His taxi driver complained that he couldn’t get close to the hotel because of fire trucks and emergency vehicles blocking the road. He got out on a street several blocks behind the hotel and walked the rest of the way. When he got closer, he saw emergency services crews and police were everywhere. The smell of gasoline was in the air and small pieces of glass and metal were afoot. Whatever happened was near to where he left the BMW. He’d be mad as hell if Abril’s car was damaged on his watch.
“What’s going on?” Marcus asked the clerk when he got inside.
“There was a huge explosion, very close to us,” the clerk said. “No one is telling us anything. If it was a gas explosion, you would think they would tell us.” He shook his head and remembered something. “A woman left a letter for you.”
Marcus tore open the envelope, saw the handwritten note, and rushed outside in a panic. He ran toward the fire trucks and got close enough for a policeman to stop him going further.
There was a tangled, smoking hulk of metal where he’d parked the BMW.
He tried to push through and the policeman and another manhandled him back.
“My friend was in that car!” he shouted. “For God’s sake, let me through!”
*
The crowds grew and the sidewalk in front of the hotel was clogged with pedestrians trying to get close to the bomb site. The hotel clerk was seized by morbid fascination and for every minute he spent at reception, he spent ten outside, trying to see if he could find out what was going on.
He was away from his post when a large man with blond hair entered the deserted lobby, checked the guest list on the logged-in computer, and headed upstairs to Marcus Handler’s room.
*
It was hours later when Marcus got to his hotel room. He went straight for the Scotch, sat on the edge of the bed, and swigged from the bottle, wishing he was the one who’d been killed. When he felt his brain numbing, he reached into his pocket for Abril’s letter. He read her note again, then looked at the substance of it. It was a printout of a single, five-year-old wire transfer for two hundred thousand euros sent from a bank in Segovia, Spain to Celeste Bobier’s Panamanian account.
Marcus blinked at the sender’s name.
Dr. Ferrol Luis Gaytan.
Ferrol’s Story
28
It was a fairy-tale place for a childhood, for what little boy wouldn’t want to grow up in a castle?
And it was no ordinary castle, but a massive four thousand square meters of Gothic majesty set on fifty acres of vineyards and agricultural land on the northern foothills of the Guadarrama Mountains, with Segovia to the north and Madrid to the south.
A smaller eighth-century Moorish castle probably antedated the present structure. It was the fourteenth century when the massive walls and six towers were erected. For as long as records existed, the property had been in the hands of the Gaytan family, Spanish hidalgos de sangre whose nobility traced back to the mists of time, untethered by memory or documentation of origin. These immemorial nobles basked in their obscurity and, in a certain respect, were more prestigious than many other Spanish nobles who could trace their position to royal decree. Yet, the nobility of hidalgos did nothing to cement their solvency and certainly did not guarantee a wealth sufficient to maintain an enormous castle. The Gaytans were wealthy because their ancestors had been consistently successful in business. In recent centuries they were farmers, vintners, and traders. In the twentieth century, they were merchants, lawyers, and politicians, and in the 1950s the Banco Gaytan was formed and became a leading merchant bank in Segovia and the province of Castile and León.
For a boy like Ferrol Luis Gaytan, it was pure magic. Even at a tender age, his family—his grandmother in particular—made sure that he was aware that most little boys did not live in a house with twenty bedrooms, twenty-five bathrooms, a banquet hall that could accommodate three hundred guests, crenellated ramparts with views of the mountains to the south and plains to the north, a library with ten thousand rare books, endless, spooky cellars, stables full of beautiful horses, and a small army of servants and gardeners.
His father, a banker, was seldom present and his mother was distracted by her social and charitable obligations, but his paternal grandmother, Izabel Gaytan, took care to ground Ferrol, an only child, in a measure of social awareness. To that end, she encouraged him to play with the children of servants and agricultural workers and arranged play dates and mutual sleepovers where he would spend time in their modest houses and they would come to the castle.
Ferrol’s best friend was a boy his age named Hugo whose father drove a tractor on the estate. The two boys were joined at the hip and disappeared for hours on end into the vast spaces of the castle and surrounding lands. When the time came for Ferrol to enroll in a prestigious boarding school in Segovia, he complained bitterly to his grandmother that he would be separated from his friend who was slated to attend the primary school in the nearby village of Lirio. Izabel pressed Ferrol’s case with her son and daughter-in-law, but Ferrol’s parents were unmoved. On no account would their son be sent to a state school and Hugo’s family could not begin to afford the tuition at the boarding school. That is when Izabel made a fateful decision: she would pay for Hugo’s tuition from her own purse.
“You’re the best grandmother in the world,” Ferrol told Izabel inside her apartment within the castle.
“And you are the best grandson,” she said, gathering him up for a kiss.
“I hate Papa,” he said. “I like Mama, but I love you.”
She pouted and said, “You must love all of us equally,
