The Hidden Assassins

by Robert Wilson

  ‘I thought we weren’t due to “chat” until tonight.’

  ‘In an emergency we’ve given Yacoub the possibility of making contact,’ said Gregorio. ‘It’s to do with the initiation rite.’

  ‘I haven’t got the Javier Marías book with me.’

  Gregorio produced a spare copy from his briefcase. They went up to Falcón’s office and Gregorio prepared the computer.

  ‘You might find there’s more of a delay between each line of “chat” this time,’ said Gregorio. ‘We’re using different encryption software and it’s a bit slower.’

  Gregorio gave up Falcón’s seat and went over to the window. Falcón sat in front of the computer and exchanged introductions with Yacoub, who opened by saying he didn’t have much time and gave a brief account of what had happened that morning. He wrote about the execution he’d witnessed, but wrote nothing of his own mock execution. Falcón reeled from the computer screen.

  ‘This is out of control,’ he said, and Gregorio read Yacoub’s words over Falcón’s shoulder.

  ‘Steady him. Keep him calm,’ said Gregorio. ‘They’re just warning him.’

  Falcón started to type just as another paragraph came through from Yacoub.

  ‘Important things in no particular order. 1) I was taken from the house in the medina at about 6.45 a.m. The journey was about three and a half hours long and then there was about forty minutes before I met the two men, who called themselves Mohamed and Abu. They told me they were following the Seville bombing very closely. 2) They said that the explosion had caused “great disruption to one of their plans which had demanded a lot of reorganization”. 3) I was left in a room with books on one wall. The titles were all about architecture or engineering. There were also a number of manufacturer’s car manuals for four-wheel-drive vehicles. 4) They knew about the arrest of three men from a political party called Fuerza Andalucía, who were suspected of murdering “an apostate and traitor” called Tateb Hassani. They also knew that this was in some way connected to the Seville bombing, but said that these men were “unimportant”. 5) The information they want from you, Javier, is as follows: the identities of the men who were responsible for the planning of the bombing of the mosque in Seville. They know about the three arrests, and they believe that although you know who the real perpetrators are, they are too powerful for you to touch them.

  ‘I don’t expect you to reply immediately. I know you will have to talk to your people first. I need your answer as soon as possible. If I can give them this information I believe it will increase my standing with the council immeasurably.’

  ‘That last bit I don’t even have to think about,’ said Falcón. ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘Just wait, Javier,’ said Gregorio, but Falcón was already typing out his reply:

  ‘Yacoub, it’s completely impossible for me to give you that information. We have our suspicions, but absolutely no proof. I assume the leaders of this council are looking for revenge for the bombing of the mosque and that is not something I am prepared to have on my conscience.’

  Falcón had to hold Gregorio back as he hit the send button. After about fifteen seconds the screen wavered and the CNI secure website disappeared to be replaced by the msn home page. Gregorio played about on the keyboard and tried to get back into the website, but there was no access. He made a call standing at the window.

  ‘We’ve lost the connection,’ he said.

  After several minutes of listening and nodding he closed down the mobile.

  ‘Trouble with the encryption software. They had to terminate the transmission as a precaution.’

  ‘Did my last paragraph go through?’

  ‘They said it did.’

  ‘All the way through to Yacoub?’

  ‘That I don’t know yet,’ said Gregorio. ‘We’ll reconvene at your house at 11 p.m. I’ll have had a chance to discuss the meat of what Yacoub was saying and its implications with Juan and Pablo by then.’

  40

  Seville—Friday, 9th June 2006, 17.45 hrs

  On the way back down to the interview rooms Falcón ran into Elvira and del Rey in the corridor. They’d been looking for him. The forensics computer specialists had hacked into the Fuerza Andalucía hard disks. From the articles and photographs found on one of the computers they could tell that the user was compiling the raw material to be transformed into the web pages that would appear on the VOMIT website. From other material on the same hard disk, the user was evidently Angel Zarrías. Elvira seemed annoyed that this news didn’t impress Falcón, whose mind was still reeling from the exchange with Yacoub.

  ‘It’s more leverage,’ said Elvira. ‘It places Zarrías and Fuerza Andalucía closer to the heart of the conspiracy.’

  Falcón had no ready opinion about that.

  ‘I’m not sure that it does,’ said del Rey. ‘It could be construed as a separate entity. Zarrías can defend it as a personal campaign. All he’s done is use a Fuerza Andalucía computer to draft the articles, which he’s downloaded on to a CD and given to some geek, to anonymously slap them up on the VOMIT website. I can’t see the leverage we can extract from that.’

  Falcón looked from one man to the other, still with no comment. Elvira took a call on his mobile. Falcón started to move away.

  ‘That was Comisario Lobo,’ said Elvira. ‘The media pressure is at breaking point.’

  ‘What has the media been told so far about these men being held?’ asked Falcón, coming back down the corridor to Elvira.

  ‘Suspicion of murder and conspiring to murder,’ said Elvira.

  ‘Has Tateb Hassani been named?’

  ‘Not yet. Naming him would involve revealing too much about the nature of our enquiry at the moment,’ said Elvira. ‘We’re still sensitive to the expectations of the people.’

  ‘I’d better get back to work. I’m due to start on Eduardo Rivero in a few minutes,’ said Falcón, looking at his watch. ‘Tell me, have the forensics found any blood traces in the Fuerza Andalucía offices, yet? Especially in the bathroom?’

  ‘I haven’t heard anything on that,’ said Elvira, moving off with del Rey.

  All the interrogators were in the corridor outside the interview rooms. A paramedic in fluorescent green was talking to Ramírez, who caught sight of Falcón over his shoulder.

  ‘Rivero’s collapsed,’ he said. ‘He started gasping for air, getting disorientated, and then fell off his chair.’

  Rivero was lying on the floor between two paramedics who were giving him oxygen.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘Heart arrhythmia and high blood pressure,’ said the paramedic. ‘We’re going to take him to hospital, keep him under observation. His heart rate is up around 160 and completely irregular. If we don’t bring it down there’s a danger that the blood will pool and clot in the heart, and if a clot gets loose he might have a stroke.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Ramírez from the corridor. ‘God knows how this is going to play out in the media. They’ll tell the world we’re running Abu Ghraib down here.’

  All the interrogators thought that Rivero, of all the suspects, had been the least attached to the central conspiracy. He had only been important as the leader of the party and, given that the intention was to wrest that from him in order to install Jesús Alarcón, it would stand to reason that he would be kept the least informed. His collapse had occurred under persistent questioning from Inspector Jefe Ramón Barros about the real reason for his relinquishing of the leadership. The pressure of sticking to his story about old age, while the truth worked away at the flaws in his mind, had proved too much.

  Just after 7 p.m. Marco Barreda, the Informáticalidad sales manager, was brought in. He’d been met at the airport having flown in from Barcelona. His mobile phone records were accessed but none of the numbers called corresponded to any of those owned by Angel Zarrías. Falcón made sure that Zarrías knew about Barreda’s appearance in the Jefatura. Zarrías was unperturbed. Barreda was qu
estioned for an hour and a half about his relationship with Ricardo Gamero. He didn’t deviate from his original story. They released him at 8.30 p.m. and went back to Zarrías and lied to him about Barreda, saying he’d admitted that Gamero had said nothing about being in love with him and wasn’t even a homosexual. Zarrías didn’t buy any of it.

  By 9 p.m. Falcón couldn’t take any more. He went outside to breathe some fresh air, but found it hot and suffocating after the chill of the Jefatura. He drank a coffee in the café across the street. His mind was confused with too much going on between Yacoub and the interrogation of the three suspects. He drank some water to wash out the bitterness of the coffee, and Zorrita’s words from last night came back to him.

  In the Jefatura he went down to the cells where he asked the officer on duty if he could speak to Esteban Calderón, who was in the last cell, lying on his back, staring at the back of his hands held above him. The guard locked Falcón in. He took a stool and leaned back against the wall. Calderón sat up on his bunk.

  ‘I didn’t think you were going to come,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t think there was much point in coming,’ said Falcón. ‘I can’t help you or discuss your case with you. I’m here out of curiosity only.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about denial,’ said Calderón.

  Falcón nodded.

  ‘I know you’ve come across a lot of it in your work.’

  ‘There’s no greater guilt than that of a murderer,’ said Falcón, ‘and denial is the human mind’s greatest defence.’

  ‘Talk me through the process?’ said Calderón. ‘The theory’s always different to the reality.’

  ‘Only in the aftermath of a serious crime, such as murder, does the motive for taking such disastrous measures suddenly seem ridiculously disproportionate,’ said Falcón. ‘So, to kill someone for, say, the paltry reason of jealousy seems like madness, an affront to the intellect. The easiest and quickest way to deal with the aberration is to deny it ever happened. Once that denial is in place, it doesn’t take long for the mind to create its own version of events which the brain comes to believe with absolute certainty.’

  ‘I’m trying to be as careful as I can,’ said Calderón.

  ‘Sometimes care is not enough to defeat a deepseated desire,’ said Falcón.

  ‘That scares me, Javier,’ said Calderón. ‘I don’t understand how the brain can be at the mercy of the mind. I don’t understand how information, facts, things we’ve seen and heard can be so easily transformed, reordered and manipulated…by what? What is it? What is the mind?’

  ‘Maybe it’s not such a good idea to lie in a prison cell, torturing yourself with unanswerable questions,’ said Falcón.

  ‘There’s nothing else to do,’ said Calderón. ‘I can’t stop my brain from working. It asks me these questions.’

  ‘Wish fulfilment is a powerful human need, on both a personal and a collective level.’

  ‘I know, which is why I’m being so careful in examining myself,’ said Calderón. ‘I’ve started at the beginning and I’ve been admitting some difficult things.’

  ‘I’m neither your confessor, nor your psychologist, Esteban.’

  ‘But, apart from Inés, you are the person I have most wronged in my life.’

  ‘You haven’t wronged me, Esteban, and if you have I don’t need to know.’

  ‘But I need you to know.’

  ‘I can’t absolve you,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m not qualified for that.’

  ‘I just need you to know the care with which I am conducting my self-examination.’

  Falcón had to admit to himself that he was interested. He leaned back against the wall and shrugged. Calderón took some moments to prepare his words.

  ‘I seduced Inés,’ he said. ‘I set out to seduce her, not because of her beauty, her intelligence or because of the woman she was. I set out to seduce her because of her relationship with you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Not because of who you were, the son of the famous Francisco Falcón, which was what had made you interesting to Inés. It was more to do with…I don’t know how to put this: your difference. You were not well liked in those days. Most people thought you cold and unapproachable, and therefore arrogant and patronizing. I saw something I didn’t understand. So, the first way, the most natural way for me to understand you was to seduce your wife. What did this beautiful, muchadmired woman see in you, that I didn’t have myself? That’s why I seduced her. And the irony of it was, she gave me no insight at all. But before I knew it, it was no longer just an affair as I’d intended; we became an open secret. She was always way ahead of me in public relations. She could manipulate people and situations with consummate ease. So, we became the golden couple and you were the cuckold, who people enjoyed laughing about behind your back. And I admit it now, Javier, just so that you know what I’m like: I enjoyed that situation because, although I didn’t understand you, which made me feel weak, I had inadvertently got one up on you, and that made me feel strong.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to tell me this?’ said Falcón.

  ‘The next item isn’t so personal to you,’ said Calderón, batting him down with his hands, as if Falcón was thinking of leaving. ‘It’s important that you know me for the…I was going to say “man” but I’m not sure that’s appropriate now. Remember Maddy Krugman?’

  ‘I didn’t like her,’ said Falcón. ‘I thought she was sinister.’

  ‘She’s probably the most beautiful woman I never went to bed with.’

  ‘You didn’t sleep with her?’

  ‘She wasn’t interested in me,’ said Calderón. ‘Beauty—I mean, great beauty—for a woman is both her good fortune and her greatest curse. Everybody is attracted to them. It’s difficult for normal people to understand that pressure. Everybody wants to please a beautiful woman. They spark something in everybody, not just men; and because the pressure is so constant, they have no idea who has good intentions, who they should choose. Of course, they recognize the poor, slack-jawed fools who drool on to their lapels, but then there are the others, the hundreds and thousands with money, charm, brilliance and charisma. Maddy liked you because you brushed aside her beauty…’

  ‘I don’t think that was true. I was as much affected by her beauty as everybody else.’

  ‘But you didn’t let it affect your vision, Javier. And Maddy saw that and liked it. She was obsessed with you,’ said Calderón. ‘Of course, I had to have her. She teased me. She played with me. I amused her. That was about it. And the worst of it was that we had to talk about you. I couldn’t bear it. I think you knew that it was eating me up inside.’

  Falcón nodded.

  ‘So when we got into that final and fatal scenario with Maddy and her husband…I had to lie about it afterwards,’ said Calderón. ‘I perjured myself, because I couldn’t bear your fearlessness. I couldn’t stand the poise with which you handled that situation.’

  ‘I can tell you that I didn’t feel fearless.’

  ‘Then I couldn’t stand the way you overcame your fear and I was left sitting on the sofa, paralysed,’ said Calderón.

  ‘I’ve been trained for those situations. I’ve been in them before,’ said Falcón. ‘Your reaction was completely natural and understandable.’

  ‘But it was not how I saw myself,’ said Calderón.

  ‘Then your standards are very high,’ said Falcón.

  ‘Inés was marvellous to me after the Maddy Krugman affair,’ said Calderón. ‘You couldn’t have wished for a better reaction from a fiancée. I’d humiliated her by announcing our engagement and on the same day, I think it was, I ran off with Maddy Krugman. And yet she stuck by me. She picked up the pieces of my career and self-esteem and…I hated her for it.

  ‘I stored up all her kindnesses to me and mixed them with my own bitterness into a rancorous stew of deep resentment. I punished her by having affairs. I even fucked her best friend during a weekend at Inés’s parents’ finca. And I didn’t
stop at affairs. I refused to look for a house. I made her sell her own apartment, but I wouldn’t let her buy the sort of house she desperately wanted. I wouldn’t let her change my apartment to suit her. When I started hitting her—and that was only four days ago—it was just the physical expression of what I’d been doing to her mentally for years. What made it worse was, that the more I abused her, the tighter she clung to me. Now there’s a story of denial for you, Javier. Inés was a great prosecutor. She could persuade anybody. And she persuaded herself, totally.’

  ‘You should have left her.’

  ‘It was too late by then,’ said Calderón. ‘We were already locked in our fatal embrace. We couldn’t bear to be together, we couldn’t wrench ourselves apart.’

  The key rattled in the door. The guard put his head in.

  ‘Comisario Elvira wants to see you in his office. He said it’s urgent.’

  Falcón stood. Calderón raised himself with effort, as if he was stiff or under a great weight.

  ‘One last thing, Javier. I know it will seem incredible after what I’ve just told you,’ said Calderón, ‘and I’m quite prepared to face the punishment handed down to me for her murder, because I deserve it. But I need you to know that I did not kill her. You might have spoken to that Inspector Jefe from Madrid, and he might have told you that I gave a very confused account of what happened that night. I have been in a fairly wild state…’

  ‘So who did kill her?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what their motive could have possibly been. I don’t know anything, other than that I did not kill Inés.’

  The Comisario was not alone in his office. His secretary nodded Falcón in. Pablo and Gregorio were there, along with the chief forensic pathologist. They all sat wherever they could except for the pathologist, who remained standing by the window. Elvira introduced him and asked him to give his report.

  ‘The mosque is now empty of all rubble, detritus, clothes and body parts. We have conducted DNA testing on all body parts, fluids and blood that we’ve been able to find. That means we have tested every square centimetre of the available area in the mosque. We have all the results of these tests, except for the final two square metres closest to the entrance, which was the area containing the least DNA material and was the last batch to be sent off. We have been able to find matches to all DNA samples supplied by the families of all the men believed to have been in the mosque. We have also matched a DNA sample retrieved from the Imam’s apartment with some in the mosque. However, we have been unable to match DNA samples taken from the Madrid apartment belonging to Djamal Hammad and Smail Saoudi with any found in the mosque. Our conclusion is that neither of those two men were in the mosque at the time of the explosion.’