Robert Wilson: The Hidden Assassins

'Am I being stupid in asking why, if you know so much about the GICM, you don't just take it out?' asked Falcon.

'Because we need to take out the whole network with it,' said Gregorio. They landed at Barrajas airport in Madrid at 1.15 on a hot afternoon, with the air crinkling above the tarmac. A car met the plane and took them to an office at one end of the terminal building where Juan and Pablo were waiting for them.

'We've had some developments here,' said Juan. 'The Parador central office has records of bookings in Zamora for tonight and Santillana del Mar for tomorrow night. Pablo called both hotels and found that the British cancelled their bookings four hours ago.'

'MI5 are trying to work out why they've changed their plans,' said Pablo. 'It could be a family matter. Two of the women are sisters. Or it could be work. The only problem is that they don't have anybody vetted on the inside of the hedge fund company. There hasn't been any seismic movement in the Far East markets. They're talking to City people now to see if there's talk of a buy-out, or a take-over.'

'Have you found the cars yet?' asked Falcon.

'If they cancelled four hours ago they were already well on their way, so we still have no idea whether they're heading north via Madrid or Salamanca.'

'What about the ferries?' asked Gregorio.

'We've checked both Bilbao/Portsmouth and Santander/Plymouth and they've made no bookings. Their Channel Tunnel booking still stands, with no alteration to the date,' said Pablo. 'That's the Interior Minster's line, Juan.'

Juan took the call, making notes. He slammed down the phone.

'British intelligence have now been in touch with French intelligence,' said Juan. 'Amanda Turner has just changed the Channel Tunnel bookings to Monday afternoon-tomorrow-so it looks as if they're driving to northern France non-stop. Neither the French Ministry of the Interior nor the British Home Office want those cars going through the Channel Tunnel. The French have said that they don't want those cars going through France. Their route north will take them close to nuclear reactors and through densely populated areas. The cars are on Spanish soil. We have areas of low population density. We're going to have to deal with it here. He's given us direct access to special forces.'

'It's about 550 kilometres from Seville to Madrid,' said Gregorio. 'It's 200 kilometres from Seville to Merida. If they changed their plans four hours ago they could have still switched to the quicker route north, via Madrid.'

'So if they went to Madrid directly they should already be past us, but if they changed their route they should be around Madrid now.'

Pablo called the Guardia Civil and told them to watch the NI/E5 heading north to Burgos and the NII/E90 heading northeast to Zaragoza, emphasizing that they only wanted a report on the cars; there was to be no pursuit and definitely no general alert.

Juan and Gregorio went to the map of Spain and studied the two possible routes. Pablo contacted special forces and asked them to have two cars ready, a driver and two armed men in each unmarked vehicle.

At 14.00 the Guardia Civil called back with a sighting of the convoy on the Madrid/Zaragoza road, just outside Guadalajara. Pablo asked them to put motorbike police in all the service stations along the route and to report if the convoy left the road. He went back to special forces, gave them the route information and told them to watch out for the convoy's shepherd. Their two cars left Madrid at 14.05.

At 14.25 the Guardia Civil called to say the convoy had left the road at a service station at Kilometre 103. They had also noticed a silver VW Golf GTI, whose registration number had shown it to be a hire car from Seville, which had come off at the same time as the convoy. Two men had got out. Neither of them had gone into the service station. They were both leaning on the back of the Golf, one of them was making a phone call on a mobile.

While Pablo relayed that information to the special forces vehicles, Gregorio called the car-hire company in Seville. It was closed. Falcon called Ramirez and told him to get it open as soon as possible. Juan ordered a helicopter to be ready for immediate take-off. He gave the Interior Minister an update on the situation and told him that at some point they would have to close the mobile phone network down for an hour on the Madrid/Zaragoza road between Calatayud and Zaragoza.

'Special forces are going to have to take out the shepherd vehicle over one of the mountain passes,' he said. 'That way, if they're using mobile phone technology to detonate the devices, the network will be down and if they're using a direct signal there's less chance of a good connection.'

At 15.00 Ramirez called back from the car-hire company. Gregorio gave the registration number of the silver Golf GTI. The car-hire company gave them the ID card of the driver. Gregorio checked it on the computer. Stolen last week in Granada. The helicopter tilted and rose up into the cloudless sky above Barrajas airport. Falcon hadn't wanted the privileged seat next to the pilot. It had been ten years since he'd been in a helicopter. He felt exposed to the elements and had an unnerving sensation of lightness of being.

They tracked the NII/E90 autopista from Madrid to Zaragoza and in less than an hour they were up above the mountains around Calatayud.

'We don't often get to see this,' said Juan, over the headphones. 'The denouement of an intelligence operation, I mean.'

Even now, as they raced towards the culmination of months of work and days of intensity, it hardly felt real. Spain tore past under his feet and men somewhere below made their final preparations as the convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles, full of real, live people, sped north unknowing and unconcerned at this vast and complicated mechanism moving into action behind them.

The pilot gave him binoculars and pointed down at the section of road where he watched as a silver Golf GTI was overtaken by a dark blue BMW. The BMW braked so sharply that puffs of smoke came out of the wheel arches. The Golf GTI slammed into the back of it, but the soldiers were out, their guns ready, arms jerking with the recoil. The helicopter swooped down on the scene. Two men were being dragged from the car; its windscreen was shattered, the front crumpled, steam pouring out from under the bonnet.

The helicopter hopped over to the other side of the mountain pass where the tourists' convoy had been pulled over on to the hard shoulder by other armed special forces travelling in a forward car. The helicopter turned and hovered as the four couples got out and ran away from their cars.

To see it all played out with no sound-or rather, too much sound from the thumping blades thrashing the air-added to the unreality. Falcon felt faint at the thought that this final operation had all happened as a result of his hunch. What if reality yielded no bombs in the vehicles and a Golf GTI with two injured innocent men? He must have been looking bewildered and lost, because Juan's voice came on in his head.

'We quite often think that,' he said. 'Did this really happen?'

The helicopter banked away from the distant city of Zaragoza, which bristled under the heat and a stagnant smog. The pilot muttered his position and direction as the brown, hard-baked mountains settled back into the late afternoon. Coda Seville-Monday, 10th July 2006 Falcon was sitting in the restaurant at the back of the bar in Casa Ricardo. It was almost four years to the day that he'd last been in this place and it had been no accident. He took a sip of his beer and ate an olive. He was just cooling off after the walk in the atrocious heat from his house.

There had been no time for anything in the last month. The paperwork had achieved surreal dimensions, from which he broke away to re-enter a world he'd expected to find changed. But the bomb had been like an epileptic fit. The city had suffered a terrible convulsion and there had been much concern for its future health, but as the days passed and there were no further outbreaks, life reverted to normal. It left a lesion. There were families with an unfillable space at the table. And others, who regularly summoned their courage to face another day at waist height to people they'd always looked in the eye. There were the forgotten hundreds who looked in the mirror every morning to shave around a scar, or smooth foundation on to a new blemish. But the one force greater than the terrorist's power to disrupt was humanity's need to get back into a routine.