The Hidden Assassins jf-3

by Robert Wilson

  'You didn't change it in politics.'

  'To tell you the truth, the PP was no different. It was like working for a huge corporation: play safe, toe the party line, everything happening by millimetres, no striding out to new horizons and changing the way people think and live.'

  'Who wants change?' said Falcon. 'Most people hate change so much that we have to have wars and revolutions to bring it about.'

  'But look at us now, Javier, talking like this in a bar,' said Angel. 'Why? Because we're in crisis. Our way of life is being threatened.'

  'You said it yourself, Angel. Most people can't cope with it, so what do they talk about?'

  'You're right. It's Esteban Calderon on everybody's lips,' said Angel. 'But at least it's not the usual trivia. It's tragedy. It's hubris bringing down the great man.'

  'So what would you tell Comisario Elvira to do now?' asked Falcon.

  'Aha! Is this what it's all about, Javier?' said Angel, smirking. 'You've brought me down here to get some free advice for your boss.'

  'I want the PR man's take on the world.'

  'You have to focus, and you have to focus on certainty. Because of the nature of the attack it's been difficult for you, but now you've finally got into the mosque it's time for you to reveal more and be specific. The evacuations of the schools and university buildings, what's that all about? People need a bone to chew on; uncertainty creates rumour, which does nothing to quell panic. Juez del Rey's mistake was that he hadn't taken the pulse of the city, so when he started spreading uncertainty again…'

  'It was the interviewer's question that spread uncertainty,' said Falcon.

  'That wasn't the way the viewers saw it.'

  'Del Rey only found out afterwards that someone had leaked the Arabic script.'

  'Del Rey should never have presented the truth of the situation: that there is still considerable confusion about what went on in that mosque. He should have pressed home the certainties. If, in the end, the truth happens to be something else, you just change your story. Your investigation lost a lot of its credibility when your spokesman was arrested for murder. The only chance of regaining that credibility lies in confirming the public's suspicions. The interviewer knew that the public would be in no mood to be told that there might be a homegrown element to this terrorist plot.'

  'Elvira has trouble deciding when to use what kind of truth so that his investigation can get on with the business of finding out what actually happened,' said Falcon.

  'Politics is great preparation for that,' said Angel.

  'So you think Jesus Alarcon has got what it takes?'

  'He's made a good start, but it's too early to say. It's what's going to happen six or seven months from now that's important,' said Angel. 'He's riding a big wave of public emotion now, but even the biggest waves end up as ripples on the beach.'

  'He could always go back to the Banco Omni if it didn't work out.'

  'They wouldn't have him,' said Angel. 'You don't leave the Banco Omni. Once they've given you a job, they take you into their confidence. If you leave them and become an outsider, that's where you remain.'

  'So, Jesus is taking some risks.'

  'Not really. He had a good introduction from my friend, who thinks very highly of him. He'll find him something else to do if it all comes to nothing.'

  'Have I met this mysterious friend of yours?'

  'Lucrecio Arenas? I don't know. Manuela's met him. He's not so mysterious now that he's retired.'

  'You mean he was mysterious before?'

  'Banco Omni is a private bank. It runs a hefty percentage of the Catholic Church's finances. It's a secretive organization. You won't even see any photographs of Banco Omni executives. I did a specific PR job for them, but I only got that job because of Lucrecio. I found out nothing about the organization, other than what I needed to know in order to perform my task,' said Angel. 'Why are we talking about Banco Omni?'

  'Because Jesus Alarcon is the man of the moment,' said Falcon. 'After Esteban Calderon.'

  'Ah, yes. You still haven't told me what you want to see me about,' said Angel.

  'I'm sounding you out, Angel,' said Falcon, shrugging. 'I told Elvira about our conversation earlier today when you offered to help us, but he's wary. I want to be able to go back to him and make him feel better about employing your talents. He just needs to be pushed, that's all.'

  'I'm prepared to help in a crisis,' said Angel. 'But I'm not looking for permanent work.'

  'Elvira's problem is that he sees you as a journalist, and therefore the enemy,' said Falcon. 'If I can talk to him about your PR activity and the sort of clients you've represented, that will give him a different perspective.'

  'I'll give advice but I won't be employed,' said Angel. 'Some might think there was a conflict of interest.'

  'Just give me some other company names that you've worked for,' said Falcon. 'Who was it you represented for their fortieth anniversary?'

  'Horizonte. The property company was called Mejorvista and the insurance group was Vigilancia,' said Angel. 'Don't promote me too much, Javier. I've got my work cut out steering Fuerza Andalucia through the media maze.'

  'The only thing is that PR is a difficult concept to sell. Other people's press cuttings are meaningless. If I could show Elvira the quality of the people you've worked for, that might help. Have you got shots of the people at Horizonte, or Banco Omni, or something from the Horizonte fortieth anniversary celebrations? You know, pictures of Angel Zarrias with senior executives. Elvira likes tangible things.'

  'Of course, Javier, anything for you. Just don't oversell me.'

  'We're in crisis,' said Falcon. 'Both our instructing judges have been discredited. We have to rebuild our image before it's too late. Elvira is a good policeman, and I don't want to see him fail just because he doesn't know how to play the media game.'

  They went up to the apartment. Manuela wasn't there. It was a huge, four-bedroomed place, with two of the bedrooms used as offices. Angel walked to the wall of his study and pointed at a shot in the middle.

  'That's the one you want,' he said, tapping a framed photograph in the centre of the wall. 'That's a rare shot of all the executives of Horizonte and Banco Omni in the same place. It was taken for the fortieth anniversary event. I've got a copy of it somewhere.'

  Angel sat at his desk, opened a drawer and went through a stack of photographs. Falcon searched the shot for a likeness of the police artist's drawing of the man seen with Ricardo Gamero.

  'Which one is Lucrecio Arenas?' asked Falcon. 'I don't see anybody I recognize here. If I'd met him, where would that have been?'

  'He has a house in Seville, although he doesn't live in it for half the year. His wife can't stand the heat so they go and live in some palatial villa, built for them by Mejorvista, down in Marbella,' said Angel. 'You remember that big dinner I had in the Restaurante La Juderia last October? He was there.'

  'I was away teaching a course at the police academy.'

  Angel gave him the shot and pointed out Lucrecio Arenas, who was in the centre, while Angel was on the very edge of the two rows of men. Arenas had similarities to the police artist's drawing in that he was the right age, but there was no revelatory moment.

  'Thanks for this,' said Falcon.

  'Don't lose it,' said Angel, who put it in an envelope for him.

  'What about this shot of you and King Juan Carlos,' said Falcon. 'Have you got a copy of that?'

  They both laughed.

  'The King doesn't need me to do his PR for him,' said Angel. 'He's a natural.' 'Are you getting anywhere, Jose Luis?' asked Falcon.

  'I can't believe it, but we've drawn a total blank,' said Ramirez. 'If Tateb Hassani was staying with someone in this area, he didn't go for a coffee, he didn't eat a tapa, drink a beer, buy bread, go to the supermarket, get a newspaper-nothing. Nobody has seen this guy before, and he's got a face you don't forget.'

  'Any news from Cristina and Emilio?'

  'They've seen most o
f the big houses in the area and there are no box hedges. They've all got internal patios rather than gardens. There's the Convento de San Leandro and the Casa Pilatos, but that doesn't help us much.'

  'I want you to find and check out another house. I don't have the address, but it belongs to someone called Lucrecio Arenas,' said Falcon. 'And I spoke to the CNI about the Imam's phone records. They've checked out the electrician's number already. It was a dead end.'

  'Can we have a look at those records ourselves?'

  'They've become classified documents,' said Falcon, and hung up.

  He was on his way to see the security guard who'd finished his shift at the Archaeological Museum and gone home. It was a long drive out to his apartment in the northeast of the city. He took a call from Pablo.

  'You're going to be pleased about this,' the CNI man said. 'Our handwriting expert has matched the Arabic script to the notes attached to the architect's drawings of the schools and the biology faculty. He's also matched Tateb Hassani's English script to the annotations in both copies of the Koran. What does this mean, Javier?'

  'I'm not absolutely sure of its greater significance, but I'm confident you can tell your code breakers to stop looking for a key to crack the non-existent cipher in those copies of the Koran,' said Falcon. 'I think they were planted in the Peugeot Partner and Miguel Botin's apartment, specifically to confuse us.'

  'And that's all you can say for the moment?'

  'I'll be seeing you later at my house,' said Falcon. 'I'm hoping it will all be clearer by then.'

  The lift to the security guard's apartment on the sixth floor was not working. Falcon was sweating as he rang the doorbell. The wife and kids were despatched to bedrooms and Falcon laid the photograph down on the dining-room table. His heart was beating tight and fast, willing the guard to find Lucrecio Arenas.

  'Do you see the older man in this photograph?'

  There were two rows of men, about thirty in all. The security guard had done this before. He took two pieces of paper and isolated each face from the rest of the shot and took a good look at it. He started on the left and worked his way across. He studied them carefully. Falcon couldn't bear the tension and looked out of the window. It took the guard some time. He knew it must be important for an Inspector Jefe to come all the way out to his apartment to show him this shot.

  'That's him,' said the guard. 'I'm absolutely sure of it.'

  Falcon's heart was thundering as he looked down. But the guard wasn't pointing at Lucrecio Arenas in the centre of the shot. He was tapping the face at the extreme right of the second row-and that face belonged to Angel Zarrias.

  33

  Seville-Thursday, 8th June 2006, 20.15 hrs

  The sun was setting on the third day since the explosion. As Falcon drove back into the city his mind reached a static but profound level of concentration focused entirely on Angel Zarrias.

  Back in the security guard's apartment he'd become quite angry. He'd torn the police sketch out of his pocket, smoothed it out on the dining-room table and asked the poor guy to show him the similarities. Falcon had been forced to admit a few things: that all old people looked the same, or invisible, to younger people; that Angel was 1.65m and only a little heavier than 75 kilos; that Angel had no facial hair and he did have a side parting and, even if he was a bit thin on top, he used all available hair to make it look as if he was still hanging on to it. Only when the security guard had talked him through the jaw line and nose did Falcon see Angel in the sketch, as an adult finally sees the outline of a face in a cloud, as pointed out by a frustrated child.

  Ramirez met him in the car park outside the preschool.

  'We found Lucrecio Arenas's house,' said Ramirez. 'It was in the Plaza Mercenarias. I sent Cristina over there to take a look and it was all closed up. The neighbours say they don't spend much time there in the summer and there's no garden, only an internal patio. They didn't recognize Tateb Hassani either.'

  They went into the classroom at the back where Juez del Rey and Comisario Elvira were waiting. Eight hours' sleep in three days was ruining Elvira. They sat down. They were all exhausted. Even del Rey, who should have been fresh, looked rumpled, as if he'd been jostled by a disgruntled crowd.

  'Good news or bad?' asked Elvira.

  'Both,' said Falcon. 'The good news is that I've identified the man seen speaking to Ricardo Gamero in the Archaeological Museum in the hours before he killed himself.'

  'Name?'

  'Angel Zarrias.'

  Silence, as if they'd all seen someone sustain an ugly blow.

  'He's your sister's partner, isn't he?' said Ramirez.

  'How did you identify him?' asked Elvira.

  Falcon briefed them on his conversation outside the Taberna Coloniales and how he'd extracted the Horizonte/Banco Omni executive photograph from Angel.

  'But that's only part of the bad news,' said Falcon. 'The other part is that I'm not sure whether this gets us any further down the chain.'

  'Meaning?'

  'What have we found out that will help us apply pressure on Zarrias to reveal more?' said Ramirez.

  'Exactly,' said Falcon. 'He was the last person to speak to Ricardo Gamero, but so what? He knew Gamero from church and that's the end of it. Why did he go to Zarrias and not his priest? His priest is dead. What did they talk about? Gamero was very upset. What about? Maybe Zarrias will give the same answer that Marco Barreda gave me. Perhaps Zarrias told Barreda to tell me that Gamero had been a closet gay. We don't know enough to be able to crack him open.'

  'I can't believe that Ricardo Gamero would go to Angel Zarrias at that particular moment to discuss emotional problems,' said del Rey.

  'You could show Zarrias the shot of Tateb Hassani and see what reaction you get,' said Elvira.

  Neither Elvira nor del Rey had heard from Pablo, so Falcon told them about Tateb Hassani and how his handwriting matched that of the documents found in the fireproof box from the mosque and the notes found in the two copies of the Koran.

  'And why did you ask for that comparison to be made in the first place?' asked Elvira.

  'It went back to a question I asked my officers when we first discovered the dead body on the rubbish dump: Why kill a man and take such drastic steps to destroy his identity? You would only do that because knowledge of the victim's identity would lead investigators to people known to the victim, or because knowledge of his expertise might jeopardize a future operation. Tateb Hassani's identity revealed a number of things. His expertise, as a professor of Arabic Studies, meant that he could write Arabic and would have a sound knowledge of the Koran. He had also given maths classes in Granada during the summer months and therefore spoke and wrote Spanish. His profile was not that of an Islamic militant-he was an apostate, a sexual predator and a drinker of alcohol. Once he lost his job at Columbia University, which had cost him his New York apartment, he became so desperate for money that he'd taught maths privately in Columbus, Ohio, which was the home of I4IT, who own Horizonte, who in turn own Informaticalidad. Finally, I was not comfortable with the fact that the keys found in the Imam's apartment, which successfully opened the fireproof box from the mosque, had been discovered in the kitchen drawer and not in the Imam's desk with his other keys. This struck me as a plant by someone who had access to the Imam's apartment, but not his study when he wasn't there.'

  'Who would have planted the keys?'

  'Botin, under instructions from Gamero?' said Ramirez.

  'At the beginning of this investigation Juan was telling us to keep an open mind and not to look at this attack historically, because there is no pattern in the way Islamic terrorists work. That's true. That's their style. Each attack comes out of the blue and there's always some new twist that teases greater terror into the mind of the West. Just think about the virtuosity of the attacks experienced so far.

  'When I was driving back from the security guard's apartment, something that struck me about the Seville bombing was its lack of originality. Of cours
e, that wasn't my first thought. My first thought was: these terrorists are prepared to attack residential property. But now I'm beginning to see that the Seville bomb refers back to some element in those previous attacks. The collapse of the apartment building reminded us of the Moscow apartment blocks coming down in 1999. The discovery of the Islamic sash, the hood and the Koran in the Peugeot Partner reminded us of the Koran tapes and detonators found in the Renault Kangoo outside the station at Alcala de Henares. The use of Goma 2 Eco in the device planted in the mosque reminded us of the explosive used on 11th March. The threat to the two schools and the biology faculty was reminiscent of Beslan. It was as if the person who planned this operation was drawing inspiration from something in those previous attacks.'

  'VOMIT,' said Ramirez. 'If there's anybody who knows everything there is to know about Islamic terrorist attacks, it's the author of that website.'

  'And now that the security guard has pointed the finger at Angel Zarrias there's a logic to it. He's a journalist, but he's also a PR man. He knows how things work in the human mind,' said Falcon. 'I'm now asking myself: who leaked the Arabic script found in the fireproof box to Canal Sur? Or rather, who didn't have to leak it, because it was already in their possession? And who planted the stories about the MILA? Who sent the Abdullah Azzam text to the ABC in Madrid from Seville?'

  'How far do you think this goes?' said Elvira. 'If they planted the Korans, the hood and the sash, was it because they knew about the hexogen?'

  'I don't think so,' said Falcon. 'I think the idea was conceived as just an attack against the mosque and the people in it. They were getting information from Miguel Botin, via Ricardo Gamero, that something was happening. The CGI had been frustrated in their first attempt to get a bugging order. Gamero found another way, or rather, another way was revealed to him by Zarrias, which was that the mosque could be put under surveillance by Informaticalidad's sales reps. Once it appeared that Hammad and Saoudi were making sinister preparations they decided to kill them, and anybody else unfortunate enough to be in the mosque at the time, before they could carry out the attack they were planning.