch. 'Someone told me that the mosque had been inspected by the council. Because we're technically a public building, we have to conform to certain rules about fire and safety, and two men came round last week, without any warning, and went through everything-drains, plumbing, electrics-the lot.'