Paco was sitting at the kitchen table with his face in his hands. Falcon touched him on the shoulder, introduced himself. Paco's eyes were red.
'Were you worried about Ricardo?'
'There's been no time for that,' said Paco. 'Obviously he was upset, because he believed he'd lost one of his best sources in the mosque.'
'Did you know his source?'
'I've seen him, but I didn't know him,' said Molero. 'Ricardo asked me to come with him a few times, to check his back-just a routine precaution to make sure he wasn't being watched or followed.'
'Did he leave the office at all today, apart from going to lunch?'
'No. He went out at one thirty. He was due back two hours later. When he hadn't showed by four thirty, and his mobile was turned off, Inspector Jefe Barros sent me over here to find out what had happened.'
'What time did you find him?'
'I was here by ten to five, so maybe just gone five o'clock.'
'Tell me what happened yesterday…after the bombing.'
'We were all at work when it happened. We called our sources to arrange meetings. Ricardo couldn't get through to Botin. Then we were told not to leave the office, so we drafted up-to-date reports from what our sources had told us the last time we'd seen them. Lunch was brought in. We weren't released to go home until after 10 p.m.'
'Were you aware of any pressure on Ricardo, apart from the usual work stress?'
'Apart from the unusual work stress, you mean?'
'Why unusual?'
'We were being investigated, Inspector Jefe,' said Molero. 'We wouldn't be much of an antiterrorist outfit if we didn't know when our own department was being investigated.'
'How long have you known about this?'
'We reckon it probably started around the end of January.'
'What happened?'
'Nothing…just a change in attitude, or atmosphere…'
'Did you suspect each other?'
'No, we had total trust in each other and a belief in what we were doing,' said Molero. 'And I would say that, out of the four of us handling Islamic terrorist threats, Ricardo was the most committed.'
'Because he was religious?'
'You've had time to do some homework,' said Molero.
'I just met his source's partner, who happened to be an old school friend of Ricardo's.'
'Esperanza,' said Molero, nodding. 'They were at school and university together. She was going to become a nun before she met Ricardo.'
'Did they ever get together?'
'No. Ricardo was never interested in her.'
'Did he have a girlfriend?'
'Not that I know of.'
'Esperanza told me that the relationship Ricardo had with his source was based on a mutual respect for each other's religion.'
'Religion had something to do with it,' said Molero. 'But they were both against fanaticism, too. Ricardo had a special understanding of fanatics.'
'Why?'
'Because he'd been one himself,' said Molero and Falcon nodded him on. 'He believed that it came from a profound desire to be good, which interacted with a deep concern and constant worry about evil. That was where the hatred came from.'
'Hatred?'
'The fanatic, in his deep desire for goodness, is in constant fear of evil. He begins to see evil all around him. In what we think of as harmless decadence, the fanatic sees the insidious encroachment of evil. He begins to worry about everybody who is not pursuing good with the same zeal as himself. After a while he tires of the pathetic weakness of others and his perception shifts. He no longer sees them as misguided fools, but rather as ministers of the devil, which is when he starts to hate them. From that moment he becomes a dangerous person, because then he is someone receptive to extreme ideas.
'Ricardo had long conversations with Botin, who described a fundamental difference between Catholicism and Islam, which was The Book. The Koran is a direct transcription of the Word of God by the Prophet Mohammed. The word Koran means 'recitation'. It is not like our Bible, a series of narratives laid down by remarkable men. It is the actual Word of God as taken down by the prophet. Ricardo used to ask us to imagine what that would be like to a fanatic. The Book was not the inspired writing of gifted human beings, but the Word of God. In his desperation for goodness, and his fear of evil, the fanatic penetrates deeper and deeper into the Word. He seeks 'better', more exactingly good interpretations of the Word. He works his way out, by degrees, to the extremes. That was Ricardo's strength. He'd been a fanatic himself, so he could give us an insight into the minds that we were up against.'
'But he wasn't a fanatic any more?' said Falcon.
'He said he'd once reached the point where he'd begun to look down on his fellow human beings and not just found them lacking but thought them subhuman in some way. It was a form of intense religious arrogance. He realized that once you've reached the point where you don't regard all humans as equals, then killing them becomes less of a problem.'
'And had he reached that point?'
'He'd been pulled back from it by a priest.'
'Do you know who this priest was?'
'He died of cancer last September.'
'That must have been a blow.'
'I suppose it must have been. He didn't talk to me about it. I think that was too personal for office consumption,' said Molero. 'He worked harder. He became a man with a mission.'
'And what was that mission?'
'To stop a terrorist attack before it happened, rather than helping to catch the perpetrators after a lot of people have been killed,' said Molero. 'In fact, last July was a bad time for Ricardo. The London bombings affected him very badly and then at the end of the month his priest was diagnosed with cancer. Six weeks later he was dead.'
'Why did the London bombings affect him like that?'
'He was disturbed by the bombers' profile: young, middle-class British citizens, some with small children, and all with family ties. They weren't loners. That was when he became focused on the nature of fanaticism. He developed his theories, bouncing ideas off one friend, the dying priest, and the other, the convert to Islam.'
'So, he would have taken this explosion as a personal failure.'
'That, and the fact that it also took the life of Miguel Botin, with whom he'd developed a very close relationship.'
'He'd just applied a second time for a bugging order.'
'We thought the refusal of the first was strange. Since the London bombings, we've been told to look for the slightest change of…inflexion in a community. And there was plenty going on in that mosque to justify a bug being placed there-according to Ricardo's source, anyway.'
'Do you think it had something to do with the department being under investigation?'
'Ricardo did. We didn't see the logic of it. We just thought he was angry at being turned down. You know how it is: your brain plays tricks and you see conspiracies wherever you look.'
'He had a ticket in his back pocket for the Archaeological Museum, which he must have visited in his lunch break today,' said Falcon. 'Any thoughts about that?'
'Apart from the fact that he didn't have to buy a ticket, no.'
'Would that be significant?' asked Falcon. 'Was he the sort of person who would leave something like that as a sign?'
'I think you're reading too much into it.'
'He met somebody in his lunch break and then killed himself,' said Falcon. 'His mind wasn't made up before the
