The Hidden Assassins jf-3

by Robert Wilson

  She knew he didn't.

  'If it's a lottery ticket, I don't want to see it.'

  'It's not a lottery ticket.'

  She knew what it was: wild hope.

  'My God,' he said, suddenly looking at his watch. 'Hey, Pedro, we've got to get going, man.'

  'Tell us the secret,' said the children.

  He lifted Gloria up and put her on her feet.

  'If I tell you that, it's not a secret any more,' he said. 'You have to wait for the secret to be revealed.'

  'Tell us now!'

  'This evening,' he said, kissing Lourdes on the head and taking Pedro's tiny hand.

  Gloria went to the door with them. She kissed Pedro, who was staring at his feet, and not much interested. She kissed her husband on the mouth and whispered on his lips:

  'I hate you.'

  'By this evening you'll love me again.'

  She went back to the breakfast table and sat opposite Lourdes. There were another fifteen minutes before they had to leave. They spent a few minutes looking at one of Lourdes' drawings before going to the window. Fernando and Pedro appeared below in the car park in front of the pre-school. They waved. Fernando held Pedro above his head and he waved back.

  Having delivered the boy to school, Fernando walked off between the apartment blocks to the main road to catch the bus to work. Gloria turned back into the room. Lourdes was already at the table working on another drawing. Gloria sipped her coffee and played with her daughter's silky hair. Fernando and his secrets. He played these games to keep them amused and their hopes up that they would eventually be able to buy their own apartment, but the property prices had exploded and they now knew that they would be renting for the rest of their lives. Gloria was never going to be anything other than a rep and, though Fernando kept saying he was going to take a plumbing course, he still needed to make the money he did as a labourer on the construction site. They'd been lucky to find this apartment with such a cheap rent. They were lucky to have two healthy children. As Fernando said: 'We might not be rich, but we are lucky and luck will serve us better than all the money in the world.'

  She didn't immediately associate the shuddering tremor beneath her feet with the booming crash that came from the outside world. It was a noise so loud that her rib cage seemed to clutch at her spine and drive the air out of her lungs. The coffee cup jumped out of her hand and broke on the floor.

  'MAMA!' screamed Lourdes, but there was nothing for Gloria to hear, she saw only her daughter's wide-eyed horror and grabbed her.

  Terrible things happened simultaneously. Windows shattered. Cracks and giant fissures opened up in the walls. Daylight appeared where it shouldn't. Level horizons tilted. Doorframes folded. Solid concrete flexed. The ceiling crowded the floor. Walls broke in half. Water spurted from nowhere. Electricity crackled and sparked under broken tiles. A wardrobe shot out of sight. Gravity showed them its remorselessness. Mother and daughter were falling. Their small, fragile bodies were hurtling downwards in a miasma of bricks, steel, concrete, wire, tubing, furniture and dust. There was no time for words. There was no sound, because the sound was already so loud it rendered everything else silent. There wasn't even any fear, because it had all become grossly incomprehensible. There was just the sickening plummet, the stunning impact and then a vast blackness, as of a great receding universe. 'What the fuck was that?' said Pintado.

  Falcon knew exactly what it was. He'd heard an ETA car bomb explode when he was working in Barcelona. This sounded big. He kicked back his chair and ran out of the Institute without replying to Pintado's question. He punched the Jefatura's number into his mobile as he left. His first thought was that it was something in the Santa Justa station, the high-speed AVE arriving from Madrid. The railway station was less than a kilometre away to the southeast of the hospital.

  'Diga,' said Ramirez.

  'There's been a bomb, Jose Luis…'

  'I heard it even out here,' said Ramirez.

  'I'm at the Institute. It sounded close. Get me some news.'

  'Hold it.'

  Falcon ran past the receptionist, the mobile pressed to his ear, listening to Ramirez's feet pounding down the corridor and up the stairs and people shouting in the Jefatura. The traffic had stopped everywhere. Drivers and passengers were getting out of their cars, looking to the northeast at a plume of black smoke.

  'The reports we're getting,' said Ramirez, panting, 'is that there's been an explosion in an apartment block on the corner of Calle Blanca Paloma and Calle Los Romeros in the barrio of El Cerezo.'

  'Where's that? I don't know it. It must be close because I can see the smoke.'

  Ramirez found a wall map and gave rapid instructions.

  'Is there any report of a gas leak?' asked Falcon, knowing this was wildly optimistic, like the so-called power surge on the day of the London underground bombings.

  'I'm checking the gas company.'

  Falcon sprinted through the hospital. People were running, but there was no panic, no shouting. They had been training for this moment. Everyone in a white coat was making for the casualty department. Orderlies were sprinting with empty trolleys. Nurses ran with boxes of saline. Plasma was on the move. Falcon slammed through endless double doors until he hit the main street and the wall of sound: a cacophony of sirens as ambulances swung out into the street.

  The main road was miraculously clear of traffic. As he crossed the empty lanes he saw cars pulling up on to pavements. There were no police. This was the work of ordinary citizens, who knew that this stretch of road had to be kept clear to ferry the wounded. Ambulances careered down the street two abreast, whooping and delirious, with lights flashing queasily, in air that was filling with a grey/pink dust and smoke that billowed out from behind the apartment blocks.

  At the crossroads bloodstained people stumbled about on their own or were being carried, or walked towards the hospital with handkerchiefs, tissues and kitchen roll held to foreheads, ears and cheeks. These were the superficially wounded victims, the ones sliced by flying glass and metal, the ones some distance from the epicentre, who would never make it into the top flight of disaster statistics but who might lose the sight in an eye, or their hearing from perforated eardrums, bear facial scars for the rest of their lives, lose the use of a finger or a hand, never walk again without a limp. They were being helped by the lucky ones, those who didn't even have a scratch as the air whistled with flying glass, but who had the images burned on to their minds of someone they knew or loved who had been whole seconds before and was now sliced, torn, bludgeoned or broken.

  In the blocks of flats leading up to Calle Los Romeros, the local police were evacuating the buildings. An old man in bloody pyjamas was being led by a boy, who had realized his importance. A young man holding a crimson-flashed towel to the side of his head stared through Falcon, his face horribly partitioned by rivulets of blood, coagulating with dust. He had his arm around his girlfriend, who appeared unhurt and was talking at full tilt into her mobile phone.

  The air, more dust-filled by the moment, was still splintering to the sound of breaking glass as it fell from high shattered windows. Falcon called Ramirez again and told him to organize three or four buses to act as improvised ambulances to ferry the lightly wounded from all these blocks of apartments down the road to the hospital.

  'The gas company have confirmed that they supply buildings in that area,' said Ramirez, 'but there's been no report of a leak and they ran a routine test on that block only last month.'

  'For some reason this doesn't feel like a gas explosion,' said Falcon.

  'We're getting reports that a pre-school behind the destroyed building has been badly damaged by flying debris and there are casualties.'

  Falcon pressed on up through the walking wounded. There were still no signs of serious damage to buildings, but the people floating around, calling and looking for family members in the spaces at the foot of the emptying apartment blocks were phantasmal, dust-covered, not themselves. The light had tu
rned strange, as the sun was scarfed by smoke and a reddish fog. There was a smell in the air, which was not immediately recognizable to anyone who didn't know war. It clogged the nostrils with powdered brick and concrete, raw sewage, open drains and a disgusting meatiness. The atmosphere was vibrant, but not with any discernible sound, although people were making noise-talking, coughing, vomiting and groaning-it was more of an airborne tinnitus, brought about by a collective human alarm at the proximity of death.

  Lines of fire engines, lights flashing, were backed up all the way to Avenida San Lazaro. There wasn't a pane of intact glass in the apartment buildings on the other side of Calle Los Romeros. A bottle bank was sticking out of the side of one of the blocks like a huge green plug. A wall that ran down the street opposite the stricken building had been blown on to its back and cars were piled up in a garden, as if it was a scrapyard. The torn stumps of four trees lined the road. Other vehicles parked on Calle Los Romeros were buried under rubble: roofs crumpled, windscreens opaque, tyres blown out, wheel trims off. There were clothes strewn everywhere, as if there'd been a laundry drop from the sky. A length of chain-link fencing hung from a fourth-floor balcony.

  Firemen had clambered up the nearest cascade of rubble and had their hoses trained on the two remaining sections of what had been a complete L-shaped building. What was now missing was a twenty-five-metre segment from the middle of it. The colossal explosion had brought down all eight floors of the block, to form a stack of reinforced concrete pancakes to a height of about six metres. Framed by the ragged remains of the eight floors of apartments, and just visible through the mist of falling dust, was the roof of the partially devastated pre-school and the apartment blocks beyond, whose facades were patched with black and gaping glassless windows. A fireman appeared on the edge of a broken room on the eighth floor and in the war-torn air made a sign to show that the building was now clear of people. A bed fell from the sixth floor, its frame crunched into the piled debris, while its mattress bounced off wildly in the direction of the pre-school.

  On the other side of the rubble, further down Calle Los Romeros, was the Fire Chief's car but no sign of any officers. Falcon walked along the collapsed wall and made his way around the block to see what had happened to the pre-school. The end of the building closest to the explosion had lost two walls, part of the roof had collapsed and the rest was hanging, ready to drop. Firemen and civilians were propping the roof, while unblinking women stared on in appalled silence, hands holding their faces as if to stop them from dropping off in disbelief.

  On the other side, at the entrance to the school, it was worse. Four small bodies lay side by side, their faces covered with school pinafores. A large group of men and women were trying to control two of the mothers of the dead children. Covered in dust they were like ghosts, fighting for the right to go back to the living. The women were screaming hysterically and clawing madly against hands trying to prevent them from reaching the inert bodies. Another woman had fainted and was lying on the ground, surrounded by people kneeling to protect her from the swaying and surging crowd. Falcon looked around for a teacher and saw a young woman sitting on a mat of broken glass, blood trickling down the side of her face, weeping uncontrollably, while a friend tried to console the inconsolable. A paramedic arrived to give her wounds some temporary dressing.

  'Are you a teacher?' asked Falcon, of the woman's friend. 'Do you know where the mother of the fourth child is?'

  The woman, dazed, looked across at the collapsed apartment block.

  'She's in there somewhere,' she said, shaking her head.

  Only firemen moved around inside the pre-school, their boots crunching over debris and glass. More props came in to support the shattered roof. The Fire Chief was in an undamaged classroom at the back of the school, giving a report to the Mayor's office on his mobile.

  'All gas and electricity to the area has been cut off and the damaged building has been evacuated. Two fires have been brought under control,' he said. 'We've pulled four dead children out of the pre-school. Their classroom was in the direct path of the explosion and took its full force. So far we've had reports of three other deaths: two men and a woman who were walking along Calle Los Romeros when the explosion occurred. My men have also found a woman who seems to have died from a heart attack in one of the apartment blocks opposite the destroyed building. It's too difficult to say how many wounded there are at the moment.'

  He listened for a moment longer and closed down the phone. Falcon showed his ID.

  'You're here very early, Inspector Jefe,' said the Fire Chief.

  'I was in the Forensic Institute. It sounded like a bomb from there. Is that what you think?'

  'To do that sort of damage, there's no doubt in my mind that it was a bomb, and a very powerful one at that.'

  'Any idea how many people were in that building?'

  'I've got one of my officers working on that at the moment. There were at least seven,' he said. 'The only thing we can't be sure of is how many were in the mosque in the basement.'

  'The mosque?'

  'That's the other reason why I'm sure this was a bomb,' said the Fire Chief. 'There was a mosque in the basement, with access from Calle Los Romeros. We think that morning prayers had just finished, but we're not sure if anyone had left. We're getting conflicting reports on that from the outside.'

  6

  Seville-Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 08.25 hrs

  Desperation had brought Consuelo to Calle Vidrio early. The children were being taken to school by her neighbour. Now she was sitting in her car outside Alicia Aguado's consulting room, getting cold feet about the emergency appointment she'd arranged only twenty-five minutes earlier. She walked the street to calm her nerves. She was not someone who had things wrong with her.

  At precisely 8.30 a.m., having stared at the second hand of her watch, chipping away at the seconds-which showed her how obsessive she was becoming-she rang the doorbell. Dr Aguado was waiting for her, as she had been for many months. She was excited at the prospect of this new patient. Consuelo walked up the narrow stairs to the consulting room, which had been painted a pale blue and was kept at a constant temperature of 22°C.

  Although Consuelo knew everything about Alicia Aguado, she let the clinical psychologist explain that she was now blind due to a degenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa and that as a result of this disability she had developed a unique technique of reading a patient's pulse.

  'Why do you need to do that?' asked Consuelo, knowing the answer, but wanting to put off the moment when they got down to work.

  'Because I'm blind I miss out on the most important indicators of the human body, which is physiognomy. We speak more to each other with our features and bodies than we do with our mouths. Think how little you would glean from a conversation just by hearing words. Only if someone was in an extreme state, such as fear or anxiety, would you understand what they were feeling, whereas if you have a face and body you pick up on a whole range of subtleties. You can tell the difference between someone who is lying, or exaggerating, someone who's bored, and someone who wants to go to bed with you. Reading the pulse, which I learnt from a Chinese doctor and have adapted to my needs, enables me to pick up on nuance.'

  'That sounds like an intelligent way of saying that you're a human polygraph.'

  'I don't just detect lies,' said Aguado. 'It's more to do with undercurrents. Translating feeling into language can defeat even the greatest of writers, so why should it be any easier for an ordinary person to tell me about their emotions, especially if they're in a confused state?'

  'This is a beautiful room,' said Consuelo, already shying away from some of the words she'd heard in Aguado's explanation. Undercurrents reminded her of her fears, of being dragged out into the ocean to die of exhaustion alone in a vast heaving expanse.

  'There was too much noise,' said Aguado. 'You know how it is in Seville. Noise was becoming so much of a distraction for me, in my state, that I had the room double-glaze
d and soundproofed. It used to be white, but I think my patients found white as intimidating as black. So I opted for tranquil blue. Let's sit down, shall we?'

  They sat in the S-shaped lovers' seat, facing each other. She showed Consuelo the tape recorder in the armrest, explaining that it was the only way for her to review her consultations. Aguado asked her to introduce herself, give her age and any medication she was on so that she could check it was recording properly.

  'Can you give me a brief medical history?'

  'Since when?'

  'Anything significant since you were born-operations, serious illnesses, children…that sort of thing.'

  Consuelo tried to drink the tranquillity of the pale blue walls into her mind. She had been hoping for some miraculous surgical strike on her mental disturbances, a fabulous technique to yank open the tangled mess and smooth it out into comprehensible strands. In her turmoil it hadn't occurred to her that this was going to be a process, an intrusive process.

  'You seem to be struggling with this question,' said Aguado.

  'I'm just coming to terms with the fact that you're going to turn me inside out.'

  'Nothing leaves this room,' said Aguado. 'We can't even be heard. The tapes are locked up in a safe in my office.'

  'It's not that,' said Consuelo. 'I hate to vomit. I would rather sweat out my nausea than vomit up the problem. This is going to be mental vomiting.'

  'Most people who arrive at my side are here because of something intensely private, so private that it might even be a secret from themselves,' said Aguado. 'Mental health and physical health are not dissimilar. Untreated wounds fester and infect the whole body. Untreated lesions of the mind are no different. The only difficulty is that you can't just show me the infected cut. You might not know what, or where, it is. The only way for us to find out is by bringing things from the subconscious to the surface of the conscious mind. It's not vomiting. It's not expelling poison. You bring perhaps painful things to the surface, so that we can examine them, but they remain yours. If anything, it's more like sweating out your nausea than vomiting.'