The Hidden Assassins (43 page)

Seville—Saturday, 10th June 2006, 07.00 hrs

Falcón woke up early, with renewed determination. Once the pathologist had left the night before, after his stunning revelation, they discussed what could possibly have happened to Hammad and Saoudi. Pablo updated Comisario Elvira on the intelligence they’d received from Yacoub, whose group believed that a total of 300 kilos of hexogen had been sent to Spain. The bomb disposal officer had thought, as a ‘conservative’ estimate, that 100 kilos of hexogen had exploded in El Cerezo on 6th June, which would leave between 150 and 200 kilos still at large. They all agreed that having secured the remaining hexogen, Hammad and Saoudi would have either gone to ground or left the country.

Elvira put a call through to the Guardia Civil about the route of the Peugeot Partner last seen at a service station outside Valdepeñas at 4 p.m. on Sunday, 4th June. There’d still been no sightings of the van on any of the main roads in the Seville, Cordoba and Granada triangle. There was now a huge operation underway, looking for sightings on the smaller routes, but it was an impossible task, given the anonymous quality of the
vehicle and the fact that the journey was made nearly a week ago. Falcón sent Pérez and Ferrera back to El Cerezo to check with the residents that the Peugeot Partner had not been seen until the Monday morning of 5th June.

The meeting broke up with Elvira drafting a press release about Hammad and Saoudi and announcing the reinstatement of spot checks on vehicles coming into the city. This was to be aired on the TVE ten o’clock news and on Canal Sur. Gregorio had come back with Falcón to his house on Calle Bailén, where they made another unsuccessful attempt to reach Yacoub. They drafted a report about Hammad and Saoudi, including photographs, which Gregorio pasted into the clipboard of the CNI website to send to Yacoub later, in the hope that he could locate them in Morocco.

For one reason or another Falcón had not yet interviewed Agustín Cárdenas, and it had been decided that he would talk to him first thing in the morning while Ramírez tackled Zarrías for a second time. The rest of the squad would be up early to walk the streets around El Cerezo to see if they could get any confirmed sightings of Hammad and Saoudi either on Sunday evening/Monday morning, or after the explosion on Tuesday.

By 7.30 a.m. Falcón had called ahead to the Jefatura to make sure that Agustín Cárdenas would be waiting, ready to be interviewed as soon as he arrived. He stopped for a coffee and some toast on the way and was sitting in front of a still groggy Agustín Cárdenas by 7.50.

In his photograph, Agustín Cárdenas looked in his mid thirties, while his CV told Falcón he was forty-six
years old. By this Saturday morning he’d found his way up into the mid fifties, which was somewhere he’d never been before.

‘You’re not looking good, Agustín,’ said Falcón. ‘You could do with a bit of nip and tuck yourself this morning.’

‘I’m not a morning person,’ he said.

‘How long have you known César Benito?’

‘About eight years.’

‘How did you meet him?’

‘I did some work on his wife and then he came to see me himself.’

‘For some work?’

‘I removed the bags under his eyes and tightened up his neck and jowls.’

‘And he was happy?’

‘He was so happy he got a mistress.’

‘Were your clinics part of the Horizonte group at this stage?’

‘No, César Benito thought that Horizonte should buy my business.’

‘Which made you a lot of money,’ said Falcón. ‘Did they give you stock options in Horizonte?’

Cárdenas nodded.

‘And being a part of the group meant that you had capital,’ said Falcón.

‘I expanded the business to nine clinics in Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Nerja and another due to open in Valencia.’

‘It’s a shame that you’ve built up such a successful business and you’re never going to see the fruits of your labour,’ said Falcón. ‘You’re not protecting César Benito just because he’s made you this fortune that you’ll never enjoy?’

Cárdenas took a deep breath and stared at the table, thinking to himself.

‘No,’ said Falcón. ‘It would have to be more than that, wouldn’t it? There’s your Hippocratic oath. César must have had quite a hold on you to be able to persuade you to not only poison Hassani at his last supper, but also to use your surgical skills to cut off the man’s hands, burn away his face and scalp him. You didn’t do all that for César just because he made you a rich man?’

More silence from Cárdenas. Something was eating away at him. Here was a man who’d done a lot of thinking and not much sleeping overnight.

‘What can you offer me?’ said Cárdenas, after some long minutes.

‘In terms of a deal?’ said Falcón. ‘Nothing.’

Cárdenas nodded, rocked himself in his chair. Falcón knew what was working its way from Cárdenas’s insides out: resentment.

‘I can only give you César Benito,’ said Cárdenas. ‘He was the only person I had contact with.’

‘We’ll be happy with that,’ said Falcón. ‘What can you tell me?’

‘One of the reasons I was not as wealthy as I should have been when I first met César was that I’d been a gambling addict for almost ten years,’ said Cárdenas.

‘Did César Benito know about that when he arranged for Horizonte to buy your cosmetic surgery clinics?’

‘No, but he found out soon afterwards,’ said Cárdenas. ‘It was through him that I managed to get it under control.’

‘And how did it get out of control again?’

‘I went on a business trip with César down to the Costa del Sol in March. He took me gambling.’

‘
He
did?’

Cárdenas nodded, looking at Falcón very steadily.

‘That started me off again. But this time it was even worse. I was much better off than I had been the last time. My funds seemed to be limitless by comparison. By the beginning of May I owed over one million euros and I was having to sell things to make the interest payments on some of the loans I’d taken out.’

‘And how did César find out?’

‘I told him,’ said Cárdenas. ‘I’d had a visit from somebody I owed money to. They took me into the bathroom of my rented flat in Madrid and gave me the wet towel treatment. You know, you really think you’re going to drown. They said they’d be back in four days’ time. It scared me enough to go to César and ask for help. We met in his apartment in Barcelona. He was shocked by what I told him, but he also said that he understood. After three days of being completely terrified I was relieved. Then he told me how he could make this problem go away.’

‘Are you a religious man, Sr Cárdenas?’

‘Yes, our families go to church together.’

‘How would you describe your relationship with César Benito?’

‘He’d become a very close friend. That’s why I went to see him.’

‘When Benito told you that you would have to commit murder and gross disfigurement, surely you must have asked him for every detail of the conspiracy?’

‘I did, but not on that occasion,’ said Cárdenas. ‘Once I realized what he was asking I decided on a safety strategy. The next time I met him was in my rented
apartment in Madrid and I secretly recorded our entire conversation.’

‘And where is that recording?’

‘It’s still in the apartment,’ he said, writing down the address and telephone number. ‘I taped it to the back of one of the kitchen drawers.’

When Lucrecio Arenas was at his villa in Marbella he liked to get up early, before the staff arrived, which on a Saturday was not before 9 a.m. Arenas put on a pair of swimming trunks, shrugged into his huge white bathrobe and slipped into a pair of sandals. On his way out of the house he picked up a large, thick, white towel and a pair of swimming goggles. He hated chlorine in his eyes and always liked to see clearly, even underwater. He walked down the sloping garden in the warm morning, pausing to take in the glorious view of the green hills and the blue of the Mediterranean, which at this time of day, before the heat haze had risen, was so intense that even his untouchable heart ached a little.

The pool had been built at the bottom of the garden, surrounded by a dense growth of oleander, bougainvillea and jasmine. His wife had insisted it be put down there because Lucrecio had wanted a 20-metre monster. They’d dynamited three hundred tons of rock out of the mountainside so that he could swim his daily kilometre in fifty lengths, rather than having the awful bore of turning just as he’d got into his stride. He reached the poolside and flung his towel on a lounger and let his bathrobe fall on top. He stepped out of his sandals and walked to the end of the pool. He fitted his goggles over his face and nestled the rubber into his eye sockets.

He raised his arms and through the rose-tinted lenses
of the goggles he saw something that looked like a postcard on the end of the diving board. He dropped his arms just as he felt two colossal thuds in his back, like sledgehammer blows but more penetrating. The third blow was to the neck and came down on him with the full weight of a cleaver. His legs would not support him and he collapsed messily into the water. The dense growth behind him rearranged itself. There was the sound of a small scooter starting up. The splendid day continued. The ice blue water in the swimming pool clouded red around the body. A speedboat nosed out into the blue morning, pursued by its white frothy wake.

The Holiday Inn on Plaza Carlos Triana Bertrán in Madrid was not one of César Benito’s favourite hotels, but it had some advantages. It was close to the conference centre where he’d given a speech to Spain’s leading constructors the night before. It was also near the Bernabeu Stadium and even when Real Madrid weren’t playing he enjoyed being close to the beating heart of Spanish football. The hotel had a third advantage on this Saturday, which was that it was only twenty minutes to the airport and he had a flight to catch to Lisbon at 11 a.m. He’d asked for breakfast to be served in his suite as he hated looking at other people, who were not his family, early in the morning. The room service boy had just wheeled in the trolley and Benito was flicking through Saturday’s
ABC
and chewing on a croissant when there was another knock at the door. It was so soon after the room service boy had left that he assumed it was him coming back for some reason. He didn’t look through the spy hole. He wouldn’t have seen anybody if he had.

He opened the door on to an empty corridor. His head was just coming forward to look out when the edge of a hand swung into him with rapid and lethal force, chopping across his Adam’s apple and windpipe and making a loud cracking noise. He fell backwards into the room, spluttering flakes of croissant over the front of his bathrobe. His heels worked furrows into the carpet as he tried to draw air into his lungs. The door closed. Benito’s feet slowed after a minute and then stopped working. There was a gargling rattle from his collapsed throat and his hands lost all grip. He didn’t feel the fingers searching for a neck pulse or the light touch of the card placed on his chest.

The door of the hotel room reopened and closed with a
Do not disturb
sign swinging on the handle. The air conditioning breathed easily in the hush of the empty corridor, while unclaimed newspapers hung in plastic bags from other, indifferent, doors.

At 9.30 a.m. Falcón had taken a break from his interview with Agustín Cárdenas and called Ramírez out to give him the news of the recording Cárdenas had made, hoping it could be used to apply pressure on Angel Zarrías. Cárdenas was taken back down to the cells while Falcón went to his office to call Elvira to get the Madrid police to pick up the recording from Cárdenas’s rented flat, while simultaneously arresting César Benito in the Holiday Inn.

It was Ferrera, calling him from a café on the Avenida de San Lázaro, who told him to look at the latest news on Canal Sur. Falcón ran through the Jefatura and burst into the communications room just in time to see a shot of Marbella disappear from the television
screen, to be replaced by the newsreader who repeated the breaking news item: Lucrecio Arenas had been found by his maid floating face down in his swimming pool at 9.05 that morning. He had been shot three times in the back.

His mobile vibrated and he took the call from Elvira.

‘I’ve just seen it,’ he said. ‘Lucrecio Arenas in his pool.’

‘They got César Benito in his hotel in Madrid as well,’ said Elvira. ‘That’s going to come through in the next few minutes.’

It took another five minutes for the Benito item to break. A TVE camera crew got to the Holiday Inn before Canal Sur reached Arenas’s villa in Marbella. It took a further half an hour before their camera crew pushed a lens into the face of the maid, who’d only just recovered from the hysteria of finding her boss dead in the pool. The newsreaders jumped between the two dramas. Falcón called Ramírez out of the interview room to let him know, went back to his office and slumped in his chair, all the enthusiasm of the morning gone.

His first thoughts were that this was the end. It didn’t matter what they found out now from Cárdenas and Zarrías, it was all immaterial. He stared at his reflection in the dead, grey computer screen and it started him thinking in a slightly less linear way about what had happened. He made some uncomfortable connections, which made him furious and then another idea came to him, which frightened him into calming down. He got the communications room to send a patrol car to Alarcón’s house in El Porvenir. He called Jesús Alarcón. His wife, Mónica, answered the phone.

‘You’ve heard the news,’ he said.

‘He can’t speak to you now,’ said Mónica. ‘He’s too upset. You know Lucrecio was like a father to him.’

‘First thing: none of you are to go outside,’ said Falcón. ‘Lock all the doors and windows and go upstairs. Don’t answer the door. I’m sending a patrol car round there now.’

Silence from Mónica.

‘I’ll tell you what it’s about when I get there,’ said Falcón. ‘Did Jesús speak to Lucrecio Arenas yesterday?’

‘Yes, they met.’

‘I’m coming round now. Lock all the doors. Don’t let anybody in.’

On the way to El Porvenir, Falcón called Elvira and asked for armed guards to protect Alarcón and his family. The request was granted immediately.