The Ignoranceof Blood jf-4

by Robert Wilson

  'When did you last see the sun shine?' he asked, in perfect English, his breath fogging the glass.

  'Sorry, mate,' said the driver, 'don't speak Spanish. Go to Mallorca every year for my holidays, but still don't speak a word.'

  Falcon checked him for irony but could tell, even from the back of the man's head and his quick glance at the rear-view, that he was totally good-natured.

  'It's not our strong point either,' said Falcon. 'Languages.'

  The driver whipped round in his seat as if to check he still had the same passenger.

  'Oh, right,' he said. 'Yeah, no. You're pretty good. Where d'you learn to speak English like that?'

  'English lessons,' said Falcon.

  'Well, that's cheating, innit?' said the driver, and they both laughed, although Falcon wasn't quite sure why.

  The traffic seized up as they came into the city. The driver turned off the Cromwell Road; twenty minutes later they went past the famous revolving sign of New Scotland Yard.

  Falcon introduced himself at reception, handed over his ID and police card. He went through security and was met at the lifts by a uniformed officer. They went up to the fifth floor. Douglas Hamilton met him off the lift, took him into a meeting room where there was another man in his late thirties.

  'This is Rodney from MI5,' said Hamilton. 'Take a seat. Flight OK?'

  'Not your sort of temperature, eh, Javier?' said Rodney, releasing Falcon's ice-cold hand.

  Finally, the weather, thought Falcon.

  'Pablo forgot to tell me it was already winter here,' he said.

  'This is our bloody summer,' said Hamilton.

  'You ever been to the Irish bar in Seville, down by the cathedral?' asked Rodney.

  'Only if someone was murdered there,' said Falcon.

  They laughed. The room relaxed. They were going to understand each other.

  'You run Yacoub Diouri,' said Rodney, 'but you're a police officer.'

  'Yacoub is a friend of mine. He said he would supply information to the CNI only on condition that I was his main contact.'

  'How long have you known him?'

  'Four years,' said Falcon. 'We first met in September 2002.'

  'And when was the last time you saw him before yesterday?'

  'We spent some time on holiday together in August.'

  'And his son, Abdullah, was with you?'

  'It was a family holiday.'

  'And how did Abdullah appear to you then?'

  'As I would have expected the son of a wealthy member of the Moroccan elite,' said Falcon.

  'Spoilt brat?' asked Hamilton.

  'Not exactly. He didn't behave any differently to a Spanish boy of his age. He was very attached to his computer, bored by the beach, but he's a good kid.'

  'Was he devout?'

  'No more than the rest of the family, who take their religion very seriously. As far as I know, he wasn't leaving dinner early to go and study the Qur'an, but then Yacoub said his browser was full of "Islamic" sites, so maybe that's what he was doing.'

  'Did he drink?' asked Rodney. 'Alcohol?'

  'Yes,' said Falcon, feeling the strange weight of this question. 'Yacoub, Abdullah and I would share a bottle of wine at dinner.'

  'Just one bottle between three?' said Rodney, whose top button was undone and the knot of his tie off centre.

  There was a grunt of laughter from Hamilton.

  'If I hadn't been there they wouldn't have drunk alcohol,' said Falcon. 'It was just to make me comfortable as their guest.'

  'Has Abdullah ever joined Yacoub on any of his business trips to the UK?' asked Hamilton.

  'I think so. I seem to remember Yacoub talking about taking Abdullah to the Tate Modern to see the Edward Hopper exhibition. That was before I recruited Yacoub.'

  'Did you know that Abdullah was in London now?'

  'No. In fact yesterday Yacoub told me he was in a training camp for GICM mujahideen back in Morocco. He also told me that he himself was returning to Rabat…'

  'Pablo briefed us,' said Rodney, nodding.

  'Have you found him yet?' asked Falcon, and Rodney glared. 'Pablo said you'd lost Yacoub, or rather Yacoub had lost your…'

  'We picked him up again about an hour ago,' said Rodney. 'It was just him. Abdullah stayed in the hotel. It's not the first time he's lost one of our tails, you know that.'

  'Do you follow him every time he comes to London?'

  'We do now,' said Hamilton. 'Since the first time he lost a tail, back in July.'

  'July?' said Falcon, amazed. 'That was only a month after I recruited him.'

  'That's the question,' said Rodney, shifting in his seat, pulling his tie back to centre. 'How was an amateur able to take us to the cleaners so easily?'

  'Take you to the cleaners?' said Falcon, puzzled.

  'Fool us,' said Hamilton, clarifying.

  'How could a fucking jeans manufacturer from Rabat take on MI5 and make us look stupid?' said Rodney.

  'And the answer is…?' said Hamilton, not wanting Rodney's testiness to get a foothold.

  'He's been very well trained,' said Rodney. 'And we don't believe he learnt that in a month.'

  'If he did, it was auto-didactic,' said Falcon.

  'You what?' said Rodney.

  'Self-taught,' said Hamilton.

  'Sorry, my English. Sometimes only the Spanish word comes to me,' said Falcon. 'Didn't you… or was it MI6, try to recruit Yacoub before me? And I heard the Americans had a go, too.'

  'So?' asked Rodney.

  'So you vetted him, didn't you?' asked Falcon.

  'MI6 said there was nothing unusual,' said Rodney. 'Apart from him being a shirt-lifter. But no fucking PhD from spy school, if that's what you mean.'

  'Shirt-lifter?' said Falcon.

  'It's nothing,' said Hamilton.

  'Maricon,' said Rodney, fixing him with a look.

  'So what's going on?' asked Falcon, giving Rodney's aggression a quick sideways glance.

  'We were hoping you'd be able to tell us,' said Hamilton, pushing over a piece of paper. 'These are the five separate occasions where we've lost him.'

  Falcon looked down the list of dates, times and places. Holland Park, Hampstead Heath, Battersea Park, Clapham Common and Russell Square. Twice in July, once in August and twice in September. Never less than three hours, except this last time.

  'So you lost him in these places, but where did he reappear?'

  'We pick him up when he's on his way back to the hotel,' said Hamilton.

  'Brown's?'

  'Always.'

  'And after your briefing to Pablo on what had happened between you and Yacoub in Madrid yesterday, we wouldn't mind knowing what he's been up to,' said Rodney. 'You're his controller and he's lying to you. He's not working with us, but he's supposed to be on our side. If he's operating in his own interests, that's one thing. If he's been turned, then, obviously, that's another.'

  'We've already got thirty-two separate possible terror groups under some sort of surveillance here in the UK,' said Hamilton. 'Seventeen of them are in London. That's nearly two thousand people we're watching nationwide. Obviously we've had to step things up since 7/7 last year, which means we're stretched. We're having to recruit at the same pace as the terrorists.'

  'So we can do without your shit on our doorstep,' said Rodney. 'To put it politely.'

  'Are any of these groups you're watching connected to any of the GICM cells in the rest of Europe, or Morocco?' asked Falcon.

  'Let's put it this way,' said Rodney, 'we haven't been able to match any known GICM players with any of the UK groups. But that's not to say it hasn't happened. The French are telling us there's already a live GICM cell here.'

  'And how do they know that?' asked Falcon.

  'They picked up a Moroccan kid on a drugs bust in Ales, in southern France, who gave up some stuff on a group in Marseille in exchange for no jail. This Marseille cell were providing safe houses and documentation. The DSG went in there and beat out some
good intelligence. The Moroccan kid was found dead in the river Gard a week later, with his feet beaten to a pulp and his throat slit. So the French reckoned they'd hit gold,' said Rodney, who recalled something else. 'And the Germans told us they saw Yacoub meeting a devout Turkish businessman at a trade fair in Berlin at the beginning of this month.'

  'What sort of businessman?' asked Falcon. 'There's plenty of cotton in Turkey, and Yacoub's a clothing manufacturer.'

  'That's why we weren't too concerned,' said Rodney. 'The Turk is a cotton manufacturer from Denizli. It's just that when we couple that with other information we find it's begging more questions.'

  'What "other information"?'

  'Where does the Turk's money go?' asked Rodney.

  'Wealthy, devout Muslims regard it as part of their duty to the community…'

  Rodney gave him the yapping hand.

  'You know how it is in Turkey, with this battle between the secular and the religious,' said Rodney. 'We could understand it if the Turk's money was being put into a local school, but it's finding its way to Istanbul and political coffers there. And they're not secular coffers.'

  'All right,' said Falcon, holding up his hands. 'So what you're looking for from me is some clarification of Yacoub's behaviour over the last few months.'

  'Don't get us wrong,' said Hamilton, running his tie between his fingers. 'We're very grateful to Yacoub. His observations back in June on the four-wheel-drive plot were invaluable. MI6 were nowhere on that mission. But the point was that then he was on your territory, now he's on ours, and we're not taking any chances.'

  'We don't think it was a coincidence that he turned down MI6 and the Yanks,' said Rodney, and Douglas Hamilton gave him a hard stare.

  'And what do you mean by that?' asked Falcon.

  'Time for a smoke,' said Rodney, who got up and left. The sports shop, Decimas, on the first floor of the Nervion Plaza shopping centre, was full of kids and parents. Everybody with the same idea. The assistants were worked off their feet. Dario knew what he wanted. Black Pumas. Consuelo cornered a salesgirl and got her working on the project. Her mobile rang. Ricardo, her eldest boy, was asking, or rather telling her, that he was going down to Matalascanas on the coast for the afternoon. She told him to be back for the family dinner with Javier. She'd reached the shop entrance by the time she hung up. Two men looked in past her shoulders, then directly at her, one after the other. They raised their eyebrows, shrugged and walked off towards the escalators.

  Back to Dario. He had the boots on. They were too small. Too small already? His feet growing by the month. The girl went back to the store room, got waylaid by a couple who would not take the brush-off. Consuelo's mobile rang again. The estate agent from Madrid. Working hard on a Saturday, trying to impress her. The signal was weak in the shop, started to break up. The salesgirl came back with the next size up. Immediately got snagged by somebody else. Consuelo got the boots on to Dario's feet. He trotted around the shop. Smiled. They were perfect. The girl came back, boxed them up and took them to the cash desk. Three people waiting to pay. The mobile went off again. She left Dario at the desk, walked out of the shop, went to the window overlooking the big open-air plaza in the middle of the shopping centre, the football stadium with Sevilla FC's coat of arms loomed to the left. She kept an eye on the progress of the queue from the main concourse. Two minutes. Cut off again. Went back into the shop. Tapped the desk with her credit card while Dario turned the box round in his hands. Couldn't wait to get back home, try them on, put a few past Javi this evening… if he got back before dark.

  Consuelo's turn to pay. Rammed the receipt in her bag. Out of the shop. Grabbed Dario's hand, down the escalator. Mobile went off again. There'd be no signal in the garage, so she went outside into the plaza in front of the football stadium. The signal was good. She talked real estate and walked up the ramp towards the ticket office of the stadium. Dario got bored. Wandered off. Consuelo paced around aimlessly, making her points, stamping her heel. A group of kids streamed past her. Dario saw the Sevilla Futbol Club shop under the stadium and went in. She lit a cigarette, sucked in the smoke, turned to find Dario. Turned again. Did a 360. No Dario. Saw the Sevilla FC shop. Knew he'd have been unable to resist. She walked over to it. Finished the call, folded away her mobile. Had a good look around. A lot of space and too many people. She went into the shop. Dario wasn't there. Despite some reassurances from Douglas Hamilton, Falcon was still feeling the weight of Rodney's accusation when the man came back into the room with three mugs of coffee.

  'I put sugar in yours. I hope that was OK,' said Rodney.

  'It sounds to me,' said Falcon, still smarting, 'that you think that we, or rather the CNI, have been set up. You reckon I'm just a channel for information that the GICM wants you to know… that, in fact, we're being disinformed by our own agent. Is that right?'

  'We have to remain open to all possibilities,' said Rodney, staring him out over the rim of his steaming mug. 'Pablo told us you'd lost confidence in Yacoub.'

  'I don't know whether I'd go that far,' said Falcon, finding himself irrationally defending his friend, because he was thinking that he probably would go that far and it made him sick to his stomach.

  'All we can do is act on our uncertainties,' said Rodney. 'You meet him and we'll judge for ourselves.'

  'You want to listen in?'

  Rodney opened his hands as if nothing could be more obvious.

  'I can't have you listening in,' said Falcon.

  'You're on our territory,' said Rodney firmly.

  'When I go in there I'll be talking to him as his friend, not his spymaster.'

  'So how were you talking to him when you were in Madrid yesterday?'

  'That was business,' said Falcon. 'He was under too much pressure to be able to talk to me openly.'

  'And that was why he lied to you,' said Rodney. 'Why should it be any different if you go in there as Javier, his close personal friend?'

  'In his culture, in business, a certain amount of flexibility with the truth is permissible. Combine that with the paranoia induced by the new uncertainty of his situation, after what he'd just found out about his son, and his evasiveness becomes understandable,' said Falcon. 'If I establish a different level of intimacy with him from the start and he still lies to me, then I know we are lost. And I can't do that if I'm wired up to you.'

  'You won't even notice it,' said Rodney.

  Falcon stared him out.

  The two Englishmen looked at each other in a complex communication that left Falcon thinking that they would be doing exactly what they wanted, regardless.

  Rodney nodded as if to give way. Falcon didn't like his look; the man had a sort of unearned confidence about him that was not appealing. The ugliness of the Nervion Plaza shopping centre became more apparent the harder Consuelo looked for her son in its grey brutality. She thought it must have been designed by an East German before the Wall came down. She stood in the empty space at its heart, which was frequented by sprinting children and dazed adults. Above it there was a jazzy, modern awning which cast geometric patterned shade on the area, making it even more difficult to make out the children's faces. She could only assume that he had gone into the shop, got bored and been drawn to the animation here. There were a lot of ways in and out: the shopping mall, where they'd just been to buy his boots, the street, the stadium and the access to the cinema complex.

  Consuelo walked around this area four or five times, darting down various alleyways to check for Dario, but always coming back to the centre in the hope of finding her blond boy clasping his cardboard box of football boots. As she did this, she called his brothers Ricardo and Matias, and told them they had to come to the Nervion Plaza immediately to help look for him. There was some protest, especially from Ricardo, who was already on his way to the coast.

  Twenty minutes later they were all in Nervion Plaza. Consuelo's sister had brought Matias, and the family Ricardo had been with joined in the search. The father went straight
to the first security guard he could find and got them to involve the local police. Announcements were made. Car parks were searched. Toilets investigated. Every shop was visited. The kids' films showing at the cinemas were all halted for ten minutes while they checked the audiences. The search was extended out into the streets and around the stadium. Local radio was contacted.

  Only after everybody's reassurances had stopped working and Consuelo had retraced her steps a hundred times and she'd ransacked her mind for the final image of the last moment that she could picture Dario, standing in that area in the godforsaken heart of the Nervion Plaza with the box of football boots in his arms, did her paralysed brain think to call Javier. His mobile was switched off.

  Ramirez was still in front of the computer screen when Consuelo's call came through.

  'Javier's not here…' he started.

  'Where is he?' she asked. 'His mobiles are switched off, both personal and police.'

  'He's not in Seville today.'

  'But where is he, Jose Luis? I need to speak to him. It's urgent.'

  'We can't say any more than that, Consuelo.'

  'Can you get a message to him?'

  'Not even that at the moment.'

  'I can't believe this,' she said. 'What's he doing that's so… so fucking important?'

  'I can't say.'

  'Can you get a message to him as soon as he's back in touch?'

  'Of course.'

  'Tell him that my youngest son, Dario, has… has…'

  'Has what, Consuelo?'

  Consuelo fought against the word in her throat, the word that she had not permitted to enter her consciousness, the word that had lurked low in some hideous dark corner of her stomach, where all mothers cordon off their worst fears, but which was now sickeningly illuminated.