ROBERT WILSON

The Ignorance of Blood

For Jane

Love is the master key that opens

the gates of happiness, of hatred,

of jealousy, and, most easily of

all, the gate of fear.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Table of Contents

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Acknowledgments

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Seville – Thursday, 14th September 2006, 19.30 hrs

The ice-cold vodka slipped down Vasili Lukyanov's throat as the traffic thundered past the lay-by on the new motorway from Algeciras to Jerez de la Frontera. The heat had started the sweat beading in his dark hair as he stood by the open boot of the Range Rover Sport. He was waiting for it to get dark, didn't want to do this last stretch into Seville in daylight. He drank, smoked, ate, and thought about his last night with Rita, the whole escapade making him silently, but grossly, oral. My God, she knew how to do it to him. He felt bad leaving her behind. He'd trained her to perfection.

The blood thumped hard in his throat as he looked down on the solid block of Samsonite luggage, jammed up against the open cool box with its chilled champagne and bottles of vodka set in blocks of ice. He tore another chunk off his bocadillo, enjoying the rip of the ham between his teeth, chugged the icy vodka. Another carnal scene from his last night with Rita came to him. Her violoncello waist, the caramel of her skin as soft as toffee in his kneading fingers. A chunk of the bread roll suddenly clogged his throat. He gasped, his eyes came out on stalks. He struggled and finally coughed. A clod of masticated bread and ham shot out over the Range Rover's roof. Steady, he thought. Don't want to choke now. Die in a lay-by with the trucks rumbling past and your future all before you.

Pepe Navajas had just finished loading the steel rods, the twenty bags of cement, and the wooden planking for making reinforced concrete pillars, which he'd stacked alongside some plumbing equipment, sanitaryware, floor and wall tiles. He was going to build an extension for his daughter and son-in-law who'd just taken delivery of twins and needed more space in their small house in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. They also had no money. So Pepe was buying everything on the cheap and, because his son-in-law was useless, he was doing the work for them over the weekends.

Pepe parked the heavily laden truck outside a restaurant in Dos Hermanas, a few kilometres before the start of the motorway heading south to Jerez de la Frontera. He'd had a beer or two with the guys from the building supplies depot. Now he was going to have an early dinner and wait for dusk. He kidded himself that the Guardia Civil didn't notice so much between dusk and night and only stopped cars later on, when people were more likely to be drunk.

Vasili turned on his mobile phone for the first time that day at just after 11 p.m. He had resisted the temptation until he was through the tollgate on the last stretch of motorway to Seville because he knew what was coming. It had been a while since he'd spent a whole day on his own and he was bursting to talk. The first call came through in a matter of seconds and, as expected, it was from Alexei, his old fellow at arms.

‘Are you alone, Vasya?’ asked Alexei.

‘Yes,’ said Vasili, his lips thick and mouth slow from the vodka.

‘I don't want you to get upset,’ said Alexei, ‘make a mistake while you're driving.’

‘Have you called to upset me?’ asked Vasili.

‘Try this,’ said Alexei. ‘Leonid's back from Moscow.’

Silence.

‘Did you hear that, Vasya? I'm not breaking up, am I? Leonid Revnik is in Marbella.’

‘He wasn't supposed to be back until next week.’

‘He came back early.’

Vasili opened the window a crack and sniffed the warm night air. It was pitch black, flat fields on either side. Only tail lights in the distance. Nothing coming the other way.

‘What did Leonid have to say?’ he asked.

‘He wanted to know where you were. I told him you'd be at the club, but they'd just come from there,’ said Alexei. ‘They'd found your office locked and Kostya on the floor unconscious.’

‘Are you on your own at the moment, Alyosha?’ asked Vasili, suspicious.

‘Leonid already knows you've crossed over to Yuri Donstov.’

‘So what is this? A warning?’

‘It's me finding out that Leonid's not lying,’ said Alexei.

Silence.

‘Something's gone missing from your office,’ said Alexei. ‘He told me that, too.’

Vasili closed the window. Sighed.

‘I'm sorry, Alyosha.’

‘Rita took a heavy beating for you. I haven't seen her, but Leonid had that animal with him – you know, the one that even the Moldovan girls won't go with.’

Vasili hit the steering wheel five times. The horn blared into the night.

‘Steady, Vasya.’

‘I'm sorry, Alyosha,’ said Vasili. ‘I'm fucking sorry. What more can I say?’

‘Well, that's something.’

‘It wasn't supposed to happen like this. Leonid wasn't supposed to be back until next week. I was going to talk to Yuri, get permission to bring you in. You were going to be part of it. You know that. I just had to …’

‘That's just the point, Vasya: I didn't know that.’

‘I couldn't tell you. You're too close, Alyosha,’ said Vasili. ‘Yuri made an offer that Leonid wouldn't have given me in a million years.’

‘But without me. You didn't want me protecting your back and … what the fuck does it matter anyway?’ said Alexei, trailing off. ‘What was that, Vasya?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I heard it. You're crying.’

Silence.

‘Well, thank fuck for that,’ said Alexei. ‘At least you're fucking sad, Vasya.’

Pepe was on the road, a little later than planned, with a few more drinks inside him than he'd intended, all because of the football: Sevilla FC winning a UEFA cup game in Athens. He'd got caught up in the post-match euphoria, eaten dinner with wine and brandy. Now he had the music on full blast and was singing along with his favourite flamenco singer, El Camarón de la Isla. What a voice. It was making him tearful.

Perhaps he was driving a little too quickly, but there wasn't much traffic and the lanes of the motorway seemed as wide and well lit as an airport runway. The music drowned out the rattling of the steel rods. He was happy, bouncing up and down on his springy seat, looking forward to seeing his daughter and the babies. His cheeks were wet with emotion.

And it was at that moment, at the very peak of his happiness, that the tyre beneath him blew. It was a noise loud enough to penetrate the cab. A muffled thump like distant heavy ordnance, followed by the crack and rip of the tyre peeling off the rim and slapping around the wheel arch. His stomach sank with the cab as it listed to the left. In the break in the music he heard the pieces of tyre smacking down the side of the truck, metal screeching on the tarmac. His headlights, which had been locked steady between the lanes, slewed across the straight white flashes, and although everything was slowing down so that no detail escaped his wide-open eyes, some deep instinct was telling him that he was going dangerously fast, in a cab with a very heavy load behind it.

Fear sliced through his innards but the alcohol in his veins only gave him the presence of mind to grip the steering wheel, which had powers of its own. El Camarón started up again just before Pepe's truck smashed into the barrier of the central reservation. Only with that abrupt halt did he realize the full extent of his forward momentum as he was catapulted through windscreen glass into the warm night air. Over the agonized voice of El Camarón he heard a noise that was the last thing his befuddled brain managed to compute. Steel rods, now loose, taking off like a battery of launched spears into a tunnel of approaching light.

And the reason Vasili was crying was that he'd just undergone that extraordinary human facility for compressing a life into a compact emotional experience. Seven times in six years of service in Afghanistan Alexei had protected his back. And now, having survived all those years fighting the Pashtoons, Alexei was going to get shot in the back of the head by one of his own in a forest on the Costa del Sol, for no other reason than that he was Vasili Lukyanov's best fucking friend.

‘Tell Leonid –’ he started, and stopped when he sensed something flashing towards him, a strange agitation in the air. ‘What the fuck …?’

The steel rods, their tail ends quivering with expectation, entered the cone of light, as if attracted to him at its apex.

They hit with explosive force.

Tyres smeared their rubber on to the dark road, thumped against an unseen obstruction and the Range Rover took off into the abysmal black of the fields beyond. There was a momentary silence.

‘Vasya?’

1

Falcón's house, Calle Bailén, Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 03.00 hrs

The phone trembled under the warm breath of the brutal night.

‘Diga,’ said Falcón, who was sitting up in bed with a file from one of the hundreds concerning the 6th June Seville bombing resting on his knees.

‘You're awake, Javier,’ said his boss, Comisario Elvira.

‘I do my best thinking at this time in the morning,’ said Falcón.

‘I thought most people our age just worried about debt and death.’

‘I have no debts … not financial ones anyway.’

‘Somebody has just woken me up to talk about death … about a death,’ said Elvira.

‘And why were you called, rather than me?’

‘At some time before eleven thirty-five, which was when it was reported, there was a car accident at kilometre thirty-eight on the northbound motorway from Jerez to Seville. In fact, on both sides of the motorway, but the deaths have occurred on the northbound side. I'm told it's very nasty and I need you to go out there.’

‘Something that the Guardia Civil can't handle?’ said Falcón, glancing at his clock. ‘They've taken their time.’

‘It's complicated. They originally thought there was just one vehicle, a truck, which had crashed into the central reservation barriers and shed its load. It took them a while to realize there was another vehicle, beyond some pine trees down a bank on the other side of the motorway.’

‘Still no reason to involve the Homicide squad.’

‘The driver of the northbound vehicle has been identified as Vasili Lukyanov, a Russian national. When they finally got round to looking in the boot of his car they discovered a suitcase had split open and there was a lot of money … I mean a hell of a lot of money. I understand we're talking about millions of euros, Javier. So, I want a full forensic examination of the vehicle and, although it's clearly an accident, I want you to investigate it as if it was a murder. There could be implications for other investigations going on around the country. And, most important, I want that money fully accounted for and made safe. I'll get a security van sent up there as soon as I can raise someone.’

‘I assume we're talking about a Russian mafia gang member,’ said Falcón.

‘We are. I've already spoken to the Organized Crime Intelligence Centre. They've confirmed it. Area of expertise – prostitution. Area of operation – Costa del Sol. And I've contacted Inspector Jefe Casado – you remember him? The guy from the GRECO, the Organized Crime Response Squad in the Costa del Sol.’

‘The one who gave us a presentation back in July about setting up a GRECO in Seville to handle the mafia activity here,’ said Falcón. ‘And nothing's happened.’

‘There's been a delay.’

‘Why can't he handle this?’

‘That's the delay, he's in Marbella running about twenty investigations down there,’ said Elvira. ‘And anyway, he hasn't started work on the situation in Seville yet.’

‘He'll know more than we do and he'll have the intelligence on Lukyanov's Costa del Sol activity.’

‘Exactly, which is why he's sending us one of his own men, Vicente Cortés, who'll bring someone from the Organized Crime Intelligence Centre with him.’

‘Well, I'm awake, so I might as well go,’ said Falcón, and hung up.

Shaving was the usual morning trial, facing the full prosecution of his stubbled face. Same old story with a few more lines. The mind engraving its doubts and fears. They'd all told him that the ultimate solution to the Seville bombing was not expected of him. He knew it himself. He'd looked at the other inspector jefes who did their ugly work in the world of violence and left it in the office. But that was not for him, not this time. He ran a hand over his short-cropped hair. The life-changing events of the last five years had turned the salt and pepper to steel grey and he didn't dye it, unlike the other inspector jefes. The light and the remnants of his summer tan brought out the amber in his brown eyes. He grimaced as the razor made lanes through the foam.

Dressed in a navy blue polo shirt and chinos, he left the bedroom, rested his hands on the railing around the gallery and leaned out. No visible stars. He looked down on to the central patio of the massive eighteenth-century house he'd inherited from his disgraced father, the artist, Francisco Falcón. The pillars and arches were roughly sketched in by a solitary light whose sulphurous glow lit the bronze boy tiptoeing across the fountain and brought up the far recesses behind the pillars of the colonnade, where a plant, dried to a rustling husk, still lurked in a corner. He must throw that out, he thought for the hundredth time. He'd asked his housekeeper, Encarnación, to get it done months ago, but she had her strange attachments: her mobile Virgins, her Stations of the Cross, that wretched plant.

Toast with olive oil. A small, strong coffee. He got into his car with the caffeine sharpening his reactions. He drove through the stifling, uneasy city, which still seemed to be panting from the uproar of the day, its tarmac ruptured into thick biscuit, cobbles piled on pavements, roads ploughed up to reveal vital inner workings, machinery poised to strike. Every street, it seemed, was fenced off and taped, bollarded to kingdom come. The air reeked of Roman dust uncaked from subterranean ruins. How could anybody settle down in this tumult of reconstruction? But, of course, everything had its purpose. This was nothing to do with the bombing of a few months ago but the mayoral elections which were to take place in early 2007. So the population had to feel the torment of the incumbent's beneficence.

It was fast work getting out of the city at this time in the morning, still dark, four hours to go before sunrise. He was across the river and out on the ring road in minutes, flying down the motorway towards Jerez de la Frontera inside a quarter of an hour. It wasn't long before he saw the lights: the surgical halogen, the queasy blue, the unnerving red, the slow, revolving, sickly yellow. He pulled up on the hard shoulder behind a huge tow truck. Disembodied luminous jackets floated in the dark. There was hardly any traffic. He crossed the motorway and entered the noise of the generator powering the lights that brutally illuminated the scene. There were three Nissan 4×4s in the white and green of the Guardia Civil, two motorbikes, a red fire engine, a Day-Glo green ambulance, another smaller tow truck, halogen lighting up on stalks, wiring all around, a spray of glass diamonds from the crashed truck's windscreen swept on to the hard shoulder.

The firemen had their cutting tools ready, but were waiting for the law men to show. As Falcón arrived more cars pulled up on the other side. He introduced himself, as did the duty judge, the forensics, Jorge and Felipe, and the médico forense. The Guardia Civil talked them through the accident.

‘The Range Rover was driving from Jerez to Seville in the fast lane at an estimated speed of 140 kilometres per hour. The truck was travelling from Seville to Jerez in the nearside lane when the front left tyre burst. The truck swerved across to the fast lane and hit the barriers of the central reservation at approximately 110 kilometres per hour. The impact sent the driver through the windscreen, dislodged a load of steel rods, wooden planking and metal tubing, which shot over the cab roof and flew into the fast lane of the oncoming traffic. The driver of the truck cleared the central reservation and the fast lane and came to rest by the crash barrier on the hard shoulder. The Range Rover was hit by two steel rods thirty metres beyond where the truck had hit the barriers. The first went through the windscreen, speared the driver through the chest and continued through the front seat, the rear seat and the floor of the vehicle, missing the fuel tank by millimetres. The second rod went through the rear window and into the boot. This rod seems to have ripped open the suitcase, exposing the money. The driver of the Range Rover died on impact, lost control of the vehicle, which must have hit some of the truck's shed load, giving the car sufficient lift so that it cleared the crash barriers, smashed through the pine trees and disappeared down the bank, into the fields.

‘If that steel rod hit him with a combined velocity of 250 kilometres per hour,’ said the médico forense, ‘I'd be surprised if there was anything left of him.’

‘What is left is not a pretty sight,’ said the Guardia Civil.

‘I'll take a look,’ said the médico forense, ‘then you can start cutting him out of there.’

Felipe and Jorge completed their initial inspection of the scene and took their photographs. They joined Falcón while the médico forense finished his work.

‘What the fuck are we doing here?’ asked Felipe, yawning wider than a dog. ‘It's not murder.’

‘He's Russian mafia and there's a lot of money here,’ said Falcón. ‘Any evidence we gather might be usable in a future conviction. Fingerprints on the money and suitcase, mobile phone, address book; there might be a laptop in there…’

‘There's a briefcase on the back seat, which wasn't touched by the steel rods,’ said the Guardia Civil. ‘And there's a cool box in the boot. We haven't opened either of them.’

‘This is why we need an Organized Crime Response Squad in Seville,’ said Jorge.

‘We're running this for the moment. They're sending someone up from the Costa del Sol GRECO and an intelligence guy from CICO,’ said Falcón. ‘Let's take a look at this money. Elvira called me on the way to say he's got Prosegur to send a van out.’

The Guardia Civil opened the boot. There was suddenly a crowd.

‘Joder,’ said one of the motorbike cops.

The visible money was in used notes and bound in packs of €100- and €50-denomination notes. Some of the packs had burst open on impact from the steel rod, but there was no loose money outside the vehicle.

‘Let's have some room around here,’ said Falcón. ‘Glove up. Only the forensics and I will touch this money. Jorge, bring a couple of bin liners over, one for each denomination.’

They counted out the packs of money, avid eyes looking on. At the bottom of the suitcase were several layers of €200-denomination notes and below them two layers of €500 notes. Jorge went to get two more bin liners. Falcón made his calculations.

‘Not counting this loose money, we're looking at seven million, six hundred and fifty thousand euros.’

‘That's got to be drug money,’ said the Guardia Civil.

‘More likely people-trafficking and prostitution,’ said Falcón, who was calling Comisario Elvira.

As he gave his report the Prosegur van pulled up in front of the last Nissan 4×4. Two helmeted guys lifted a metal trunk out of the back. Falcón hung up. Felipe had taped up the packs of money into tight black blocks and was marking up the bin liners with white stick-on labels. They put the four blocks into the trunk, which was locked with two keys, one given to Falcón, who signed for it.

The money moved off. The scene relaxed.

Falcón lifted out the cool box, opened it. Krug champagne and melting blocks of ice around bottles of Stolichnaya.

‘I suppose eight million euros would merit a bit of a celebration,’ said the Guardia Civil. ‘We could have all retired on that lot.’

While one of the fire brigade teams winched the steel rods out of the car, the other reached through the window, cut away the air bag and started on the door frames with an oxyacetylene torch. Vasili Lukyanov's body was taken out in pieces and laid on an opened body bag on a stretcher. His arms, shoulders and head were intact, as were his legs, hips and lower torso. The rest had vaporized. His face was deeply furrowed with red streaks where the windscreen glass had shredded the skin. His left eye had exploded, part of his scalp was missing and his right ear was a mangled flap of gristle. He grinned horribly with lips partially torn away and some teeth ripped from their gums. His lap was stained dark with his blood. His shoes were brand new, the soles hardly scuffed.

A young fireman vomited into the oleanders by the side of the road. The paramedics tucked Lukyanov into the body bag and zipped it up.

‘Poor fucker,’ said Felipe, bagging the suitcase. ‘Eight million in the boot and you get speared by a flying steel rod.’

‘You're more likely to win the lottery,’ said Jorge, taking a look at the briefcase's combination lock, trying to open it, unsuccessfully, and then bagging it. ‘Should have bought a ticket and stayed at home.’

‘Here we go,’ said Felipe, who'd just opened the glove compartment. ‘One nine-millimetre Glock and a spare clip for our friendly Russian comrade.’

He sorted through the car papers and insurance documents, while Jorge worked through a selection of motorway receipts.

‘Something to brighten up his day,’ said Jorge, shaking a plastic sachet of white powder which had fallen out of the receipts.

‘And something to dull someone else's day,’ said Felipe, pulling out a cosh from under the seat. ‘There's blood and hair still stuck to it.’

‘He's got GPS.’

‘Anyone got the keys?’ asked Felipe, over his shoulder.

The Guardia Civil handed him the keys, they turned on the electrics. Felipe played with the GPS.

‘He was coming from Estepona, heading for Calle Garlopa in Seville Este.’

‘That narrows it down to a few thousand apartments,’ said Falcón.

‘At least it didn't say Town Hall, Plaza Nueva, Seville,’ said Jorge.

Everybody laughed and went quiet, as if it might not be so far from the truth.

Another hour and they'd been through the rest of the car. They crossed over the motorway with the evidence bags, loaded them into the back of their van and drove off. Falcón oversaw the loading of the Range Rover on to the breakdown truck.

First light creaked open at the hinge of the world as he walked back up to where the truck had hit the barrier, whose galvanized metal ballooned. The truck had been pulled away and was now on the hard shoulder, front jacked up behind the tow truck. He called Elvira to tell him that the Prosegur van had left and to make sure someone was at the Jefatura to receive the money. The forensics still needed to go over it before it could be sent to the bank.

‘What else?’ asked Elvira.

‘A locked briefcase, a handgun, a bloody cosh, Krug champagne, vodka and a few grams of coke,’ said Falcón. ‘A violent party animal was Vasili Lukyanov.’

‘Animal is the word,’ said Elvira. ‘He was arrested back in June on suspicion of rape of a sixteen-year-old girl from Málaga.’

‘And he got off?’

‘The charges were dropped on him and another brute called Nikita Sokolov and, having seen the photos of the girl, it's nothing short of a miracle,’ said Elvira. ‘But then I called Málaga and it seems that the girl and her parents have moved into a brand-new, four-bedroomed house in a development outside Nerja and her father has just opened a restaurant in the town … which is where his daughter now works. This new world makes me feel old, Javier.’

‘There are a lot of well-fed people out there who are still hungry,’ said Falcón. ‘You should have seen the reaction to all that money in the back of the Russian's car.’

‘You got it all, though, didn't you?’

‘Who knows if a few packs were lifted before I arrived?’

‘I'll call you when Vicente Cortés gets here and we'll have a meeting in my office,’ said Elvira. ‘Maybe you should go home and get some sleep.’

They came for Alexei just before dawn and couldn't raise him. One of them had to scramble down the side of the small villa and get into the garden over a low wall. He broke the lock on the sliding window, let himself in and opened the front door for his friend, who took out his Stechkin APS handgun, which he'd hung on to since leaving the KGB back in the early 1990s.

They went upstairs. He was in the bedroom, wound up in a sheet on the floor with an empty bottle of whisky next to him, dead to the world. They kicked him awake. He came to, moaning.

They stuck him in the shower and turned on the water, cold. Alexei grunted as if they were still kicking him. The muscles trembled under his tattoos. They kept the water trained on him for a couple of minutes and let him out. He shaved with the two men in the mirror and took some aspirin, swilled down with tap water. They walked him into the bedroom and watched him while he got dressed in his Sunday best. The ex-KGB man sat on the bed with his Stechkin APS dangling between his knees.

They went downstairs and out into the heat. The sun was just up, the sea was blue, there was barely any movement, just birds. They got into the car and drove down the hill.

Ten minutes later they were in the club, sitting in Vasili Lukyanov's office, but with Leonid Revnik behind the desk smoking an H. Upmann Coronas Junior cigar. He had short grey hair, cut en brosse with a sharp widow's peak, big shoulders and chest under a very expensive white shirt from Jermyn Street.

‘Did you speak to him last night?’ asked Revnik.

‘To Vasili? Yes, I got through eventually,’ said Alexei.

‘Where was he?’

‘On the road to Seville. I don't know where.’

‘What did he have to say?’ asked Revnik.

‘That Yuri Donstov had made him an offer that you wouldn't have given him in a million years.’

‘He's right there,’ said Revnik. ‘What else?’

Alexei shrugged. Revnik glanced up. A hard fist clubbed Alexei in the side of the head, knocked him and the chair over.

‘What else?’ said Revnik.

They hefted Alexei and the chair back to vertical. A lump was already up on the side of his face.

‘“What the fuck,”’ said Alexei. ‘He had an accident.’

That had Revnik's attention.

‘Tell me.’

‘We were talking and he suddenly said: “What the fuck is this …” then BANG! and the sound of tyres screeching, a thump, a crash and then it all went dead.’

Revnik hit the desk.

‘Why the fuck didn't you tell us that last night?’

‘I was drunk. I passed out.’

‘You know what that means?’ said Revnik to no one in particular, but pointing across the room. ‘It means that what was in there is now in the hands of the police.’

They looked at the empty safe.

‘Take him away,’ said Revnik.

They took him back out to the car, drove up into the hills. The smell of pine was very strong after the cool of the night. They walked him into the trees and the ex-KGB man finally got to use his Stechkin APS.

2

Outside Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 08.30 hrs

The sun had been up for twenty-five minutes over the flat fields of the fertile flood plain of the Guadalquivir river. It was close to 30°C when Falcón drove back into the city at 8.30 a.m. At home he lay on his bed fully clothed in the air-con and tried to get some sleep. It was hopeless. He drank another coffee before heading into the office.

The short drive took him down by the river, past the spearhead railings and gates to the Maestranza bullring, whose whitewashed façade, smooth and brilliant as the icing of a cake, had its porthole windows and dark red doors and shutters piped with ochre. The high phoenix palms near the Toro de Oro sagged against the already bleached sky and as he crossed the San Telmo bridge the slow water was almost green and had no autumnal sparkle.

The emptiness of the Plaza de Cuba and the shopping streets leading off it was a reminder that it was still a summer heat beating down on the bludgeoned city. Sevillanos had returned from their August holidays to find their new vitality sapped by suffocating apartments, drained by power cuts and the old city centre crammed with hot, unbreathable air. The end-of-summer storms, which scrubbed the cobbles clean, hosed down the grateful trees, rinsed the uninspired atmosphere and brought colour back to the faded sky, had not arrived. With no respite since May, ladies' fans no longer opened with the customary snap and their wrists trembled with a fluttering palsy at the thought of another month of endless palpitations.

Nobody in the office at 10.15 a.m. The paperwork from the 6th June Seville bombing still stacked knee-high around his desk. The court case against the two remaining suspects was going to take months, possibly years, to construct and there was no guarantee of success. The wall chart pinned up opposite Falcón's desk with all its names and links said it all – there was a gap in what the media were calling the Catholic Conspiracy, or rather, not so much a gap as a dead end.

Every time he sat at his desk the same five facts presented themselves to him:

 1) Although the two suspects they had in custody had been successfully linked to the two ringleaders of the plot – all four were right-wing and staunch Catholics, hence the name of the conspiracy – neither of them had any idea who'd planted the bomb, which on 6th June had destroyed an apartment building and a nearby pre-school in a residential area of Seville.

 2) The ringleaders themselves, Lucrecio Arenas and César Benito, had been murdered before they could be arrested. The former had been shot just as he was about to dive into his swimming pool in Marbella and the latter had had his throat so brutally chopped with the blade of a hand that he'd choked to death in his hotel room in Madrid.

 3) Over the last three months a plethora of agencies, at the behest of the board of directors, had gone through the offices of the Banco Omni in Madrid, where Lucrecio Arenas had been the Chief Executive Officer. They'd interviewed all his old colleagues and business contacts, searched his properties and grilled his family, but had found nothing.

 4) They'd also gone through the Horizonte Group's building in Barcelona where César Benito had been an architect and board director of the construction division. They'd searched his apartments, houses in the Costa del Sol and studio, and interviewed everybody he'd ever known and likewise found nothing.

 5) They had tried to gain access to the I4IT (Europe) building in Madrid. This company was the European arm of an American-based investment group run by two born-again Christians from Cleveland, Ohio. They were the ultimate owners of Horizonte and, through a team of highly paid lawyers, had successfully blocked all investigations, arguing that the police had no right to enter their offices.

Every time Falcón threw himself into his chair he faced that chart and the hard brick wall behind it.

The world had moved on, as it always did, even after New York, Madrid and London, but Falcón had to mark time, wandering aimlessly in the maze of passages that the conspiracy had become. As always, he was haunted by the promise he'd made to the people of Seville in a live broadcast on 10th June: that he would find the perpetrators of the Seville bombing, even if it took him the rest of his career. That was what he faced, although he would never admit it to Comisario Elvira, when he woke up alone in the dark. He had penetrated the conspiracy, gained access to the dark castle, but it had rewarded him with nothing. Now he was reduced to hoping for ‘the secret door’ or ‘the hidden passage’ which would take him to what he could not see.

What he had noticed was that the one person, over these three long months, who was never far from his thoughts was the disgraced judge, Esteban Calderón, and, by association, the judge's girlfriend, a Cuban wood sculptor called Marisa Moreno.

‘Inspector Jefe?’

Falcón looked up from the dark pit of his mind to find the wide-open face of one of his best young detectives, the ex-nun, Cristina Ferrera. There was nothing very particular about Cristina that made her attractive – the small nose, the big smile, the short, straight, dull blonde hair didn't do it. But what she had on the inside – a big heart, unshakeable moral beliefs and an extraordinary empathy – had a way of appearing on the outside. And it was that which Falcón had found so appealing during their first interview for the job she now held.

‘I thought you were in here,’ she said, ‘but you didn't answer. Up early?’

‘A colourful Russian got killed by a flying steel rod on the motorway,’ said Falcón. ‘Have you got anything for me?’

‘Two weeks ago you asked me to look into the life of Juez Calderón's girlfriend, Marisa Moreno, to see if there was any dirt attached,’ said Ferrera.

‘And here I am, by remarkable coincidence, thinking about that very person,’ said Falcón. ‘Go on.’

‘Don't get too excited.’

‘I can tell from your face,’ said Falcón, drifting back to the wall chart, ‘that whatever it is, it's not much to show for two weeks' work.’

‘Not solid work, and you know what it's like here in Seville: things take time,’ said Ferrera. ‘You already know she has no criminal record.’

‘So what did you find?’ asked Falcón, catching a different tone in her voice.

‘After getting people to do a lot of rooting around in the local police archives, I've come up with a reference.’

‘A reference?’

‘She reported a missing person. Her sister, Margarita, back in May 1998.’

‘Eight years ago?’ said Falcón, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Is that interesting?’

‘That's the only thing I could find,’ said Ferrera, shrugging. ‘Margarita was seventeen and had already left school. The local police did nothing except check up on her about a month later and Marisa reported that she'd been found. Apparently, the girl had left home with a boyfriend that Marisa didn't know about. They'd gone to Madrid until their money ran out and then hitched back. That's it. End of story.’

‘Well, if nothing else, it gives me an excuse to go and see Marisa Moreno,’ said Falcón. ‘Is that all?’

‘Did you see this message from the prison governor? Your meeting with Esteban Calderón is confirmed for one o'clock this afternoon.’

‘Perfect.’

Ferrera left and Falcón was once again alone in his head with Marisa Moreno and Esteban Calderón. There was an obvious reason why Calderón was never far from his thoughts: the brilliant but arrogant instructing judge of the 6th June bombing had been found, days after the explosion, at an absolutely crucial moment of their investigation, trying to dispose of his prosecutor wife in the Guadalquivir river. Calderón's wife, Inés, was Javier Falcón's ex-wife. As the Homicide chief, Falcón had been called to the scene. When they'd opened the shroud around the body and he'd found himself looking down into Inés's beautiful but inanimate features he'd fainted. Given the circumstances, the investigation into Inés's murder had been handed over to an outsider, Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita from Madrid. In an interview with Marisa Moreno, Zorrita had discovered that, on the night of the murder, Calderón had left her, taken a cab home and let himself into his double-locked apartment. Zorrita had drawn together an extraordinary array of lurid detail involving domestic and sexual abuse, and extracted a confession from a stunned Calderón, who had been subsequently charged. Since then Falcón had spoken to the judge only once, in a police cell, shortly after the event. Now he was nervous, not because he feared a resurgence of the earlier emotions, but because, after all his file reading, he was hoping he'd found the smallest chink into the heart of the conspiracy.

The internal phone rang. Comisario Elvira told Falcón that Vicente Cortés from the Costa del Sol GRECO had arrived. Falcón checked with the forensics, who'd so far only found fingerprints that matched those of Vasili Lukyanov. They were about to start work on the money, but they needed Falcón for the key. He went down to the evidence room.

‘When you're done, tell me and I'll put the money in the safe until we can get it transferred to the bank,’ said Falcón. ‘What about the briefcase?’

‘The most interesting things in there were twenty-odd disks,’ said Jorge. ‘We played one. It looked like hidden-camera footage of guys having sex with young women, snorting cocaine, some S&M stuff, that kind of thing.’

‘You haven't transferred it to a computer, have you?’

‘No, just played it on a DVD player.’

‘Where are the disks now?’

‘On top of the safe there.’

Falcón locked them inside, took the lift up to Comisario Elvira's office where he was introduced to Vicente Cortés from the Organized Crime Response Squad, and Martín Díaz from the Organized Crime Intelligence Centre, CICO. Both men were young, in their mid-thirties. Cortés was a trained accountant who, from the way his shoulders and biceps strained against the material of his white shirt, looked as if he'd been put through a few assault courses since he'd graduated from number-crunching. He had brown hair swept back, green eyes and a mouth that was permanently on the brink of a sneer. Díaz was a computer specialist and a linguist with Russian and Arabic up his sleeve. He wore a suit which he probably had to have made especially for him, being close to two metres tall. He played basketball to professional standard. He was dark-haired with brown eyes and a slight stoop, probably earned by trying to listen to his wife, half a metre shorter than him. This was the reality of catching organized criminals – accountants and computer whizzes, rather than special forces and weapons-trained cops.

Falcón delivered his report to the three men. Elvira, with his dark, laser-parted hair, kept straightening the files on his desk and fingering the neat and perfect knot of his blue tie. He was conservative, conventional and played everything by the book, with one eye on his job and the other on his boss, the Jefe Superior, Andrés Lobo.

‘Vasili Lukyanov ran a number of puti clubs on the Costa del Sol and some of the main roads around Granada,’ said Cortés. ‘People-trafficking, sexual slavery and prostitution were his main –’

‘Sexual slavery?’ asked Falcón.

‘Nowadays you can rent a girl for any amount of time you like. She'll do everything, from housework to full sex. When you get bored of her, you hand her back and get another one. She costs fifteen hundred euros per week,’ said Cortés. ‘The girls are traded in markets. They may come from Moldova, Albania, or even Nigeria, but they're sold and resold as much as ten times before they get here. Normal price is around three thousand euros, depending on looks. By the time the girl arrives in Spain she may have accumulated sales of thirty thousand – which she has to pay off. I know it's illogical, but that's only to you and me, not to people like Vasili Lukyanov.’

‘We found some cocaine in his car. Is that a sideline or …?’

‘He's recently moved into cocaine distribution. Or rather, his gang leader has struck a deal for product coming in from Galicia and they've now come to some form of agreement with the Colombians with regard to their operations on the Costa del Sol.’

‘So where is Lukyanov in the hierarchy?’ asked Elvira.

Cortés nodded to Díaz.

‘Difficult question, and we're wondering about the significance of finding him in a car bound for Seville with nearly eight million euros,’ said Díaz. ‘He's important. The Russians make huge profits from the sex trade, more than they make from drugs at the moment. The hierarchy has been a problem in the last year since we had Operation Wasp in 2005 and the Georgian boss of the Russian mafia here in Spain fled to Dubai.’

‘Dubai?’ asked Elvira.

‘That's where you go nowadays if you're a criminal, a terrorist, an arms trader, a money-launderer…’

‘Or a builder,’ finished Cortés. ‘It's the Costa del Sol of the Middle East.’

‘Did that leave a power vacuum here in Spain?’ asked Falcón.

‘No, his position was taken over by Leonid Revnik, who was sent from Moscow to take control. It was not a popular move with the mafia soldiers on the ground, mainly because his first act was to execute two leading mafia “directors” from one of the Moscow brigades who had encroached on his turf,’ said Díaz.

‘They were both found bound, gagged and shot in the back of the head in the Sierra Bermeja, ten kilometres north of Estepona,’ said Cortés.

‘We think that it was some old feud, dating back to the 1990s in Moscow, but what it did was create nervousness among the soldiers. They found they were having to run their business and look out for revenge attacks. There have been four “disappearances” so far this year. We're not used to this level of violence. All the other mafia groups – the Turks and Italians, who run the heroin trade; the Colombians and the Galicians, who control cocaine; the Moroccans, who traffic people and hashish – none of them practise the sort of spectacular violence they use in their own countries because they see Spain as a safe haven. They followed our old, long-standing friends the Arab arms dealers, who run their global businesses from the Costa del Sol. To all of them it's just a massive laundromat to clean their money, which means they don't want to draw attention to themselves. The Russians, on the other hand, don't seem to give a damn.’

‘Any idea why Vasili Lukyanov would be heading for Seville with eight million euros in his boot?’ asked Elvira.

‘I don't know. I'm not up to date on what's happening in Seville. It's possible that CICO in Madrid have some intelligence on what's been going on here. I've put in a request,’ said Díaz. ‘It wouldn't surprise me if there was a rival group opening up here. Leonid Revnik is fifty-two and old school. I think he'd be suspicious of someone like Vasili Lukyanov, who didn't come up through the Russian prison system but was an Afghan war veteran who bought his way in and works with women, which Revnik probably considers inferior, despite its profitability.’

‘How profitable?’ asked Elvira.

‘We have four hundred thousand prostitutes here in Spain and they generate eighteen billion euros' worth of business,’ said Díaz. ‘We are the biggest users of prostitutes and cocaine of any country in Europe.’

‘So you think Leonid Revnik despised Vasili Lukyanov, who would then have been open to offers for his expertise in a very profitable business?’ said Falcón.

‘Could be,’ said Díaz. ‘Revnik has been away in Moscow. We were expecting him back next week, but he returned early. Maybe he heard Lukyanov was making a move. I can tell you one thing for sure: Lukyanov wouldn't be going it alone. He'd need protection; but whose support he's getting, I don't know.’

‘And the eight million?’ asked Elvira, still not satisfied.

‘That's a sort of entry fee. It forces Lukyanov to burn his bridges,’ said Cortés. ‘Once he's stolen that sort of money he's never going to be able to go back to Revnik.’

‘The disks in the briefcase I mentioned in my initial report,’ said Falcón. ‘Hidden-camera stuff, older men with young girls…’

‘It's how the Russians get things done. They corrupt whoever they come into contact with,’ said Cortés. ‘We might be about to find out how our town planners, councillors, mayors and even senior policemen spent their summer holidays.’

Comisario Elvira ran his hand over his perfectly combed hair.

3

Seville Prison, Alcalá de Guadaira – Friday, 15th September 2006, 13.05 hrs

Through the reinforced glass pane of the door, Falcón watched Calderón, who was hunched over the table, smoking, staring into the tin-foil ashtray, waiting for him. The judge, who'd been young for his position, looked older. He had lost his gilded, moisturized sheen. His skin was dull and he'd lost weight where there was none to lose, making him look haggard. His hair had never been luxuriant, but was now definitely thinning to baldness. His ears seemed to have got longer, the lobes fleshier, as if from some unconscious tugging while musing on the entanglements of his mind. It settled Falcón to see the judge so reduced; it would have been intolerable had the wife-beater been his usual arrogant self. Falcón opened the door for the guard, who held a tray of coffee, and followed him in. Calderón instantly reanimated himself into an approximation of the supremely confident man he had once been.

‘To what, or to whom, do I owe this pleasure?’ asked Calderón, standing up, sweeping his arm across the sparsely furnished room. ‘Privacy, coffee, an old friend … these unimaginable luxuries.’

‘I'd have come before now,’ said Falcón, sitting down, ‘but, as you've probably realized, I've been busy.’

Calderón took a long, careful look at him and lit another cigarette, the third of his second pack of the day. The guard set down the tray and left the room.

‘And what could possibly make you want to come and see the murderer of your ex-wife?’

‘Alleged murderer of your wife.’

‘Is that significant, or are you just being accurate?’

‘This last week is the first time I've had since June to think and … do some reading,’ said Falcón.

‘Well, I hope it was a good novel and not the transcript of my interview with my Grand Inquisitor, Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita,’ said Calderón. ‘That, as my lawyer will tell you, was not my finest hour.’

‘I've read that quite a few times and I've also gone over Zorrita's interview with Marisa Moreno,’ said Falcón. ‘She's been to see you a number of times, hasn't she?’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Calderón, nodding, ‘they've not been conjugal visits. We talk.’

‘About what?’

‘We were never very good at talking,’ said Calderón, drawing hard on his cigarette. ‘We had that other language.’

‘I was just thinking that maybe since you've been in here you might have developed some other communication skills.’

‘I have, but not particularly with Marisa.’

‘So why does she come to see you?’

‘Duty? Guilt? I don't know. Ask her.’

‘Guilt?’

‘I think there might be a few things she regrets telling Zorrita about,’ said Calderón.

‘Like what?’

‘I don't want to talk about it,’ said Calderón. ‘Not with you.’

‘Things like that little joke you had with Marisa about the “bourgeois solution” to costly divorce: … murder your wife.’

‘Fuck knows how that bastard Zorrita squeezed that out of her.’

‘Maybe he didn't have to squeeze too hard,’ said Falcón calmly.

Calderón's cigarette stopped on the way to his mouth.

‘What else do you think she regretted talking to Zorrita about?’ asked Falcón.

‘She covered for me. She said I left her apartment later than I did. She thought she was doing me a favour, but Zorrita had all the timings from the cab company. It was a stupid thing to have done. It counted against me. Made me look as if I needed help, especially taken in conjunction with the cops finding me on the banks of the Guadalquivir river trying to dispose of Inés's body,’ said Calderón, who stopped, frowned and did some concentrated smoking. ‘What the fuck are you doing here, Javier? What's this all about?’

‘I'm trying to help you,’ said Falcón.

‘Are you now?’ said Calderón. ‘And why would you want to help the alleged murderer of your ex-wife? I realize that you and Inés weren't particularly close any more, but… still…’

‘You told me you were innocent. You've said so from the very beginning.’

‘Well, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, you're the expert on the murderer's constant state of denial,’ said Calderón.

‘I am,’ said Falcón. ‘And I'm not going to pretend to you that my investigation into what happened on that night doesn't have ulterior motives.’

‘All right,’ said Calderón, sitting back, paradoxically satisfied by this revelation. ‘I didn't think you wanted to save my ass … especially if you've read that transcript as many times as you said.’

‘There's some very ugly stuff in there, I can't deny that, Esteban.’

‘Nor can I,’ said Calderón. ‘I wouldn't mind turning back the clock on my whole relationship with Inés.’

‘I have some questions relating to the transcript,’ said Falcón, heading off a possible descent into self-pity. ‘I understand that the first time you hit Inés was when she discovered the naked photographs of Marisa on your digital camera.’

‘She was trying to download them on to her computer,’ said Calderón, leaping to his own defence. ‘I didn't know what her intentions were. I mean, it's one thing to find them, but it seemed to me that she was going to make use of them in some way.’

‘I'm sure Inés knew you very well, by then,’ said Falcón. ‘So why did you leave the camera hanging around? What were you thinking of, taking shots of your naked lover?’

‘ I didn't take them, Marisa did … while I was asleep. She was nice about it, though. She told me she'd left some “presents” on the camera,’ said Calderón. ‘And I didn't leave the camera hanging around. Inés went through my pockets.’

‘And what were you doing with the camera in the first place?’

‘I took some shots of a lawyers' dinner I'd attended earlier in the evening,’ said Calderón. ‘My alibi, if Inés found the camera.’

‘Which you knew she would.’

Calderón nodded, smoked, searched his memory; something he did a lot these days.

‘I'd overslept at Marisa's,’ he said. ‘It was six o'clock in the morning and, you know, I wasn't as collected as I would have been normally. Inés appeared to be asleep. She wasn't. When I dropped off, she got up and found the shots.’

‘And that was the first time you hit her,’ said Falcón. ‘Have you thought about that since you've been in here?’

‘Are you going to be my shrink as well, Javier?’

Falcón showed him an empty pair of hands.

‘If you didn't take the shots of Marisa and the only reason you had the camera with you was to provide yourself with an alibi for Inés, how come it was at hand for your lover to take photos of herself naked?’

Calderón stared into the wall for some time until he gradually started chopping the air with his cigarette fingers.

‘She told me she went through my jacket pockets. She said: “I come from a bourgeois family; I kick against it, but I know all the tricks,”’ said Calderón. ‘They all go through your pockets. That's what women do, Javier. It's part of their training. They're very exigent on details.’

‘Did she volunteer that information?’

‘No, I asked her.’

‘Any reason?’

‘I don't know,’ said Calderón. ‘I think I was hunting for my shoes. I was nervous about getting back to my apartment and having a confrontation with Inés. I'd never stayed out all night before. I suppose Marisa's behaviour just struck me as a bit odd.’

‘Any thoughts about it now?’

‘It's the sort of thing a wife would do … not a lover,’ said Calderón, crushing out the cigarette in the tin-foil ashtray. ‘It's what Inés did when I got home.’

‘You're smoking a lot, Esteban.’

‘There's nothing else to do, and it calms my nerves.’

‘Maybe you should think of an alternative method of calming your nerves.’

Calderón looked up, suspicious.

‘You can keep trying, Javier, but I'm not going to lie down on your couch.’

‘What about somebody else's couch?’ said Falcón, flicking over a page in his notebook. ‘Another question about the transcript…’

Calderón lit a cigarette, belligerently. He inhaled deeply without taking his eyes off Falcón and blew the smoke out the side of his mouth.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I'm listening.’

‘Why do you think Marisa told Inspector Jefe Zorrita that she'd met Inés?’

‘Zorrita said that dealing with liars was like dealing with children. Marisa tried to lie about it but he broke her down.’

‘Zorrita is a dictaphone man, not a note-taker. I've listened to the recording of the interview with Marisa,’ said Falcón. ‘If there was one bit of evidence you didn't want in Zorrita's hands it was the fact of Marisa and Inés having met before, and especially the circumstances of that meeting.’

‘Probably,’ said Calderón, not that interested in something he didn't regard as a development.

‘Zorrita found a witness to that meeting in the Murillo Gardens on 6th June. It wasn't too difficult because, apparently, it was quite a showdown between the two women. The witness said they went at each other like a couple of whores competing for the same patch.’

‘Doesn't sound like that witness hung around in very nice places.’

They smiled at each other with no humour.

‘According to this witness, Marisa had the last word,’ said Falcón, flicking through his notebook. ‘She said something along the lines of: “Just remember, Inés, that when he's beating you it's because he's been fucking me so beautifully all night that he can't bear to see your disappointed little face in the morning.” Is that what Marisa told you? Because she didn't happen to mention that to Zorrita.’

‘What's your point?’

‘First of all, how did Marisa find out that you'd been beating Inés? She didn't have a bruised face. Did you tell her?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe one of the ugly lessons she learnt in her early life in Havana was how to spot an abused woman.’

‘Your point, Javier?’ said Calderón, with courtroom lawyer's steel.

‘Marisa gave Zorrita the impression that Inés had the upper hand. She mentioned Inés's phrase several times: “La puta con el puro.”’ The whore with the cigar.

‘That's what she told me,’ said Calderón, listening hard now.

‘Zorrita thought Marisa had told him all that because she was still furious at being shamed by Inés in public, but clearly she wasn't. Marisa crushed Inés. The witness said that Inés went off like “the village cur”. So what was Marisa's purpose in telling Zorrita about that meeting?’

‘You think it was calculated,’ said Calderón.

‘I listened to the tape. Zorrita only had to prod her a couple of times to get the story out of her. And the story, her version of it, was crucial in redoubling your motive to beat Inés and perhaps take it too far and kill her. Now that would be a story that you'd want to keep out of the investigating officer's mind at all costs.’

Calderón was smoking so intently that he was making himself dizzy with the nicotine rush.

‘My final question to do with the transcript,’ said Falcón. ‘Inspector Jefe Zorrita came to see me some hours after he'd interviewed you. I asked if you'd broken down and confessed, and his answer was: sort of. He admitted that when you refused a lawyer – God knows what you were thinking of at that moment, Esteban – it meant that he could be more brutal with you in the interview. That, combined with the horror of the autopsy revelations, seemed to create doubt in your mind and, Zorrita reckoned, it was then that you believed that you could have done it.’

‘I was very confused,’ said Calderón. ‘My hubris was in refusing the lawyer. I was a lawyer. I could handle myself.’

‘When Zorrita asked you to describe what happened when you went back to your apartment that night, he said you rendered the events in the form of a film script.’

‘I don't remember that.’

‘You used the third person singular. You were describing something you'd seen … as if you were out of your body, or behind a camera. It was clear you were in some kind of trance. Didn't your lawyer mention any of this?’

‘Maybe he was too embarrassed.’

‘There seems to be some confusion about what you saw when you came into the apartment,’ said Falcón.

‘My lawyer and I have talked about that.’

‘In your film script version, you describe yourself as “annoyed”, because you didn't want to see Inés.’

‘I didn't want a confrontation. I wasn't angry, as I had been when Marisa told me about meeting Inés in the Murillo Gardens. I was pretty much asleep on my feet. Those were long days. All the work, followed by media engagements in the evening.’

Falcón flipped over another page of his notebook.

‘What interested me was when you said: “He stumbled into the bedroom, collapsed on to the bed and passed out immediately. He was aware only of pain. He lashed out wildly with his foot. He woke up with no idea where he was.” What was all that about?’

‘Is that a direct quote?’

‘Yes,’ said Falcón, putting the dictaphone on the table and pressing ‘play’.

Calderón listened, transfixed, as the smoke crawled up the valleys of his fingers.

‘Is that me?’

Falcón played it again.

‘It doesn't seem that important.’

‘I think Marisa put a cigarette lighter to your foot,’ said Falcón.

Calderón leapt to his feet as if he'd been spiked from underneath.

‘My foot was sore for days,’ he said, with sudden recall. ‘I had a blister.’

‘Why would Marisa put a cigarette lighter to your foot?’

‘To wake me up. I was dead to the world.’

‘There are more charming ways to wake your lover up than burning his foot with a cigarette lighter,’ said Falcón. ‘I think that she had to wake you up because the timing of your departure from her apartment was crucial.’

Calderón sank back into his chair, lit another cigarette and stared up into the light coming in through the high, barred window. He blinked as his eyes filled and he bit down on his bottom lip.

‘You're helping me,’ said Calderón. ‘The irony's not lost on me, Javier.’

‘You need different help to what I can give you,’ said Falcón. ‘Now, let's just go back to my original point from the transcript. Just one more thing about that night. The two versions you gave Zorrita about how you found Inés in the apartment.’

Calderón's brain snapped back into some pre-rehearsed groove and Falcón held up his hand.

‘I'm not interested in the version you and your lawyer have prepared for court,’ said Falcón. ‘Remember, none of this is about your case. What I'm trying to do might help you, but the design is not to get you off the hook, it's for me to find my way in.’

‘To what?’

‘The conspiracy. Who planted that small Goma 2 Eco bomb in the basement mosque, which exploded on the 6th of June, detonating the hundred kilos of hexogen stored there, bringing down the apartment building and destroying the pre-school?’

‘Javier Falcón keeps his promise to the people of Seville,’ said Calderón, grunting.

‘Nobody's forgotten that… least of all me.’

Calderón leaned across the table, looked up through the pupils of Falcón's eyes into the top of his cranium.

‘Do I detect something of an obsession going on here?’ he said. ‘Personal crusades, Javier, are not advisable in police work. Every old people's home in Spain probably has a retired detective gaping from the windows, his mind still twisted around a missing girl, or a poor, bludgeoned boy. Don't go there. Nobody expects it of you.’

‘People remind me of it all the time in the Jefatura and in the Palacio de Justicia,’ said Falcón. ‘And what's more, I expect it of myself.’

‘See you in the loony bin, Javier. Save me a place by the window,’ said Calderón, sitting back, inspecting the conical ember of his cigarette.

‘We're not going to end up in the loony bin,’ said Falcón.

‘You're pretty keen to get me down on some shrink's couch,’ said Calderón, dredging for lost confidence. ‘And you know what I say? Fuck off, you and anybody else. Mind your own madness. You especially, Javier. It's been less than five years since your “complete breakdown” – wasn't that what they called it? – and I can see you've been working hard. God knows how many times you went through the files on the bombing before you started combing Zorrita's reports, looking for the flaws in my case. You should get out more, Javier. Have you fucked that Consuelo yet?’

‘Let's get back to what happened at around 4 a.m. on Thursday 8th June in your apartment in Calle San Vicente,’ said Falcón, tapping his notebook. ‘In one version you came in to see Inés standing at the sink and you were “so happy to see her”, and yet in the other version you were “annoyed”, there was some sort of hiatus, you woke up lying in the corridor and when you went back to the kitchen you found Inés dead on the floor.’

Calderón swallowed hard as he replayed that night in the darkness of his mind. He had done it so many times, more times than even the most obsessive director would have edited, and re-edited, a scene from a movie. It now played in short sequences, but in reverse. From that moment of intense guilt when, trapped in the patrolman's torch beam, he'd been discovered trying to throw Inés into the river, to that blissful, pre-lapsarian state when he'd got out of the cab, helped by the driver, and walked up the stairs to his apartment, with no other intention than to get into bed as quickly as possible. And that was the point he always seized on: he knew at that moment he did not have murder on his mind.

‘There was no intent,’ he said, out loud.

‘Start from the beginning, Esteban.’

‘Look, Javier, I've tried it every which way: forwards, backwards and inside out, but however hard I try there's always a gap,’ said Calderón, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the last one. ‘The cab driver opened the apartment door for me, two turns of the key. He left me there. I went into the apartment. I saw the light from the kitchen. I remember being annoyed – and I repeat, “annoyed”, not angry or murderous. I was just irritated that I might have to explain myself when all I wanted to do was crash out. So I remember that emotion very clearly, then nothing until I woke up on the floor in the corridor beyond the kitchen.’

‘What do you think about Zorrita's theory, that people have blank moments about terrible things they have done?’

‘I've come across it professionally. I don't doubt it. I've searched every corner of my mind…’

‘So what was this about seeing Inés alive and being so happy?’

‘My lawyer tells me that Freud had a term for that: “wish fulfilment”, he called it,’ said Calderón. ‘You want something to be true so badly that your mind invents it for you. I did not want Inés to be dead on the floor. We were not happy together, but I did not want her dead. I wanted her to be alive so badly that my mind substituted the reality with my most fervent wish. Both versions came out in the turmoil of that first interview with Zorrita.’

‘You know that this is the crux of your case,’ said Falcón. ‘The flaws I've found are small. Marisa going through your pockets, getting the upper hand in the shouting match with Inés in the Murillo Gardens and burning your foot to wake you up. These things amount to nothing when put against your recorded statement, in which you say that you entered the double-locked apartment alone, saw Inés alive, blacked out and then found her dead. Your inner turmoil and all that wish-fulfilment crap is no match for those powerful facts.’

More concentrated smoking from Calderón. He scratched at his thinning hair and his left eye twitched.

‘And why do you think Marisa is the key?’

‘The worst possible thing that could have happened at that moment in our investigation into the bombing was to have our instructing judge, and our strongest performer in front of the media, arrested for the murder of his wife,’ said Falcón. ‘Losing you pretty well derailed the whole process. If your disgrace was planned, then Marisa was crucial to its execution.’

‘I'll speak to her,’ said Calderón, nodding, his face hardening.

‘You won't,’ said Falcón. ‘We've stopped her visits. You're too desperate, Esteban. I don't want you to give anything away. What you've got to do is unlock your mind and see if you can find any detail that might help me. And it might be advisable to get a professional in to do that for you.’

‘Ah!’ said Calderón, getting it finally. ‘The shrink.’

4

Puti Club, Estepona, Costa del Sol – Friday, 15th September 2006, 14.35 hrs

Leonid Revnik was still sitting at Vasili Lukyanov's desk in the club, but this time he was waiting for news from Viktor Belenki, his second-in-command. When Revnik had taken control of the Costa del Sol after the police had mounted Operation Wasp in 2005, he'd got Belenki to run the construction businesses through which they laundered most of the proceeds of their drugs and prostitution trade. Belenki had just the right veneer of the good-looking, successful businessman and he spoke fluent Spanish, too. The veneer, though, was only an expensive suit thick, as Viktor Belenki was a violent brute with access to a rage so incandescent that even Revnik's most psychopathic henchmen were afraid of him. Belenki could also be very friendly and extremely generous, especially if you jumped when he told you to. This meant that he had developed good contacts in the Guardia Civil, some of whom had thick wads of Belenki's euros hidden in their garages. Leonid Revnik was hoping that Belenki could tell him where the money and disks that Lukyanov had stolen from the puti club safe had ended up. He was on his third cigar of the day. The empty safe was still gaping. The air-con was on the blink and he was uncomfortably hot. The mobile on the desk rang.

‘Viktor,’ said Revnik.

‘It's taken some time to get this information because it's out of the normal area of my guy's jurisdiction,’ said Belenki. ‘The Guardia Civil who went to the scene of the accident came from a town outside Seville called Utrera. When they found the money they called the police headquarters in Seville and, because it was clear that this wasn't just any old guy who'd died in a car accident, they went to the top for instructions: Comisario Elvira.’

‘Shit,’ said Revnik.

‘And he put it in the hands of Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón. Remember him?’

‘Everybody remembers him from the bombing in June,’ said Revnik. ‘So where's it all gone?’

‘It's in the Jefatura in Seville.’

‘Have we still got somebody in there?’

‘That's how I know where everything is.’

‘Right, so how do we get it out?’

‘You can say goodbye to the money,’ said Belenki. ‘Once the forensics have been over it, they'll stick it in the bank – unless you want to hold up a Prosegur van.’

‘I don't give a fuck about the money. I mean, I do, but … you're right. The disks, they're a different matter,’ said Revnik. ‘What can we get on Falcón?’

‘You're not going to be able to buy him, that's for sure.’

‘So what else?’

‘There's always the woman,’ said Belenki. ‘Consuelo Jiménez.’

‘Ah, yes, the woman,’ said Revnik.

At the traffic lights Falcón searched his eyes in the rear-view mirror, trying to find the evidence of obsession Calderón had seen there. He didn't really need to look at the tell-tale blackberry smudges; he knew from the slight gaucherie in his left hand, and that feeling of wearing someone else's right leg, that what was cradled in his mind was beginning to have physical manifestations.

Work had sat on Falcón's shoulders like an overweight, badly packed rucksack, and it never slipped off, not even at night. In the mornings he opened an eye, his face crushed hard into the pillow after snatching an hour's lethal sleep, to feel his bones creaking in his skeleton. The week's holiday he'd taken at the end of August, when he'd joined his friend Yacoub Diouri and his family on the beach at Essaouira in Morocco, had worn off on his first day back in the office.

Horns blared behind him. He pulled away from the traffic lights. He came into the old city through the Puerta Osario. He parked badly near the San Marcos church and walked down Calle Bustos Tavera to the tunnelled passageway that led from the street into a courtyard of workshops where Marisa Moreno had her studio. His footsteps sounded loud on the large cobbles of the dark tunnel. He broke out into the fierce light in the courtyard, squinted against it to take in the dilapidated buildings, the grass growing up through old rear axles and expired fridges. He walked up a metal stairway to a doorway above a small warehouse. Foot shuffling and dull thuds came from inside. He knocked.

‘Who is it?’

‘Police.’

‘ Momentito.’

The door was opened by a tall, slim mulatto woman with an unusually long neck, who had wood chips stuck to her face and in her coppery hair, which was tied back. She wore a cobalt-blue gown under which she was naked apart from some bikini briefs. Sweat pimpled across her forehead, over the undulation of her nose and trickled down the visible bones of her chest. She was breathing heavily.

‘Marisa Moreno?’ he said, holding up his police ID. ‘I am Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón.’

‘I've already told Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita everything I know a couple of hundred times,’ she said. ‘I've got nothing to add.’

‘I've come to talk to you about your sister.’

‘My sister?’ she said, and Falcón did not miss the momentary fear that froze her features.

‘You have a sister called Margarita.’

‘I know my own sister's name.’

Falcón paused, hoping that Marisa might feel the need to fill the moment with more information. She stared him out.

‘You reported her missing in 1998, when she was two months short of her seventeenth birthday.’

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Don't touch anything.’

The studio's floor was patched with rough concrete where the clay tiles had come up. The air smelled of bare timber, turps and oils. There were chippings everywhere and a pile of sawdust in the corner. A meat hook large enough to take a full carcass hung from the tie rod which spanned the room. Suspended from its sharp hook was an electric chain saw, its flex thrown over the bar. Three dark and polished statues stood beneath the oily, sawdust-encrusted tool, one with its head missing. Falcón made for the space around the piece. The headless statue was that of a young woman, with breasts high on her chest, perfect orbs. The faces of the men flanking her had nothing in them. Their eyes were blank. The musculature of their bodies had something of the savagery of an existence in the wild about them. Their genitals were outsized and, despite being flaccid, seemed sinister, as if they were spent from a recent rape.

Marisa watched him as he took the piece in, waiting for the banality of his comments. She had yet to meet the white man who could resist a little critique, and her warriors with their prize penises drew plenty of lewd admiration. What she registered in Falcón's face was not even a raised eyebrow, but a brief revulsion as he looked down the bodies.

‘So what happened to Margarita?’ he asked, switching to Marisa. ‘You reported her missing on 25th May 1998, and when the police came to check with you a month later you said she'd turned up again about a week after she'd disappeared.’

‘That was how much they cared,’ she said, reaching for a small half-smoked cigar which she relit. ‘They took down her details and I never heard from them again. They wouldn't take my calls, and when I went round to the station they just dismissed me, said she was with some boyfriend or other. If you're pretty and mulatto like her they just think you're some kind of fucking machine. I'm sure they did nothing.’

‘She did go to Madrid with a boyfriend, though, didn't she?’

‘They were pretty pleased about that when I told them.’

‘Where were your parents in all this?’ asked Falcón. ‘Margarita was still a kid.’

‘Dead. You see, they probably didn't put that in the report. My father died up north in Gijón in 1995. My mother died here in Seville in 1998 and two months later Margarita went missing. She was upset. That was why I was worried.’

‘Your father was Cuban?’

‘We came over here in 1992. It was a bad time in Cuba; Russian aid had dried up after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. There's a large Cuban community in Gijón, so that's where we settled.’

‘How did your parents meet?’

‘My father had a club in Gijón. My mother was a flamenco dancer from Seville. She'd come up to perform at the annual Semana Negra fair. My father was a good salsa dancer and there's such a thing as Cuban flamenco, so they taught each other things and my mother made the mistake that a lot of other women made.’

‘So obviously she wasn't your natural mother?’

‘No, we don't know what happened to her. She was Cuban of Spanish descent, white and political. She disappeared soon after my sister was born in 1981.’

‘You were seven years old.’

‘It's not something I think about very much,’ said Marisa. ‘Things like that could happen in Cuba. My father never talked about it.’

‘So who looked after you?’

‘My father had girlfriends. Some were interested in us … others weren't.’

‘What did your father do in Cuba?’

‘He was somebody in the government. An official on the Sugar Board. Export,’ said Marisa. ‘I thought you wanted to talk about my sister, and I'm beginning to wonder why.’

‘I like to get people's family situation sorted out in my mind,’ said Falcón. ‘It doesn't sound like you had a normal life.’

‘We didn't, until my stepmother came along. She was a good woman. The caring type. She really looked after us. For the first time in our lives we were loved. She even looked after my father when he was dying.’

‘How was that?’

‘Lung cancer. Too many cigars,’ she said, waving the smoking stub in her hand. ‘He only married her after his diagnosis.’

Marisa blew a plume of smoke out into the rafters of the wooden roof. She felt she had to keep this thing going. Do one long stint with this new inspector jefe and then maybe he'd leave her alone.

‘What did you do after your father died?’ asked Falcón.

‘We moved down here. My mother couldn't stand the north. All that rain.’

‘What about her family?’

‘Her parents were dead. She had a brother in Málaga, but he didn't like black people very much. He didn't come to her wedding.’

‘How did your mother die?’

‘Heart attack,’ said Marisa, eyes shining at the memory of it.

‘Were you living here at the time?’

‘I was in Los Angeles.’

‘I'm sorry,’ said Falcón. ‘That must have been hard. She wasn't very old.’

‘Fifty-one.’

‘Did you see her before she died?’

‘Is that any of your business?’ she said, turning away, looking for an ashtray.

This cop was getting under her skin.

‘My mother died when I was five,’ said Falcón. ‘It doesn't matter whether you're five or fifty-five, it's not something you ever get over.’

Marisa turned back slowly; she'd never heard a Sevillano, let alone a cop, talk like this. Falcón was frowning at the floor.

‘So you came back from Los Angeles and you've been here ever since?’ he said.

‘I stayed for a year,’ said Marisa. ‘I thought I should look after my sister.’

‘And what happened?’

‘She left again. But she was eighteen this time so …’

‘And you haven't seen or heard from her since?’

There was a long silence in which Marisa's mind seemed to float off out of the room and Falcón thought for the first time that he was getting somewhere.

‘Señora Moreno?’ said Falcón.

‘I haven't heard from her … no.’

‘Are you worried about her?’

She shrugged and for some reason Falcón didn't think he was going to believe what he heard next.

‘We weren't very close, which was why she left the first time without telling me.’

‘Is that right?’ said Falcón, locking eyes with her across the studio. ‘So what did you do when she left the second time?’

‘I finished the course I was doing at the Bella Artes, rented out my mother's apartment, which my sister and I had inherited…’

‘Is that where you live now, in Calle Hiniesta?’

‘And I went to Africa,’ she said, nodding. ‘Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Congo, until it got too dangerous and then I went to Mozambique.’

‘What about the Touaregs … didn't you spend some time with them?’

Silence, as she registered that he'd heard that from someone else.

‘If you know all this, Inspector Jefe, why are you asking me?’

‘I know it, but hearing it from you arranges the furniture.’

‘I let you in here to talk about my sister.’

‘Who you're not close to.’

‘You seem to have expanded your interests since you started using up my work time.’

‘And then there was New York …?’

She grunted. Puffed on the cigar to get it going again.

‘You've been talking to Esteban, haven't you?’

‘How do you know?’

‘I lied to him about New York,’ she said. ‘I saw a movie about an artist starring Nick Nolte, and I assumed the role of his assistant. I've never been to New York.’

‘Did you lie to him about anything else?’

‘Probably. I had an image to live up to.’

‘An image?’

‘That's how most of the men I've spent any time with see women.’

‘You described Esteban Calderón as your lover to Inspector Jefe Zorrita.’

‘He was then … still is, kind of, although prison doesn't help,’ she said. ‘I'm sorry he killed his wife. He was always so controlled, you know, still passionate in the way Sevillanos are, but a lawyer, too, and with a lawyer's mentality.’

‘So you think he did it?’

‘What I think doesn't matter. It's what Inspector Jefe Zorrita thinks that matters,’ she said, and something clicked in her mind. ‘That's it, I've got it now. It was your ex-wife that Esteban murdered. That's interesting.’

‘Is it?’

‘I don't know what you're doing here,’ she said, puffing on her cigar, appraising him anew.

‘Was your sister with a boyfriend when she left the second time?’

‘There was always a man involved with Margarita.’

‘Pretty girl?’

‘That … and the other thing.’

‘Sex?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Marisa, who went over to a small plans chest, opened a drawer and slapped a sheaf of photos down on the top. She was going to let him in, or rather let him think that she was opening up. ‘Take a look. I took these three weeks before her eighteenth birthday.’

Falcón flicked through the shots. A sadness lodged itself in his chest. It wasn't sex, despite the provocative nudity. Even when she was lying back, legs splayed, she had an innocence about her. An innocence that itched to be desecrated in the eyes of men. That was why Marisa had taken the shots and only Marisa could have taken them. Even in the most pornographic of poses Margarita never lost her childlike purity, whereas the viewer, or the voyeur, felt the beast rise up on its hind legs and dance on its furry hooves.

‘For a Sevillano, you don't say very much, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Nothing to add,’ he said, giving up on the shots halfway through, feeling the woman's intention and not flattered by it. ‘They do their work.’

‘You're the first person to see those.’

‘I'd like a shot of Margarita with some clothes on,’ he said, ‘so that we can begin to look for her.’

‘She's not lost any more,’ said Marisa. ‘She doesn't need to be found.’

‘I'm sure you'd like to hear from her, though, wouldn't you?’

Another shrug from Marisa, something very uneasy about her. She handed over a head-and-shoulders shot of her sister.

‘You used to go through Esteban's pockets,’ said Falcón, taking the photo. ‘Why did you do that? I mean, you're an artist, I can see that from the quality of this work. So you're curious, but not for the sort of crap you find in a man's pockets.’

‘My stepmother did the same thing when my father came back at seven in the morning. She hated herself for it but couldn't help it. She had to know, even though she already knew.’

‘That doesn't explain anything,’ said Falcón. ‘I could understand Inés wanting to go through his pockets, but you? What were you looking for? You knew he was married, and not very happily. What else was there?’

‘My mother came from a very conservative Sevillana family. You can see the type in her brother. And she got involved with a black man when she was forty-five years old and he repaid her by fucking everything that passed beneath his nose. Her bourgeois instinct –’

‘Hers, not yours. She wasn't your natural mother.’

‘We adored her.’

‘That's your only explanation?’

‘You amaze me, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Keys?’ he said, cutting in on her digression, eyebrows raised.

‘What?’

‘You were after his keys.’

‘That's why you amaze me,’ said Marisa, puffing on her chewed-over cigar butt, spitting out flakes of tobacco. ‘Zorrita told me, triumphantly no less, that he had a rock-solid case against Esteban for the murder of his wife, your ex, and here you are, trying to chip away at it for some reason that I don't quite understand.’

‘Did you get a key made to his apartment and have a good look around for yourself, or make a duplicate for somebody else so that they could?’

‘Look, Inspector Jefe, one time I found he had condoms which he never wore when he was with me,’ said Marisa. ‘Once a woman finds something like that, she keeps checking to see if there are any fewer.’

‘I've spoken to the governor. We're stopping your prison visits.’

‘Why?’

‘I'd have thought that would be a relief.’

‘Think what you like.’

Falcón nodded. Something caught his eye under the table. He knelt down and rolled it back towards him. It was a stained and polished wooden head. He inspected it under the light. Margarita's smooth unsophisticated face looked back at him, eyes closed. He ran a thumb over the jagged edge of her neck where the chain saw had bitten into the wood.

‘What happened here?’ asked Falcón.

‘A change of artistic vision,’ she said.

Falcón went to the door, feeling that the first phase of his work was done. He handed her the head.

‘Too perfect?’ he asked. ‘Or not the point?’

Marisa listened to his feet on the metal stairway and looked down at the carved features of her sister's face. She ran her fingers over the eyelids, nose and mouth. Her arm, bearing the full weight of the head, trembled. She put it down, found her mobile on the work bench and made a call.

The cop made her nervous, but she was also surprised to find that she did not dislike him. And there were very few men that Marisa liked, not many of them were white, and none of them were policemen.

Leonid Revnik hadn't moved. He'd cleared his henchmen out of the room and they'd got a technician in to fix the air-con. He was taking a drink from the half-bottle of vodka that was still left in Vasili Lukyanov's freezer. Viktor Belenki hadn't called him back. He had to remind himself to relax because he kept coming out of his thoughts to find his biceps tight in his shirt and his pectorals clenched. The land-line phone on the desk rang. He looked at it suspiciously; nobody used these things any more. He picked it up, spoke in Russian without thinking. A woman's voice answered in the same language and asked to speak to Vasili Lukyanov.

‘Who is this?’ he asked, hearing a strange accent.

‘My name is Marisa Moreno. I've tried calling Vasili on his mobile but there's no answer. This is the only other number he gave me.’

The Cuban woman. Rita's sister.

‘Vasili isn't here. Maybe I can help; I'm his boss,’ said Revnik. ‘If you want to leave a message, I'll make sure he gets it.’

‘He told me I should call him if I had any trouble.’

‘And what's happened?’ asked Revnik.

‘A homicide cop called Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón came round to my workshop and started asking questions about my sister, Margarita.’

That name, Falcón, again.

‘What did he want with her?’

‘He said he was going to find her.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I told him she didn't need to be found.’

‘That's good,’ said Revnik. ‘Have you spoken to anybody else about this?’

‘I left a message on Nikita's phone.’

‘Sokolov?’ he asked, barely able to control his rage at having to pronounce another traitor's name.

‘Yes.’

‘You did the right thing,’ said Revnik. ‘We'll handle it. Don't worry.’

5

Calle Bustos Tavera, Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 15.50 hrs

There were two people in the world for whom Falcón would drop everything. One was Consuelo Jiménez and the other was Yacoub Diouri. Ever since he'd tracked down Yacoub four years ago he'd become the younger brother Falcón had never had. Because of Yacoub's own complicated past he'd had a special understanding of the complexities of the family horrors that had led to Falcón's complete mental breakdown back in 2001. In gradually revealing themselves to each other, Yacoub had become synonymous with the reassertion of sanity in Falcón's mind. Now, in the wake of the Seville bombing, he was even more than a friend and brother. He had become Falcón's spy. The Spanish intelligence agency, the CNI, in their sudden, desperate need for agents in the Arab countries nearest their borders, had researched the special relationship between Falcón and Yacoub Diouri. Having seen other Western intelligence agencies fail in their bid to recruit Yacoub, they'd used Falcón to bring him into their fold.

It was for this reason that, when Falcón received a text from Yacoub Diouri as he stood in the courtyard outside Marisa's studio, he went immediately in search of a public telephone. They hadn't spoken since the short break in Essaouira last month. Their only communication had been on ‘business’, via the intelligence service's encrypted website. The CNI had insisted on zero physical contact with Yacoub since he'd successfully penetrated the radical Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, the GICM, in the days after the Seville bombing. It was this group which had been storing a hundred kilos of the high explosive, hexogen, in the basement mosque in a residential quarter of Seville. Yacoub had found out how that hexogen was going to be used, and in doing so the CNI were concerned that his cover had been blown. There had been some tense days in Paris when they thought that their new agent might be assassinated. Their fears had been groundless. Yacoub returned to Rabat, but the CNI were still so nervous that the only contact they'd allowed was on Falcón's August holiday, which had been arranged in April, two months before the recruitment of Yacoub Diouri.

It took him a while to find a public phone. Falcón understood from the text, which they'd arranged between themselves in Essaouira, that this was to be a private conversation and he should not to use his home phone or mobile to make the call.

‘I'm in Madrid,’ said Yacoub, with a quiver in his voice.

‘You sound nervous.’

‘We have to meet.’

‘When?’

‘Now … as soon as possible. I couldn't warn you before because … well, you know why.’

‘I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to get away at such short notice.’

‘I'm not asking you to do this for no reason at all, Javier. It's complicated and important. It's the most important thing that's happened so far.’

‘Is this business?’

‘It's business and it's personal.’

Falcón had something else ‘personal’ going on tonight. He was supposed to be having dinner with Consuelo, just the two of them. Another assignation in the gradual process of their coming together.

‘Are you talking about tonight?’ asked Falcón.

‘Earlier.’

‘It sounds like you want me to catch the next possible train.’

‘That would be good,’ said Yacoub. ‘It's that important.’

‘I'll have to work up a plausible reason for…’

‘You're in the middle of an international investigation. There must be a hundred reasons for you to come to Madrid. Call me when you know which train you're on. I'll let you know where I'm going to be. And, Javier … don't tell anyone that you're coming to see me.’

It was strange how, even after all this time, there were still certain moments which demanded an immediate cigarette. He drove to the Santa Justa station, got caught in traffic and called Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita, said he needed to talk to him about Marisa Moreno's evidence. Did he have some time this evening? Zorrita was surprised; the case was locked off. Falcón said he had other things to discuss as well. They arranged to meet as close to 7 p.m. as possible.

A thought came to him as he replayed Yacoub's conversation. He wondered if this ‘business and personal’ problem was related to Yacoub's homosexuality. Although Yacoub was a happily married man with two children, he had this other secret life which, to the radical Islamic GICM, would be unacceptable.

The traffic opened up. Falcón moved on, put a call through to his second-in-command, Inspector José Luis Ramírez, whose usual stolid pugnacity had given way to a mixture of anger and excitement after viewing the disks they'd found in Vasili Lukyanov's briefcase.

‘You won't believe this shit,’ he said. ‘A councillor with two girls at the same time. A town planner giving it to a teenager in the ass. A building inspector snorting cocaine off a black girl's tits. And that's the mild stuff. This will crack the Costa del Sol wide open, if it gets out.’

‘Don't let it. You know the rules. Only one computer in our department –’

‘Relax, Javier. It's all under control.’

‘I'm not coming back in today,’ said Falcón. ‘Am I going to see you tomorrow?’

‘Elvira's out. It's quiet here. I'll be here in the morning and I'll stay if you want me to, but I'd rather not.’

‘Let's see how it goes,’ said Falcón. ‘I hope you can have a nice weekend.’

‘Hold on a sec, the GRECO guy, Vicente Cortés, was in here earlier looking for you. He wanted to tell you that he's had a report about a Russian who was found up in the hills behind San Pedro de Alcántara, with a nine-millimetre bullet in the back of his head. Alexei Somebody. A big friend of the guy you found on the motorway with a steel rod through his heart. Mean anything?’

‘More to Cortés than to me,’ said Falcón, and hung up.

At the Santa Justa station, Falcón found that the next AVE to Madrid was at 16.30, which would put him there just in time for his meeting with Inspector Jefe Zorrita. He called Yacoub on a phone in the station, trying to work out when he could get back to Seville and whether it would still be possible to make it to Consuelo's for dinner. Wanting that. Needing that. Even though progress was slow.

‘See Zorrita,’ said Yacoub. ‘I'll let you know where to go afterwards.’

Falcón ate something unmemorable, drank a beer, sunk a café solo and boarded the train. He wanted to sleep but there was too much brain interference. A woman sitting opposite him was talking to her daughter on her mobile. She was getting remarried and her daughter wasn't happy about it. Complicated lives, getting more complicated by the minute.

The prison governor called to say that Esteban Calderón had put in a request to see a psychologist.

The train slashed through the brown, parched plains of northern Andalucía.

Where had the rain gone?

‘He won't see the prison psychologist,’ said the governor. ‘He talks about this woman you know, but he can't remember her name.’

‘Alicia Aguado,’ said Falcón.

‘You're not the investigating officer in Señor Calderón's case, are you?’

‘No, but I'm seeing the officer who is this evening. I'll make sure he contacts you.’

He hung up. The woman opposite had finished speaking to her daughter. She spun the mobile on the table with a long, painted nail. She looked up. The sort of woman who always knows when she's under observation. Dangerous, save-my-life eyes, thought Falcón. The daughter was right to be concerned.

Up since before three and still not even lethargic. He closed his eyes to the dangerous ones opposite, but never reached below that confused state on the edge of oblivion. Now that he was worried he might not see her this evening, Consuelo surfaced in his mind. They'd first met five years ago when she'd been the prime suspect in the murder of her husband, the restaurateur Raúl Jiménez. A year later they'd met again and had a fling. Falcón had been hurt when she broke it off, but, as he'd recently discovered, Consuelo had had her own problems, which had sent her to the consulting rooms of the blind clinical psychologist, Alicia Aguado. Now, for the last three months, they'd been trying again. He could tell she was happier. She was easing him into her life gradually: only seeing him at weekends and quite often in family situations, with her sister and the children. He didn't mind that. His work had been punishing. Consuelo, too, was expanding the restaurant business left to her by Raúl Jiménez. Falcón enjoyed the feeling of belonging that he got from sitting at her family table. He wouldn't have minded more sex, but the food was always good, and in their moments alone they were getting on.

Thoughts of Consuelo always seemed to involve Yacoub. The two were inextricably linked in his mind. The one had led to the other. Falcón and Consuelo had first been drawn together by their fascination with the fate of Raúl Jiménez's youngest son from his first marriage, Arturo, who'd vanished in the mid 1960s never to be seen again. The boy had been kidnapped by a Moroccan businessman as an act of revenge against Raúl Jiménez, who had impregnated the businessman's twelve-year-old daughter and then fled back to Spain. After his brief affair with Consuelo, Falcón had set out to find Arturo, hoping that this would bring her back to him. It hadn't worked, but the reward had been to discover that Arturo had been brought up as one of the Moroccan businessman's sons and had even been given his family name to become Yacoub Diouri.

Their strange pasts: Falcón, who had been raised in Spain by Francisco Falcón only to find that his real father was a Moroccan artist, and Yacoub, born a Spaniard, forsaken by his father Raúl Jiménez, to be raised by his Moroccan abductor in Rabat, had been the bizarre foundation of their powerful friendship. And for the first time, perhaps as a result of his exhausted state, Falcón found his mildly confused mind reflecting, within the emotional compression of these unusual events, on what had happened to the child of the twelve-year-old daughter who'd been impregnated by Raúl Jiménez. He must ask Yacoub.

His mobile vibrating against his chest brought him back with a start to the dusty fields flashing past. It was his police mobile and he took the call without checking the name on the screen.

‘Listen, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón. Keep your nose out of things that don't concern you.’

‘Who is this?’

‘You heard.’

The line went dead. He checked the number. Withheld. He folded the phone away. The woman opposite was looking at him again. Across the aisle they were watching him, too. Paranoia, that horribly infectious disease, closed in. The voice on the mobile. Had there been an accent? How had they got his police number? Something a little more uncomfortable than satisfaction eased between his shoulder blades as he realized that, in putting pressure on Marisa Moreno, he must be on the right track. He'd been dredging his mind for something to talk about to Inspector Jefe Zorrita. He didn't want to annoy him with a bunch of hairline cracks in his cast-iron case. Now things were firming up in his mind.

The train eased into the Atocha station. Falcón hadn't arrived in Madrid on the AVE for some years and as he came into the main concourse he was distracted by the continuing memorial to the victims of the 11 March 2004 bombings. He was standing there, looking at the flowers and candles, when the woman from the train appeared by his side. This was too much, he thought.

‘Forgive me, now I know it must be you,’ she said. ‘You are Javier Falcón, aren't you? May I shake your hand and tell you how much I admire you for what you said on the television, about catching the perpetrators of the Seville bomb. Now I've seen you in the flesh, I know you won't let us down.’

He held out his hand, almost in a trance, thanked her. She smiled and brushed past him and in that moment he found that his other hand now contained a piece of folded paper. He wasn't sure who'd put it there, but he was sensible enough not to look at it. He left the station, picked up a cab to the Jefatura. The folded note gave an address just off the Plaza de la Paja in the Latina district and instructions to enter via the garage.

Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita welcomed him into his office. He was wearing a dark blue suit, a red tie and a white shirt in a way that hinted that minus the tie was about as informal as he ever got. He had his black hair combed back in rails to reveal a forehead with three lines drawn to a focal point above the bridge of his nose. It struck Falcón that there was no mistaking him for anything other than a cop. His hardness had been added in layers; the lacquer of experience. A meeting of the eyes, a handshake, dispelled any possibility that this person was a civil servant or businessman. He had seen it all, heard it all, and his whole family structure and belief system had kept him powerfully sane.

‘You look tired, Javier,’ he said, falling back into his chair. ‘It never stops, does it?’

They looked out of the window at the bright, sunlit world that kept them so fully employed. Falcón's eyes shifted back to the desk where there was a photo of Zorrita with his wife and three children.

‘I didn't want to do this over the phone,’ said Falcón. ‘I have enormous respect for the work you did last June under very difficult circumstances…’

‘What have you found?’ asked Zorrita, cutting through the preliminaries, interested to hear what he could possibly have missed.

‘As yet … nothing.’

Zorrita sat back, hands clasped over his flat, hard stomach. Not so concerned now that he knew he wasn't going to have to confront a failing on his part.

‘My interest in this case is not to get a wife-beater and suspected murderer off the hook,’ said Falcón.

‘That man is a cabrón,’ said Zorrita with profound distaste from behind his family photograph. ‘A nasty, arrogant… cabrón.’

‘He's beginning to recognize that himself,’ said Falcón.

‘I'll believe that when I see it,’ said Zorrita, who was a man incapable of complications in his love life, because there'd only ever been one woman in it.

‘The prison governor just called me to say that he's volunteered to see a shrink.’

‘No amount of talking, no amount of disentangling the shit that went on between him and his parents, no amount of “light” shed on “feelings”, will take away the fact that he beat that poor woman and then killed her and, if he's given half a chance, like all those other weak brutes, he'll do it again.’

‘This isn't what I've come to talk to you about today,’ said Falcón, seeing that this was something that stoked Zorrita up. ‘Would you mind if I laid out the basic problem I've got? Some of it you'll know, but other parts of it will be news to you.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Zorrita, still simmering.

‘As you know, the destruction of the pre-school and apartment block by the Seville bomb of 6th June, three months ago, came about as a result of the detonation, by a smaller device, of approximately one hundred kilos of hexogen. This high explosive was being stored by a logistics cell of the Moroccan terrorist group, the GICM, in the basement mosque of the building. The smaller device was comprised of Goma 2 Eco, the same explosive used in the 11th March bombings here in Madrid back in 2004. Prior to the explosion, the mosque was cased by two men masquerading as council inspectors, who, we believe, inserted some device in the fuse box, which blew and caused a power failure. These men have not been found, nor have the electricians who were brought in to repair the fuse box, restore power and do some other work, during which we believe they planted the Goma 2 Eco device in the false ceiling of the mosque.

‘The idea of the so-called Catholic conspiracy was to use this outrage to blame Islamic extremists, to make it look as if they had a plan to return Andalucía to the Muslim fold. The conspirators wanted to turn public opinion in favour of a small right-wing party called Fuerza Andalucía, who, in becoming the new partner of the ruling Partido Popular, would put the conspirators in control of the Andalucían state parliament. It didn't work and the alleged masterminds of the plot – César Benito, a board director of Horizonte, and Lucrecio Arenas, the ex-CEO of Banco Omni, who were Horizonte's bankers – were executed a few days after the bombing.’

‘What about the Islamic calling cards left near their bodies?’ asked Zorrita.

‘Nobody thinks that those killings were carried out by any radical Islamist group,’ said Falcón. ‘It's believed they were terminated by their co-conspirators.’

‘Who are, as yet, unknown.’

‘We're coming to that.’

‘What about the company that owned Horizonte?’ said Zorrita, squinting at the evening sunlight coming in through the window. ‘The media tried to make something of them – a couple of American Christian fundamentalists.’

‘I4IT own Horizonte. It's an American investment group run by two born-again Christians, called Cortland Fallenbach and Morgan Havilland. They are so far removed from this situation as to be completely untouchable and, for legal reasons, we have as yet been unable to gain access to I4IT's European offices here in Madrid.’

‘And presumably the lives of the Catholic Kings, as the media now calls César Benito and Lucrecio Arenas, have been taken apart.’

‘That has been, and still is, a time-consuming business. The CNI's banking and accounting department are working their way into the offshore world. Benito and Arenas were what are known in that world as Hen-Wees – High Net Worth Individuals. Their assets are hidden behind nominee directors and shareholders and unregistered offshore trusts. It will be pure luck if somebody manages to find something in the next six months that we can act upon.’

‘So you're blocked,’ said Zorrita. ‘And the whole of Spain knows what Javier Falcón is after.’

‘I think I only want what any police officer in my position would want,’ said Falcón, leaning forward in his chair. ‘To catch the people responsible for casing that mosque and planting the Goma 2 Eco device, along with the bosses who ordered them to do it.’

Zorrita held up his hand to calm Falcón down, nodded his agreement.

‘You're not getting anything from the suspects in your custody and the two ringleaders have been “executed”,’ said Zorrita. ‘So where else have you got to go?’

‘I've decided to take a long look at the violence,’ said Falcón. ‘Where do a bunch of conspirators, sophisticated men like Lucrecio Arenas and César Benito, access that sort of violence?’

‘As you say, every news channel and paper, apart from the ABC, are calling this the Catholic Conspiracy. What with the national obsession with Opus Dei, the PR campaign by the Church to counteract all this has been unprecedented,’ said Zorrita. ‘Do Opus Dei have an Improvised Explosive Device division?’

The two men smiled at each other.

‘What we do know from our suspects in custody and other inquiries is that Arenas's motivation was not his Catholic beliefs,’ said Falcón. ‘The Hen-Wee spoke from his heart.’

‘And César Benito was in construction,’ said Zorrita.

‘Where there's always large amounts of black money, which can be hidden away in the offshore world.’

‘But you're not getting anywhere by following the money,’ said Zorrita.

‘Only that there's undoubtedly money-laundering involved and that both men were well set up in property in the Costa del Sol.’

‘The Russian mafia,’ said Zorrita. ‘I know it's a knee-jerk reaction when you hear the words “money-laundering” and “Costa del Sol” in the same sentence, but after the recent Marbella town council scandal…’

Falcón nodded.

‘And you think they're going to be easier to penetrate than the offshore world?’ said Zorrita.

‘Let's just take a look at the violence,’ said Falcón, holding up a finger. ‘In that period around the 6th June bombing there were five expressions of violence. The first was the murder of Tateb Hassani, who was vital to the conspiracy for his drafting in Arabic script of the extremists' plans for taking over Andalucía. He was found on the Seville dump, poisoned and mutilated, on the morning of the explosion. Murdered because a) he knew too much, b) he would always be a vulnerable point to the conspiracy and c) it got everybody's hands dirty. The second expression of violence was the bomb itself which, as I said, was designed to point the finger at Muslim extremism whilst increasing the prestige of Fuerza Andalucía, making them the preferred partners of the ruling Partido Popular.’

‘The third, presumably, was Esteban Calderón's murder of his wife,’ said Zorrita, ‘which derailed the investigation into the Seville bombing.’

‘And four and five were the executions of Lucrecio Arenas and César Benito,’ said Falcón. ‘They had to be killed once we'd caught the other half of the conspiracy, because there were direct links between them. It would only be a matter of time before Arenas and Benito gave up the bombers they had employed.’

‘So there's a clear motive in every case.’

‘Except Calderón,’ said Falcón.

‘He was beating her, that was clear, and he's never denied it,’ said Zorrita. ‘If he didn't kill her, then why didn't he just call the police when he discovered her dead body in their apartment? Why did he try to dispose of her body in the river?’

‘He made a serious error of judgement.’

‘You're telling me.’

‘Another angle,’ said Falcón. ‘What was the worst thing that could have happened to our investigation of the Seville bombing?’

‘I agree, losing Calderón at that stage was a disaster for you.’

‘He was at the top of his game,’ said Falcón. ‘Giving good direction. Keeping the media away from my squad, the counter-terrorism guys and the CNI. If you were at the zenith of your career, would you choose that moment to murder your wife?’

‘He chose that moment to start abusing her.’

‘And that was important.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I think that when Marisa Moreno saw Inés in the Murillo Gardens she noticed somehow that she was being abused,’ said Falcón. ‘I've just been speaking to her, getting her family background. Her natural mother “disappeared” in Cuba. Her attitude to her dead father was not exactly respectful. He was, like Calderón, an inveterate womanizer. She had more time for her Sevillana stepmother than she did for him.’

‘This isn't going to stand up anywhere near a court, Javier.’

‘I know; all I'm trying to do here is find weaknesses. The only killing about which there's a very slight doubt in my mind is that of Inés.’

‘But not in my mind, Javier.’

‘Two hours after I'd been to see Marisa this afternoon I got an anonymous phone call telling me to keep my nose out of things that were not my concern.’

‘It wasn't from me,’ said Zorrita, deadpan.

They laughed.

‘What else did Marisa tell you?’ asked Zorrita. ‘You must have something more than that.’

‘I decided to go to see Marisa to ram a stick in the wasps' nest, to see what happened,’ said Falcón. ‘The only thing I had to go on was something one of my officers found while trying to dig up some dirt on her.’

‘Marisa had no criminal record, I know that,’ said Zorrita.

‘The only thing my officer found was that Marisa had reported her sister missing.’

‘When?’

‘Eight years ago.’

‘You really are clutching at straws, Javier.’

Falcón was tempted to tell Zorrita about Marisa's wood carving, but another glance at the family photo on the desktop persuaded him otherwise. He felt weak in front of Zorrita's steadiness, but still resisted the temptation to point up all the other little flaws he'd found.

‘Marisa is no fool,’ said Falcón. ‘If you despised your womanizing father, would you be drawn to an incorrigible womanizer yourself?’

‘I doubt it would be the first time it had happened,’ said Zorrita, still feeling as solid as a rock.

‘Her sister went missing again, but this time she was over eighteen.’

‘So Marisa didn't go to the police.’

‘Her sister is the only family Marisa's got. Father, mother and stepmother are dead. Would you just shrug your shoulders if your sister ran off again?’

‘If I didn't care, yes,’ said Zorrita.

‘She cares,’ said Falcón.

‘You've still got a long way to go with this, Javier.’

‘I know,’ said Falcón. ‘I just wanted to ask you if you'd mind me digging around.’

‘Dig away, Javier. The way you're going, you'll come out in Buenos Aires.’

6

La Latina district, Madrid – Friday, 15th September 2006,19.45 hrs

The early-evening sun was still bright, but low in the sky so it was already dark in the cavernous Madrid streets. Falcón was sitting in the back of a patrol car, which Zorrita had arranged for him. He felt foolish as they left the Jefatura and he lay down across the back seat. The driver saw him out of the corner of his eye. Falcon told him to keep looking straight ahead.

The driver dropped him off at the Ópera metro station and Falcón took the one-stop ride to La Latina. He checked the other occupants of the metro carriage. He was still smarting at Zorrita's scorn for his theory on Marisa Moreno. Was all this getting out of control in his mind? Everything looked dangerously plausible at three in the morning, but laughable by ten. And did he really have to be this careful about his assignation with Yacoub? Were there actually people on every street corner looking out for him? Once your mind had been proven unstable there was always a doubt, and not just to outsiders.

A car went into the garage of the apartment block on Calle Alfonso VI and Falcón ducked in behind it as the door was closing. He walked down into the dark, took the lift up to the third floor, stepped out into an empty landing, rang the buzzer and waited. He sensed the eyeball on the other side of the peep-hole. The door clicked open. Yacoub beckoned him in. They went through the customary pleasantries; Falcón asked after Yacoub's wife, Yousra, and his two children, Abdullah and Leila. There was nodding and thanks, but Yacoub was strangely subdued.

A full ashtray was the centrepiece of the living room, with a smoking, filterless cigarette on its edge. The curtains were drawn. A single lamp in the corner half-lit the room. Yacoub was wearing faded jeans and a white shirt untucked. He was barefoot and he'd shaved his long hair off to a short stubble, which he kept dusting with the palm of his hand as if he'd only just had it done. His head now matched his beard. His eyes seemed deeper set and darker, as if some wariness had put him in retreat to a safer place. He sat on the sofa with the ashtray at his side and smoked enthusiastically, with lips that twitched more than Falcón remembered.

‘I made some tea,’ he said. ‘You're all right with tea, aren't you?’

‘You always ask me that,’ said Falcón, throwing off his jacket, rolling up his shirt sleeves. ‘You know I'm fine with tea.’

‘Sorry about the heat,’ said Yacoub. ‘I don't want to turn on the air-con. I shouldn't be here. I'm hiding.’

‘Who from?’

‘Everybody. My people. Your people. The world,’ he said, and, as an afterthought, ‘Maybe myself, too.’

He poured the tea, stood up, paced around the room to bring his nerves back under control.

‘So, nobody knows about this meeting,’ said Falcón, encouraging Yacoub to open up.

‘This is just you and me,’ said Yacoub. ‘The only man I can trust. The only one I can talk to. The only one I can rely on not to use what has happened against me.’

‘You're nervous. I can see that.’

‘Nervous,’ he said, nodding. ‘That's why I like you, Javier. You keep me calm. I'm not just nervous. I'm paranoid. I'm totally fucking paranoid.’

These last words were accompanied by a ferocious sideways slash of the air in front of him. Falcón tried to remember whether he'd ever heard Yacoub swear.

Yacoub then launched himself into a long rant about the lengths to which he'd had to go in order to arrive unseen in this apartment.

‘You were careful, weren't you, Javier?’ he said at the end of it all.

Falcón reciprocated with his own procedure, which seemed to have a mildly calming influence on Yacoub, who listened and gnawed at a hangnail. Then he lit another cigarette, sipped his tea, which was too hot, sat down on the sofa, and stood up again.

‘The last time you got like this was after those four days in Paris,’ said Falcón. ‘But you were OK. You were taken back into the fold.’

‘My cover's not blown,’ said Yacoub, quickly. ‘No, there's no problem with that. It's just that they've found the perfect way to keep me … close.’

‘Keep you close?’ said Falcón. ‘You mean in the sense of not straying? Does that mean they suspect you?’

‘Suspect is too strong a word,’ said Yacoub, tucking his hand under his armpit and chopping the air with his cigarette. ‘They like me. They need me. But they are naturally unsure of me. It's the part of my brain that isn't Moroccan that makes them nervous.’

‘We're Andalucíans, Yacoub, same people, same Berber genetic marker,’ said Falcón.

‘The problem for them is that they can't rely on me to think in a certain way. I'm not consistently Moroccan,’ said Yacoub. ‘And that makes them uneasy.’

Falcón waited. If he'd been with another European he'd have asked the question: ‘Is this something to do with you being gay?’ But he had the same problem that the radical Islamist group, the GICM, had with Yacoub, but the other way round; Falcón couldn't rely on him to think like a European. His mentality for argument was more Moroccan. Direct questioning didn't work.

‘Before Friday noon prayers last week, Abdullah, my son, came to see me,’ said Yacoub. ‘I was alone in my study. He closed the door and came to the edge of my desk. He said: “I am going to tell you something that will make you very happy and very proud.” I was confused. The boy is only eighteen. I didn't remember any talk of a girl and, anyway, this would not be the way for that sort of thing to happen. I stood up as if I was about to hear important news. He came over to my side of the desk and told me that he had become a mujahideen and embraced me as a fellow warrior.’

‘The GICM have recruited him?’ said Falcón, cannoning out of his armchair.

Yacoub nodded, drew on the cigarette, took the smoke deep into his lungs and then held open his arms in a gesture of total helplessness.

‘Directly after the Friday noon prayers, he left to continue his training.’

‘Continue?’

‘Exactly that,’ said Yacoub. ‘The boy's been lying to me. He's taken four weekends away in the last two months. I thought he was going to see his friends in Casablanca, but he's been out in the country on military-training exercises.’

‘How was he recruited?’

Yacoub shrugged, shook his head. Falcón doubted that he was going to hear the precise truth.

‘He's been working with me at the factory, just temporarily before he goes to university at the end of the month. We go to a mosque in Salé. There are … elements there. I thought he was steering clear of them … clearly, he wasn't.’

‘Have you spoken to anyone about this?’

‘You are the first outsider.’

‘What about in the GICM?’

‘The military commander is not there at the moment. Even when he is, he's not easy to get to see. I've only conveyed my gratitude via an intermediary.’

‘Your gratitude?’

‘What was I supposed to do? I should be happy and proud,’ he said, and sank back down on to the sofa, buried his face in his hands and sobbed twice.

‘And you assume that this has been done to keep you “close”, to control you, to make them feel less uneasy about you.’

‘Nobody but the maddest radical would want their son to become a mujahideen … potentially a suicide bomber. All this talk you hear on TV in France or England about honour and paradise and seventy-two virgins, it's just… it's just bullshit. You might find that sort of thinking in Gaza, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, but you won't find it in Rabat – not in my circle.’

‘Let's think this through,’ said Falcón. ‘What are they trying to achieve through this manoeuvre? If it's to keep you close, then…’

‘They want to infiltrate my household,’ said Yacoub. And then, touching his temple: ‘They want to infiltrate my mind.’

‘They're not convinced that they can control you, so they set about controlling all those around you?’

‘Their whole reason for being interested in me is that they know that I can live “convincingly” in both worlds: Islamic and secular, East and West. It doesn't mean they like it. They didn't like the fact that my sixteen-year-old daughter, Leila, was wearing a swimsuit on the beach.’

‘They were watching you on the beach?’

‘When we were on holiday in Essaouira, they were watching us, Javier,’ said Yacoub. ‘Abdullah has stopped playing his music, which I thought a blessing at first, but now I'm desperate for him to be normal. And, can you believe this, he reads the Qur'an. He doesn't play computer games any more. I had a look at the history on his browser … it's all Islamic websites, Palestinian politics – Hamas versus Fatah, the Muslim Brotherhood…’

‘Where is this influence coming from?’

Another shrug.

Does he know? Why isn't he telling me? thought Falcón. Is it someone close to him? Someone in his extended family? When Yacoub had been recruited, he'd said he'd never give up a family member.

‘They find their way in,’ said Yacoub. ‘And you know, until Abdullah came to me with his news last Friday, I didn't think these developments were such a bad thing. It's good for teenagers to have something serious in their lives, something other than violent video games and hip-hop … but mujahideen?’

‘I know it's difficult for you to be calm about this,’ said Falcón. ‘But there's no immediate danger if, as you say, they're trying to keep you close. We have time.’

‘They've taken my boy away from me,’ said Yacoub, who shaded his eyes and sobbed again, before coming back at Falcón, angry. ‘He's in one of their camps. That's 24/7. When they're not running over hills and assault courses, they're doing weapons training and bomb-making. And when that's all over, they're plugged into radical Islam. I have no idea what is going to come back to me, but I'm sure it won't be the Abdullah I knew. It will be their Abdullah. And then how will I live? Looking over my shoulder at my own son?’

The enormity of Yacoub's predicament hit Falcón hard. Three months ago he'd asked Yacoub to make what should have been a personal step towards embracing radical Islam. He had been stunned at the rapidity with which Yacoub had been taken deep inside the GICM organization. It could only mean that he had something that they wanted. And now the GICM were protecting themselves and it meant enclosing not just Yacoub but his whole family as well. And, worse still, there was no way out. Radical Islam was not something you changed your mind about. Once admitted to the close fraternity and their secrets there was no walking away. They wouldn't let you. It wasn't so different – and Falcón couldn't believe he was thinking this – to being part of a mafia family.

‘You don't have to say anything, Javier. There's nothing to say,’ said Yacoub. ‘I just needed to tell someone and you're the only person I've got.’

‘You don't want me to talk to Pablo at the CNI about this?’

‘Pablo? What happened to Juan?’ said Yacoub. ‘Juan was the old, experienced guy.’

‘Juan was given early retirement last week,’ said Falcón. ‘He'd blown it over Madrid and their assessment of his work in the Seville bombing wasn't so good either. Pablo's good. Forty-two years old. Very experienced in North Africa. Totally committed.’

‘No, Javier, you must not tell anyone,’ said Yacoub, the flat of his hand taking on the threat of a chopping blade. ‘If you do they will only use it. That is how these intelligence people think: He's vulnerable, let's use it. You won't use it. I know that. And that's why you always have to be there between me and them. You are, and will be, the only one who truly understands my situation.’

Something like a cramp started up in Falcón's guts. This was different to the dead weight of his responsibility in this matter. That was just a few more rocks in the already unwieldy rucksack. This was the knot of fear making itself felt. Now he was being forced into the unique position of having to decide whether Yacoub was reliable or not. Given the choice between his son, Abdullah, and the anonymous face of the Spanish intelligence agency, there would be no doubt who Yacoub would choose. He'd said it from the very beginning and the CNI had accepted those terms.

‘What can I do to make your situation any easier?’ asked Falcón.

‘You're a good friend, Javier. The only true friend I've got,’ said Yacoub. ‘You will be the one to help me with the plan to save my son.’

‘I doubt he could walk away from being a mujahideen very easily, especially after he's been to one of their camps.’

‘I think the only way would be for him to be arrested on his way to a mission,’ said Yacoub.

‘Those would be extraordinary circumstances,’ said Falcón. ‘For the GICM to let you know what was being planned … unless you were directly involved.’

‘There you have it, Javier,’ said Yacoub. ‘It would also depend very much on whether my survival is considered critical.’

Falcón and Yacoub looked at each other for some time, smoke steadily rising from Yacoub's fingers and dissipating over his shaven head.

‘What?’ asked Yacoub.

‘I can't believe you said those words.’

‘We were naïve, Javier. We have absurdly idealistic minds. It was no accident that you were chosen to recruit me. All these agencies have people specifically employed to size you up, to perceive whether you have the necessary strengths and weaknesses for the work required of you. And I'm not talking about whether you're a good manager of people or handle stress well, but whether, under the right circumstances, you could torture a man to get the necessary information or …’

‘Or be ingenuous enough to be completely malleable, or perhaps, utterly predictable?’ said Falcón.

‘The CNI saw in you a need. They knew your history. They knew that you no longer viewed the world in the blinkered way that most people see it, that you demanded a different perspective. They fed it to you. You fed it to me. We didn't know the sort of people we were dealing with. Possibly we imagined that they might be like ourselves, and we could enter their world beneath the surface of everyday life and change things. And what happens? We meet completely ruthless minds who beat us into corners and force us to behave – or else.’

Falcón looked around the darkened room. Their situation – meeting in an anonymous Madrid apartment to discuss unseen dramatic developments – was so far removed from real life that he was suddenly desperate for the surface; but like the diver surrounded by sharks, who still needed to decompress, he had to hold the line, not panic.

‘You envisage a situation where you will give us information about an imminent attack, which will enable us to intercept Abdullah's group and arrest him, but…’

‘It will irrevocably undermine my position in the GICM and I will be immediately executed.’

‘No,’ said Falcón.

‘Yes,’ said Yacoub. ‘It's the only way.’

‘But you realize all that will happen is that Abdullah will end up in jail, where he will gravitate to the radical elements which exist in Spanish prisons, and he will come out even more zealous than he went in. Having done his time he will be welcomed back into the group, and all you will have achieved is your own death,’ said Falcón. ‘You have to let me draw on some experience in this matter. Pablo and others in the CNI must have come across this type of situation before. They will have ideas on how to handle it.’

‘You're my friend,’ said Yacoub. ‘I'm in this because of you. By that I mean I wanted to do this and you were the only one I could trust. I don't want you to start talking to others. As soon as you do that, I lose control and they start to run the situation; and believe me, they will look after their own interests, not mine. Before you know it, we'll be in a hall of mirrors, not knowing which way to turn. And this is my son, Javier. I can't allow him to be sucked in, manipulated, turned into a piece of the game, a fanatic's mass murderer, who will imagine in his adolescent mind that in killing and maiming…’

‘Yacoub, you're letting this get out of control in your mind.’

‘This is my Moroccan side,’ he said, leaping to his feet and pacing around the room, scratching at childhood scars on his head which had been laid bare by the severity of his haircut. ‘I get very emotional. I can't seem to calm myself down, or rather, I can calm down. I do calm down. And you know how I do it?’

Falcón waited for him to come back into his line of sight, but Yacoub leaned over the back of the armchair, his face so close the tobacco breath was sharp in Falcón's nostrils. ‘I imagine Abdullah safe … away from all this … this madness. I imagine myself under a funeral shroud and able to see the sun coming through the cotton, the breeze playing over the material, and I am at peace for the first time in my life.’

‘Try an alternative vision, Yacoub. Don't be so fatalistic. Imagine yourself at home with Abdullah, his wife and your grandchildren on your lap. Try achieving that instead of your death and his incarceration.’

‘I would, if it wasn't such an absurd dream, an impossible ideal, Javier,’ said Yacoub. ‘The boy is already a part of their organization. He has no thoughts for girls, wives, children. Normal life has become a miserable existence to him. He despises his carefree childhood. He mourns the lost hours spent on his Gameboy. His whole adolescence is a tragedy of unconsciousness to him now. There's no question of bringing him back. The irony of it all is that, in joining himself to this new world, he has, to me, become a lost soul. He wanders a world of death, destruction and martyrdom. While my stomach heaves at the thought of a market in Baghdad with two hundred dead women and children, the whole area a blackened, smoking charnel house, Abdullah smiles beatifically at the imagined grace of the martyr who has committed this godless atrocity.’

‘So you've seen him again since he went to this training camp a week ago?’ asked Falcón, confused at how Yacoub could have known all this.

‘The purpose of admitting me to the GICM in the first place was primarily to make one of their international attacks possible,’ said Yacoub inconsequentially, buying himself some time. ‘This means, as you know, I have unprecedented access to the military wing of the GICM. As soon as Abdullah told me his news, it was arranged for me to be shown his training camp. I spent some time there. We had a couple of evenings together in which I was able to see the profound change wrought in his young mind.’

‘But you didn't manage to see the commander of the military wing?’

‘No, as I told you, he wasn't there,’ said Yacoub, turning his back on Falcón to stare at the drawn curtains. ‘I had to convey my gratitude for this honour through one of his officers.’

Was that how it happened? thought Falcón as he joined Yacoub by the window. They embraced and he caught sight of his own confused face over Yacoub's shoulder in the only mirror in the room.

‘My friend,’ said Yacoub, his hot breath on Falcón's neck. ‘You know me so well.’

Do I? thought Falcón. Do I?

7

AVE from Madrid to Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 22.00 hrs

If on the train journey from Seville to Madrid he'd been slightly feverish with paranoia, then the ride back saw a serious multiplication of the uncertainty parasites in his bloodstream. The darkness rushing past outside meant that all he could see was his disconcerted visage reflected back to him and, with the movement of the train, it seemed to tremble like his vacillating mind.

Not only had Yacoub forbidden him to talk to any of the intelligence officers from the CNI, but he had also already set in motion a plan for extracting Abdullah from the ranks of the GICM. Yacoub had begged the senior officers in the military wing to ask their commander to send his son on a mission as soon as possible, with the condition that he be responsible for its planning, logistics and execution.

‘Why did you do that?’ asked Falcón. ‘The one thing we need in this situation is time.’

‘More important than time, at this stage,’ Yacoub said, ‘is to show them how honoured I am that my son has been chosen. Delay would have meant that suspicion would have come down heavily on me and I would have been excluded from my son's future. This was the only way for me to keep my foot in the door.’

The high command were thinking about it. Yacoub had told Falcón that the following morning he would be flying back to Rabat, where he expected to be told of their decision. None of this was exactly calming, but it wasn't the cause of Falcón's paranoia. That had started with those cramps of fear in his gut. He'd tried to ignore them, like the man with acute appendicitis who'd convinced himself it was just wind, but they'd made him very apprehensive. One moment he was sitting in front of a man who'd become his closest friend, with whom he shared a level of intimacy he'd only ever experienced with the man he'd believed to be his father – Francisco Falcón. And the next there was a person he no longer completely trusted. Doubt had been interposed. That last embrace in front of the closed curtains had been an attempt to reinforce the relationship, but it was as if some impenetrable barrier, like a Kevlar skin, had come between them.

Perhaps that had been the fatal flaw; the only other time he'd experienced this level of intimacy, it had been based on lies and fraudulence: his father had tricked the five-year-old Javier into becoming the agent of his own mother's death. But how could it have been so quick with Yacoub? Suspicion had ripped through him. But why? He replayed the meeting in minute detail, almost frame by frame, to extract every nuance.

The haircut was part of it, or had it become part of it? Was that retrospective suspicion? Yacoub had always liked to keep his luxuriant hair long. Maybe he was just getting into role. In fact, before the haircut was the apartment. He hadn't asked him about it. Whose was it? He'd have to find that out. He called an old detective friend from his Madrid days who was in a bar on his way home. Falcón gave him the address, told him to keep it to himself. He wanted the owner's identity and background and he was to speak to Falcón only, no messages left in the office.

‘I'm not even going to ask,’ said his friend, who told him he'd probably have to wait until Monday now.

Headlights wavered in the blackness of the countryside and swung away. Someone across the aisle was studying him. He got up, walked down the train to the bar, ordered a beer. What else? He took out his notebook, jotted down his thoughts. Trust. Yacoub had kept on at Falcón about how much he trusted him: ‘The only man I can trust … You always have to be between me and them …’ That was where the cramps had started and when he'd first questioned Yacoub's reliability. ‘You're a good friend. The only true friend I've got.’ It was that line which had allowed the ugliest thought to enter his head: Is he using me? Falcón rewound to a question he'd asked: ‘So where's this influence coming from?’ The shrug. Had someone got to Yacoub? He knew the GICM didn't like his relationship with the inspector jefe. Were they breaking it up, and using young Abdullah to do it?

The notes streamed out of his pen. The swearing. The plan. There was no plan, but Yacoub wanted him involved. Why? ‘You're my friend. I'm in this because of you.’ He'd qualified that blame immediately, but there was no doubt that he wanted Falcón to feel culpable. Then there was Yacoub's vision of his own death. Had he overdone the self-pity? Finally, there was the slip. Was it a slip to reveal that he'd seen Abdullah since he'd gone to the training camp? Yacoub was under pressure. The stress of it created emotional extremes and mistakes were made.

He closed the notebook, took a swig of beer. He breathed back a sense of disequilibrium that he couldn't put his finger on. How do you describe that feeling when it occurs to you that your brother might be exploiting you? There was no word for it. It couldn't be that it was so rare that they hadn't bothered to invent it. People were always exploited and betrayed by those closest to them. But what was the word for the feeling of the victim? The Americans have a good word: suckered. Because the feeling was one of being drained, having the marrow sucked out.

He took out his mobile, and it wasn't just for the usual banal exchange that was played out in trains all over the world; he needed to hear the sound of a voice that he believed in and who believed in him. He called Consuelo. Darío, her youngest boy, the eight-year-old, picked up the phone.

‘Hola, Darío, how's it going?’ he said.

‘Javi-i-i,’ screamed Darío. ‘Mamá, mamá, it's Javi.’

‘Bring the phone to the kitchen,’ said Consuelo.

‘Are you good, Darío?’ asked Falcón.

‘I'm good, Javi. Why aren't you here? You should be here. Mamá's been waiting and waiting…’

‘Bring that phone here, Darío!’

He heard the boy sprinting down the corridor. The phone changed hands.

‘I don't want you thinking I'm sitting around here like some lovesick teenager,’ said Consuelo. ‘Darío's been desperate for you to get here.’

‘I'm on the AVE and running late.’

‘He won't go to bed until you arrive, and we're going shopping tomorrow. New football boots.’

‘I've got to see someone in town before I come out to your place,’ said Falcón. ‘It's going to be after midnight before I get to you.’

‘Maybe we should have dinner out,’ said Consuelo. ‘That's a better idea. I really want him to go to bed now. I'll take him next door. He's in love with their sixteen-year-old daughter. Let's do that, Javier.’

‘Tell him I'll have a kick around with him in the garden tomorrow morning.’

A hesitation.

‘You think you're getting lucky tonight?’ she said quietly, teasing.

They hadn't discussed his staying over. It was part of the new coming together. No assumptions.

‘I've been praying for luck,’ he said. ‘Has Our Lady been good to me?’

Another hesitation.

‘I'll tell Darío,’ she said. ‘But once you've made a promise like that, you've got to be prepared for him to jump on your head at eight in the morning.’

‘Where shall we meet?’

She said she'd arrange everything. All he had to do was meet her in the Bar La Eslava on the Plaza San Lorenzo and they'd take it from there.

Calm restored. He nearly felt like a family man. Consuelo's two older boys, Ricardo and Matías, hadn't been so interested in him. They were fourteen and twelve. But Darío was still keen on the idea of a dad. The boy had brought him closer to Consuelo. She could see that Darío liked him and, although she would never say it, Darío was her favourite. He also distracted them from the seriousness of what they were trying to do, made them feel more casual, less anxious.

And with that thought, sleep finally claimed him.

He woke up sitting in the carriage in the Santa Justa station, with people shuffling out of the train. It was just after 11.30. He left the station, drove to Calle Hiniesta. Falcón wanted to have Marisa sleeping uneasily with the knowledge that after their chat this afternoon he'd taken an anonymous threatening phone call and that he wasn't scared by it.

As he parked at the back of the Santa Isabel church he saw that the light was on in her penthouse apartment, the plants were lit up on her roof terrace. He pressed her buzzer.

‘I'm coming down,’ she said.

‘This is Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón,’ he said.

‘What are you doing here?’ she said, annoyed. ‘I'm on my way out.’

‘We can discuss this in the street, if that's what you want.’

She buzzed the door open. He took the small lift up to her floor. Marisa let him in, closing down her mobile, nervous, as if she'd just asked her date to delay his arrival unless he wanted to meet the police.

‘Going somewhere special?’ asked Falcón, taking in her long, tight turquoise dress, her coppery hair down to her shoulders, the gold earrings, the twenty-odd gold and silver bangles on her arm, an expensive scent.

‘A gallery opening and then dinner.’

She closed the door behind him. Her hands were uneasy at her sides. The bangles rattled. She didn't ask him to sit down.

‘I thought we had a long talk this afternoon,’ she said. ‘You took up an hour of my work-time and now you've moved in on my relaxation…’

‘I had a call from a friend of yours this afternoon.’

‘A friend of mine?’

‘He told me to keep my nose out of your business.’

Her lips opened. No sound came out.

‘It was a couple of hours after we talked,’ said Falcón. ‘I was on my way up to Madrid to see another friend of yours.’

‘I don't know anyone in Madrid.’

‘Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita?’

‘There's the confusion,’ said Marisa, dredging up some boldness. ‘He's no friend of mine.’

‘He's as interested as I am in your story,’ said Falcón. ‘He's told me I can dig away to my heart's content.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she said, her brow puckering with fury. ‘Story? What story?’

‘We all have stories,’ said Falcón. ‘We all have versions of these stories to suit every occasion. We've got one version of your story, which has put Esteban Calderón in prison. Now we're going to find the real version, and it'll be interesting to see where that puts you.’

Even with the armour of her beauty, her lithe sexuality encased in the aquamarine sheath, he could see that he'd got under her skin. The fever had started. The uncertainty behind the big, brown eyes. His work was done. Now it was time to get out.

‘Tell your friends,’ said Falcón, making powerful eye contact as he walked past her to the door, ‘that I'll be waiting for their next call.’

‘What friends?’ she said to the back of his head. ‘I don't have any friends.’

On his way out of the apartment he looked back at her, standing alone in the middle of the room. He believed her. And for some reason he couldn't help but pity her, too.

Back in his car he wanted to hang on to see who turned up to take her out. Then he saw her on the roof terrace, looking down at him with the mobile to her ear. He didn't want to keep Consuelo waiting. He pulled away, drove back home where he had a quick shower to try to wash off all that police work. He changed his clothes and ten minutes later he was on his way to the Plaza San Lorenzo. The cab dropped him off in the square, which was full of people ambling about in the warm night under the high trees, with the impressive terracotta brick façade of the church of Jesús del Gran Poder behind. His police mobile vibrated in his pocket. He took the call without thinking, resigned to his fate.

‘Listen,’ said the voice. ‘You'll realize when you've gone too far with this because something will happen. And when it does, you will know that you are to blame. You will recognize it. But there'll be no discussion and no negotiation because, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, you will never hear from us again.’

Dead. No number. He wrote the words he'd heard in a notebook he always carried with him. Having just seen Marisa he'd expected that call, but now that it had come he did not feel strengthened by it. Its psychology had unnerved him. That was the calculation of the voice, but his anticipation of it should have protected him. It hadn't. Like a probing question from the blind psychologist, Alicia Aguado, the voice had lifted the lid on something and, despite not knowing its precise nature, he dreaded it coming to the surface.

The Bar La Eslava was packed. Consuelo was standing outside, smoking and sipping a glass of manzanilla. Sevillanos were not known for respecting other people's personal space, but they'd made an exception for Consuelo. Her charisma seemed to create a forcefield. Her short blonde hair stood out under the street lights. She made the simple wild pink mini-dress she was wearing look even more expensive than it was and her high heels made her slim, strong legs look even longer. Falcón was glad he'd taken the time to shower and change. He walked through the crowd towards her and she didn't see him until he was on her.

They kissed. He tasted her peachy lipstick, put his hands around her slim waist, felt her contours fitting into his. He inhaled her smell, felt the sharp prick of her diamond-stud earring in his cheek as his lips found her neck.

‘Are you all right?’ she said, running a hand up the back of his head so that electricity earthed through his heels.

‘More than all right now,’ he said, as her hands travelled the outline of his shoulders and his blood went live. Her thigh slipped between his legs. His stomach leapt, cock stirred, perfume shunted into his head and he became human for the first time that day.

They parted, feeling the eyes of the people around them.

‘I'll get a beer,’ he said.

‘I've booked us a table across the road,’ she said.

The bar was heaving and noisier than the trading floor of a metal exchange. He fought his way in. He knew the owner, who was serving. A guy he didn't immediately recognize grabbed him around the shoulders. ‘Hola, Javier. Que tal?’ The owner handed him a beer, refused payment. Two women kissed him on his way through. He was sure he knew one of them. He squeezed back out into the street.

‘I didn't know you were going to Madrid today,’ said Consuelo.

She knew Yacoub, but not that he was Falcón's spy.

‘I had a meeting with another cop about all that stuff in June,’ said Falcón, keeping it vague, but still stumbling around in the memory of his meeting with Yacoub, Marisa, that second phone call.

‘You were looking as if you'd had a hard day.’

He took out his mobile, turned it off.

‘That helps,’ he said, sipping his beer. ‘How about you?’

‘I had some interesting conversations with a couple of estate agents and I had a session with Alicia.’

‘How's that going?’

‘I'm nearly sane,’ she said, smiling, blue eyes widening hysterically. ‘Only another year to go.’

They laughed.

‘I saw Esteban Calderón today.’

‘I'm not as nuts as he is,’ said Consuelo.

‘The prison governor called me on the way up to Madrid to say he'd put in a request to see Alicia.’

‘I don't know if even she could sort out his madness,’ said Consuelo.

‘That was the first time I'd seen him since it happened,’ said Falcón. ‘He didn't look good.’

‘If what he's got in his mind has started to come out in his face, he should be looking terrible,’ she said.

‘Are you moving?’ he asked.

‘Moving?’

‘The estate agents,’ said Falcón. ‘You're not bored of Santa Clara already?’

‘My business expansion plans.’

‘Seville not big enough for all your ideas?’

‘Maybe not, but how about Madrid or Valencia? What do you think?’

‘Will you still talk to me when you've been photographed by Hola?’ he said. ‘Consuelo Jiménez in her glorious home, surrounded by her beautiful children.’

‘And my lover … the cop?’ she said, looking at him sadly. ‘I might have to let you go unless you learn how to sail a yacht.’

That was the first time she'd called him her lover and she knew it. He finished his beer, took her empty glass and put them on a ledge. She took his arm and they walked across the square to the restaurant.

They knew her in the restaurant, which despite its Arabic name had a neo-classical feel to it – all pillars and marble and strong white nappery, with no such thing as a round plate. The chef came out to greet her and two glasses of cava, on the house, arrived at their table. There was a lull in the restaurant hubbub as the other diners looked at them, recognized their faces from distant scandalous news stories; moments later they were forgotten and the cacophony resumed. Consuelo ordered for both of them. He liked it when she took over. They drank the cava. He wished they were at home and he could lean over and kiss her throat. They talked about the future, which was a good sign.

The starter arrived. Three tapas on an oblong plate: a tiny filo pastry money bag containing soft goat's cheese, a crisp toast of duck liver set in sticky sweet quince jam, and a shot-glass of white garlic and almond soup with an orb of melon ice cream floating at the top and flakes of wind-dried tuna nestling in the bottom. Each one went off in his mouth like a firecracker.

‘This is oral sex,’ said Consuelo.

Plates were removed with their empty flutes. A bottle of 2004 Pesquera from the Ribeiro del Duero was opened, decanted and glasses filled with the dark red wine. They talked about the impossibility of going back to live in Madrid after the lotus life of Seville.

She'd ordered him duck breast, which was presented in a fan with a mound of couscous. Consuelo had the sea bass with crisp silver skin in a delicate white sauce. He felt her calf rub against his and they decided to forgo the dessert and get a taxi instead.

They practically lay down in the back and he kissed her neck as the street lights flashed overhead and the young people outside made their moves from the bars to the clubs. The lights were still on at her neighbour's house and the daughter let them in. Falcón lifted Darío from the bed. He was fast asleep.

As they walked across to Consuelo's house the boy came awake.

‘Hola, Javi,’ he said sleepily and thumped his blond head into Falcón's chest and left it there, as if he was listening to his heart. The trust nearly broke Falcón apart. They went upstairs where he poured the boy into his bed. Darío's eyelids fluttered against the weight of sleep.

‘Football tomorrow,’ he murmured. ‘You promised.’

‘Penalty shoot-out,’ said Falcón, pulling up the bedclothes, kissing him on the forehead.

‘Goodnight, Javi.’

Falcón stood at the door while Consuelo knelt and kissed her son goodnight, stroked his head; he felt the complicated pang of being a parent, or of never having been one.

They went downstairs. She poured a whisky for Falcón, made herself a gin and tonic. He could see her properly now for the first time that night. Those slim, muscular legs, a subtle line running down her calf. He found himself wanting to kiss the backs of her knees.

There had been a difference in her touch tonight. It wasn't as if they hadn't made love since they'd got back together after the Seville bombing. She hadn't been restrained in that department, although, what with the summer holiday and the kids being around, there hadn't been much opportunity. The first time they'd got together, a couple of years ago, it had been different. They'd both been a little wild then after a long drought. This time they'd been feeling their way around each other tentatively. They needed reassurance that this was the right thing to be doing. But tonight he'd felt a difference. She was letting him in. Maybe it was Alicia, her psychologist, telling her she should let herself go, not just physically this time, but emotionally, too.

‘What's going on in there?’ asked Consuelo.

‘Nothing.’

‘All men say that when they're thinking dirty thoughts.’

‘I was thinking how magnificent that meal was.’

‘Then they lie to you.’

‘How is it that you always know what I'm thinking?’

‘Because you are completely in my thrall,’ she said.

‘You really want to know what I was thinking?’

‘Only if it's about me.’

‘I was controlling a powerful desire to kiss the back of your knees.’

A slow smile crept across her face as a thrill streaked down the back of her thighs.

‘I like a bit of patience in a man,’ she said, sipping her drink, the ice cubes rolling and tickling the glass.

‘The trick of the patient man is to recognize boredom before it sets in.’

She stifled a fake yawn.

‘Joder,’ he said, getting to his feet.

They kissed and ran upstairs, leaving their drinks quaking on the table.

She stepped out of her pink dress and a small pair of knickers. It was all she had to do. He wrenched at his hands caught in the cuffs of his shirt, kicked off his shoes. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands on her knees, tanned all over except a small white triangle. After some ferocious moments with his clothes he was naked, went over to her, stood between her legs. She stroked him, looking up at his agony. Her lips were moist, still with the vestiges of the peachy lipstick that matched her fingernails. She reached up from his thighs, over his abdomen, to his chest. Her hands slipped round his back and she dug her nails into his skin. As he felt her mouth on him, her nails clawed their way down to his buttocks. He was hanging on to his patience by the skin of his teeth.

She fell back on to the bed, rolled on to her front, looked over her shoulder at him and pointed at the backs of her knees. His thighs shivered as he knelt on the bed. He kissed her Achilles tendon, her calf, the back of one knee, then the other. He worked his way up her hamstrings, which trembled under his lips. She raised her buttocks to him, reached behind her for him, patience out of the question now. They shunted together, his hands full of her. She gripped the sheets in her fists. And all the hell of the day just fell away from them.

They lay where they'd collapsed, still joined, the room lit only by the glow of street light coming in through the blinds.

‘You're different tonight,’ said Falcón, stroking her stomach, kissing her between the shoulder blades, welded to her by their sweat.

‘I feel different.’

‘It was like two years ago.’

She stared into the dark, her vision still green at the edges, as if recovering from an intense light.

‘Something happened?’ he asked.

‘I'm ready,’ she said.

‘Why now?’

He felt her shrug under his hands.

‘Maybe it's because my children are leaving me,’ she said.

‘Darío still needs you.’

‘And his Javi,’ she said. ‘He loves you. I can tell.’

‘And I love him,’ said Falcón. ‘And I love you, too.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, I love you, too … always have done.’

She took his hand from her stomach, kissed the fingers and pressed it between her breasts. She'd heard those words before from men, but this was the first time she'd got close to believing them.

8

Consuelo's house, Santa Clara, Seville – Saturday, 16th September 2006, 07.45 hrs

Morning began with football. Falcón in goal. He had a spring in his legs so that he had to remind himself not to save everything. He let Darío send him the wrong way a few times and watched on his knees as the boy ran around the garden with his Sevilla FC shirt over his head, flying. Consuelo looked out from the sitting room in her dressing gown. She was in a strange mood, as if last night's admissions had made her cautious. She knew she loved Javier, especially when she saw his mock dismay as another of Darío's penalties rifled past him and sizzled down the back of the nylon net. There was something boyish about her cop and it made her ache as much as seeing her own son lying on his back, arms open to receive the embraces of his imaginary fellow players. She knocked on the window as if checking the scene for reality and they came in for breakfast.

Falcón sat in the front of the cab on the way back to his house and chatted cheerfully with the driver about Sevilla FC's chances in the UEFA cup. He knew it all from Darío. He picked up his car. The morning traffic on the other side of the Plaza de Cuba, screwed up by the ongoing metro construction, today posed no problems for him. He felt completely mended. Obsession had been cleared from his mind. A crescendo of the fullness of life expanded his chest. His paranoia seemed absurd. Decisions were easy. He knew now that he was going to have to talk to Pablo of the CNI about Yacoub's situation. That was something he wasn't going to attempt to manage on his own. It had come to him with clarity and accompanied by the words of Mark Flowers, the CIA agent, who doubled as a ‘Communications Officer’, attached to the US Consulate in Seville: ‘Don't try to understand the whole picture … there's nobody in the world who does.’ Just realizing the thinness of the slice of the world he saw was enough to persuade him that he needed another point of view.

Nobody from the Homicide squad was in yet. He closed the door to his office and picked up the phone with the scrambled line, which would connect him directly to Pablo in the CNI's offices in Madrid. It was a Saturday and early but Pablo was the new section head since Juan had left and Falcón knew he'd be there. It took half an hour to talk Pablo through what had happened in the apartment in La Latina yesterday afternoon and another fifteen minutes for Pablo to ask all his questions, the last of which was:

‘Where did he say he was going and when?’

‘Rabat. This morning. The GICM high command were going to give him their decision.’

Long silence.

‘Are you still there, Pablo?’

‘I'm still here,’ he said. ‘I'm wondering if there's anything that needs to be done immediately.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Yacoub is not in Rabat.’

‘He's flying there from Madrid this morning.’

‘That's the interesting thing,’ said Pablo. ‘He flew into Heathrow last night. It might not mean anything. It might just be an omission on his part, but we still haven't found a flight into Casablanca with his name on the manifest.’

Falcón felt that metallic coldness in his stomach again.

‘This is the problem I had yesterday,’ he said. ‘I think I'm losing him.’

‘Trust is a strange thing in this game,’ said Pablo. ‘It's more fluid than in the real world. You can't expect someone who's constantly dissimulating to be as reliable as yourself. Look what happens to married people when they have affairs. The first few lies are OK. Then, as time goes on and the subterfuge builds, the lying becomes an all-consuming activity. Yacoub is now having to pretend to be someone else almost twenty-four hours a day. The GICM have racked up the pressure by invading his domestic situation, which means that Yacoub now has one less rock to stand on to remind himself of who he really is.’

‘And I'm his last remaining rock.’

‘Without you, he's in danger of losing that vital sense of self,’ said Pablo. ‘Part of your job is to shore him up. Let him know that you are dependable, that you can be trusted in every situation.’

‘He told me not to talk to you,’ said Falcón. ‘He was obsessed with losing control to others. He's trying to control me and yet he's putting himself beyond my control. I'm not sure where I stand any more. All I know is that it will be below his son, Abdullah.’

‘You have to rebuild that trust. He must feel that it's you and him against the GICM. You have to anchor him,’ said Pablo. ‘I'm going to get more information on what he's doing.’

‘Whatever you do now will expose me. He'll know that I've talked to you.’

‘This fluidity of trust is a two-way thing,’ said Pablo. ‘He hasn't gone straight to Rabat as he told you. You've come to me for some advice on how to proceed. Nobody's been hurt. Just leave it with me for a while. Don't go anywhere else for advice, especially not to that “friend” of yours, Mark Flowers.’

He hung up. Pablo didn't like Falcón's relationship with Mark Flowers, which had started four years ago when Falcón had earned the CIA agent's respect during one of his investigations. Since that time they'd exchanged information, Falcón letting him know what was happening in his police work and Flowers helping out with specialist knowledge and FBI contacts. Cristina Ferrera knocked and came into Falcón's office as he put the phone down.

‘What's happening?’ he asked.

‘We've gone through all the disks in the Russian's briefcase and we've singled out sixty-four individuals, fifty-five men and nine women. All of them have been caught on camera with their pants down, using drugs, receiving money and/or “presents”.’

‘And how are you getting on with identifying these people?’

‘Vicente Cortés from GRECO and Martín Díaz from CICO have managed to identify all of the mafia guys and all but three of the so-called “victims” in the footage.’

‘What are we talking about?’

‘The usual local council people: mayors, town planners, building inspectors, health and safety, utilities, some local businessmen and estate agents, Guardia Civil. Cortés and Díaz weren't surprised by any of it … not even the child sex footage or the women with big black guys.’

‘You look around at all these people you're supposed to be protecting,’ said Falcón, eyes drifting to the window, ‘and you find they're in it up to their necks.’

‘I've isolated a still from one bit of footage that I want you to look at. You'll have to come next door to see it because Inspector Ramírez is making sure everything is confined to one computer. We don't even want the stills on a LAN in case they find their way out to our “friends” in the press.’

Falcón followed her out. Ferrera's fingers rapped the keys as she sat at the desk. An image came up on the screen of two people: a man kneeling behind a woman whose bottom was raised, face and shoulders on the bed. The girl was looking directly into the camera. Ferrera tapped the screen.

‘I'm absolutely certain,’ she said, ‘that this woman is Marisa Moreno's sister. I even went back to the police station and found the picture which had been supplied by Marisa to her “missing” file. She's only seventeen in the old shot but… what do you think?’

Ferrera's photo was of a girl with her hair unplaited, Afro style. The eyes were innocent and wide, her mouth closed tight with bee-stung lips. The woman on the screen was in her mid-twenties, which would have been Margarita Moreno's age now. Her hair was plaited, which wasn't the only difference. The eyes weren't innocent any more but glazed, unfocused, out of it.

Falcón held the photo Marisa had given him yesterday up to the screen. Margarita's hair was plaited in the shot.

‘You're right, Cristina. Good work,’ he said. ‘Now we're getting to it, Marisa, aren't we?’

‘Getting to what?’ asked Ferrera.

‘Another version of Marisa's story,’ said Falcón. ‘The reason why she was having an affair with Esteban Calderón, why that affair included more than just sexual duties, and, perhaps, why Inés was murdered in her own home.’

‘Marisa is in with the Russians?’

‘I've been to see her twice and each time I've had a threatening phone call within hours of our meetings,’ said Falcón. ‘Has the man in this shot been identified?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Tell Cortés and Díaz that, out of the three, this is the first shot that they have to work on. This guy will tell us where Margarita is being held,’ said Falcón. ‘Now let's go back to Marisa.’

‘Both of us?’

‘She doesn't like men,’ said Falcón. ‘I want you involved with her.’

On the way to Calle Hiniesta Cristina Ferrera called Inspector José Luis Ramírez and Vicente Cortés. The shot was accessible on Ramírez's computer in padlocked files to which only he and Ferrera had the password.

Marisa was not at home. They walked to her atelier on Calle Bustos Tavera. Marisa answered the door in a scarlet silk dressing gown open to reveal bikini briefs. She held a hammer and a wood chisel in one hand, a chewed cigar stub in the other.

‘You again,’ she said, making eye contact with Falcón, before dropping her gaze to Ferrera. ‘Who is this?’

‘I can perfectly understand why you don't like men now, Marisa,’ said Falcón. ‘So I've brought another member of my squad to talk to you. This is Detective Cristina Ferrera.’

‘Encantada,’ said Marisa, and turned her back on them.

She put the hammer and chisel down on the work bench, tied up her dressing gown, sat on a high stool and lit the cigar stub. Resistant was a mild description of her attitude.

‘Now?’ she asked. ‘Why can you understand it now, Inspector Jefe?’

‘Because we've just found your sister,’ said Falcón.

The line was intended to shock and it did. In the intense silence after its delivery Falcón saw pain, fear and horror flash across Marisa's beautiful features.

‘I distinctly remember telling you that my sister was not lost,’ said Marisa, summoning all the self-control she could muster.

Ferrera stepped forward and gave her the printout of the still image taken from Vasili Lukyanov's disks. Marisa looked down at it, pursed her lips. Her face was impassive as she reconnected with Falcón.

‘What is this?’

‘This was in the possession of a known Russian gangster who died in a motorway accident yesterday morning,’ said Falcón. ‘Maybe you knew him, too: Vasili Lukyanov.’

‘How is this relevant to me?’ asked Marisa, that name thudding into her with the force of a slaughterer's bolt. ‘If my sister, who I haven't seen for six or seven years, has chosen to take up prostitution…’

‘Chosen to take up prostitution?’ said Ferrera, unable to contain herself. ‘Of the four hundred thousand prostitutes operating in Spain, barely five per cent have chosen their profession. And I don't think any of them are working for the Russian mafia.’

‘Look, Marisa, we're not here to take you down,’ said Falcón. ‘We know you've been coerced. And we know who's been doing the coercing. We're here to relieve your situation. To get you out of it, and your sister.’

‘I'm not sure what this situation is that you're talking about,’ said Marisa, not ready yet, needing to keep it going while she weighed things up in her mind.

‘What was the deal? Did they say they'd let Margarita go if you started up an affair with Esteban?’ asked Falcón. ‘If you fed them information, told them he was beating his wife, got them a key to his apartment…’

‘I don't know what you're talking about,’ said Marisa. ‘Esteban and I are lovers. I go to see him every week in prison – or at least I did, until you stopped my visits.’

‘So they haven't let Margarita go yet,’ said Ferrera. ‘Is that right?’

‘Is what right?’ said Marisa, turning on Ferrera, feeling that she could loose off some of her fierceness at her. ‘What …?’

‘That you've got to keep up the after-sales service,’ said Falcón. ‘But how long for, Marisa? How long do you think they'll keep you dangling? A month? A year? Maybe for ever?’

As he said this he wondered whether he was the right man for this job. Maybe he was too personally involved. This woman's responsibility for Inés's death was perhaps making him too brutal, giving her nowhere to turn. But he had to show the full weight of his knowledge, make her face the gravity of her circumstances, before showing her that he was the softer option. This, he thought, might not be achievable in a single visit.

‘Esteban and I are very close,’ said Marisa, setting off on another round of fabrication. ‘It might not look it from the outside. You might think I've been using him in some way. That he was somehow my ticket to a better life. But I'm not …’

‘I've heard all this before, Marisa,’ said Falcón. ‘Maybe I should let you see Esteban again.’

‘Now that you've poisoned his mind against me, Inspector Jefe?’ she said, getting to her feet, going on the attack with that cigar stub. ‘Now that you've told him that he might not have to face twenty years in jail because you reckon you can shift the blame on to some black trash he was fucking. Is that it, Inspector Jefe?’

‘I'm not the one who's put you in your situation.’

‘What fucking situation?’ she screeched. ‘You keep talking about it, but I don't know what it is.’

‘Your position between the gangsters holding your sister and the police investigating the Seville bombing,’ said Falcón calmly.

‘We're already close to finding where Margarita is being held,’ said Ferrera, which snapped Marisa's head round in her direction.

‘The man in the photo,’ said Falcón. ‘He'll talk. And if you talk to us, Marisa, nothing will happen until Margarita is safe.’

Marisa looked at the printout. Still not ready. Needing more time to make up her mind, not sure who or what was going to be more dangerous for her sister. Ferrera and Falcón exchanged a look. Ferrera gave her a card with her fixed line and mobile numbers. They made for the door.

‘Talk to us, Marisa,’ said Ferrera. ‘I would, if I was you.’

‘Why? Why would you?’ said Marisa.

‘Because we are not in the business of killing defenceless women in their homes, planting bombs, bribing local government officials and forcing girls into prostitution,’ said Falcón.

They went down the steps from her atelier and into the broiling heat of the courtyard. They stood for a moment in the cool of the tunnel leading to Calle Bustos Tavera.

‘We were that close,’ said Ferrera, holding up her thumb and forefinger pressed together.

‘I don't know,’ said Falcón. ‘Fear does strange things to people. It can bring them to the brink of the only possible next logical step, and then they veer off into the night because some perceived threat appears to be nearer and uglier.’

‘She just needs time,’ said Ferrera.

‘Time is the problem, because she's alone,’ said Falcón. ‘Under those circumstances, the person who's going to kill you seems more powerful than the one who's holding out a helping hand. That's why I want you involved with her. I want you to make her feel as if she's not facing this on her own.’

‘Let's find Margarita then,’ said Ferrera. ‘If we can get her safe, Marisa will follow.’

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