The Hidden Assassins

by Robert Wilson

Manuela lay in bed alone, trying to ignore the faint click of Angel’s fingers on the keys of his laptop in another room. She blinked in the dark, holding back the full contemplation of something very horrible: the sale of her villa in El Puerto de Santa María, an hour’s drive south from Seville on the coast. The villa had been left to her by her father, and every room was packed with adolescent nostalgia. The fact that Francisco Falcón didn’t much like the place and loathed all the neighbours, the so-called Seville high society, had been erased from Manuela’s memory. She imagined her father’s spirit writhing in agony at the proposed sale. It was, however, the only way that she could see of repairing her financial situation. The banks had already called her before close of business, asking where the funds were that she’d told them to expect. It was the only solution that had come to her, in the death and debt hour of four o’clock in the morning. The estate agent had told her the obvious: the Seville property market would be stalled until further notice. She had four possible buyers for her villa, who were constantly 261 reminding her of their readiness to purchase. But could she let it go?

  Angel had been calling her all day, trying to restrain the excitement in his voice. His conversation was full of the ramifications of Rivero’s retirement and the great new hope of Fuerza Andalucía, Jesús Alarcón, who he’d been steering around all day, after interviewing him for the profile in the ABC. Angel’s media manipulation had been brilliant. He’d kept Jesús off camera when he visited the hospital and got him to talk privately to the victims and their families. His greatest coup had been to get him through to Fernando Alanis in the intensive care unit. Jesús and Fernando had talked. No cameras. No reporters. And they’d hit it off. It couldn’t have been better. Later, when the Mayor and a camera crew got through to intensive care, Fernando had mentioned Jesús Alarcón, on camera, as the only politician who hadn’t sought to make any media capital out of the victims’ misery. It was pure luck, but a total masterstroke for Angel’s campaign. The Mayor had just managed to squeeze back the nervous smile that wanted to creep across his face.

  Consuelo couldn’t stop herself. Why should she? She couldn’t sleep. What better way to remember carefree sleep than to watch the experts; the calm faces of the innocents, eyelids trembling, softly breathing, deep and dreamless in their beds. Ricardo was first, the fourteen-year-old, who’d reached the gawky age, where his face was stretching in odd directions, trying to find its adult mould. This wasn’t such a peaceful age, with too many hormones shooting around the body and sexual yearning fighting with football in his mind. Matías was twelve and seemed to be growing up quicker than his elder brother; easier to walk in somebody else’s footsteps than to tread out one’s own, as Ricardo had done with no father to guide him.

  Consuelo knew where this was heading, though. Ricardo and Matías took care of themselves. It was Darío, her youngest at eight years old, who drew her in. She loved his face, his blond hair, his amber-coloured eyes, his perfect little mouth. It was in his room that she sat down in the middle of the floor, half a metre from his bed, looking into his untroubled features and easing herself into the uneasy state she craved. It started in her mouth, with the lips that had kissed his baby head. She drank it down her throat and felt the twinge in her breasts. It settled in her stomach, high up around the diaphragm, an ache that transmitted its pain from her viscera to the tingling surface of her skin. She scoffed at Alicia Aguado’s questioning. What was wrong with such a love as this?

  Fernando Alanis sat in the intensive care unit of the Hospital de la Macarena. He watched his daughter’s vital signs on the monitors. Grey numbers and green lines that told him good things, that she was capable of lighting up a machine, if not her father. His mind crashed and fell about like a hopeless drunk in a binfilled narrow alleyway. One moment it was gasping at the catastrophic destruction of the apartment building, the next it was buckling at the sight of four covered bodies outside the pre-school. He still couldn’t quite believe what he had lost. Was this a mechanism of the mind that suspended things too unbearable to comprehend, almost to the point of a barely remembered nig htmare? He’d been told by people who’d survived bad falls from scaffolding that the rush of the ground coming to meet you was not so terrifying. The horror was in the eventual awakening. And with that he would lurch sickeningly forward to the bruised and battered face of his daughter, her oval mouth slack against the clear plastic concertina of tube. Everything inside him felt too big. His organs were jostled by the colossal inflation of hate and despair which had no direction, other than to make themselves as uncomfortable as possible. He went back to a time when his family and the building had been intact, but the thought of the third child he’d been proposing made him break down inside. He couldn’t bear to take himself back to a state that would never exist again, he couldn’t bear the notion of never seeing Gloria and Pedro again, he couldn’t stomach the finality of that word ‘never’.

  He concentrated on his daughter’s beating heart. The jumping line. Be-dum, be-dum, be-dum. The thready skip of the green fuse against the terminal blackness of the monitor made him rear back in his seat. It was all too fragile. Anything could happen in this life and did…and had. Perhaps the answer was to retreat into emptiness. Feel nothing. But that held its terror, too. The monstrous negativity of the black hole in space, sucking in all light. He breathed in. The air expanded his chest. He breathed out. His stomach wall relaxed. This, for the time being, was the only way to proceed.

  Inés lay where she had fallen. She hadn’t moved since he’d left. Her body was a miasma of pain from the pummelling it had sustained from his hard, white knuckles. Nausea humped in her stomach. He’d punched her through her flailing hands; one of her fingers had been bent back. In an escalation of his fury he’d torn off his belt and lashed her, with the buckle digging into her buttocks and thighs. With each stroke he’d told her through clenched teeth: ‘Never…speak…to my girlfriend…like that…ever again. Do you hear me? Never…again.’ She’d rolled to the corner of the room to get away from him. He’d stood over her, breathing heavily, not so different from when he was sexually aroused. Their eyes met. He pointed his finger at her as if he might shoot her. She didn’t pick up what he said. She’d taken in the purity of his hatred from his blank, basilisk eyes, the colourless lips and his red, swollen neck.

  No sooner had he left the apartment than she started to rebuild her illusion. His anger was understandable. The whore had told him some nonsense and set him against her. That was the way these things worked. He was just fucking the whore, but she wanted more now. She wanted to be in the wife’s shoes, on the wife’s side of the bed, but she was just the whore so she had to play her little games. Inés hated the whore. A line came into her head from an old conversation with Javier: ’Most people are killed by people they know, because it is only they who are capable of arousing the passionate emotions that can lead to uncontrollable violence.’ Inés knew Esteban. My God, did she know Esteban Calderón. She’d seen him gilded with the laurel wreath, and cringing like the village cur. That was why she could arouse such emotions in him. Only she. That old cliché holds true. Love and hate have the same source. He would love her again once that black bitch stopped meddling with his mind.

  She raised herself on to all fours. The pain made her gasp. Blood dripped from her mouth. She must have bitten her tongue. She crawled up the bed to stand on her feet. She unzipped her dress and let it fall. Unhooking her bra was a torture, bending to slip off her panties nearly made her faint. She stood in front of the mirror. A massive bruise spread across her torso where he’d hit her that morning. Her chest ached through to her spine. A criss-cross of weals covered her buttocks and upper thighs, broken by punctured skin where the buckle had dug in. She put a finger to one of these marks and pressed. The pain was exquisite. Esteban, in that passionate moment, really had given her his fullest attention.

  Javier lay in the dark, with images from the late news still present in his mind: the demolished building under the
surgical glare of the floodlights; the smashed plate-glass windows of a number of shops with Moroccan wares for sale; the fire brigade spraying a flaming apartment which had been fire-bombed by kids on the rampage; a cut, bruised and swollen-faced Moroccan boy, who’d been set upon by neo-Nazi thugs with clubs and chains; a butcher’s selling halal meat with a car rammed through the metal blinds of the store front. Falcón shunted all the images out of his mind until all that was left was the ultimate remnant of terror—deep uncertainty.

  He cast his mind back to before the bombing, looking for a clue amongst all those extraordinary emotions that might help him make sense of what was happening. His mind played tricks. Uncertainty had that effect. Human beings always believe that an event has been prefigured in some way. It’s the necessary part of rediscovering the pattern. Mankind cannot bear too much chaos.

  He had the illusion of the impenetrable darkness receding from him, like the endlessly expanding universe. This was the new certainty, the one that sent all the old narratives, with which we structured our lives, down into the black hole of human understanding. We have to be even stronger now that science has told us that time is unreliable, and even light behaves differently if you turn your back. It was a terrible irony that, just as science was pushing back the limits of our comprehension, religion, the greatest and oldest of human narratives, was fighting back. Was it because of resentment at being found on the discard pile of modern European life that religion was making a stand? Falcón closed his eyes and concentrated on relaxing each part of his body until, finally, he drifted away from the unanswerable questions and into a deep sleep. He was a man who had made up his mind and had a car arriving early to take him to the airport.

  The car, a black Mercedes with tinted windows, turned up at 6 a.m. with Pablo sitting in the back in a dark suit with an open-neck shirt.

  ‘How did your talk with Yacoub go last night?’ asked Pablo, as the car pulled away.

  ‘Given that a bomb went off in Seville yesterday, he knows I’m not coming over on a social visit.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He was pleased that we were going to see each other, but he knows there’s an ulterior motive.’

  ‘He’s going to be a natural at this business.’

  ‘I’m not sure he’ll take that as a compliment.’

  ‘Because of your investigation this is time-critical, so we’ve arranged a private jet to take us down there. The flight to Casablanca will be less than an hour and a half as long as we get good air-traffic clearance. You’ve got diplomatic status so we’ll get through any formalities quickly, and you’ll be on the road to Rabat within two hours of take-off,’ said Pablo. ‘I presume you’re meeting Yacoub in his home?’

  ‘I’m a friend, not a business associate,’ said Falcón. ‘Although that might change after this meeting.’

  ‘I’m sure Mark Flowers gave you some good tips.’

  ‘How long have you known about Mark…and me?’ asked Falcón, smiling.

  ‘Since you first outwitted him back in July 2002 and he made you one of his sources,’ said Pablo. ‘We’re not worried about Mark. He’s a friend. After 9/11 the Americans said they were going to put someone in Andalucía and we asked for Mark. Juan has known him since they were in Tunis together, keeping an eye on Gaddafi. Did Mark give you any ideas on how to approach Yacoub Diouri?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure he tried to recruit him and was rebuffed,’ said Falcón. ‘He said that Yacoub didn’t like Americans.’

  ‘That should make your task easier, if he’s used to being approached.’

  ‘I don’t think Yacoub Diouri is someone you “approach”. He’s the sort of guy who would see you coming a long way off if you did. We’ll just talk, as we always do, about everything. It will come out in the way it does. I’m not going to use any strategies on him. Like a lot of Arabs, he has a powerful belief in honour, which h e learnt from the man who became his father. He is someone to whom you show respect, and not just as a gesture,’ said Falcón. ‘Perhaps you should tell me the sort of thing you want him to do, how you want him to operate, what contacts you’re expecting him to make. Are you hoping to get information about the MILA from him?’

  ‘MILA? Has Mark been talking to you about the MILA?’

  ‘You’re all the same, you intelligence people,’ said Falcón. ‘You can’t take a question, you have to answer it with another. Do you exchange any information?’

  ‘The MILA has nothing to do with what we want from Yacoub.’

  ‘The TVE news said they were responsible for the bomb,’ said Falcón. ‘A text was posted from Seville to the Madrid office of the ABC, about Andalucía being brought back into the Muslim fold.’

  ‘The MILA are only interested in money,’ said Pablo. ‘They’ve dressed their intentions up in jihadist rhetoric, but the reason they want to liberate Ceuta and Melilla is that they want the enclaves for themselves.’

  ‘Tell me what we’re trying to achieve,’ said Falcón.

  ‘For the purposes of this mission, what is crucial is not who destroyed that apartment building in Seville and why, but rather what the explosion has revealed to us,’ said Pablo. ‘Forget the MILA, they’re not important. This is not about your investigation into yesterday’s bomb. This is not about the past, but the future.’

  ‘OK. Tell me,’ said Falcón, thinking that Flowers may have been right about the CNI planting the MILA story.

  ‘Last year the British held their parliamentary elections. They didn’t need the example of the Madrid bombings to know that these elections were going to be the target of a number of attempts by terrorists to change the way a population thinks.’

  ‘And nothing happened,’ said Falcón. ‘Tony Blair, the “little Satan”, got in with a reduced majority.’

  ‘Exactly, and nobody knew that there were three separate cells with active plans, who were prevented from carrying out their attacks by MI5,’ said Pablo. ‘All those cells were sleepers, dormant until they received their instructions in January 2005. Every member of the cell was either a second—or third-generation immigrant, originally from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Morocco, but now British. They spoke perfect English with regional accents. They all had clean police records. They all had jobs and came from decent backgrounds. In other words, they were impossible to find in a country with millions of people of the same ethnicity. But they were found and their attacks were prevented because MI5 had a codebook to help them.

  ‘When they were searching some suspects’ properties after a series of arrests made in 2003 and early 2004 they came across identical editions of a text called the Book of Proof by a ninth-century Arab writer called al-Jahiz. Both editions had notes—all in English, because the accused didn’t have a word of Arabic between them. Some of the notes in each copy were remarkably similar. MI5 photocopied the books, replaced the originals, released the accused and set their code-breakers to work.’

  ‘And when did they share that information with the CNI?’

  ‘October 2004.’

  ‘So what happened with the London bombings of 7th and 21st July 2005?’

  ‘The British think they stopped using the Book of Proof after the May 2005 elections.’

  ‘And now you think you’ve discovered a new codebook,’ said Falcón. ‘What about the new copy of the Koran found on the front seat of the Peugeot Partner?’

  ‘We think they were going to prepare another code-book to give to someone.’

  ‘The Imam Abdelkrim Benaboura?’

  ‘We haven’t finished searching his apartment,’ said Pablo, shrugging.

  ‘That’s taken some time.’

  ‘The Imam lived in a two-bedroomed flat in El Cerezo and almost every room is full, floor to ceiling, of books.’

  ‘I don’t feel any closer to knowing why you want to recruit Yacoub Diouri.’

  ‘The jihadis are in need of another big coup. Something on the scale of 9/11.’

  ‘But not as “small scale” as a few
hundred people killed on trains in Madrid and the underground in London,’ said Falcón, not quite able to stomach this level of objectivity.

  ‘I’m not diminishing those atrocities, I’m just saying that they were on a different scale. You’ll learn about intelligence work as you do it, Javier; you’re not in the trenches, seeing your friends getting killed. It has an effect on your vision,’ said Pablo. ‘Madrid was timetargeted, with a specific goal. It wasn’t a big, bold statement. It was just saying: This is what we can do. There’s no comparison to the operation that brought down the Twin Towers. No flight or hijack training. They just had to board trains and leave rucksacks. The most difficult aspect of the operation was to buy and deliver the explosives, and in that we now know they had considerable help from local petty criminals.’

  ‘So what is the big coup?’ asked Falcón, uneasy at this breezy talk of death and destruction. ‘The World Cup in Germany?’

  ‘No. For the same reason that the Olympics in Greece was untouched. It’s just too difficult. The terrorists are competing with specialists who have been planning security at these events for years. Even the buildings are constructed with security in mind. The chances of discovery are increased enormously. Why waste resources?’

  Silence, as the Mercedes tyres ripped over the tarmac towards the airport, which was smudged out by the early-morning haze.

  ‘You don’t know what it is, do you?’ said Falcón. ‘You just know it’s coming, or maybe you “feel” it’s coming.’

  ‘We have no idea,’ said Pablo, nodding. ‘But we don’t just “sense” their desperation, we know it, too. The design of the Twin Towers attack was to generate a fervour in Muslims all over the world, to get them to rise up against the decadent West, which they feel has humiliated them so much over the years, and to turn on their own dictatorial leaders and corrupt governments. It hasn’t happened. The disgust level is rising in the Muslim world at what the fanatics are prepared to do—the kidnapping and beheading of people like the aid worker Margaret Hassan, the daily slaughter of Iraqis who just want to have a normal life—these things are not going down well. But the demographics of the Muslim world lean heavily on the side of youth, and a disenfranchised youth likes nothing better than a demonstration of rebel power. And that is what these radicals are in need of now: another symbol of their power, even if it’s the last bang before they die out with a whimper.’