The Ignoranceof Blood

5

Calle Bustos Tavera, Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 15.50 hrs

There were two people in the world for whom Falcon would drop everything. One was Consuelo Jimenez and the other was Yacoub Diouri. Ever since he'd tracked down Yacoub four years ago he'd become the younger brother Falcon had never had. Because of Yacoub's own complicated past he'd had a special understanding of the complexities of the family horrors that had led to Falcon's complete mental breakdown back in 2001. In gradually revealing themselves to each other, Yacoub had become synonymous with the reassertion of sanity in Falcon's mind. Now, in the wake of the Seville bombing, he was even more than a friend and brother. He had become Falcon's spy. The Spanish intelligence agency, the CNI, in their sudden, desperate need for agents in the Arab countries nearest their borders, had researched the special relationship between Falcon and Yacoub Diouri. Having seen other Western intelligence agencies fail in their bid to recruit Yacoub, they'd used Falcon to bring him into their fold.

It was for this reason that, when Falcon received a text from Yacoub Diouri as he stood in the courtyard outside Marisa's studio, he went immediately in search of a public telephone. They hadn't spoken since the short break in Essaouira last month. Their only communication had been on 'business', via the intelligence service's encrypted website. The CNI had insisted on zero physical contact with Yacoub since he'd successfully penetrated the radical Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, the GICM, in the days after the Seville bombing. It was this group which had been storing a hundred kilos of the high explosive, hexogen, in the basement mosque in a residential quarter of Seville. Yacoub had found out how that hexogen was going to be used, and in doing so the CNI were concerned that his cover had been blown. There had been some tense days in Paris when they thought that their new agent might be assassinated. Their fears had been groundless. Yacoub returned to Rabat, but the CNI were still so nervous that the only contact they'd allowed was on Falcon's August holiday, which had been arranged in April, two months before the recruitment of Yacoub Diouri.

It took him a while to find a public phone. Falcon understood from the text, which they'd arranged between themselves in Essaouira, that this was to be a private conversation and he should not to use his home phone or mobile to make the call.

'I'm in Madrid,' said Yacoub, with a quiver in his voice.

'You sound nervous.'

'We have to meet.'

'When?'

'Now… as soon as possible. I couldn't warn you before because… well, you know why.'

'I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to get away at such short notice.'

'I'm not asking you to do this for no reason at all, Javier. It's complicated and important. It's the most important thing that's happened so far.'

'Is this business?'

'It's business and it's personal.'

Falcon had something else 'personal' going on tonight. He was supposed to be having dinner with Consuelo, just the two of them. Another assignation in the gradual process of their coming together.

'Are you talking about tonight?' asked Falcon.

'Earlier.'

'It sounds like you want me to catch the next possible train.'

'That would be good,' said Yacoub. 'It's that important.'

'I'll have to work up a plausible reason for…'

'You're in the middle of an international investigation. There must be a hundred reasons for you to come to Madrid. Call me when you know which train you're on. I'll let you know where I'm going to be. And, Javier… don't tell anyone that you're coming to see me.'

It was strange how, even after all this time, there were still certain moments which demanded an immediate cigarette. He drove to the Santa Justa station, got caught in traffic and called Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita, said he needed to talk to him about Marisa Moreno's evidence. Did he have some time this evening? Zorrita was surprised; the case was locked off. Falcon said he had other things to discuss as well. They arranged to meet as close to 7 p.m. as possible.

A thought came to him as he replayed Yacoub's conversation. He wondered if this 'business and personal' problem was related to Yacoub's homosexuality. Although Yacoub was a happily married man with two children, he had this other secret life which, to the radical Islamic GICM, would be unacceptable.

The traffic opened up. Falcon moved on, put a call through to his second-in-command, Inspector Jose Luis Ramirez, whose usual stolid pugnacity had given way to a mixture of anger and excitement after viewing the disks they'd found in Vasili Lukyanov's briefcase.

'You won't believe this shit,' he said. 'A councillor with two girls at the same time. A town planner giving it to a teenager in the ass. A building inspector snorting cocaine off a black girl's tits. And that's the mild stuff. This will crack the Costa del Sol wide open, if it gets out.'

'Don't let it. You know the rules. Only one computer in our department -'

'Relax, Javier. It's all under control.'

'I'm not coming back in today,' said Falcon. 'Am I going to see you tomorrow?'

'Elvira's out. It's quiet here. I'll be here in the morning and I'll stay if you want me to, but I'd rather not.'

'Let's see how it goes,' said Falcon. 'I hope you can have a nice weekend.'

'Hold on a sec, the GRECO guy, Vicente Cortes, was in here earlier looking for you. He wanted to tell you that he's had a report about a Russian who was found up in the hills behind San Pedro de Alcantara, with a nine-millimetre bullet in the back of his head. Alexei Somebody. A big friend of the guy you found on the motorway with a steel rod through his heart. Mean anything?'

'More to Cortes than to me,' said Falcon, and hung up. At the Santa Justa station, Falcon found that the next AVE to Madrid was at 16.30, which would put him there just in time for his meeting with Inspector Jefe Zorrita. He called Yacoub on a phone in the station, trying to work out when he could get back to Seville and whether it would still be possible to make it to Consuelo's for dinner. Wanting that. Needing that. Even though progress was slow.

'See Zorrita,' said Yacoub. 'I'll let you know where to go afterwards.'

Falcon ate something unmemorable, drank a beer, sunk a cafe solo and boarded the train. He wanted to sleep but there was too much brain interference. A woman sitting opposite him was talking to her daughter on her mobile. She was getting remarried and her daughter wasn't happy about it. Complicated lives, getting more complicated by the minute.

The prison governor called to say that Esteban Calderon had put in a request to see a psychologist.

The train slashed through the brown, parched plains of northern Andalucia.

Where had the rain gone?

'He won't see the prison psychologist,' said the governor. 'He talks about this woman you know, but he can't remember her name.'

'Alicia Aguado,' said Falcon.

'You're not the investigating officer in Senor Calderon's case, are you?'

'No, but I'm seeing the officer who is this evening. I'll make sure he contacts you.'

He hung up. The woman opposite had finished speaking to her daughter. She spun the mobile on the table with a long, painted nail. She looked up. The sort of woman who always knows when she's under observation. Dangerous, save-my-life eyes, thought Falcon. The daughter was right to be concerned.

Up since before three and still not even lethargic. He closed his eyes to the dangerous ones opposite, but never reached below that confused state on the edge of oblivion. Now that he was worried he might not see her this evening, Consuelo surfaced in his mind. They'd first met five years ago when she'd been the prime suspect in the murder of her husband, the restaurateur Raul Jimenez. A year later they'd met again and had a fling. Falcon had been hurt when she broke it off, but, as he'd recently discovered, Consuelo had had her own problems, which had sent her to the consulting rooms of the blind clinical psychologist, Alicia Aguado. Now, for the last three months, they'd been trying again. He could tell she was happier. She was easing him into her life gradually: only seeing him at weekends and quite often in family situations, with her sister and the children. He didn't mind that. His work had been punishing. Consuelo, too, was expanding the restaurant business left to her by Raul Jimenez. Falcon enjoyed the feeling of belonging that he got from sitting at her family table. He wouldn't have minded more sex, but the food was always good, and in their moments alone they were getting on.

Thoughts of Consuelo always seemed to involve Yacoub. The two were inextricably linked in his mind. The one had led to the other. Falcon and Consuelo had first been drawn together by their fascination with the fate of Raul Jimenez's youngest son from his first marriage, Arturo, who'd vanished in the mid 1960s never to be seen again. The boy had been kidnapped by a Moroccan businessman as an act of revenge against Raul Jimenez, who had impregnated the businessman's twelve-year-old daughter and then fled back to Spain. After his brief affair with Consuelo, Falcon had set out to find Arturo, hoping that this would bring her back to him. It hadn't worked, but the reward had been to discover that Arturo had been brought up as one of the Moroccan businessman's sons and had even been given his family name to become Yacoub Diouri.

Their strange pasts: Falcon, who had been raised in Spain by Francisco Falcon only to find that his real father was a Moroccan artist, and Yacoub, born a Spaniard, forsaken by his father Raul Jimenez, to be raised by his Moroccan abductor in Rabat, had been the bizarre foundation of their powerful friendship. And for the first time, perhaps as a result of his exhausted state, Falcon found his mildly confused mind reflecting, within the emotional compression of these unusual events, on what had happened to the child of the twelve-year-old daughter who'd been impregnated by Raul Jimenez. He must ask Yacoub.

His mobile vibrating against his chest brought him back with a start to the dusty fields flashing past. It was his police mobile and he took the call without checking the name on the screen.

'Listen, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcon. Keep your nose out of things that don't concern you.'

'Who is this?'

'You heard.'

The line went dead. He checked the number. Withheld. He folded the phone away. The woman opposite was looking at him again. Across the aisle they were watching him, too. Paranoia, that horribly infectious disease, closed in. The voice on the mobile. Had there been an accent? How had they got his police number? Something a little more uncomfortable than satisfaction eased between his shoulder blades as he realized that, in putting pressure on Marisa Moreno, he must be on the right track. He'd been dredging his mind for something to talk about to Inspector Jefe Zorrita. He didn't want to annoy him with a bunch of hairline cracks in his cast-iron case. Now things were firming up in his mind.

The train eased into the Atocha station. Falcon hadn't arrived in Madrid on the AVE for some years and as he came into the main concourse he was distracted by the continuing memorial to the victims of the 11 March 2004 bombings. He was standing there, looking at the flowers and candles, when the woman from the train appeared by his side. This was too much, he thought.

'Forgive me, now I know it must be you,' she said. 'You are Javier Falcon, aren't you? May I shake your hand and tell you how much I admire you for what you said on the television, about catching the perpetrators of the Seville bomb. Now I've seen you in the flesh, I know you won't let us down.'

He held out his hand, almost in a trance, thanked her. She smiled and brushed past him and in that moment he found that his other hand now contained a piece of folded paper. He wasn't sure who'd put it there, but he was sensible enough not to look at it. He left the station, picked up a cab to the Jefatura. The folded note gave an address just off the Plaza de la Paja in the Latina district and instructions to enter via the garage.

Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita welcomed him into his office. He was wearing a dark blue suit, a red tie and a white shirt in a way that hinted that minus the tie was about as informal as he ever got. He had his black hair combed back in rails to reveal a forehead with three lines drawn to a focal point above the bridge of his nose. It struck Falcon that there was no mistaking him for anything other than a cop. His hardness had been added in layers; the lacquer of experience. A meeting of the eyes, a handshake, dispelled any possibility that this person was a civil servant or businessman. He had seen it all, heard it all, and his whole family structure and belief system had kept him powerfully sane.

'You look tired, Javier,' he said, falling back into his chair. 'It never stops, does it?'

They looked out of the window at the bright, sunlit world that kept them so fully employed. Falcon's eyes shifted back to the desk where there was a photo of Zorrita with his wife and three children.

'I didn't want to do this over the phone,' said Falcon. 'I have enormous respect for the work you did last June under very difficult circumstances…'

'What have you found?' asked Zorrita, cutting through the preliminaries, interested to hear what he could possibly have missed.

'As yet… nothing.'

Zorrita sat back, hands clasped over his flat, hard stomach. Not so concerned now that he knew he wasn't going to have to confront a failing on his part.

'My interest in this case is not to get a wife-beater and suspected murderer off the hook,' said Falcon.

'That man is a cabron,' said Zorrita with profound distaste from behind his family photograph. 'A nasty, arrogant… cabron.'

'He's beginning to recognize that himself,' said Falcon.

'I'll believe that when I see it,' said Zorrita, who was a man incapable of complications in his love life, because there'd only ever been one woman in it.

'The prison governor just called me to say that he's volunteered to see a shrink.'

'No amount of talking, no amount of disentangling the shit that went on between him and his parents, no amount of "light" shed on "feelings", will take away the fact that he beat that poor woman and then killed her and, if he's given half a chance, like all those other weak brutes, he'll do it again.'

'This isn't what I've come to talk to you about today,' said Falcon, seeing that this was something that stoked Zorrita up. 'Would you mind if I laid out the basic problem I've got? Some of it you'll know, but other parts of it will be news to you.'

'Go ahead,' said Zorrita, still simmering.

'As you know, the destruction of the pre-school and apartment block by the Seville bomb of 6th June, three months ago, came about as a result of the detonation, by a smaller device, of approximately one hundred kilos of hexogen. This high explosive was being stored by a logistics cell of the Moroccan terrorist group, the GICM, in the basement mosque of the building. The smaller device was comprised of Goma 2 Eco, the same explosive used in the 11th March bombings here in Madrid back in 2004. Prior to the explosion, the mosque was cased by two men masquerading as council inspectors, who, we believe, inserted some device in the fuse box, which blew and caused a power failure. These men have not been found, nor have the electricians who were brought in to repair the fuse box, restore power and do some other work, during which we believe they planted the Goma 2 Eco device in the false ceiling of the mosque.

'The idea of the so-called Catholic conspiracy was to use this outrage to blame Islamic extremists, to make it look as if they had a plan to return Andalucia to the Muslim fold. The conspirators wanted to turn public opinion in favour of a small right-wing party called Fuerza Andalucia, who, in becoming the new partner of the ruling Partido Popular, would put the conspirators in control of the Andalucian state parliament. It didn't work and the alleged masterminds of the plot – Cesar Benito, a board director of Horizonte, and Lucrecio Arenas, the ex-CEO of Banco Omni, who were Horizonte's bankers – were executed a few days after the bombing.'

'What about the Islamic calling cards left near their bodies?' asked Zorrita.

'Nobody thinks that those killings were carried out by any radical Islamist group,' said Falcon. 'It's believed they were terminated by their co-conspirators.'

'Who are, as yet, unknown.'

'We're coming to that.'

'What about the company that owned Horizonte?' said Zorrita, squinting at the evening sunlight coming in through the window. 'The media tried to make something of them – a couple of American Christian fundamentalists.'

'I4IT own Horizonte. It's an American investment group run by two born-again Christians, called Cortland Fallenbach and Morgan Havilland. They are so far removed from this situation as to be completely untouchable and, for legal reasons, we have as yet been unable to gain access to I4IT's European offices here in Madrid.'

'And presumably the lives of the Catholic Kings, as the media now calls Cesar Benito and Lucrecio Arenas, have been taken apart.'

'That has been, and still is, a time-consuming business. The CNI's banking and accounting department are working their way into the offshore world. Benito and Arenas were what are known in that world as Hen-Wees – High Net Worth Individuals. Their assets are hidden behind nominee directors and shareholders and unregistered offshore trusts. It will be pure luck if somebody manages to find something in the next six months that we can act upon.'

'So you're blocked,' said Zorrita. 'And the whole of Spain knows what Javier Falcon is after.'

'I think I only want what any police officer in my position would want,' said Falcon, leaning forward in his chair. 'To catch the people responsible for casing that mosque and planting the Goma 2 Eco device, along with the bosses who ordered them to do it.'

Zorrita held up his hand to calm Falcon down, nodded his agreement.

'You're not getting anything from the suspects in your custody and the two ringleaders have been "executed",' said Zorrita. 'So where else have you got to go?'

'I've decided to take a long look at the violence,' said Falcon. 'Where do a bunch of conspirators, sophisticated men like Lucrecio Arenas and Cesar Benito, access that sort of violence?'

'As you say, every news channel and paper, apart from the ABC, are calling this the Catholic Conspiracy. What with the national obsession with Opus Dei, the PR campaign by the Church to counteract all this has been unprecedented,' said Zorrita. 'Do Opus Dei have an Improvised Explosive Device division?'

The two men smiled at each other.

'What we do know from our suspects in custody and other inquiries is that Arenas's motivation was not his Catholic beliefs,' said Falcon. 'The Hen-Wee spoke from his heart.'

'And Cesar Benito was in construction,' said Zorrita.

'Where there's always large amounts of black money, which can be hidden away in the offshore world.'

'But you're not getting anywhere by following the money,' said Zorrita.

'Only that there's undoubtedly money-laundering involved and that both men were well set up in property in the Costa del Sol.'

'The Russian mafia,' said Zorrita. 'I know it's a knee-jerk reaction when you hear the words "money-laundering" and "Costa del Sol" in the same sentence, but after the recent Marbella town council scandal…'

Falcon nodded.

'And you think they're going to be easier to penetrate than the offshore world?' said Zorrita.

'Let's just take a look at the violence,' said Falcon, holding up a finger. 'In that period around the 6th June bombing there were five expressions of violence. The first was the murder of Tateb Hassani, who was vital to the conspiracy for his drafting in Arabic script of the extremists' plans for taking over Andalucia. He was found on the Seville dump, poisoned and mutilated, on the morning of the explosion. Murdered because a) he knew too much, b) he would always be a vulnerable point to the conspiracy and c) it got everybody's hands dirty. The second expression of violence was the bomb itself which, as I said, was designed to point the finger at Muslim extremism whilst increasing the prestige of Fuerza Andalucia, making them the preferred partners of the ruling Partido Popular.'

'The third, presumably, was Esteban Calderon's murder of his wife,' said Zorrita, 'which derailed the investigation into the Seville bombing.'

'And four and five were the executions of Lucrecio Arenas and Cesar Benito,' said Falcon. 'They had to be killed once we'd caught the other half of the conspiracy, because there were direct links between them. It would only be a matter of time before Arenas and Benito gave up the bombers they had employed.'

'So there's a clear motive in every case.'

'Except Calderon,' said Falcon.

'He was beating her, that was clear, and he's never denied it,' said Zorrita. 'If he didn't kill her, then why didn't he just call the police when he discovered her dead body in their apartment? Why did he try to dispose of her body in the river?'

'He made a serious error of judgement.'

'You're telling me.'

'Another angle,' said Falcon. 'What was the worst thing that could have happened to our investigation of the Seville bombing?'

'I agree, losing Calderon at that stage was a disaster for you.'

'He was at the top of his game,' said Falcon. 'Giving good direction. Keeping the media away from my squad, the counter-terrorism guys and the CNI. If you were at the zenith of your career, would you choose that moment to murder your wife?'

'He chose that moment to start abusing her.'

'And that was important.'

'Why?'

'Because I think that when Marisa Moreno saw Ines in the Murillo Gardens she noticed somehow that she was being abused,' said Falcon. 'I've just been speaking to her, getting her family background. Her natural mother "disappeared" in Cuba. Her attitude to her dead father was not exactly respectful. He was, like Calderon, an inveterate womanizer. She had more time for her Sevillana stepmother than she did for him.'

'This isn't going to stand up anywhere near a court, Javier.'

'I know; all I'm trying to do here is find weaknesses. The only killing about which there's a very slight doubt in my mind is that of Ines.'

'But not in my mind, Javier.'

'Two hours after I'd been to see Marisa this afternoon I got an anonymous phone call telling me to keep my nose out of things that were not my concern.'

'It wasn't from me,' said Zorrita, deadpan.

They laughed.

'What else did Marisa tell you?' asked Zorrita. 'You must have something more than that.'

'I decided to go to see Marisa to ram a stick in the wasps' nest, to see what happened,' said Falcon. 'The only thing I had to go on was something one of my officers found while trying to dig up some dirt on her.'

'Marisa had no criminal record, I know that,' said Zorrita.

'The only thing my officer found was that Marisa had reported her sister missing.'

'When?'

'Eight years ago.'

'You really are clutching at straws, Javier.'

Falcon was tempted to tell Zorrita about Marisa's wood carving, but another glance at the family photo on the desktop persuaded him otherwise. He felt weak in front of Zorrita's steadiness, but still resisted the temptation to point up all the other little flaws he'd found.

'Marisa is no fool,' said Falcon. 'If you despised your womanizing father, would you be drawn to an incorrigible womanizer yourself?'

'I doubt it would be the first time it had happened,' said Zorrita, still feeling as solid as a rock.

'Her sister went missing again, but this time she was over eighteen.'

'So Marisa didn't go to the police.'

'Her sister is the only family Marisa's got. Father, mother and stepmother are dead. Would you just shrug your shoulders if your sister ran off again?'

'If I didn't care, yes,' said Zorrita.

'She cares,' said Falcon.

'You've still got a long way to go with this, Javier.'

'I know,' said Falcon. 'I just wanted to ask you if you'd mind me digging around.'

'Dig away, Javier. The way you're going, you'll come out in Buenos Aires.'