locate them in Morocco.
For one reason or another Falcon had not yet interviewed Agustin Cardenas, and it had been decided that he would talk to him first thing in the morning while Ramirez tackled Zarrias for a second time. The rest of the squad would be up early to walk the streets around El Cerezo to see if they could get any confirmed sightings of Hammad and Saoudi either on Sunday evening/Monday morning, or after the explosion on Tuesday.
By 7.30 a.m. Falcon had called ahead to the Jefatura to make sure that Agustin Cardenas would be waiting, ready to be interviewed as soon as he arrived. He stopped for a coffee and some toast on the way and was sitting in front of a still groggy Agustin Cardenas by 7.50.
In his photograph, Agustin Cardenas looked in his mid thirties, while his CV told Falcon he was forty-six years old. By this Saturday morning he'd found his way up into the mid fifties, which was somewhere he'd never been before.
'You're not looking good, Agustin,' said Falcon. 'You could do with a bit of nip and tuck yourself this morning.'
'I'm not a morning person,' he said.
'How long have you known Cesar Benito?'
'About eight years.'
'How did you meet him?'
'I did some work on his wife and then he came to see me himself.'
'For some work?'
'I removed the bags under his eyes and tightened up his neck and jowls.'
'And he was happy?'
'He was so happy he got a mistress.'
'Were your clinics part of the Horizonte group at this stage?'
'No, Cesar Benito thought that Horizonte should buy my business.'
'Which made you a lot of money,' said Falcon. 'Did they give you stock options in Horizonte?'
Cardenas nodded.
'And being a part of the group meant that you had capital,' said Falcon.
'I expanded the business to nine clinics in Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Nerja and another due to open in Valencia.'
'It's a shame that you've built up such a successful business and you're never going to see the fruits of your labour,' said Falcon. 'You're not protecting Cesar Benito just because he's made you this fortune that you'll never enjoy?'
Cardenas took a deep breath and stared at the table, thinking to himself.
'No,' said Falcon. 'It would have to be more than that, wouldn't it? There's your Hippocratic oath. Cesar must have had quite a hold on you to be able to persuade you to not only poison Hassani at his last supper, but also to use your surgical skills to cut off the man's hands, burn away his face and scalp him. You didn't do all that for Cesar just because he made you a rich man?'
More silence from Cardenas. Something was eating away at him. Here was a man who'd done a lot of thinking and not much sleeping overnight.
'What can you offer me?' said Cardenas, after some long minutes.
'In terms of a deal?' said Falcon. 'Nothing.'
Cardenas nodded, rocked himself in his chair. Falcon knew what was working its way from Cardenas's insides out: resentment.
'I can only give you Cesar Benito,' said Cardenas. 'He was the only person I had contact with.'
'We'll be happy with that,' said Falcon. 'What can you tell me?'
'One of the reasons I was not as wealthy as I should have been when I first met Cesar was that I'd been a gambling addict for almost ten years,' said Cardenas.
'Did Cesar Benito know about that when he arranged for Horizonte to buy your cosmetic surgery clinics?'
'No, but he found out soon afterwards,' said Cardenas. 'It was through him that I managed to get it under control.'
'And how did it get out of control again?'
'I went on a business trip with Cesar down to the Costa del Sol in March. He took me gambling.'
'He did?'
Cardenas nodded, looking at Falcon very steadily.
'That started me off again. But this time it was even worse. I was much better off than I had been the last time. My funds seemed to be limitless by comparison. By the beginning of May I owed over one million euros and I was having to sell things to make the interest payments on some of the loans I'd taken out.'
'And how did Cesar find out?'
'I told him,' said Cardenas. 'I'd had a visit from somebody I owed money to. They took me into the bathroom of my rented flat in Madrid and gave me the wet towel treatment. You know, you really think you're going to drown. They said they'd be back in four days' time. It scared me enough to go to Cesar and ask for help. We met in his apartment in Barcelona. He was shocked by what I told him, but he also said that he understood. After three days of being completely terrified I was relieved. Then he told me how he could make this problem go away.'
'Are you a religious man, Sr Cardenas?'
'Yes, our families go to church together.'
'How would you describe your relationship with Cesar Benito?'
'He'd become a very close friend. That's why I went to see him.'
'When Benito told you that you would have to commit murder and gross disfigurement, surely you must have asked him for every detail of the conspiracy?'
'I did, but not on that occasion,' said Cardenas. 'Once I realized what he was asking I decided on a safety strategy. The next time I met him was in my rented apartment in Madrid and I secretly recorded our entire conversation.'
'And where is that recording?'
'It's still in the apartment,' he said, writing down the address and telephone number. 'I taped it to the back of one of the kitchen drawers.' When Lucrecio Arenas was at his villa in Marbella he liked to get up early, before the staff arrived, which on a Saturday was not before 9 a.m. Arenas put on a pair of swimming trunks, shrugged into his huge white bathrobe and slipped into a pair of sandals. On his way out of the house he picked up a large, thick, white towel and a pair of swimming goggles. He hated chlorine in his eyes and always liked to see clearly, even underwater. He walked down the sloping garden in the warm morning, pausing to take in the glorious view of the green hills and the blue of the Mediterranean, which at this time of day, before the heat haze had risen, was so intense that even his untouchable heart ached a little.
The pool had been built at the bottom of the garden, surrounded by a dense growth of oleander, bougainvillea and jasmine. His wife had insisted it be put down there because Lucrecio had wanted a 20-metre monster. They'd dynamited three hundred tons of rock out of the mountainside so that he could swim his daily kilometre in fifty lengths, rather than having the awful bore of turning just as he'd got into his stride. He reached the poolside and flung his towel on a lounger and let his bathrobe fall on top. He stepped out of his sandals and walked to the end of the pool. He fitted his goggles over his face and nestled the rubber into his eye sockets.
He raised his arms and through the rose-tinted lenses of the goggles he saw something that looked like a postcard on the end of the diving board. He dropped his arms just as he felt two colossal thuds in his back, like sledgehammer blows but more penetrating. The third blow was to the neck and came down on him with the full weight of a cleaver. His legs would not support him and he collapsed messily into the water. The dense growth behind him rearranged itself. There was the sound of a small scooter starting up. The splendid day continued. The ice blue water in the swimming pool clouded red around the body. A speedboat nosed out into the blue morning, pursued by its white frothy wake. The Holiday Inn on Plaza Carlos Triana Bertran in Madrid was not one of Cesar Benito's favourite hotels, but it had some advantages. It was close to the conference centre where he'd given a speech to Spain's leading constructors the night before. It was also near the Bernabeu Stadium and even when Real Madrid weren't playing he enjoyed being close to the beating heart of Spanish football. The hotel had a third advantage on this Saturday, which was that it was only twenty minutes to the airport and he had a flight to catch to Lisbon at 11 a.m. He'd asked for breakfast to be served in his suite as he hated looking at other people, who were
