The Ignoranceof Blood

23

Falcon's house, Calle Bailen, Seville – Tuesday, 19th September 2006, 12.00 hrs

Outside, the world broke about them as Falcon and Consuelo slept on. Only at midday did a call on Falcon's mobile crack open their sedation. He came to as if from some coma life where fantastic goings on were now reduced to the dullness of reality.

'Late night?' asked Ramirez.

'You could say that,' said Falcon, panting into the phone, his heart walloping in his chest. 'What's going on?'

'I got a call from Perez about ten thirty. He was in Las Tres Mil with one of the Narcotics guys, following up on Carlos Puerta. They found him in an empty basement, still with the needle in his arm. Overdose. I told him not to disturb you and to handle it himself.'

Falcon ran his hand down his face, tried to rub some feeling of reality into it.

'He just called me again about ten minutes ago,' said Ramirez. 'He's been doing some hunting around, talking to people with the Narc. Remember Julia Valdes, El Pulmon's girlfriend, who was shot yesterday in his apartment? She used to be Carlos Puerta's girlfriend. They worked together. She was a flamenco dancer, he sang. They bust up in June and she started going with his dealer. Closer to the source, I suppose.'

'Are we looking at a suicide?' asked Falcon, still not quite with it. 'Had Puerta taken the bust-up badly?'

'Very badly. He went downhill fast,' said Ramirez. 'His junkie friends said he got some royalties from a recording contract and put the whole lot up his arm. By the time you interviewed him with Tirado he was at the end of a three-month binge.'

'How much money did he get?' asked Falcon. 'Three months is a long binge.'

'Good point,' said Ramirez. 'For some reason I don't think we've quite got the full story on Puerta.'

Falcon nodded, said he would get into the office as soon as he could. They hung up. Consuelo called her sister, spoke to her sons Ricardo and Matias, told them she'd be with them in an hour. No news.

Breakfast was a stunned affair, conducted by automatons in wordless understanding. She wore a shirt of his and a pair of boxer shorts. The toast soaked up the green olive oil, the fresh red tomato pulp, the thinly sliced jamon. They ate and drank small cups of bitumen coffee. The sun was bright in the patio, the water in the fountain flat as glass, birds swooped between the pillars. They could not eat slowly enough for this to last longer than twenty minutes.

The car's windscreen framed their view of the city, a documentary so dull, of people going about their business, that its audience could not believe that this was what it had all been about. There must be more to it than shopping, having your hair done and painting a door.

'Did it happen?' asked Consuelo.

'It happened,' he said, and held her hand.

'What now?'

'I have to think where I went wrong,' said Falcon. 'I have to retrace my thoughts to find the deviation point.'

'What do I tell Inspector Jefe Tirado?'

'Let him carry on,' said Falcon. 'He'll have his own way of doing things, and he's probably got as good a chance of success as we have.'

'He might be concentrating too much on the Russians.'

'I'll put him right about that.'

He came off Avenida Kansas City and went into Santa Clara, found her street.

'I can't stop thinking that I've ruined you,' she said.

'You said that last night, Consuelo, and I told you…'

'You corrupted yourself because of me,' she said. 'I forced you to join hands with gangsters and made you complicit in the kind of aberration you're paid to investigate, and I can't tell you how…'

'Francisco Falcon and I used to play chess together,' he said. 'I remember one time when he forced me into a position where the only move I could make would get me deeper into trouble, and, having made the move, his response meant that, again, I had to do something which made things even worse. And so it went on to the inevitable checkmate. That's what's been happening here. Once I'd made the mistake of believing that the Russians had taken Dario, I drew us both into a series of inexorable moves. You didn't ruin me. I ruined myself with a blinkered approach. I panicked because…'

'Because Dario means almost as much to you as he does to me,' said Consuelo. 'And I think it brought back the horror of what happened to Raul's child, Arturo, too. That was the first time I fell for you, four years ago, when we asked each other: What happened to that little boy? And that's partly why you did it: all that terrible stuff came back to you.'

Falcon put his foot on the brake. The car eased to a halt in the middle of the road. He stared vacantly down the shaded street. The street where Consuelo lived.

'How could I forget it?' he said to himself. 'How could I possibly have forgotten that?'

A car pulled up behind them and, when its driver saw that nobody was going to get out, honked its horn. Falcon pulled over.

'It happened in the Plaza San Lorenzo,' he said. 'I got the call just before we met at the Bar La Eslava. The voice said: "Something will happen. When it does, you will know that you are to blame because you will recognize it. But there'll be no discussion and no negotiation because you'll never hear from us again."'

'You'll recognize it?' she repeated. 'And what did you think they meant by that at the time?'

'I don't know that I did think about it that much,' said Falcon. 'It was just another threatening phone call. I'd had several.'

'You'd been somewhere that night.'

'Madrid. On the train. I had a call on the AVE telling me to keep my nose out of other people's business.'

'What was the business you were going to do in Madrid?'

'Yes,' he said slowly. 'Police business and… other business.'

'The same business you were on when you went to London and Dario was abducted?'

'Exactly that,' said Falcon. 'I thought the call I received on the AVE was because I was pushing Marisa Moreno to talk to me. So when I got back to Seville I went to see her again before I went to meet you, just so that she knew I wasn't scared by the calls. I even told her I'd be waiting for a call from her people. So when I got that call just as I came into the Plaza San Lorenzo I didn't think about it. My brain made the automatic connection back to Marisa.'

'But they weren't Marisa's people.'

'And by going to London I disobeyed their instructions to keep my nose out of their business.'

'And who are they?'

'I'm not quite sure,' said Falcon. 'Let me use your mobile.'

'But do you know why Dario was taken?'

'I think,' said Falcon, punching out a text to Yacoub, 'that it was done so that my attention would be diverted elsewhere.'

'You're saying things without saying anything, Javier.'

'Because I can't,' he said and sent the text.

Need to talk. Call me. J.

'But you think you know who took Dario?' asked Consuelo.

'I'm not precisely sure who would have done the job, but I know the group who ordered it.'

'And they are?' said Consuelo, grabbing his head, turning it towards her. 'You don't want to tell me, do you, Javier? What could be worse than the Russian mafia?'

'This time I'm going to get my intelligence right,' said Falcon. 'I'm not making the same mistake twice.' Crawling along Avenida Kansas City looking for a public phone. The heat oppressive. Falcon alone now. The text back from Yacoub had told him that he was in a hotel in Marbella and gave the telephone number of a Spanish mobile to use. Falcon gave up looking, went to the railway station.

'What are you doing in Marbella?' asked Falcon.

'Business. I mean, clothes,' said Yacoub. 'It's a small fashion show, but I always pick up a lot of work for the factory here.'

'Is Abdullah with you?'

'No, I left him in London. He's going back to Rabat,' said Yacoub. 'Why all the questions?'

'There's been a development. We need to talk face to face.'

'I don't know whether I can get all the way to Seville,' said Yacoub. 'That's three hours in the car.'

'How about half way?'

'I'm on the road to Malaga now.'

'Could you get to Osuna?' asked Falcon. 'That's about a hundred and fifty kilometres from Malaga.'

'When?'

'I'll call you with a time. I haven't been into the office yet.' As he was leaving the station he picked up a message from Mark Flowers asking for a meeting in the usual place. Falcon was desperate to get to the office, but the river was on the way.

Ten minutes later he parked by the bullring, crossed the Paseo Cristobal Colon and trotted down the steps to their bench. Flowers was waiting.

'I haven't got much time,' said Falcon.

'Nor have I,' said Flowers. 'These Russians holding the boy…'

'What are you looking at them for?'

'I thought you wanted to find Consuelo's kid?'

'Right,' said Falcon, needing to think about Flowers's relationship to this before he told him anything important. 'A lot on my plate, Mark. Long nights.'

'I need some help.'

'Does that mean you've been given permission to help me?'

'I don't always need permission,' said Flowers.

Falcon briefed him on the power struggle between Leonid Revnik and Yuri Donstov, only giving him as much detail as Pablo of the CNI had told him and not touching on any of the developments of last night. He couldn't afford to have that knowledge swimming around in Flowers's head.

'And you don't know which group has the boy?'

'Either or neither,' said Falcon.

'But the threatening phone calls were about what exactly?'

'Initially they wanted me to stop investigating Marisa Moreno and thereby make a connection through her to them and the Seville bombing,' said Falcon. 'But then they identified me at the scene of Vasili Lukyanov's accident and saw an opportunity to get their disks back.'

'Which would allow them to pressurize I4IT and Horizonte in whatever business they're doing,' said Flowers. 'So why neither? You said: "Either or neither".'

'The threatening phone calls are unidentifiable. I've been guessing that it's the Russians, but it could just as easily be something to do with… other things.'

'Yacoub, you mean?' said Flowers immediately. 'And you've heard nothing since the kidnap?'

'One of the calls said I would never hear from them again.'

'Can you get me copies of these disks?'

'What for?'

'You, as an inspector jefe, can't be seen to be negotiating with criminal gangs, but there's nothing to stop me in my line of work.'

'Is this your profound moral certitude coming out again?' asked Falcon.

'I wish I'd never said that.'

'The disks are evidence.'

'Just copies, Javier. Copies.'

'You want me to start making copies of certified evidence in a busy Jefatura?'

'It's dead in there at lunchtime,' said Flowers. 'If you want me to find the boy, you've got to give me the tools.'

'I'll see what I can do,' said Javier, who was feeling a strong desire to get away from Flowers, something smelling very bad about his request. It was 1.30 p.m. by the time he got to the Jefatura. Cristina Ferrera was alone in the office. He told her he'd heard from Ramirez about Carlos Puerta and asked if there'd been any developments on the various murders.

'We picked up some further sightings of El Pulmon after he left his vehicle yesterday afternoon,' said Ferrera. 'He bought a bottle of water on Avenida Ramon y Cajal and was seen washing himself off in the street. He was spotted again, still stripped to the waist, running down Calle Enramadilla. The last sighting was in the bus station in the Plaza San Sebastian.'

'That sounds as if he was getting out of town.'

'They're still working the bus station, but at some point he must have got a T-shirt because we're not picking up any more sightings of someone stripped to the waist.'

He got her to check the arrival time of the I4IT private jet in Seville and went down to the computer room. No natural light. Banks of computers. Young faces lit by grey light coming from the screens. The Inspector Jefe told him that they'd been working on the disks since eight thirty that morning. At eleven thirty they'd brought in a couple of mathematicians from the university. By midday they were in touch with Interpol to see if they'd cracked any Russian mafia codes recently. They hadn't heard anything back.

'How urgent is this?' asked the IT chief.

'There's a late afternoon meeting between a Spanish business consortium and the town hall, which we believe the Russian mafia are trying to influence,' said Falcon. 'We assume this because some of the participants in that meeting feature in the sex footage on the disks. We think that the two encrypted disks you're working on contain "associated material" and we'd like to know what it is before the meeting takes place.'

Back up to his office. Ferrera with news of a revised flight plan logged by the pilot of the private jet. It was now due to arrive at Seville airport at 19.00 this evening. Falcon's mobile vibrated. His brother, Paco.

'El Pulmon,' he said. 'Are you still interested in finding him?'

'You've had a tip-off?'

'Not exactly,' said Paco. 'But I've managed to find out that the only guy he's kept in touch with in the bullfight business is another gypsy, a brilliant horseman, who looks after the animals on a finca in the Serrania de Ronda.'

Falcon took down the address, hung up, began to plan his afternoon.

'Where's Ramirez?' he asked.

'Lunch with Serrano and Baena,' said Ferrera.

'Ask them to come back here as soon as they can. We might have a lead on El Pulmon.'

The mobile vibrated again; he put it to his ear without checking the screen.

'I hope you haven't forgotten about us,' said the voice.

'You said you'd call. I've been waiting,' said Falcon, going into his office, closing the door.

'You've got the disks?'

'No, they're in use. They're being examined. I don't have access to them.'

'You'll never crack that code,' said the voice. 'We have the resources to pay for the best minds in the business. You'll be doing better than MI6 if you crack it… and they've been working on it for three years.'

'The process is not in my hands,' said Falcon. 'And even if it was and I could access those disks I'd still be waiting for you to deliver on your promise.'

'Our promise?'

'I delivered those disks, but you haven't kept up your end of the deal.'

'But there was no boy,' said the voice. 'And we saved your lives.'

'If you wanted to get your hands on those disks you were always going to have to do that,' said Falcon. 'Now you have what you want and I have nothing.'

'You're negotiating with us?' asked the voice, perplexed.

'You want those two remaining disks,' said Falcon. 'I want the Seville bombers. That means: the two men who masqueraded as building inspectors and the three electricians who planted the device. I also want to know where I can find Nikita Sokolov.'

'You're being very demanding, Inspector Jefe.'

'And I want the person who murdered Esteban Calderon's wife in her apartment early in the morning of 8th June this year.'

'The judge murdered her himself,' said the voice. 'He's confessed.'

'I don't know where you heard that from,' said Falcon. 'Maybe your source in the Jefatura is not so reliable. That was the prime reason why Marisa Moreno was murdered, wasn't it?'

'Why do you think we had anything to do with that?'

'Nikita Sokolov,' said Falcon, and left it at that, hoped that would be enough to persuade the voice that he knew more than he did.

'Sokolov is not one of ours.'

'But he was.'

'I'll have to get back to you.'

'And before you deliver on Sokolov, you can ask him where his two friends are, the ones he used to cut up Marisa Moreno with a chain saw.'

'This is a lot of people,' said the voice. 'This is… two, five, six, seven – nine people you want in return for the two disks. I'll have to come back to you, but I can assure you that Senor Revnik will not be happy about this.'

'There's no rush.'

'I don't follow you.'

'If, as you say, we'll never crack the code on those two disks, then we have all the time in the world.'