Robert Wilson: The Ignoranceof Blood

'And here I am, by remarkable coincidence, thinking about that very person,' said Falcon. 'Go on.'

'Don't get too excited.'

'I can tell from your face,' said Falcon, drifting back to the wall chart, 'that whatever it is, it's not much to show for two weeks' work.'

'Not solid work, and you know what it's like here in Seville: things take time,' said Ferrera. 'You already know she has no criminal record.'

'So what did you find?' asked Falcon, catching a different tone in her voice.

'After getting people to do a lot of rooting around in the local police archives, I've come up with a reference.'

'A reference?'

'She reported a missing person. Her sister, Margarita, back in May 1998.'

'Eight years ago?' said Falcon, looking up at the ceiling. 'Is that interesting?'

'That's the only thing I could find,' said Ferrera, shrugging. 'Margarita was seventeen and had already left school. The local police did nothing except check up on her about a month later and Marisa reported that she'd been found. Apparently, the girl had left home with a boyfriend that Marisa didn't know about. They'd gone to Madrid until their money ran out and then hitched back. That's it. End of story.'

'Well, if nothing else, it gives me an excuse to go and see Marisa Moreno,' said Falcon. 'Is that all?'

'Did you see this message from the prison governor? Your meeting with Esteban Calderon is confirmed for one o'clock this afternoon.'

'Perfect.'

Ferrera left and Falcon was once again alone in his head with Marisa Moreno and Esteban Calderon. There was an obvious reason why Calderon was never far from his thoughts: the brilliant but arrogant instructing judge of the 6th June bombing had been found, days after the explosion, at an absolutely crucial moment of their investigation, trying to dispose of his prosecutor wife in the Guadalquivir river. Calderon's wife, Ines, was Javier Falcon's ex-wife. As the Homicide chief, Falcon had been called to the scene. When they'd opened the shroud around the body and he'd found himself looking down into Ines's beautiful but inanimate features he'd fainted. Given the circumstances, the investigation into Ines's murder had been handed over to an outsider, Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita from Madrid. In an interview with Marisa Moreno, Zorrita had discovered that, on the night of the murder, Calderon had left her, taken a cab home and let himself into his double-locked apartment. Zorrita had drawn together an extraordinary array of lurid detail involving domestic and sexual abuse, and extracted a confession from a stunned Calderon, who had been subsequently charged. Since then Falcon had spoken to the judge only once, in a police cell, shortly after the event. Now he was nervous, not because he feared a resurgence of the earlier emotions, but because, after all his file reading, he was hoping he'd found the smallest chink into the heart of the conspiracy.

The internal phone rang. Comisario Elvira told Falcon that Vicente Cortes from the Costa del Sol GRECO had arrived. Falcon checked with the forensics, who'd so far only found fingerprints that matched those of Vasili Lukyanov. They were about to start work on the money, but they needed Falcon for the key. He went down to the evidence room.

'When you're done, tell me and I'll put the money in the safe until we can get it transferred to the bank,' said Falcon. 'What about the briefcase?'

'The most interesting things in there were twenty-odd disks,' said Jorge. 'We played one. It looked like hidden-camera footage of guys having sex with young women, snorting cocaine, some S amp;M stuff, that kind of thing.'

'You haven't transferred it to a computer, have you?'

'No, just played it on a DVD player.'

'Where are the disks now?'

'On top of the safe there.'

Falcon locked them inside, took the lift up to Comisario Elvira's office where he was introduced to Vicente Cortes from the Organized Crime Response Squad, and Martin Diaz from the Organized Crime Intelligence Centre, CICO. Both men were young, in their mid-thirties. Cortes was a trained accountant who, from the way his shoulders and biceps strained against the material of his white shirt, looked as if he'd been put through a few assault courses since he'd graduated from number-crunching. He had brown hair swept back, green eyes and a mouth that was permanently on the brink of a sneer. Diaz was a computer specialist and a linguist with Russian and Arabic up his sleeve. He wore a suit which he probably had to have made especially for him, being close to two metres tall. He played basketball to professional standard. He was dark-haired with brown eyes and a slight stoop, probably earned by trying to listen to his wife, half a metre shorter than him. This was the reality of catching organized criminals – accountants and computer whizzes, rather than special forces and weapons-trained cops.

Falcon delivered his report to the three men. Elvira, with his dark, laser-parted hair, kept straightening the files on his desk and fingering the neat and perfect knot of his blue tie. He was conservative, conventional and played everything by the book, with one eye on his job and the other on his boss, the Jefe Superior, Andres Lobo.

'Vasili Lukyanov ran a number of puti clubs on the Costa del Sol and some of the main roads around Granada,' said Cortes. 'People-trafficking, sexual slavery and prostitution were his main -'

'Sexual slavery?' asked Falcon.

'Nowadays you can rent a girl for any amount of time you like. She'll do everything, from housework to full sex. When you get bored of her, you hand her back and get another one. She costs fifteen hundred euros per week,' said Cortes. 'The girls are traded in markets. They may come from Moldova, Albania, or even Nigeria, but they're sold and resold as much as ten times before they get here. Normal price is around three thousand euros, depending on looks. By the time the girl arrives in Spain she may have accumulated sales of thirty thousand – which she has to pay off. I know it's illogical, but that's only to you and me, not to people like Vasili Lukyanov.'

'We found some cocaine in his car. Is that a sideline or…?'

'He's recently moved into cocaine distribution. Or rather, his gang leader has struck a deal for product coming in from Galicia and they've now come to some form of agreement with the Colombians with regard to their operations on the Costa del Sol.'

'So where is Lukyanov in the hierarchy?' asked Elvira.

Cortes nodded to Diaz.

'Difficult question, and we're wondering about the significance of finding him in a car bound for Seville with nearly eight million euros,' said Diaz. 'He's important. The Russians make huge profits from the sex trade, more than they make from drugs at the moment. The hierarchy has been a problem in the last year since we had Operation Wasp in 2005 and the Georgian boss of the Russian mafia here in Spain fled to Dubai.'

'Dubai?' asked Elvira.

'That's where you go nowadays if you're a criminal, a terrorist, an arms trader, a money-launderer…'

'Or a builder,' finished Cortes. 'It's the Costa del Sol of the Middle East.'

'Did that leave a power vacuum here in Spain?' asked Falcon.

'No, his position was taken over by Leonid Revnik, who was sent from Moscow to take control. It was not a popular move with the mafia soldiers on the ground, mainly because his first act was to execute two leading mafia "directors" from one of the Moscow brigades who had encroached on his turf,' said Diaz.

'They were both found bound, gagged and shot in the back of the head in the Sierra Bermeja, ten kilometres north of Estepona,' said Cortes.

'We think that it was some old feud, dating back to the 1990s in Moscow, but what it did was create nervousness among the soldiers. They found they were having to run their business and look out for revenge attacks. There have been four "disappearances" so far this year. We're not used to this level of violence. All the other mafia groups – the Turks and Italians, who run the heroin trade; the Colombians and the Galicians, who control cocaine; the Moroccans, who traffic people and hashish – none of them practise the sort of spectacular violence they use in their own countries because they see Spain as a safe haven. They followed our old, long-standing friends the Arab arms dealers, who run their global businesses from the Costa del Sol. To all of them it's just a massive laundromat to clean their money, which means they don't want to draw attention to themselves. The Russians, on the other hand, don't seem to give a damn.'