The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

The thief made the call, which took seconds because he said only one word: 'Romany'. They went down to Falcon's car and the thief drove them back into the city. They parked on Cristobal Colon and went down the steps to the walkway by the river. They waited in the dark. After some minutes footsteps came down on to the walkway. A man stood looking around. Falcon came at him from the shadows.

'Is this what you're looking for, Mr Flowers?' asked Falcon, holding out the printout lit by his pen torch.

Flowers nodded, studying the shot.

'I think we should take a seat,' he said.

The thief ran off up the steps. Flowers handed back the printout. He took out a handkerchief.

'Sorry for underestimating you, Inspector Jefe,' said Flowers, wiping his brow and face. 'I came down here from Madrid ten months ago. The Madrilenos have a rather jaded view of the Sevillano mentality. I should have been less crude in my methods.'

'Ten months ago?'

'We're taking a more active interest in our North African friends and the way they come into Europe since last September.'

'Of course you are,' said Falcon. 'And how did Marty Krugman fit into all that?'

'He didn't,' said Flowers. 'The Vega business was a side issue, although we got a fright when we heard about his 'suicide note', until we found out where that came from.'

'Which was?'

'It had been scratched on to the wall of one of the cells in the Villa Grimaldi torture centre in Santiago de Chile by an American called Todd Kravitz, who was held there for a month in 1974 before being 'disappeared',' said Flowers. The full inscription reads: We will be in the thin air you breathe from 9/11 until the end of time. Poetic enough to stick in his mind and come back nearly thirty years later to haunt him.'

'He mentioned to his doctor that he was having sleepwalking problems,' said Falcon, 'but not the unconscious writing.'

The pressures on a mind that didn't know it was guilty,' said Flowers.

'Let's talk about Marty Krugman,' said Falcon. 'Why don't we start with what he was doing, and who was he doing it for?'

That's a little more awkward for us to discuss.'

'This isn't America, Mr Flowers. I'm not wearing a wire. My only interest as the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios is who murdered Rafael Vega and why.'

'I have to take precautions,' said Flowers.

Falcon stood. Flowers frisked him expertly, found the gun immediately. They sat back down.

'The Vega business was not strictly a government operation,' said Flowers. 'It was more of an Agency issue – Company business. The tying up of loose ends.'

'But there was co-operation between the FBI and the Agency, which extended to allowing Krugman to walk away from the Reza Sangari killing.'

'They couldn't make a case without Marty cracking up and confessing the whole thing to them, and I told you about his trips to Chile in the seventies. What I didn't tell you was that the Chilean authorities did eventually catch up with him and he spent three weeks in the London Clinic, which was another torture centre, on Calle Almirante Barroso. In three weeks of punishment he didn't give anybody up. The only reason he didn't suffer the same fate as Todd Kravitz was because it was later on in the game and the human rights people were being more assiduous by then. This was not a guy who was going to crack under some FBI questioning.'

'So you thought it was fitting that he should be reporting back to you on someone who had been a notorious member of that regime?' said Falcon.

'Most Europeans think that Americans have no sense of irony, Inspector Jefe.'

'Was that why you didn't give him any information on Rafael Vega's real identity?'

'One of the reasons,' said Flowers. 'But if you're supposed to be reporting back on the state of mind of a person, it's better not to have your insight distorted by history.'

'What was so important about Vega's state of mind?'

'This was a guy we lost track of in 1982 when he absconded from a witness protection programme.'

'So that was true about him testifying in a drug- trafficking trial?'

'That was the surface truth. He held some damaging information about US Army officers and Agency personnel who were involved in running drugs for arms back in the late seventies and early eighties, so we cut a deal. He would act as a witness in a show trial and we would give him a new identity and fifty thousand dollars. He took both and disappeared. We couldn't find him anywhere.'

'But you knew about the wife and daughter?'

'That's all we could do, keep an eye on them and hope that he resurfaced. He was careful. He didn't come back for his daughter's wedding, which we were all expecting, and we assumed he was dead. We stopped watching, but we did send someone down to his wife's funeral.'

'When was that?'

'Not that long ago, something like three years – I can't remember exactly. But the funeral was when we found him again. He'd finally thought he was safe,' said Flowers. 'We researched his life, found that he was a successful businessman and thought that we had nothing to worry about, until the Russian mafia connection came to light about eighteen months ago.'

'Did you think he was in the arms dealing business again?'

'We just thought we'd better take a closer look at Rafael Vega,' said Flowers. 'But, I lied to you earlier, we did train him. He knew our ways. He knew our type of people. So we looked for other candidates and that was where the FBI came in. Marty Krugman was our perfect candidate – apart from some instability in his marriage.'

'Do you know what I'm feeling now, Sr Flowers?' said Falcon. 'That you're giving me just enough information to satisfy my curiosity.'

'The full story would take a long time.'

'One moment you're talking about tying up loose ends and the next you're talking about reporting on his state of mind.'

'It was both.'

'What 'loose ends' were you really nervous about?'

'We had begun to think that he might be operating again in some way,' said Flowers. 'It's an addictive profession, Inspector Jefe. We found out that he'd bought a passport in the name of Emilio Cruz and that he'd taken Moroccan visas.'

'I assumed that was his escape route.'

'What did he need to escape from?'

'Maybe it was from you, Sr Flowers,' said Falcon.

'He had the Emilio Cruz passport before we put Marty Krugman next to him, before we discovered his Russian mafia connection.'

'Why did he run from the witness protection programme in the first place?'

'They're living deaths, those things,' said Flowers. 'I'd have done the same.'

'Did he have good reason to believe that his daughter's family was not killed in an accident?'

'That was twenty years after he'd absconded,' said Flowers. 'It's one of the unfortunate side effects of an addiction to this profession – you can never take things at face value. People die in road accidents all the time, Inspector Jefe.'

'And did you discover what the Russian mafia connection was all about?'

'He allowed them to launder money through his projects and they indulged his paedophilia. I understand he liked to watch. El Salido, remember?'

'So what was Marty's job – if you already knew all that?'

Silence from Sr Flowers. A big, bored sigh.

'When did you tell him that Rafael Vega was Miguel Velasco?' asked Falcon.

'No, no, you're wrong there, Inspector Jefe. I'm not lying to you about that,' said Flowers. 'You're thinking we told him, and because of his past involvement in Chilean politics that was enough to incite him to murder.'

'Forcing a man to drink acid…' said Falcon.

'It's a nasty way to die,' said Flowers. 'It sounds like a revenge killing. But I want to