The Hidden Assassins

by Robert Wilson

  The conference lasted about an hour and was a subdued affair. Elvira had just reached the point where he was looking to wrap up the event when a journalist at the back stood up.

  ‘A final question for Inspector Jefe Falcón,’ he said. ‘Are you satisfied with this result?’

  A brief silence. A cautionary look from Elvira. A woman leaned forward in the front row to get a good look at him.

  ‘Experience tells me I might have to be,’ said Falcón. ‘It is the nature of all murder investigations that, the more time passes, the less chance there is that fresh discoveries will be made. However, I would like to tell the people of Seville that I, personally, am not satisfied with this outcome. With each act, terrorism reaches new depths of iniquity. Humanity now has to live in a world where people have been prepared to abuse a population’s vulnerability to terrorism in order to gain power. I would have liked to have provided the ultimate resolution to this crime, which would have been to bring everyone, from the planners to the man who planted the device, to justice. We have only been partially successful, but, for me, the battle does not end with this press conference, and I want to assure all Sevillanos that I, and my squad, will do everything in our power to find all the perpetrators, wherever they may be, even if it takes me the rest of my career.’

  From the end of the press conference until 10.30 p.m. Falcón was in the Jefatura, catching up on the monumental load of paperwork that had accumulated in the five days of investigation. He went home, took a shower and changed, and was ready for the evening transmission to Yacoub when Gregorio came round at 11 p.m.

  Gregorio was nervous and excited.

  ‘It’s been confirmed, from several different sources, that three separate cells are on the move. A group left Valencia last night by car, a married couple left from Madrid, in a transit van, early this morning and another group left from Barcelona, some together, some alone, at various times between Friday lunchtime and early this morning. They all seem to be heading for Paris.’

  ‘Let’s see what Yacoub makes of it,’ said Falcón.

  They made contact and exchanged introductions.

  ‘I have no time,’ wrote Yacoub. ‘I have to leave for Paris on the 11.30 flight and it will take me more than an hour to get to the airport.’

  ‘Any reason?’

  ‘None. They told me to book my usual hotel in the Marais and that I would receive my instructions once I arrived.’

  Falcón asked about the three cells activated in Spain since Friday, all heading for Paris.

  ‘I’ve heard nothing. I have no idea if my trip is connected.’

  ‘What about the “hardware”?’

  ‘Still nothing. Any more questions? I have to leave now.’

  Gregorio shook his head.

  ‘When you were taken to the GICM camp for your initiation, you wrote about a wall of books—the car manuals. Have you remembered anything about them? It seems a curious thing to have.’

  ‘They were all four-wheel-drive vehicles. I remember a VW insignia and a Mercedes. The third book was for Range Rover and the last I had to check my memory of the insignia on the internet. It was Porsche. That’s it. I will try to make contact from Paris.’

  Gregorio got up to leave, as if he’d just wasted his time.

  ‘Any thoughts on that?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘I’ll talk to Juan and Pablo, see what they think.’

  Gregorio let himself out. Falcón sat back in his chair. He didn’t like this intelligence work. Suddenly everything was moving around him at an alarming pace, with great urgency, but in reaction to electronic nods and winks. He could see how people could go mad in this world, where reality came in the form of “information” from “sources”, and agents were told to go to hotels and wait for “instructions”. It was all too disembodied for his liking. He never thought he’d hear himself say it, but he preferred his world, where there was a corpse, pathology, forensics, evidence and face-to-face dialogue. It seemed to him that intelligence work demanded the same leap of faith as religious belief and, in that respect, he’d always found himself in a twilight world, where his belief in a form of spirituality couldn’t quite extend itself to the recognition of an ultimate being.

  The three notebooks he’d filled during the course of the investigation sat on his desk, next to a pile of paperwork he’d brought home with him. He took a sheet of paper from the printer and opened up the first notebook. The date was 5th June, the day he’d been called to view Tateb Hassani’s corpse on the rubbish tip outside Seville. He saw that he’d semiconsciously written El Rocío next to the date. Perhaps there’d been something on the radio. It was always reported when the Virgen del Rocío had been successfully brought out of the church and paraded on Pentecost Monday. As he doodled out the shape of one of the painted wagons that was so typical of the pilgrimage, he realized how El Rocío had become almost as important an event to tourists as Semana Santa and the Feria. It had always drawn thousands from all over Andalucía, and they had now been joined by hundreds of tourists, looking for another Sevillano experience. His brother, Paco, had even started providing horses and accommodation on his bull-breeding farm for an agency specializing in more luxurious forms of the pilgrimage, with magnificent tents, champagne dinners and flamenco every night. There were luxury versions of everything these days. There was probably a caviar version of the walk to Santiago de Compostela. Decadence had even got into the pilgrimage trade. Below the drawing of the wagon he wrote: El Rocío. Tourists. Seville.

  More flipping through the random notes and jottings. When he did this he couldn’t help but think of artists and writers with their notebooks. He loved it, in the great retrospective of an artist, when the museum showed the notebook sketches, which eventually became the great, and much recognized, painting.

  A single line he’d written on the reverse side of a sheet of paper caught his eye: drain the resources of the West through increased security measures, threaten economic stability by attacking tourist resorts in southern Europe and financial centres in the north: London, Paris, Frankfurt, Milan. Who had said that? Was it Juan? Or perhaps it was something Yacoub had written?

  There was a map of Spain on the wall next to his desk and he crabbed across to it on his chair. Was Seville the obvious place to bring explosives together to launch attacks on the tourist infrastructure of Andalucía? Granada was more central. The Costa del Sol was more accessible from Málaga. Then he remembered the ‘hardware’. To create panic in a tourist resort needed nothing more than a pipe bomb packed with nuts, bolts and nails, so why go to the trouble of special hardware and procuring hexogen? Back to the desk. Another note: hexogen—high brisance = explosive power, shattering effect. Exactly. Hexogen had been chosen for its power. A small quantity did a lot of damage. And with that thought his mind slipped back to the important buildings of Andalucía: the regional parliament in Seville, the cathedrals in Seville and Cordoba, the Alhambra and Generalife in Granada. Pablo was right, it would be impossible to get a bomb anywhere near those places with the whole region on terrorist alert.

  His computer told him it was midnight. He hadn’t eaten. He wanted to be out and amongst people. Normally he would have relied on Laura to fill his Saturday night, but that was over now. He’d allowed himself that morbid thought and it led him back to Inés’s funeral. Her parents, lost as children, in the sea of people. He snapped out of it and was walking aimlessly from his study to the patio when he remembered Consuelo’s call. He hadn’t expected her to be so thoughtful. She’d been the only person to call him about Inés. Not even Manuela had done that. He dug out his mobile. Was this a good time? He retrieved her number, punched the call button, let it ring twice and cut it off. It was Saturday night. She’d be in the restaurant, or with her children. Two or three images of their sexual encounters shot through his mind. They’d been so intense and satisfying. He had a rush of physical and chemical desire. He punched the call button again and before it even started ringing he could hear himself try
ing to smother his desire with inept small talk. He cut the line again. This was all too much for one week: he’d split up with a girlfriend, his ex-wife had been murdered and now he wanted to rekindle a love affair which had burnt out after a matter of days nearly four years ago. Consuelo had called him about Inés as a friend would. It was nothing more than that.

  It was warm outside and there was life in the streets. Human beings were resilient creatures. He walked to El Arenal and found the Galician bar, which did wonderful octopus and served wine in white porcelain dishes. As he ate, he saw himself appear on the news, answering that last question put to him by the journalist at the press conference. They showed his answer in its entirety. The waiter recognized him and wouldn’t take money for the food and instead sloshed more wine into his white porcelain dish.

  Out in the street he was suddenly exhausted. The hours of adrenaline-filled work had caught up. He bought a pringá—a spicy, meat-filled roll—and ate it on the way home. He fell into bed and dreamed of Francisco Falcón, back in this house, knocking down a wall to reveal a secret chamber. It woke him in the intense dark of his bedroom, with his heart pounding in his ears. He knew that he would not sleep for at least two hours after that.

  Downstairs he flicked through the endless satellite channels, looking for a movie, anything that would quieten down his brain activity. He knew why he was awake: he’d heard himself on the news making that promise to the people of Seville. He still had Hammad and Saoudi on his mind. The hexogen they’d stored in the ruined house outside El Saucejo. The great deal of ‘reorganization’ that ‘the disruption’ of the bomb had caused to the GICM’s plan.

  The TV screen was filled with the face-off between two colossal armies in some recent swords-and-sandals epic. He’d seen it before and it had made no lasting impression on him apart from the designer’s vision of what the wooden horse would have looked like if the Greeks had built it, as he supposed they had, out of broken-up triremes. He had to wait for more than an hour for the horse to be given its roll-on part and, as he lay on the sofa, drifting along with the plot, he wondered at the power of myth. How an idea, even one with faulty wiring in the logic, could worm its way into the psyche of the Western world. Why did the Trojans drag the damn thing inside their city walls? Why, after all they’d been through, weren’t they in the least bit suspicious?

  Just as he’d reached the point of wondering whether there would ever be a generation of kids that didn’t know about the wooden horse, the beast hove into view on the screen. The sight of it triggered something in his brain and all the random thoughts, notes and jottings of the past five days came together, jolting him off the sofa and into his study.

  43

  Seville—Sunday, 11th June 2006, 08.00 hrs

  The Hotel Alfonso XIII was, in terms of size, probably Seville’s grandest place to stay. It had been built to impress for the 1929 Expo and had a mock mudejar interior, with geometric tiles and Arabic arches, around a central patio. It was dark in the reception and the strong scent of the lilies in the huge flower arrangement struck a funereal note.

  The manager arrived a few minutes after eight. Falcón had dragged him out of bed. He was shown into the office. The manager glanced at the police ID as if he saw them every day.

  ‘I thought it was a heart attack,’ he said. ‘We get plenty of those.’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ said Falcón.

  ‘I know you. You’re investigating the bomb,’ said the manager. ‘I saw you on the news. What can I do for you? We haven’t got any Moroccan clients here.’

  People saw the news, thought Falcón, but they only listened to what they wanted to hear.

  ‘I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. It could be a block-booking for a minimum of four rooms made by some foreign tourists, possibly French, maybe from Paris. The booking would have been made for El Rocío,’ said Falcón. ‘It could possibly be for more rooms, but the crucial thing is that they would have four-wheel-drive cars, driven down from Northern Europe rather than hired locally.’

  The manager spent time at his keyboard, shaking his head as he entered variations on Falcón’s data.

  ‘Around the time of El Rocío I’ve got large tour groups in coaches,’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing in the smaller block-bookings of between four and eight rooms.’

  There were roadworks where the metro was being built outside the Hotel Alfonso XIII and Falcón decided that this was not the sort of place they’d stay in. He’d had a look at the Porsche Cayenne on the internet, and he reckoned that the owner of a car like that would be looking for exclusivity. Somehow the Alfonso XIII’s grandeur made it passé. It was a conservative person’s hotel.

  He tried the Hotel Imperial. It was hidden away down a quiet street and overlooked the gardens of the Casa Pilatos. He had no luck there either. His epiphany of last night was beginning to take on the luridness of an early-morning idea that looked absurd in the cold light of day.

  The first indication that his creative instincts hadn’t gone completely awry was at a boutique hotel where the receptionist remembered a woman from London, calling in March, asking for four rooms before and after El Rocío with parking for four vehicles. The hotel had no parking and only two rooms for the dates she’d wanted. The woman had asked to hold those rooms for twenty-four hours to see if she could find another two elsewhere. The receptionist showed an email from a UK company, which had arrived after the call, from a woman called Mouna Chedadi making the booking on behalf of Amanda Turner. Falcón was certain that he’d found what he was looking for.

  He started working his way through a list of local hotels, asking for a booking made by Amanda Turner. Thirty-five minutes later, he was sitting in the manager’s office of the Hotel Las Casas de la Judería.

  ‘She was lucky,’ he said. ‘A group had just cancelled ten minutes before she called and she got her four deluxe suites together.’

  ‘What about their cars?’ asked Falcón, giving him Mouna Chedadi’s name to make the search through the hotel email database.

  ‘They had four cars,’ said the manager. ‘And I see here, she was asking if they could leave them in the hotel while they went on the pilgrimage to El Rocío.’

  ‘Did you let them?’

  ‘The garage isn’t big enough to hold four cars for people who aren’t current clients of the hotel at that time of year. They were told that there were plenty of car parks in Seville where they could leave them.’

  ‘Any idea what they did with their cars?’

  The manager called the receptionist and asked her to bring in the hotel registration forms for the four rooms. She confirmed that the eight people had arrived in taxis from wherever they’d parked their cars.

  ‘They stayed here on 31st May,’ said the manager, ‘and left the following day to go on the pilgrimage. They came back on 5th June and left again on 8th June.’

  ‘I remember they were going to Granada for a night,’ said the receptionist.

  ‘They came back here on 9th June and left…have they left yet?’

  ‘They paid their bill last night and left at seven thirty this morning, when the garage opened.’

  ‘So they did leave their cars here when they came back from Granada?’ said Falcón. ‘Do you know the models?’

  ‘Only the registration numbers.’

  ‘What do they give as their professions?’

  ‘Fund managers, all four of them.’

  ‘Did they leave any mobile phone numbers?’

  Falcón asked for photocopies of the forms. He went outside and phoned Gregorio, gave him the four UK registration numbers and asked him to find which models they belonged to. Back in the hotel he asked to speak to the bar staff who’d been on duty the night before. He knew what English people were like.

  The bar staff remembered the group. They tipped very well, like Americans rather than English people. The men drank beer and the women drank manzanilla, and then gin and tonics. None of the bar staff knew enough E
nglish to understand anything of their conversation. They remembered a man who’d had a short exchange with them and then left soon after and there was another couple, some other foreigners, who’d joined them for drinks. They’d all gone out for dinner afterwards.

  The other couple were identified as Dutch, and were called down to reception. Falcón worked on identifying the lone man who’d had a brief chat with the group before leaving. The bar staff said he looked Spanish and spoke with a Castellano, rather than Andaluz, accent. The receptionist remembered him and said that he’d paid his bill last night as well. She dug out his registration form. He’d given a Spanish name and ID card. He’d arrived on 6th June and had parked a car in the hotel garage as well. Falcón asked them to scan the ID and registration form, paste it into an email and send it to Gregorio.

  The Dutchman appeared looking hungover. They’d had a big night out with the English, who they’d met on the pilgrimage to El Rocío. They hadn’t got to bed until two in the morning and yet the English said they were leaving early.

  ‘Did they say where they were going?’

  ‘They just said they were going back to England.’

  ‘What about their route?’

  ‘They were staying in paradors, then going via Biarritz and the Loire to the Channel Tunnel. They all had to be back at work a week tomorrow.’

  Falcón paced the patio, willing his mobile to start vibrating. Gregorio called back just before 10 a.m.

  ‘First of all, that Spanish ID card was stolen last year and we haven’t got a visual match for his face in any of our files. His car was a Mercedes and was hired in Jerez de la Frontera on Monday, 5th June in the afternoon, and it was returned at 9.15 this morning. I’ve told them not to touch the car until they hear from us. Are you going to tell me what this is about?’