LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

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