The Hidden Assassins (38 page)

Rivero clasped his hands, drove them between his slim thighs and sobbed with his head dropped on to his chest. Released at last.

Seville—Friday, 9th June 2006, 01.45 hrs

‘Great news,’ said Elvira, sitting at his desk in his office in the Jefatura.

‘Nearly great news,’ said Falcón. ‘We didn’t manage to force Rivero into revealing the entire conspiracy. He only gave us two names. It’s quite possible that we can charge the three of them, but only with the murder of Tateb Hassani and not the planning of the bombing of the mosque.’

‘But now we can get a search warrant for Eduardo Rivero’s house and the Fuerza Andalucía offices,’ said Elvira. ‘We must be able to squeeze something out of those two places.’

‘But nothing in writing. You don’t draw this sort of stuff up in the minutes of a Fuerza Andalucía meeting,’ said Falcón. ‘We have a tenuous link between Angel Zarrías and Ricardo Gamero, but no proof of what they discussed in the Archaeological Museum. We have no idea of the connection of any of these men to the people who actually planted the bomb. Both José Luis and I think that there is a missing element to the conspiracy.’

‘A criminal element,’ added Ramírez.

‘We’re sure that Lucrecio Arenas and César Benito are in some way involved, but we couldn’t persuade Rivero to even give us their names,’ said Falcón. ‘They could be the “other half” of the conspiracy. Arenas put up Jesús Alarcón as a candidate for the leadership, so we assume that he is involved. But did Arenas and Benito make contact with the criminal element who planted the bomb? We’re not sure we’ll ever find out who, or what, that missing element was.’

‘But you can put Rivero, Zarrías and Cárdenas under enormous pressure…’

‘Except that they know, with the clarity of selfpreservation, that all they have to do is keep their mouths shut and we’ll only be able to pin murder on one of them, and conspiring to murder on all three, but nothing more,’ said Falcón. ‘And as for Lucrecio Arenas, Jesús Alarcón and César Benito, we have no chance. Ferrera worked hard just to get that final sighting of Tateb Hassani. Once those few remaining employees left, the house was empty, which means we’ll have a job to place Arenas, Benito and Alarcón there…that is, assuming that they turned up for the killing.’

‘And if I was them, I’d have kept well away from that,’ said Ramírez.

‘The link to the bomb conspiracy is Tateb Hassani,’ said Elvira. ‘Work on the suspects until they reveal why Hassani had to be killed. Once they’ve admitted—’

‘If it was
my
life that depended on it,’ said Ramírez,

‘I’d just hold out.’

‘I can’t speak for Rivero and Cárdenas, but I know Angel Zarrías is very religious, with a deep faith—
however misguided it might be. I’m sure he’ll even find it in himself to be absolved of all his sins,’ said Falcón. ‘Angel is urbane. He knows what’s tolerable in modern Spanish society, as far as expressing religious views is concerned. But I don’t think we’re talking about a mentality that’s any less fanatical than an Islamic jihadist’s.’

‘Rivero, Zarrías and Cárdenas are going to spend the night in the cells,’ said Elvira. ‘And we’ll see what tomorrow brings. You both have to get some sleep. We’ll have search warrants ready in the morning for all of their properties.’

‘I’m going to have to give my sister at least half an hour of my time,’ said Falcón. ‘Her partner has just been dragged out of bed and arrested in the middle of the night. There’s probably a hundred messages on my mobile already.’

Cristina Ferrera slammed back into consciousness with dead-bolt certainty and sat upright in her bed, faintly swaying, as if moored by guy ropes in a wind. She only came awake like this if her maternal instinct had received a high-voltage neural alarm call. Despite the depth of the sleep she’d just abandoned, her lucidity was instantaneous; she knew that her children were neither in the apartment, nor in danger, but that something was very wrong.

The street lighting showed that there was nobody in her room. She swung her legs out of bed and scanned the living room. Her handbag was no longer in the centre of the dining-room table. It had been moved to the corner. She toed the door open to the bedroom she’d made up for Fernando. The bed was empty. The
pillow was dented, but the sheets had not been drawn back. She checked her watch. It was coming up to 4.30 a.m. Why would he have come here just to sleep for a few hours?

She turned the light on over the dining-room table and wrenched open the neck of her large handbag. Her notebook was on top of her purse. She slapped it on the table. Nothing was missing, not even the € 15 in cash. She sat down as their conversation came back to her: Fernando badgering her for news. Her eyes drifted from her handbag to her notebook. Her notes were personal. She always kept two columns; one for the facts, the other for her thoughts and observations. The latter was not always tethered to the former and sometimes verged on the creative. She turned the notebook over. One of her observations jumped out at her from the page. It was alongside the names of the people who’d been seen by Mario Gómez going up with Tateb Hassani to the ‘last supper’. In her observation column she’d scribbled the only possible conclusion to all the enquiries she’d made: Fuerza Andalucía planted the bomb. No question mark. A bold statement, based on the facts she’d gathered.

It was suddenly cold in the room, as if the air conditioning had found another gear. She swallowed against the rise of adrenaline. She headed for the bedroom, with the backs of her thighs trembling below the oversized T-shirt she wore in bed. She slapped the light on and opened the drawer of her dresser where she kept a vast tangle of knickers and bras. Her hand roved the drawer, again and again. She ripped it out and turned it over. She ripped out the other drawer and did the same. She thought she was going to faint with the
quantity of chemicals her body was injecting into her system. Her gun was no longer there.

This was too big for her to manage on her own. She was going to have to call her Inspector Jefe. She hit the speed-dial button, listened to the endless ringing tone and reminded herself to breathe. Falcón answered on the eighth ring. He’d been asleep for one and a half hours. She told him everything in three seconds flat. It went down the line like a massive file under compression software.

‘You’re going to have to tell me all that again, Cristina,’ he said, ‘and a little slower. Breathe. Close your eyes. Speak.’

This time it came out in a thirty-second stream.

‘There’s only one person from Fuerza Andalucía who Fernando knows who isn’t currently in police custody and that’s Jesús Alarcón,’ said Falcón. ‘I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.’

‘But he’s going to kill him, Inspector Jefe,’ said Ferrera. ‘He’s going to kill him with my gun. Shouldn’t we…?’

‘If we send a patrol car round there he might get spooked and do just that,’ said Falcón. ‘My guess is that Fernando is going to want to tell him something first. Punish him before he
tries
to kill him.’

‘With a gun he doesn’t have to try very hard.’

‘The concept is easy, the reality takes a bit more,’ said Falcón. ‘Let’s hope he woke you up as he left your apartment. If he’s on foot he can’t be too far ahead of us.’

Fernando squatted on his haunches next to some bins on the edge of the Parque María Luisa. Only his hands were in the light from the street lamps. He looked from
the dark at the blue metal of the small .38 revolver. He turned it over, surprised at its weight. He’d only ever held toy guns, made from aluminium. The real thing had the heft of a much bigger tool, condensed into pure efficiency and portability.

He emptied the bullets from the chambers of the revolver’s cylinder and put them in his pocket. He clicked the cylinder back into place. He was good with his hands. He played around with the weapon, getting used to its weight and the simple, lethal mechanisms. When he was confident with it, he counted the bullets back into the chambers. He was ready. He stood and did what he’d seen people do in the movies. He tucked it into the waistband in the small of his back and pulled the Fuerza Andalucía polo shirt, given to him by Jesús Alarcón, over the top.

The wide Avenida that separated the park from the smart residential area of El Porvenir was empty. He knew where Jesús Alarcón lived because there’d been the offer of a room for as long as he wanted it. He hadn’t accepted it because he didn’t feel comfortable with their class differences.

He stood in front of the huge, sliding metal gate of the house. A silver Mercedes was parked in front of the garage. If Fernando had known that it was worth twice as much as his destroyed apartment it would have stoked his fury even more. As it was, the malignancy growing inside him was too big to contain. His rib cage creaked against his endlessly extending outrage at what Jesús Alarcón had done. Not just the bombing, but the purpose with which he’d set out to make Fernando, whose family he had personally been responsible for destroying, his close friend. It was treachery
and betrayal on a scale to which only a politician could have been impervious. Jesús Alarcón, with all his authentic concern and genuine sympathy, had been playing him like a fish.

There was no traffic. The street in El Porvenir was empty. None of the people in these houses was ever up before dawn. Fernando called Alarcón on his mobile. It rang for some time and switched into the message service. He called Alarcón’s house phone and looked up at the window he imagined would be the master bedroom. Jesús and Mónica in some gargantuan bed, beneath high-quality linen, dressed in silk pyjamas. A faint glow appeared behind the curtains. Alarcón answered groggily.

‘Jesús, it’s me, Fernando. I’m sorry to call you so early. I’m here. Outside. I’ve been out all night. They threw me out of the hospital. I had nowhere to go. I need to talk to you. Can you come down? I’m…I’m desperate.’

It was true. He was desperate. Desperate for revenge. He’d only ever heard tales of the monstrousness of this horrific emotion. He had not been prepared for the way it found every crevice of the body. His organs screamed for it. His bones howled with it. His joints ground with it. His blood seethed with it. It was so intolerable that he had to get it out of himself. He wanted stilts so that he could step over the gate, smash through the glass, reach into Alarcón’s bed and pluck out his beautiful wife and throw her to the ground, break her bones, dash out her brains, tread his sharpened stilt into her heart and then see what Jesús Alarcón made of that. Yes, he wanted to be enormous, to drive his arm into Alarcón’s home as if it was a doll’s house.
He saw his hand ferreting around the bedrooms reaching for Alarcón’s small children, who would run squealing from his snatching hand. He wanted Alarcón to see them crushed and laid out under little sheets in front of the house.

‘I’m coming,’ said Alarcón. ‘No problem, Fernando.’ Had he known the hidden hunger behind the eyes staring through the bars of the gate, Jesús Alarcón would have stayed in his bed, called the police and begged for special forces.

A light came on outside the front of the house. The door opened. Alarcón, in a silk dressing gown, pointed the remote at the gate. Fernando flinched, as if being shot at. The gate rumbled back on its rails. Fernando slipped through the gap and walked quickly up to the house. Alarcón had already turned back to the front door, holding out an arm, which he expected to fit around Fernando’s shoulders and welcome him into his home.

Moths swirled around the porch light, maddened by the prospect of a greater darkness, which never materialized. Alarcón was still too groggy to recognize the level of intent moving up on him. He was astonished to feel a fistful of his dressing-gown collar grabbed from behind and the front door reeling away from him as Fernando, with the hardened strength of a manual worker, swung him round. Alarcón lost his footing and fell to his knees. Fernando yanked him backwards and trapped his head between his thighs. He had the gun out of his waistband. Alarcón reached back, grabbing at Fernando’s trousers and polo shirt. Fernando showed him the gun, poked the barrel into the socket of his eye so that Alarcón gasped with pain.

‘You see that?’ said Fernando. ‘You see it, you little fucker?’

Alarcón was paralysed with fear. His voice, with his neck pulled taut, produced only a grunt. Fernando pushed the gun between Alarcón’s lips, felt the barrel rattle across his teeth and sensed the steel mushing into the softness of his tongue.

‘Feel it. Taste it. You know what it is now.’

He wrenched the gun out of his mouth, taking a chip of tooth with it. He jammed the barrel into the back of Alarcón’s neck.

‘Are you ready? Say your prayers, Jesús, because you’re going to meet your namesake.’

Fernando pulled the trigger, the gun pressed hard against Alarcón’s shaking neck. There was a dry click. A gasp from Alarcón and a stink rose up from behind him as he loosed his bowels into his pyjamas.

‘That was for Gloria,’ said Fernando. ‘Now you know her fear.’

Fernando moved the gun round to Alarcón’s temple, screwed it into the top of his sideburn so that Alarcón winced away from it. Another dry click and a sob from Alarcón.

‘That was for my little Pedro,’ said Fernando, coughing against the emotion rising in his throat. ‘He didn’t know fear. He was too young to know it. Too innocent. Now look at the gun, Jesús. You see the cylinder. Two empty chambers and four full ones. We’re going upstairs now and you’re going to watch me shoot your wife and two children, just so you know how it feels.’

‘What are you doing, Fernando?’ said Alarcón, finding his voice and his presence of mind, now that
the rush of the initial onslaught was past. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘You and your friends. You’re all the same. There’s no difference between you and any other politician. You’re all liars, cheats and egomaniacs. I don’t know how I fell for your stupid, fucking line. Jesús Alarcón, the man who will talk to you without cameras, without the photo opportunity, without his beautiful profile in mind.’

‘What are you talking about, Fernando? What have I done? How have I lied and cheated?’ said Alarcón, pleading.

‘You killed my wife and child,’ said Fernando. ‘And then, because you needed me, you made me your friend.’