The Ignorance of Blood (40 page)

‘But do you know
why
Darío was taken?’

‘I think,’ said Falcón, punching out a text to Yacoub, ‘that it was done so that my attention would be diverted elsewhere.’

‘You're saying things without saying anything, Javier.’

‘Because I can't,’ he said and sent the text.

Need to talk. Call me. J.

‘But you
think
you know who took Darío?’ asked Consuelo.

‘I'm not precisely sure who would have done the job, but I know the group who ordered it.’

‘And they are?’ said Consuelo, grabbing his head, turning it towards her. ‘You don't want to tell me, do you, Javier? What could be worse than the Russian mafia?’

‘This time I'm going to get my intelligence right,’ said Falcón. ‘I'm not making the same mistake twice.’

Crawling along Avenida Kansas City looking for a public phone. The heat oppressive. Falcón alone now. The text back from Yacoub had told him that he was in a hotel in Marbella and gave the telephone number of a Spanish mobile to use. Falcón gave up looking, went to the railway station.

‘What are you doing in Marbella?’ asked Falcón.

‘Business. I mean, clothes,’ said Yacoub. ‘It's a small fashion show, but I always pick up a lot of work for the factory here.’

‘Is Abdullah with you?’

‘No, I left him in London. He's going back to Rabat,’ said Yacoub. ‘Why all the questions?’

‘There's been a development. We need to talk face to face.’

‘I don't know whether I can get all the way to Seville,’ said Yacoub. ‘That's three hours in the car.’

‘How about half way?’

‘I'm on the road to Málaga now.’

‘Could you get to Osuna?’ asked Falcón. ‘That's about a hundred and fifty kilometres from Málaga.’

‘When?’

‘I'll call you with a time. I haven't been into the office yet.’

As he was leaving the station he picked up a message from Mark Flowers asking for a meeting in the usual place. Falcón was desperate to get to the office, but the river was on the way.

Ten minutes later he parked by the bullring, crossed the Paseo Cristóbal Colón and trotted down the steps to their bench. Flowers was waiting.

‘I haven't got much time,’ said Falcón.

‘Nor have I,’ said Flowers. ‘These Russians holding the boy …’

‘What are you looking at them for?’

‘I thought you wanted to find Consuelo's kid?’

‘Right,’ said Falcón, needing to think about Flowers's relationship to this before he told him anything important. ‘A lot on my plate, Mark. Long nights.’

‘I need some help.’

‘Does that mean you've been given permission to help me?’

‘I don't always need permission,’ said Flowers.

Falcón briefed him on the power struggle between Leonid Revnik and Yuri Donstov, only giving him as much detail as Pablo of the CNI had told him and not touching on any of the developments of last night. He couldn't afford to have that knowledge swimming around in Flowers's head.

‘And you don't know which group has the boy?’

‘Either or neither,’ said Falcón.

‘But the threatening phone calls were about what exactly?’

‘Initially they wanted me to stop investigating Marisa
Moreno and thereby make a connection through her to them and the Seville bombing,’ said Falcón. ‘But then they identified me at the scene of Vasili Lukyanov's accident and saw an opportunity to get their disks back.’

‘Which would allow them to pressurize I4IT and Horizonte in whatever business they're doing,’ said Flowers. ‘So why neither? You said: “Either or neither”.’

‘The threatening phone calls are unidentifiable. I've been guessing that it's the Russians, but it could just as easily be something to do with … other things.’

‘Yacoub, you mean?’ said Flowers immediately. ‘And you've heard nothing since the kidnap?’

‘One of the calls said I would never hear from them again.’

‘Can you get me copies of these disks?’

‘What for?’

‘You
, as an inspector jefe, can't be seen to be negotiating with criminal gangs, but there's nothing to stop me in my line of work.’

‘Is this your profound moral certitude coming out again?’ asked Falcón.

‘I wish I'd never said that.’

‘The disks are evidence.’

‘Just copies, Javier. Copies.’

‘You want me to start making copies of certified evidence in a busy Jefatura?’

‘It's dead in there at lunchtime,’ said Flowers. ‘If you want me to find the boy, you've got to give me the tools.’

‘I'll see what I can do,’ said Javier, who was feeling a strong desire to get away from Flowers, something smelling very bad about his request.

It was 1.30 p.m. by the time he got to the Jefatura. Cristina Ferrera was alone in the office. He told her he'd heard from Ramírez about Carlos Puerta and asked if there'd been any developments on the various murders.

‘We picked up some further sightings of El Pulmón after he left his vehicle yesterday afternoon,’ said Ferrera. ‘He bought a bottle of water on Avenida Ramón y Cajal and was seen washing himself off in the street. He was spotted again, still stripped to the waist, running down Calle Enramadilla. The last sighting was in the bus station in the Plaza San Sebastián.’

‘That sounds as if he was getting out of town.’

‘They're still working the bus station, but at some point he must have got a T-shirt because we're not picking up any more sightings of someone stripped to the waist.’

He got her to check the arrival time of the I4IT private jet in Seville and went down to the computer room. No natural light. Banks of computers. Young faces lit by grey light coming from the screens. The Inspector Jefe told him that they'd been working on the disks since eight thirty that morning. At eleven thirty they'd brought in a couple of mathematicians from the university. By midday they were in touch with Interpol to see if they'd cracked any Russian mafia codes recently. They hadn't heard anything back.

‘How urgent is this?’ asked the IT chief.

‘There's a late afternoon meeting between a Spanish business consortium and the town hall, which we believe the Russian mafia are trying to influence,’ said Falcón. ‘We assume this because some of the participants in that meeting feature in the sex footage on the disks. We think that the two encrypted disks you're working on contain “associated material” and we'd like to know what it is before the meeting takes place.’

Back up to his office. Ferrera with news of a revised flight plan logged by the pilot of the private jet. It was now due to arrive at Seville airport at 19.00 this evening. Falcón's mobile vibrated. His brother, Paco.

‘El Pulmón,’ he said. ‘Are you still interested in finding him?’

‘You've had a tip-off?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Paco. ‘But I've managed to find out that the only guy he's kept in touch with in the bullfight business is another gypsy, a brilliant horseman, who looks after the animals on a finca in the Serranía de Ronda.’

Falcón took down the address, hung up, began to plan his afternoon.

‘Where's Ramírez?’ he asked.

‘Lunch with Serrano and Baena,’ said Ferrera.

‘Ask them to come back here as soon as they can. We might have a lead on El Pulmón.’

The mobile vibrated again; he put it to his ear without checking the screen.

‘I hope you haven't forgotten about us,’ said the voice.

‘You said you'd call. I've been waiting,’ said Falcón, going into his office, closing the door.

‘You've got the disks?’

‘No, they're in use. They're being examined. I don't have access to them.’

‘You'll never crack that code,’ said the voice. ‘We have the resources to pay for the best minds in the business. You'll be doing better than MI6 if you crack it… and they've been working on it for three years.’

‘The process is not in my hands,’ said Falcón. ‘And even if it was and I could access those disks I'd still be waiting for you to deliver on your promise.’

‘Our promise?’

‘I delivered those disks, but you haven't kept up your end of the deal.’

‘But there
was
no boy,’ said the voice. ‘And we saved your lives.’

‘If you wanted to get your hands on those disks you were always going to have to do that,’ said Falcón. ‘Now you have what
you
want and I have nothing.’

‘You're negotiating with us?’ asked the voice, perplexed.

‘You want those two remaining disks,’ said Falcón. ‘I want the Seville bombers. That means: the two men who masqueraded as building inspectors and the three electricians who planted the device. I also want to know where I can find Nikita Sokolov.’

‘You're being very demanding, Inspector Jefe.’

‘And
I want the person who murdered Esteban Calderón's wife in her apartment early in the morning of 8th June this year.’

‘The judge murdered her himself,’ said the voice. ‘He's confessed.’

‘I don't know where you heard that from,’ said Falcón. ‘Maybe your source in the Jefatura is not so reliable. That was the prime reason why Marisa Moreno was murdered, wasn't it?’

‘Why do you think
we
had anything to do with that?’

‘Nikita Sokolov,’ said Falcón, and left it at that, hoped that would be enough to persuade the voice that he knew more than he did.

‘Sokolov is not one of ours.’

‘But he was.’

‘I'll have to get back to you.’

‘And before you deliver on Sokolov, you can ask him where his two friends are, the ones he used to cut up Marisa Moreno with a chain saw.’

‘This is a lot of people,’ said the voice. ‘This is … two, five, six, seven – nine people you want in return for the two disks. I'll have to come back to you, but I can assure you that Señor Revnik will not be happy about this.’

‘There's no rush.’

‘I don't follow you.’

‘If, as you say, we'll never crack the code on those two disks, then we have all the time in the world.’

24

On the road to the Serranía de Ronda – Tuesday, 19th September 2006, 14.30 hours

They took two cars. Falcón, Ramírez and Ferrera in the lead car, Serrano and Baena behind. Only Pérez was left in Seville, still working on the murders in Las Tres Mil and Carlos Puerta's suicide. Falcón was anxious about taking all his men off their various cases, but El Pulmón was an important witness and the intelligence they'd had from the local Guardia Civil, who they were going to meet in Cuevas del Becerro, about twenty kilometres north-east of Ronda, had been promising. He needed all this manpower because the farm was in an area protected by high mountains to the north. There were a lot of horses on the farm and if the two gypsies got wind of their approach they could ride into the
sierra
in minutes and, once up there, they'd never find them.

Falcón had arranged to meet Yacoub in Osuna at as close to five o'clock as possible. Just as he was leaving the Jefatura he'd bumped into Inspector Jefe Tirado of GRUME, but hadn't been able to think his way round all the complications of warning him off the Russians. He'd just told him what he'd mentioned to Flowers – either or neither – and
to keep an open mind. Tirado didn't think that was helpful. His investigation was stalled. He was doing a lot of work around the Nervión Plaza for nearly no return.

The heat was more brutal out in the open country, where the bleached sky and the bare, chalky brown earth seemed drained of all vascular circulation. The ridge of mountains they had to cross to get to the village where they were meeting the Guardia Civil was lost in the afternoon haze. The endless hectares of olive trees, ranked like ancient armies ready for battle on some vast uncontested plain, were the only evidence of civilization in this arid, deserted landscape.

On the way he briefed Ramírez and Ferrera on the situation with Alejandro Spinola, his involvement with the mayor's office and his relationship with Marisa Moreno and therefore, very possibly, the Russians. He also told them what had happened when he went to see Comisarios Elvira and Lobo.

‘So, what are we going to do about Spinola?’

‘When we finish this business, you two are going to the airport to see who comes out of the I4IT chartered jet and follow the car to wherever it takes them. Serrano and Baena are going to track Spinola.’

‘But they're all going to end up in that fancy hotel, La Berenjena,’ said Ferrera. ‘Why don't we just go straight there?’