The Hidden Assassins

by Robert Wilson

  ‘You see that?’ said Fernando. ‘You see it, you little fucker?’

  Alarcón was paralysed with fear. His voice, with his neck pulled taut, produced only a grunt. Fernando pushed the gun between Alarcón’s lips, felt the barrel rattle across his teeth and sensed the steel mushing into the softness of his tongue.

  ‘Feel it. Taste it. You know what it is now.’

  He wrenched the gun out of his mouth, taking a chip of tooth with it. He jammed the barrel into the back of Alarcón’s neck.

  ‘Are you ready? Say your prayers, Jesús, because you’re going to meet your namesake.’

  Fernando pulled the trigger, the gun pressed hard against Alarcón’s shaking neck. There was a dry click. A gasp from Alarcón and a stink rose up from behind him as he loosed his bowels into his pyjamas.

  ‘That was for Gloria,’ said Fernando. ‘Now you know her fear.’

  Fernando moved the gun round to Alarcón’s temple, screwed it into the top of his sideburn so that Alarcón winced away from it. Another dry click and a sob from Alarcón.

  ‘That was for my little Pedro,’ said Fernando, coughing against the emotion rising in his throat. ‘He didn’t know fear. He was too young to know it. Too innocent. Now look at the gun, Jesús. You see the cylinder. Two empty chambers and four full ones. We’re going upstairs now and you’re going to watch me shoot your wife and two children, just so you know how it feels.’

  ‘What are you doing, Fernando?’ said Alarcón, finding his voice and his presence of mind, now that the rush of the initial onslaught was past. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘You and your friends. You’re all the same. There’s no difference between you and any other politician. You’re all liars, cheats and egomaniacs. I don’t know how I fell for your stupid, fucking line. Jesús Alarcón, the man who will talk to you without cameras, without the photo opportunity, without his beautiful profile in mind.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Fernando? What have I done? How have I lied and cheated?’ said Alarcón, pleading.

  ‘You killed my wife and child,’ said Fernando. ‘And then, because you needed me, you made me your friend.’

  ‘How did I kill them?’

  ‘I read it in the police notes. You were all in it. Rivero, Zarrías, Cárdenas. You planted the bomb in the mosque. You killed my wife and son. You killed all those people. And for what?’

  ‘Fernando?’

  He looked up. A different voice from beyond the gate. Female. Not in his head. The blood was simmering in his brain, bubbling and popping in such arterial rage that he’d become confused.

  ‘Gloria?’ he said.

  ‘It’s me, Cristina,’ she said. ‘I’m here with Inspector Jefe Falcón. We want you to put the gun down, Fernando. This is not how you resolve things. You’ve misunderstood…’

  ‘No, no. That is not true. I have finally understood only too well. You listen. You listen to my “friend”, Jesús Alarcón.’

  Fernando knelt down by the side of Alarcón and whispered harshly in his ear.

  ‘I am not going to shoot you or your family on one condition,’ he said. ‘The condition is that you must tell them the truth. They’re the cops. They know what the truth is. You’re going to tell them the truth for the first time with your gilded politician’s lips. Tell them how you planted the bomb and you will live to see the rest of this day. If you don’t, I will shoot you and, when you are dead, I will go inside and find Mónica and shoot her, too. Go on, tell them.’

  Fernando stood up and prodded Alarcón in the neck with the gun. Alarcón cleared his throat.

  ‘The truth,’ said Fernando, ‘or I’m sending you into the dark. Tell them.’

  Alarcón crossed himself.

  ‘He has asked me to tell you the truth about the bomb,’ said Alarcón, his head hung on to his chest, his arms limp by his sides. ‘If I fail to tell you the truth he says he will shoot me and then my wife. I can only tell you what I know, which may not be the whole truth, but only a part of it.’

  Fernando stood back, arm straight. He rested the gun barrel on the crown of Alarcón’s head.

  ‘I had nothing to do with the planting of any bomb in that mosque, so help me God,’ said Alarcón.

  37

  Seville—Friday, 9th June 2006, 05.03 hrs

  There was no gunshot. A force travelled from Alarcón’s head, up the gun barrel, through Fernando’s hand, arm and shoulder and into his mind. It made his upper body shudder so that the gun barrel drifted from its aim, and had to be retrained on to Alarcón’s crown, not once or twice, but three times. His finger caressed the trigger with each retraining of the revolver. He blinked, took in huge gulps of air and looked down on the man, who a few moments ago had been the object of his deepest hatred. He couldn’t do it. Alarcón’s words had somehow drained all his resolve. It was the miracle cure for the malignancy of his revenge. He knew with absolute certainty that he had heard the truth.

  At first light, with the sky turning from midnight blue to anil, Fernando dropped his arm and let it hang with the weight of the gun. Ferrera stepped forward and removed it from his slack grasp and holstered it. She moved him away from behind Alarcón, who fell forwards on to all fours.

  ‘Take Fernando to the car,’ said Falcón. ‘Cuff him.’

  Alarcón was dry retching and sobbing at the sudden release of tension. Falcón got him to his feet and took him to where his wife was standing, wide-eyed, features rigid, by the front door. Falcón asked for the bathroom. The request brought Mónica Alarcón back to reality. She led Falcón and her husband upstairs to where the children were standing, one holding a fluffy tiger, the other a small blue blanket, uncomprehending of the adult drama. Mónica got the kids back into their bedroom. She joined Falcón in the bathroom where her husband was struggling to undo the buttons on his pyjamas. Falcón told her to strip her husband’s clothes off and get him into the shower. He would wait downstairs in the kitchen.

  Exhaustion leaned on Falcón like a big, stupid dog. He shut the front door and sat at the kitchen table, staring into the garden, with only one thought shuttling backwards and forwards through his mind. Jesús Alarcón was not part of the conspiracy. It looked as if he was their compliant and ignorant front man.

  Mónica came back down to the kitchen and offered him a coffee. She was shaken, her hands trembled over the crockery. She had to ask him to work the espresso machine.

  ‘Did he have a gun?’ she asked. ‘Did Fernando have a gun?’

  ‘Your husband handled himself very well,’ said Falcón, nodding.

  ‘But Fernando and Jesús were getting on so well.’

  ‘Fernando read something he shouldn’t have done and misunderstood an observation as a fact,’ said Falcón. ‘Your husband’s courage meant that it didn’t end in tragedy.’

  ‘We both admired Fernando so much for the way in which he was managing his terrible loss,’ she said. ‘I had no idea he was so unstable.’

  ‘He thought your husband had betrayed him, that he’d made him his friend to further his political career. And Fernando is unstable. Nobody can be called stable after losing their wife and son like that.’

  Jesús appeared in the doorway. He’d lost the ashen look. He was shaved and dressed in a white shirt and black trousers. Falcón made him a coffee. Mónica went back upstairs to check on the children. They sat at the kitchen table.

  ‘A lot has happened overnight,’ said Falcón. ‘Can you answer a few questions before we discuss that?’

  Alarcón nodded, stirred sugar into his coffee.

  ‘Can you tell me where you were on Saturday 3rd June?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘We were north of Madrid for the weekend,’ said Alarcón. ‘One of Mónica’s friends got married. The wedding party was at a finca on the way up to El Escorial. We stayed there on Sunday and came back on the AVE train early on Monday morning.’

  ‘Did you go to the Fuerza Andalucía offices in Eduardo Rivero’s house during the week befor
e that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Alarcón. ‘On the advice of Angel Zarrías I was staying clear of Eduardo. Angel was still working on him to relinquish the leadership and he reckoned that for Eduardo to see the new young blade of the party around him might be construed as humiliation. So, I didn’t see any of them, except Angel, who came here a couple of times to tell me how things were going.’

  ‘When you say you didn’t see any of them, who do you include in that?’

  ‘Eduardo Rivero and the three main sponsors of the party, who are all my supporters: Lucrecio Arenas, César Benito and Agustín Cárdenas.’

  ‘When did you last see Eduardo Rivero?’

  ‘On the Tuesday morning, when he formally handed over the leadership.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘I think we had lunch around the 20th of May. I’d have to check my diary.’

  ‘Have you ever seen this man before?’ asked Falcón, looking at Alarcón as he pushed a photo of Tateb Hassani across the table. It was clear he didn’t recognize the man.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Have you ever heard mention of the name Tateb Hassani or Jack Hansen?’

  ‘No.’

  Falcón took the photograph back and turned it over and over in his hands.

  ‘Has that man got anything to do with what Fernando was talking about?’ asked Alarcón. ‘He looks North African. That first name you mentioned…’

  ‘He’s originally a Moroccan who became a US citizen,’ said Falcón. ‘He’s dead now. Murdered. Rivero, Zarrías and Cárdenas are under arrest on suspicion of his killing.’

  ‘I’m confused, Inspector Jefe.’

  ‘Don Eduardo told me a few hours ago that he paid Tateb Hassani a € 5,000 consultancy fee last week for his advice on the formulation of Fuerza Andalucía’s immigration policy.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. Our immigration policy has been in place for months. We started work on that last October when the EU opened the door to Turkey and all those African immigrants tried to jump the wire into Melilla. Fuerza Andalucía does not believe that a Muslim country, even with a secular government, can be compatible with Christian countries. Europeans have shown themselves to be consistently intolerant of other religions throughout history. We have no idea of the social consequences of introducing Turkey, whose membership will result in one fifth of the European Union population being Muslim.’

  ‘You’re not on the campaign trail now, Sr Alarcón,’ said Falcón, holding up his hands against the avalanche of opinion.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s automatic,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But why are Rivero, Zarrías and Cárdenas accused of murdering a man who they’d just paid to help formulate policy? Why does Fernando think that Fuerza Andalucía is in some way responsible for planting a bomb in the mosque?’

  ‘I’m going to give you an irrefutable fact and I want you to tell me what you construe from it,’ said Falcón. ‘You heard on the news that a fireproof box was found in the destroyed mosque, which included architect’s drawings of two schools and the university biology faculty, with notes attached in Arabic script.’

  ‘The ones giving the horrific instructions.’

  ‘Those were written by Tateb Hassani.’

  ‘So, he was a terrorist?’

  Falcón waited, tapping the edges of the photograph, one after the other, on the table top, while the espresso machine fumed quietly in the corner. Alarcón frowned at the back of his hands as his brain worked through the permutations. Falcón gave him the other facts that were not in the public domain, as yet: Tateb Hassani’s handwriting also matched that found in the two Korans, found in the Peugeot Partner and in Miguel Botín’s apartment. He also told him about Ricardo Gamero’s final meeting with Angel Zarrías and the CGI agent’s subsequent suicide. Alarcón turned his hands over and looked at his palms, as if his political future was trickling away through his fingers.

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  Falcón gave him a short life history of Tateb Hassani and asked him if that sounded like the profile of a dangerous Islamic radical.

  ‘Why did they pay Hassani to make up documents that would indicate a planned terrorist attack when, as has been made clear by the discovery of traces of hexogen in the Peugeot Partner, Islamic terrorists were positioning material to carry out a bombing campaign?’ asked Alarcón. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘The executive committee of Fuerza Andalucía did not know about the hexogen,’ said Falcón, which opened up the story about the surveillance by Informáticalidad, the fake council inspectors, the electricians, and the planting of the secondary Goma 2 Eco device and the fireproof box.

  Alarcón was stunned. He knew all the directors of Informáticalidad, whom he described as ‘part of the set-up’. Only then did he finally understand how he’d been used.

  ‘And I was positioned as the fresh face of Fuerza Andalucía, who, in the aftermath of the atrocity, would attract the anti-immigration vote, which would give us the necessary percentage to make ourselves the natural coalition partner of the Partido Popular for next year’s parliamentary campaign,’ said Alarcón.

  The revelations drained what little energy remained in Alarcón and he sat back with his arms limp at his sides and contemplated the catastrophe in which he’d been unwittingly involved.

  ‘I realize that this must be hard for you…’ said Falcón.

  ‘There are enormous implications, of course,’ said Alarcón, with an odd mixture of dismay and relief spreading across his features. ‘But I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking that Fernando’s madness has had the inadvertent side effect of allowing me to exonerate myself in front of the investigating Inspector Jefe.’

  ‘Our range of interrogation techniques no longer includes mock executions,’ said Falcón. ‘But it has saved me a lot of time.’

  ‘It wasn’t what I had in mind for the extension of police powers in the handling of terrorists, either,’ said Alarcón.

  ‘You might have to work a little harder than that to get my vote,’ said Falcón. ‘How would you describe your relationship to Lucrecio Arenas?’

  ‘I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that he’s been like a father to me,’ said Alarcón.

  ‘How long have you known him?’

  ‘Eleven years,’ said Alarcón. ‘In fact, I met him before that, when I was working for McKinsey’s in South America, but we became close when I moved to Lehman Brothers and started working with Spanish industrialists and banks. Then he head-hunted me in 1997 and since then he’s been a surrogate father…he’s shaped my whole career. He’s the one who has given me belief in myself. He’s second in my life only to God.’

  It was the response Falcón had expected.

  ‘If you think he is involved in whatever this is, then think again. You don’t know the man like I do,’ said Alarcón. ‘This is some local intrigue, cooked up by Zarrías and Rivero.’

  ‘Rivero is finished. He was finished before this happened. He was walking with the fly-buzz of scandal about him,’ said Falcón. ‘I know Angel Zarrías. He’s not a leader. He makes people into leaders, but he doesn’t make things happen himself. What can you tell me about Agustín Cárdenas and César Benito?’

  ‘I need another coffee,’ said Alarcón.

  ‘Here’s an interesting link for you to think about,’ said Falcón. ‘Informáticalidad to Horizonte, to Banco Omni, to…I4IT?’

  The coffee machine gurgled, trickled, hissed and steamed, while Alarcón hovered around it, blinking in this new point of view, matching it to his own bank of knowledge. Doubt threaded its way across his eyebrows. Falcón knew this wasn’t going to be enough, but he didn’t have anything more. If Rivero, Zarrías and Cárdenas didn’t break down then Alarcón might be his only door into the conspiracy, but it was going to be a heavy door to open. He didn’t know enough about Lucrecio Arenas to induce a sense of outrage in Alarcón at the way in which he’d been shamelessly exploited by his so-called �
��father’.

  ‘I know what you want from me,’ said Alarcón, ‘but I can’t do it. I realize it’s not fashionable to be loyal, especially in politics and business, but I can’t help myself. Even suspecting these people would be like turning on my own family. I mean, they are my family. My father-in-law is one of these people…’

  ‘That was why you were chosen,’ said Falcón. ‘You are an extraordinary combination. I don’t agree with your politics, but I can see that, for a start, you are very courageous and that your intentions towards Fernando were completely honourable. You’re an intelligent and gifted man, but your vulnerability is in your professed loyalty. Powerful people like that in a person, because you have all the qualities that they don’t, and you can be manipulated towards achieving their goals.’

  ‘It’s a marvellous world in which loyalty is perceived as a vulnerability,’ said Alarcón. ‘You must be a man made cynical by your work, Inspector Jefe.’

  ‘I’m not cynical, Sr Alarcón, I’ve just come to realize that it’s the nature of virtue to be predictable,’ he said. ‘It’s always evil that leaves one gasping at its bold and inconceivable virtuosity.’

  ‘I’ll remember that.’

  ‘Don’t make me any more coffee,’ said Falcón. ‘I have to sleep. Perhaps we should talk again when you’ve had time to think about what I’ve told you and I’ve started working on Rivero, Zarrías and Cárdenas.’ Alarcón walked him to the front door.

  ‘As far as I am concerned, I have no wish to see Fernando punished for what he did to me,’ he said. ‘My sense of loyalty also enables me to understand the profound effects of disloyalty and betrayal. You might have charges you wish to press against him, but I don’t.’