‘All right. You've made your point,’ said Pablo. ‘You'll have to leave it to the kidnappers. They will make their demands.’
‘There's a further complication because of the defections from Revnik's group to Donstov's,’ said Falcón. ‘There are probably going to be members of each group who were responsible in some way for elements of the Seville bombing and wanted to keep Marisa quiet.’
‘Leonid Revnik must be holding her sister. Margarita was having sex with the I4IT Europe boss, Juan Valverde, on Vasili Lukyanov's disk.’
‘Right, so there would have been contact between Marisa and Leonid Revnik. But what about any defections to Yuri Donstov's group before Vasili Lukyanov?’ said Falcón. ‘We have no idea whether Lukyanov was the first. Given Marisa's terror and unwillingness to talk, it wouldn't surprise me if she had been taking heat from both sides.’
‘Find Margarita?’ said Pablo, shrugging.
Falcón checked him, detected a flagging interest in his problems.
‘All right, you've helped me, Pablo,’ said Falcón. ‘You've given me enough to go on. So what do you really want to see me about?’
‘The notes of your meeting with MI5 and SO15 were sent to me yesterday,’ said Pablo. ‘I'd already heard about the kidnapping, so I held off until today.’
‘Very thoughtful of you,’ said Falcón.
‘I realize that you're pledging your support to Yacoub, which is what I asked you to do. It's just that you're doing it blindly,’ said Pablo. ‘All you know is what he's told you: that the GICM have recruited his son.’
‘Why would he lie about that?’
‘You also know that Yacoub would never do anything that might result in a family member being harmed or arrested,’ said Pablo. ‘This may mean he'll want to put you off the scent. What we can do is prevent that, through corroboration of information and a broader view of the intelligence picture. But you have to get us started. You have to tell us what you know about Yacoub's actions or intentions.’
‘But that would endanger Yacoub.’
‘Just out of interest,’ said Pablo, ‘what did Yacoub tell you about the one piece of information he was prepared to give away: the identity of Mustafa Barakat?’
‘No more than I told the British,’ said Falcón. ‘He's a family friend. He has a carpet business and tourist shops in Fès.’
‘And this is what Yacoub told you to say?’
‘It's the information he gave me.’
‘You said he'd lived in Fès all his life.’
‘A lot has happened, Pablo. I don't remember everything perfectly.’
‘You probably don't know this, but before I came back to the CNI in Madrid I ran agents in the Maghreb for more than ten years. I'm part of an enormous North African intelligence community,’ said Pablo. ‘If you give me a name like Mustafa Barakat I have access to all my friends' archives as well as my own. I put that name straight across to my Moroccan colleagues, who don't just look at their files but, because they understand the complex nature of families in their country, they get down on the ground as well. They feed their informers into the termites' nest of the medina. That's a lot of manpower I can draw on.’
‘And what did they find?’
‘That there are very close ties between the Barakat and Diouri families. Since 1940 there have been thirty-six marriages between the families, which have produced one hundred and seventeen children. Sixty-four with the name Diouri and fifty-two with the name Barakat. Eight of those Barakats are called Mustafa. Two of them are interesting because they were both born in the late 1950s. The other six are either too old or too young to be the Barakat staying at Yacoub's house.
‘Of those two remaining Mustafas, one went into the family carpet business during the seventies and never left Morocco, but the other had a much more interesting life. In 1979 he went to a madrassa, a religious school, in Jeddah for three years. From there he went to Pakistan, where nothing more was heard about him until he resurfaced in Morocco in 1991. The word on the street is that he spent quite a few of those years in Afghanistan. Now this is where there's a bit of confusion, because in 1992 Mustafa Barakat died in a car accident on a steep road up in the Rif mountains on his way back from Chefchaouen, where the family had opened a small hotel and tourist shop. It was sad because he'd only just settled back in his own country and…’
‘Which Mustafa Barakat are we talking about?’ asked Falcón.
‘That's where it gets confusing. The interesting thing is, after the accident on the road from Chefchaouen, the other Mustafa Barakat still ran the family carpet business, tourist shops and hotels but, having never left the country before, he suddenly started an import/export business. He would fly to Pakistan to buy carpets. Since the Afghan war, all carpets in that area of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, even the eastern part of Iran, come to Pakistan and are exported as Pakistani carpets. These carpets, which he brought back from Pakistan, were then re-exported to countries like France, Germany, Holland and the UK.’
‘You think there was a switch?’
‘There are no post mortems performed out there in the Rif.’
‘Presumably the Mustafa Barakat who'd gone to the madrassa in Jeddah had also made the pilgrimage to Mecca and was al-Hadji.’
‘Mustafa Barakat, who'd only just started travelling in 1993, did the Haj that same year,’ said Pablo. ‘Detail is something we're good at in the intelligence service. So before you ask: no dental records.’
‘Anything else that might help us identify which Mustafa Barakat we're dealing with?’
‘It would be nice if the mujahideen kept army records and let us have a look at them. It would be better to have some DNA.’
A wave of paranoia swept through Falcón. He stared into Pablo's face, like a poker player looking for tells. Is this true? Is this just a construct to get me back on side? Why would Yacoub have given such a thing away, exposing a family member to such scrutiny?
‘Don't cut yourself off from that level of intelligence,’ said Pablo, ‘without at least giving it a second thought.’
In the end Consuelo had taken the sleeping pills left by the doctor. She'd watched the clock work its way round to 6 a.m. with her mind unable to hold steady on any logical path. She was caught in triangular thinking, flitting between Darío, herself and Javier, but unable to concentrate on any one of them.
Even with her sister and her two other sons in the house she felt a terrible loneliness. In between the bouts of rage that periodically washed over her she reluctantly identified a need for the one person she'd banished from her sight for ever. Almost as soon as this came to her she was consumed by hatred for him. Then despair would crash in and she would sob at the thought of her little boy lost in the dark, terrified and alone. It was exhausting, emotionally draining, but the mind would not shut down and let her drift into sleep. So she took the pills. Three instead of two. She woke up at two in the afternoon with her head and mouth full of cotton wool, feeling as if she'd been embalmed.
The sleep had weakened her and she couldn't stand in the shower. She sat and let the water fall on her pitiful shoulders. She sobbed and raged all over again.
She drank water and her strength slowly returned. She dressed, went downstairs. Everybody looked at her. She read their faces. Victims were always the stars of their own dramas and the supporting cast had nothing to offer.
This was Sunday. Sitting with her arms folded, waiting for the phone to ring.
14
Las Tres Mil Viviendas, Seville – Monday, 18th September 2006, 12.15 hrs
His name was Roque Barba but he was known to everybody in the run-down, dead-end barrio of Las Tres Mil Viviendas as El Pulmón, because he only had one lung. He'd lost the other one two months after his seventeenth birthday at a corrida in a small village in the east of Andalucía when he was still a novillero. He'd liked the look of his second bull of the afternoon and told the picador not to dig too deep with the lance because he wanted to show the crowd what
he could do. It was right at the beginning of the faena and the bull still had his head up. El Pulmón had two problems: he wasn't quite tall enough and the bull had a little hook from right to left, which he hadn't seen. This meant that during the first pass the bull's horn, instead of flashing past his chest, caught him under the armpit, and the next thing he knew he was up in the air. There was no pain. No sound. Life slowed down. The crowd and the arena came to him in sickly waves as the bull's immensely powerful neck reared up and then shook him from side to side. Then he hit the deck, felt the sand grind into his face and heard his collar bone crack in his ear.
The bull's horn broke two ribs and cracked another two. It tore the lung apart and drove splinters of bone close to the heart. The surgeons removed the ragged lung that night. That was the end of his career as a torero. Not because he only had one lung; the other expanded to compensate. But he could no longer raise his left arm above shoulder height.
Now he sat on the fourth floor of one of the many brutalized tower blocks in Las Tres Mil Viviendas. There was a gun on the table, which he had just finished cleaning. He'd bought it last week. Until then he'd only ever used a blade. He still had the knife, which he carried in a spring-loaded mechanism attached to the underside of an ornately tooled leather wrist strap on his right forearm.
He'd bought the gun for two reasons. The high-quality product he'd started selling a few months ago had brought him a lot more clients, which meant that he was now handling more money on a regular basis. Only he knew about this – and, of course, his girlfriend Julia, who was asleep in the bedroom. But El Pulmón knew that people loved to talk, and in Las Tres Mil they loved to talk about the one commodity that was in short supply – money. Hence the gun. Although that wasn't the full story.
The gun wasn't needed to control any of his clients. They knew he had balls. Anybody who was prepared to get into a confined space with a half-ton bull was not lacking in that department. And he still had the reflexes. No, the gun had become necessary because, although he was now receiving high-quality product from the Russians, he hadn't stopped selling the gear that he was getting from the Italians. In fact, he'd started cutting the one with the other. So, not only was there the potential for trouble from outsiders interested in money, but there was also an element of unpredictability in his suppliers.
Now, when he handed over his €10,000 for the week, he was never quite sure whether he was going to be given another package to sell or find himself hanging out of the window upside down, with a four-floor drop beneath him. It had already happened once. The weightlifter, the one called Nikita, had dropped by to remind him that his supply was exclusive and if he didn't like the arrangement they'd install their own dealer. Four floors to a concrete pavement had been Nikita's way of trying to make him see reason. He hadn't enjoyed the adrenaline rush.
Fucking Russians. This had never been a friendly business. Dealing in death was never going to be that. But the Italians spoke his language, and he didn't know how long the Russian product was going to last. So he was going to play this tricky game until things got a little clearer, and that's why he was tooled up.
His girlfriend sighed in her sleep. He shut the bedroom door and looked around the living room. He moved the table to a more central position between the window and the wall, on which hung an oblong mirror. With a screwdriver he put a five-centimetre screw in the centre of the table. He eased the safety off the gun and positioned it so that the trigger rested against the screw and the barrel pointed to the right of the mirror. He inserted another couple of screws to maintain the line of the barrel. He placed a copy of 6 Toros magazine over the handgun. He put a chair by the table which, when he sat on it, would leave his good right arm free and his poor left arm close to the gun. He sat and checked the view he got from the mirror. It gave him angles on the two corners of the room behind him. He dropped the blinds on the window, shut out the sunlight and the view of the busy Carretera de Su Eminencia. He didn't bother with any other chairs. The supplier, with his Cuban translator, never sat down. They did smoke, even though they knew he didn't like it. He was the drug dealer with one lung who didn't smoke, didn't drink and didn't do drugs. El Pulmón breathed in slowly, the way he'd always done to control his fear.
Ramírez was standing at the window in Falcón's office, looking out. Ferrera was at her computer.
‘I've had the three mystery men in the Russian's disks identified,’ said Falcón. ‘The guy with Margarita is Juan Valverde, the boss of I4IT Europe in Madrid. The American is Charles Taggart, an ex-TV preacher, who's an I4IT consultant, reporting back to the owner, Cortland Fallenbach. The last guy is Antonio Ramos, who is an engineer and the new director of Horizonte's construction division. I want you to find out where those three men are, because I want to talk to them as soon as possible.’
Cristina Ferrera nodded. Falcón went through to join Ramírez in his office, gave him the intelligence he'd learned from Pablo about the renegade Russian gang set up by Yuri Donstov in Seville. Ramírez said he'd put detectives Serrano and Baena on a door-to-door, starting in Calle Garlopa in Seville Este, which was the address they'd found in the GPS of Vasili Lukyanov's Range Rover. They moved on to other matters.
‘The blood on both those paper suits we found in the rubbish bins on Calle Feria has been confirmed as a perfect match to Marisa Moreno,’ said Ramírez.
‘Anything on the inside of them?’ asked Falcón.
‘Both the hoods contained hairs, and we've picked up some sweat patches from the suits,’ said Ramírez. ‘One of them even had a semen deposit.’
‘Sweat patches? Semen? Was he naked underneath this suit?’
‘Not if he stripped it off, walked round the corner to Calle Gerona and stuck it in the bin,’ said Ramírez. ‘But it was a hot night, maybe they had a car.’
‘Gangsters driving around in their underpants?’ said Falcón, making for the door.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Ramírez. ‘You've only just got here.’
‘To talk to Esteban Calderón.’
‘The judge on the Marisa Moreno case is going to want to see us at some stage,’ said Ramírez. ‘It's the new guy: Anibal Parrado. He's all right. How's Consuelo holding up?’
‘She's not all right,’ said Falcón. ‘We're not all right.’
‘So you told her about Marisa and the threatening phone calls.’
‘And she remembered those Russians breaking into her house four years ago, putting a red cross over a family photograph.’
‘I'm sorry,’ said Ramírez. ‘I wasn't thinking when I told you about the semen deposit. That's not a nice thing to know … I mean, given Darío's situation.’
‘I have to know,’ said Falcón. ‘Give me a call when you get the full forensics. Let's get the DNA on the semen deposit to Vicente Cortés and Martín Díaz. They can see if it matches DNA on the GRECO and CICO databases from any Russians they've had in custody. And get everybody in the squad to remember that this is all connected: the Seville bombing, the murder of Inés, the cutting up of Marisa and the kidnapping of Darío.’
‘The only problem,’ said Ramírez, fingers exploding up into the air, ‘is evidence.’
Today was delivery day, but he wasn't sure when the Russian was going to turn up. All he knew was that he had four hundred grams of Italian left, which wasn't going to satisfy those of his clients who were already coming out of their dens all twitchy and gabbling, with the first sweats and that clawing and gnawing in the blood. They'd be looking for his boys on the streets, the sign that the Russian product had arrived and that all would soon be well.
El Pulmón checked on Julia. Still asleep. Should he wake her? Get her up and out before the guys came? He shrugged; it seemed a shame. Softly, he closed the door. She could sleep all day, that one. He had to keep an eye on her, though, make sure she wasn't sampling the product. He sat down. Breathed slowly, got the fear crouched down low in his stomach. He was always scared these days, what with the money getting bigger and
these Russians being so unreadable.
Maybe he should wake Julia. Keep calm, just the nerves talking. Keep the fear. He knew he needed the fear, but it had to be where he wanted it. Low in the stomach, not all up his throat and over his head. He'd seen that with novilleros facing their first full-size bull. The fear that paralysed and got you killed.
The knock came at 12.45 p.m. First man in was the Cuban translator. Behind him was the weightlifter – head shaved with just a dusting of black showing through the white skin, nose slightly flattened, one cheekbone with a red scar. He was smaller than El Pulmón, but twice his width. His arms were very hairy and were covered in indiscernible tattoos. His legs moved as if he had animals up his trousers. El Pulmón led them into the room, felt their eyes searching his back, took his seat by the table. The Cuban stood to the left of the mirror. The weightlifter kept his back to the wall, moved to the right of the mirror and had a good, long look around with his dark, deep-set eyes. El Pulmón didn't like it. He knew now that the Russian was carrying a gun in the small of his back. He wished he'd woken Julia. He had the roll of money in his shirt, but he didn't take it out. He could feel some questions backed up against the wall over there.
‘He wants to know if you're still buying from the Italians?’ asked the Cuban.
‘No, I told you I'd stopped.’
‘Take a look,’ said the Cuban, giving him a twist of silver foil.
El Pulmón opened it up, saw the white powder, knew that he was in trouble. He shrugged.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.
‘We bought it from one of your clients,’ said the Cuban. ‘Paid eighty euros for it.’
‘I don't know what the problem is.’
‘It's our product cut with the Italian shit you told us you'd stopped moving.’
‘I still have some Italian product left. I didn't want to just throw it away.’
‘You buy from the Italians,’ said the weightlifter, his first words in rough, accented Spanish.
The Ignorance of Blood Page 17