The Hidden Assassins

41

Seville-Saturday, 10th June 2006, 07.00 hrs

Falcon woke up early, with renewed determination. Once the pathologist had left the night before, after his stunning revelation, they discussed what could possibly have happened to Hammad and Saoudi. Pablo updated Comisario Elvira on the intelligence they'd received from Yacoub, whose group believed that a total of 300 kilos of hexogen had been sent to Spain. The bomb disposal officer had thought, as a 'conservative' estimate, that 100 kilos of hexogen had exploded in El Cerezo on 6th June, which would leave between 150 and 200 kilos still at large. They all agreed that having secured the remaining hexogen, Hammad and Saoudi would have either gone to ground or left the country.

Elvira put a call through to the Guardia Civil about the route of the Peugeot Partner last seen at a service station outside Valdepenas at 4 p.m. on Sunday, 4th June. There'd still been no sightings of the van on any of the main roads in the Seville, Cordoba and Granada triangle. There was now a huge operation underway, looking for sightings on the smaller routes, but it was an impossible task, given the anonymous quality of the vehicle and the fact that the journey was made nearly a week ago. Falcon sent Perez and Ferrera back to El Cerezo to check with the residents that the Peugeot Partner had not been seen until the Monday morning of 5th June.

The meeting broke up with Elvira drafting a press release about Hammad and Saoudi and announcing the reinstatement of spot checks on vehicles coming into the city. This was to be aired on the TVE ten o'clock news and on Canal Sur. Gregorio had come back with Falcon to his house on Calle Bailen, where they made another unsuccessful attempt to reach Yacoub. They drafted a report about Hammad and Saoudi, including photographs, which Gregorio pasted into the clipboard of the CNI website to send to Yacoub later, in the hope that he could locate them in Morocco.

For one reason or another Falcon had not yet interviewed Agustin Cardenas, and it had been decided that he would talk to him first thing in the morning while Ramirez tackled Zarrias for a second time. The rest of the squad would be up early to walk the streets around El Cerezo to see if they could get any confirmed sightings of Hammad and Saoudi either on Sunday evening/Monday morning, or after the explosion on Tuesday.

By 7.30 a.m. Falcon had called ahead to the Jefatura to make sure that Agustin Cardenas would be waiting, ready to be interviewed as soon as he arrived. He stopped for a coffee and some toast on the way and was sitting in front of a still groggy Agustin Cardenas by 7.50.

In his photograph, Agustin Cardenas looked in his mid thirties, while his CV told Falcon he was forty-six years old. By this Saturday morning he'd found his way up into the mid fifties, which was somewhere he'd never been before.

'You're not looking good, Agustin,' said Falcon. 'You could do with a bit of nip and tuck yourself this morning.'

'I'm not a morning person,' he said.

'How long have you known Cesar Benito?'

'About eight years.'

'How did you meet him?'

'I did some work on his wife and then he came to see me himself.'

'For some work?'

'I removed the bags under his eyes and tightened up his neck and jowls.'

'And he was happy?'

'He was so happy he got a mistress.'

'Were your clinics part of the Horizonte group at this stage?'

'No, Cesar Benito thought that Horizonte should buy my business.'

'Which made you a lot of money,' said Falcon. 'Did they give you stock options in Horizonte?'

Cardenas nodded.

'And being a part of the group meant that you had capital,' said Falcon.

'I expanded the business to nine clinics in Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Nerja and another due to open in Valencia.'

'It's a shame that you've built up such a successful business and you're never going to see the fruits of your labour,' said Falcon. 'You're not protecting Cesar Benito just because he's made you this fortune that you'll never enjoy?'

Cardenas took a deep breath and stared at the table, thinking to himself.

'No,' said Falcon. 'It would have to be more than that, wouldn't it? There's your Hippocratic oath. Cesar must have had quite a hold on you to be able to persuade you to not only poison Hassani at his last supper, but also to use your surgical skills to cut off the man's hands, burn away his face and scalp him. You didn't do all that for Cesar just because he made you a rich man?'

More silence from Cardenas. Something was eating away at him. Here was a man who'd done a lot of thinking and not much sleeping overnight.

'What can you offer me?' said Cardenas, after some long minutes.

'In terms of a deal?' said Falcon. 'Nothing.'

Cardenas nodded, rocked himself in his chair. Falcon knew what was working its way from Cardenas's insides out: resentment.

'I can only give you Cesar Benito,' said Cardenas. 'He was the only person I had contact with.'

'We'll be happy with that,' said Falcon. 'What can you tell me?'

'One of the reasons I was not as wealthy as I should have been when I first met Cesar was that I'd been a gambling addict for almost ten years,' said Cardenas.

'Did Cesar Benito know about that when he arranged for Horizonte to buy your cosmetic surgery clinics?'

'No, but he found out soon afterwards,' said Cardenas. 'It was through him that I managed to get it under control.'

'And how did it get out of control again?'

'I went on a business trip with Cesar down to the Costa del Sol in March. He took me gambling.'

'He did?'

Cardenas nodded, looking at Falcon very steadily.

'That started me off again. But this time it was even worse. I was much better off than I had been the last time. My funds seemed to be limitless by comparison. By the beginning of May I owed over one million euros and I was having to sell things to make the interest payments on some of the loans I'd taken out.'

'And how did Cesar find out?'

'I told him,' said Cardenas. 'I'd had a visit from somebody I owed money to. They took me into the bathroom of my rented flat in Madrid and gave me the wet towel treatment. You know, you really think you're going to drown. They said they'd be back in four days' time. It scared me enough to go to Cesar and ask for help. We met in his apartment in Barcelona. He was shocked by what I told him, but he also said that he understood. After three days of being completely terrified I was relieved. Then he told me how he could make this problem go away.'

'Are you a religious man, Sr Cardenas?'

'Yes, our families go to church together.'

'How would you describe your relationship with Cesar Benito?'

'He'd become a very close friend. That's why I went to see him.'

'When Benito told you that you would have to commit murder and gross disfigurement, surely you must have asked him for every detail of the conspiracy?'

'I did, but not on that occasion,' said Cardenas. 'Once I realized what he was asking I decided on a safety strategy. The next time I met him was in my rented apartment in Madrid and I secretly recorded our entire conversation.'

'And where is that recording?'

'It's still in the apartment,' he said, writing down the address and telephone number. 'I taped it to the back of one of the kitchen drawers.' When Lucrecio Arenas was at his villa in Marbella he liked to get up early, before the staff arrived, which on a Saturday was not before 9 a.m. Arenas put on a pair of swimming trunks, shrugged into his huge white bathrobe and slipped into a pair of sandals. On his way out of the house he picked up a large, thick, white towel and a pair of swimming goggles. He hated chlorine in his eyes and always liked to see clearly, even underwater. He walked down the sloping garden in the warm morning, pausing to take in the glorious view of the green hills and the blue of the Mediterranean, which at this time of day, before the heat haze had risen, was so intense that even his untouchable heart ached a little.

The pool had been built at the bottom of the garden, surrounded by a dense growth of oleander, bougainvillea and jasmine. His wife had insisted it be put down there because Lucrecio had wanted a 20-metre monster. They'd dynamited three hundred tons of rock out of the mountainside so that he could swim his daily kilometre in fifty lengths, rather than having the awful bore of turning just as he'd got into his stride. He reached the poolside and flung his towel on a lounger and let his bathrobe fall on top. He stepped out of his sandals and walked to the end of the pool. He fitted his goggles over his face and nestled the rubber into his eye sockets.

He raised his arms and through the rose-tinted lenses of the goggles he saw something that looked like a postcard on the end of the diving board. He dropped his arms just as he felt two colossal thuds in his back, like sledgehammer blows but more penetrating. The third blow was to the neck and came down on him with the full weight of a cleaver. His legs would not support him and he collapsed messily into the water. The dense growth behind him rearranged itself. There was the sound of a small scooter starting up. The splendid day continued. The ice blue water in the swimming pool clouded red around the body. A speedboat nosed out into the blue morning, pursued by its white frothy wake. The Holiday Inn on Plaza Carlos Triana Bertran in Madrid was not one of Cesar Benito's favourite hotels, but it had some advantages. It was close to the conference centre where he'd given a speech to Spain's leading constructors the night before. It was also near the Bernabeu Stadium and even when Real Madrid weren't playing he enjoyed being close to the beating heart of Spanish football. The hotel had a third advantage on this Saturday, which was that it was only twenty minutes to the airport and he had a flight to catch to Lisbon at 11 a.m. He'd asked for breakfast to be served in his suite as he hated looking at other people, who were not his family, early in the morning. The room service boy had just wheeled in the trolley and Benito was flicking through Saturday's ABC and chewing on a croissant when there was another knock at the door. It was so soon after the room service boy had left that he assumed it was him coming back for some reason. He didn't look through the spy hole. He wouldn't have seen anybody if he had.

He opened the door on to an empty corridor. His head was just coming forward to look out when the edge of a hand swung into him with rapid and lethal force, chopping across his Adam's apple and windpipe and making a loud cracking noise. He fell backwards into the room, spluttering flakes of croissant over the front of his bathrobe. His heels worked furrows into the carpet as he tried to draw air into his lungs. The door closed. Benito's feet slowed after a minute and then stopped working. There was a gargling rattle from his collapsed throat and his hands lost all grip. He didn't feel the fingers searching for a neck pulse or the light touch of the card placed on his chest.

The door of the hotel room reopened and closed with a Do not disturb sign swinging on the handle. The air conditioning breathed easily in the hush of the empty corridor, while unclaimed newspapers hung in plastic bags from other, indifferent, doors. At 9.30 a.m. Falcon had taken a break from his interview with Agustin Cardenas and called Ramirez out to give him the news of the recording Cardenas had made, hoping it could be used to apply pressure on Angel Zarrias. Cardenas was taken back down to the cells while Falcon went to his office to call Elvira to get the Madrid police to pick up the recording from Cardenas's rented flat, while simultaneously arresting Cesar Benito in the Holiday Inn.

It was Ferrera, calling him from a cafe on the Avenida de San Lazaro, who told him to look at the latest news on Canal Sur. Falcon ran through the Jefatura and burst into the communications room just in time to see a shot of Marbella disappear from the television screen, to be replaced by the newsreader who repeated the breaking news item: Lucrecio Arenas had been found by his maid floating face down in his swimming pool at 9.05 that morning. He had been shot three times in the back.

His mobile vibrated and he took the call from Elvira.

'I've just seen it,' he said. 'Lucrecio Arenas in his pool.'

'They got Cesar Benito in his hotel in Madrid as well,' said Elvira. 'That's going to come through in the next few minutes.'

It took another five minutes for the Benito item to break. A TVE camera crew got to the Holiday Inn before Canal Sur reached Arenas's villa in Marbella. It took a further half an hour before their camera crew pushed a lens into the face of the maid, who'd only just recovered from the hysteria of finding her boss dead in the pool. The newsreaders jumped between the two dramas. Falcon called Ramirez out of the interview room to let him know, went back to his office and slumped in his chair, all the enthusiasm of the morning gone.

His first thoughts were that this was the end. It didn't matter what they found out now from Cardenas and Zarrias, it was all immaterial. He stared at his reflection in the dead, grey computer screen and it started him thinking in a slightly less linear way about what had happened. He made some uncomfortable connections, which made him furious and then another idea came to him, which frightened him into calming down. He got the communications room to send a patrol car to Alarcon's house in El Porvenir. He called Jesus Alarcon. His wife, Monica, answered the phone.

'You've heard the news,' he said.

'He can't speak to you now,' said Monica. 'He's too upset. You know Lucrecio was like a father to him.'

'First thing: none of you are to go outside,' said Falcon. 'Lock all the doors and windows and go upstairs. Don't answer the door. I'm sending a patrol car round there now.'

Silence from Monica.

'I'll tell you what it's about when I get there,' said Falcon. 'Did Jesus speak to Lucrecio Arenas yesterday?'

'Yes, they met.'

'I'm coming round now. Lock all the doors. Don't let anybody in.'

On the way to El Porvenir, Falcon called Elvira and asked for armed guards to protect Alarcon and his family. The request was granted immediately.

'There's more stuff coming out all the time,' said Elvira, 'but I can't talk about it on the phone. I'm coming in.'

'I'm on my way to see Alarcon,' said Falcon.

'Do we know where Alarcon was on the night of Tateb Hassani's murder?'

'He was at a wedding in Madrid.'

'So you think he's clean?'

'I know he's clean,' said Falcon. 'I've got a special insight.'

'Special insights, even your special insights, don't always look good in police reports,' said Elvira.

The street was empty of people and Falcon parked behind the patrol car, which was already outside the metal sliding gate of Alarcon's house. Monica buzzed him in. Falcon had a good look around before he went through the front door, which he closed and triple locked. He went to the back of the house and checked all the doors and windows.

'We're just being careful,' said Falcon. 'We don't know who we're dealing with yet and we're not sure whether Jesus is on their list. So we're putting you under armed guard until we know.'

'He's in the kitchen,' she said, looking sick with fear.

She went upstairs to sit with the children.

Alarcon was sitting at the kitchen table with an untouched espresso in front of him. He had his arms stretched out on the table, fists clenched, staring into space. He only came out of his trance when Falcon broke into the frame of his vision and offered his condolences.

'I know he was important to you,' said Falcon.

Alarcon nodded. He didn't look as if he'd slept much. He made light knocking noises with his fists on the tabletop.

'Did you speak to Arenas yesterday?' asked Falcon.

Alarcon nodded.

'How did he react to the information I gave you?'

'Lucrecio had reached the point in his life and business career where he no longer had to bother with detail,' said Alarcon. 'He had people who did the detail. I shouldn't think he'd seen a bill for the last twenty-five years, or read a contract, or even been aware of the tonnage of paperwork involved in a modern merger or acquisition. His desk is always clean. It doesn't even have a phone on it since he discovered that the only people he wants to talk to are on his mobile. He never learnt how to use a computer.'

'What are you telling me, Jesus?' said Falcon, impatient now. 'That the services of Tateb Hassani and his consequent murder were "details" that did not concern Lucrecio Arenas?'

'I'm telling you that he's the sort of man who will listen to the business news, with all its astonishing up-to-the-minute detail, even a channel like Bloomberg, which is right on top of its subject, and laugh,' said Alarcon. 'Then he'll tell you what's really happening, because he is talking to the people who are actually making it happen, and you realize that the so-called news is just a bit of detail that a journalist has either picked up or been given.'

'So what did you talk about?'

'We talked about power.'

'That doesn't sound as if it's going to help me.'

'No, but it has been an enormous help to me,' said Alarcon. 'I'll be resigning from the leadership of Fuerza Andalucia and returning to my business career. My statement to the media will take place at eleven o'clock this morning. There's nothing left, Javier. Fuerza Andalucia is over.'

'So, what did he tell you about power?'

'That all the things that matter to me about politics, such as people, health, education, religion…all these things are details, and none of it can happen without power.'

'I think I can grasp that.' 'There's a saying in business, that what happens in the USA takes about five years to start happening here,' said Alarcon. 'Lucrecio told me: look at the Bush administration and understand that you only achieve power in a democracy with an enormous sense of indebtedness.'

'You owe favours to all the people who've made it possible for you to reach high office,' said Falcon.

'You owe them so much that you begin to find that their needs are shaping your policies.'

Three armed police arrived as Falcon left. Falcon drove back to the Jefatura, amazed at his naivety in thinking that Jesus Alarcon would be able to get anything approaching an admission from an animal like Lucrecio Arenas.

Elvira was alone in his office, standing by the window, peering through the blinds as if he was expecting insurgents in the street. Without turning round he told Falcon that he was going to have to prepare for a major televised press conference whose time, as yet, had not been set.

'The CNI will be here in a minute,' he said. 'Did you get anything from Alarcon?'

'Nothing. He's resigning later this morning,' said Falcon. 'He had a very unappetizing lesson on the nature of power from his old master.'

'Who seems to have met his nemesis,' said Elvira. 'A card was found on the diving board of his swimming pool. An identical card was found on Cesar Benito's body in his hotel room. Arabic script. A quote from the Koran about the enemies of God.'

Elvira finally turned round when he sensed something thunderous developing behind him.

'Are you all right, Javier?'

'No,' he said, gritting his teeth. 'I'm not all right.'

'You're angry?' said Elvira, surprised. 'It's very dismaying, but…'

'I've been betrayed,' he said. 'Those bastards from the CNI have betrayed me, and it's cost us the possibility of a resolution to this entire investigation.'

A knock on the open door. Pablo and Gregorio came in. Falcon wouldn't shake their hands, got up and went over to the window.

'So, what's going on here?' asked Elvira.

Pablo shrugged.

'I recruited a Moroccan friend of mine…' started Falcon, and Gregorio tried to interrupt by saying this was all top-secret CNI business and not for public consumption. Pablo told him to sit down and shut up.

'My Moroccan friend has infiltrated the group which positioned Hammad and Saoudi with the hexogen in Seville. The group demanded that he show his loyalty by passing an initiation rite. This required him to ask me who was behind the Fuerza Andalucia conspiracy. I refused to do this. At which point there was a very timely breakdown in communication-"a problem with new encryption software". Since then, I have not been able to contact my friend. I do not think that the deaths of Cesar Benito and Lucrecio Arenas are unconnected with what happened. I believe that my refusal to help was intercepted and replaced with the information my friend required. The fact that these two men were found dead with quotations from the Koran on, or near, their bodies seems to indicate that revenge has successfully been taken.'

Elvira looked at the CNI men.

'Not true,' said Pablo. 'It proves nothing, but we can show you the transcripts. It's true that your refusal to help did not go through before the system failed, but we did not replace it with anything else. The encryption software problem has still not been solved and we are now thinking of going back to the original software so that we can at least make contact with your friend. On the subject of the deaths of Arenas and Benito: the detectives and forensics on the ground in Marbella and Madrid have independently told us that they believe this to be the work of professional hitmen. They say that, whilst they have no record of any individual "hits" being taken out by Islamic jihadists, they do have records of professional hitmen using these methods.'

'Agustin Cardenas had just given me Cesar Benito,' said Falcon slowly.

'We know,' said Pablo. 'We spoke to Madrid. They've picked up the recording he mentioned in his interview with you.'

'You nailed him,' said Gregorio.

'For the murder of Tateb Hassani,' said Falcon. 'Don't you think the families of the people who died in El Cerezo deserve a bit more than that?'

'They might get it in court,' said Elvira.

'You said it yourself on Tuesday night,' said Pablo. 'Terrorist attacks are complicated things. You only have a chance at a resolution. At least in this one the perpetrators have all suffered.'

'Apart from the electrician who planted the Goma 2 Eco,' said Falcon. 'And, of course, the people who are so contemptuous of law and order that they will assassinate anybody who might make them vulnerable.'

'You have to be satisfied with what you've achieved,' said Pablo. 'You've prevented a dangerous group of Catholic fanatics from developing a power base in Andalucian politics. And in the process, through the actions of Hammad and Saoudi, we have uncovered an Islamic jihadist plot. Juan doesn't think that that is such a terrible outcome.'

'Which brings us back to the business in hand,' said Elvira. 'Hammad and Saoudi. Their faces have been all over the news and there's been a terrific response. Unfortunately, there have been sightings from all over Spain. They've been seen on the same day, at the same time, in La Coruna, Almeria, Barcelona and Cadiz.'

Elvira took a call on his mobile.

'Chasing Hammad and Saoudi is a waste of time,' said Pablo. 'It's been four days. They'll have done whatever needed to be done and got out. The only thing that will help us now is intelligence.'

Elvira came back into the conversation.

'That was the Guardia Civil. They've had a confirmed sighting of Hammad and Saoudi, early on Monday morning 5th June, on a stretch of country road near a village called El Saucejo, about twenty-five kilometres south of Osuna.'

'And how do we know this is a bona fide sighting?' asked Pablo.

'They were changing the back tyre, driver's side, on a white Peugeot Partner,' said Elvira.