The Hidden Assassins

by Robert Wilson

  In the ABC offices Angel went to work on the dossier and archives. In an hour he’d put together a page, the editor was never going to look at more than that. The headline: THIS MAN HAS ANSWERS. The main shot was part of a photograph he’d found of Jesús in a business magazine about Spain’s future. Jesús was supposedly looking up to a sun, which was probably a photographer’s lighting umbrella, and his face was shining with hope and belief in the future. He also had shots of Jesús with the stunning Mónica, and the couple with their children. There was a sub headline, which said: The New Leader of Fuerza Andalucía Believes in Our Future. The writing was in note form and described not just the radical immigration policy of Fuerza Andalucía, but also vital economic and agrarian reforms that were necessary to make Andalucía a force in the future. It included Jesús’s employment profile, which showed that he was economically ‘sensible’, internationally connected and had the contacts in industry to make his ideas work.

  There was a lull in activity just before lunch at around two o’clock. The traffic into the editor’s office had calmed. Angel made his move.

  ‘We’re probably going to have to cut your column for at least the next few days,’ said the editor when he saw Angel crossing his threshold.

  ‘Of course,’ said Angel. ‘Nobody wants political gossip at a time like this.’

  ‘What do you want with me, then?’ said the editor, interested now he knew that Angel hadn’t come for a fight.

  ‘Most of the stuff in tomorrow’s newspaper is going to be hard news and a lot of it will be heart-rending, with reports on the destruction of the pre-school and the dead children. The only positive stories will be about the excellence of the emergency services, and I’ve heard that there’s a survivor. You’ll be writing a leader that captures the mood of the city, that reacts to the receipt of Abdullah Azzam’s text, and that declares that we might not have moved so far forward since 11th March as everybody would like to think.’

  ‘Well, Angel, now you’ve told me my job,’ said the editor, ‘you can get on with telling me what you’re proposing.’

  ‘A vision of hope,’ he said, handing over the page he’d just created. ‘In this time of crisis there’s a young, energetic, capable man in the wings, who could make Andalucía a safe and prosperous place to live.’

  The editor scanned the page, took it all in, nodded and grunted.

  ‘So the rumours about Eduardo Rivero are true.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re referring to.’

  ‘Come off it, Angel,’ said the editor, flinging out a dismissive fist. ‘He was caught with his pants down.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any truth in that.’

  ‘With an under-age girl. There was talk of a DVD.’

  ‘Nobody’s seen it.’

  ‘The rumblings have been very loud, and now this—’ said the editor, waving the page in the air. ‘If it wasn’t for the bomb, I’d have someone digging in the dirt after your old friend.’

  ‘Look, this has been in the pipeline for a long time,’ said Angel. ‘With this bomb going off he just feels that it’s time to stand down and let somebody younger take the party to the next stage. He’s going to be seventy at the end of this year.’

  ‘So we have the first political casualty of the bomb.’

  ‘That’s not how we should be thinking about it,’ said Angel. ‘It’s precipitated change and it’s saying that change is what we have to do if we want to survive this challenge to our liberty.’

  ‘You’re serious, Angel. What’s happened to the great deflator? The man with the sharpened nib who pops those hot-air egos?’

  ‘Perhaps my cynicism is another casualty of the bomb.’

  ‘Well, you’re always complaining that nothing happens,’ said the editor, ‘and now…you believe in this guy and yet you’ve barely written a word about him before.’

  ‘As you’ve just pointed out, my column was primarily for puncturing egos,’ said Angel. ‘Jesús Alarcón hasn’t had time to develop an ego that needs to be punctured. He’s quietly taken Fuerza Andalucía from being an organization with a small debt to one with regular contributions from members and businesses. He’s done amazing, if uncharismatic, work.’

  ‘So what makes you think he’s got the personality for it?’

  ‘I saw him this morning,’ said Angel. ‘He’s learnt a lot…’

  ‘But can you learn charisma?’

  ‘Charisma is just an intense form of self-belief,’ said Angel. ‘Jesús Alarcón has always been confident. He’s ambitious. He’s dealt with serious personal setbacks, which, to me, are a far more powerful measure of the man than his ability to broker international finance deals. He has the inner steel and common sense that our last prime minister had. You know politics. It’s like boxing. It’s all very well to have the fast hands and fancy footwork, but even the greatest fighters get hit very hard and if you can’t absorb punishment you’re finished. Jesús Alarcón has all those qualities and, after the conferring of the leadership, I can now see emerging that indefinable quality that will make people want to follow him.’

  ‘All right,’ said the editor, thinking positively about it. ‘A new face for a new era. Write me a profile. And, by the way, I agree with you about charisma, it is an intense form of self-belief. But there’s something both blinding and blind about it, too. Its closest friend can quite quickly become corruption—the belief that you can do anything with impunity. I hope Jesús Alarcón does not have the makings of a tragic figure.’

  ‘He’s not a hollow man,’ said Angel. ‘He’s suffered and come through it.’

  ‘Get him to remember that suffering,’ said the editor. ‘Every politician should have the words of the president of the Terrorists’ Victims’ Association, Pilar Manjón, ringing in their ears: “They only think of themselves.”‘

  The Madrid police and forensics had been working hard in the apartment used by Djamel Hammad and Smail Saoudi. Taped to the underside of a gas bottle they’d found a selection of stolen and forged IDs and passports, with pictures of the two men whose descriptions fitted those given by Trabelsi Amar and the Seville homicide squad. They’d also discovered € 5,875 in small-denomination notes in three separate packages hidden around the apartment. DNA was currently being generated from hairs, bristles and pubic hairs found in the bathroom. An empty pad on the kitchen table had revealed indentations, which proved to be complicated directions to a property southwest of Madrid, not far from a village called Valmojado. The isolated house near the Río Guadarrama was found to be empty, with no evidence of recent habitation. The police concluded that it was a staging post—a place to pick up and leave material—and nothing more. The property had been rented in the name of a Spaniard, whose ID was false. The owners had been paid six months in advance, which had made them reluctant to ask too many questions. The forensics were still conducting their search of the premises, but so far not a trace of explosive had been found. The Guardia Civil had questioned a number of locals, including shepherds, and reckoned that in the four months it had been rented it had been visited by a white van five times. Three of those visits corresponded roughly to the times Trabelsi Amar had lent the Peugeot Partner to Hammad and Saoudi.

  There was a complication with this scenario, which was that the directions to the isolated house found in the Madrid apartment were freshly written in Hammad’s handwriting, which would imply that their visit on Sunday at around midday was their first. This in turn implied that the other two times they’d borrowed Trabelsi Amar’s van they’d lent it to others who had gone to the farmhouse. A clearer indication that the isolated farmhouse was being visited by people other than Hammad and Saoudi came from eyewitness reports that as many as six different people, including one woman, had been seen going there. This information had an adrenalizing effect on the CGI in Madrid, who concluded that Hammad and Saoudi were acting within a much larger network than at first thought. They contacted all the major intelligence agencies but none of them ha
d picked up any ‘chatter’ about a planned attack in Spain. The fear now was that Hammad and Saoudi’s logistical work was part of a wider effort.

  The CGI, with the help of the Guardia Civil, were now trying to find Hammad and Saoudi’s route from Madrid to the isolated house near Valmojado and then down to Seville. They wanted to know if they had made any other stopovers—anonymous-looking meetings in roadside bars, other visits to isolated houses or, worse, other deliveries to, for instance, a location in another major Andalucían city.

  That was the primary content of a seven-page report, drafted by several senior officers of the counterterrorism unit and sent by the Madrid CGI to Comisario Elvira in the damaged pre-school in Seville. There was a conclusion attached, which had been written by the Director of the CNI and had also reached the hands of Prime Minister Zapatero:

  On the basis of our own findings and the reports received so far from the offices of the CGI and, taken in conjunction with the preliminary reports from the bomb squad and the police on the ground at the site of the disaster, we can only conclude, at this point, that we have come across an Islamic terrorist network who were planning an attack, or, more likely, a series of attacks, with the intention of destabilizing the political and social fabric of the region of Andalucía. Whilst the investigating bodies have so far uncovered some anomalies to the usual modus operandi of radical Islamic groups, they have not brought to our attention any suspicious activity, or even stated intention, of any other group that might want to inflict damage on the Muslim population of Andalucía. We therefore recommend that the government take the necessary steps to protect all major cities in the region.

  The noise of demolition work reasserted itself in the room after Comisario Elvira finished the reading of the report. Inspector Jefe Falcón and Juez Calderón were sitting on small children’s desks, arms folded, ankles crossed and staring into the ground, which had now been swept clear of glass. Plastic sheeting, which had been stretched across the empty window frames, revealed an indistinct outside world that ballooned and lurched with the hot breeze, blowing from the south.

  ‘They seem to have made up their minds, don’t they?’ said Calderón. ‘Having told us not to disappear exclusively down one path, that’s just what they’ve done themselves. There’s no mention of the VOMIT website or of any other anti-Muslim groups.’

  ‘Given all the stuff they’ve just found in the Madrid apartment of Hammad and Saoudi, and the hexogen deposit in the rear of the Peugeot Partner and the Islamic paraphernalia in the front,’ said Elvira, ‘who could blame them?’

  ‘It doesn’t look good for the Islamic radicals at the moment,’ said Falcón. ‘But the bomb squad haven’t got to the epicentre of the explosion yet. There’s still vital forensic information to come. I’ve also spoken to the forensics going over the Peugeot Partner and so far all they’ve come up with is that a new tyre had been fitted to the rear driver’s side and the spare had a puncture.

  ‘What they’ve found in the Madrid apartment and the existence of the isolated house could be interpreted as terrorist activity, or illegal immigrant activity. We’ve been told that Hammad and Saoudi have a track record of logistical involvement, but what does that mean? If they’d been caught with something, then we’d know about it. If they’ve been named by others, that’s questionable information.’

  ‘My reading of this document,’ said Elvira, flapping the paper derisively in front of him, ‘is that it’s something that has been drafted for the politicians, so that they can appear knowledgeable and decisive on a day of crisis. The CNI and CGI have stuck to the known facts. They’ve mentioned “anomalies” but have given no detail. VOMIT and other groups aren’t mentioned because there’s nothing to support their involvement. The MILA doesn’t appear either, despite its mention on the news. It’s because they’ve got no intelligence to offer on any of them.’

  ‘Are we allowed to talk about the CGI?’ said Falcón, purposely disingenuous.

  Calderón’s secrecy radar was on to it in a flash. Elvira threw up his hands.

  ‘Needless to say, this can’t go out of this room,’ said Elvira, ‘but seeing as you’re the instructing judge controlling this investigation you should know that there have been some concerns about the reliability of the Seville branch of the CGI. A decision from above has not yet been taken to allow them to fully enter the battle. Their agents have been in touch with their informer network and have drafted reports, but we haven’t seen anything yet. They’ve been denied access to our reports and they know nothing about certain pieces of evidence, such as the heavily annotated copy of the Koran, which, as far as I know, has been kept out of the news.’

  ‘That’s a big blow to the investigation,’ said Calderón. ‘Shouldn’t we have heard about this before now?’

  ‘I don’t have clearance to tell either of you,’ said Elvira.

  ‘So what is it about this heavily annotated copy of the Koran that’s so important?’ asked Calderón.

  ‘I don’t know, but it’s received a very high level of interest from the CNI,’ said Elvira. ‘Anyway, that doesn’t concern us right now. When was the last time you heard from your squad?’

  ‘Recently enough to be able to say that we’ve got a pretty clear picture of what happened here in the last forty-eight hours, some of which is connected to occurrences in the week before the explosion.’

  Falcón now had at least two witnesses to each of the significant events that preceded the blast. Hammad and Saoudi had first been seen at the mosque on Tuesday 30th May at 12.00. They arrived on foot and stayed talking to the Imam until 1.30 p.m. The two other events of that week were the visit from council inspectors at 10 a.m. on Friday 2nd June and a power cut some time on Saturday 3rd June at night, when the Imam had been in the mosque alone.

  This led to an electrician turning up at 8.30 a.m. on Monday 5th June to assess the damage and the work involved. He returned with two labourers at 10.30 a.m. to repair the blown fuse box and also install a power socket in the storeroom next to the Imam’s office.

  The second visit from the electrician coincided with Hammad and Saoudi’s arrival in the Peugeot Partner and the unloading of two large polypropylene sacks, which were believed to contain couscous. They stayed about an hour. The electricians left just before lunch at about 2.30 p.m. Hammad and Saoudi returned at 5.45 p.m. with four heavy cardboard boxes believed to contain sugar and some carrier bags of mint, all of which went into the storeroom. They were still there at 7 p.m. and, so far, nobody had seen them leave the premises.

  ‘And what are your areas of concern in all that?’

  ‘We have witnesses to the arrivals and departures of all these people,’ said Falcón. ‘But we haven’t been able to make contact with the electrician. In order to get this done as quickly as possible I’ve asked my squad, who are already overloaded with interview work, to coordinate with local police and get them to visit every electrician’s outlet or workshop within a square kilometre of the explosion. So far we’ve come up with nothing. All we know is that three men arrived in a blue transit van with no markings and we have no witnesses for the registration number.’

  ‘Do you want the media to make an announcement?’ asked Elvira.

  ‘Not yet. I want to do more footwork on this.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘I have other members of my squad tied up interviewing the Informáticalidad sales reps. None of them has come back to me with anything significant, but I have yet to talk to them and find out what the story was there.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘My greatest concern at the moment, apart from the undiscovered electrician, is that the council have no record of sending any inspectors to the mosque, or any other part of this building, or even this barrio, on Friday 2nd June, or any day, for that matter, in the last three months.’

  15

  Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 19.55 hrs

  Before the three men left the bombsite for the night, Calderón gave an upda
te on the deaths and injuries. Four children had died of head wounds and internal bleeding in the pre-school. Seven children had been seriously wounded—ranging from the loss of a leg below the knee to severe facial lacerations. Eighteen children had been lightly wounded, mainly cut by flying glass. Two men and a woman who had been passing by the building on Calle Los Romeros had been killed, either by flying debris or falling masonry. An elderly woman had died of a heart attack in an apartment across the road. There were thirty-two seriously injured people, who had been either inside, or around, buildings close to the stricken block and there were three hundred and forty-three lightly injured. From the rubble they had so far removed two men and two women who were dead and young Lourdes Alanis, who had survived. The list of missing in the mosque, including the Imam, numbered thirteen. Apart from them this gave a total so far of twelve dead, thirty-nine seriously injured and three hundred and sixty-one lightly injured.

  The demolition crews were now removing the remaining slabs of concrete from what had been the fifth floor. The whole area was under floodlights as they prepared to work all night. An air-conditioned tent had been erected on some wasteground between the pre-school and another block of apartments to handle forensic evidence. Another tent was being erected to deal with the bodies and body parts, which would eventually be coming out of the crushed mosque. The judges, homicide squad, forensics and emergency services had worked out a duty roster, so that there would be someone on site all night from each group.

  It was still light and very warm as Elvira, Falcón and Calderón left the pre-school just before 8 p.m. A group of people had gathered in a corner of the playground. Hundreds of candles flickered on the ground amidst bouquets of flowers. Banners and placards had been pinned up on the chain-link fencing—No más muertes. Paz. Sólo los inocentes han caido. Por el derecho de vivir sin violencia—No more death. Peace. Only the innocents have fallen. For the right to live without violence. But the largest banner of all was written in red against a white background—ODIO ETERNO AL TERRORISMO—Eternal Hate to Terrorism. In the bottom right-hand corner was written VOMIT. Falcón asked if anybody had seen the person who had unfurled this banner, but nobody had. It was this banner which had drawn people to that part of the playground and so it had become a natural place for the locals to pay tribute to the fallen.