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 Falcon 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. Falcon'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 Falcon. '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 Falcon.
'That man is a cabron,' said Zorrita with profound distaste from behind his family photograph. 'A nasty, arrogant… cabron.'
'He's beginning to recognize that himself,' said Falcon.
'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 Falcon, 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 Andalucia to the Muslim fold. The conspirators wanted to turn public opinion in favour of a small right-wing party called Fuerza Andalucia, who, in becoming the new partner of the ruling Partido Popular, would put the conspirators in control of the Andalucian state parliament. It didn't work and the alleged masterminds of the plot – Cesar 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 Falcon. '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 Cesar 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 Falcon is after.'
'I think I only want what any police officer in my position would want,' said Falcon, 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 Falcon down, nodded his agreement.
'You're not getting anything from the suspects in your custody and the two ringleaders have been 'executed',' said Zorrita. 'So where else have you got to go?'
'I've decided to take a long look at the violence,' said Falcon. 'Where do a bunch of conspirators, sophisticated men like Lucrecio Arenas and Cesar Benito, access that sort of violence?'
'As you say, every news channel and paper, apart from the ABC, are calling this the Catholic Conspiracy. What with the national obsession with Opus Dei, the PR campaign by the Church to counteract all this has been unprecedented,' said Zorrita. 'Do Opus Dei have an Improvised Explosive Device division?'
The two men smiled at each other.
'What we do know from our suspects in custody and other inquiries is that Arenas's motivation was not his Catholic beliefs,' said Falcon. 'The Hen-Wee spoke from his heart.'
'And Cesar Benito was in construction,' said Zorrita.
'Where there's always large amounts of black money, which can be hidden away in the offshore world.'
'But you're not getting anywhere by following the money,' said Zorrita.
'Only that there's undoubtedly money-laundering involved and that both men were well set up in property in the Costa del Sol.'
'The Russian mafia,' said Zorrita. 'I know it's a knee-jerk reaction when you hear the words 'money-laundering' and 'Costa del Sol' in the same sentence, but after the recent Marbella town council scandal…'
Falcon nodded.
'And you think they're going to be easier to penetrate than the offshore world?' said Zorrita.
'Let's just take a look at the violence,' said Falcon, holding up a finger. 'In that period around the 6th June bombing there were five expressions of violence. The first was the murder of Tateb Hassani, who was vital to the conspiracy for his drafting in Arabic script of the extremists' plans for taking over Andalucia. He was found on the Seville dump, poisoned and mutilated, on the morning of the explosion. Murdered because a) he knew too much, b) he would always be a vulnerable point to the conspiracy and c) it got everybody's hands dirty. The second expression of violence was the bomb itself which, as I said, was designed to point the finger at Muslim extremism
