'I can't say.'
'But you found something that makes you think Botin was acting for the terrorists while working for Gamero?'
'This is what it's like, Javier,' said Pablo, shrugging. 'The Hall of Mirrors. We constantly have to revise what we're actually seeing.'
'You found another heavily annotated copy of the Koran, didn't you?' said Falcon, sitting back, dazed. 'What the hell does that mean?'
'It means you cannot say a word about this conversation to anybody,' said Pablo. 'It means we have to get our counterintelligence up and running as soon as possible.'
'But it also means that the terrorists, whoever they are, were letting Miguel Botin serve up information to the CGI that compromised the Imam, Hammad and Saoudi, along with whatever operation was being planned in the mosque.'
'We're still conducting our enquiries,' said Pablo.
'They were sacrificing them?' asked Falcon, nauseated by his inability to think his way around this new development.
'First of all, we live in an age of suicide bombing-there's sacrifice for you,' said Pablo. 'And secondly, intelligence services all over the world have always had to sacrifice agents for the greater good of the mission. It's nothing new.'
'So this electrician, whose card Miguel Botin handed over to the Imam, was the agent of their destruction? The electrician was sent by Botin's Islamic terrorist masters to bomb the building? That's just fantastic.'
'We don't know that,' said Pablo. 'But as you know, not all suicide bombers realize that they are suicide bombers. Some have just been told to deliver a car, or leave a rucksack on a train. Botin had just been told to give an electrician's card to the Imam. What we need to find out is who told him to do that.'
'Are we wasting our time here?' asked Falcon. 'Is this whole investigation just a show, for whichever terrorist group decided to abort their mission and blow up any possible leads back to their network?'
'We're still very interested to find out what's in the mosque,' said Pablo. 'And we're very keen to get Yacoub up and running.'
'And how do you know that Yacoub is approaching the right group, even?' asked Falcon, exhausted and close to rage from frustration.
'We have confidence in that because it has come from a reliable detainee and has also been verified by British agents on the ground in Rabat,' said Pablo.
'What group are we talking about?'
'The GICM, Groupe Islamique de Combattants Marocains, otherwise known as the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. They had links to the bombings in Casablanca, Madrid and London,' said Pablo. 'What we're doing here is not something that was thought up yesterday as an idea worth trying, Javier. This represents months of intelligence work.'
Pablo left soon after. Falcon was almost depressed by their exchange. All the man-hours put in by his squad were beginning to look like a waste of energy, and yet there were unnerving gaps in what Pablo had told him. It was as if each group involved in the investigation put most trust in the information that they themselves uncovered. So the CNI believed in the annotated Koran as the codebook, because of the example of the Book of Proof uncovered by British intelligence, and that coloured everything they looked at. The fact that the witness in the mosque, Jose Duran, had described the electrician and his labourers as a Spaniard and two Eastern bloc natives, who did not sound anything like Islamic terrorist operatives, held little water for Pablo. But then again, it had been local Spanish petty criminals who'd supplied the Madrid bombers with explosives, and what does it take to leave a bomb? A little care and a psychotic mind. After the press conference on TVE with Comisarios Lobo and Elvira, Juez Calderon had taken a taxi round to Canal Sur, where he was miked up and eased on to the set of a roundtable discussion about Islamic terrorism. He was the man of the hour and within moments the female chair of the programme had drawn him into the discussion. He controlled the rest of the programme with a combination of incisive and informed comment, humour, and a savage wit he reserved for so-called security specialists and terrorism pundits.
Afterwards he was taken out to dinner by some executives from Canal Sur's current affairs department and the female chair of the programme. They fed and flattered him for an hour and a half until he found himself alone with the female chair, who let it be known that this could continue in more comfortable surroundings. For once Calderon demurred. He was tired. There was another long day ahead of him and-the main reason-he was sure that Marisa was a better lay.
Calderon sat in the middle seat in the back of the Canal Sur limousine. He felt like a hero. His mind was racing with endorphins after his TV performances. He had a sense of the world at his feet. Seville, as it flashed past in the night, began to feel small to him. He imagined what it must be like to be as high on success as this in a city like New York, where they really knew how to make a man feel important.
The limousine dropped him off outside the San Marcos church at 12.45 a.m. and, for once, rather than take his usual little deviation around the back, he strode past the bars on the other side, hoping that friends of Ines would be drinking there who would stop him and congratulate him. He really had been exceptionally brilliant. The bars, however, were already closed. Calderon, in his heightened state, had failed to notice how quiet the city was.
As he went up in the lift he knew that the only way he was going to sleep was after a strenuous, crazy fuck with Marisa, out on the balcony, in the hall, going down in the lift, out in the street. He felt so on top of the world he wanted everybody to see him performing.
Marisa had watched the TV programmes in a state of insensate boredom. She could tell that the press conference revolved around Esteban, as all the questions from journalists were for him. She could also see that he was controlling the roundtable discussion, and even that the female chair was dying to get into his trousers, but the drivel that was being talked had reduced her to a vegetative state. Why do Westerners have to get so exercised about things and talk them to death, as if it's going to be any help? Then it struck her. That was what irked her about Westerners. They always took things at face value, because that was what could be controlled, and what could be measured. They just served up their lies all round and then congratulated each other on 'their command of the situation'. That was why white people bored her. They had no interest beyond the surface. 'What are you doing, sitting there all day, Marisa?' had been the most frequently asked question she'd faced in America. And yet in Africa they'd never asked her that question-or any question, for that matter. Questioning existence didn't help you live it.
She looked down on Calderon's arrival from her balcony. She saw his jaunty steps, his little preparations. When he said his usual: 'It's me,' into her entry phone, she replied: 'My hero.'
He burst into her apartment like a showman, arms raised, waiting for the applause. He drew her to him and kissed her, pushing his tongue between the barrier of her teeth, which she did not like. Their kissing had only ever been lip deep.
It wasn't difficult to tell that he was still on the crest of the media wave. She let him drive her out on to the balcony, where they had sex. He looked up at the stars, holding on to her hips, imagining even greater glory. She participated by hanging on to the railings and making a suitable amount of noise.
As soon as he was finished, he was rendered mentally and physically drained, like someone coming off a coke high. She managed to steer him to the bed and get his shoes off before he fell into a deep sleep at 1.15 a.m. She stood over him, smoking a cigarette, wondering if she'd be able to wake him in a couple of hours' time.
She washed herself in the bidet, closing her right eye to the smoke rising from the cigarette. She lay on the sofa and let time do what it was good at. At 3 a.m. she started trying to rouse him, but he was completely inert. She held a lighter to his foot. He writhed and kicked out. It took time to get him to come round. He had no idea where he was. She explained that he had to go home, he had an early start, he had to get changed.
At 3.25 she called a taxi. She put his shoes on, got him standing, put his arms into his jacket and called the lift up to her floor. She stood outside with him, his head dropping and jerking off his chest and her shoulder. The taxi arrived just after 3.30. She put him in the back and instructed the driver to take him to Calle San Vicente. She said he was exhausted, that he was the leading judge in the Seville bombing, and that gave the driver a sense of mission. He waved away her € 10 note. For this man it was going to be free. The cab pulled away. Calderon had his head thrown back on the rear shelf. In the yellowish street lighting he looked as he would when dead. The whites of his eyes were just visible below the lids.
