LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

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