Robert Wilson - The Ignoranceof Blood

Falcon nodded. Something caught his eye under the table. He knelt down and rolled it back towards him. It was a stained and polished wooden head. He inspected it under the light. Margarita's smooth unsophisticated face looked back at him, eyes closed. He ran a thumb over the jagged edge of her neck where the chain saw had bitten into the wood.

'What happened here?' asked Falcon.

'A change of artistic vision,' she said.

Falcon went to the door, feeling that the first phase of his work was done. He handed her the head.

'Too perfect?' he asked. 'Or not the point?'

Marisa listened to his feet on the metal stairway and looked down at the carved features of her sister's face. She ran her fingers over the eyelids, nose and mouth. Her arm, bearing the full weight of the head, trembled. She put it down, found her mobile on the work bench and made a call.

The cop made her nervous, but she was also surprised to find that she did not dislike him. And there were very few men that Marisa liked, not many of them were white, and none of them were policemen. Leonid Revnik hadn't moved. He'd cleared his henchmen out of the room and they'd got a technician in to fix the air-con. He was taking a drink from the half-bottle of vodka that was still left in Vasili Lukyanov's freezer. Viktor Belenki hadn't called him back. He had to remind himself to relax because he kept coming out of his thoughts to find his biceps tight in his shirt and his pectorals clenched. The land-line phone on the desk rang. He looked at it suspiciously; nobody used these things any more. He picked it up, spoke in Russian without thinking. A woman's voice answered in the same language and asked to speak to Vasili Lukyanov.

'Who is this?' he asked, hearing a strange accent.

'My name is Marisa Moreno. I've tried calling Vasili on his mobile but there's no answer. This is the only other number he gave me.'

The Cuban woman. Rita's sister.

'Vasili isn't here. Maybe I can help; I'm his boss,' said Revnik. 'If you want to leave a message, I'll make sure he gets it.'

'He told me I should call him if I had any trouble.'

'And what's happened?' asked Revnik.

'A homicide cop called Inspector Jefe Javier Falcon came round to my workshop and started asking questions about my sister, Margarita.'

That name, Falcon, again.

'What did he want with her?'

'He said he was going to find her.'

'And what did you say?'

'I told him she didn't need to be found.'

'That's good,' said Revnik. 'Have you spoken to anybody else about this?'

'I left a message on Nikita's phone.'

'Sokolov?' he asked, barely able to control his rage at having to pronounce another traitor's name.

'Yes.'

'You did the right thing,' said Revnik. 'We'll handle it. Don't worry.'

Calle Bustos Tavera, Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 15.50 hrs

There were two people in the world for whom Falcon would drop everything. One was Consuelo Jimenez and the other was Yacoub Diouri. Ever since he'd tracked down Yacoub four years ago he'd become the younger brother Falcon had never had. Because of Yacoub's own complicated past he'd had a special understanding of the complexities of the family horrors that had led to Falcon's complete mental breakdown back in 2001. In gradually revealing themselves to each other, Yacoub had become synonymous with the reassertion of sanity in Falcon's mind. Now, in the wake of the Seville bombing, he was even more than a friend and brother. He had become Falcon's spy. The Spanish intelligence agency, the CNI, in their sudden, desperate need for agents in the Arab countries nearest their borders, had researched the special relationship between Falcon and Yacoub Diouri. Having seen other Western intelligence agencies fail in their bid to recruit Yacoub, they'd used Falcon to bring him into their fold.

It was for this reason that, when Falcon received a text from Yacoub Diouri as he stood in the courtyard outside Marisa's studio, he went immediately in search of a public telephone. They hadn't spoken since the short break in Essaouira last month. Their only communication had been on 'business', via the intelligence service's encrypted website. The CNI had insisted on zero physical contact with Yacoub since he'd successfully penetrated the radical Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, the GICM, in the days after the Seville bombing. It was this group which had been storing a hundred kilos of the high explosive, hexogen, in the basement mosque in a residential quarter of Seville. Yacoub had found out how that hexogen was going to be used, and in doing so the CNI were concerned that his cover had been blown. There had been some tense days in Paris when they thought that their new agent might be assassinated. Their fears had been groundless. Yacoub returned to Rabat, but the CNI were still so nervous that the only contact they'd allowed was on Falcon's August holiday, which had been arranged in April, two months before the recruitment of Yacoub Diouri.

It took him a while to find a public phone. Falcon understood from the text, which they'd arranged between themselves in Essaouira, that this was to be a private conversation and he should not to use his home phone or mobile to make the call.

'I'm in Madrid,' said Yacoub, with a quiver in his voice.

'You sound nervous.'

'We have to meet.'

'When?'

'Now… as soon as possible. I couldn't warn you before because… well, you know why.'

'I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to get away at such short notice.'

'I'm not asking you to do this for no reason at all, Javier. It's complicated and important. It's the most important thing that's happened so far.'

'Is this business?'

'It's business and it's personal.'

Falcon had something else 'personal' going on tonight. He was supposed to be having dinner with Consuelo, just the two of them. Another assignation in the gradual process of their coming together.

'Are you talking about tonight?' asked Falcon.

'Earlier.'

'It sounds like you want me to catch the next possible train.'

'That would be good,' said Yacoub. 'It's that important.'

'I'll have to work up a plausible reason for…'

'You're in the middle of an international investigation. There must be a hundred reasons for you to come to Madrid. Call me when you know which train you're on. I'll let you know where I'm going to be. And, Javier… don't tell anyone that you're coming to see me.'

It was strange how, even after all this time, there were still certain moments which demanded an immediate cigarette. He drove to the Santa Justa station, got caught in traffic and called Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita, said he needed to talk to him about Marisa Moreno's evidence. Did he have some time this evening? Zorrita was surprised; the case was locked off. Falcon said he had other things to discuss as well. They arranged to meet as close to 7 p.m. as possible.

A thought came to him as he replayed Yacoub's conversation. He wondered if this 'business and personal' problem was related to Yacoub's homosexuality. Although Yacoub was a happily married man with two children, he had this other secret life which, to the radical Islamic GICM, would be unacceptable.

The traffic opened up. Falcon moved on, put a call through to his second-in-command, Inspector Jose Luis Ramirez, whose usual stolid pugnacity had given way to a mixture of anger and excitement after viewing the disks they'd found in Vasili Lukyanov's briefcase.

'You won't believe this shit,' he said. 'A councillor with two girls at the same time. A town planner giving it to a teenager in the ass. A building inspector snorting cocaine off a black girl's tits. And that's the mild stuff. This will crack the Costa del Sol wide open, if it gets out.'

'Don't let it. You know the rules. Only one computer in our department -'