The Hidden Assassins (25 page)

‘We’re still conducting our enquiries,’ said Pablo.

‘They were sacrificing them?’ asked Falcón, nauseated by his inability to think his way around this new development.

‘First of all, we live in an age of suicide bombing—there’s sacrifice for you,’ said Pablo. ‘And secondly, intelligence services all over the world have always had to sacrifice agents for the greater good of the mission. It’s nothing new.’

‘So this electrician, whose card Miguel Botín handed over to the Imam, was the agent of their destruction? The electrician was sent by Botín’s Islamic terrorist masters to bomb the building? That’s just fantastic.’

‘We don’t know that,’ said Pablo. ‘But as you know, not all suicide bombers realize that they
are
suicide bombers. Some have just been told to deliver a car, or leave a rucksack on a train. Botín had just been told to give an electrician’s card to the Imam. What we need to find out is
who
told him to do that.’

‘Are we wasting our time here?’ asked Falcón. ‘Is this whole investigation just a show, for whichever terrorist group decided to abort their mission and blow up any possible leads back to their network?’

‘We’re still very interested to find out what’s in the mosque,’ said Pablo. ‘And we’re very keen to get Yacoub up and running.’

‘And how do you know that Yacoub is approaching the right group, even?’ asked Falcón, exhausted and close to rage from frustration.

‘We have confidence in that because it has come from a reliable detainee and has also been verified by British agents on the ground in Rabat,’ said Pablo.

‘What group are we talking about?’

‘The GICM, Groupe Islamique de Combattants Marocains, otherwise known as the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. They had links to the bombings in Casablanca, Madrid and London,’ said Pablo. ‘What
we’re doing here is not something that was thought up yesterday as an idea worth trying, Javier. This represents months of intelligence work.’

Pablo left soon after. Falcón was almost depressed by their exchange. All the man-hours put in by his squad were beginning to look like a waste of energy, and yet there were unnerving gaps in what Pablo had told him. It was as if each group involved in the investigation put most trust in the information that they themselves uncovered. So the CNI believed in the annotated Koran as the codebook, because of the example of the
Book of Proof
uncovered by British intelligence, and that coloured everything they looked at. The fact that the witness in the mosque, José Duran, had described the electrician and his labourers as a Spaniard and two Eastern bloc natives, who did not sound anything like Islamic terrorist operatives, held little water for Pablo. But then again, it had been local Spanish petty criminals who’d supplied the Madrid bombers with explosives, and what does it take to leave a bomb? A little care and a psychotic mind.

After the press conference on TVE with Comisarios Lobo and Elvira, Juez Calderón had taken a taxi round to Canal Sur, where he was miked up and eased on to the set of a roundtable discussion about Islamic terrorism. He was the man of the hour and within moments the female chair of the programme had drawn him into the discussion. He controlled the rest of the programme with a combination of incisive and informed comment, humour, and a savage wit he reserved for so-called security specialists and terrorism pundits.

Afterwards he was taken out to dinner by some
executives from Canal Sur’s current affairs department and the female chair of the programme. They fed and flattered him for an hour and a half until he found himself alone with the female chair, who let it be known that this could continue in more comfortable surroundings. For once Calderón demurred. He was tired. There was another long day ahead of him and—the main reason—he was sure that Marisa was a better lay.

Calderón sat in the middle seat in the back of the Canal Sur limousine. He felt like a hero. His mind was racing with endorphins after his TV performances. He had a sense of the world at his feet. Seville, as it flashed past in the night, began to feel small to him. He imagined what it must be like to be as high on success as this in a city like New York, where they really knew how to make a man feel important.

The limousine dropped him off outside the San Marcos church at 12.45 a.m. and, for once, rather than take his usual little deviation around the back, he strode past the bars on the other side, hoping that friends of Inés would be drinking there who would stop him and congratulate him. He really had been exceptionally brilliant. The bars, however, were already closed. Calderón, in his heightened state, had failed to notice how quiet the city was.

As he went up in the lift he knew that the only way he was going to sleep was after a strenuous, crazy fuck with Marisa, out on the balcony, in the hall, going down in the lift, out in the street. He felt so on top of the world he wanted everybody to see him performing.

Marisa had watched the TV programmes in a state of insensate boredom. She could tell that the press
conference revolved around Esteban, as all the questions from journalists were for him. She could also see that he was controlling the roundtable discussion, and even that the female chair was dying to get into his trousers, but the drivel that was being talked had reduced her to a vegetative state. Why do Westerners have to get so exercised about things and talk them to death, as if it’s going to be any help? Then it struck her. That was what irked her about Westerners. They always took things at face value, because that was what could be controlled, and what could be measured. They just served up their lies all round and then congratulated each other on ’their command of the situation’. That was why white people bored her. They had no interest beyond the surface. ‘What are you doing, sitting there all day, Marisa?’ had been the most frequently asked question she’d faced in America. And yet in Africa they’d never asked her that question—or any question, for that matter. Questioning existence didn’t help you live it.

She looked down on Calderón’s arrival from her balcony. She saw his jaunty steps, his little preparations. When he said his usual: ‘It’s me,’ into her entry phone, she replied: ‘My hero.’

He burst into her apartment like a showman, arms raised, waiting for the applause. He drew her to him and kissed her, pushing his tongue between the barrier of her teeth, which she did not like. Their kissing had only ever been lip deep.

It wasn’t difficult to tell that he was still on the crest of the media wave. She let him drive her out on to the balcony, where they had sex. He looked up at the stars, holding on to her hips, imagining even greater
glory. She participated by hanging on to the railings and making a suitable amount of noise.

As soon as he was finished, he was rendered mentally and physically drained, like someone coming off a coke high. She managed to steer him to the bed and get his shoes off before he fell into a deep sleep at 1.15 a.m. She stood over him, smoking a cigarette, wondering if she’d be able to wake him in a couple of hours’ time.

She washed herself in the bidet, closing her right eye to the smoke rising from the cigarette. She lay on the sofa and let time do what it was good at. At 3 a.m. she started trying to rouse him, but he was completely inert. She held a lighter to his foot. He writhed and kicked out. It took time to get him to come round. He had no idea where he was. She explained that he had to go home, he had an early start, he had to get changed.

At 3.25 she called a taxi. She put his shoes on, got him standing, put his arms into his jacket and called the lift up to her floor. She stood outside with him, his head dropping and jerking off his chest and her shoulder. The taxi arrived just after 3.30. She put him in the back and instructed the driver to take him to Calle San Vicente. She said he was exhausted, that he was the leading judge in the Seville bombing, and that gave the driver a sense of mission. He waved away her € 10 note. For this man it was going to be free. The cab pulled away. Calderón had his head thrown back on the rear shelf. In the yellowish street lighting he looked as he would when dead. The whites of his eyes were just visible below the lids.

At that time of the morning, with Seville as silent as a ghost city, there was no traffic and the cab arrived at Calle San Vicente in just under ten minutes. After
much cajoling, the cab driver had to reach in and physically haul Calderón out into the street. He walked him to the front door of the building and asked him for his keys. The driver got the door open and realized he was going to have to go all the way. They crammed themselves into the hall.

‘Is there a light?’ asked the driver.

Calderón slapped at the wall. Light burst into the hall and the ticking sound of a timer started up. The driver supported him up the stairs.

‘This one here,’ said Calderón, as they reached the first floor.

The driver opened the apartment door, which was double locked, and returned the keys to Calderón.

‘Are you all right now?’ he asked, looking into the judge’s bleary eyes.

‘Yeah, I’m fine now. I’ll be OK, thanks,’ he said.

‘You’re doing a great job,’ said the driver. ‘I saw you on the telly before I started my shift.’

Calderón clapped him on the shoulder. The driver went down the stairs and the light in the hall went out with a loud snap. The cab started up and pulled away. Calderón rolled over the doorjamb into the apartment. The light was on in the kitchen. He shut the door, leaned back on it. Even in his exhausted state, with his eyelids as heavy as lead, his teeth clenched with irritation.

Seville—Thursday, 8th June 2006, 04.07 hrs

Calderón came to with a start that thumped his head into the wall. His face was pressed against the wooden floor. The smell of polish was strong in his nose. His eyelids snapped open. He was instantly wide awake, as if danger was present and near. He was still dressed as he had been all day. He couldn’t understand why he was lying in the corridor of his apartment. Had he been so exhausted that he’d slept where he fell? He checked his watch: just gone four o’clock. He’d only been out for ten minutes or so. He was mystified. He remembered coming into the apartment and the light being on in the kitchen. It was still on, but he was beyond it now, further into the flat, which appeared to be completely dark and cold from the air conditioning. He struggled to his feet, checked himself. He wasn’t hurt, hadn’t even banged his head. He must have slid down the wall.

‘Inés?’ he said out loud, puzzled by the kitchen light. Calderón stretched his shoulders back. He was stiff. He stepped into the rhomboid of light on the corridor floor. He saw the blood first, a huge, burgeoning crimson
pool on the white marble. The colour of it under the bright white light was truly alarming. He stepped back as if expecting an intruder still to be there. He lowered himself and saw her through the chair and table. He knew immediately that she was dead. Her eyes were wide open, with not a scintilla of light in them.

The blood had spread to the right side of the table and underneath it. It was viscous and seemed to be sucking at the chair and table legs. It was so horribly bright that it throbbed in his vision, as if there was still life in it. Calderón crawled on all fours round to the left of the table to where Inés’s feet lay, slack and pointed outwards in front of the sink. Her nightie was rucked up. His eyes travelled from her white legs, over her white cotton panties, beyond the waistband—and that was where the bruising started. He hadn’t seen it before. He’d had no idea his fists had accomplished such horrifically visible damage. And it was then that he thought he might have seen this before after all, because his whole body was suddenly consumed with a remembered panic that seemed to constrict his throat and cut off the blood supply to his brain. He reared back on his knees and held his head.

He crawled back out of the kitchen and got to his feet in the corridor. He went swiftly out of the apartment, which required him to unlock the door. He hit the stair light, looked around and went back in. The light was still on in the kitchen. Inés was still lying there. The blood was now one floor tile’s width from the wooden floor of the corridor. He pressed the balls of his palms into his eye sockets and ripped them away, but it made no difference to the horror of what lay before him. He dropped to all fours again.

‘You fucking bitch, you stupid fucking bitch,’ he said. ‘Look what the fuck you’ve gone and done now.’

The noisily bright blood resounded in the hard kitchen. It was also moving, consuming the white marble, reaching towards him. He went back around the table. The ghastly purple of the contusions seemed to have deepened in colour in the interim, or his constant toing and froing in and out of the light was playing tricks. Between her splayed thighs he now saw the welts from his belt lashing. He sank to his knees again, pressed his fists into his eyes and started sobbing. This was it. This was the end. He was finished, finished, finished. Even the most incompetent state judge couldn’t fail to make a watertight case against him. A wife-beater who’d gone a step too far. A wife-beater who’d just come back from fucking his mistress, had another confrontation and this time…Oh, yes, it might have been an accident. Was it an accident? It probably was. But this time he’d overdone it and she’d smashed her stupid head open. He pounded the table.

It cleared as suddenly as it had arrived. Calderón sank back on his heels and realized that the terrible panic had gone. His mind was back on track. At least, he felt it was back on track. What he hadn’t realized was the nature of the damage done by the panic, the way it had opened up electronic pathways to the flaws in his character. As far as Calderón was concerned, his mind was back to the steel-trap clarity of the leading judge in Seville, and it came to him that, with no chest freezer, the only solution was to get her out of the apartment, and he had to do it now. There was just over an hour before dawn.

Weight was not the problem. Inés was currently 48
kilos. Her height at 1.72m was more of a difficulty. He stormed around the table and into the spare room, where the luggage was kept. He pulled out the biggest suitcase he could find, a huge grey Samsonite with four wheels. He grabbed two white towels from the cupboard.

One of the towels he laid across the kitchen doorway to stop the blood from seeping into the corridor. The other he wrapped around Inés’s head. It nearly made him sick. The back of her head was a flat mush and the blood soaked gratefully into the towel, consuming the whiteness with its incarnadine stain. He found a bin liner and pulled it over her head, securing it with cooking string. He washed his hands. He put the case on the table, picked Inés up and laid her in it. She was far too big. Even foetally she didn’t fit. He couldn’t cram her feet in and, even if he could, her shoulders were too broad for the case to shut. He looked down on her with his considerable intellect surging forward, but fatally, in the wrong direction.

‘I’ll have to cut her up,’ he said to himself. ‘Take her feet off and break her collar bones.’

No. That was not going to work. He’d seen films and read novels where they cut up bodies and it never seemed to work, even in fiction where everything can be made to bloody work. He was squeamish, too. Couldn’t even watch
Extreme Makeover
on TV without writhing on the sofa. Think again. He walked around the apartment looking at everyday objects in a completely new light. He stopped in the living room and stared at the carpet, as if willing it not to be the cliché of all clichés.

‘You can’t wrap her up in the carpet. It’ll come
straight back to you. Same with the luggage. Think again.’

The river was only three hundred metres from Calle San Vicente. All he had to do was get her in the car, drive fifty metres, turn right on Calle Alfonso XII, go straight up to the traffic lights, cross Calle Nuevo Torneo and there was a road he remembered as quite dark, which ran down to the river and veered left behind the huge bus station of Plaza de Armas. From there it was a matter of metres to the water’s edge, but it was a stretch used by early-morning runners, so he would have to act quickly and decisively.

The decorators. The memory of his irritation at them leaving their sheet up the stairs a few days ago juddered into his brain. He ran out of the apartment again, slashed on the stairwell light and stopped himself. He put the apartment door on the latch. That would be too much to bear: locked out of his apartment with his dead wife on the kitchen floor. He leapt down the stairs three at a time and there it all was, under the stairs. There were even full cans of paint to weigh down the body. He pulled out a length of paint-spattered hessian sheeting. He sprinted back up the stairs and laid it out on the clean half of the kitchen floor. He lifted her out of the suitcase, where she’d been lying like a prop in an illusionist’s trick, and laid her on the sheet. He folded the edges over. He gasped at the momentary peak of horror at what he was doing. Inés’s beautiful face reduced to a scarecrow’s stuffed bin liner.

The blood had reached the towel across the doorway and he had to leap over it. He crashed with the deranged heaviness of a toppled wardrobe into the corridor, cracking his head and shoulder a glancing blow on the
wall. He shrugged off the pain. He went into his study, tore open the drawers, found the roll of packing tape. He kissed it. On the way back he steadied himself and hopped more carefully over the blood-soaked towel.

He wrapped the tape around her ankles, knees, waist, chest, neck and head. He pocketed the cooking string and tape. He didn’t bother to admire his mummified wife, but ran out of the apartment, grabbing his keys and the garage remote as he left. He took the door off the latch. Slapped the fucking light on again—tick, tick, tick, tick, tick—and rumbled down the stairs. He sprinted down Calle San Vicente to the garage, which was just around the corner. He hit the button of the remote as he rounded the bend and the garage door opened, but so slowly he was jumping up and down in towering frustration, swearing and punching at the air. He rolled underneath the quarter-open door and hurtled down the ramp, pressing another button on the remote for the light. He found his car. He hadn’t driven the damn thing for weeks. Who needs a car in Seville? Thank
fuck
I’ve got a car.

No mistakes. He reversed out calmly, as if suddenly on beta-blockers. He eased up the ramp. The garage door was only just fully open. The car hopped out on to the street, which was deadly quiet. The red digits on the dashboard told him it was 4.37. He pulled up outside the apartment, clicked the button to open the boot. He sprinted upstairs, in the dark this time, fell and cracked his shin such a blow on the top stair that the pain ricocheted up his skeleton to the inside of his skull. He didn’t even stop. He unlocked the door, slowed down at the kitchen and stepped over the bloody towel.

Inés. No, not Inés any more. He picked her up. She
was absurdly heavy for someone who was less than fifty kilos and had lost at least three kilos of blood. He got her into the corridor, but she was too heavy to cradle-carry her. He hoisted her over his shoulder and closed the apartment door. He stepped carefully down the stairs in the dark again. That fucking tick, tick, tick of the light just too unbearably stressful at this stage. He stuck his head out into the street.

Empty.

Two steps. In the boot. Shut the boot. Close the apartment building door. Wait. Slow down. Think. The tins of paint to weigh down the body. Open the boot. Back under the stairs. Pick up the two cans of paint. As heavy as Inés. Heave them into the boot. Close the boot. In the car. Rear-view mirror. No headlights. Calm. Nice and slow. You’re nearly there. This
is
going to work.

Calderón’s car was alone at the traffic lights by the Plaza de Armas, which were showing red. The lights from the dash glowed in his face. He checked the rearview again, saw his eyes. They were pitiful. The lights changed to green. He eased across the six empty lanes and took the ramp down to the river. It was first light. It wasn’t quite as dark as he would have liked down by the river. He would have preferred something subterranean, as black as antimatter, as utterly lightless as a collapsed star.

There was still plenty to do. He had to get the body out, attach the cans of paint, and push it into the river. He had a good, long look around until he couldn’t believe that everything wasn’t moving. He shook the paranoia out of his mind, opened the boot. He lifted the body out and laid it down on the pavement close to the car for cover. He heaved out the cans of paint
with superhuman strength. Sweat cascaded. His shirt was stuck to him. His mind closed off. This was the home stretch. Get it done.

He didn’t see the man at the back of the bus station, was not aware of him making his fatal call to the police. He worked with savage haste while the man muttered what he was seeing into his mobile phone, along with Calderón’s registration number.

With no traffic it took less than a minute for a patrol car to arrive. It had been cruising down by the river less than a kilometre away when the two officers were notified by the communications centre in the Jefatura. The car rolled down the ramp towards the river with its headlights and engine switched off. Only Calderón’s car was visible. He was kneeling behind it, taping the second can of paint to Inés’s neck. His sweat was dripping on to the hessian sheet. He was finished. All he had to do now was hump close to 100 kilos about a metre across the pavement and then up over a low wall and into the water. He summoned his last reserves of strength. With the two paint cans attached, the body had become incredibly unwieldy. He jammed his hands underneath, not caring about the skin he tore from his fingers and knuckles. He drove forward with his thighs and, with his chest and pelvis close to the floor, he looked like an enormous lizard with some unmanageable prey. Inés’s body shifted and thumped into the low wall. He was panting and sobbing. Tears streamed down his face. The pain from his stubbed fingers and torn nails didn’t register, but when the headlights of the patrol car finally came on and he found himself encased in light, like an exhibit in the reptile house, he stiffened as if he’d just been shot.

The policemen got out of the patrol car with their weapons drawn. Calderón had yanked his arms out from under the body, rolled over, and was now lying on his back. His stomach convulsed with each racking sob. A lot of the emotion he was coughing up was relief. It was all over. He’d been caught. All that hideous desperation had flowed out of him and now he could relax into infamy and shame.

While one patrolman stood over the sobbing Calderón, the other ran a torch over the taped-up hessian sheet. He put on some latex gloves and squeezed Inés’s shoulder just to confirm what he already knew, that this was a body. He went back to the patrol car and radioed the Jefatura.

‘This is Alpha-2-0, we’re down by the river now, just off the Torneo at the back of the bus station in Plaza de Armas. I can confirm that we have a male in his early forties attempting to dispose of an unidentified body. You’d better get the Inspector Jefe de Homicidios down here.’

‘Give me the car registration number.’

‘SE 4738 HT.’

‘Fuck me.’

‘What?’

‘That’s the same number given to me by the guy who reported the incident. I don’t fucking believe this.’

‘Who’s the owner of the vehicle?’

‘Don’t you recognize him?’

The patrolman called out to his colleague, who passed a torch over Calderón’s face. He was barely recognizable as human, let alone a specific person. His face bore the contortions of a particularly agonized flamenco singer. The patrolman shrugged.