'No more than I told the British,' said Falcon. 'He's a family friend. He has a carpet business and tourist shops in Fes.'
'And this is what Yacoub told you to say?'
'It's the information he gave me.'
'You said he'd lived in Fes all his life.'
'A lot has happened, Pablo. I don't remember everything perfectly.'
'You probably don't know this, but before I came back to the CNI in Madrid I ran agents in the Maghreb for more than ten years. I'm part of an enormous North African intelligence community,' said Pablo. 'If you give me a name like Mustafa Barakat I have access to all my friends' archives as well as my own. I put that name straight across to my Moroccan colleagues, who don't just look at their files but, because they understand the complex nature of families in their country, they get down on the ground as well. They feed their informers into the termites' nest of the medina. That's a lot of manpower I can draw on.'
'And what did they find?'
'That there are very close ties between the Barakat and Diouri families. Since 1940 there have been thirty-six marriages between the families, which have produced one hundred and seventeen children. Sixty-four with the name Diouri and fifty-two with the name Barakat. Eight of those Barakats are called Mustafa. Two of them are interesting because they were both born in the late 1950s. The other six are either too old or too young to be the Barakat staying at Yacoub's house.
'Of those two remaining Mustafas, one went into the family carpet business during the seventies and never left Morocco, but the other had a much more interesting life. In 1979 he went to a madrassa, a religious school, in Jeddah for three years. From there he went to Pakistan, where nothing more was heard about him until he resurfaced in Morocco in 1991. The word on the street is that he spent quite a few of those years in Afghanistan. Now this is where there's a bit of confusion, because in 1992 Mustafa Barakat died in a car accident on a steep road up in the Rif mountains on his way back from Chefchaouen, where the family had opened a small hotel and tourist shop. It was sad because he'd only just settled back in his own country and…'
'Which Mustafa Barakat are we talking about?' asked Falcon.
'That's where it gets confusing. The interesting thing is, after the accident on the road from Chefchaouen, the other Mustafa Barakat still ran the family carpet business, tourist shops and hotels but, having never left the country before, he suddenly started an import/export business. He would fly to Pakistan to buy carpets. Since the Afghan war, all carpets in that area of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, even the eastern part of Iran, come to Pakistan and are exported as Pakistani carpets. These carpets, which he brought back from Pakistan, were then re-exported to countries like France, Germany, Holland and the UK.'
'You think there was a switch?'
'There are no post mortems performed out there in the Rif.'
'Presumably the Mustafa Barakat who'd gone to the madrassa in Jeddah had also made the pilgrimage to Mecca and was al-Hadji.'
'Mustafa Barakat, who'd only just started travelling in 1993, did the Haj that same year,' said Pablo. 'Detail is something we're good at in the intelligence service. So before you ask: no dental records.'
'Anything else that might help us identify which Mustafa Barakat we're dealing with?'
'It would be nice if the mujahideen kept army records and let us have a look at them. It would be better to have some DNA.'
A wave of paranoia swept through Falcon. He stared into Pablo's face, like a poker player looking for tells. Is this true? Is this just a construct to get me back on side? Why would Yacoub have given such a thing away, exposing a family member to such scrutiny?
'Don't cut yourself off from that level of intelligence,' said Pablo, 'without at least giving it a second thought.' In the end Consuelo had taken the sleeping pills left by the doctor. She'd watched the clock work its way round to 6 a.m. with her mind unable to hold steady on any logical path. She was caught in triangular thinking, flitting between Dario, herself and Javier, but unable to concentrate on any one of them.
Even with her sister and her two other sons in the house she felt a terrible loneliness. In between the bouts of rage that periodically washed over her she reluctantly identified a need for the one person she'd banished from her sight for ever. Almost as soon as this came to her she was consumed by hatred for him. Then despair would crash in and she would sob at the thought of her little boy lost in the dark, terrified and alone. It was exhausting, emotionally draining, but the mind would not shut down and let her drift into sleep. So she took the pills. Three instead of two. She woke up at two in the afternoon with her head and mouth full of cotton wool, feeling as if she'd been embalmed.
The sleep had weakened her and she couldn't stand in the shower. She sat and let the water fall on her pitiful shoulders. She sobbed and raged all over again.
She drank water and her strength slowly returned. She dressed, went downstairs. Everybody looked at her. She read their faces. Victims were always the stars of their own dramas and the supporting cast had nothing to offer.
This was Sunday. Sitting with her arms folded, waiting for the phone to ring.
14
Las Tres Mil Viviendas, Seville – Monday, 18th September 2006, 12.15 hrs
His name was Roque Barba but he was known to everybody in the run-down, dead-end barrio of Las Tres Mil Viviendas as El Pulmon, because he only had one lung. He'd lost the other one two months after his seventeenth birthday at a corrida in a small village in the east of Andalucia when he was still a novillero. He'd liked the look of his second bull of the afternoon and told the picador not to dig too deep with the lance because he wanted to show the crowd what he could do. It was right at the beginning of the faena and the bull still had his head up. El Pulmon had two problems: he wasn't quite tall enough and the bull had a little hook from right to left, which he hadn't seen. This meant that during the first pass the bull's horn, instead of flashing past his chest, caught him under the armpit, and the next thing he knew he was up in the air. There was no pain. No sound. Life slowed down. The crowd and the arena came to him in sickly waves as the bull's immensely powerful neck reared up and then shook him from side to side. Then he hit the deck, felt the sand grind into his face and heard his collar bone crack in his ear.
The bull's horn broke two ribs and cracked another two. It tore the lung apart and drove splinters of bone close to the heart. The surgeons removed the ragged lung that night. That was the end of his career as a torero. Not because he only had one lung; the other expanded to compensate. But he could no longer raise his left arm above shoulder height.
Now he sat on the fourth floor of one of the many brutalized tower blocks in Las Tres Mil Viviendas. There was a gun on the table, which he had just finished cleaning. He'd bought it last week. Until then he'd only ever used a blade. He still had the knife, which he carried in a spring-loaded mechanism attached to the underside of an ornately tooled leather wrist strap on his right forearm.
He'd bought the gun for two reasons. The high-quality product he'd started selling a few months ago had brought him a lot more clients, which meant that he was now handling more money on a regular basis. Only he knew about this – and, of course, his girlfriend Julia, who was asleep in the bedroom. But El Pulmon knew that people loved to talk, and in Las Tres Mil they loved to talk about the one commodity that was in short supply – money. Hence the gun. Although that wasn't the full story.
The gun wasn't needed to control any of his clients. They knew he had balls. Anybody who was prepared to get into a confined space with a half-ton bull was not lacking in that department. And he still had the reflexes. No, the gun had become necessary because, although he was now receiving high-quality product from the Russians, he hadn't stopped selling the gear that he was getting from the Italians. In fact, he'd started cutting the one with the other. So, not only was there the potential for trouble from outsiders interested in money, but there was also an element of unpredictability in his suppliers.
Now, when he handed over his €10,000 for the week, he was never quite sure whether he was going to be given another package to sell or find himself hanging out of the window upside down, with a four-floor drop beneath him. It had already happened once. The weightlifter, the one called Nikita, had dropped by to remind him that his
