The Ignoranceof Blood

2

Outside Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 08.30 hrs

The sun had been up for twenty-five minutes over the flat fields of the fertile flood plain of the Guadalquivir river. It was close to 30°C when Falcon drove back into the city at 8.30 a.m. At home he lay on his bed fully clothed in the air-con and tried to get some sleep. It was hopeless. He drank another coffee before heading into the office.

The short drive took him down by the river, past the spearhead railings and gates to the Maestranza bullring, whose whitewashed facade, smooth and brilliant as the icing of a cake, had its porthole windows and dark red doors and shutters piped with ochre. The high phoenix palms near the Toro de Oro sagged against the already bleached sky and as he crossed the San Telmo bridge the slow water was almost green and had no autumnal sparkle.

The emptiness of the Plaza de Cuba and the shopping streets leading off it was a reminder that it was still a summer heat beating down on the bludgeoned city. Sevillanos had returned from their August holidays to find their new vitality sapped by suffocating apartments, drained by power cuts and the old city centre crammed with hot, unbreathable air. The end-of-summer storms, which scrubbed the cobbles clean, hosed down the grateful trees, rinsed the uninspired atmosphere and brought colour back to the faded sky, had not arrived. With no respite since May, ladies' fans no longer opened with the customary snap and their wrists trembled with a fluttering palsy at the thought of another month of endless palpitations.

Nobody in the office at 10.15 a.m. The paperwork from the 6th June Seville bombing still stacked knee-high around his desk. The court case against the two remaining suspects was going to take months, possibly years, to construct and there was no guarantee of success. The wall chart pinned up opposite Falcon's desk with all its names and links said it all – there was a gap in what the media were calling the Catholic Conspiracy, or rather, not so much a gap as a dead end.

Every time he sat at his desk the same five facts presented themselves to him: * 1) Although the two suspects they had in custody had been successfully linked to the two ringleaders of the plot – all four were right-wing and staunch Catholics, hence the name of the conspiracy – neither of them had any idea who'd planted the bomb, which on 6th June had destroyed an apartment building and a nearby pre-school in a residential area of Seville. * 2) The ringleaders themselves, Lucrecio Arenas and Cesar Benito, had been murdered before they could be arrested. The former had been shot just as he was about to dive into his swimming pool in Marbella and the latter had had his throat so brutally chopped with the blade of a hand that he'd choked to death in his hotel room in Madrid. * 3) Over the last three months a plethora of agencies, at the behest of the board of directors, had gone through the offices of the Banco Omni in Madrid, where Lucrecio Arenas had been the Chief Executive Officer. They'd interviewed all his old colleagues and business contacts, searched his properties and grilled his family, but had found nothing. * 4) They'd also gone through the Horizonte Group's building in Barcelona where Cesar Benito had been an architect and board director of the construction division. They'd searched his apartments, houses in the Costa del Sol and studio, and interviewed everybody he'd ever known and likewise found nothing. * 5) They had tried to gain access to the I4IT (Europe) building in Madrid. This company was the European arm of an American-based investment group run by two born-again Christians from Cleveland, Ohio. They were the ultimate owners of Horizonte and, through a team of highly paid lawyers, had successfully blocked all investigations, arguing that the police had no right to enter their offices.

Every time Falcon threw himself into his chair he faced that chart and the hard brick wall behind it.

The world had moved on, as it always did, even after New York, Madrid and London, but Falcon had to mark time, wandering aimlessly in the maze of passages that the conspiracy had become. As always, he was haunted by the promise he'd made to the people of Seville in a live broadcast on 10th June: that he would find the perpetrators of the Seville bombing, even if it took him the rest of his career. That was what he faced, although he would never admit it to Comisario Elvira, when he woke up alone in the dark. He had penetrated the conspiracy, gained access to the dark castle, but it had rewarded him with nothing. Now he was reduced to hoping for 'the secret door' or 'the hidden passage' which would take him to what he could not see.

What he had noticed was that the one person, over these three long months, who was never far from his thoughts was the disgraced judge, Esteban Calderon, and, by association, the judge's girlfriend, a Cuban wood sculptor called Marisa Moreno.

'Inspector Jefe?'

Falcon looked up from the dark pit of his mind to find the wide-open face of one of his best young detectives, the ex-nun, Cristina Ferrera. There was nothing very particular about Cristina that made her attractive – the small nose, the big smile, the short, straight, dull blonde hair didn't do it. But what she had on the inside – a big heart, unshakeable moral beliefs and an extraordinary empathy – had a way of appearing on the outside. And it was that which Falcon had found so appealing during their first interview for the job she now held.

'I thought you were in here,' she said, 'but you didn't answer. Up early?'

'A colourful Russian got killed by a flying steel rod on the motorway,' said Falcon. 'Have you got anything for me?'

'Two weeks ago you asked me to look into the life of Juez Calderon's girlfriend, Marisa Moreno, to see if there was any dirt attached,' said Ferrera.

'And here I am, by remarkable coincidence, thinking about that very person,' said Falcon. 'Go on.'

'Don't get too excited.'

'I can tell from your face,' said Falcon, drifting back to the wall chart, 'that whatever it is, it's not much to show for two weeks' work.'

'Not solid work, and you know what it's like here in Seville: things take time,' said Ferrera. 'You already know she has no criminal record.'

'So what did you find?' asked Falcon, catching a different tone in her voice.

'After getting people to do a lot of rooting around in the local police archives, I've come up with a reference.'

'A reference?'

'She reported a missing person. Her sister, Margarita, back in May 1998.'

'Eight years ago?' said Falcon, looking up at the ceiling. 'Is that interesting?'

'That's the only thing I could find,' said Ferrera, shrugging. 'Margarita was seventeen and had already left school. The local police did nothing except check up on her about a month later and Marisa reported that she'd been found. Apparently, the girl had left home with a boyfriend that Marisa didn't know about. They'd gone to Madrid until their money ran out and then hitched back. That's it. End of story.'

'Well, if nothing else, it gives me an excuse to go and see Marisa Moreno,' said Falcon. 'Is that all?'

'Did you see this message from the prison governor? Your meeting with Esteban Calderon is confirmed for one o'clock this afternoon.'

'Perfect.'

Ferrera left and Falcon was once again alone in his head with Marisa Moreno and Esteban Calderon. There was an obvious reason why Calderon was never far from his thoughts: the brilliant but arrogant instructing judge of the 6th June bombing had been found, days after the explosion, at an absolutely crucial moment of their investigation, trying to dispose of his prosecutor wife in the Guadalquivir river. Calderon's wife, Ines, was Javier Falcon's ex-wife. As the Homicide chief, Falcon had been called to the scene. When they'd opened the shroud around the body and he'd found himself looking down into Ines's beautiful but inanimate features he'd fainted. Given the circumstances, the investigation into Ines's murder had been handed over to an outsider, Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita from Madrid. In an interview with Marisa Moreno, Zorrita had discovered that, on the night of the murder, Calderon had left her, taken a cab home and let himself into his double-locked apartment. Zorrita had drawn together an extraordinary array of lurid detail involving domestic and sexual abuse, and extracted a confession from a stunned Calderon, who had been subsequently charged. Since then Falcon had spoken to the judge only once, in a police cell, shortly after the event. Now he was nervous, not because he feared a resurgence of the earlier emotions, but because, after all his file reading, he was hoping he'd found the smallest chink into the heart of the conspiracy.

The internal phone rang. Comisario Elvira told Falcon that Vicente Cortes from the Costa del Sol GRECO had arrived. Falcon checked with the forensics, who'd so far only found fingerprints that matched those of Vasili Lukyanov. They were about to start work on the money, but they needed Falcon for the key. He went down to the evidence room.

'When you're done, tell me and I'll put the money in the safe until we can get it transferred to the bank,' said Falcon. 'What about the briefcase?'

'The most interesting things in there were twenty-odd disks,' said Jorge. 'We played one. It looked like hidden-camera footage of guys having sex with young women, snorting cocaine, some S amp;M stuff, that kind of thing.'

'You haven't transferred it to a computer, have you?'

'No, just played it on a DVD player.'

'Where are the disks now?'

'On top of the safe there.'

Falcon locked them inside, took the lift up to Comisario Elvira's office where he was introduced to Vicente Cortes from the Organized Crime Response Squad, and Martin Diaz from the Organized Crime Intelligence Centre, CICO. Both men were young, in their mid-thirties. Cortes was a trained accountant who, from the way his shoulders and biceps strained against the material of his white shirt, looked as if he'd been put through a few assault courses since he'd graduated from number-crunching. He had brown hair swept back, green eyes and a mouth that was permanently on the brink of a sneer. Diaz was a computer specialist and a linguist with Russian and Arabic up his sleeve. He wore a suit which he probably had to have made especially for him, being close to two metres tall. He played basketball to professional standard. He was dark-haired with brown eyes and a slight stoop, probably earned by trying to listen to his wife, half a metre shorter than him. This was the reality of catching organized criminals – accountants and computer whizzes, rather than special forces and weapons-trained cops.

Falcon delivered his report to the three men. Elvira, with his dark, laser-parted hair, kept straightening the files on his desk and fingering the neat and perfect knot of his blue tie. He was conservative, conventional and played everything by the book, with one eye on his job and the other on his boss, the Jefe Superior, Andres Lobo.

'Vasili Lukyanov ran a number of puti clubs on the Costa del Sol and some of the main roads around Granada,' said Cortes. 'People-trafficking, sexual slavery and prostitution were his main -'

'Sexual slavery?' asked Falcon.

'Nowadays you can rent a girl for any amount of time you like. She'll do everything, from housework to full sex. When you get bored of her, you hand her back and get another one. She costs fifteen hundred euros per week,' said Cortes. 'The girls are traded in markets. They may come from Moldova, Albania, or even Nigeria, but they're sold and resold as much as ten times before they get here. Normal price is around three thousand euros, depending on looks. By the time the girl arrives in Spain she may have accumulated sales of thirty thousand – which she has to pay off. I know it's illogical, but that's only to you and me, not to people like Vasili Lukyanov.'

'We found some cocaine in his car. Is that a sideline or…?'

'He's recently moved into cocaine distribution. Or rather, his gang leader has struck a deal for product coming in from Galicia and they've now come to some form of agreement with the Colombians with regard to their operations on the Costa del Sol.'

'So where is Lukyanov in the hierarchy?' asked Elvira.

Cortes nodded to Diaz.

'Difficult question, and we're wondering about the significance of finding him in a car bound for Seville with nearly eight million euros,' said Diaz. 'He's important. The Russians make huge profits from the sex trade, more than they make from drugs at the moment. The hierarchy has been a problem in the last year since we had Operation Wasp in 2005 and the Georgian boss of the Russian mafia here in Spain fled to Dubai.'

'Dubai?' asked Elvira.

'That's where you go nowadays if you're a criminal, a terrorist, an arms trader, a money-launderer…'

'Or a builder,' finished Cortes. 'It's the Costa del Sol of the Middle East.'

'Did that leave a power vacuum here in Spain?' asked Falcon.

'No, his position was taken over by Leonid Revnik, who was sent from Moscow to take control. It was not a popular move with the mafia soldiers on the ground, mainly because his first act was to execute two leading mafia "directors" from one of the Moscow brigades who had encroached on his turf,' said Diaz.

'They were both found bound, gagged and shot in the back of the head in the Sierra Bermeja, ten kilometres north of Estepona,' said Cortes.

'We think that it was some old feud, dating back to the 1990s in Moscow, but what it did was create nervousness among the soldiers. They found they were having to run their business and look out for revenge attacks. There have been four "disappearances" so far this year. We're not used to this level of violence. All the other mafia groups – the Turks and Italians, who run the heroin trade; the Colombians and the Galicians, who control cocaine; the Moroccans, who traffic people and hashish – none of them practise the sort of spectacular violence they use in their own countries because they see Spain as a safe haven. They followed our old, long-standing friends the Arab arms dealers, who run their global businesses from the Costa del Sol. To all of them it's just a massive laundromat to clean their money, which means they don't want to draw attention to themselves. The Russians, on the other hand, don't seem to give a damn.'

'Any idea why Vasili Lukyanov would be heading for Seville with eight million euros in his boot?' asked Elvira.

'I don't know. I'm not up to date on what's happening in Seville. It's possible that CICO in Madrid have some intelligence on what's been going on here. I've put in a request,' said Diaz. 'It wouldn't surprise me if there was a rival group opening up here. Leonid Revnik is fifty-two and old school. I think he'd be suspicious of someone like Vasili Lukyanov, who didn't come up through the Russian prison system but was an Afghan war veteran who bought his way in and works with women, which Revnik probably considers inferior, despite its profitability.'

'How profitable?' asked Elvira.

'We have four hundred thousand prostitutes here in Spain and they generate eighteen billion euros' worth of business,' said Diaz. 'We are the biggest users of prostitutes and cocaine of any country in Europe.'

'So you think Leonid Revnik despised Vasili Lukyanov, who would then have been open to offers for his expertise in a very profitable business?' said Falcon.

'Could be,' said Diaz. 'Revnik has been away in Moscow. We were expecting him back next week, but he returned early. Maybe he heard Lukyanov was making a move. I can tell you one thing for sure: Lukyanov wouldn't be going it alone. He'd need protection; but whose support he's getting, I don't know.'

'And the eight million?' asked Elvira, still not satisfied.

'That's a sort of entry fee. It forces Lukyanov to burn his bridges,' said Cortes. 'Once he's stolen that sort of money he's never going to be able to go back to Revnik.'

'The disks in the briefcase I mentioned in my initial report,' said Falcon. 'Hidden-camera stuff, older men with young girls…'

'It's how the Russians get things done. They corrupt whoever they come into contact with,' said Cortes. 'We might be about to find out how our town planners, councillors, mayors and even senior policemen spent their summer holidays.'

Comisario Elvira ran his hand over his perfectly combed hair.