The Hidden Assassins (26 page)

‘No idea,’ the patrolman said, into the radio.

‘How about Juez Esteban Calderón?’ said the operator.

‘Fuck!’ said the patrolman and dropped the mouthpiece.

He shone his own torch in the man’s face, grabbed him by the chin to hold him still. Calderón’s agony slackened off with surprise. The patrolman let a sly grin spread across his face before he went back to the car.

Falcón had to claw his way out of sleep like an abandoned potholer, desperately trying to reach a star of light in a firmament of blackness. He came to with a jerk and grunt of disgust, as if he’d been spewed up by his own bed. The bedside light hurt him. The green digits on his clock told him it was 5.03. He grappled with the phone and sank back into his pillow with it clasped to his ear.

The voice was of the duty officer in the communications centre of the Jefatura. He was babbling. He was speaking so fast and with such a heavy Andaluz accent that Falcón only picked up the first syllable of every other word. He stopped him, got him to start again from the top.

‘We have a situation down by the bus station at the Plaza de Armas. Behind the bus station, down by the river near the Puente de Chapina, a man has been apprehended attempting to dispose of a body. We have a positive identification of the owner of the vehicle used to bring the body to that point, and we have a positive ID of the man who was attempting to dispose of the body. And the man’s name, Inspector Jefe, is…Esteban Calderón.’

Falcón’s leg spasmed as if some high voltage had shot up it. In one movement he was out of bed and pacing the floor.

‘Esteban Calderón, the judge? Are you positive?’

‘We are now. The patrolman at the scene has checked the ID and read the number back to me. That and the car’s registration confirm the man as Esteban Calderón.’

‘Have you spoken to anyone about this?’

‘Not yet, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Have you called the Juez de Guardia?’

‘No, you’re the first person. I should have—’

‘How was the incident reported?’

‘An anonymous phone call from a guy who said he was walking his dog down by the river.’

‘What time?’

‘It was timed at 4.52 a.m.’

‘Is that when people walk their dogs?’

‘Old people who can’t sleep do, especially in this heat.’

‘How did he report it?’

‘He called in on his mobile, told me what he was seeing, gave me the registration number and hung up.’

‘Name and address?’

‘Didn’t have time to ask him.’

‘Don’t talk to anyone about this,’ said Falcón. ‘Call the patrolmen and tell them there is to be radio silence on this matter until I’ve spoken to Comisario Elvira.’

The bedroom seemed to fill up with the catastrophe of scandal. Falcón went out on to the gallery overlooking the patio. The morning was warm. He felt sick. He called Elvira, gave him some seconds to wake up and then told him the news in the most measured tone he could muster. Falcón broke the ensuing silence
himself, by telling Elvira how many people, at this point, knew what had taken place.

‘We have to get him, the body and the car off the street as soon as possible, whatever happens,’ said Elvira. ‘And we need a judge and a Médico Forense to do that.’

‘Juez Romero is reliable and neither a friend, nor enemy, of Esteban Calderón.’

‘This mustn’t look like a cover-up,’ said Elvira, almost to himself.

‘This isn’t something that can be covered up,’ said Falcón.

‘We have to do things absolutely by the book. The investigation might have to be taken off your hands, given Esteban Calderón’s status.’

‘I think it better for me to initiate the proceedings,’ said Falcón.

‘Let’s go for normal procedure, but nobody, absolutely nobody, is to talk about this. We must have no leaks until we can get a press statement together. I’ll speak to Comisario Lobo. Tell the communications officer to make the usual calls but not, under any circumstances, to inform the press. If it gets out before we’re ready there’ll be hell to pay.’

‘The only person we can’t control is the anonymous caller who reported the incident,’ said Falcón.

‘Well,
he
shouldn’t know who it was he was reporting, should he?’ said Elvira.

This was too big a scandal to contain. Elvira was asking too much. This was going to come sweating out of the Jefatura walls. Falcón called the communications centre, gave the instructions and asked the officer to call Felipe and Jorge to the crime scene. He
showered, standing under the drilling water, trying to think of any plausible, innocent explanation for Calderón being discovered down by the river with a dead body.

It was 5.30 and the dawn was well advanced by the time he walked across the Plaza de Armas to the incident. The traffic on the Torneo was still very light. A patrol car had parked at the top of the ramp and some cones had been put out to stop any traffic from turning down the road. The duty judge was already at the scene, as was a police photographer, who was taking some shots. Jorge and Felipe arrived and were allowed down the ramp.

There was no sign of Calderón. Two patrolmen were making sure no early-morning joggers came past the scene along the riverbank. The duty judge told Falcón that Calderón was sitting in the back of the patrol car with one of the policemen who’d first come across the incident.

‘We’re just waiting for a Médico Forense to arrive and inspect the body.’

A set of tyres squeaked at the top of the ramp and a car rolled down and parked up. The Médico Forense got out with his bag. He was already dressed in a white hooded boiler suit and had a mask hanging from his neck. He shook hands, put on gloves, and they proceeded to the body. An ambulance arrived with no siren or flashing lights.

The Médico Forense used a scalpel to cut the tape wrapped around the body. He worked from the feet up to the head. He laid open the hessian sheet. The head wrapped in the black bin liner looked sinister, as if the body had been the subject of some sexual
deviancy. Falcón started to feel dizzy. The Médico Forense murmured into his dictaphone about the heavy bruising on the torso. He put his scalpel through the cooking string at the neck of the body and eased away the bin liner. A darkening at the edges of his vision made Falcón clutch at the duty judge’s sleeve.

‘Are you all right, Inspector Jefe?’ he asked.

Under the bin liner the head was wrapped in a towel. The front was white, with blood smears over it. The Médico Forense lifted up one corner of the towel and folded it back. The outline of the face was visible, as under a shroud. He pulled away the other corner of the towel and Falcón dropped unconscious to the floor, with the features of his ex-wife imprinted on his retina.

Falcón came to on the ground. The duty judge had managed to catch him and break his fall. The paramedics from the ambulance were over him. He heard the duty judge above their heads.

‘He’s in shock. This is his ex-wife. He shouldn’t really be here.’

The paramedics helped him up. The Médico Forense continued to murmur into his dictaphone. He checked the thermometer, made a calculation and muttered the time of death.

Tears welled up as Falcón looked down once more on Inés’s inert body. This was a scene from her life that he’d never imagined—her death. Over the years he’d done a lot of thinking and talking about Inés. He’d relived their life together ten times over, until he’d nearly driven Alicia Aguado insane. He’d only been
able to get rid of her permanent occupation of his mind by finally seeing her for what she was, and realizing how badly she’d behaved and treated him. But this was not how it should have ended. No amount of selfishness deserved this.

The paramedics moved him away from the body and got him sitting on the low wall by the river, away from where the Médico Forense was working. Falcón breathed deeply. The duty judge came over.

‘You can’t handle this case,’ he said.

‘I’ll call Comisario Elvira,’ said Falcón, nodding. ‘He’ll appoint somebody from the outside. My entire squad is an interested party.’

Elvira was speechless until he finally managed to come up with his condolences. The catastrophe was so much worse than he’d imagined and, as he spoke, first to Falcón and then the duty judge, the hideousness of the morning press conference began to spread like a malignancy through his innards.

The duty judge finished the call and handed the mobile back to Falcón. They shook hands. Falcón took one last look at the body. Her face was perfect and undamaged. He shook his head in disbelief and had an image from years ago, when he’d come across Inés in the street. She’d been laughing; laughing so hard that she was doubled up with her hair flung forward, staggering backwards on her high heels.

He turned away and left the scene. He walked past the patrol car where Calderón was being held. The door was open. The radio squawked. Calderón’s wrists were cuffed, his torn and bleeding hands lay in his lap. He stared straight ahead and his vision did not deviate even when Falcón leaned in.

‘Esteban,’ said Falcón.

Calderón turned to him, and said the sentence that Falcón had heard more times from the mouths of murderers than any other.

‘I didn’t do it.’

Seville—Thursday, 8th June 2006, 08.04 hrs

The classroom in the pre-school had been reglazed and new blinds put up. The air conditioners were already working full blast, which was the only way to keep the sulphurous stink of the corrupted bodies still in the destroyed apartment building at a bearable level. It was already past eight o’clock and still Comisario Elvira had not arrived. Everybody was tired, but there was a buzz of expectation in the room.

‘Something’s happened,’ said Ramírez, ‘and I’ve got the feeling it’s something big. What do you think, Javier?’

Falcón couldn’t speak.

‘Where’s Juez Calderón?’ said Ramírez. ‘That’s what makes me think it’s big. He’s the man for the press conference.’

Falcón nodded, appalled to silence by what he’d seen down by the river. The door opened and Elvira came in and made his way to the blackboard at the far end of the room, followed by three men. Already present at the meeting were Pablo and Gregorio from the CNI, Inspector Jefe Ramón Barros and one of his
senior officers from the antiterrorist squad of the CGI, and Falcón and Ramírez from the homicide squad. Elvira turned. His face was grim.

‘There’s no easy way to put this,’ he said, ‘so I’m just going to give you the facts. At around six o’clock this morning Juez Esteban Calderón was placed under arrest on suspicion of murdering his wife. Two patrolmen found him earlier this morning, attempting to dispose of his wife’s body in the Guadalquivir. Given these circumstances, he will no longer be acting as the Juez de Instrucción in our investigation. It will also be impossible for our own homicide squad to conduct the murder enquiry, which will be carried out by these three officers from Madrid, led by Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita. Thank you.’

The three homicide officers from Madrid nodded and filed out of the room, stopping briefly to introduce themselves and shake hands with Falcón and Ramírez. The door closed. Elvira resumed the meeting. Ramírez stared at Falcón in a state of shock.

‘We have decided to appoint a Juez de Instrucción from outside Seville,’ said Elvira, ‘and Juez Sergio del Rey is on his way down from Madrid now. On his arrival an announcement will be made to the press at a conference to be held in the Andalucian Parliament building and until that time I would ask you to keep this information to yourselves.

‘Following the suicide yesterday of Ricardo Gamero of the CGI, there have been some major developments and the CNI will now explain these to us.’

Something had been sucked out of Elvira’s face overnight. The staggering import of his announcements had left him haggard. He sat back in the teacher’s chair,
inanimate, with his chin resting on his fist, as if his head needed that sort of support to keep it in place. Pablo made his way to the front.

‘Just prior to the suicide of the CGI agent, Ricardo Gamero, we had received information from British intelligence that they had successfully identified the other two men photographed by Gamero’s source, Miguel Botín. These two men are of Afghan nationality, living in Rome. They were known to MI5 because they were arrested in London two weeks after the failed 21st July bombings and held for questioning under the Terrorism Act. They were released without being charged. The British were not able to establish what these men were doing in London at the time, other than that they were visiting family. The known addresses of these two men in Rome were raided by the Italian police last night and found to be empty. Their current whereabouts is unknown. What concerns us about these suspects is that they are believed to have connections to the high command of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and are believed by the British to have forged links with the GICM in Morocco. In the last year they are known to have visited the UK, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain and Morocco. All these countries are believed to have GICM sleeper cells. There is considerable intelligence work still to be done to ascertain Miguel Botín’s role, Imam Abdelkrim Benaboura’s relationship to these two men, and their involvement with what has happened here in Seville.

‘After Ricardo Gamero’s suicide we conducted a search of Miguel Botín’s apartment and discovered a heavily annotated copy of the Koran which matches the edition found in the Peugeot Partner driven by
Hammad and Saoudi. Large chunks of the notes are exact transcripts and we believe that this is a codebook. It is now thought that as each sleeper cell is activated they are issued with a new codebook, which they use until their mission is complete.

‘The significance of finding this copy of the Koran in Miguel Botín’s apartment is that it
could
mean that Ricardo Gamero’s source was a double: working with the CGI and operating for a terrorist cell. This throws considerable confusion into the current investigation, because it would mean that the only intelligence Botín was communicating to Gamero was what his commanders
wanted
us to know. This would mean that Hammad and Saoudi, the two Afghans, and the Imam were all expendable.

‘There is one final confusing detail about Botín’s actions in this scenario. As you know, a great deal of manpower has been spent trying to find the fake council inspectors and the electricians. Inspector Jefe Falcón has found a witness who was in the mosque on the Sunday morning, after the fuse box blew on the Saturday night. This witness saw Botín give the electrician’s card to the Imam, and he watched as the Imam called the number and made the appointment. Inspector Jefe Barros has informed us that this was not something sanctioned by him or anyone in his department. The CGI was still waiting for authorization to bug the mosque.

‘We now have to examine the possibility that the council inspectors and the electricians were members of, or in the pay of, a terrorist cell. It could be—and we might only have a chance of verifying this when the forensics have reached the mosque—that the
council inspectors laid a device to blow the fuse box and that the electricians were brought in to set a bomb that would wipe out the Imam, Hammad and Saoudi, and Botín himself.’

‘There seems to be a break in the logic chain of that scenario,’ said Barros. ‘It might just be believable that Botín was the unwitting agent of their destruction, but I don’t see any terrorist commander allowing that quantity of hexogen, brought into this country at what one imagines was considerable risk and expense, to be destroyed.’

‘The electricians and council inspectors would constitute a type of terrorist cell we’ve never come across before, too,’ said Falcón. ‘The witness said they were a Spaniard and two Eastern Europeans.’

‘And how does Ricardo Gamero’s suicide fit into this scenario?’ asked Barros.

‘A profound sense of failure at his inability to prevent this atrocity,’ said Pablo. ‘We understand that he took his work very seriously.’

Silence, while everybody wrestled with the CNI’s possible scenario. Falcón snapped out of his shocked state and burned with his theory that too much weight was being attached to the copy of the Koran as a codebook. But it was impossible to understand how two identical copies could have ended up in the Peugeot Partner and Botín’s apartment.

‘Why do you think this cell self-destructed?’ asked Barros.

‘We can only think that it was a spectacular diversionary tactic, to occupy our domestic investigating teams and all European intelligence services while they plan and carry out an attack elsewhere,’ said Pablo. ‘If
Botín was a double agent, his terrorist masters would have known that the mosque was under suspicion. They fed that suspicion further by bringing in the hexogen and Hammad and Saoudi, two known logistics men. They then blew it up. They don’t mind. They’re all going to paradise, whether as successful bombers or magnificent decoys.’

‘What about the Afghans?’ asked Barros. ‘They’ve been identified, but not exactly sacrificed.’

‘Perhaps Botín intended the shot of the two Afghans to be interpreted by us as an indication of an attack planned for Italy. Botín supplied those photographs when he was a trusted CGI source.’

‘So, another diversionary tactic?’

‘The Italians, Danish and Belgians are all on red alert, as they were after the London bombings.’

‘So this letter sent to the
ABC
with the Abdullah Azzam text and all the media references to MILA—was that all part of this grand diversion?’ asked Barros, nearly enjoying himself at being able to finally needle the CNI, who had so humiliated him and his department.

‘What we’re working on now is the real target,’ said Pablo. ‘The Abdullah Azzam text and the idea of MILA are powerful tools of terror. They inspire fear in a population. We see this as part of the escalation of this particular brand of terrorism. We are fighting the equivalent of a mutating virus. No sooner do we find one cure than it adapts to it with renewed lethal strength. There is no model. Only after we have sustained attacks do we become aware of a modus operandi. The intelligence gathered from the hundreds of people interviewed after the Madrid and London bombings is no
help to us now. We are not talking about an integrated organization with a defined structure, but more of a satellite organization with a fluid structure and total flexibility.’

‘Are you sure you’re not reading too much into the diversionary tactic?’ said Elvira. ‘After the Madrid bombings—’

‘We’re pretty sure that ETA provided the diversion which led to the devastating success of the Madrid bombings. We don’t think it was a coincidence that, 120 kilometres southeast of Madrid, the Guardia Civil stopped a van driven by two ETA incompetents, and loaded with 536 kilos of titadine for delivery to Madrid; and on the same day, 500 kilometres away in Avilés, three Moroccan terrorists were taking delivery of the 100 kilos of Goma 2 Eco used on the Madrid trains,’ said Pablo. ‘British security forces and intelligence were focused on an attack on the G8 Summit in Edinburgh when suicide bombers blew themselves up on the London Underground.’

‘All right, so there is a history of diversion,’ said Elvira.

‘And a diversion that is prepared to sacrifice 536 kilos of titadine,’ said Pablo, looking pointedly at Barros.

‘The reality,’ said Elvira, ‘is that we have no idea who we are dealing with most of the time. We call them al-Qaeda because it helps us to sleep at night, but we seem to have come up against a very pure form of terrorism whose “goal” is to attack our way of life and “decadent values” at whatever cost. There even seems to be competition between these disparate groups to think up and carry out the most devastating attack possible.’

‘This is what we’re concerned about here,’ said Pablo, enthused by Elvira seeing his point of view. ‘Are we experiencing a series of diversionary jabs prior to the main attack—something on the scale of the World Trade Center in New York?’

‘What
we
need to know,’ said Ramírez, tiring of all the conjecture, ‘is where our investigation here, in Seville, should be heading.’

‘There is no Juez de Instrucción until Sergio del Rey arrives from Madrid,’ said Elvira. ‘The Madrid CGI have been pulling in all contacts of Hammad and Saoudi for interviews, but so far they appear to have been operating alone. The Guardia Civil have successfully plotted the route taken by the Peugeot Partner from Madrid to the safe house near Valmojado, where it is believed they were keeping the hexogen. They are having difficulties plotting the route taken by the vehicle from Valmojado down to Seville. There are concerns that it diverted on its route.’

‘Where was the last sighting of the Peugeot Partner?’ asked Falcón.

‘Heading south on the NIV/E5. It stopped at a service station near Valdepeñas. The concern is that ninety kilometres later the road forks. The NIV continues to Cordoba and Seville, while the N323/E902 goes to Jaen and Granada. They are looking at both routes, but it’s not easy to track a particular white van amongst the thousands on the roads. Their only chance is if the vehicle stopped and the two men got out so that someone could identify them, as happened at the service station near Valdepeñas.’

‘Which means there’s a distinct possibility that there’s more hexogen elsewhere,’ said Pablo. ‘Our job at the
moment is to find out what connections Botín made, and we’ll be speaking to his partner, Esperanza, this morning.’

‘That’s great,’ said Ramírez. ‘But what are
we
supposed to do? Keep searching for the non-existent electricians and council inspectors? We’re looking like incompetents at the moment. Juez Calderón was doing a good job of protecting us from too much media attention. Now he’s in a police cell. A CGI antiterrorist agent has committed suicide and
his
source
could
be a double agent. We’re at crisis point here. Our squad can’t just carry on as we were.’

‘Until we receive forensic information from inside the mosque, there’s not a lot else we can do,’ said Falcón. ‘We can go back to the congregation of the mosque and interview them about Miguel Botín, see what that throws up. But I believe we
should
keep hammering away at the electricians and council inspectors—who
do
exist. They
have
been seen. And if I understand the CNI correctly, the council inspectors created a pretext so that the electricians could plant a bomb. They are the perpetrators of this atrocity. We
have
to find them and the people who sent them.
That,
as the Grupo de Homicidios, is our goal.’

‘But possibly one that you can only achieve through quality intelligence,’ said Elvira. ‘Are they part of an Islamic terrorist cell or not? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the history of Miguel Botín, who gave their card to the Imam.’

‘And what
about
the Imam?’ said Ramírez, not wanting to be thwarted. ‘Where is he in all this? Has the CNI search of his apartment been completed? Can we have their findings? Has access to his history
finally been granted to someone who’s allowed to tell us?’

‘We can’t access it because we do not hold it,’ said Pablo.

‘Who does hold it?’

‘The Americans.’

‘Did you find a heavily annotated copy of that edition of the Koran in the Imam’s apartment?’ asked Falcón.

‘No.’

‘So you don’t think he was in the loop?’ said Ramírez.