The Hidden Assassins

14

Seville-Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 18.30 hrs

The offices of the ABC newspaper, a glass cylinder on the Isla de la Cartuja, had been as close to bedlam as a hysterical business like journalism could get. Angel Zarrias watched from the edge of the newsroom as journalists roared down telephones, bawled at assistants and harangued each other.

Through the flickering computer screens, the phone lines stretched to snapping point and the triangles formed by hands slapped to foreheads, Angel was watching the open door of the editor's office. He was biding his time. This was the newshounds' moment. It was their job to find the stories, which the editor would knit together to construct the right image and tone, for the new history of a city in crisis.

On the way from Manuela's apartment to the ABC offices he'd asked the taxi to drop him off in a street near the Maestranza bullring where his friend Eduardo Rivero lived and which also housed the headquarters of his political party: Fuerza Andalucia. He'd been dining with Eduardo Rivero and the new sponsors of Fuerza Andalucia last night. A momentous decision had been made, which he hadn't been able to share with Manuela until it became official today. He had also not been able to tell her that he was now going to be working more for Fuerza Andalucia than the ABC. He had a lot more important things on his mind than grumbling about same-sex marriages in his daily political column.

Rivero's impressive house bore all the hallmarks of his traditional upbringing and thinking. Its facade was painted to a deep terracotta finish, the window surrounds were picked out in ochre and all caged in magnificent wrought-iron grilles. The main door was three metres high, built out of oak, varnished to the colour of chestnuts and studded with brass medallions. It opened on to a huge marble-flagged patio, in which Rivero had departed briefly from tradition by planting two squares of box hedge. In the centre of each was a statue; to the left was Apollo and to the right Dionysus, and in between was the massive bowl of a white marble fountain, whose restrained trickles of water held the house, despite these pagan idols, in a state of religious obeisance.

The front of the house was the party headquarters, with the administration below and the policy-making and political discussions going on above. Angel took the stairs just inside the main door, which led up to Rivero's office. They were waiting for him; Rivero and his second-in-command, the much younger Jesus Alarcon.

Unusually, he and Rivero were sitting together in the middle of the room, with the boss's wood and leather armchair empty behind his colossal English oak desk. They all shook hands. Rivero, the same age as Angel, seemed remarkably relaxed. He wasn't even wearing a tie, his jacket was hanging off the back of his chair. He was smiling beneath an ebullient white moustache. He did not look as if scandal had come anywhere near him.

'Like any good journalist, Angel, you've arrived at the crucial moment,' said Rivero. 'A decision has been made.'

'I don't believe it,' said Angel.

'Well, you'll have to believe it, because it's true,' said Rivero. 'I'd like you to meet the new leader of Fuerza Andalucia, Jesus Alarcon. Effective as from five minutes ago.'

'I think that's a bold and brilliant decision,' said Angel, shaking them both by the hand and embracing them. 'And one you've been keeping very quiet.'

'The committee voted on it last night before we met for dinner,' said Rivero. 'I didn't want to break the news until I had asked Jesus and he'd accepted. Something was going to have to happen before the 2007 campaign and, with this morning's explosion, that campaign will be starting today-and what better way to kick it off than with a new leader?'

Alarcon's expression was a mask of seriousness that bore all the weight and lines of the gravity that the situation demanded, but it could not hide what came shining out from within. His grey suit, dark tie and white shirt could not contain his sense of achievement. He was the schoolboy at the prize-giving, who'd already been told that he had won the top award.

Angel Zarrias had known Jesus Alarcon since the year 2000, when he'd been introduced to him by his old friend, Lucrecio Arenas the Chief Executive Officer of the Banco Omni in Madrid. In the last six years Angel had drawn Jesus into Eduardo Rivero's orbit and gradually eased him into positions of greater importance within the party. Angel had never had any doubt about Alarcon's brains, his political commitment or astuteness, but, as an old PR man, he had been worried by his lack of charisma. But the final wresting of the leadership from Rivero's trembling clutches had wrought an extraordinary change in the younger man. Physically he was the same, but his confidence had become dazzlingly palpable. Angel couldn't help himself. He embraced Jesus once again as the new leader of Fuerza Andalucia.

'As you know,' said Rivero, 'in the last three elections there has been steady growth in our share of the vote, but it has only grown to a maximum of 4.2 per cent and that is not enough for us to be the chosen partner of the Partido Popular. We need a new kind of energy at the top.'

'I have the business experience,' said Alarcon, breaking in with his new-found confidence, 'to raise our funding to unprecedented levels, but this is of limited significance in a torpid political atmosphere. What this morning's event has given us is a unique opportunity to focus voters' minds on the real and perceivable threat of radical Islam. It gives our immigration policy new bite where before, even after 11th March, it was dismissed as extreme and out of step with the ways in which contemporary societies were developing. If we spend the next eight months getting that message across to the population of Andalucia then we stand a chance of a substantial increase in our share of the vote, come 2007. So we have the right ideology for the time, and I can raise the money to make it heard across the region.'

'We don't think that it's a coincidence that the first call after the explosion in El Cerezo this morning should be from you, Angel,' said Rivero. 'You, more than anybody else, know what would make an enormous impression on the population of Andalucia tomorrow morning.'

Angel sat back in his chair, ran his fingers through his hair and hissed air out from between his clenched teeth. He knew what Rivero wanted and it was a tall order under the circumstances.

'Just think of the impact it would have,' said Rivero, nodding at Jesus, 'his face, his profile and his ideas in the pages of ABC Sevilla on the day after such a catastrophe as this. We would tread Izquierda Unida into the dust and make the Partido Andalucista writhe in their beds at night.'

'Are you ready for what I can do for you?' asked Angel.

'I'm more prepared for it than at any time in my life,' said Alarcon, and handed him his CV.

Angel had sat in the back of the cab on the way to the ABC offices, leafing through Alarcon's CV. Jesus Alarcon was born in Cordoba in 1965. He'd been accepted at Madrid University at the age of seventeen to study philosophy, political history and economics. As a staunch Catholic he despised the atheistic creed of communism and believed that the best way to break one's enemy was to know them. He went to Berlin University to study Russian and Russian political history. He was there-and a photograph existed to support this-when the Wall came down in 1989. It wasn't supposed to have happened like that and the crucial event had left him bereft of a cause. At the same time his father's business collapsed and he died soon after. His mother followed her husband into the grave six months later and Jesus applied to INSEAD in Paris to do an MBA. By Christmas 1991 he was working for McKinsey's in Boston, and in the following four years became one of their analysts and consultants in Central and South America. In 1995 he moved to Lehman Brothers, to join their mergers and acquisitions team. There he changed his sphere of operations to the European Union and built up a powerful list of investors looking to buy into the booming Spanish economy. In 1997 his life changed again when he met a beautiful Sevillana called Monica Abellon, whose father had been one of Jesus's leading clients. Monica's father effected an introduction to Lucrecio Arenas, who headhunted him for the secretive Banco Omni and he moved to Madrid, where Monica was working as a model.

It was in the year 2000 that Angel, totally fed up with the Partido Popular, had taken on some PR work for Banco Omni clients. Lucrecio Arenas, convinced that he'd discovered a future leader of Spain in Jesus Alarcon, was eager for his new find to cut his teeth in regional politics, and had enlisted Angel's help. As soon as Angel introduced Alarcon to Eduardo Rivero and the other Fuerza Andalucia committee members, they welcomed him into the fold, recognizing one of their own. Jesus Alarcon was a traditionalist, a practising Catholic, a man who loathed communism and socialism, a believer in the power of business to do good in society and also a lover of the bulls. He was twenty years younger than any of them. He was good looking, if a little on the dull side, but he made up for it by having the beautiful Monica Abellon as his wife, and two gorgeous children.

In the ABC offices Angel went to work on the dossier and archives. In an hour he'd put together a page, the editor was never going to look at more than that. The headline: THIS MAN HAS ANSWERS. The main shot was part of a photograph he'd found of Jesus in a business magazine about Spain's future. Jesus was supposedly looking up to a sun, which was probably a photographer's lighting umbrella, and his face was shining with hope and belief in the future. He also had shots of Jesus with the stunning Monica, and the couple with their children. There was a sub headline, which said: The New Leader of Fuerza Andalucia Believes in Our Future. The writing was in note form and described not just the radical immigration policy of Fuerza Andalucia, but also vital economic and agrarian reforms that were necessary to make Andalucia a force in the future. It included Jesus's employment profile, which showed that he was economically 'sensible', internationally connected and had the contacts in industry to make his ideas work.

There was a lull in activity just before lunch at around two o'clock. The traffic into the editor's office had calmed. Angel made his move.

'We're probably going to have to cut your column for at least the next few days,' said the editor when he saw Angel crossing his threshold.

'Of course,' said Angel. 'Nobody wants political gossip at a time like this.'

'What do you want with me, then?' said the editor, interested now he knew that Angel hadn't come for a fight.

'Most of the stuff in tomorrow's newspaper is going to be hard news and a lot of it will be heart-rending, with reports on the destruction of the pre-school and the dead children. The only positive stories will be about the excellence of the emergency services, and I've heard that there's a survivor. You'll be writing a leader that captures the mood of the city, that reacts to the receipt of Abdullah Azzam's text, and that declares that we might not have moved so far forward since 11th March as everybody would like to think.'

'Well, Angel, now you've told me my job,' said the editor, 'you can get on with telling me what you're proposing.'

'A vision of hope,' he said, handing over the page he'd just created. 'In this time of crisis there's a young, energetic, capable man in the wings, who could make Andalucia a safe and prosperous place to live.'

The editor scanned the page, took it all in, nodded and grunted.

'So the rumours about Eduardo Rivero are true.'

'I'm not sure what you're referring to.'

'Come off it, Angel,' said the editor, flinging out a dismissive fist. 'He was caught with his pants down.'

'I don't think there's any truth in that.'

'With an under-age girl. There was talk of a DVD.'

'Nobody's seen it.'

'The rumblings have been very loud, and now this-' said the editor, waving the page in the air. 'If it wasn't for the bomb, I'd have someone digging in the dirt after your old friend.'

'Look, this has been in the pipeline for a long time,' said Angel. 'With this bomb going off he just feels that it's time to stand down and let somebody younger take the party to the next stage. He's going to be seventy at the end of this year.'

'So we have the first political casualty of the bomb.'

'That's not how we should be thinking about it,' said Angel. 'It's precipitated change and it's saying that change is what we have to do if we want to survive this challenge to our liberty.'

'You're serious, Angel. What's happened to the great deflator? The man with the sharpened nib who pops those hot-air egos?'

'Perhaps my cynicism is another casualty of the bomb.'

'Well, you're always complaining that nothing happens,' said the editor, 'and now…you believe in this guy and yet you've barely written a word about him before.'

'As you've just pointed out, my column was primarily for puncturing egos,' said Angel. 'Jesus Alarcon hasn't had time to develop an ego that needs to be punctured. He's quietly taken Fuerza Andalucia from being an organization with a small debt to one with regular contributions from members and businesses. He's done amazing, if uncharismatic, work.'

'So what makes you think he's got the personality for it?'

'I saw him this morning,' said Angel. 'He's learnt a lot…'

'But can you learn charisma?'

'Charisma is just an intense form of self-belief,' said Angel. 'Jesus Alarcon has always been confident. He's ambitious. He's dealt with serious personal setbacks, which, to me, are a far more powerful measure of the man than his ability to broker international finance deals. He has the inner steel and common sense that our last prime minister had. You know politics. It's like boxing. It's all very well to have the fast hands and fancy footwork, but even the greatest fighters get hit very hard and if you can't absorb punishment you're finished. Jesus Alarcon has all those qualities and, after the conferring of the leadership, I can now see emerging that indefinable quality that will make people want to follow him.'

'All right,' said the editor, thinking positively about it. 'A new face for a new era. Write me a profile. And, by the way, I agree with you about charisma, it is an intense form of self-belief. But there's something both blinding and blind about it, too. Its closest friend can quite quickly become corruption-the belief that you can do anything with impunity. I hope Jesus Alarcon does not have the makings of a tragic figure.'

'He's not a hollow man,' said Angel. 'He's suffered and come through it.'

'Get him to remember that suffering,' said the editor. 'Every politician should have the words of the president of the Terrorists' Victims' Association, Pilar Manjon, ringing in their ears: "They only think of themselves."' The Madrid police and forensics had been working hard in the apartment used by Djamel Hammad and Smail Saoudi. Taped to the underside of a gas bottle they'd found a selection of stolen and forged IDs and passports, with pictures of the two men whose descriptions fitted those given by Trabelsi Amar and the Seville homicide squad. They'd also discovered € 5,875 in small-denomination notes in three separate packages hidden around the apartment. DNA was currently being generated from hairs, bristles and pubic hairs found in the bathroom. An empty pad on the kitchen table had revealed indentations, which proved to be complicated directions to a property southwest of Madrid, not far from a village called Valmojado. The isolated house near the Rio Guadarrama was found to be empty, with no evidence of recent habitation. The police concluded that it was a staging post-a place to pick up and leave material-and nothing more. The property had been rented in the name of a Spaniard, whose ID was false. The owners had been paid six months in advance, which had made them reluctant to ask too many questions. The forensics were still conducting their search of the premises, but so far not a trace of explosive had been found. The Guardia Civil had questioned a number of locals, including shepherds, and reckoned that in the four months it had been rented it had been visited by a white van five times. Three of those visits corresponded roughly to the times Trabelsi Amar had lent the Peugeot Partner to Hammad and Saoudi.

There was a complication with this scenario, which was that the directions to the isolated house found in the Madrid apartment were freshly written in Hammad's handwriting, which would imply that their visit on Sunday at around midday was their first. This in turn implied that the other two times they'd borrowed Trabelsi Amar's van they'd lent it to others who had gone to the farmhouse. A clearer indication that the isolated farmhouse was being visited by people other than Hammad and Saoudi came from eyewitness reports that as many as six different people, including one woman, had been seen going there. This information had an adrenalizing effect on the CGI in Madrid, who concluded that Hammad and Saoudi were acting within a much larger network than at first thought. They contacted all the major intelligence agencies but none of them had picked up any 'chatter' about a planned attack in Spain. The fear now was that Hammad and Saoudi's logistical work was part of a wider effort.

The CGI, with the help of the Guardia Civil, were now trying to find Hammad and Saoudi's route from Madrid to the isolated house near Valmojado and then down to Seville. They wanted to know if they had made any other stopovers-anonymous-looking meetings in roadside bars, other visits to isolated houses or, worse, other deliveries to, for instance, a location in another major Andalucian city.

That was the primary content of a seven-page report, drafted by several senior officers of the counterterrorism unit and sent by the Madrid CGI to Comisario Elvira in the damaged pre-school in Seville. There was a conclusion attached, which had been written by the Director of the CNI and had also reached the hands of Prime Minister Zapatero: On the basis of our own findings and the reports received so far from the offices of the CGI and, taken in conjunction with the preliminary reports from the bomb squad and the police on the ground at the site of the disaster, we can only conclude, at this point, that we have come across an Islamic terrorist network who were planning an attack, or, more likely, a series of attacks, with the intention of destabilizing the political and social fabric of the region of Andalucia. Whilst the investigating bodies have so far uncovered some anomalies to the usual modus operandi of radical Islamic groups, they have not brought to our attention any suspicious activity, or even stated intention, of any other group that might want to inflict damage on the Muslim population of Andalucia. We therefore recommend that the government take the necessary steps to protect all major cities in the region.

The noise of demolition work reasserted itself in the room after Comisario Elvira finished the reading of the report. Inspector Jefe Falcon and Juez Calderon were sitting on small children's desks, arms folded, ankles crossed and staring into the ground, which had now been swept clear of glass. Plastic sheeting, which had been stretched across the empty window frames, revealed an indistinct outside world that ballooned and lurched with the hot breeze, blowing from the south.

'They seem to have made up their minds, don't they?' said Calderon. 'Having told us not to disappear exclusively down one path, that's just what they've done themselves. There's no mention of the VOMIT website or of any other anti-Muslim groups.'

'Given all the stuff they've just found in the Madrid apartment of Hammad and Saoudi, and the hexogen deposit in the rear of the Peugeot Partner and the Islamic paraphernalia in the front,' said Elvira, 'who could blame them?'

'It doesn't look good for the Islamic radicals at the moment,' said Falcon. 'But the bomb squad haven't got to the epicentre of the explosion yet. There's still vital forensic information to come. I've also spoken to the forensics going over the Peugeot Partner and so far all they've come up with is that a new tyre had been fitted to the rear driver's side and the spare had a puncture.

'What they've found in the Madrid apartment and the existence of the isolated house could be interpreted as terrorist activity, or illegal immigrant activity. We've been told that Hammad and Saoudi have a track record of logistical involvement, but what does that mean? If they'd been caught with something, then we'd know about it. If they've been named by others, that's questionable information.'

'My reading of this document,' said Elvira, flapping the paper derisively in front of him, 'is that it's something that has been drafted for the politicians, so that they can appear knowledgeable and decisive on a day of crisis. The CNI and CGI have stuck to the known facts. They've mentioned "anomalies" but have given no detail. VOMIT and other groups aren't mentioned because there's nothing to support their involvement. The MILA doesn't appear either, despite its mention on the news. It's because they've got no intelligence to offer on any of them.'

'Are we allowed to talk about the CGI?' said Falcon, purposely disingenuous.

Calderon's secrecy radar was on to it in a flash. Elvira threw up his hands.

'Needless to say, this can't go out of this room,' said Elvira, 'but seeing as you're the instructing judge controlling this investigation you should know that there have been some concerns about the reliability of the Seville branch of the CGI. A decision from above has not yet been taken to allow them to fully enter the battle. Their agents have been in touch with their informer network and have drafted reports, but we haven't seen anything yet. They've been denied access to our reports and they know nothing about certain pieces of evidence, such as the heavily annotated copy of the Koran, which, as far as I know, has been kept out of the news.'

'That's a big blow to the investigation,' said Calderon. 'Shouldn't we have heard about this before now?'

'I don't have clearance to tell either of you,' said Elvira.

'So what is it about this heavily annotated copy of the Koran that's so important?' asked Calderon.

'I don't know, but it's received a very high level of interest from the CNI,' said Elvira. 'Anyway, that doesn't concern us right now. When was the last time you heard from your squad?'

'Recently enough to be able to say that we've got a pretty clear picture of what happened here in the last forty-eight hours, some of which is connected to occurrences in the week before the explosion.'

Falcon now had at least two witnesses to each of the significant events that preceded the blast. Hammad and Saoudi had first been seen at the mosque on Tuesday 30th May at 12.00. They arrived on foot and stayed talking to the Imam until 1.30 p.m. The two other events of that week were the visit from council inspectors at 10 a.m. on Friday 2nd June and a power cut some time on Saturday 3rd June at night, when the Imam had been in the mosque alone.

This led to an electrician turning up at 8.30 a.m. on Monday 5th June to assess the damage and the work involved. He returned with two labourers at 10.30 a.m. to repair the blown fuse box and also install a power socket in the storeroom next to the Imam's office.

The second visit from the electrician coincided with Hammad and Saoudi's arrival in the Peugeot Partner and the unloading of two large polypropylene sacks, which were believed to contain couscous. They stayed about an hour. The electricians left just before lunch at about 2.30 p.m. Hammad and Saoudi returned at 5.45 p.m. with four heavy cardboard boxes believed to contain sugar and some carrier bags of mint, all of which went into the storeroom. They were still there at 7 p.m. and, so far, nobody had seen them leave the premises.

'And what are your areas of concern in all that?'

'We have witnesses to the arrivals and departures of all these people,' said Falcon. 'But we haven't been able to make contact with the electrician. In order to get this done as quickly as possible I've asked my squad, who are already overloaded with interview work, to coordinate with local police and get them to visit every electrician's outlet or workshop within a square kilometre of the explosion. So far we've come up with nothing. All we know is that three men arrived in a blue transit van with no markings and we have no witnesses for the registration number.'

'Do you want the media to make an announcement?' asked Elvira.

'Not yet. I want to do more footwork on this.'

'What else?'

'I have other members of my squad tied up interviewing the Informaticalidad sales reps. None of them has come back to me with anything significant, but I have yet to talk to them and find out what the story was there.'

'Is that it?'

'My greatest concern at the moment, apart from the undiscovered electrician, is that the council have no record of sending any inspectors to the mosque, or any other part of this building, or even this barrio, on Friday 2nd June, or any day, for that matter, in the last three months.'