'At about two o'clock this morning,' said Falcon. 'She'd already left about fifty messages on my mobile by then.'
'Of course…she would.'
'As you know, she can be quite a daunting prospect when she's emotionally charged,' said Falcon. 'It wasn't possible for me to just say that you'd been arrested on suspicion of murder and leave it at that. She had to know who, where and why.'
'And what did you tell her?'
'I had to tell her by degrees because, of course, there are legal implications, but I can assure you I only told her the truth.'
'What was this "truth" that you told her?'
'That is what you are supposed to tell me, Angel. You are the perpetrator and I am the interrogator, and between us there is a truth. The idea is that we negotiate our way to the heart of it, but it's not up to me to tell you what I think you've done. That's your job.'
Silence. Zarrias looked at the dead recording equipment. Falcon was pleased to see him confused. He leaned over, turned on the recorder and made the introductions.
'Why did you kill Tateb Hassani?' asked Falcon, sitting back.
'And what if I tell you that I didn't kill him?'
'If you like, for the purposes of this interview, we won't draw a distinction between murder and conspiring to murder,' said Falcon. 'Does that make it easier for you?'
'What if I tell you I had nothing to do with the murder of Tateb Hassani?'
'You've already been implicated, along with Agustin Cardenas, by the host of Hassani's final and fatal dinner, Eduardo Rivero. You've also been identified as being present at the scene of the crime by an employee in his household,' said Falcon. 'So for you to say that you had nothing to do with Hassani's death would be a very difficult position to defend.'
Angel Zarrias looked deeply into Falcon's face. Falcon had been looked at like this before. His old technique, before his breakdown in 2001, was to meet it with the armour-plated stare. His new technique was to welcome them in, bring them to the lip of his deep well and dare them to look down. This was what he did to Angel Zarrias. But Angel wouldn't come. He looked hard but he never came to the edge. He backed off and glanced around the room.
'Let's not get bogged down in all the detail,' said Falcon. 'I'm not interested in who put the cyanide in what, or who was present when Agustin Cardenas did his gruesome work. Although I am interested to know whose idea it was to sew Tateb Hassani into a shroud. Did you come up with any suitable Islamic orisons for him? Did you wash him before you sewed him up? It was a bit tricky for us to tell once we'd discovered him, bloated and stinking, with the shroud torn off, on the rubbish dump outside Seville. But I thought that was a nice touch of respect from one religion to another. Was that your idea?'
Angel Zarrias had pushed his chair back and, in his agitation, had started to pace the room.
'You're not talking to me already, Angel, and we've only just started.'
'What the hell do you expect me to say?'
'All right. I know. It's difficult. You've always been a good Catholic, a man of great religious faith. You even managed to get Manuela to go to Mass, and she must have loved you to do that,' said Falcon. 'Guilt is a debilitating state for a good man, such as yourself. Living in mortal sin must be petrifying but, equally, it's a daunting task to bring yourself to the confessional for the greatest of human crimes. I'm going to make this easier for you. Let's forget about Tateb Hassani for the time being and move on to something you're more comfortable with, that you should be able to talk about, that should loosen your vocal cords so that you will, eventually, be able to come back to the more demanding revelations.'
Angel Zarrias stopped in his tracks and faced Falcon. His shoulders slumped, his chest looked like a cathedral roof on the brink of collapse.
'Go on then, ask your question.'
'Where were you on Wednesday, 7th June between 1.30 p.m. and 3 p.m.?'
'I can't recall. I was probably having lunch.'
'Sit down and think about it,' said Falcon. 'This is the day after the explosion. You would have received a phone call from someone who was desperate. I'm sure you'd remember that: a fellow human being in distress who needed to speak to you.'
'You know who it is, so you tell me,' said Angel, who'd started his agitated walking again.
'SIT DOWN, ANGEL!' roared Falcon.
Zarrias had never heard Falcon shout before. He was shocked at the anger simmering beneath the placid surface. He swerved towards the chair, sat down and stared into the table with his hands clasped tight.
'You were seen and identified by a security guard,' said Falcon.
'I went to the Archaeological Museum and met a man called Ricardo Gamero.'
'Are you aware of what happened to Ricardo Gamero about half an hour after you spoke to him?'
'He committed suicide.'
'You were the last person to speak to him, face to face. What did you talk about?'
'He told me he had developed feelings for another man. He was very ashamed and distressed about it.'
'You're lying to me, Angel. Why should a committed CGI agent leave his office during the most important antiterrorist investigation ever to happen in this city, to go and discuss his sexual angst with you?'
'You asked me a question and I replied,' said Zarrias, without taking his eyes off the table.
Falcon pummelled Zarrias with questions about Ricardo Gamero for three-quarters of an hour, but could not get him to budge from his story. He accused Zarrias of telling Marco Barreda from Informaticalidad to offer up the same lie. Zarrias didn't even give Falcon the satisfaction of a flicker of recognition at this new name. Falcon made a show of ordering Barreda to be brought down to the Jefatura for questioning. Zarrias hung on grimly, knowing that this was the difference between life and a living death.
It was well past 10 a.m. when Falcon returned to the murder of Tateb Hassani. Zarrias looked pale and sick from maintaining his wall of deceit. One eye was bloodshot and his lower lids were hanging down from his eyeballs to reveal raw, veined and shiny flesh.
'Let's talk about Tateb Hassani again,' said Falcon. 'An employee, Mario Gomez, saw you, Rivero and Hassani going upstairs to the Fuerza Andalucia offices in Rivero's house to dine on a buffet that he'd just laid out. The time was 9.45 p.m. Rivero has told us that Agustin Cardenas arrived a little later and parked his car underneath the arch of the entrance. Tell me what happened in the time between you going up the stairs and Tateb Hassani's body being brought down to be loaded into Agustin Cardenas's Mercedes E500.'
'We drank some chilled manzanilla, ate some olives. Agustin turned up a little after ten o'clock. We served ourselves from the buffet. Eduardo opened a special bottle of wine, one of his Vega Sicilias. We ate, we drank, we talked.'
'What time did Lucrecio Arenas and Cesar Benito arrive?'
'They didn't. They weren't there.'
'Mario Gomez told us that there was enough food for eight people.'
'Eduardo has always been generous with his portions.'
'At what point did you administer the cyanide to Tateb Hassani?'
'You're not going to get me to incriminate myself,' said Angel. 'We'll leave that for the court to decide.'
'How was Tateb Hassani introduced to you?'
'We met at the Chamber of Commerce.'
'What did Tateb Hassani do for you?'
'He helped us formulate our immigration policy.'
'Jesus Alarcon says that was already in place months ago.'
'Tateb Hassani was very knowledgeable about North Africa. He'd read a lot of the UN reports about the mass assaults by illegal immigrants on the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. We were incorporating new ideas into our policy. We had no idea how well-timed his help would be in view of what happened on 6th June.'
Falcon announced the end of the interview and flicked off the recorder. It was more important now that he prepare Zarrias for the next interview. There was plenty of evidence of decrepitude in his face, but he had retreated into hims
elf, concentrated his powers into a nucleus of defence. Falcon had only achieved some superficial damage. Now he had to make him vulnerable.
'I had to tell Manuela,' said Falcon. 'You know what she's like. I told her that you'd had to murder Tateb Hassani because he was the only element outside the conspiracy and, therefore, the only danger to it. If he was left alive it would render Fuerza Andalucia vulnerable. Manuela wasn't prepared to deal in those sorts of generalizations so I had to give her the detail; how you'd employed him and where evidence of his handwriting was found. She knows you, of course, Angel. She knows you very well. She hadn't quite realized how far your obsession had gone. She hadn't realized that you'd gone from being extreme to fanatical. And she admired you so much, Angel, you know that, don't you? You helped her a lot with your positive energy. You helped me, too. You saved my relationship with her, which was important to me. I believe that she could have forgiven you this misguided attempt to finally grab a workable power, even if she didn't hold with your extreme beliefs. She thought, at least, that you were honourable. But there was something that she could not forgive.'
At last Zarrias looked up, as if he'd just come to the surface of himself. The tired, bruised and sagging eyes were suddenly alive with interest. In that moment Falcon realized something he'd never quite been sure about: Angel loved Manuela. Falcon knew that his sister was attractive, plenty of people had told him that they found her funny and that she had a great zest for life, and he'd seen her affect men touchingly by playing the little girl as well as the grown woman. But Falcon knew her too well and it had always seemed unlikely to him that anybody not related to Manuela could love her absolutely, because she had too many faults and dislikeable traits constantly on display. Clearly, though, she'd given something to Angel that he'd missed from his previous marriage, because there was no mistaking his need to know why she hated him.
'I'm listening,' said Zarrias.
'She could not forgive the way you talked to her that morning, when you'd already planned for that bomb to explode and she hadn't sold her properties.'
39
Rabat-Friday, 9th June 2006, 08.45 hrs
Yacoub was in the library in the group's house in the medina when they came for him. With no warning there were suddenly four men around him. They put a black hood over his head and tied his hands behind him with plastic cuffs. Nobody said a word. They took him through the house and out into the street, where he was thrust into the footwell in the back of a car. Three men came in after him and rested their feet on his supine body. The car took off.
They drove for hours. It was uncomfortable in the footwell, but at least they were driving on tarmac. Yacoub controlled his fear by telling himself that this was part of the initiation rite. After several hours they came off the good road and began labouring up some rough track. It was hot. The car had no air conditioning. The windows were open. It must have been dusty, because he could smell it even inside his hood. They spent an hour dipping and diving on the rough track until the car came to a halt. There was the sound of a rifle mechanism, followed by an intense silence as if each face in the car were being searched. They were told to carry on.
The car continued for another fifteen minutes until it again came to a halt. Doors opened and Yacoub was dragged out, losing his barbouches. They ran him across some rocky ground so fast that he stumbled. They paid no attention to his lost footing and hauled him on. A door opened. He was taken across a beaten earth floor and down some steps. Another door. He was hurled against a wall. He dropped to the floor. The door shut. Footsteps retreated. No light came through the dense material of the hood. He listened hard and became aware of a sound, which did not seem to be in the same room. It was a human sound. It was coming from a man's throat, a gasping and groaning, as if he was in great pain. He called out to the man, but all that happened was that the voice fell silent, apart from a faint sobbing.
The sound of approaching feet kick-started Yacoub's heart. His mouth dried as the door opened. The room seemed to be full of people, all shouting and pushing him around. There was the sound of screaming from the next room and a man's voice, pleading. They picked Yacoub up bodily, held him face down, and took him back up the stairs, outside, across rough ground. They dropped him and stood back. Whoever had been downstairs in the cells was now out in the open with him, crying out in pain. A rifle mechanism clattered close to his ear. Yacoub's head was pulled up and the hood removed. He saw a man's feet, bloody and pulpy. His hair was grabbed from behind and his vision directed towards the man lying in front of him. A gunshot, loud and close. The man's head jolted and matter spurted from the other side. His bloody feet twitched. The hood was pulled back over Yacoub's head. The barrel of a gun was put to the back of his neck. His heart was thundering in his ears, eyes tight shut. The trigger clicked behind his head.
They picked him up again. They seemed gentler. They walked him away. There was no rush now. He was taken into a house and given a chair to sit on. They removed his plastic cuffs and black hood. Sweat cascaded down his neck and into the collar of his jellabah. A boy put his barbouches down by his feet. A glass of mint tea was poured for him. He was so disorientated that he could not even take in the faces of those around him before they left the room. He put his head down on the table top and gasped and wept.
After being inside the hood, his eyes were already accustomed to the darkness of the room. There was a single bed in the corner. One wall was covered with books. The windows were all shuttered. He sipped the tea. His heart rate eased back down to below the one hundred mark. His throat, which had been tight with hysteria, slackened. He went over to the books and studied the titles of each one. Most of them were about architecture or engineering: detailed tomes on buildings and machines. There were even some car manuals, thick manufacturer's plans for some four-wheel-drive vehicles. They were all in French, English or German. The only Arabic texts were eight volumes of poetry. He sat back down.
Two men came in and gave him a formal, but warm, welcome. One called himself Mohamed, the other Abu. A boy followed them, carrying a tray of tea, glasses and a plate of flat bread. The two men were both heavily bearded and each wore a dark brown burnous and army boots. They sat at the table. The boy poured the tea and left. Abu and Mohamed studied Yacoub very carefully.
'That is not normally part of our initiation procedure,' said Mohamed.
'A member of our council thought that you were a special case,' said Abu, 'because you have so many outside contacts.'
'He felt that you needed to be left in no doubt as to the punishment for treachery.'
'We did not agree with him,' said Abu. 'We did not think that anyone bearing the name of Abdullah Diouri would need such a demonstration.'
Yacoub acknowledged the honour accorded to his father. More tea was poured and sipped. The bread was broken and distributed.
'You had a visit from a friend of yours on Wednesday,' said Mohamed.
'Javier Falcon,' said Yacoub.
'What did he want to discuss with you?'
'He is the investigator of the Seville bombing,' said Yacoub.
'We know everything about him,' said Abu. 'We just want to know what you discussed.'
'The Spanish intelligence agency had asked him to approach me on their behalf,' said Yacoub. 'He wanted to know if I would be willing to be a source for them.'
'And what did you tell him?'
'I gave him the same answer that I'd given the Americans and the British when they'd made the same approaches,' said Yacoub, 'which is why I am here today.'
'Why is that?'
'In refusing all these people, who dishonoured me by offering money for my services, I realized that it was time for me to take a stand. If I was certain that I did not want to be with them, then it should follow that my loyalties lay elsewhere. I had refused them because it would be the ultimate betrayal of everything my father stood for. And, if that was the case, then I should take a stand for what he believed in, against the decadence that he so
despised. So when my friend left I went straight to the mosque in Sale and let it be known that I wanted to help in any way that I could.'
'Do you still consider Javier Falcon to be a friend?'
'Yes, I do. He was not acting for himself. I still consider him to be an honourable man.'
'We have been following the Seville bombing with interest,' said Mohamed. 'As you've probably realized, it has caused great disruption to one of our plans, which has demanded a lot of reorganization. We understand that some arrests were made last night. Three men are being held. They are all members of the political party Fuerza Andalucia, a party holding anti-Islamic views, which it wants to translate into regional policy. We have been watching them closely. They have recently elected a new leader, who we know little about. What we do know is that the three men they have arrested are being held on a charge of suspected murder. It is believed that they killed an apostate and traitor called Tateb Hassani. That is of no interest to us, nor are these three men, who we believe to be unimportant. We would like to know-and we think that your friend, Javier Falcon, will be able to help-who gave the orders for the mosque to be bombed?'
'If he knew that, then I am sure they would have been arrested.'
'We don't think so,' said Abu. 'We think that they are too powerful for your friend to be able to touch them.' Seville-Friday, 9th June 2006, 10.00 hrs Falcon knew that his goading of Angel Zarrias would not help in any material way, but he hoped that it would cause some unseen structural damage, which might lead to a breakdown later on. Angel Zarrias had revealed himself, of course-how could he not? While he'd been squaring up to do battle with the corruptive powers of materialism and the ruthless energy of radical Islam, his partner, the woman he loved, was having a tantrum like some spoilt two-year-old, consumed by her pathetic needs and concerns. It represented to him all that was wrong with this modern existence that he'd grown to despise, which was how he justified employing equally corruptive powers and fanatical energy to bring the aimless world back to heel.
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