The Hidden Assassins

24

Seville-Wednesday, 7th June 2006, 20.30 hrs

Falcon called Inspector Jefe Barros to see if anybody had searched Miguel Botin's apartment. Nobody from the CGI had been there. He called Ramirez, gave him Botin's address, told him to get round there and look for the electrician's card. He called Baena, gave him the Imam's mobile number and told him to get the phone records. He called Esperanza, Miguel's partner, she'd never heard of any friends of his who were electricians. By the time he'd made these calls he was at the doors of the Iglesia de San Marcos. It wasn't quite 9 p.m. He flicked through his messages to see if Serrano had called. He had. At the museum they'd remembered Ricardo Gamero at the ticket desk. Two security guards had seen him speeding through rooms taking no notice of the exhibits. A third security guard had seen Gamero talking to a man in his sixties for some twenty minutes. The guard was now at the Jefatura with a police artist working up a sketch of the older man.

Father Roman was in his early forties. He was out of the robes of office and in an ordinary dark suit with the jacket folded over his arm. He was standing in the nave of the brick interior of the church, talking to two women dressed in black. On seeing Falcon he excused himself from the conversation, went over to shake hands, and led him up to his office.

'You look exhausted, Inspector Jefe,' he said, sitting at his desk.

'The first days after something like this are always the longest,' said Falcon.

'My congregations have doubled since Tuesday morning,' said Father Roman. 'A surprising number of young people. They're confused. They don't know when this will end or how it can possibly end.'

'Not just young people,' said Falcon. 'But I'm sorry, Father, I must press on.'

'Of course you must,' said Father Roman.

'You may know that one of your congregation committed suicide today-Ricardo Gamero. Did you know him?'

Father Roman blinked at the swift devastation of this news. It left him dumb with shock.

'I'm sorry I wasn't able to break it to you more gently,' said Falcon. 'He took his life this afternoon. Obviously you knew him. I understand he was a very…'

'I met him when my predecessor was taken ill,' said Father Roman. 'They were very close. My predecessor had helped him resolve a number of issues to do with his faith.'

'How well did you know Ricardo?'

'He didn't appear to be seeking the same sort of relationship with me as he'd had with my predecessor.'

'Did you know what these issues to do with his faith were?'

'That was between them. Ricardo hasn't spoken to me about them.'

'When was the last time you saw Ricardo?'

'He was here on Sunday for Mass, as always.'

'And you haven't seen him since?'

Silence from Father Roman, who looked as if he was coping with a distressing nausea.

'Sorry,' he said, snapping out of it. 'I'm just trying to think of the last time we spoke…and if there was any indication that he was still troubled to the same extent as he had been in my predecessor's time.'

'You didn't happen to see him today, did you, Father?'

'No, no, not today,' he said, distracted.

'Have you heard of a company called Informaticalidad?' asked Falcon.

'Should I have done?' asked Father Roman, frowning.

'They actively recruit personnel from amongst your congregation,' said Falcon. 'Is that without your knowledge?'

'Forgive me, Inspector Jefe, but I find it rather confusing the way this conversation has developed. I'm feeling the pressure of your suspicion, but I'm not sure about what?'

'It's better just to answer the questions rather than trying to understand what they're about. This has become a very complicated situation,' said Falcon. 'Have you ever met a man called Diego Torres?'

'It's not such an unusual name.'

'He happens to be the Human Resources Director at Informaticalidad.'

'I don't always know the profession of the members of my congregation.'

'But you have someone of that name who attends this church?'

'Yes,' said Father Roman, squeezing it out like a splinter. Falcon went through the list of board members of Informaticalidad. Four out of the ten were members of Father Roman's congregation.

'Would you mind telling me what exactly is going on here?' said Falcon.

'Nothing is "going on here",' said Father Roman. 'If, as you say, this company is using my church as an informal recruiting agency, what can I do? It is the nature of people that they will meet at a church and that there will be a social exchange. Quite possibly invitations are made and it's conceivable that jobs might be offered. Just because the Church seems to have less influence in society, doesn't mean that some churches don't perform in the way that they used to.'

Falcon nodded. He'd overreached himself in his excitement at finally realizing a connection, only to find it a little too loose.

'Did you know Ricardo Gamero's profession?'

'I knew from my predecessor that he was a member of the police force, but I have no idea what he does, or rather, did. Was he a member of your squad?'

'He was an agent with the CGI; specifically, the antiterrorism group,' said Falcon. 'Islamic terrorism.'

'I doubt that was something he talked to many people about,' said Father Roman.

'Did you happen to notice if he mixed with any of the people I mentioned who worked for Informaticalidad?'

'I'm sure he would have done. When people leave church they go to the two cafes around the corner. They socialize.'

'Did you notice regular meetings?'

Father Roman shook his head.

Falcon sat back. He needed more ammunition for this conversation. He was tired, too. The flight to Casablanca and back seemed to have been from a month ago. The fullness of every minute, with not only his own findings but the ramifications of concurrent investigations under the colossal concentration of manpower rolling out all over Spain, Europe and the world, made hours feel like days.

'Were you aware that Informaticalidad not only used your church but two others inside the old city for the same purpose?' said Falcon.

'Look, Inspector Jefe, it's quite possible that this company has an unspoken employment policy of only taking on practising Catholics. I don't know. These days, I believe, you're not allowed to ask a recruitment agency to discriminate on your behalf. What would you do?'

'They do have an unspoken employment policy,' said Falcon. 'They don't take on any women. I suppose that's not dissimilar to the Catholic Church.' On the walk back to his car, Falcon called Ramirez, who was still searching Miguel Botin's apartment.

'We're not getting anywhere here,' said Ramirez. 'I don't know what it is about this place, but we're sure somebody's been around here before us. It's a bit tidy. We've turned the place upside down and we're going through his library now.'

'I have a witness who saw him give a card to the Imam.'

'Maybe they're still with him in his bag under the rubble.'

'What state was the bombsite in when you last saw it?'

'The heavy work is over. The crane has gone. They're working by hand now, with just a couple of tippers standing by. They've put scaffolding up and sheeted off the remaining rubble. About six teams of forensics are ready to go in. They reckon they'll get into the mosque itself by mid-morning tomorrow.'

'When you've finished at Botin's apartment, let everybody go home and get some sleep,' said Falcon. 'It's going to be another big day tomorrow. Have you seen Juez Calderon?'

'Only on television,' said Ramirez. 'He's been giving a press conference with Comisario Lobo and Comisario Elvira.'

'Anything we should know?'

'There's a job waiting for Juez Calderon as a chatshow host if he gets bored of being a judge.'

'So he's not telling them anything, but it looks as if he is.'

'Exactly,' said Ramirez. 'And given that we've come up with fuck-all today, he's making us sound like heroes.' The drive back home was eerily quiet. At nearly 10 p.m. the streets should have been alive and the bars full of people. A lot of places were closed. There was so little traffic Falcon went through the centre of town. Only a few young people had gathered in the Plaza del Museo under the trees. The mood was sombre and the narrow streets tense with anxiety.

An investigation of his fridge revealed some cooked prawns and a fresh swordfish steak. He ate the prawns with mayonnaise while drinking a beer direct from the bottle. He fried up the fish, squeezed some lemon over it, poured himself a glass of white rioja and ate, his mind picking over the detail of the day. He went over the dialogue with Father Roman. Had the priest been trying to avoid the sin of lying by omission, evasion and ducking the question? It felt like it. He poured himself another glass of white wine, pushed back his plate and folded his arms and had just started to contemplate the big event of the day-the suicide of Ricardo Gamero, when his first visitor arrived.

Pablo had come on business. He refused a beer and they went into the study.

'You mentioned Yacoub had some conditions before you fell asleep on the plane this morning,' said Pablo.

'The first condition is that he will only talk or deal with me,' said Falcon. 'He won't meet any other agents, or take phone calls from anyone but me.'

'That's quite normal except, of course, you'll be in different countries. I'll talk you through the communication procedure later, but it won't exactly be direct contact,' said Pablo. 'It puts you under a lot of pressure.'

'He also says he's not making a lifelong commitment,' said Falcon.

'That's understandable,' said Pablo. 'But you know, spying can have an addictive effect on certain personalities.'

'Like Juan,' said Falcon. 'He looks like a man with a few secrets. As if he's running two families that don't know about each other.'

'He does. He has his wife and two kids and the CNI, and they don't know anything about each other. Keep going with the conditions.'

'Yacoub will not give us any information that could jeopardize the life of any of his family members,' said Falcon.

'That was to be expected,' said Pablo. 'But does he suspect any of his family members?'

'He says not. But they're all devout Muslims and they lead very different lives to him,' said Falcon. 'It could be that he finds out that they are closely involved or at some remove, but he will not be an instrument in their downfall if they are. These people have totally accepted him as one of their own and he won't give them up.'

'Anything else?' asked Pablo.

'My problem: Yacoub doesn't have any training for this work.'

'Most spies don't. They just happen to be in a position where information comes their way.'

'You make it sound easy.'

'It's only dangerous if you're careless.'

Falcon had to raise his concentration levels to take in Pablo's briefing about the method of communication with Yacoub. He got him to boil it down to the basics, which were: they would communicate via email, using a secure website run by the CNI. Both Falcon and Diouri would have to load their computers with different encryption software. The emails would go to the CNI website to be decrypted and passed on. The CNI would obviously see all emails and make their recommendations for action. All Falcon had to do this evening was to call Yacoub and tell him to go to the shop in Rabat and pick up a couple of books. These books would give Yacoub all the information he needed. Falcon made the call and kept it short, saying he was tired.

'We've got to get him working as soon as possible,' said Pablo. 'This whole thing is moving fast.'

'What whole thing?'

'The game, the plan, the operation,' said Pablo.

'We're not sure which. All we know is that, since the bomb went off yesterday, the level of encrypted emails on the web has gone up fivefold.'

'And how many of those encrypted emails can you read?'

'Not many.'

'So you haven't cracked the code from the Koran found in the Peugeot Partner?'

'Not yet. We've got the world's best mathematicians working on it, though.'

'What do the CNI make of Ricardo Gamero's suicide?' asked Falcon.

'Inevitably we're thinking that he was the mole,' said Pablo. 'But that's just a theory. We're trying to work up the logic around it.'

'If he was the mole, from what I know about him, I'd find it hard to believe he was passing information to an Islamic terrorist movement.'

'Right, but what about Miguel Botin? What do you know about him?'

'That his brother was maimed in the Madrid train bombings, giving him good reason to be operating against Islamic terrorism,' said Falcon. 'That his girlfriend was a school friend of Gamero who remains a devout Catholic, having so far been reluctant to convert to Islam. And it was Botin who followed the Imam and took shots of Hammad and Saoudi and these other two mystery men, which he handed over to the CGI. He was also prompting Gamero to get the Imam's office bugged. That's about it.'

'He doesn't sound like a promising candidate as a terrorist, does he?'

'Have you searched Botin's apartment?' asked Falcon.

Pablo cradled his knee, nodded.

'What did you find there?'

'I can't say.'

'But you found something that makes you think Botin was acting for the terrorists while working for Gamero?'

'This is what it's like, Javier,' said Pablo, shrugging. 'The Hall of Mirrors. We constantly have to revise what we're actually seeing.'

'You found another heavily annotated copy of the Koran, didn't you?' said Falcon, sitting back, dazed. 'What the hell does that mean?'

'It means you cannot say a word about this conversation to anybody,' said Pablo. 'It means we have to get our counterintelligence up and running as soon as possible.'

'But it also means that the terrorists, whoever they are, were letting Miguel Botin serve up information to the CGI that compromised the Imam, Hammad and Saoudi, along with whatever operation was being planned in the mosque.'

'We're still conducting our enquiries,' said Pablo.

'They were sacrificing them?' asked Falcon, nauseated by his inability to think his way around this new development.

'First of all, we live in an age of suicide bombing-there's sacrifice for you,' said Pablo. 'And secondly, intelligence services all over the world have always had to sacrifice agents for the greater good of the mission. It's nothing new.'

'So this electrician, whose card Miguel Botin handed over to the Imam, was the agent of their destruction? The electrician was sent by Botin's Islamic terrorist masters to bomb the building? That's just fantastic.'

'We don't know that,' said Pablo. 'But as you know, not all suicide bombers realize that they are suicide bombers. Some have just been told to deliver a car, or leave a rucksack on a train. Botin had just been told to give an electrician's card to the Imam. What we need to find out is who told him to do that.'

'Are we wasting our time here?' asked Falcon. 'Is this whole investigation just a show, for whichever terrorist group decided to abort their mission and blow up any possible leads back to their network?'

'We're still very interested to find out what's in the mosque,' said Pablo. 'And we're very keen to get Yacoub up and running.'

'And how do you know that Yacoub is approaching the right group, even?' asked Falcon, exhausted and close to rage from frustration.

'We have confidence in that because it has come from a reliable detainee and has also been verified by British agents on the ground in Rabat,' said Pablo.

'What group are we talking about?'

'The GICM, Groupe Islamique de Combattants Marocains, otherwise known as the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. They had links to the bombings in Casablanca, Madrid and London,' said Pablo. 'What we're doing here is not something that was thought up yesterday as an idea worth trying, Javier. This represents months of intelligence work.'

Pablo left soon after. Falcon was almost depressed by their exchange. All the man-hours put in by his squad were beginning to look like a waste of energy, and yet there were unnerving gaps in what Pablo had told him. It was as if each group involved in the investigation put most trust in the information that they themselves uncovered. So the CNI believed in the annotated Koran as the codebook, because of the example of the Book of Proof uncovered by British intelligence, and that coloured everything they looked at. The fact that the witness in the mosque, Jose Duran, had described the electrician and his labourers as a Spaniard and two Eastern bloc natives, who did not sound anything like Islamic terrorist operatives, held little water for Pablo. But then again, it had been local Spanish petty criminals who'd supplied the Madrid bombers with explosives, and what does it take to leave a bomb? A little care and a psychotic mind. After the press conference on TVE with Comisarios Lobo and Elvira, Juez Calderon had taken a taxi round to Canal Sur, where he was miked up and eased on to the set of a roundtable discussion about Islamic terrorism. He was the man of the hour and within moments the female chair of the programme had drawn him into the discussion. He controlled the rest of the programme with a combination of incisive and informed comment, humour, and a savage wit he reserved for so-called security specialists and terrorism pundits.

Afterwards he was taken out to dinner by some executives from Canal Sur's current affairs department and the female chair of the programme. They fed and flattered him for an hour and a half until he found himself alone with the female chair, who let it be known that this could continue in more comfortable surroundings. For once Calderon demurred. He was tired. There was another long day ahead of him and-the main reason-he was sure that Marisa was a better lay.

Calderon sat in the middle seat in the back of the Canal Sur limousine. He felt like a hero. His mind was racing with endorphins after his TV performances. He had a sense of the world at his feet. Seville, as it flashed past in the night, began to feel small to him. He imagined what it must be like to be as high on success as this in a city like New York, where they really knew how to make a man feel important.

The limousine dropped him off outside the San Marcos church at 12.45 a.m. and, for once, rather than take his usual little deviation around the back, he strode past the bars on the other side, hoping that friends of Ines would be drinking there who would stop him and congratulate him. He really had been exceptionally brilliant. The bars, however, were already closed. Calderon, in his heightened state, had failed to notice how quiet the city was.

As he went up in the lift he knew that the only way he was going to sleep was after a strenuous, crazy fuck with Marisa, out on the balcony, in the hall, going down in the lift, out in the street. He felt so on top of the world he wanted everybody to see him performing.

Marisa had watched the TV programmes in a state of insensate boredom. She could tell that the press conference revolved around Esteban, as all the questions from journalists were for him. She could also see that he was controlling the roundtable discussion, and even that the female chair was dying to get into his trousers, but the drivel that was being talked had reduced her to a vegetative state. Why do Westerners have to get so exercised about things and talk them to death, as if it's going to be any help? Then it struck her. That was what irked her about Westerners. They always took things at face value, because that was what could be controlled, and what could be measured. They just served up their lies all round and then congratulated each other on 'their command of the situation'. That was why white people bored her. They had no interest beyond the surface. 'What are you doing, sitting there all day, Marisa?' had been the most frequently asked question she'd faced in America. And yet in Africa they'd never asked her that question-or any question, for that matter. Questioning existence didn't help you live it.

She looked down on Calderon's arrival from her balcony. She saw his jaunty steps, his little preparations. When he said his usual: 'It's me,' into her entry phone, she replied: 'My hero.'

He burst into her apartment like a showman, arms raised, waiting for the applause. He drew her to him and kissed her, pushing his tongue between the barrier of her teeth, which she did not like. Their kissing had only ever been lip deep.

It wasn't difficult to tell that he was still on the crest of the media wave. She let him drive her out on to the balcony, where they had sex. He looked up at the stars, holding on to her hips, imagining even greater glory. She participated by hanging on to the railings and making a suitable amount of noise.

As soon as he was finished, he was rendered mentally and physically drained, like someone coming off a coke high. She managed to steer him to the bed and get his shoes off before he fell into a deep sleep at 1.15 a.m. She stood over him, smoking a cigarette, wondering if she'd be able to wake him in a couple of hours' time.

She washed herself in the bidet, closing her right eye to the smoke rising from the cigarette. She lay on the sofa and let time do what it was good at. At 3 a.m. she started trying to rouse him, but he was completely inert. She held a lighter to his foot. He writhed and kicked out. It took time to get him to come round. He had no idea where he was. She explained that he had to go home, he had an early start, he had to get changed.

At 3.25 she called a taxi. She put his shoes on, got him standing, put his arms into his jacket and called the lift up to her floor. She stood outside with him, his head dropping and jerking off his chest and her shoulder. The taxi arrived just after 3.30. She put him in the back and instructed the driver to take him to Calle San Vicente. She said he was exhausted, that he was the leading judge in the Seville bombing, and that gave the driver a sense of mission. He waved away her € 10 note. For this man it was going to be free. The cab pulled away. Calderon had his head thrown back on the rear shelf. In the yellowish street lighting he looked as he would when dead. The whites of his eyes were just visible below the lids.

At that time of the morning, with Seville as silent as a ghost city, there was no traffic and the cab arrived at Calle San Vicente in just under ten minutes. After much cajoling, the cab driver had to reach in and physically haul Calderon out into the street. He walked him to the front door of the building and asked him for his keys. The driver got the door open and realized he was going to have to go all the way. They crammed themselves into the hall.

'Is there a light?' asked the driver.

Calderon slapped at the wall. Light burst into the hall and the ticking sound of a timer started up. The driver supported him up the stairs.

'This one here,' said Calderon, as they reached the first floor.

The driver opened the apartment door, which was double locked, and returned the keys to Calderon.

'Are you all right now?' he asked, looking into the judge's bleary eyes.

'Yeah, I'm fine now. I'll be OK, thanks,' he said.

'You're doing a great job,' said the driver. 'I saw you on the telly before I started my shift.'

Calderon clapped him on the shoulder. The driver went down the stairs and the light in the hall went out with a loud snap. The cab started up and pulled away. Calderon rolled over the doorjamb into the apartment. The light was on in the kitchen. He shut the door, leaned back on it. Even in his exhausted state, with his eyelids as heavy as lead, his teeth clenched with irritation.