LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘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

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