The Hidden Assassins

39

Rabat-Friday, 9th June 2006, 08.45 hrs

Yacoub was in the library in the group's house in the medina when they came for him. With no warning there were suddenly four men around him. They put a black hood over his head and tied his hands behind him with plastic cuffs. Nobody said a word. They took him through the house and out into the street, where he was thrust into the footwell in the back of a car. Three men came in after him and rested their feet on his supine body. The car took off.

They drove for hours. It was uncomfortable in the footwell, but at least they were driving on tarmac. Yacoub controlled his fear by telling himself that this was part of the initiation rite. After several hours they came off the good road and began labouring up some rough track. It was hot. The car had no air conditioning. The windows were open. It must have been dusty, because he could smell it even inside his hood. They spent an hour dipping and diving on the rough track until the car came to a halt. There was the sound of a rifle mechanism, followed by an intense silence as if each face in the car were being searched. They were told to carry on.

The car continued for another fifteen minutes until it again came to a halt. Doors opened and Yacoub was dragged out, losing his barbouches. They ran him across some rocky ground so fast that he stumbled. They paid no attention to his lost footing and hauled him on. A door opened. He was taken across a beaten earth floor and down some steps. Another door. He was hurled against a wall. He dropped to the floor. The door shut. Footsteps retreated. No light came through the dense material of the hood. He listened hard and became aware of a sound, which did not seem to be in the same room. It was a human sound. It was coming from a man's throat, a gasping and groaning, as if he was in great pain. He called out to the man, but all that happened was that the voice fell silent, apart from a faint sobbing.

The sound of approaching feet kick-started Yacoub's heart. His mouth dried as the door opened. The room seemed to be full of people, all shouting and pushing him around. There was the sound of screaming from the next room and a man's voice, pleading. They picked Yacoub up bodily, held him face down, and took him back up the stairs, outside, across rough ground. They dropped him and stood back. Whoever had been downstairs in the cells was now out in the open with him, crying out in pain. A rifle mechanism clattered close to his ear. Yacoub's head was pulled up and the hood removed. He saw a man's feet, bloody and pulpy. His hair was grabbed from behind and his vision directed towards the man lying in front of him. A gunshot, loud and close. The man's head jolted and matter spurted from the other side. His bloody feet twitched. The hood was pulled back over Yacoub's head. The barrel of a gun was put to the back of his neck. His heart was thundering in his ears, eyes tight shut. The trigger clicked behind his head.

They picked him up again. They seemed gentler. They walked him away. There was no rush now. He was taken into a house and given a chair to sit on. They removed his plastic cuffs and black hood. Sweat cascaded down his neck and into the collar of his jellabah. A boy put his barbouches down by his feet. A glass of mint tea was poured for him. He was so disorientated that he could not even take in the faces of those around him before they left the room. He put his head down on the table top and gasped and wept.

After being inside the hood, his eyes were already accustomed to the darkness of the room. There was a single bed in the corner. One wall was covered with books. The windows were all shuttered. He sipped the tea. His heart rate eased back down to below the one hundred mark. His throat, which had been tight with hysteria, slackened. He went over to the books and studied the titles of each one. Most of them were about architecture or engineering: detailed tomes on buildings and machines. There were even some car manuals, thick manufacturer's plans for some four-wheel-drive vehicles. They were all in French, English or German. The only Arabic texts were eight volumes of poetry. He sat back down.

Two men came in and gave him a formal, but warm, welcome. One called himself Mohamed, the other Abu. A boy followed them, carrying a tray of tea, glasses and a plate of flat bread. The two men were both heavily bearded and each wore a dark brown burnous and army boots. They sat at the table. The boy poured the tea and left. Abu and Mohamed studied Yacoub very carefully.

'That is not normally part of our initiation procedure,' said Mohamed.

'A member of our council thought that you were a special case,' said Abu, 'because you have so many outside contacts.'

'He felt that you needed to be left in no doubt as to the punishment for treachery.'

'We did not agree with him,' said Abu. 'We did not think that anyone bearing the name of Abdullah Diouri would need such a demonstration.'

Yacoub acknowledged the honour accorded to his father. More tea was poured and sipped. The bread was broken and distributed.

'You had a visit from a friend of yours on Wednesday,' said Mohamed.

'Javier Falcon,' said Yacoub.

'What did he want to discuss with you?'

'He is the investigator of the Seville bombing,' said Yacoub.

'We know everything about him,' said Abu. 'We just want to know what you discussed.'

'The Spanish intelligence agency had asked him to approach me on their behalf,' said Yacoub. 'He wanted to know if I would be willing to be a source for them.'

'And what did you tell him?'

'I gave him the same answer that I'd given the Americans and the British when they'd made the same approaches,' said Yacoub, 'which is why I am here today.'

'Why is that?'

'In refusing all these people, who dishonoured me by offering money for my services, I realized that it was time for me to take a stand. If I was certain that I did not want to be with them, then it should follow that my loyalties lay elsewhere. I had refused them because it would be the ultimate betrayal of everything my father stood for. And, if that was the case, then I should take a stand for what he believed in, against the decadence that he so despised. So when my friend left I went straight to the mosque in Sale and let it be known that I wanted to help in any way that I could.'

'Do you still consider Javier Falcon to be a friend?'

'Yes, I do. He was not acting for himself. I still consider him to be an honourable man.'

'We have been following the Seville bombing with interest,' said Mohamed. 'As you've probably realized, it has caused great disruption to one of our plans, which has demanded a lot of reorganization. We understand that some arrests were made last night. Three men are being held. They are all members of the political party Fuerza Andalucia, a party holding anti-Islamic views, which it wants to translate into regional policy. We have been watching them closely. They have recently elected a new leader, who we know little about. What we do know is that the three men they have arrested are being held on a charge of suspected murder. It is believed that they killed an apostate and traitor called Tateb Hassani. That is of no interest to us, nor are these three men, who we believe to be unimportant. We would like to know-and we think that your friend, Javier Falcon, will be able to help-who gave the orders for the mosque to be bombed?'

'If he knew that, then I am sure they would have been arrested.'

'We don't think so,' said Abu. 'We think that they are too powerful for your friend to be able to touch them.' Seville-Friday, 9th June 2006, 10.00 hrs Falcon knew that his goading of Angel Zarrias would not help in any material way, but he hoped that it would cause some unseen structural damage, which might lead to a breakdown later on. Angel Zarrias had revealed himself, of course-how could he not? While he'd been squaring up to do battle with the corruptive powers of materialism and the ruthless energy of radical Islam, his partner, the woman he loved, was having a tantrum like some spoilt two-year-old, consumed by her pathetic needs and concerns. It represented to him all that was wrong with this modern existence that he'd grown to despise, which was how he justified employing equally corruptive powers and fanatical energy to bring the aimless world back to heel.

Falcon became quite concerned that the rage unleashed by his revelation of Manuela's comparative peevishness might result in a fatal embolism or lethal infarction. Angel's forty-five years of political frustration had finally erupted, producing spluttering admissions which indicated, beyond any doubt, his and Fuerza Andalucia's involvement in the conspiracy, but did nothing to help the investigation cross the divide into unknown areas.

By prior arrangement, Falcon was not going to be interviewing anybody between 10.30 and midday. He was going to attend the funeral of Ines Conde de Tejada. He drove out to the San Fernando cemetery on the northern outskirts of the city. As he drew near he counted three television vans and seven camera crews.

Everybody from the Edificio de los Juzgados and the Palacio de Justicia was in attendance at the cemetery. Close to two hundred people were milling around the gates, most of them smoking. Falcon knew them all and it took him some time to work his way through the crowd to reach Ines's parents.

Neither of her parents was tall, but the death of their daughter had diminished them. They were dwarfed by its enormity and overwhelmed by the numbers of people around them. Falcon paid his respects and Ines's mother kissed him and held on to him so tightly it was as if he was her lifesaver in this sea of humanity. Her husband's handshake had nothing in it. His face was slack, his eyes rheumy. He'd aged ten years overnight. He spoke as if he didn't recognize Falcon. As he was about to leave, Ines's mother grabbed his arm and in a hoarse whisper said: 'She should have stayed with you, Javier', to which there was no answer.

Falcon joined the crowd walking up the tree-lined path to the family mausoleum. The camera crews were there, but they kept their distance. As the coffin was taken up the steps there was a great wailing from some of the women in the crowd. These occasions, especially with untimely deaths, were so emotionally lacerating that many of the men had their handkerchiefs out. When one elderly woman cried out, 'Ines, Ines,' as the coffin disappeared into the dark, the crowd seemed to convulse with grief.

The crowd dispersed after the short ceremony. Falcon walked back to his car, head bowed and throat so constricted he couldn't respond to the few people who tried to stop him. Driving back alone was a relief, a great unknotting of strangled emotion. He arrived at the Jefatura and wept for a minute, with his forehead on the steering wheel, before pulling himself together for the next round of interviews. By lunchtime they'd all discovered their fundamental problem. Not even Rivero, who was the weakest of the three, would give the interrogators the necessary link between Fuerza Andalucia and the bomb makers. Not one of them would even yield up the link to Informaticalidad, never mind to Lucrecio Arenas and Cesar Benito.

In a conference between Elvira, del Rey and Falcon, in which they were trying to work out the most serious possible charges with which they could hold the three suspects, Elvira put forward the possibility that the link wasn't forthcoming because it didn't exist.

'They had to give Hassani's work to someone,' said del Rey.

'And I think we all believe now that the reason Ricardo Gamero killed himself was that the electrician's card, which would end up in the Imam's hands, via Botin, made him feel responsible,' said Falcon. 'Mark Flowers told me that the Imam was expecting more intrusive surveillance. In fact, he wanted the microphone planted in his office so that the CGI antiterrorist squad would find out about Hammad and Saoudi's plan. Obviously, none of them knew a bomb was going to be planted with that microphone. The point is that Gamero went back to the person who had given him the card, looking for an explanation. Who gave that card to Zarrias?'

'It's possible that Zarrias didn't know about the bomb either,' said Elvira. 'Perhaps he just thought this was an escalation of the surveillance carried out by Informaticalidad.'

'The person I would really like to see down here is Lucrecio Arenas,' said Falcon. 'He positioned his protege, Jesus Alarcon, to take over the leadership from Rivero. He is a long-standing friend of Angel Zarrias and he has been involved with the Horizonte group, with whom Benito and Cardenas are associated and who ultimately own Informaticalidad.'

'But unless these guys give him up, all you can do is talk to him,' said del Rey. 'You have no leverage. The only reason we've got this far is a lucky sighting of Tateb Hassani late on the Saturday night in Rivero's house, and Rivero's subsequent confusion and loss of nerve when you and Inspector Ramirez first spoke to him.' Falcon was in the observation room for the next interviews, which started at four o'clock. At about five Gregorio appeared at his shoulder.

'Yacoub needs to talk,' he said.

'I thought we weren't due to "chat" until tonight.'

'In an emergency we've given Yacoub the possibility of making contact,' said Gregorio. 'It's to do with the initiation rite.'

'I haven't got the Javier Marias book with me.'

Gregorio produced a spare copy from his briefcase. They went up to Falcon's office and Gregorio prepared the computer.

'You might find there's more of a delay between each line of "chat" this time,' said Gregorio. 'We're using different encryption software and it's a bit slower.'

Gregorio gave up Falcon's seat and went over to the window. Falcon sat in front of the computer and exchanged introductions with Yacoub, who opened by saying he didn't have much time and gave a brief account of what had happened that morning. He wrote about the execution he'd witnessed, but wrote nothing of his own mock execution. Falcon reeled from the computer screen.

'This is out of control,' he said, and Gregorio read Yacoub's words over Falcon's shoulder.

'Steady him. Keep him calm,' said Gregorio. 'They're just warning him.'

Falcon started to type just as another paragraph came through from Yacoub.

'Important things in no particular order. 1) I was taken from the house in the medina at about 6.45 a.m. The journey was about three and a half hours long and then there was about forty minutes before I met the two men, who called themselves Mohamed and Abu. They told me they were following the Seville bombing very closely. 2) They said that the explosion had caused "great disruption to one of their plans which had demanded a lot of reorganization". 3) I was left in a room with books on one wall. The titles were all about architecture or engineering. There were also a number of manufacturer's car manuals for four-wheel-drive vehicles. 4) They knew about the arrest of three men from a political party called Fuerza Andalucia, who were suspected of murdering "an apostate and traitor" called Tateb Hassani. They also knew that this was in some way connected to the Seville bombing, but said that these men were "unimportant". 5) The information they want from you, Javier, is as follows: the identities of the men who were responsible for the planning of the bombing of the mosque in Seville. They know about the three arrests, and they believe that although you know who the real perpetrators are, they are too powerful for you to touch them.

'I don't expect you to reply immediately. I know you will have to talk to your people first. I need your answer as soon as possible. If I can give them this information I believe it will increase my standing with the council immeasurably.'

'That last bit I don't even have to think about,' said Falcon. 'I can't do it.'

'Just wait, Javier,' said Gregorio, but Falcon was already typing out his reply:

'Yacoub, it's completely impossible for me to give you that information. We have our suspicions, but absolutely no proof. I assume the leaders of this council are looking for revenge for the bombing of the mosque and that is not something I am prepared to have on my conscience.'

Falcon had to hold Gregorio back as he hit the send button. After about fifteen seconds the screen wavered and the CNI secure website disappeared to be replaced by the msn home page. Gregorio played about on the keyboard and tried to get back into the website, but there was no access. He made a call standing at the window.

'We've lost the connection,' he said.

After several minutes of listening and nodding he closed down the mobile.

'Trouble with the encryption software. They had to terminate the transmission as a precaution.'

'Did my last paragraph go through?'

'They said it did.'

'All the way through to Yacoub?'

'That I don't know yet,' said Gregorio. 'We'll reconvene at your house at 11 p.m. I'll have had a chance to discuss the meat of what Yacoub was saying and its implications with Juan and Pablo by then.'