The Hidden Assassins Read online

  The Fire Chief was a man in his moment. He’d trained for this terrible day and brought the immediate calamity under control in less than ninety minutes. He accompanied Falcón to the edge of the destruction. On the way he ordered a crew of firemen to stop work on supporting the roof of the destroyed classroom so that the bomb squad could see how the explosion had affected the building. He talked Falcón through the architecture of the destroyed apartment block and how enormous the explosion must have been to blow out the four main supporting pillars for that section. The effect of that would have brought the sudden and phenomenal weight of all the reinforced concrete floors on to the skin walls between each storey. There would have been an accumulative weight and acceleration as each level fell from a greater and greater height.

  ‘Nobody could have survived that collapse,’ he said. ‘We’re praying for miracles here.’

  ‘Why are you so certain that this couldn’t have been a gas explosion?’

  ‘Apart from the fact that there’s been no reported leak, and we’ve only had to deal with two small fires, the mosque in the basement is in daily use. Gas is heavier than air and would accumulate at the lowest point. A large enough quantity of gas couldn’t have accumulated without anybody noticing,’ he said. ‘Added to that, the gas would have had to collect in a big enough space before exploding. Its power would be dissipated. Our main problem would have been incendiary, rather than destruction. There would have been a massive fireball, which would have scorched the whole area. There would have been burns victims. A bomb explodes from a small, confined source. It therefore has far more concentrated destructive power. Only a very large bomb, or several smaller bombs, could have taken out those reinforced concrete supporting pillars. Most of the dead and injured we’ve seen so far have been hit by flying debris and glass. All the windows in the area have been blown out. It’s all consistent with a bomb blast.’

  At the edge of the destruction the light was bruised and sickly yellow. The pulverized brick and concrete formed a fine dust, which clogged the throat and nostrils with the stench of decay. From within the stacked floors came the repetitive, desperate sounds of mobile phone jingles, the same customized tunes begging to be answered. Here, rather than being an irritant, they had personality. The Fire Chief shook his head.

  ‘It’s the worst thing,’ he said, ‘listening to someone else’s hope fading away.’

  Falcón almost jumped as his own mobile vibrated against his thigh.

  ‘Manuela,’ he said, walking away from the Fire Chief.

  ‘Are you all right, little brother?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, but I’m busy.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Just tell me one thing. Was it a bomb?’

  ‘We’ve had no confirmation—’

  ‘I don’t want the official communiqué,’ she said. ‘I’m your sister.’

  ‘I don’t want Angel running off to the ABC with a quote from the Inspector Jefe at the scene.’

  ‘This is for my ears only.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Just tell me, Javier.’

  ‘We think it was a bomb.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  Falcón hung up in a fury without saying goodbye. Men, women and children had died and been injured. Families had been destroyed, along with homes and possessions. But Manuela still needed to know which way the property market was going to tip.

  7

  Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 09.45 hrs

  A figure sprinted between Falcón and the Fire Chief as he closed down his mobile. The man stumbled into the rubble at the foot of the fallen building, picked himself up and ran at the stacked pancakes of the reinforced concrete floors. His scale was strangely diminished by the vastness of the collapse. He seemed like a puppet as he dithered to the left and right, trying to find a purchase point in the tangle of cracked concrete, bristling steel rods, ruptured netting and shattered brick.

  The Fire Chief shouted at him. He didn’t hear. He plunged his hands into the wreckage, swung his body up and hooked his leg over a thick steel rod, but he was a horribly human mixture of crazed strength overwhelmed by futility.

  By the time they got to him he was hanging helpless, his palms already torn and bloody, his face distorted by the rawness of his pain. They lifted him off his ghastly perch, like soldiers removing a comrade from the wire of the front line. No sooner had they got him down than he recovered his strength and lunged at the building once more. Falcón had to tackle him around the legs to hold him back. They scrabbled over the rubble, like an ancient articulated insect, until Falcón managed to crawl up the man’s body and clasp his arms to his chest.

  ‘You can’t go in there,’ he said, his voice rasping from the dust.

  The man grunted and flexed his arms against Falcón’s embrace. His mouth was wide open, his eyes stared into the mangled mess of the building and sweat beaded in fat drops on his filthy face.

  ‘Who do you know who is in there?’ asked Falcón.

  On the back of the man’s grunting came two words—wife, daughter.

  ‘Which floor?’ asked the Fire Chief.

  The man looked up at them blinking, as if this question demanded some complicated differential calculus.

  ‘Gloria,’ said the man. ‘Lourdes.’

  ‘But which floor?’ asked the Fire Chief.

  The man’s head went limp, all fight gone. Falcón released him and rolled him on to his back.

  ‘Do you know anybody else in there, apart from Gloria and Lourdes?’ asked Falcón.

  The man’s head listed to one side, and his dark eyes took in the damaged end of the pre-school. He sat up, got to his feet and trod robotically through the rubble and household detritus between the apartment block and the pre-school. Falcón followed. The man stood at the point where there should have been a wall. The classroom was a turmoil of broken furniture and shards of glass, and on the far wall fluttering in a breeze were children’s paintings—big suns, mad smiles, hair standing on end.

  The man’s feet crunched through the glass. He tripped and fell heavily over a twisted desk, but righted himself immediately and made for the paintings. He pulled one off the wall and looked at it with the intensity of a collector judging a masterpiece. There was a tree, a sun, a high building and four people—two big, two small. In the bottom right-hand corner was a name written in an adult hand—Pedro. The man folded it carefully and put it inside his shirt.

  The three men went into the main corridor of the school and out through the entrance. The local police had arrived and were trying to clear a path for the ambulance to remove the four bodies of the dead children taken from the destroyed classroom. Two of the mothers kneeling at the feet of their children gave a hysterical howl at this latest development. The third mother had already been taken away.

  A woman with a thick white bandage on the side of her face, through which the blood underneath was just beginning to bloom, recognized the man.

  ‘Fernando,’ she said.

  The man turned to her, but didn’t recognize her.

  ‘I’m Marta, Pedro’s teacher,’ she said.

  Fernando had lost the power of speech. He took the painting out of his shirt and pointed at the smallest figure. Marta’s motor reflexes seemed to malfunction and she couldn’t swallow what was in her throat, nor articulate what was in her mind. Instead her face just caved in and she only managed to squeeze out a sound of such brutality and ugliness that it left Fernando’s chest shuddering. It was a sound uncontrolled by any civilizing influence. It was grief in its purest form, before its pain had been made less acute by time or more poignant by poetry. It was a dark, guttural, heaving clot of emotion.

  Fernando was not affronted. He folded the painting up and put it back in his shirt. Falcón led him by the arm to the four small bodies. The ambulance was backing up, the rest of the crowd had been squeezed out of the scene. Two paramedics appeared with two body bags each. They worked quickly because they knew the situation woul
d be better with those pitiful bodies removed. Falcón held Fernando around the shoulders as the paramedics uncovered each body and placed it in a body bag. He had to remind Fernando to breathe. At the third body Fernando’s knees buckled and Falcón lowered him to the ground, where he fell forward on to all fours and crawled around, like a poisoned dog looking for a place to die. One of the paramedics shouted and pointed. A TV cameraman had come around the back, through the pre-school, and was filming the bodies. He turned and ran before anybody could react.

  The ambulance moved off. The ghostly crowd surged after it and gave up, with a final spasm of grief, before dissolving into groups, with the bereaved women supported from all sides. Television journalists and their cameramen tried to force their way in to talk to the women. They were rebuffed. Falcón pulled Fernando to his feet, pushed him back into the pre-school out of sight, and went to find a policeman to keep journalists away.

  Outside a journalist had found a young guy in his twenties, with a couple of bloody nicks in his cheek, who’d been there when the bomb exploded. The camera was right in his face, inches away, the proximity giving the pictures their urgency.

  ‘…straight after it happened, I mean, the noise…you just can’t believe the loudness of that noise, it was so loud I couldn’t breathe, it was like…’

  ‘What was it like?’ asked the journalist, an eager young woman, stabbing the microphone back into his face. ‘Tell us. Tell Spain what it was like.’

  ‘It was like the noise took away all the air.’

  ‘What was the first thing you noticed after the explosion, after the noise?’

  ‘Silence,’ he said. ‘Just a deathly quiet. And, I don’t know whether this was in my head or it actually happened, I heard bells ringing…’

  ‘Church bells?’

  ‘Yes, church bells, but they were all crazy, as if the shock waves of the explosion were making them ring, you know, at random. It made me sick to hear it. It was as if everything had gone wrong with the world, and nothing would be the same.’

  The rest was lost in the clatter and thump of a helicopter’s rotor blades, thrashing away at the dust in the air. It went up higher, to take in the whole scene. This was the aerial photography Falcón had ordered up.

  He posted a policeman at the entrance of the school, but found that Fernando had disappeared. He crossed the corridor to the wrecked classroom. Empty. He called Ramírez as he crashed through the broken furniture.

  ‘Where are you?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘We’ve just arrived. We’re on Calle Los Romeros.’

  ‘Is Cristina with you?’

  ‘We’re all here. The whole squad.’

  ‘All of you come round to the pre-school now.’

  Fernando was back at the wall of rubble and collapsed floors. He threw himself at it like a madman. He tore at the concrete, bricks, window frames and hurled them behind him.

  ‘…rescue teams working on this side,’ roared Ramírez, over the noise of the helicopter. ‘There are dogs in the wreckage.’

  ‘Get over here.’

  Fernando had grabbed at the steel netting of a shattered reinforced concrete floor. He had his feet braced against the rubble. His neck muscles stood out and his carotid arteries appeared as thick as cord. Falcón pulled him off and they fought for some moments, tripping and floundering about in the dust and rubble until they were ghosts of their former selves.

  ‘Have you got Gloria’s phone number?’ roared Falcón.

  They were panting in the choking atmosphere, their sweating faces caked with grey, white and brown dust, which swirled around them from the chopper’s blades.

  The question transfixed Fernando. Despite hearing all these mobile phones ringing, his mind was so paralysed with shock, he hadn’t thought of his own. He ripped it out of his pocket. He squeezed life into the starter button. The helicopter moved off, leaving an immense silence.

  Fernando blinked, his brain fluttering like torn flags, trying to remember his PIN. It came to him and he thumbed in Gloria’s number. He stood up from his kneeling position and walked towards the wreckage. He held a hand up as if demanding silence from the world. From his left came the faint, tinny sound of some Cuban piano.

  ‘That’s her,’ he roared, moving left. ‘She was on this side of the building when…when I last saw her.’

  Falcón got to his feet and made a futile attempt to dust himself down just as his homicide squad turned up. He stayed them with his hand and moved towards the tinkling piano, which he recognized as a song called ‘Lágrimas Negras’—Black Tears.

  ‘She’s there!’ roared Fernando. ‘She’s in there!’

  Baena, a junior detective from Falcón’s squad, ran back and fetched a rescue team with a dog. The team pinpointed the spot from where the ringing tone was coming and managed to get Fernando to tell them that his wife and daughter had been on the fifth floor. They gave him steady looks when he released that information. In the face of his radiant hope not one of them had the heart to tell him that the fall, with three storeys coming down on top, meant that, at this moment, they were praying only.

  ‘She’s in there,’ he said, to their still, expressionless faces. ‘That mobile is always with her. She’s a sales rep. “Lágrimas Negras” was her favourite song.’

  Falcón nodded to Cristina Ferrera and they guided Fernando back to the pre-school and got a nurse to clean him up and dress his cuts. Falcón called the homicide squad into the school latrines. He washed his hands and face and looked at them in the mirror.

  ‘This is going to be the most complicated investigation that any of us have ever been involved in, and that includes me,’ said Falcón. ‘Nothing is straightforward in terrorist attacks. We know that from what happened on March 11th in Madrid. There are going to be a lot of people involved—the CNI’s intelligence agents, the CGI’s antiterrorist squad, the bomb disposal teams and us—and that’s just on the investigative side. What we’ve got to do is keep it clear in our minds what we, as the homicide squad, are trying to achieve. I’ve already asked for a police cordon to keep the site clear for us.’

  ‘They’re in place,’ said Ramírez. ‘They’re working on getting the journalists out.’

  Falcón turned to face them, shaking his wet hands.

  ‘By now you all know that there was a mosque in the basement of that block. Our job is not to speculate on what happened and why. Our job is to find out who went into that mosque, and who came out, and what went on inside it in the last twenty-four hours, and then forty-eight hours, and so on. We do that by talking to every possible witness we can find. Our other crucial task is to find out about every vehicle in the vicinity. The bomb was big. It would have had to be transported to this place. If that vehicle is still here, we have to find it.

  ‘At the moment the first task is going to be difficult, with all the occupants of the apartments evacuated from their buildings. So our priority is to identify all vehicles and their owners. José Luis will divide you up and you will search every sector, starting with cars closest to the collapsed building. Cristina, you’ll stay with me for the moment.

  ‘And remember, everybody here is suffering in some way, whether they’ve lost somebody or seen them injured, whether they’ve had their home destroyed or their windows smashed. You’ve got a heavy workload and you’re going to be under a lot of pressure, with or without the media on your backs. You’ll get more information by being sensitive and understanding than by treating this as the usual process. You’re all good people, which is why you’re in the homicide squad—now go out there and find out what happened.’

  They filed out. Ferrera stayed behind. Falcón washed his hair under the tap and then wiped his face and hands.

  ‘His name is Fernando. His wife and daughter were in the collapsed apartment block, his son was one of the children killed in the blast. Find out if he has any other family and, if not, any close friends. Not anybody will do. He left home after his breakfast to find out, half an hour later, th
at he’s lost everything. When it comes home to him, he’s going to lose his mind.’

  ‘And you want me to stay with him?’

  ‘I can’t afford that. I want you to make sure he’s safely delivered into the hands of a trauma team, who should be along any minute. He needs his predicament explained, he’s lost the ability to articulate. He’ll want to stay here until the bodies are found. But don’t lose track of him. I want to know where he ends up.’

  They left the latrines. A bomb squad team was picking its way through the shattered classroom, like mineral fossickers looking for valuable rocks. They filled polypropylene sacks with their finds. There were two more teams outside, working furiously so that the machinery could move in to start the demolition task and the search for survivors.

  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.’