The Hidden Assassins

Cristina Ferrera went into the classroom where the nurse was just finishing dressing Fernando’s cuts. She knew why Falcón had chosen her for this job. The nurse was doing her best with Fernando, but he wasn’t responding, his brain was teeming with bigger, darker fish. The nurse finished and packed up. Cristina asked her to send someone from a trauma team as soon as possible. She sat on a chair by the blackboard, at some distance from Fernando. She didn’t want to crowd him, even though it was obvious that he was living inside his head at an intensity that excluded the outside world. Grief darkened, as quickly as hope lightened, his face, like clouds passing over fields.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, after some minutes, as if noticing her for the first time.

‘I’m a policewoman. My name is Cristina Ferrera.’

‘There was a man before. Who was he?’

‘That was my boss, Javier Falcón. He’s the Inspector Jefe of the homicide squad.’

‘He’s got some work on his hands.’

‘He’s a good man,’ said Ferrera. ‘An unusual man. He’ll get to the bottom of it.’

‘We all know who it is, though, don’t we?’

‘Not yet.’

‘The Moroccans.’

‘It’s too early to say.’

‘You ask around. We’ve all thought about it. Ever since March 11th we’ve watched them going in there and we’ve been waiting.’

‘Into the mosque, you mean? The mosque in the basement.’

‘That’s right.’

‘They’re not all Moroccans who go to mosques, you know. Plenty of Spaniards have converted to Islam.’

‘I work in construction,’ he said, uninterested in her balanced approach. ‘I put together buildings like that. Much better buildings than that. I work with steel.’

‘In Seville?’

‘Yes, I build apartments for rich young professionals…that’s what I’m told anyway.’

Fernando’s head had been turned upside down and now he was trying to put the furniture straight. Except that, occasionally, he noticed the furniture’s emptiness and it tipped his mind back into the abyss of loss and grief. He tried to talk about building work but got lost in moments of imagination as he saw his wife and daughter falling through steel and concrete. He wanted to get out of himself, out of his body and head and into…where? Where could the mind go for respite? A helicopter battering the air overhead knocked his thoughts into another pattern.

‘Do you have children?’ he asked.

‘A boy and a girl,’ she said.

‘How old?’

‘The boy’s sixteen. The girl’s fourteen.’

‘Good kids,’ he said; not a question, more of a hope.

‘They’re both being difficult at the moment,’ she said. ‘Their father died about three years ago. It’s not been easy for them.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but wanting her tragedy to bury his own for a while. ‘How did he die?’

‘He died of a rare type of cancer.’

‘That’s hard for your kids. Fathers are good for them at that age,’ he said. ‘They like to try things out on their mothers to give themselves the confidence to rebel against the world. That’s what Gloria told me, anyway. They need fathers to show them it’s not as easy as they think.’

‘You might be right.’

‘Gloria says I’m a good father.’

‘Your wife…’

‘Yes, my wife,’ he said.

‘Can you tell me about your own kids?’ she asked.

He couldn’t. There were no words for them. He measured them out with a hand up from the floor, he pointed out of the window at the destroyed apartment block, and finally he pulled the painting out from his shirt. That said it all—sticks and triangles, a tall rectangle with windows, a round green tree and behind it a massive orange sun in a blue sky.

A colossal crane arrived, preceded by a bulldozer, which cleared the land in between the destroyed block and the pre-school. Two tipper trucks manoeuvred around the back of the crane and a digger began to scoop rubble and dump it in the tippers. In the cleared land the crane settled its feet and a team of men in yellow hard hats began preparing the rig.

Around the front of the building, on Calle Los Romeros, a change of clothes had arrived from the Jefatura for Falcón. The rest of the homicide squad were busy working with the local police, identifying vehicles and their owners. Comisario Elvira had turned up in full uniform and was being given a tour of the site by the Fire Chief. As he moved around, his assistant called all the team leaders involved in the operation to a meeting in one of the classrooms in the pre-school. As the entourage headed for the pre-school a woman approached Elvira and gave him a list with twelve names on it.

‘And who are these people?’ asked Elvira.

‘They are the names of all the men in the mosque at the time of the explosion not including the Imam, Abdelkrim Benaboura,’ she said. ‘My name is Esperanza. I’m Spanish. My partner, who is also Spanish, was in the mosque. I represent the wives, mothers and girlfriends of these men. We are in hiding. The women, especially the Moroccan women, are scared that people may think that their husbands and sons were in some way responsible for what has happened. There’s a mobile number on the back of the list. We would ask you to call us when you have some news of their…of anything.’

She moved away, and the pressure of time and lack of personnel meant that Elvira let her go unfollowed. Calderón made his way through the crowd to Falcón.

‘I didn’t realize it was you, Javier,’ he said, shaking him by the hand. ‘How did you get into that state?’

‘I had to stop someone from throwing himself into the wreckage to rescue his wife and daughter.’

‘So, this is the big one,’ said Calderón, not bothering to engage with what Falcón had said. ‘It’s finally happened to us.’

They continued to the school, where the police, judges, fire brigade, bomb squad, rescue services, trauma units, medical services and demolition gangs were all represented. Elvira made it clear that nobody was allowed to say a word until he had delivered the plan of action. To focus their attention he asked the leader of the bomb squad to give a brief report on the initial analyses of fragments from the blast. They showed that the apartment block had been devastated by a bomb of extraordinary power, most probably situated in the basement of that section of the building, and whose explosive was probably of military, rather than commercial, quality. This expert opinion silenced the assembled company completely and Elvira was able to hammer out a coordinated plan in about forty minutes.

At the end of the meeting Ramírez headed Falcón off as he was making for the latrines to change his clothes.

‘We’ve got something,’ he said.

‘Talk me through it while I change.’

As soon as he was dressed, Falcón found Comisario Elvira and Juez Calderón, and asked Ramírez to repeat what he’d just told him.

‘In the immediate vicinity of the building, excluding vehicles buried in the rubble, we’ve found three stolen cars plus this van,’ said Ramírez. ‘It’s parked right outside the pre-school here. It’s a Peugeot Partner, registered in Madrid. There’s a copy of the Koran on the front seat. We can’t see in the back because it’s a closed van and the rear windows have been shattered, but the owner of the vehicle is a man called Mohammed Soumaya.’

8 (#ulink_d59fb04d-ff71-54c5-9024-3bbab92f6b05)

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 11.35 hrs