The Hidden Assassins (14 page)

‘All right,’ said the editor, thinking positively about it. ‘A new face for a new era. Write me a profile. And, by the way, I agree with you about charisma, it
is
an intense form of self-belief. But there’s something both blinding
and
blind about it, too. Its closest friend can quite quickly become corruption—the belief that you can do anything with impunity. I hope Jesús Alarcón does not have the makings of a tragic figure.’

‘He’s not a hollow man,’ said Angel. ‘He’s suffered and come through it.’

‘Get him to remember that suffering,’ said the editor. ‘Every politician should have the words of the president of the Terrorists’ Victims’ Association, Pilar Manjón, ringing in their ears: “They only think of themselves.”‘

The Madrid police and forensics had been working hard in the apartment used by Djamel Hammad and Smail Saoudi. Taped to the underside of a gas bottle they’d found a selection of stolen and forged IDs and passports, with pictures of the two men whose descriptions fitted those given by Trabelsi Amar and the Seville homicide squad. They’d also discovered € 5,875 in small-denomination notes in three separate packages hidden around the apartment. DNA was currently being generated from hairs, bristles and pubic hairs found in the
bathroom. An empty pad on the kitchen table had revealed indentations, which proved to be complicated directions to a property southwest of Madrid, not far from a village called Valmojado. The isolated house near the Río Guadarrama was found to be empty, with no evidence of recent habitation. The police concluded that it was a staging post—a place to pick up and leave material—and nothing more. The property had been rented in the name of a Spaniard, whose ID was false. The owners had been paid six months in advance, which had made them reluctant to ask too many questions. The forensics were still conducting their search of the premises, but so far not a trace of explosive had been found. The Guardia Civil had questioned a number of locals, including shepherds, and reckoned that in the four months it had been rented it had been visited by a white van five times. Three of those visits corresponded roughly to the times Trabelsi Amar had lent the Peugeot Partner to Hammad and Saoudi.

There was a complication with this scenario, which was that the directions to the isolated house found in the Madrid apartment were freshly written in Hammad’s handwriting, which would imply that their visit on Sunday at around midday was their first. This in turn implied that the other two times they’d borrowed Trabelsi Amar’s van they’d lent it to others who had gone to the farmhouse. A clearer indication that the isolated farmhouse was being visited by people other than Hammad and Saoudi came from eyewitness reports that as many as six different people, including one woman, had been seen going there. This information had an adrenalizing effect on the CGI in Madrid, who concluded that Hammad and Saoudi were acting
within a much larger network than at first thought. They contacted all the major intelligence agencies but none of them had picked up any ‘chatter’ about a planned attack in Spain. The fear now was that Hammad and Saoudi’s logistical work was part of a wider effort.

The CGI, with the help of the Guardia Civil, were now trying to find Hammad and Saoudi’s route from Madrid to the isolated house near Valmojado and then down to Seville. They wanted to know if they had made any other stopovers—anonymous-looking meetings in roadside bars, other visits to isolated houses or, worse, other deliveries to, for instance, a location in another major Andalucían city.

That was the primary content of a seven-page report, drafted by several senior officers of the counterterrorism unit and sent by the Madrid CGI to Comisario Elvira in the damaged pre-school in Seville. There was a conclusion attached, which had been written by the Director of the CNI and had also reached the hands of Prime Minister Zapatero:

On the basis of our own findings and the reports received so far from the offices of the CGI and, taken in conjunction with the preliminary reports from the bomb squad and the police on the ground at the site of the disaster, we can only conclude, at this point, that we have come across an Islamic terrorist network who were planning an attack, or, more likely, a series of attacks, with the intention of destabilizing the political and social fabric of the region of Andalucía. Whilst the investigating bodies have so far uncovered some anomalies to the usual modus operandi of radical Islamic groups, they
have not brought to our attention any suspicious activity, or even stated intention, of any other group that might want to inflict damage on the Muslim population of Andalucía. We therefore recommend that the government take the necessary steps to protect all major cities in the region.

The noise of demolition work reasserted itself in the room after Comisario Elvira finished the reading of the report. Inspector Jefe Falcón and Juez Calderón were sitting on small children’s desks, arms folded, ankles crossed and staring into the ground, which had now been swept clear of glass. Plastic sheeting, which had been stretched across the empty window frames, revealed an indistinct outside world that ballooned and lurched with the hot breeze, blowing from the south.

‘They seem to have made up their minds, don’t they?’ said Calderón. ‘Having told us not to disappear exclusively down one path, that’s just what they’ve done themselves. There’s no mention of the VOMIT website or of any other anti-Muslim groups.’

‘Given all the stuff they’ve just found in the Madrid apartment of Hammad and Saoudi, and the hexogen deposit in the rear of the Peugeot Partner and the Islamic paraphernalia in the front,’ said Elvira, ‘who could blame them?’

‘It doesn’t look good for the Islamic radicals at the moment,’ said Falcón. ‘But the bomb squad haven’t got to the epicentre of the explosion yet. There’s still vital forensic information to come. I’ve also spoken to the forensics going over the Peugeot Partner and so far all they’ve come up with is that a new tyre had been fitted to the rear driver’s side and the spare had a puncture.

‘What they’ve found in the Madrid apartment and the existence of the isolated house could be interpreted as terrorist activity, or illegal immigrant activity. We’ve been told that Hammad and Saoudi have a track record of logistical involvement, but what does that mean? If they’d been caught with something, then we’d know about it. If they’ve been named by others, that’s questionable information.’

‘My reading of this document,’ said Elvira, flapping the paper derisively in front of him, ‘is that it’s something that has been drafted for the politicians, so that they can appear knowledgeable and decisive on a day of crisis. The CNI and CGI have stuck to the known facts. They’ve mentioned “anomalies” but have given no detail. VOMIT and other groups aren’t mentioned because there’s nothing to support their involvement. The MILA doesn’t appear either, despite its mention on the news. It’s because they’ve got no intelligence to offer on any of them.’

‘Are we allowed to talk about the CGI?’ said Falcón, purposely disingenuous.

Calderón’s secrecy radar was on to it in a flash. Elvira threw up his hands.

‘Needless to say, this can’t go out of this room,’ said Elvira, ‘but seeing as you’re the instructing judge controlling this investigation you should know that there have been some concerns about the reliability of the Seville branch of the CGI. A decision from above has not yet been taken to allow them to fully enter the battle. Their agents have been in touch with their informer network and have drafted reports, but we haven’t seen anything yet. They’ve been denied access to our reports and they know nothing about certain
pieces of evidence, such as the heavily annotated copy of the Koran, which, as far as I know, has been kept out of the news.’

‘That’s a big blow to the investigation,’ said Calderón. ‘Shouldn’t we have heard about this before now?’

‘I don’t have clearance to tell either of you,’ said Elvira.

‘So what is it about this heavily annotated copy of the Koran that’s so important?’ asked Calderón.

‘I don’t know, but it’s received a very high level of interest from the CNI,’ said Elvira. ‘Anyway, that doesn’t concern us right now. When was the last time you heard from your squad?’

‘Recently enough to be able to say that we’ve got a pretty clear picture of what happened here in the last forty-eight hours, some of which is connected to occurrences in the week before the explosion.’

Falcón now had at least two witnesses to each of the significant events that preceded the blast. Hammad and Saoudi had first been seen at the mosque on Tuesday 30th May at 12.00. They arrived on foot and stayed talking to the Imam until 1.30 p.m. The two other events of that week were the visit from council inspectors at 10 a.m. on Friday 2nd June and a power cut some time on Saturday 3rd June at night, when the Imam had been in the mosque alone.

This led to an electrician turning up at 8.30 a.m. on Monday 5th June to assess the damage and the work involved. He returned with two labourers at 10.30 a.m. to repair the blown fuse box and also install a power socket in the storeroom next to the Imam’s office.

The second visit from the electrician coincided with Hammad and Saoudi’s arrival in the Peugeot Partner
and the unloading of two large polypropylene sacks, which were believed to contain couscous. They stayed about an hour. The electricians left just before lunch at about 2.30 p.m. Hammad and Saoudi returned at 5.45 p.m. with four heavy cardboard boxes believed to contain sugar and some carrier bags of mint, all of which went into the storeroom. They were still there at 7 p.m. and, so far, nobody had seen them leave the premises.

‘And what are your areas of concern in all that?’

‘We have witnesses to the arrivals and departures of all these people,’ said Falcón. ‘But we haven’t been able to make contact with the electrician. In order to get this done as quickly as possible I’ve asked my squad, who are already overloaded with interview work, to coordinate with local police and get them to visit every electrician’s outlet or workshop within a square kilometre of the explosion. So far we’ve come up with nothing. All we know is that three men arrived in a blue transit van with no markings and we have no witnesses for the registration number.’

‘Do you want the media to make an announcement?’ asked Elvira.

‘Not yet. I want to do more footwork on this.’

‘What else?’

‘I have other members of my squad tied up interviewing the Informáticalidad sales reps. None of them has come back to me with anything significant, but I have yet to talk to them and find out what the story was there.’

‘Is that it?’

‘My greatest concern at the moment, apart from the
undiscovered electrician, is that the council have no record of sending any inspectors to the mosque, or any other part of this building, or even this barrio, on Friday 2nd June, or any day, for that matter, in the last three months.’

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 19.55 hrs

Before the three men left the bombsite for the night, Calderón gave an update on the deaths and injuries. Four children had died of head wounds and internal bleeding in the pre-school. Seven children had been seriously wounded—ranging from the loss of a leg below the knee to severe facial lacerations. Eighteen children had been lightly wounded, mainly cut by flying glass. Two men and a woman who had been passing by the building on Calle Los Romeros had been killed, either by flying debris or falling masonry. An elderly woman had died of a heart attack in an apartment across the road. There were thirty-two seriously injured people, who had been either inside, or around, buildings close to the stricken block and there were three hundred and forty-three lightly injured. From the rubble they had so far removed two men and two women who were dead and young Lourdes Alanis, who had survived. The list of missing in the mosque, including the Imam, numbered thirteen. Apart from them this gave a total so far of twelve dead, thirty-nine seriously injured and three hundred and sixty-one lightly injured.

The demolition crews were now removing the remaining slabs of concrete from what had been the fifth floor. The whole area was under floodlights as they prepared to work all night. An air-conditioned tent had been erected on some wasteground between the pre-school and another block of apartments to handle forensic evidence. Another tent was being erected to deal with the bodies and body parts, which would eventually be coming out of the crushed mosque. The judges, homicide squad, forensics and emergency services had worked out a duty roster, so that there would be someone on site all night from each group.

It was still light and very warm as Elvira, Falcón and Calderón left the pre-school just before 8 p.m. A group of people had gathered in a corner of the playground. Hundreds of candles flickered on the ground amidst bouquets of flowers. Banners and placards had been pinned up on the chain-link fencing—
No más muertes. Paz. Sólo los inocentes han caido. Por el derecho de vivir sin violencia
—No more death. Peace. Only the innocents have fallen. For the right to live without violence. But the largest banner of all was written in red against a white background—
ODIO ETERNO AL TERRORISMO
—Eternal Hate to Terrorism. In the bottom right-hand corner was written VOMIT. Falcón asked if anybody had seen the person who had unfurled this banner, but nobody had. It was this banner which had drawn people to that part of the playground and so it had become a natural place for the locals to pay tribute to the fallen.

They stood in the violet light of a sun that was beginning to set on this catastrophic day and, with the
machinery inexorably clawing away at the piled rubble, their murmured prayers, guttering candles and the already wilting flowers were both pathetic and touching, as pitiful and moving as the futile deaths of all humans in the vast grotesqueness of war. As the lawmen backed away from the shrine, Elvira’s mobile rang. He took the call and handed it to Falcón. It was Juan from the CNI, saying that they had to meet tonight. Falcón said he would be home in an hour.

The hospital was calm after the frenetic activity of the day. In the emergency room they were still picking glass out of people’s faces and suturing lacerations. There were patients in the waiting room, but there was no longer the horror of the triage nurse wading through the victims, skidding on blood, looking into the wide, dark eyes of the injured, silently pleading. Falcón showed his police ID and asked for Lourdes Alanis, who was in the intensive care unit on the first floor.

Through the glass panels of the intensive care unit Fernando was visible at his daughter’s bedside, holding her hand. She was hooked up to machines but seemed to be breathing on her own. The doctor in the ICU said she was making good progress. She had sustained a broken arm and a crushed leg, but no spinal injuries. Their main concern had been her head injuries. She was still in a coma, but a scan had revealed no evidence of brain damage or haemorrhaging. As they talked, Fernando left the ICU to go to the toilet. Falcón gave him a few minutes and went in after him. He was washing his hands and face.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, looking at Falcón via the mirror, suspicious, knowing he wasn’t a doctor.

‘We met earlier today by your apartment block. My name is Javier Falcón. I’m the Inspector Jefe of the homicide squad.’

Fernando frowned, shook his head; he didn’t remember.

‘Does this mean that you’ve caught the people who destroyed my family?’

‘No, we’re still working on that.’

‘You won’t have to look very far. That rat hole is crawling with them.’

‘With who?’

‘Fucking Moroccans,’ he said. ‘Those fucking bastards. We’ve been looking at them all this time, ever since 11th March, and we’ve been thinking…when’s the next time going to be. We always knew that there was going to be a next time.’

‘Who is “we”?’

‘Alright, me. That’s what
I’ve
been thinking,’ said Fernando. ‘But I know I’m not alone.’

‘I didn’t think the relations between the communities were so bad,’ said Falcón.

‘That’s because you don’t live in “the communities”,’ said Fernando. ‘I’ve seen the news, full of nice, comfortable people telling you that everything is all right, that Muslims and Catholics are communicating, that there’s some kind of “healing process” going on. I can tell you, it’s all bullshit. We live in a state of suspicion and fear.’

‘Even though you know that very few members of the Muslim population are terrorists?’

‘That’s what we’re told, but we don’t
know
it,’ said Fernando. ‘And what’s more, we have no idea who
they
are. They could be standing next to me in the bar, drinking beer and eating
jamón
. Yes, you see, some of
them even do that. Eat pig and drink alcohol. But it seems that they’re just as likely to blow themselves up as the one who spends his life with his nose to the floor in the mosque.’

‘I didn’t come here to make you angry,’ said Falcón. ‘You’ve got enough to think about without that.’

‘You didn’t
make
me angry. I
am
angry. I’ve
been
angry a long time. Two years and three months I’ve been angry,’ said Fernando. ‘Gloria, my wife…’

He stopped. His face came apart. His mouth thickened with saliva. He had to support himself against the basin as the physical pain worked its way through. It took some minutes for him to pull himself together.

‘Gloria was a good person. She believed in the good that exists in everyone. But her belief didn’t protect her, it didn’t protect our son. The people she spoke up for killed her, in the same way that they killed the ones they hate, and who hate them. Anyway, that’s enough. I must get back to my daughter. I know you didn’t have to come and find me here. You’ve got a lot on your plate. So I thank you for that…for your concern. And I wish you well in your investigation. I hope you find the killers before I do.’

‘I want you to call me,’ said Falcón, giving him his card, ‘at any time, day or night, for whatever reason. If you’re angry, depressed, violent, lonely or even hungry, I want you to call me.’

‘I didn’t think you people were supposed to get personally involved.’

‘I also want you to tell me if you’re ever contacted by a group who call themselves VOMIT, so it’s important on two levels that we keep in touch.’

They left the toilet and shook hands outside, where,
on the other side of the glass, his daughter’s life was readable in green on the screens. Fernando hesitated as he leaned against the door.

‘Only one politician spoke to me today,’ he said. ‘I saw them all parading themselves before the cameras with the victims and their families. This was while they were operating on Lourdes’ skull, so I had time to look at their ridiculous antics. Only one person found me.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Jesús Alarcón,’ said Fernando. ‘I’d never heard of him before. He’s the new leader of Fuerza Andalucía.’

‘What did he say to you?’

‘He didn’t say anything. He listened—and there wasn’t a camera in sight.’

The sky darkened to purple over the old city like the discoloration around a recent wound that had begun to hurt in earnest. Falcón drove on automatic, his mind buried deep in intractable problems: a bomb explodes, killing, maiming and destroying. What is left after the dust clears and the bodies are taken away is a horrendous social and political confusion, where emotions rise to the surface and, like wind on the susceptible grass of the plain, influence can blow people’s minds this way and that, turn them from beer-sippers into chest-thumpers.

The three CNI men were waiting for him outside his house on Calle Bailén. He parked his car in front of the oak doors. They all shook hands and followed him through to the patio, which was looking a little dishevelled these days. Encarnación, his housekeeper, wasn’t as capable as she used to be and Falcón didn’t have the money for the renovation required. And
anyway, he’d grown to enjoy living in the encroaching shabbiness of his surroundings.

He dragged some chairs out around a marble-topped table on the patio and left the CNI men to listen to the water trickling in the fountain. He came back with cold beers, olives, capers, pickled garlic, crisps, bread, cheese and
jamón
. They ate and drank and talked about Spain’s chances in the World Cup in Germany; always the same—a team full of genius and promise, which was never fulfilled.

‘Do you have any idea why we want to talk to you?’ asked Pablo, who was more relaxed now, less intensely observant.

‘Something to do with my Moroccan connections, so I was told.’

‘You’re a very interesting man to us,’ said Pablo. ‘We don’t want to hide the fact that we’ve been looking at you for some time now.’

‘I’m not sure that I’ve got the right mentality for secret work any more. If you’d asked me five years ago, then you might have found the ideal candidate…’

‘Who is the ideal candidate?’ asked Juan.

‘Someone who is already hiding a great deal from the world, from his family, from his wife, and from himself. A few state secrets on top wouldn’t be such a burden.’

‘We don’t want you to be a spy,’ said Juan.

‘Do you want me to deceive?’

‘No, we think deceiving would be a very bad idea under the circumstances.’

‘You’ll understand better what we want by answering a few questions,’ said Pablo, wresting the interview back from his boss.

‘Don’t make them too difficult,’ said Falcón. ‘I’ve had a long day.’

‘Tell us how you came to meet Yacoub Diouri.’

‘That could take some time,’ said Falcón.

‘We’re not in any hurry,’ said Pablo.

And, as if at some prearranged signal, Juan and Gregorio sat back, took out cigarette packs and lit up. It was one of those occasions after a long day, with a little beer and food inside him, that made Falcón wish he was still a smoker.

‘I think you probably know that just over five years ago, on 12th April 2001, I ran a murder investigation into the brutal killing of an entrepreneur turned restaurateur called Raúl Jiménez.’

‘You’ve got a policeman’s memory for dates,’ said Juan.

‘You’ll find that date written in scar tissue on my heart when I’m dead,’ said Falcón. ‘It’s got nothing to do with being a policeman.’

‘It had a big impact on your life?’ said Pablo.

Falcón took another fortifying gulp of Cruzcampo.

‘The whole of Spain knows this story. It was all over the newspapers for weeks,’ said Falcón, a little irritated with the knowingness with which the questions had started coming at him.

‘We weren’t in Spain at the time,’ said Juan. ‘We’ve read the files, but it’s not the same as hearing it for real.’

‘My investigation into Raúl Jiménez’s past showed that he’d known my father, the artist Francisco Falcón. They’d started a smuggling business together in Tangier during and after the Second World War. It meant they could establish themselves and start families and
Francisco Falcón could begin the process of turning himself into an artist.’

‘And what about Raúl Jiménez?’ said Pablo. ‘Didn’t he meet his wife when she was very young?’

‘Raúl Jiménez had an unhealthy obsession with young girls,’ said Falcón, taking a deep breath, knowing what they were after. ‘It wasn’t
so
unusual in those days in Tangier or Andalucía for a girl to get married at thirteen, but in fact her parents made Raúl wait until she was seventeen. They had a couple of children, but they were difficult births and the doctor recommended that his wife didn’t have any more.

‘In the run-up to Moroccan independence in the 1950s, Raúl became involved with a businessman called Abdullah Diouri who had a young daughter. Raúl had sex with this girl and, I think, even got her pregnant. This would not have been a problem had he done the honourable thing and married the girl. In Muslim society he would have just taken a second wife and that would have been the end of it. As a Catholic, it was impossible. To complicate matters further, despite doctor’s orders, his wife became pregnant with their third child.

‘In the end Raúl took the coward’s way out and fled with his family. Abdullah Diouri was incensed when he discovered this and wrote a letter to Francisco Falcón in which he told him of Raúl’s betrayal and expressed his determination to be avenged, which he achieved five years later.

‘The third child, a boy called Arturo, was kidnapped on his way back from school in southern Spain. Raúl Jiménez’s way of dealing with this terrible loss was to deny the boy’s existence. It devastated the family. His
wife committed suicide and the children were damaged, one of them beyond repair.’

‘Was it that sad story that made you decide to try to find Arturo thirty-seven years after he had disappeared?’ asked Pablo.

‘As you know, I met Raúl’s second wife, Consuelo, while investigating his murder. About a year later we started a relationship and during that time we revealed to each other that the one thing that still haunted us about her husband’s murder case, and all that surfaced with it, was the disappearance of Arturo. There was still a part of us that imagined the eternally lost six-year-old boy.’