The Hidden Assassins jf-3
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To see it all played out with no sound-or rather, too much sound from the thumping blades thrashing the air-added to the unreality. Falcon felt faint at the thought that this final operation had all happened as a result of his hunch. What if reality yielded no bombs in the vehicles and a Golf GTI with two injured innocent men? He must have been looking bewildered and lost, because Juan's voice came on in his head.
'We quite often think that,' he said. 'Did this really happen?'
The helicopter banked away from the distant city of Zaragoza, which bristled under the heat and a stagnant smog. The pilot muttered his position and direction as the brown, hard-baked mountains settled back into the late afternoon. Coda Seville-Monday, 10th July 2006 Falcon was sitting in the restaurant at the back of the bar in Casa Ricardo. It was almost four years to the day that he'd last been in this place and it had been no accident. He took a sip of his beer and ate an olive. He was just cooling off after the walk in the atrocious heat from his house.
There had been no time for anything in the last month. The paperwork had achieved surreal dimensions, from which he broke away to re-enter a world he'd expected to find changed. But the bomb had been like an epileptic fit. The city had suffered a terrible convulsion and there had been much concern for its future health, but as the days passed and there were no further outbreaks, life reverted to normal. It left a lesion. There were families with an unfillable space at the table. And others, who regularly summoned their courage to face another day at waist height to people they'd always looked in the eye. There were the forgotten hundreds who looked in the mirror every morning to shave around a scar, or smooth foundation on to a new blemish. But the one force greater than the terrorist's power to disrupt was humanity's need to get back into a routine.
The debrief on the intelligence operation had lasted four days. Falcon 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. Falcon 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, Falcon had been working with Juez del Rey to bring the case against Rivero, Cardenas and Zarrias 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 Cardenas and Zarrias 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.
Calderon'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. Falcon had not seen Calderon 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 Falcon. 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 Maria; 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 Zarrias.
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 Maria Luisa, Falcon 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 Falcon 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.
Falcon 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 Jose 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.
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