up the air-con. The cool blasted into his chest. He drove back into town, pulled up outside the restaurant. Consuelo tore open the door, got in. He pulled away.
'What?' he said to her questioning eyes.
'What have you been doing?' she asked. 'You're soaked to the skin.'
'There's a shirt in the back seat,' he said. 'Revnik. The voice. What did they tell us to do?'
'They came back with a different plan,' said Consuelo. 'Fortunately the same as ours. They wanted us to offer Donstov the disks early. I told them it had already been done. They took it well. They're on the move.'
Falcon drove alongside the river, with the old Expo '92 site on the Isla de la Cartuja just across the water.
'They do know that we've been sent to this petrol station precisely so that Donstov can make sure we're not being followed.'
'Revnik's voice told me that he has two ex-KGB men working for him,' said Consuelo. 'And four years ago the Russian Interior Ministry disbanded a group called the SOBR, a special rapid-reaction unit. All these highly trained guys were suddenly out of a job on a small pension. Revnik has three of them working for him now.'
'You had quite a conversation with the voice.'
'He opened up when I told him you'd left to get the disks,' said Consuelo. 'I got a guided tour of the Russian mafia. You know, it's not so different to Seville. If you have friends in the right places, it all works.'
'The town hall hasn't got round to killing people yet.'
'But most of the Marbella town council are in jail for corruption.'
'Did the voice tell you anything practical, like how they were going to follow us?'
'He said they had 'listening equipment'. With my mobile number they can pick up my signal and listen in,' said Consuelo. 'Doesn't it make you despair when you see such contempt for the forces of law and order?'
He didn't answer.
She squeezed his arm. Falcon turned left, crossed the river over Calatrava's harp bridge, headed away from the lights of the city, past the Olympic stadium and into the darkness.
Barely any traffic. The odd truck. The new motorway bypassing Las Pajanosas was smooth and empty. The lights studding the tarmac were an odd comfort, a show of someone's concern. Consuelo sat with her legs crossed at the ankle, hands in her lap playing with her rings. She had her head tilted back against the head-rest, eyes open, drinking in the illuminated road. Occasionally she took a deep, quivering breath.
'I can hear you thinking,' said Falcon.
'What is said and demanded in business negotiations is one thing,' said Consuelo. 'But there's always a subtext.'
'You mean, why did the brutal Donstov suddenly become a reasonable human being half an hour later?' asked Falcon.
'Is there any significance to him getting those disks seven or eight hours earlier than he originally asked?' said Consuelo. 'Why have they halved their demand to four million euros? Why is he being weak?'
'Maybe the money is much more important to Donstov than we realized,' said Falcon. 'Revnik's man thought so.'
'And it's much closer to the amount of money that he knows I can raise,' said Consuelo. 'Which is why I'm thinking: why did Donstov release the pressure on me?'
'This doesn't feel like a release to me. If anything, he's racked it up. He's making us act quicker. He's given us less time to plan.'
'What about this: when I told him that another group had claimed they were holding Dario, it made him suspect that we'd formed the sort of relationship we have.'
'So, he gets us to speed up,' said Falcon. 'And, at the same time, he confirms that we still believe him and haven't fallen for the other side's bluff.'
They arrived at the petrol station where they'd been told to wait, Falcon filled up and extracted a couple of cafe solos from the machine, took them back to the car. They parked in front of the neighbouring hostal. He changed his shirt. They stared out into the dark and sipped coffee.
'If we get through this I'm never going to the Costa del Sol ever again in my life,' said Consuelo.
'Nothing's changed in the Costa del Sol for the last forty years. Why withdraw your custom now?'
'Because it's only now that I've faced up to what these people have being doing,' said Consuelo. 'Almost every apartment building, every development, every golf course, marina, fun park, casino – every source of recreation for visiting tourists is built on the profit from human misery. Hundreds of thousands of girls being forced to work in the puti clubs. Hundreds of thousands of addicts sticking themselves with needles. Hundreds of thousands of brainless, decadent fools snorting white powder up their noses so that they can dance and fuck all night long. And that's not counting any of the migrants, who are washed up dead on the glorious beaches. It makes me sick and I'm not going to do it any more. I'm not going to do it any fucking more.'
She jabbed her heel down in the footwell with each vehement syllable. Falcon reached out to calm her down and it was then that the mobile rang. She grabbed it off the dashboard. The irritating sound of an SMS arriving filled the car.
Donstov's man sending a text.
'They're telling us to go north, direction Merida.'
Falcon pulled away from the hostal with a squeal from the tyres and crossed the hot road, turning left.
'Do you think our friends can 'hear' a text?' asked Consuelo, nervous, sneaking a glance at Falcon's impassive face.
'Technology is not my strong point,' he said, suppressing a sense of the complete madness of what they were doing. 'We have to believe that they know their work.'
After ten kilometres they were told to leave the main road north and, following endless instructions from texts sent on the mobile, they drove down narrow rough roads with patched tarmac, through small villages with just a couple of street lights, up hills with deep blackness on either side while the smell of the rock rose, the stone pines cooling, the wild herbs and the dry earth wafted through the half-open windows. Consuelo writhed in her seat, staring out of the front and side, checking the rear-view mirror.
'If Revnik's men were following us and we could see them, they'd be visible to Donstov's people, too,' said Falcon. 'So keep calm, Consuelo. Look ahead.'
'Where the hell are we?'
The tyres rumbled over the roads. A sign. Castelblanco de los Arroyos. Turn left. Darkness again.
'How long have we been driving?' she asked.
'Forty minutes.'
She rested a hand on his forearm.
'There's nothing out there. There's nobody with us. There can't be anybody in this blackness. They'd see any headlights coming from kilometres away,' she said, losing heart. 'We're going to have to prolong this thing as much as we can.'
'It'll take time for them to go through the disks,' said Falcon.
The mobile rang, this time it was a call. Donstov's man.
'You'll see a sign to the Embalse de la Cala on the left. Take it, and tell me when you get there.'
Four minutes.
'We're here.'
'Take the second track on the right.'
They came off the tarmac on to a dirt road.
'Hand-painted sign: Granja de las Once Higeras. Follow it.'
They followed the signs through the tall grasses and low, wide-spread holm oaks. It went on for kilometres until they came through an open gate to a single-storey house. The headlights brushed over the whitewashed walls, the shuttered and barred windows, the door with red paint peeling off it.
'Put the car in the barn,' said the voice. 'Leave the keys in the ignition. Come out with your hands up… hold the disks on your head. Stand in front of the garage, legs apart.'
In the barn was a yellow rusting digger. Consuelo felt the warmth of its engine radiating towards her.
She and Javier stood a few metres from the back of the car, hands on heads. Two men in baseball caps, indiscernible behind their torch beams, approached the car. They had kerchiefs pulled up over their faces. One went into the garage while the other gave Falcon a thorough pat-down, put a sleeping mask over his eyes. He heard the
