capable of arousing the passionate emotions that can lead to uncontrollable violence.' Ines knew Esteban. My God, did she know Esteban Calderon. She'd seen him gilded with the laurel wreath, and cringing like the village cur. That was why she could arouse such emotions in him. Only she. That old cliche holds true. Love and hate have the same source. He would love her again once that black bitch stopped meddling with his mind.
She raised herself on to all fours. The pain made her gasp. Blood dripped from her mouth. She must have bitten her tongue. She crawled up the bed to stand on her feet. She unzipped her dress and let it fall. Unhooking her bra was a torture, bending to slip off her panties nearly made her faint. She stood in front of the mirror. A massive bruise spread across her torso where he'd hit her that morning. Her chest ached through to her spine. A criss-cross of weals covered her buttocks and upper thighs, broken by punctured skin where the buckle had dug in. She put a finger to one of these marks and pressed. The pain was exquisite. Esteban, in that passionate moment, really had given her his fullest attention. Javier lay in the dark, with images from the late news still present in his mind: the demolished building under the surgical glare of the floodlights; the smashed plate-glass windows of a number of shops with Moroccan wares for sale; the fire brigade spraying a flaming apartment which had been fire-bombed by kids on the rampage; a cut, bruised and swollen-faced Moroccan boy, who'd been set upon by neo-Nazi thugs with clubs and chains; a butcher's selling halal meat with a car rammed through the metal blinds of the store front. Falcon shunted all the images out of his mind until all that was left was the ultimate remnant of terror-deep uncertainty.
He cast his mind back to before the bombing, looking for a clue amongst all those extraordinary emotions that might help him make sense of what was happening. His mind played tricks. Uncertainty had that effect. Human beings always believe that an event has been prefigured in some way. It's the necessary part of rediscovering the pattern. Mankind cannot bear too much chaos.
He had the illusion of the impenetrable darkness receding from him, like the endlessly expanding universe. This was the new certainty, the one that sent all the old narratives, with which we structured our lives, down into the black hole of human understanding. We have to be even stronger now that science has told us that time is unreliable, and even light behaves differently if you turn your back. It was a terrible irony that, just as science was pushing back the limits of our comprehension, religion, the greatest and oldest of human narratives, was fighting back. Was it because of resentment at being found on the discard pile of modern European life that religion was making a stand? Falcon closed his eyes and concentrated on relaxing each part of his body until, finally, he drifted away from the unanswerable questions and into a deep sleep. He was a man who had made up his mind and had a car arriving early to take him to the airport. The car, a black Mercedes with tinted windows, turned up at 6 a.m. with Pablo sitting in the back in a dark suit with an open-neck shirt.
'How did your talk with Yacoub go last night?' asked Pablo, as the car pulled away.
'Given that a bomb went off in Seville yesterday, he knows I'm not coming over on a social visit.'
'What did he say?'
'He was pleased that we were going to see each other, but he knows there's an ulterior motive.'
'He's going to be a natural at this business.'
'I'm not sure he'll take that as a compliment.'
'Because of your investigation this is time-critical, so we've arranged a private jet to take us down there. The flight to Casablanca will be less than an hour and a half as long as we get good air-traffic clearance. You've got diplomatic status so we'll get through any formalities quickly, and you'll be on the road to Rabat within two hours of take-off,' said Pablo. 'I presume you're meeting Yacoub in his home?'
'I'm a friend, not a business associate,' said Falcon. 'Although that might change after this meeting.'
'I'm sure Mark Flowers gave you some good tips.'
'How long have you known about Mark…and me?' asked Falcon, smiling.
'Since you first outwitted him back in July 2002 and he made you one of his sources,' said Pablo. 'We're not worried about Mark. He's a friend. After 9/11 the Americans said they were going to put someone in Andalucia and we asked for Mark. Juan has known him since they were in Tunis together, keeping an eye on Gaddafi. Did Mark give you any ideas on how to approach Yacoub Diouri?'
'I'm pretty sure he tried to recruit him and was rebuffed,' said Falcon. 'He said that Yacoub didn't like Americans.'
'That should make your task easier, if he's used to being approached.'
'I don't think Yacoub Diouri is someone you 'approach'. He's the sort of guy who would see you coming a long way off if you did. We'll just talk, as we always do, about everything. It will come out in the way it does. I'm not going to use any strategies on him. Like a lot of Arabs, he has a powerful belief in honour, which h e learnt from the man who became his father. He is someone to whom you show respect, and not just as a gesture,' said Falcon. 'Perhaps you should tell me the sort of thing you want him to do, how you want him to operate, what contacts you're expecting him to make. Are you hoping to get information about the MILA from him?'
'MILA? Has Mark been talking to you about the MILA?'
'You're all the same, you intelligence people,' said Falcon. 'You can't take a question, you have to answer it with another. Do you exchange any information?'
'The MILA has nothing to do with what we want from Yacoub.'
'The TVE news said they were responsible for the bomb,' said Falcon. 'A text was posted from Seville to the Madrid office of the ABC, about Andalucia being brought back into the Muslim fold.'
'The MILA are only interested in money,' said Pablo. 'They've dressed their intentions up in jihadist rhetoric, but the reason they want to liberate Ceuta and Melilla is that they want the enclaves for themselves.'
'Tell me what we're trying to achieve,' said Falcon.
'For the purposes of this mission, what is crucial is not who destroyed that apartment building in Seville and why, but rather what the explosion has revealed to us,' said Pablo. 'Forget the MILA, they're not important. This is not about your investigation into yesterday's bomb. This is not about the past, but the future.'
'OK. Tell me,' said Falcon, thinking that Flowers may have been right about the CNI planting the MILA story.
'Last year the British held their parliamentary elections. They didn't need the example of the Madrid bombings to know that these elections were going to be the target of a number of attempts by terrorists to change the way a population thinks.'
'And nothing happened,' said Falcon. 'Tony Blair, the 'little Satan', got in with a reduced majority.'
'Exactly, and nobody knew that there were three separate cells with active plans, who were prevented from carrying out their attacks by MI5,' said Pablo. 'All those cells were sleepers, dormant until they received their instructions in January 2005. Every member of the cell was either a second-or third-generation immigrant, originally from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Morocco, but now British. They spoke perfect English with regional accents. They all had clean police records. They all had jobs and came from decent backgrounds. In other words, they were impossible to find in a country with millions of people of the same ethnicity. But they were found and their attacks were prevented because MI5 had a codebook to help them.
'When they were searching some suspects' properties after a series of arrests made in 2003 and early 2004 they came across identical editions of a text called the Book of Proof by a ninth-century Arab writer called al-Jahiz. Both editions had notes-all in English, because the accused didn't have a word of Arabic between them. Some of the notes in each copy were remarkably similar. MI5 photocopied the books, replaced the originals, released the accused and set their code-breakers to work.'
'And when did they share that information with the CNI?'
'October 2004.'
'So what happened with the London bombings of 7th and 21st July 2005?'
'The British think they stopped using the Book of Proof after the May 2005 elections.'
'And now you think you've discovered a new codebook,' said Falcon. 'What about the new copy of the Koran found on the front seat of the Peugeot Partner?'
'We think they were going to prepare another code-book to give to someone.'
'The Imam Abdelkrim Benaboura?'
'We haven't finished searching his apartment,' said Pablo, shrugging.
'That's taken some time.'
'The Imam lived in a two-bedroomed flat in El Cerezo and almost every room is full, floor to ceiling, of books.'
