The Hidden Assassins

by Robert Wilson

  The debrief on the intelligence operation had lasted four days. Falcón had been relieved when four explosive devices had been found in the British four-wheel-drive vehicles. Each device was a small marvel of engineering, as each bomb’s aluminium casing had been built to fit in the car as if it was an integral piece of the structure. Falcón couldn’t help but think that the bombs were like terrorism itself, fitting so perfectly into society, its sinister element indistinguishable. His relief had been that they existed. They weren’t a figment of his, or the intelligence world’s, imagination. And there had been no ‘dirty’ element in the core as the British had feared.

  Since returning from Madrid, Falcón had been working with Juez del Rey to bring the case against Rivero, Cárdenas and Zarrías to court although, since Rivero had suffered a stroke and been left unable to speak, it was really against the last two. The case was being prepared in another surreal dimension. Del Rey had decided to prosecute the two men for the murder of Tateb Hassani first because he wanted to proceed step by step towards proving their involvement in the greater conspiracy. What the public knew about Hassani was that he had written the horrific instructions attached to the plans of the schools and biology faculty. Somehow, through a collective blindness, these instructions had been separated from the fiction that the conspiracy had attempted to establish. The result was that large sections of the public thought of Cárdenas and Zarrías as folk heroes.

  Yacoub had made contact on his return from Paris. The GICM high command had given him no instructions. He thought that they suspected him and had therefore made no attempt to contact the CNI. He had wandered about in public places, afraid to stay in his hotel room in case there was a knock he couldn’t bear to answer. He returned to Rabat. He attended the group’s meetings in the house in the medina. There was no mention of the failed mission.

  Calderón’s case was due to be tried in September. Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita and the instructing judge, Juan Romero, were convinced of his guilt. Their case was rock-solid. Falcón had not seen Calderón again, but had heard that he was resigned to his fate, which was to spend fifteen years in prison for the murder of his wife.

  Manuela had been a worry to Falcón. He’d thought that the vacancy left by Angel’s removal would leave her lonely and depressed, but he’d underestimated her. Once the horror, rage and despair at his crime had burnt out, she found a renewed vitality. All those lessons on positive energy from Angel had paid off. She did not sell the villa in Puerto de Santa María; the German buyer came back to her and she found a Swede to take the other Seville property. She also didn’t lack for dinner invitations. People wanted to know everything about her life with Angel Zarrías.

  There had been other positive developments in the aftermath to the bomb. Last Sunday, while sitting on a park bench in the shade of some trees in the Parque María Luisa, Falcón had found his eye drawn to a family group. The man was pushing a wheelchair occupied by a young girl and he was talking to a small blonde woman in a turquoise top and white skirt. Only when two kids sprinted up to join them did Falcón recognize that the children belonged to Cristina Ferrera, who put her arm around her son while her daughter reached over and helped the man push the wheelchair. It was only then that he realized that he was looking at Fernando Alanis.

  Falcón had arrived too early in the Casa Ricardo. He finished his beer and asked the passing waiter to bring him a chilled manzanilla. The waiter came back with a bottle of La Guita and the menu. The dry sherry misted the glass as it trickled in. He fanned himself with the menu. He was on a different table to the one he’d been at four years ago. This one gave him the perfect view of the door, which drew his attention every time someone came in. He couldn’t bear the teenage anxiety creeping up on him. At times like this his mind would gang up on him and he’d find himself thinking about the other thing that made him anxious: that promise he’d made to the people of Seville to find the ultimate perpetrators of the bombing. The sight of himself on the television in the Galician bar came back to him again and again, along with Juan’s sarcastic comment. Had that been a crazy thing to do or, as Juan had said, just sentimental? No, it hadn’t been, he was sure of it. He had his ideas. He knew, when he had more time, where he was going to start looking.

  It’s always the way that, just as your mind engages elsewhere, the person you’ve been waiting for all this time arrives. She was over him before he knew it.

  ‘The pensive Inspector Jefe,’ she said.

  His heart leapt in his chest, so that he sprang to his feet.

  ‘As usual,’ he said, ‘you’re looking beautiful, Consuelo.’

  Acknowledgements

  This book would have been impossible without extensive research in Morocco, especially to see how all levels of Moroccan society are reacting to the friction between Islam and the West. I would like to thank Laila for her hospitality and for introducing me to people from all walks of life. They gave me valuable insights into the Arab world’s point of view. I must stress that although all opinions are faithfully represented, none of the characters in this book remotely resembles any real person, alive or dead. They are all figments of my imagination and were generated to perform their functions in my story.

  As always, I would like to thank my friends Mick Lawson and José Manuel Blanco for putting me up and putting up with me. They made the Seville end of my research for this book a lot easier. My thanks to the Linc language school in Seville and my teacher Lourdes Martinez, for doing her best to improve my Spanish.

  I have been published by HarperCollins for just over ten years and I think it fitting that after a decade of hard work on my behalf I should thank my editor, Julia Wisdom, who has not only offered perceptive advice about my books and brought them successfully to the market place, but has also been one of my greatest inhouse proponents.

  Finally I would like to thank my wife, Jane, who has helped me with my research, spurred me on through the long months of writing, and been my first, and unflagging, reader and critic. Some think that being a writer is hard, but spare a thought for the writer’s wife, who while working and supporting has to watch much writhing and torment and is rewarded with scant praise and little compensation for the horrors she must witness. You’d only do it for love and I thank her for it and return it doubled.

  About the Author

  ROBERT WILSON

  Robert Wilson was born in 1957. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping and advertising in London and trading in West Africa.

  He is married and divides his time between England, Spain and Portugal. He was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger for Fiction for his fifth novel, A Small Death in Lisbon.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Also by Robert Wilson

  The Company of Strangers

  A Small Death in Lisbon

  JAVIER FALCÓN NOVELS

  The Blind Man of Seville

  The Silent and The Damned

  The Ignorance of Blood

  BRUCE MEDWAY NOVELS

  A Darkening Stain

  Blood Is Dirt

  The Big Killing

  Instruments of Darkness

  Praise for The Hidden Assassins:

  ‘Wilson drives his narrative expertly…a riveting read, filled with incident and unexpected twists’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘The third and most ambitious yet in Robert Wilson’s planned quartet starring Inspector Javier Falcón, Seville’s chief homicide detective…Wilson, as always, delivers’

  The Times

  ‘The plot works well…the novel comes alive…with detail piled on detail, culminating in a sharply vivid image’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Few writers mix tension and action as effectively as Robert Wilson…his carefully drawn characters inhabit unusual, intriguing and psychologically intricate plots that never leave the realm of possibility…Excellent’

  Guardian
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br />   ‘If you only read one thriller this year, make it this one…a thrilling and memorable read’

  Literary Review

  ‘Wilson has combined an utterly gripping and detailed police investigation with a sensitive and compelling examination of the impact of history on modern Spanish life. One of the year’s best thrillers’

  Irish Independent

  ‘This is crime fiction of the highest order, featuring one of the most interesting fictional ‘tecs around’

  Belfast Telegraph

  ‘The Hidden Assassins successfully entwines several strands into a complicated, coherent whole…these layers of semi-related plots make for an intricate and compelling story’

  Spectator

  ‘Fine characterization and plotting, and a gripping narrative, are Robert Wilson’s trademarks, and his latest psychological thriller is right up there with the best’

  Choice

  ‘Once again demonstrates that few writers—in any genre—can match Wilson’s depth of character and plot or his evocation of place and of history’

  Boston Globe

  A Small Death in Lisbon

  Robert Wilson

  A Portuguese bank is founded on the back of Nazi wartime deals. Over half a century later a young girl is murdered in Lisbon.

  1941. Klaus Felsen, SS officer, arrives in Lisbon and the strangest party in history, where Nazis and Allies, refugees and entrepreneurs, dance to the strains of opportunism and despair. Felsen’s war takes him to the mountains of the north where a brutal battle is being fought for an element vital to Hitler’s blitzkrieg. There he meets the man who makes the first turn of the wheel of greed and revenge which rolls through to the century’s end.

  Late 1990s, Lisbon. Inspector Zé Coelho is investigating the murder of a young girl. As he digs deeper, Zé overturns the dark soil of history and unearths old bones. The 1974 revolution has left injustices of the old fascist regime unresolved. But there’s an older, greater injustice, for which this small death in Lisbon is horrific compensation, and in his final push for the truth, Zé must face the most chilling opposition.

  ‘Compulsively readable, with the cop’s quest burning its way through a narrative rich in history and intrigue, love and death’

  Literary Review

  ISBN: 978 0 00 732215 2

  Copyright

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

  The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Harper

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  FIRST EDITION

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

  Copyright © Robert Wilson 2006

  Robert Wilson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 978-0-0073-4753-7

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