Robert Wilson - The Ignoranceof Blood

'Who's made a booking in the last forty-eight hours?'

'Sanchez and Ortega,' said Ramirez. 'And Horizonte made that alteration.'

'Anything else I should know?'

'Horizonte have also reserved the conference room and cinema before dinner for one hour and asked for DVD projection facilities to be available.'

'So, it looks as if we're right about it being a big new construction project,' said Falcon. 'First they'll have the site inspection, then the video of what it's going to look like, followed by the celebratory dinner and maybe even the signing ceremony.'

'Horizonte have specifically asked that six bottles of Cristal vintage champagne be made available after the dinner.'

'This isn't just another stepping stone in the negotiating process,' said Falcon. 'This is the big moment, and it's why the contents of Vasili Lukyanov's briefcase were so crucial.'

'But without the disks what can the Russians do?' asked Ramirez.

Falcon winced behind his sunglasses. Was he going to start lying to his right-hand man? This was what he told suspects: the first lie begets a hundred others and nothing sticks in your mind like the truth.

'The meeting I've just been to in Osuna was about the abduction of Dario,' he said. 'I don't think the Russians have him. I'm nearly certain that he's in Morocco.'

'CNI business?' said Ramirez. 'Inspector Jefe Tirado of the GRUME told me there's still been no contact from the abductors, and if the Russians were trying to influence the outcome of this meeting with the mayor tonight they'd need those disks, which are still in our safe.'

'Which could mean that at least one of the mafia groups has copies,' said Falcon. 'So we have to assume that is the case.'

He was appalled at the smoothness with which he'd plastered over that little crack.

'If the Russians are going to muscle in on this deal,' said Falcon, 'they're not going to do it in the business park on the Isla de la Cartuja with all its security. If it happens it'll be in the hotel.'

'Maybe we should get back-up,' said Ramirez. 'Fuck Comisario Elvira, we can't put our own people -'

'Back-up will involve Elvira, and we'll still be briefing him by the time the meeting takes place in a couple of hours' time,' said Falcon. 'And besides, the Russians aren't going to go in there guns blazing. This isn't gang warfare. They're going to put pressure on the Horizonte/I4IT consortium. These are civilized people who scare very easily. We also have to keep our strategy quiet, because if the Russians have informers in the Guardia Civil, I'm sure they have them in the Jefatura as well.'

'I was thinking more in terms of securing the hotel so that the mayor can have his meeting and sign the deal in peace,' said Ramirez. 'The mafia don't get a look in. None of our people have to take any risks.'

'Perfect, as long as the deal is totally legitimate,' said Falcon. 'Alejandro Spinola has created a question mark over that.'

'How do you think Comisarios Lobo and Elvira are going to take it when a corruption scandal of this magnitude hits the press?'

'Badly,' said Falcon. 'But the attraction of this scenario to me is that it's likely that the extortion will be done by senior mafia group members: Viktor Belenki and possibly even Leonid Revnik himself. For once we might actually catch some major players committing serious crimes, rather than picking them up for money-laundering or running illegal businesses,' said Falcon. 'And in the fallout, I think we're going to find answers to the Seville bombing, too.'

'Right. I forgot. It's all connected,' said Ramirez. 'Where are you now?'

'On the outskirts of Seville. I'm going into the Jefatura. Just keep me informed of any developments.'

He hung up, continued driving into the sun. Something about his conversation with Yacoub still bothered him, but there was too much going on for him to pick it out of his memory. And anyway, it was less to do with words and more to do with a feeling about Yacoub.

There was a lot of traffic on the ring road taking him from east to west Seville. He suddenly had to concentrate, and it was at this moment that 'the voice' chose to call.

'How are you getting on with our last two disks?'

'I'm just heading over to the Jefatura to see what progress the IT department are making on them. They might be available now.'

'We've been able to comply with all your requests,' said the voice.

'What? Round up all the perpetrators of the Seville bombing? Including Nikita Sokolov and his two friends?' said Falcon, incredulous. 'I find that hard to believe.'

'As we told you, Yuri Donstov's operation was in the process of being closed down.'

'And what's happened to Yuri Donstov himself?'

'He has disappeared.'

'Are you sure you don't mean terminated?' said Falcon. 'Remember, I had a very special insight into the workings of your organization.'

'Yuri Donstov saw the way things were going and decided that disappearing was more advisable than the alternative. Although the alternative is only a question of time.'

'We're going to have to interview all these people you've brought together for me.'

'Interview them? Why? They'll be arriving with signed confessions.'

'We have to establish that you're sending us the right people,' said Falcon. 'Their confessions have to satisfy a court of law.'

'You're not just being demanding now, Inspector Jefe,' said the voice. 'You're being impossible.'

'The Jefatura's IT department have been hard at work, deciphering those disks. They've brought in some mathematics professors and Interpol, and it won't be long before they'll be approaching the intelligence community…' Back at the Jefatura he went straight to the IT room. The two disks were still in use. So far they'd made no significant progress. They'd contacted the CNI, who were sending someone down to take a look. He went upstairs to his office, sat at his desk. The wall chart – my God, he was looking forward to tearing that down. It depressed him. That's what Alicia Aguado had said in his later sessions with her: contemplation of the past induces depression, but who are you without a past? Falcon had always thought that, if you had a past full of joy you wouldn't mind contemplating it. Aguado countered: If you only had joy to contemplate you'd learn nothing, until you reached the point where you questioned your relative happiness. He'd thrown up his hands. 'The unexamined life is not worth living,' she quoted.

'Is this the philosophical Inspector Jefe?' said Pablo, leaning against the door jamb of his office.

'I was wondering what had happened to you,' said Falcon.

'I've been spending too much time on the AVE. I came down from Madrid with our software-encryption specialist,' said Pablo. 'You don't call us any more, Javier, so I have to seek you out and force you into face-to-face meetings.'

'I'm not avoiding you,' said Falcon. 'I'm just busy.'

'Not helped by having to drive out to Osuna this afternoon.'

'Are you following him or me?'

'Him, of course,' said Pablo. 'You don't represent a threat.'

'Nor does Yacoub,' said Falcon, who briefed Pablo on his 'rogue' agent's mental state and his resignation to a future of long-term dissimulation.

'Agents like Yacoub have to go through this phase,' said Pablo. 'We're trained for it in the service and plenty of people fall at that fence. This isn't a game that you pack up and put away. It's not suspended reality, like a good novel or a great film. It's a whole life to lead in a certain way and very few people are suited to it. And even those who are suited to it necessarily go through this… well, it's almost a grieving process, I suppose. Saying farewell to the simple life involves anger, despair, sorrow, anxiety, depression… all those emotions that we associate with the loss of something or someone important to us. And the only way out of it is to replace it with something that gives us purpose.'