The Hidden Assassins

5

Seville-Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 06.30 hrs

Falcon came to in the profound darkness of his shuttered bedroom. He lay there in his private universe, contemplating last night's events. After the disappointment at Consuelo's restaurant the drink with Laura had gone better than expected. They'd agreed to see each other as friends. She was only a little offended that he was ending their affair with, as he'd told her, no other prospect in sight.

He showered and put on a dark suit and white shirt and folded a tie into his pocket. He had meetings planned all morning after he'd been to see the Medico Forense. It was a morning of shimmering brilliance, with not a cloud in the sky. The rain had cleansed the atmosphere of all that puzzling electricity.

A temperature gauge outside in the street told him it was 16°C while the radio warned that a great heat was about to descend on Seville and by evening they should expect temperatures in excess of 36°C.

The Forensic Institute was next to the Hospital de la Macarena behind the Andalucian Parliament, which itself looked across the road to the Basilica de la Macarena, just inside the old city walls. At 8.15 a.m. Falcon was early, but the Medico Forense had already arrived.

Dr Pintado had the file open on his desk and was reminding himself of the detail of the autopsy. They shook hands, sat down and he resumed his reading.

'What I concentrated on in this case,' he said, still scanning the pages, 'apart from the cause of death, which was straightforward-he was poisoned with potassium cyanide-was giving you as much help as possible on the identification of the body.'

'Potassium cyanide?' said Falcon. 'That's not exactly in keeping with the ruthlessness of the post-mortem operations. Was it injected?'

'No, ingested,' said Pintado, other things on his mind. 'The face…I might be able to help you with that, or rather I have a friend who is interested in helping. You remember I was telling you about a case I handled in Bilbao, where they made a facial model from a skull found in a shallow grave?'

'It cost a fortune.'

'That's right, and you don't get resources like that for any old murder.'

'So how much does your friend cost?'

'He's free.'

'And who is he?'

'He's a sort of sculptor, but he's not that interested in the body, just faces.'

'Would I have heard of him?'

'No. He's strictly amateur. His name is Miguel Covo. He's seventy-four years old and retired,' said Pintado. 'But he's been working with faces for nearly sixty years. He builds them out of clay, makes moulds for wax, and carves them out of stone, although that's quite a recent development.'

'What's he proposing and why is it free?'

'Well, he's never done this kind of thing before, but he wants to try,' said Pintado. 'I let him take a plaster cast of the head last night.'

'OK, so there's no decision,' said Falcon.

'He'll make up a half-dozen models, do some sketches and then start working up the face. He'll paint it, too, and give it hair-real hair. His studio can give you the creeps, especially if he likes you and introduces you to his mother.'

'I've always got on well with mothers.'

'He keeps her in a cupboard,' said Dr Pintado. 'Just a model of her, I mean.'

'It would be cruel to keep a woman in her nineties in a cupboard.'

'She died when he was small, which was when his fascination with faces started. He wanted the photographs of her to be more real. So he recreated her. It was the only time he fashioned a body. She's in that cupboard with real hair, make-up, her own clothes and shoes.'

'So, he's weird, too?'

'Of course he is,' said Pintado, 'but likeably weird. You might not want to invite him to dinner with the Comisario and his wife, though.'

'Why not?' said Falcon. 'It would make a change from the opera.'

'Anyway, he'll call you when he has something, but…not tomorrow.'

'What else have you got?'

'It's all helpful, but not as helpful as a physical image,' said Pintado. 'I worked with a guy who did forensics on mass graves in Bosnia and I learnt a bit from him. The first thing is dental. I've made a full set of digital X-rays and notes about each tooth. He's had extensive orthodontic work done to get the teeth all straight and looking perfect.'

'How old is this guy?'

'Mid forties.'

'And normally you'd have that sort of work done in your early teens.'

'Exactly.'

'And there wasn't a lot of orthodontic work being done in Spain in the mid seventies.'

'Most likely it was done in America,' said Pintado. 'Apart from that, there's nothing much else to go on, dentally. He's had no major work done, and only a molar missing on the lower right side.'

'Have you found any distinguishing marks on the outside of the body-moles, birthmarks?'

'No, but I did come across something interesting on his hands.'

'Forgive me, Doctor, but…'

'I know. They were severed. But I checked the lymph nodes to see what was deposited there,' said Pintado. 'I'm sure our friend had a small tattoo on each hand.'

'I don't suppose there's a snapshot of it in the lymph node?' asked Falcon.

'Lymph nodes are quite clever about killing bacteria and neutralizing toxins, but their talent for recreating images from tattoo ink, introduced into the bloodstream via the hand, is extremely limited. There was a trace of ink and that was all.'

'What about surgery?'

'There's good news and bad there,' said Pintado. 'He's had surgery, but it was a hernia operation, which is just about the world's most common procedure. His was also the most common type of inguinal hernia, so he has a scar on the right side of his pubis. I'd guess it was about three years old, but I'll get one of the vascular surgeons to come over and confirm that for me. Then we'll take a look at the mesh they used to patch the hernia and hopefully he'll be able to tell me who supplied it, then you can find the hospitals they supply…and, I know, it's going to take a lot of work and time.'

'Maybe he had that done in America as well,' said Falcon.

'Like I said: good news and bad.'

'What about his hair?' asked Falcon. 'They scalped him.'

'He had hair that was at least long enough to cover his collar.'

'How do you get that?'

'He's been on the beach this year,' said Pintado, turning some photographs around for Falcon to look at. 'You can see the tan lines on his arms and legs, but if you turn him over you don't see any tan line at the back of his neck. In fact, if you look, it's quite white compared to the rest of his back, which to me means that it rarely sees the sun.'

'Would you describe him as "white"?' asked Falcon. 'His skin colour didn't look Northern European to me.'

'No. He's olive-skinned.'

'Do you think he was Spanish?'

'Without doing any genetic testing, I would say that he was Mediterranean.'

'Any scars?'

'Nothing significant,' said Pintado. 'He'd sustained a fracture to his skull, but it's years old.'

'Anything interesting about the structure of his body that would give us an idea of what he did?'

'Well, he wasn't a bodybuilder,' said Pintado. 'Spine, shoulder and elbows indicate a deskbound, sedentary life. I'd say that his feet didn't spend much time in shoes. The heels are more splayed than usual, with a lot of hardened skin.'

'As you said, he liked the sun,' said Falcon.

'He also smoked cannabis and I would say he was a regular user, which could be thought of as unusual in someone in his mid forties,' said Pintado. 'Kids smoke dope, but if you're still doing it in your forties it's because it's your milieu…you're an artist, or a musician, or hanging out with that sort of crowd.'

'So he's a desk worker with long hair, who spent time in the sun, not wearing shoes, and smoking dope.'

'A hard-working hippy.'

'They might have been like that in the seventies, but it's not the profile of a modern-day drug smuggler,' said Falcon. 'And potassium cyanide would be an unusual method of execution for people with 9mm handguns in their waistbands.'

The two men sat back from the desk. Falcon flicked through the photographs from the file hoping that something else might jump out at him. He was already thinking about the university and the Bellas Artes, but he didn't want to confine himself at this early stage.

In this momentary silence the two men looked up at each other, as if they were on the brink of the same idea. From beyond the grey walls of the Facultad de Medicina came the unmistakable boom of a significant explosion, not far away. Gloria Alanis was ready for work. By this time she would normally be on her way to her first client meeting, thinking how much, as it receded in the rearview mirror, she hated the drab seventies apartment block where she lived in the barrio of El Cerezo. She was a sales rep for a stationery company but her area of operation was Huelva. On the first Tuesday of every month there was a meeting of the sales team at the head office in Seville, followed by a team-building exercise, a lunch and then a mini-conference to show and discuss new products and promotions.

It meant that for one day during the month, she could put breakfast on the table for her husband and two children. She could also take her eight-year-old daughter, Lourdes, to school, while her husband delivered their three-year-old son, Pedro, to the pre-school which was visible from the back window of their fifth-floor apartment.

On this morning, instead of hating her apartment, she was looking down on the heads of her children and husband and feeling an unusual sensation of warmth and affection early in the week. Her husband sensed this, grabbed her and pulled her on to his lap.

'Fernando,' she said, warning him, in case he tried anything too salacious in front of the children.

'I was thinking,' he whispered in her ear, his lips tickling her lobe.

'It's always dangerous when you start doing that,' she said, smiling at the children, who were now interested. ,'I was thinking there should be more of us,' he whispered. 'Gloria, Fernando, Lourdes, Pedro and…'

'You're crazy,' she said, loving those lips on her ear, saying these things.

'We always talked about having four, didn't we?'

'But that was before we knew how much two cost,' she said. 'Now we work all day and still don't have enough money to get out of this apartment or take a holiday.'

'I have a secret,' he said.

She knew he didn't.

'If it's a lottery ticket, I don't want to see it.'

'It's not a lottery ticket.'

She knew what it was: wild hope.

'My God,' he said, suddenly looking at his watch. 'Hey, Pedro, we've got to get going, man.'

'Tell us the secret,' said the children.

He lifted Gloria up and put her on her feet.

'If I tell you that, it's not a secret any more,' he said. 'You have to wait for the secret to be revealed.'

'Tell us now!'

'This evening,' he said, kissing Lourdes on the head and taking Pedro's tiny hand.

Gloria went to the door with them. She kissed Pedro, who was staring at his feet, and not much interested. She kissed her husband on the mouth and whispered on his lips:

'I hate you.'

'By this evening you'll love me again.'

She went back to the breakfast table and sat opposite Lourdes. There were another fifteen minutes before they had to leave. They spent a few minutes looking at one of Lourdes' drawings before going to the window. Fernando and Pedro appeared below in the car park in front of the pre-school. They waved. Fernando held Pedro above his head and he waved back.

Having delivered the boy to school, Fernando walked off between the apartment blocks to the main road to catch the bus to work. Gloria turned back into the room. Lourdes was already at the table working on another drawing. Gloria sipped her coffee and played with her daughter's silky hair. Fernando and his secrets. He played these games to keep them amused and their hopes up that they would eventually be able to buy their own apartment, but the property prices had exploded and they now knew that they would be renting for the rest of their lives. Gloria was never going to be anything other than a rep and, though Fernando kept saying he was going to take a plumbing course, he still needed to make the money he did as a labourer on the construction site. They'd been lucky to find this apartment with such a cheap rent. They were lucky to have two healthy children. As Fernando said: 'We might not be rich, but we are lucky and luck will serve us better than all the money in the world.'

She didn't immediately associate the shuddering tremor beneath her feet with the booming crash that came from the outside world. It was a noise so loud that her rib cage seemed to clutch at her spine and drive the air out of her lungs. The coffee cup jumped out of her hand and broke on the floor.

'MAMA!' screamed Lourdes, but there was nothing for Gloria to hear, she saw only her daughter's wide-eyed horror and grabbed her.

Terrible things happened simultaneously. Windows shattered. Cracks and giant fissures opened up in the walls. Daylight appeared where it shouldn't. Level horizons tilted. Doorframes folded. Solid concrete flexed. The ceiling crowded the floor. Walls broke in half. Water spurted from nowhere. Electricity crackled and sparked under broken tiles. A wardrobe shot out of sight. Gravity showed them its remorselessness. Mother and daughter were falling. Their small, fragile bodies were hurtling downwards in a miasma of bricks, steel, concrete, wire, tubing, furniture and dust. There was no time for words. There was no sound, because the sound was already so loud it rendered everything else silent. There wasn't even any fear, because it had all become grossly incomprehensible. There was just the sickening plummet, the stunning impact and then a vast blackness, as of a great receding universe. 'What the fuck was that?' said Pintado.

Falcon knew exactly what it was. He'd heard an ETA car bomb explode when he was working in Barcelona. This sounded big. He kicked back his chair and ran out of the Institute without replying to Pintado's question. He punched the Jefatura's number into his mobile as he left. His first thought was that it was something in the Santa Justa station, the high-speed AVE arriving from Madrid. The railway station was less than a kilometre away to the southeast of the hospital.

'Diga,' said Ramirez.

'There's been a bomb, Jose Luis…'

'I heard it even out here,' said Ramirez.

'I'm at the Institute. It sounded close. Get me some news.'

'Hold it.'

Falcon ran past the receptionist, the mobile pressed to his ear, listening to Ramirez's feet pounding down the corridor and up the stairs and people shouting in the Jefatura. The traffic had stopped everywhere. Drivers and passengers were getting out of their cars, looking to the northeast at a plume of black smoke.

'The reports we're getting,' said Ramirez, panting, 'is that there's been an explosion in an apartment block on the corner of Calle Blanca Paloma and Calle Los Romeros in the barrio of El Cerezo.'

'Where's that? I don't know it. It must be close because I can see the smoke.'

Ramirez found a wall map and gave rapid instructions.

'Is there any report of a gas leak?' asked Falcon, knowing this was wildly optimistic, like the so-called power surge on the day of the London underground bombings.

'I'm checking the gas company.'

Falcon sprinted through the hospital. People were running, but there was no panic, no shouting. They had been training for this moment. Everyone in a white coat was making for the casualty department. Orderlies were sprinting with empty trolleys. Nurses ran with boxes of saline. Plasma was on the move. Falcon slammed through endless double doors until he hit the main street and the wall of sound: a cacophony of sirens as ambulances swung out into the street.

The main road was miraculously clear of traffic. As he crossed the empty lanes he saw cars pulling up on to pavements. There were no police. This was the work of ordinary citizens, who knew that this stretch of road had to be kept clear to ferry the wounded. Ambulances careered down the street two abreast, whooping and delirious, with lights flashing queasily, in air that was filling with a grey/pink dust and smoke that billowed out from behind the apartment blocks.

At the crossroads bloodstained people stumbled about on their own or were being carried, or walked towards the hospital with handkerchiefs, tissues and kitchen roll held to foreheads, ears and cheeks. These were the superficially wounded victims, the ones sliced by flying glass and metal, the ones some distance from the epicentre, who would never make it into the top flight of disaster statistics but who might lose the sight in an eye, or their hearing from perforated eardrums, bear facial scars for the rest of their lives, lose the use of a finger or a hand, never walk again without a limp. They were being helped by the lucky ones, those who didn't even have a scratch as the air whistled with flying glass, but who had the images burned on to their minds of someone they knew or loved who had been whole seconds before and was now sliced, torn, bludgeoned or broken.

In the blocks of flats leading up to Calle Los Romeros, the local police were evacuating the buildings. An old man in bloody pyjamas was being led by a boy, who had realized his importance. A young man holding a crimson-flashed towel to the side of his head stared through Falcon, his face horribly partitioned by rivulets of blood, coagulating with dust. He had his arm around his girlfriend, who appeared unhurt and was talking at full tilt into her mobile phone.

The air, more dust-filled by the moment, was still splintering to the sound of breaking glass as it fell from high shattered windows. Falcon called Ramirez again and told him to organize three or four buses to act as improvised ambulances to ferry the lightly wounded from all these blocks of apartments down the road to the hospital.

'The gas company have confirmed that they supply buildings in that area,' said Ramirez, 'but there's been no report of a leak and they ran a routine test on that block only last month.'

'For some reason this doesn't feel like a gas explosion,' said Falcon.

'We're getting reports that a pre-school behind the destroyed building has been badly damaged by flying debris and there are casualties.'

Falcon pressed on up through the walking wounded. There were still no signs of serious damage to buildings, but the people floating around, calling and looking for family members in the spaces at the foot of the emptying apartment blocks were phantasmal, dust-covered, not themselves. The light had turned strange, as the sun was scarfed by smoke and a reddish fog. There was a smell in the air, which was not immediately recognizable to anyone who didn't know war. It clogged the nostrils with powdered brick and concrete, raw sewage, open drains and a disgusting meatiness. The atmosphere was vibrant, but not with any discernible sound, although people were making noise-talking, coughing, vomiting and groaning-it was more of an airborne tinnitus, brought about by a collective human alarm at the proximity of death.

Lines of fire engines, lights flashing, were backed up all the way to Avenida San Lazaro. There wasn't a pane of intact glass in the apartment buildings on the other side of Calle Los Romeros. A bottle bank was sticking out of the side of one of the blocks like a huge green plug. A wall that ran down the street opposite the stricken building had been blown on to its back and cars were piled up in a garden, as if it was a scrapyard. The torn stumps of four trees lined the road. Other vehicles parked on Calle Los Romeros were buried under rubble: roofs crumpled, windscreens opaque, tyres blown out, wheel trims off. There were clothes strewn everywhere, as if there'd been a laundry drop from the sky. A length of chain-link fencing hung from a fourth-floor balcony.

Firemen had clambered up the nearest cascade of rubble and had their hoses trained on the two remaining sections of what had been a complete L-shaped building. What was now missing was a twenty-five-metre segment from the middle of it. The colossal explosion had brought down all eight floors of the block, to form a stack of reinforced concrete pancakes to a height of about six metres. Framed by the ragged remains of the eight floors of apartments, and just visible through the mist of falling dust, was the roof of the partially devastated pre-school and the apartment blocks beyond, whose facades were patched with black and gaping glassless windows. A fireman appeared on the edge of a broken room on the eighth floor and in the war-torn air made a sign to show that the building was now clear of people. A bed fell from the sixth floor, its frame crunched into the piled debris, while its mattress bounced off wildly in the direction of the pre-school.

On the other side of the rubble, further down Calle Los Romeros, was the Fire Chief's car but no sign of any officers. Falcon walked along the collapsed wall and made his way around the block to see what had happened to the pre-school. The end of the building closest to the explosion had lost two walls, part of the roof had collapsed and the rest was hanging, ready to drop. Firemen and civilians were propping the roof, while unblinking women stared on in appalled silence, hands holding their faces as if to stop them from dropping off in disbelief.

On the other side, at the entrance to the school, it was worse. Four small bodies lay side by side, their faces covered with school pinafores. A large group of men and women were trying to control two of the mothers of the dead children. Covered in dust they were like ghosts, fighting for the right to go back to the living. The women were screaming hysterically and clawing madly against hands trying to prevent them from reaching the inert bodies. Another woman had fainted and was lying on the ground, surrounded by people kneeling to protect her from the swaying and surging crowd. Falcon looked around for a teacher and saw a young woman sitting on a mat of broken glass, blood trickling down the side of her face, weeping uncontrollably, while a friend tried to console the inconsolable. A paramedic arrived to give her wounds some temporary dressing.

'Are you a teacher?' asked Falcon, of the woman's friend. 'Do you know where the mother of the fourth child is?'

The woman, dazed, looked across at the collapsed apartment block.

'She's in there somewhere,' she said, shaking her head.

Only firemen moved around inside the pre-school, their boots crunching over debris and glass. More props came in to support the shattered roof. The Fire Chief was in an undamaged classroom at the back of the school, giving a report to the Mayor's office on his mobile.

'All gas and electricity to the area has been cut off and the damaged building has been evacuated. Two fires have been brought under control,' he said. 'We've pulled four dead children out of the pre-school. Their classroom was in the direct path of the explosion and took its full force. So far we've had reports of three other deaths: two men and a woman who were walking along Calle Los Romeros when the explosion occurred. My men have also found a woman who seems to have died from a heart attack in one of the apartment blocks opposite the destroyed building. It's too difficult to say how many wounded there are at the moment.'

He listened for a moment longer and closed down the phone. Falcon showed his ID.

'You're here very early, Inspector Jefe,' said the Fire Chief.

'I was in the Forensic Institute. It sounded like a bomb from there. Is that what you think?'

'To do that sort of damage, there's no doubt in my mind that it was a bomb, and a very powerful one at that.'

'Any idea how many people were in that building?'

'I've got one of my officers working on that at the moment. There were at least seven,' he said. 'The only thing we can't be sure of is how many were in the mosque in the basement.'

'The mosque?'

'That's the other reason why I'm sure this was a bomb,' said the Fire Chief. 'There was a mosque in the basement, with access from Calle Los Romeros. We think that morning prayers had just finished, but we're not sure if anyone had left. We're getting conflicting reports on that from the outside.'