'It was the least I could do,' she said.
'I'd like to hear from you again, you know.'
'I'm thinking of you, Javier,' she said, and it was all over.
He sat back, looking at the phone as if her voice was still inside it. She'd kept his number for four years. She was thinking of him. Do these things have meaning? Was that just social convention? It didn't feel like it. He saved her number.
The car park at the back of the Jefatura was brutally hot, the car windscreens blinded by the sun in the clear sky. Falcon sat in the car with the air conditioning blasting into his face. Those few sentences, the sound of her voice, had opened up a whole chapter of memory which he'd closed off for years. He shook his head and pulled out of the Jefatura car park. He headed for El Cerezo the back way, via the Expo ground, crossing the river at the Puente del Alamillo. He arrived at the bombsite at the same time as Ramirez.
'Any news about the electricians?' asked Falcon.
'Perez called. They've been through seventeen building sites. Nothing.'
'What's Ferrera doing?'
'She's chasing down witnesses who might have seen our friend with the hernia being dumped in the bin on Calle Boteros.'
They went into the pre-school. Juez del Rey was alone, waiting for them in the classroom. They sat down on the edges of the school desks. Del Rey folded his arms and stared into the floor. He gave them a perfect recap of the major findings of the investigation so far. He didn't use notes. He got all the names of the Moroccan witnesses correct. He had the whole timetable of what had happened in and around the mosque, in his head. He'd decided to make an impression on the two detectives and it worked. Falcon felt Ramirez relax. Calderon's replacement was no fool.
'The two most significant recent developments in the investigation concern me the most,' said del Rey. 'Ricardo Gamero's suicide and the belief that his source was working as a double agent.'
'We had a sighting of Gamero by a security guard in the Archaeological Museum in the Parque Maria Luisa,' said Falcon. 'We've got a police artist working on some sketches of the older man he was seen talking to.'
'I'll call Serrano,' said Ramirez, 'see how that's going.'
'I'm not convinced that a sense of failure at preventing this bomb attack from taking place was enough to drive a man like Gamero to suicide,' said del Rey. 'There's something more. Failure is too general. Feeling personally responsible is what drives people to kill themselves.'
'The police artist didn't have much luck with the security guard last night,' said Ramirez, coming back from his call. 'He's been with him again this morning. They should have something by lunchtime.'
'I'm not convinced by Miguel Botin as a double, either,' said del Rey. 'His brother was maimed by an Islamic terrorist bomb, for God's sake. Can you see someone like that being turned?'
'He was a convert,' said Falcon. 'He took his religion very seriously. It's difficult to know what sort of impression a charismatic radical preacher could make on someone like that. We have the example of Mohammed Sidique Khan, one of the London bombers, who was transformed from a special needs teacher into a radical militant.'
'We don't know what the relationship between Miguel Botin and his injured brother was like, either,' said Ramirez.
'I'm also uncomfortable about the electricians and the fake council inspectors. I don't buy the CNI line that they were a terrorist cell. The CNI seem to me to be trying to cram square information into a round hole.'
There was a knock at the door. A policeman put his head round.
'The forensics have been working their way through the rubble above the storeroom in the mosque,' he said. 'They've found a fireproof, shock-proof metal box. It's been taken to the forensic tent and they thought you might like to be there when they open it.'
28
Seville-Thursday, 8th June 2006, 12.18 hrs
Outside the pre-school everybody was wearing masks against the stench and Falcon, Ramirez and del Rey walked with their hands clasped over their mouths and noses. There was an anteroom to the main body of the forensics' tent, where they all dressed in white hooded boiler suits and put on masks. The interior of the tent was air conditioned down to 22°C. Five forensic teams were currently working at the site. All of them had stopped for the opening of the box. Something within the human psyche making it impossible, even for forensics, to resist the mystery of a closed, secure container.
A dictaphone was tested and set in the middle of the table. The leader of the forensic team nodded to the judge and detectives as they gathered around. His hands, in latex gloves, were spread on either side of a red metal box. Next to him was a shallow cardboard evidence box, dated and with the address of the Imam's apartment on the lid. Inside were three small plastic bags containing keys. A white-suited figure nudged into Falcon. It was Gregorio.
'This could be interesting if those keys open that box,' he said. 'Two sets came from the desk and one from the kitchen of the Imam's apartment.'
'Are we ready?' asked the forensics team leader. 'Here we are on Thursday, 8th June 2006 at 12.24 hours. We have a sealed metal box, which has sustained some blast damage to the lid, although the lock still appears to be sound. We are going to attempt to open this box, using keys taken from the Imam's apartment during a search of those premises on Wednesday, 7th June 2006.'
He rejected the first sachet of keys but selected the next one and poured the two keys into his hand. He fitted one of the identical keys into the lock, turned it, and the lid sprang open.
'The box has been successfully opened by a key found in the kitchen drawer of the Imam's apartment.'
He opened the lid and lifted out three coloured plastic folders, thick with folded paper. This emptied the box, which was removed to another table. He opened up the first green folder.
'Here we have one sheet of writing in Arabic script, which has been paper-clipped to what appears to be a set of architect's drawings.'
He opened out the drawings, which proved to be a detailed plan of a secondary school in San Bernardo. The other two folders followed the same pattern. The second set of drawings featured the plan of a primary school in Triana, and the third, the biology faculty on Avenida de la Reina Mercedes.
Silence, while the men and women of the forensic teams contemplated their find. Falcon could feel the minds in the room working their way towards more and more uneasy conclusions. Each Islamic terrorist atrocity had released new viral strains of horror into the body of the West. No sooner had the West become reconciled to men as bombs, than they had to accept women as bombs, and even children as bombs. It seemed sickeningly obvious now that car bombs would transmute to boats as bombs, and then planes as bombs. Finally the atrocities would no longer remain at a distance in the Middle East, Far East or America, but come to Madrid and London. Then there was the unimaginable. The stuff that would make a horror novelist tremble at night: executions beamed around the world of men and women being beheaded with kitchen knives. And finally Beslan: children held hostage, given no food or water, explosives hung over their heads. How is an ordinary mind supposed to work under these conditions of easy contagion?
'Were they going to blow these places up?' asked a voice.
'Take hostages,' said a woman. 'Look, they're after kids from five years old up to twenty-five years old.'
'Bastards.'
'Is there nothing these people won't do? Are there no fucking boundaries?'
'I think,' said Juez del Rey, quick to put a lid on the mounting hysteria, 'that we should wait until we have translations of the Arabic script in our hands before we jump to conclusions.'
It was not the voice of reason that people wanted to hear. Not just yet, anyway. They'd been waiting a long time to get their hands on solid evidence and now they'd found something spectacular they wanted to vent some of their anger. Del Rey sensed this. He moved things along once more.
'As a precaution, these three buildings should be searched. If there was a plan to seize them it's possible that weaponry has been stored there.'
