'Why did you do that?' asked Falcon. 'The one thing we need in this situation is time.'
'More important than time, at this stage,' Yacoub said, 'is to show them how honoured I am that my son has been chosen. Delay would have meant that suspicion would have come down heavily on me and I would have been excluded from my son's future. This was the only way for me to keep my foot in the door.'
The high command were thinking about it. Yacoub had told Falcon that the following morning he would be flying back to Rabat, where he expected to be told of their decision. None of this was exactly calming, but it wasn't the cause of Falcon's paranoia. That had started with those cramps of fear in his gut. He'd tried to ignore them, like the man with acute appendicitis who'd convinced himself it was just wind, but they'd made him very apprehensive. One moment he was sitting in front of a man who'd become his closest friend, with whom he shared a level of intimacy he'd only ever experienced with the man he'd believed to be his father – Francisco Falcon. And the next there was a person he no longer completely trusted. Doubt had been interposed. That last embrace in front of the closed curtains had been an attempt to reinforce the relationship, but it was as if some impenetrable barrier, like a Kevlar skin, had come between them.
Perhaps that had been the fatal flaw; the only other time he'd experienced this level of intimacy, it had been based on lies and fraudulence: his father had tricked the five-year-old Javier into becoming the agent of his own mother's death. But how could it have been so quick with Yacoub? Suspicion had ripped through him. But why? He replayed the meeting in minute detail, almost frame by frame, to extract every nuance.
The haircut was part of it, or had it become part of it? Was that retrospective suspicion? Yacoub had always liked to keep his luxuriant hair long. Maybe he was just getting into role. In fact, before the haircut was the apartment. He hadn't asked him about it. Whose was it? He'd have to find that out. He called an old detective friend from his Madrid days who was in a bar on his way home. Falcon gave him the address, told him to keep it to himself. He wanted the owner's identity and background and he was to speak to Falcon only, no messages left in the office.
'I'm not even going to ask,' said his friend, who told him he'd probably have to wait until Monday now.
Headlights wavered in the blackness of the countryside and swung away. Someone across the aisle was studying him. He got up, walked down the train to the bar, ordered a beer. What else? He took out his notebook, jotted down his thoughts. Trust. Yacoub had kept on at Falcon about how much he trusted him: 'The only man I can trust… You always have to be between me and them…' That was where the cramps had started and when he'd first questioned Yacoub's reliability. 'You're a good friend. The only true friend I've got.' It was that line which had allowed the ugliest thought to enter his head: Is he using me? Falcon rewound to a question he'd asked: 'So where's this influence coming from?' The shrug. Had someone got to Yacoub? He knew the GICM didn't like his relationship with the inspector jefe. Were they breaking it up, and using young Abdullah to do it?
The notes streamed out of his pen. The swearing. The plan. There was no plan, but Yacoub wanted him involved. Why? 'You're my friend. I'm in this because of you.' He'd qualified that blame immediately, but there was no doubt that he wanted Falcon to feel culpable. Then there was Yacoub's vision of his own death. Had he overdone the self-pity? Finally, there was the slip. Was it a slip to reveal that he'd seen Abdullah since he'd gone to the training camp? Yacoub was under pressure. The stress of it created emotional extremes and mistakes were made.
He closed the notebook, took a swig of beer. He breathed back a sense of disequilibrium that he couldn't put his finger on. How do you describe that feeling when it occurs to you that your brother might be exploiting you? There was no word for it. It couldn't be that it was so rare that they hadn't bothered to invent it. People were always exploited and betrayed by those closest to them. But what was the word for the feeling of the victim? The Americans have a good word: suckered. Because the feeling was one of being drained, having the marrow sucked out.
He took out his mobile, and it wasn't just for the usual banal exchange that was played out in trains all over the world; he needed to hear the sound of a voice that he believed in and who believed in him. He called Consuelo. Dario, her youngest boy, the eight-year-old, picked up the phone.
'Hola, Dario, how's it going?' he said.
'Javi-i-i,' screamed Dario. 'Mama, mama, it's Javi.'
'Bring the phone to the kitchen,' said Consuelo.
'Are you good, Dario?' asked Falcon.
'I'm good, Javi. Why aren't you here? You should be here. Mama's been waiting and waiting…'
'Bring that phone here, Dario!'
He heard the boy sprinting down the corridor. The phone changed hands.
'I don't want you thinking I'm sitting around here like some lovesick teenager,' said Consuelo. 'Dario's been desperate for you to get here.'
'I'm on the AVE and running late.'
'He won't go to bed until you arrive, and we're going shopping tomorrow. New football boots.'
'I've got to see someone in town before I come out to your place,' said Falcon. 'It's going to be after midnight before I get to you.'
'Maybe we should have dinner out,' said Consuelo. 'That's a better idea. I really want him to go to bed now. I'll take him next door. He's in love with their sixteen-year-old daughter. Let's do that, Javier.'
'Tell him I'll have a kick around with him in the garden tomorrow morning.'
A hesitation.
'You think you're getting lucky tonight?' she said quietly, teasing.
They hadn't discussed his staying over. It was part of the new coming together. No assumptions.
'I've been praying for luck,' he said. 'Has Our Lady been good to me?'
Another hesitation.
'I'll tell Dario,' she said. 'But once you've made a promise like that, you've got to be prepared for him to jump on your head at eight in the morning.'
'Where shall we meet?'
She said she'd arrange everything. All he had to do was meet her in the Bar La Eslava on the Plaza San Lorenzo and they'd take it from there.
Calm restored. He nearly felt like a family man. Consuelo's two older boys, Ricardo and Matias, hadn't been so interested in him. They were fourteen and twelve. But Dario was still keen on the idea of a dad. The boy had brought him closer to Consuelo. She could see that Dario liked him and, although she would never say it, Dario was her favourite. He also distracted them from the seriousness of what they were trying to do, made them feel more casual, less anxious.
And with that thought, sleep finally claimed him.
He woke up sitting in the carriage in the Santa Justa station, with people shuffling out of the train. It was just after 11.30. He left the station, drove to Calle Hiniesta. Falcon wanted to have Marisa sleeping uneasily with the knowledge that after their chat this afternoon he'd taken an anonymous threatening phone call and that he wasn't scared by it.
As he parked at the back of the Santa Isabel church he saw that the light was on in her penthouse apartment, the plants were lit up on her roof terrace. He pressed her buzzer.
'I'm coming down,' she said.
'This is Inspector Jefe Javier Falcon,' he said.
'What are you doing here?' she said, annoyed. 'I'm on my way out.'
'We can discuss this in the street, if that's what you want.'
She buzzed the door open. He took the small lift up to her floor. Marisa let him in, closing down her mobile, nervous, as if she'd just asked her date to delay his arrival unless he wanted to meet the police.
'Going somewhere special?' asked Falcon, taking in her long, tight turquoise dress, her coppery hair down to her shoulders, the gold earrings, the twenty-odd gold and silver bangles on her arm, an expensive scent.
'A gallery opening and then dinner.'
She closed the door behind him. Her hands were uneasy at her sides. The bangles rattled. She didn't ask him to sit down.
'I thought we had a long talk this afternoon,' she said. 'You took up an hour of my work-time and now you've moved in on my relaxation…'
'I had a call from a friend of yours this afternoon.'
