you're here and in touch with him.'
'Is that it?'
'Not quite. The CIA have come back to us with the identity of your mystery man with no hands or face.'
'That was quick.'
'They've developed quite a system over there for tracing people of Arabic origin, even when they've become American citizens,' said Pablo. 'Your model man did a good job with the face, and his identity was corroborated by the hernia op, tattoos and dental X-rays.'
'What were the tattoos?'
'On the webbing between thumb and forefinger he had four dots configured in a square on his right hand, and five dots on his left hand.'
'Any reason?'
'It helped him count,' said Pablo.
'Up to nine?'
'Apparently women never failed to comment on them.'
'That is on his file?' said Falcon, amazed.
'You'll see why when I tell you he was a professor in Arabic Studies at Columbia University until March last year, when he was fired after being found in bed with one of his students,' said Pablo. 'And you know how they found out? He was shopped by one of his other students who he was bedding at the same time.
'You don't do that sort of thing at an American university and get caught. The police were brought in. The girls' parents threatened to sue the university and then him personally. It was the end of his career-and it cost him, too. He managed to settle out of court on advice from his lawyers, who knew he would lose and that they wouldn't get paid. He had to sell his midtown apartment, which had been left to him by his parents. The only job he could get after the case blew over was teaching maths privately in Columbus, Ohio. He lasted three months of a Mid West winter and then flew to Madrid in April last year.
'After that, our information gets a little sparse. We've a record of him taking a trip to Morocco for three weeks at the end of April. He took the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier on 24th April and he came back on 12th May. That's it.'
'Does he have a name?'
'His real name is Tateb Hassani,' said Pablo. 'When he became an American citizen in 1984-which was also the year both his parents died, one in a car crash and the other of cancer-he changed his name to Jack Hansen. It's not so unusual for immigrants to anglicize their names. He was born in Fes in 1961 and his parents left Morocco in 1972. His father was a businessman who went back and forth frequently. Tateb only went back to Morocco twice in thirty years. He didn't like it. His parents forced him to maintain an Arabic education and his mother spoke to him only in French. He wrote and spoke Arabic fluently. He graduated in mathematics, but couldn't get a place as a post-graduate, so he switched to Arabic Studies and wrote a thesis on Arab mathematicians. He came out of Princeton with a doctorate in 1986. He spent time in the universities of Madison, Minnesota and San Francisco before ending up in New York. He had a good life: a university salary, with the rent from his parents' apartment coming in. Then, when he landed the professorship at Columbia, he took over the apartment and had the perfect existence, until he started sleeping with his students.'
'What about his religion?'
'He's down as a Muslim, but, as you might have gathered from his history, he'd let that lapse.'
'Was he known for any opinions about radical Islam?'
'You can read the file sent over by the CIA,' said Pablo, taking it out of his briefcase, laying it on the table. It looked to be about ten pages long.
'Are there any samples of his handwriting in here?' asked Falcon.
'Not that I've seen.'
'Can the CIA send some across to us?' asked Falcon, flicking through the pages. 'In both Arabic script and English.'
'I'll get them on to it.'
'Any other languages, apart from French, English and Arabic?'
'He spoke and wrote Spanish, too,' said Pablo. 'He used to give a maths course every summer over here at Granada University.'
'Comisario Elvira told me that you're not much interested in our investigation any more and that Juan has gone back to Madrid,' said Falcon. 'Does that mean you've cracked the code in the annotated versions of the Koran?'
'Juan's been called back to Madrid because there have been reports of other cells, not connected with Hammad and Saoudi, which are now on the move,' said Pablo. 'We're still interested in your investigation, but not in the way you are. And, no, we haven't cracked the code.'
'How's the diversion theory going?'
'Madrid have hit dead ends with the Hammad and Saoudi connections,' said Pablo. 'Arrests have been made, but it's the usual thing. They only knew what they were doing. They received encrypted emails and did what they were told to do. So far we've only picked up a few 'associates' of Hammad and Saoudi, which hardly constitutes unravelling the whole network-if there was one to unravel. We're hoping Yacoub can help us there.'
'What about the MILA?'
'A story invented by the media based on some truth-that this group does, in fact, exist-but they weren't involved in any way,' said Pablo. 'It was a neat follow-on from the Abdullah Azzam text sent to the ABC. Something to capture the public's imagination, but, in the end, bogus. If you ask me, it's irresponsible journalism.'
'And VOMIT?' asked Falcon. 'Did you break them down, too?'
'That's not a priority for us,' said Pablo, riding over Falcon's irony. 'We're more concerned about future attacks on European countries which emanate from Spain rather than an enumeration of the past.'
'So nothing has changed?' said Falcon. 'You still believe that Miguel Botin was a double, and he was instructed to give the electrician's card to the Imam by someone in his radical Islamic network?'
'I know you don't have any faith in it,' said Pablo, 'but we have more information than you do.'
'And you're not going to give it to me?'
'Ask your old friend, Mark Flowers,' said Pablo. 'I've got to go now.'
'You know, it was a set of keys from the Imam's kitchen drawer that opened the fireproof box recovered from the storeroom of the mosque,' said Falcon. 'Gregorio was with me when they opened it and he was very interested by that, although, as usual, he didn't say why the CNI was so fascinated.'
'This is just the way we have to be, Javier,' said Pablo. 'It's nothing personal, it's just the nature of our work and the work of others in our business.'
'Make sure you call me when the handwriting comes through from the CIA,' said Falcon.
'What do you want us to do with it?'
'You've got a handwriting expert back in Madrid, haven't you?'
'Sure.'
Falcon bowed his head and started flicking through Tateb Hassani's file. He knew it was childish, but he wanted to show that two could play at the withholding information game.
'Gregorio and I will come by your house tonight.'
He nodded, waited for Pablo to leave. He closed the file, sat back and let his mind wander. The television was on and the four o'clock news showed the evacuations of the schools and the biology faculty while the bomb squad went in with their dogs. Gradually, a palimpsest of the Arabic script found with the architect's drawings appeared over the action images with a voice-over of their translations. Cut to a journalist outside the school, trying to make something out of the fact that nothing, as yet, had been found on the premises.
The chair recently vacated by Pablo slid into Falcon's vision. He went back to the photographs of Horizonte's fortieth anniversary and the shot of Banco Omni's table. That's what he'd noticed: an empty chair next to Jesus Alarcon's wife, Monica. A closer look showed that the chair had just been vacated by a man in a dark suit who was walking away. Against the dark background, only a cuff of shirt, a hand and his collar with some grey hair above it was visible.
The pre-school was empty, apart from a policewoman at the door and another on the computer in one of the classrooms. The stink from the bombsite did not make it a popular location to hang out. Falcon logged on to the
