After a few more minutes they passed a sign announcing that they were entering an industrial complex. Except that – apart from one building – there were no factories or offices in sight.
‘Ran out of money,’ said Daniel simply. ‘Built all this trying to cash in on the boom years, but did it too late, just as the banks collapsed. Infrastructure all there, but no industry.’
He snorted and shook his head.
‘Idiots.’
They stepped over a weed-infested pavement to the one building that had been erected: a simple warehouse about the size of half a football pitch. Dídac glanced around, trying to see if there were any cameras: the place might be empty but perhaps even more reason to have a security system set up. But the usual places – the four corners of the building, or over the main door – showed no sign of any.
Daniel had gone around to the back. Dídac skipped along after him, keen to share his discovery.
‘We can get in here,’ said Daniel, standing by an open door. ‘There’s no security issues here, but there’s no point advertising our presence by going in through the front.’
The door must have been left unlocked, Dídac assumed. They stepped into a gloomy open space with a concrete floor. A small amount of light came in through grimy windows near the top of the building. In one corner two separating walls created a small office area, perhaps designed as some kind of reception. Nearby stood a stack of three giant tractor tyres.
‘Gives you an idea of what they were intending the place for,’ said Daniel.
Otherwise, there was nothing else in there: it was empty.
Daniel took his rucksack off his shoulders and crouched down on the floor to open it up.
‘Come over here.’
Dídac bent down to get a closer look.
‘Your eyes adjusted yet to the light?’
He nodded.
‘Right,’ said Daniel. ‘These are your tools. You’re going to learn how to make a detonator using a mobile phone.’
One by one he reached into the rucksack and pulled out a battery-powered soldering iron, a Stanley knife, some wire, a relay, a stick of solvent, a 9-volt battery, a small screwdriver, a cheap mobile phone, and some thin metal tubes, about the size of hand-rolled cigarettes.
‘Blasting caps,’ Daniel explained.
Dídac bent down lower, shifting his weight until he was sitting on his heels.
‘You need to be focused for this,’ said Daniel. ‘No bullshit in your head. I need you concentrated. This is the real thing. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because if you fuck up with this stuff you’ll lose a finger. Or worse. OK?’
‘OK.’
Daniel paused, examining him. Then he sniffed and nodded.
‘We’re making an improvised explosive device – what ordinary people call a home-made bomb. But if we’re going to do this properly we use the correct terminology. Got it?’
‘Improvised explosive device,’ repeated Dídac.
Daniel picked up the phone.
‘To set the device off, we need a remote detonator. Anything that can send a signal to initiate an electric charge can be used – a car alarm, a garage door opener, even a remote control for a toy car, for example. But –’ he waved the phone close to Dídac’s face – ‘mobile phones are usually the best because they have a longer range.’
He picked up the screwdriver and started taking the phone apart.
‘What we have to do is find the vibration motor,’ he said.
After placing the plastic casings carefully on the floor, he held the innards up and pointed at a small metal disc at the bottom corner.
‘When the phone rings, that spins,’ he said, ‘making the phone vibrate.’
He gently pulled it out.
‘We don’t need it. What we want is access to the contacts underneath.’
Using the soldering iron, he carefully connected two short wires to the phone where the vibration motor had been, attaching the other ends to the small relay. Then he used the knife to cut a hole in the casing for the wires to come out, and put the phone back together. He glued the relay to the back of the phone. Two other wires came out and led to a clip which he snapped on to the battery, which was also then stuck to the phone. A third pair of wires led from the battery.
The process took only a few minutes, during which time Dídac watched closely, absorbing every detail.
Daniel laid the mechanism on the floor.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘when someone calls this number, the current for the vibration motor will pass to the relay, which then passes to the battery, sending a stronger current down these wires.’
With his finger, he lifted the two spare wires leading from the 9-volt battery.
‘And these,’ he said, picking up a metal tube, ‘attach to here.’
‘The blasting cap,’ said Dídac.
‘Good.’
He left it all on the floor and reached over to the rucksack, pulling out a plastic bag. Inside, wrapped in paper, was a small pellet of what looked like an off-white plasticine.
‘Composition C-4,’ said Daniel. ‘Plastic explosive.’
He tossed it to Dídac. His son caught it with a terrified expression on his face.
‘It’s fine,’ Daniel said with a grin. ‘You could jump up and down on this stuff and it would never explode. You can even set it alight and nothing would happen. It’s a very stable compound.’
Dídac pressed it gently with his thumb: it was pasty and greasy.
‘You don’t need very much of it – it’s a high explosive. A couple of hundred grammes would be enough to destroy that bus we were riding on earlier. And the only thing that will set it off is one of these.’
He held the shiny blasting cap between his fingers.
‘And what sets the blasting cap off,’ said Dídac, ‘is the mobile phone.’
Daniel threw him a look, and something moved inside Dídac: had he managed to impress his father?
Daniel pushed the phone detonator to one side, then reached into his rucksack and pulled out another phone, a relay and more wire.
‘Now you do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll watch.’
It was trickier than it looked – not least soldering the small wires into the right places. And it took him much longer. But Daniel said nothing. Dídac knew that if he made a mistake he would find out by the thing not exploding: he was expected to work it out for himself.
Finally, however, after almost gluing his fingers rather than the relay to the back of the phone, he finished, and held his first detonator over for inspection. Daniel simply took it and stuck the end of the blasting cap into the tiny ball of C-4. Then he stood up and walked to the far end of the warehouse.
‘You can hide behind that stack of tyres,’ he said. ‘But your eardrums would probably never be the same again.’
He stepped towards the door. Dídac hesitated.
‘A confined space greatly accentuates the explosive power,’ Daniel said, stretching out for the handle. ‘Remember that – it’s important. The number of deaths from a blast in a closed area – like the bus – is around fifty per cent of people. In fact it’s forty-nine per cent. But that figure drops to just eight per cent if the explosion happens in an open space. If you want to kill more people in an open-space environment you need to include shrapnel in the device – bolts, nails, nuts. The blast in itself is often not enough.’
Dídac was motionless, as though the blood had stopped pumping to his legs.
Daniel opened the door, holding his own phone in his hand.
‘In a few seconds I’m going to be dialling that number,’ he said, nodding back towards the bomb. ‘So I suggest you get up now.’
Dídac jumped to his feet.
‘And bring all that with you,’ said Daniel, indicating the materials on the floor near the rucksack.
Daniel was already walking away from the warehouse when Dídac made it to the door. He ran after his father, who kept his
back turned, his head bent down looking at the phone in his hand.
‘Watch out for flying glass,’ he said.
And he pressed the green call button on the screen.
THIRTY-FIVE
THEY SAT IN their office in silence. Torres swivelled on his chair, looking at nothing in particular on his desk, while Cámara stared into space.
A drink? A smoke? The usual crutches that they reached out for had lost their appeal.
‘We should get a dartboard in here,’ said Torres, mumbling into his beard. ‘Something to distract us.’
‘We’d only end up throwing the darts at each other,’ said Cámara.
‘I’ve never understood that,’ said Torres. ‘You know how in films there’s always a dartboard hanging on the back of a door. So what happens when someone opens it from the other side just as you’re launching your dart? Could take someone’s eye out. I mean, what a fucking stupid place to hang a dartboard. Never understood that.’
Cámara grunted.
‘Can’t say I’ve ever thought about it. The prime location for a dartboard has, surprisingly, occupied quite a small amount of my concentration over the years. But now I realise this is an important question that deserves serious consideration. Thank you for bringing my attention to it.’
‘Fuck off.’
They could feel Terreros’s presence in the cells below them, imagining him sitting quietly and calmly on the edge of his bed. Sharp, focused, unperturbed, and enjoying the attention of the guards’ frequent visits to escort him to the toilet facilities. Half of their usual arsenal – the long, intense hours of interrogation, the social isolation in the prison, the psychological effect that a simple combination of depriving and pressurising could bring – were denied to them. The colonel was using his medical condition to his full advantage, throwing them off their rhythm.
‘It’s my fault,’ said Cámara. ‘I should have foreseen this.’
‘How?’ asked Torres.
‘What?’
‘How were you supposed to have foreseen this happening? What, you got some crystal fucking ball hidden away somewhere?’
‘Perhaps Laura’s right,’ said Cámara. ‘We moved too soon.’
It had been delicately put, but the remark by the head of the murder squad – who had been given the Fermín murder case originally – had found its target. Many of the difficulties with Terreros, she said, might be overcome if they had more to throw at him. Meaning, of course, that she believed Cámara ought to have gathered more evidence before hauling him in: he had, in her view, swooped down to Ceuta far too soon.
And, Cámara thought, she was probably right. But he had assumed that he had enough, that once Terreros saw what they had on him he would begin to open up, to crack. And he had had that instinctive certainty when they flew down, that sensation he recognised more and more: his intuition, his hunch, flaring back into life suddenly after a prolonged silence. Going to Ceuta had felt a hundred per cent right. And experience had taught him to follow these feelings: the outcomes might not always be predictable, but in the end it always proved to be the correct thing to do.
Now, though, he wondered. Terreros was making fools of them. Not that being made a fool of overly concerned him. He was not impervious to ridicule, and image had to be maintained to a certain degree – as much as anything being perceived as a good, efficient detective helped get things done. But the fact that this investigation had been given to them, the first crowning case of the floundering Special Crimes Unit, made him smart now. After weeks of stagnating, they had made sudden and rapid progress, and it had seemed as though momentum were on their side. But now they had stalled again. Terreros was giving them nothing: all they had, in the end, was his handwritten note, a mere threat: nothing to link him materially to the murder of Fermín.
Commissioner Pardo, Judge Andreu Peris – he could almost feel those above them starting to get nervous.
‘I don’t suppose …’ Torres began, but the words petered out.
That’s right, thought Cámara. I don’t suppose the source that got us so far in the first place might provide us with something more? Get us out of this hole? Torres could wonder, and almost formulate the question himself, but pulled back at the last minute.
Cámara gave it as long as he could, not wanting to appear to be responding to Torres’s partly voiced suggestion. At least not too quickly. He stared at his computer screen for a few minutes, shuffled his mouse around for a bit, made a phone call about some administrative matter, and then finally got up, stretching as he did so.
‘Might go for a stroll,’ he said. ‘Get some air.’
Torres grunted, not looking up.
Cámara had his phone between his fingers before he even closed the office door, but he waited until he was out of the building and walking along the Calle Hospital towards the city centre before he finally looked at it. He had memorised Carlos’s number, not wanting to record it on the phone itself, pretending to himself that he would never dial it again. But now the digits fell quickly in order under his fingertip. He stared for a moment at the number, wondering. Something for nothing? Would Carlos give him anything unless he could supply some more information on his anarchist friends? The truth was that he had not seen any of them since Dídac and Daniel had left for Barcelona: the Fermín case, the situation with Alicia … there was too much else going on. Carlos might demand something from him, however. He would just have to make something up.
He pressed the green call button and held the phone to his ear. After a click, the line beeped as the connection was made and Carlos’s phone began to ring. Three, four, five times. But there was no answer.
Cámara cursed; he was an idiot to think that Carlos would respond. He, Cámara, was the one being played in this relationship – he worked for Carlos, not the other way around.
He closed his eyes and was about to hit the kill button, when a robotic female voice came on the line inviting him to leave a message. Cámara pulled the phone quickly up to his face again and heard the signal for him to start speaking.
‘This is Cámara,’ he said. Then he paused.
‘I’ve got something for you. New information.’
He coughed.
‘Call me as soon as you can.’
He felt uncomfortable, anxious. There seemed to be no point going back to the Jefatura just to sit in the office in frustration with Torres. But neither could he think of anything else to do. Normally he was a master of distracting himself when faced with a stalemate, waiting for things to happen rather than trying to force them along. There were times to move, and there were times to stop. He likened it sometimes to a dance – sometimes he led and at other times he let events take over.
Now it felt as though there were nothing more that he could do. But what to be getting on with in the meantime? It was as if he had lost some inner compass.
Behind him was the Jefatura, in front lay the city centre, while just a few blocks further on to the left was his flat, a home that was no longer his. He felt trapped and, faced with his own silence, he simply walked over to one of the outside tables of a nearby bar and slumped into a chair shaded by a large red umbrella.
It was hot; he felt sweat forming on the back of his head and start to trickle towards his shoulders. The place was virtually empty and in an instant the waiter was at his side.
Cámara paused. A beer? Brandy? For some reason his usual choices had no appeal. Sensing the waiter’s patience running out, he ordered a bottle of fizzy water, something he never drank. But at least, he tried to convince himself, it might help cool him down. Why was he sitting outside in the first place? Why not go inside and enjoy the soothing embrace of the air conditioning?
With his left hand he placed his phone on the table, staring at it. That was why. He was waiting for the damned thing to ring, or bleep, or make some signal or other. At least acknowledgement by Carlos that he had received the message. He had baited the line with a promise of more information. How could Ca
rlos resist?
And yet something within him knew that Carlos would not be calling. Not today, and perhaps not tomorrow either. In fact the horizon looked empty of any more contact at all with Carlos.
Why?
Because he had only ever been a one-shot. Carlos had needed him for one task only. After that, Cámara was a mere spent casing for him, of no more use, to be discarded.
And what had Carlos needed him for?
To arrest Terreros.
Terreros was in custody. That was enough for Carlos.
He let the thought settle for a moment. Yes, that was right. Carlos had given him enough to get to Terreros and to bring him in. But would give him no more.
But why? Why bring him only so far? It made no sense.
Oyen las voces y no las razones. They hear the voices but not their reasoning. The proverb popping into his head was correct. But what was he not hearing? He was seeing only a small part of the puzzle. What was missing?
He glanced at the phone again. It would never ring. Not from Carlos. He knew that now, but he left it there all the same, willing it to do something.
The sound of laughter from behind distracted him for a second. He turned his head and caught sight of a small group of people walking up the street: three women. They looked relaxed, happy, enjoying themselves. The women on either side were smiling, listening to the middle one as she talked, spinning out some amusing anecdote. Two of the women were unknown to him, but the third, walking on the left side, was Alicia. His Alicia.
There was a brightness in her eyes, something he had not seen for a long time. And a grin across her face. She was out, having fun, cocooned.
He twitched, ready to stand up and call her name. But instead he relented and fell back into his chair. Better that she did not see him; he wanted to watch, to observe her.
The group walked closer, sauntering slowly along the pedestrianised street. When they came abreast of him, Alicia glanced in the opposite direction from Cámara, her attention momentarily focused on something on the other side.
A Body in Barcelona: Max Cámara 5 Page 19