The Hidden Assassins (18 page)

‘You’d need an army and a navy to take Andalucía.’

‘And there’s the British in Gibraltar, who might have an opinion on the matter, too,’ said Flowers. ‘But that is not the point. The liberation of Andalucía is an
inspiring
ideal
that fills the hearts of Islamic fanatics with a warm Allah-infused glow. It is the
dream
that will draw followers to the cause. My source also read the Algerians’ intentions wrong. They didn’t want access to the hashish trade because of finance, they wanted to tap into their smuggling routes to get people and material across to Spain.’

‘Has that been happening?’

‘Nobody’s been caught,’ said Flowers. ‘Smuggling routes generally exist because they’re allowed to. There’s a constant stream of hashish from Morocco and cocaine from South America coming into the long, unpatrollable Iberian coastline, and there’s plenty of money to keep the authorities happy and quiet.’

This talk made Falcón’s sweat run cold. The money, organization and corruption were all in place to make a devastating campaign on Andalucía seem likely rather than crazy.

‘What about Seville and the MILA?’ asked Falcón.

‘Some Afghans arrived in Morocco in January.’

‘Where in Morocco? How do your sources get such information? Why aren’t we getting it?’

‘There’s no base. There’s no town hall with posters outside advertising “MILA Meeting Tonight”. I have one source, at the wrong level, who is able to give me bits and pieces. You don’t just walk into these groups off the street. You have to be vouched for. It’s all to do with family and tribal ties. I believe my source’s information, but I’m wary of sharing it because he’s peripheral to the group’s leading council.’

‘Which means it could be invention?’

‘You see, Javier, being given information doesn’t necessarily make the picture any clearer.’

‘Tell me about the Afghan connection.’

‘Some Afghans arrived, offering the group a Seville connection. They said he was capable of giving recce and logistical support, but did not have the capacity to carry out an attack.’

‘Name?’

‘He couldn’t give me one.’

‘One of the worshippers in the mosque here told me that there had been a visit from a group of Afghans and that the Imam had spoken to them in Pashto.’

‘I’d be careful about putting those two pieces of information together without more corroboration,’ said Flowers.

‘What’s the news on Abdelkrim Benaboura?’ asked Falcón. ‘He doesn’t seem to be high risk and yet there’s a clearance problem with his history. What does that mean?’

‘That they don’t know who he is from a certain date, which is normally around the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002 when the US went into Afghanistan and the Taliban regime broke up and dispersed. You have to remember, until 9/11 the US and European intelligence network in the Islamic world was negligible. We sorted out who was who on our own turf in the years that followed, but there were, and still are, very large gaps—as you’d expect from an introverted religion that stretches from Indonesia to Morocco and Northern Europe to South Africa. Factor in the difficulties of identification, given the clothes these people wear, the headgear and facial hair, and histories are not so easily matched to people.’

‘You still haven’t told me anything about Abdelkrim Benaboura.’

‘Why do the CNI think it’s so important for you to recruit Yacoub now, right at the moment when you’re supposed to be heading the biggest murder enquiry of your career?’

‘The CNI think they might have discovered something even bigger.’

‘Like what?’

‘They weren’t prepared to say.’

‘What have they got that’s made them think that?’

‘You don’t miss much, Mark, do you?’ said Falcón, but Flowers didn’t answer. He was deep in distracted thought until he looked at his watch, knocked back his whisky and said he had to go. Falcón walked him to the door.

‘Have you tried to recruit Yacoub Diouri yourself?’ asked Falcón.

‘Something worth remembering,’ said Flowers, ‘he doesn’t like Americans. Now, who was that beautiful woman who left just as I arrived?’

‘My ex-wife.’

‘I’ve got two ex-wives,’ said Flowers. ‘It’s funny how ex-wives are always more beautiful than wives. Think about that, Javier.’

‘That’s all you do, Mark, leave me with more to think about than when you arrived.’

‘I’ll give you something else to roll around your brain,’ said Flowers. ‘The CNI planted the story about the MILA in the press. How about that?’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘Welcome to my wonderful world, Javier,’ said Flowers, walking off into the night.

He stopped at the end of the short avenue of orange trees and turned back to Javier, who was silhouetted in the doorway.

‘One last piece of advice,’ said Flowers. ‘Don’t try to understand the whole picture…there’s nobody in the world who does.’

Seville—Wednesday, 7th June 2006, 04.05 hrs

Manuela lay in bed alone, trying to ignore the faint click of Angel’s fingers on the keys of his laptop in another room. She blinked in the dark, holding back the full contemplation of something very horrible: the sale of her villa in El Puerto de Santa María, an hour’s drive south from Seville on the coast. The villa had been left to her by her father, and every room was packed with adolescent nostalgia. The fact that Francisco Falcón didn’t much like the place and loathed all the neighbours, the so-called Seville high society, had been erased from Manuela’s memory. She imagined her father’s spirit writhing in agony at the proposed sale. It was, however, the only way that she could see of repairing her financial situation. The banks had already called her before close of business, asking where the funds were that she’d told them to expect. It was the only solution that had come to her, in the death and debt hour of four o’clock in the morning. The estate agent had told her the obvious: the Seville property market would be stalled until further notice. She had four possible buyers for her villa, who were constantly
261 reminding her of their readiness to purchase. But could she let it go?

Angel had been calling her all day, trying to restrain the excitement in his voice. His conversation was full of the ramifications of Rivero’s retirement and the great new hope of Fuerza Andalucía, Jesús Alarcón, who he’d been steering around all day, after interviewing him for the profile in the
ABC
. Angel’s media manipulation had been brilliant. He’d kept Jesús off camera when he visited the hospital and got him to talk privately to the victims and their families. His greatest coup had been to get him through to Fernando Alanis in the intensive care unit. Jesús and Fernando had talked. No cameras. No reporters. And they’d hit it off. It couldn’t have been better. Later, when the Mayor and a camera crew got through to intensive care, Fernando had mentioned Jesús Alarcón, on camera, as the only politician who hadn’t sought to make any media capital out of the victims’ misery. It was pure luck, but a total masterstroke for Angel’s campaign. The Mayor had just managed to squeeze back the nervous smile that wanted to creep across his face.

Consuelo couldn’t stop herself. Why should she? She couldn’t sleep. What better way to remember carefree sleep than to watch the experts; the calm faces of the innocents, eyelids trembling, softly breathing, deep and dreamless in their beds. Ricardo was first, the fourteen-year-old, who’d reached the gawky age, where his face was stretching in odd directions, trying to find its adult mould. This wasn’t such a peaceful age, with too many hormones shooting around the body and sexual yearning fighting with football in his mind. Matías was
twelve and seemed to be growing up quicker than his elder brother; easier to walk in somebody else’s footsteps than to tread out one’s own, as Ricardo had done with no father to guide him.

Consuelo knew where this was heading, though. Ricardo and Matías took care of themselves. It was Darío, her youngest at eight years old, who drew her in. She loved his face, his blond hair, his amber-coloured eyes, his perfect little mouth. It was in his room that she sat down in the middle of the floor, half a metre from his bed, looking into his untroubled features and easing herself into the uneasy state she craved. It started in her mouth, with the lips that had kissed his baby head. She drank it down her throat and felt the twinge in her breasts. It settled in her stomach, high up around the diaphragm, an ache that transmitted its pain from her viscera to the tingling surface of her skin. She scoffed at Alicia Aguado’s questioning. What was wrong with such a love as this?

Fernando Alanis sat in the intensive care unit of the Hospital de la Macarena. He watched his daughter’s vital signs on the monitors. Grey numbers and green lines that told him good things, that she was capable of lighting up a machine, if not her father. His mind crashed and fell about like a hopeless drunk in a binfilled narrow alleyway. One moment it was gasping at the catastrophic destruction of the apartment building, the next it was buckling at the sight of four covered bodies outside the pre-school. He still couldn’t quite believe what he had lost. Was this a mechanism of the mind that suspended things too unbearable to comprehend, almost to the point of a barely remembered nig
htmare? He’d been told by people who’d survived bad falls from scaffolding that the rush of the ground coming to meet you was not so terrifying. The horror was in the eventual awakening. And with that he would lurch sickeningly forward to the bruised and battered face of his daughter, her oval mouth slack against the clear plastic concertina of tube. Everything inside him felt too big. His organs were jostled by the colossal inflation of hate and despair which had no direction, other than to make themselves as uncomfortable as possible. He went back to a time when his family and the building had been intact, but the thought of the third child he’d been proposing made him break down inside. He couldn’t bear to take himself back to a state that would never exist again, he couldn’t bear the notion of never seeing Gloria and Pedro again, he couldn’t stomach the finality of that word ‘never’.

He concentrated on his daughter’s beating heart. The jumping line. Be-dum, be-dum, be-dum. The thready skip of the green fuse against the terminal blackness of the monitor made him rear back in his seat. It was all too fragile. Anything could happen in this life and did…and had. Perhaps the answer was to retreat into emptiness. Feel nothing. But that held its terror, too. The monstrous negativity of the black hole in space, sucking in all light. He breathed in. The air expanded his chest. He breathed out. His stomach wall relaxed. This, for the time being, was the only way to proceed.

Inés lay where she had fallen. She hadn’t moved since he’d left. Her body was a miasma of pain from the pummelling it had sustained from his hard, white knuckles. Nausea humped in her stomach. He’d
punched her through her flailing hands; one of her fingers had been bent back. In an escalation of his fury he’d torn off his belt and lashed her, with the buckle digging into her buttocks and thighs. With each stroke he’d told her through clenched teeth: ‘Never…speak…to my girlfriend…like that…ever again. Do you hear me? Never…again.’ She’d rolled to the corner of the room to get away from him. He’d stood over her, breathing heavily, not so different from when he was sexually aroused. Their eyes met. He pointed his finger at her as if he might shoot her. She didn’t pick up what he said. She’d taken in the purity of his hatred from his blank, basilisk eyes, the colourless lips and his red, swollen neck.

No sooner had he left the apartment than she started to rebuild her illusion. His anger was understandable. The whore had told him some nonsense and set him against her. That was the way these things worked. He was just fucking the whore, but she wanted more now. She wanted to be in the wife’s shoes, on the wife’s side of the bed, but she was just the whore so she had to play her little games. Inés hated the whore. A line came into her head from an old conversation with Javier: ’Most people are killed by people they know, because it is only they who are capable of arousing the passionate emotions that can lead to uncontrollable violence.’ Inés knew Esteban. My God, did she know Esteban Calderón. She’d seen him gilded with the laurel wreath, and cringing like the village cur. That was why she could arouse such emotions in him. Only she. That old cliché holds true. Love and hate have the same source. He would love her again once that black bitch stopped meddling with his mind.

She raised herself on to all fours. The pain made her gasp. Blood dripped from her mouth. She must have bitten her tongue. She crawled up the bed to stand on her feet. She unzipped her dress and let it fall. Unhooking her bra was a torture, bending to slip off her panties nearly made her faint. She stood in front of the mirror. A massive bruise spread across her torso where he’d hit her that morning. Her chest ached through to her spine. A criss-cross of weals covered her buttocks and upper thighs, broken by punctured skin where the buckle had dug in. She put a finger to one of these marks and pressed. The pain was exquisite. Esteban, in that passionate moment, really had given her his fullest attention.

Javier lay in the dark, with images from the late news still present in his mind: the demolished building under the surgical glare of the floodlights; the smashed plate-glass windows of a number of shops with Moroccan wares for sale; the fire brigade spraying a flaming apartment which had been fire-bombed by kids on the rampage; a cut, bruised and swollen-faced Moroccan boy, who’d been set upon by neo-Nazi thugs with clubs and chains; a butcher’s selling halal meat with a car rammed through the metal blinds of the store front. Falcón shunted all the images out of his mind until all that was left was the ultimate remnant of terror—deep uncertainty.

He cast his mind back to before the bombing, looking for a clue amongst all those extraordinary emotions that might help him make sense of what was happening. His mind played tricks. Uncertainty had that effect. Human beings always believe that an event has been
prefigured in some way. It’s the necessary part of rediscovering the pattern. Mankind cannot bear too much chaos.

He had the illusion of the impenetrable darkness receding from him, like the endlessly expanding universe. This was the new certainty, the one that sent all the old narratives, with which we structured our lives, down into the black hole of human understanding. We have to be even stronger now that science has told us that time is unreliable, and even light behaves differently if you turn your back. It was a terrible irony that, just as science was pushing back the limits of our comprehension, religion, the greatest and oldest of human narratives, was fighting back. Was it because of resentment at being found on the discard pile of modern European life that religion was making a stand? Falcón closed his eyes and concentrated on relaxing each part of his body until, finally, he drifted away from the unanswerable questions and into a deep sleep. He was a man who had made up his mind and had a car arriving early to take him to the airport.

The car, a black Mercedes with tinted windows, turned up at 6 a.m. with Pablo sitting in the back in a dark suit with an open-neck shirt.

‘How did your talk with Yacoub go last night?’ asked Pablo, as the car pulled away.

‘Given that a bomb went off in Seville yesterday, he knows I’m not coming over on a social visit.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He was pleased that we were going to see each other, but he knows there’s an ulterior motive.’

‘He’s going to be a natural at this business.’

‘I’m not sure he’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘Because of your investigation this is time-critical, so we’ve arranged a private jet to take us down there. The flight to Casablanca will be less than an hour and a half as long as we get good air-traffic clearance. You’ve got diplomatic status so we’ll get through any formalities quickly, and you’ll be on the road to Rabat within two hours of take-off,’ said Pablo. ‘I presume you’re meeting Yacoub in his home?’

‘I’m a friend, not a business associate,’ said Falcón. ‘Although that might change after this meeting.’

‘I’m sure Mark Flowers gave you some good tips.’

‘How long have you known about Mark…and me?’ asked Falcón, smiling.

‘Since you first outwitted him back in July 2002 and he made you one of his sources,’ said Pablo. ‘We’re not worried about Mark. He’s a friend. After 9/11 the Americans said they were going to put someone in Andalucía and we asked for Mark. Juan has known him since they were in Tunis together, keeping an eye on Gaddafi. Did Mark give you any ideas on how to approach Yacoub Diouri?’

‘I’m pretty sure he tried to recruit him and was rebuffed,’ said Falcón. ‘He said that Yacoub didn’t like Americans.’

‘That should make your task easier, if he’s used to being approached.’

‘I don’t think Yacoub Diouri is someone you “approach”. He’s the sort of guy who would see you coming a long way off if you did. We’ll just talk, as we always do, about everything. It will come out in the way it does. I’m not going to use any strategies on him. Like a lot of Arabs, he has a powerful belief in honour, which h
e learnt from the man who became his father. He is someone to whom you show respect, and not just as a gesture,’ said Falcón. ‘Perhaps you should tell me the sort of thing you want him to do, how you want him to operate, what contacts you’re expecting him to make. Are you hoping to get information about the MILA from him?’

‘MILA? Has Mark been talking to you about the MILA?’

‘You’re all the same, you intelligence people,’ said Falcón. ‘You can’t take a question, you have to answer it with another. Do you exchange
any
information?’

‘The MILA has nothing to do with what we want from Yacoub.’

‘The TVE news said they were responsible for the bomb,’ said Falcón. ‘A text was posted from Seville to the Madrid office of the
ABC
, about Andalucía being brought back into the Muslim fold.’

‘The MILA are only interested in money,’ said Pablo. ‘They’ve dressed their intentions up in jihadist rhetoric, but the reason they want to liberate Ceuta and Melilla is that they want the enclaves for themselves.’

‘Tell me what we’re trying to achieve,’ said Falcón.

‘For the purposes of this mission, what is crucial is not
who
destroyed that apartment building in Seville and
why,
but rather
what
the explosion has revealed to us,’ said Pablo. ‘Forget the MILA, they’re not important. This is not about your investigation into yesterday’s bomb. This is not about the past, but the future.’

‘OK. Tell me,’ said Falcón, thinking that Flowers may have been right about the CNI planting the MILA story.

‘Last year the British held their parliamentary
elections. They didn’t need the example of the Madrid bombings to know that these elections were going to be the target of a number of attempts by terrorists to change the way a population thinks.’

‘And nothing happened,’ said Falcón. ‘Tony Blair, the “little Satan”, got in with a reduced majority.’