'Cristina, go and stand outside Belenki's suite with your weapon,' said Falcon. 'I don't want him to have a chance of getting back in there. Ramirez and I will go to the toilets. Can you back us up?'
The head of security nodded. They left the room. The shops and art gallery were empty apart from an assistant. Ramirez told her to go and wait in reception for a few minutes. They took out their weapons. Falcon eased open the door to the toilets. Ramirez closed it silently behind them. No sign of Belenki or Spinola. A harsh, guttural voice speaking good Spanish came from the last cubicle. It was the wide-doored disabled toilet.
'I don't know how to impress upon you the importance of this, you little piece of shit,' said Belenki. 'Did you tell them that this is the deal, or there is no deal and they get this?'
No answer, apart from a kind of grunting noise.
They moved towards the cubicle. Falcon stood poised, gun at shoulder height in both hands. Ramirez readied himself.
'What?' said Belenki.
A spitting, gagging sound from Spinola.
'What we're both going to do now is pay a visit to Alfredo Manzanares and explain to him the nature of our earlier agreement,' said Belenki.
'Alfredo Manzanares is not the only problem,' said Spinola, gasping for air. 'Cortland Fallenbach, the owner of I4IT, is here. He's the one who has to be persuaded.'
'Is he?' said Belenki. 'Do you think he could be persuaded like this?'
More grunting, heavy nasal breathing.
Falcon nodded. Ramirez took four steps and kicked the door with such a savage blow that it cracked back into the tiled wall with the sound of a rifle shot. Belenki, a hank of blond hair over his forehead, was in the middle of the floor, he had Spinola's tie wrapped around his fist and the man was dangling, his knees just brushing the tiles. Belenki's gun, a thick silencer attached, was forced hard into Spinola's mouth so that his Adam's apple jumped.
Belenki dropped Spinola, who fell to his side, as if the noise he'd heard was the shot that had gone down his throat. Because his tie was still wrapped around Belenki's fist, his head hung about a half-metre from the floor.
'Police! Drop the fucking gun,' said Ramirez, his weapon pointed at Belenki's chest.
With intense, ice-blue eyes Belenki looked from Ramirez to Falcon, weighing up all the violent possibilities. He let Spinola's tie slip slowly from his grip as if preparing himself to move.
'You want to lose an arm, Viktor?' asked Falcon.
Silence and then the gun clattered to the floor. The room seemed to exhale.
'Come here,' said Falcon, beckoning to Belenki. 'Face down on the floor, hands behind your head.'
Belenki got down. Ramirez frisked him thoroughly, found a small firearm in an ankle holster.
'Hands behind your back,' said Ramirez, and handcuffed him, hauled him to his feet.
They called in the head of security. Falcon checked Belenki's pockets for disks. Nothing.
'Who's with you, Viktor, apart from Isabel?' asked Falcon.
No answer.
'You didn't come alone, did you?'
No answer.
'Is Leonid Revnik with you?'
No answer, but a slight widening of the eyes.
'Take him down to the lock-up,' said Falcon. 'Start questioning him, Jose Luis. See if you can get anywhere. I'll look after this one.'
27
Hotel La Berenjena – Tuesday, 19th September 2006, 22.05 hrs
Alejandro Spinola was still lying on his side in the disabled toilet, shaking, the image of the accomplished networker from the mayor's office gone for good. His mouth was connected to the tiled floor by strings of bloody saliva. He was dry-retching and crying. Falcon knelt beside him, patted him on the shoulder.
'All right, Alejandro?' asked Falcon. 'Glad to see me this time?'
A nod, his fists jammed between his thighs, like a little boy who'd taken his first bullying on the playground.
'Good,' said Falcon. 'Let's get you cleaned up.'
Spinola stood at the sink, looked at himself in the mirror. His lips were cut up and swollen, and he'd lost one of his front teeth, an incisor. He buried his face in his arms and sobbed.
'Wash your face, Alejandro. Pull yourself together. We have to talk before this little event gets under way.'
Falcon helped Spinola out of his jacket. The shirt underneath was so drenched in sweat that the cotton was transparent. While he washed his face, Falcon asked the receptionist to bring a white shirt. Spinola lifted the tie over his head and unpicked the dense knot. He straightened the material with trembling fingers. A girl arrived with a shirt. He put it on, reconstructed the tie around his neck, combed his hair back into place and, staring into the mirror, touched his tender lips with the tips of his fingers.
'I'm finished,' he said, and his stomach started juddering with emotion.
'You're alive and Viktor Belenki is out of the game,' said Falcon, patting him on the shoulder. 'When did he first talk to you about his plans for Russian involvement in the Isla de la Cartuja construction projects?'
'In August,' said Spinola, thighs shivering uncontrollably. 'We met in Marbella.'
'What did he tell you?'
'That he had Valverde, Ramos and the American, Taggart, on film fucking whores and taking drugs,' said Spinola. 'All I had to do was line up the I4IT/Horizonte consortium to make sure it tendered the best possible bid, and he would sort out the rest.'
'Which meant that you leaked information about the other bids to whom?'
'Antonio Ramos, Horizonte's head of construction. He was the guy who was putting the building project together.'
'Couldn't they have sorted all this out before today?'
'Alfredo Manzanares has only been in charge of the bank for a fortnight. The whole financing of the Horizonte deal was being discussed with other parties from Dubai. Then the big boss in the US, Cortland Fallenbach, stepped in and said he wasn't going to have a project of this magnitude being financed, well, he said by the Middle East, but we all know he meant Muslims. You know how they feel about non-Christian religions in I4IT. He told Antonio Ramos that he was going to have to use the Banco Omni.'
'When was this?'
'The beginning of this month.'
'Were the Russians involved in the financing from Dubai?'
'I think they must have been, but I don't know,' said Spinola. 'They were furious when it was taken away from Dubai.'
'So the Russians lost their way into the building project through the financing, laundering their money in the process, and had to try a different tactic.'
'Alfredo Manzanares, as the financier, wanted all contractors on the job to have pristine track records. He's hardline Opus Dei and after the Seville bombing, with all its associations with Lucrecio Arenas and the Catholic Kings shit, he wasn't going to allow anything that had the faintest stink about it. So telling him he had to use Viktor Belenki's construction companies was never going to work. I don't know how Valverde and Ramos put it to him, but that, in effect, is what they would have been asking him to accept this evening.'
'All right, that gives us some vital background detail on tonight's event,' said Falcon. 'Now, I just want to clarify why you introduced Marisa Moreno to your cousin, Esteban Calderon, last year.'
'I was told to,' said Spinola. 'I didn't understand what it was all about at the time. I couldn't have known the implications.'
'Except that you knew you'd been asked by members of a criminal organization to introduce a woman to the
