minister had. You know politics. It's like boxing. It's all very well to have the fast hands and fancy footwork, but even the greatest fighters get hit very hard and if you can't absorb punishment you're finished. Jesus Alarcon has all those qualities and, after the conferring of the leadership, I can now see emerging that indefinable quality that will make people want to follow him.'
'All right,' said the editor, thinking positively about it. 'A new face for a new era. Write me a profile. And, by the way, I agree with you about charisma, it is an intense form of self-belief. But there's something both blinding and blind about it, too. Its closest friend can quite quickly become corruption-the belief that you can do anything with impunity. I hope Jesus Alarcon does not have the makings of a tragic figure.'
'He's not a hollow man,' said Angel. 'He's suffered and come through it.'
'Get him to remember that suffering,' said the editor. 'Every politician should have the words of the president of the Terrorists' Victims' Association, Pilar Manjon, ringing in their ears: 'They only think of themselves.'' The Madrid police and forensics had been working hard in the apartment used by Djamel Hammad and Smail Saoudi. Taped to the underside of a gas bottle they'd found a selection of stolen and forged IDs and passports, with pictures of the two men whose descriptions fitted those given by Trabelsi Amar and the Seville homicide squad. They'd also discovered € 5,875 in small-denomination notes in three separate packages hidden around the apartment. DNA was currently being generated from hairs, bristles and pubic hairs found in the bathroom. An empty pad on the kitchen table had revealed indentations, which proved to be complicated directions to a property southwest of Madrid, not far from a village called Valmojado. The isolated house near the Rio Guadarrama was found to be empty, with no evidence of recent habitation. The police concluded that it was a staging post-a place to pick up and leave material-and nothing more. The property had been rented in the name of a Spaniard, whose ID was false. The owners had been paid six months in advance, which had made them reluctant to ask too many questions. The forensics were still conducting their search of the premises, but so far not a trace of explosive had been found. The Guardia Civil had questioned a number of locals, including shepherds, and reckoned that in the four months it had been rented it had been visited by a white van five times. Three of those visits corresponded roughly to the times Trabelsi Amar had lent the Peugeot Partner to Hammad and Saoudi.
There was a complication with this scenario, which was that the directions to the isolated house found in the Madrid apartment were freshly written in Hammad's handwriting, which would imply that their visit on Sunday at around midday was their first. This in turn implied that the other two times they'd borrowed Trabelsi Amar's van they'd lent it to others who had gone to the farmhouse. A clearer indication that the isolated farmhouse was being visited by people other than Hammad and Saoudi came from eyewitness reports that as many as six different people, including one woman, had been seen going there. This information had an adrenalizing effect on the CGI in Madrid, who concluded that Hammad and Saoudi were acting within a much larger network than at first thought. They contacted all the major intelligence agencies but none of them had picked up any 'chatter' about a planned attack in Spain. The fear now was that Hammad and Saoudi's logistical work was part of a wider effort.
The CGI, with the help of the Guardia Civil, were now trying to find Hammad and Saoudi's route from Madrid to the isolated house near Valmojado and then down to Seville. They wanted to know if they had made any other stopovers-anonymous-looking meetings in roadside bars, other visits to isolated houses or, worse, other deliveries to, for instance, a location in another major Andalucian city.
That was the primary content of a seven-page report, drafted by several senior officers of the counterterrorism unit and sent by the Madrid CGI to Comisario Elvira in the damaged pre-school in Seville. There was a conclusion attached, which had been written by the Director of the CNI and had also reached the hands of Prime Minister Zapatero: On the basis of our own findings and the reports received so far from the offices of the CGI and, taken in conjunction with the preliminary reports from the bomb squad and the police on the ground at the site of the disaster, we can only conclude, at this point, that we have come across an Islamic terrorist network who were planning an attack, or, more likely, a series of attacks, with the intention of destabilizing the political and social fabric of the region of Andalucia. Whilst the investigating bodies have so far uncovered some anomalies to the usual modus operandi of radical Islamic groups, they have not brought to our attention any suspicious activity, or even stated intention, of any other group that might want to inflict damage on the Muslim population of Andalucia. We therefore recommend that the government take the necessary steps to protect all major cities in the region.
The noise of demolition work reasserted itself in the room after Comisario Elvira finished the reading of the report. Inspector Jefe Falcon and Juez Calderon were sitting on small children's desks, arms folded, ankles crossed and staring into the ground, which had now been swept clear of glass. Plastic sheeting, which had been stretched across the empty window frames, revealed an indistinct outside world that ballooned and lurched with the hot breeze, blowing from the south.
'They seem to have made up their minds, don't they?' said Calderon. 'Having told us not to disappear exclusively down one path, that's just what they've done themselves. There's no mention of the VOMIT website or of any other anti-Muslim groups.'
'Given all the stuff they've just found in the Madrid apartment of Hammad and Saoudi, and the hexogen deposit in the rear of the Peugeot Partner and the Islamic paraphernalia in the front,' said Elvira, 'who could blame them?'
'It doesn't look good for the Islamic radicals at the moment,' said Falcon. 'But the bomb squad haven't got to the epicentre of the explosion yet. There's still vital forensic information to come. I've also spoken to the forensics going over the Peugeot Partner and so far all they've come up with is that a new tyre had been fitted to the rear driver's side and the spare had a puncture.
'What they've found in the Madrid apartment and the existence of the isolated house could be interpreted as terrorist activity, or illegal immigrant activity. We've been told that Hammad and Saoudi have a track record of logistical involvement, but what does that mean? If they'd been caught with something, then we'd know about it. If they've been named by others, that's questionable information.'
'My reading of this document,' said Elvira, flapping the paper derisively in front of him, 'is that it's something that has been drafted for the politicians, so that they can appear knowledgeable and decisive on a day of crisis. The CNI and CGI have stuck to the known facts. They've mentioned 'anomalies' but have given no detail. VOMIT and other groups aren't mentioned because there's nothing to support their involvement. The MILA doesn't appear either, despite its mention on the news. It's because they've got no intelligence to offer on any of them.'
'Are we allowed to talk about the CGI?' said Falcon, purposely disingenuous.
Calderon's secrecy radar was on to it in a flash. Elvira threw up his hands.
'Needless to say, this can't go out of this room,' said Elvira, 'but seeing as you're the instructing judge controlling this investigation you should know that there have been some concerns about the reliability of the Seville branch of the CGI. A decision from above has not yet been taken to allow them to fully enter the battle. Their agents have been in touch with their informer network and have drafted reports, but we haven't seen anything yet. They've been denied access to our reports and they know nothing about certain pieces of evidence, such as the heavily annotated copy of the Koran, which, as far as I know, has been kept out of the news.'
'That's a big blow to the investigation,' said Calderon. 'Shouldn't we have heard about this before now?'
'I don't have clearance to tell either of you,' said Elvira.
'So what is it about this heavily annotated copy of the Koran that's so important?' asked Calderon.
'I don't know, but it's received a very high level of interest from the CNI,' said Elvira. 'Anyway, that doesn't concern us right now. When was the last time you heard from your squad?'
'Recently enough to be able to say that we've got a pretty clear picture of what happened here in the last forty-eight hours, some of which is connected to occurrences in the week before the explosion.'
Falcon now had at least two witnesses to each of the significant events that preceded the blast. Hammad and Saoudi had first been seen at the mosque on Tuesday 30th May at 12.00. They arrived on foot and stayed talking to the Imam until 1.30 p.m. The two other events of that week were the visit from council inspectors at 10 a.m. on Friday 2nd June and a power cut some time on Saturday 3rd June at night, when the Imam had been in the mosque alone.
This led to an electrician turning up at 8.30 a.m. on Monday 5th June to assess the damage and the work involved. He returned with two labourers at 10.30 a.m. to repair the blown fuse box and also install a power socket in the storeroom next to the Imam's office.
The second visit from the electrician coincided with Hammad and Saoudi's arrival in the Peugeot Partner and the unloading of two large polypropylene sacks, which were believed to contain couscous. They stayed about an hour. The electricians left just before lunch at about 2.30 p.m. Hammad and Saoudi returned at 5.45 p.m. with four
