use it. I know that. And that's why you always have to be there between me and them. You are, and will be, the only one who truly understands my situation.'
Something like a cramp started up in Falcon's guts. This was different to the dead weight of his responsibility in this matter. That was just a few more rocks in the already unwieldy rucksack. This was the knot of fear making itself felt. Now he was being forced into the unique position of having to decide whether Yacoub was reliable or not. Given the choice between his son, Abdullah, and the anonymous face of the Spanish intelligence agency, there would be no doubt who Yacoub would choose. He'd said it from the very beginning and the CNI had accepted those terms.
'What can I do to make your situation any easier?' asked Falcon.
'You're a good friend, Javier. The only true friend I've got,' said Yacoub. 'You will be the one to help me with the plan to save my son.'
'I doubt he could walk away from being a mujahideen very easily, especially after he's been to one of their camps.'
'I think the only way would be for him to be arrested on his way to a mission,' said Yacoub.
'Those would be extraordinary circumstances,' said Falcon. 'For the GICM to let you know what was being planned… unless you were directly involved.'
'There you have it, Javier,' said Yacoub. 'It would also depend very much on whether my survival is considered critical.'
Falcon and Yacoub looked at each other for some time, smoke steadily rising from Yacoub's fingers and dissipating over his shaven head.
'What?' asked Yacoub.
'I can't believe you said those words.'
'We were naive, Javier. We have absurdly idealistic minds. It was no accident that you were chosen to recruit me. All these agencies have people specifically employed to size you up, to perceive whether you have the necessary strengths and weaknesses for the work required of you. And I'm not talking about whether you're a good manager of people or handle stress well, but whether, under the right circumstances, you could torture a man to get the necessary information or…'
'Or be ingenuous enough to be completely malleable, or perhaps, utterly predictable?' said Falcon.
'The CNI saw in you a need. They knew your history. They knew that you no longer viewed the world in the blinkered way that most people see it, that you demanded a different perspective. They fed it to you. You fed it to me. We didn't know the sort of people we were dealing with. Possibly we imagined that they might be like ourselves, and we could enter their world beneath the surface of everyday life and change things. And what happens? We meet completely ruthless minds who beat us into corners and force us to behave – or else.'
Falcon looked around the darkened room. Their situation – meeting in an anonymous Madrid apartment to discuss unseen dramatic developments – was so far removed from real life that he was suddenly desperate for the surface; but like the diver surrounded by sharks, who still needed to decompress, he had to hold the line, not panic.
'You envisage a situation where you will give us information about an imminent attack, which will enable us to intercept Abdullah's group and arrest him, but…'
'It will irrevocably undermine my position in the GICM and I will be immediately executed.'
'No,' said Falcon.
'Yes,' said Yacoub. 'It's the only way.'
'But you realize all that will happen is that Abdullah will end up in jail, where he will gravitate to the radical elements which exist in Spanish prisons, and he will come out even more zealous than he went in. Having done his time he will be welcomed back into the group, and all you will have achieved is your own death,' said Falcon. 'You have to let me draw on some experience in this matter. Pablo and others in the CNI must have come across this type of situation before. They will have ideas on how to handle it.'
'You're my friend,' said Yacoub. 'I'm in this because of you. By that I mean I wanted to do this and you were the only one I could trust. I don't want you to start talking to others. As soon as you do that, I lose control and they start to run the situation; and believe me, they will look after their own interests, not mine. Before you know it, we'll be in a hall of mirrors, not knowing which way to turn. And this is my son, Javier. I can't allow him to be sucked in, manipulated, turned into a piece of the game, a fanatic's mass murderer, who will imagine in his adolescent mind that in killing and maiming…'
'Yacoub, you're letting this get out of control in your mind.'
'This is my Moroccan side,' he said, leaping to his feet and pacing around the room, scratching at childhood scars on his head which had been laid bare by the severity of his haircut. 'I get very emotional. I can't seem to calm myself down, or rather, I can calm down. I do calm down. And you know how I do it?'
Falcon waited for him to come back into his line of sight, but Yacoub leaned over the back of the armchair, his face so close the tobacco breath was sharp in Falcon's nostrils. 'I imagine Abdullah safe… away from all this… this madness. I imagine myself under a funeral shroud and able to see the sun coming through the cotton, the breeze playing over the material, and I am at peace for the first time in my life.'
'Try an alternative vision, Yacoub. Don't be so fatalistic. Imagine yourself at home with Abdullah, his wife and your grandchildren on your lap. Try achieving that instead of your death and his incarceration.'
'I would, if it wasn't such an absurd dream, an impossible ideal, Javier,' said Yacoub. 'The boy is already a part of their organization. He has no thoughts for girls, wives, children. Normal life has become a miserable existence to him. He despises his carefree childhood. He mourns the lost hours spent on his Gameboy. His whole adolescence is a tragedy of unconsciousness to him now. There's no question of bringing him back. The irony of it all is that, in joining himself to this new world, he has, to me, become a lost soul. He wanders a world of death, destruction and martyrdom. While my stomach heaves at the thought of a market in Baghdad with two hundred dead women and children, the whole area a blackened, smoking charnel house, Abdullah smiles beatifically at the imagined grace of the martyr who has committed this godless atrocity.'
'So you've seen him again since he went to this training camp a week ago?' asked Falcon, confused at how Yacoub could have known all this.
'The purpose of admitting me to the GICM in the first place was primarily to make one of their international attacks possible,' said Yacoub inconsequentially, buying himself some time. 'This means, as you know, I have unprecedented access to the military wing of the GICM. As soon as Abdullah told me his news, it was arranged for me to be shown his training camp. I spent some time there. We had a couple of evenings together in which I was able to see the profound change wrought in his young mind.'
'But you didn't manage to see the commander of the military wing?'
'No, as I told you, he wasn't there,' said Yacoub, turning his back on Falcon to stare at the drawn curtains. 'I had to convey my gratitude for this honour through one of his officers.'
Was that how it happened? thought Falcon as he joined Yacoub by the window. They embraced and he caught sight of his own confused face over Yacoub's shoulder in the only mirror in the room.
'My friend,' said Yacoub, his hot breath on Falcon's neck. 'You know me so well.'
Do I? thought Falcon. Do I?
7
AVE from Madrid to Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 22.00 hrs
If on the train journey from Seville to Madrid he'd been slightly feverish with paranoia, then the ride back saw a serious multiplication of the uncertainty parasites in his bloodstream. The darkness rushing past outside meant that all he could see was his disconcerted visage reflected back to him and, with the movement of the train, it seemed to tremble like his vacillating mind.
Not only had Yacoub forbidden him to talk to any of the intelligence officers from the CNI, but he had also already set in motion a plan for extracting Abdullah from the ranks of the GICM. Yacoub had begged the senior officers in the military wing to ask their commander to send his son on a mission as soon as possible, with the condition that he be responsible for its planning, logistics and execution.
