Robert Wilson - The Hidden Assassins

The Fire Chief shouted at him. He didn't hear. He plunged his hands into the wreckage, swung his body up and hooked his leg over a thick steel rod, but he was a horribly human mixture of crazed strength overwhelmed by futility.

By the time they got to him he was hanging helpless, his palms already torn and bloody, his face distorted by the rawness of his pain. They lifted him off his ghastly perch, like soldiers removing a comrade from the wire of the front line. No sooner had they got him down than he recovered his strength and lunged at the building once more. Falcon had to tackle him around the legs to hold him back. They scrabbled over the rubble, like an ancient articulated insect, until Falcon managed to crawl up the man's body and clasp his arms to his chest.

'You can't go in there,' he said, his voice rasping from the dust.

The man grunted and flexed his arms against Falcon's embrace. His mouth was wide open, his eyes stared into the mangled mess of the building and sweat beaded in fat drops on his filthy face.

'Who do you know who is in there?' asked Falcon.

On the back of the man's grunting came two words-wife, daughter.

'Which floor?' asked the Fire Chief.

The man looked up at them blinking, as if this question demanded some complicated differential calculus.

'Gloria,' said the man. 'Lourdes.'

'But which floor?' asked the Fire Chief.

The man's head went limp, all fight gone. Falcon released him and rolled him on to his back.

'Do you know anybody else in there, apart from Gloria and Lourdes?' asked Falcon.

The man's head listed to one side, and his dark eyes took in the damaged end of the pre-school. He sat up, got to his feet and trod robotically through the rubble and household detritus between the apartment block and the pre-school. Falcon followed. The man stood at the point where there should have been a wall. The classroom was a turmoil of broken furniture and shards of glass, and on the far wall fluttering in a breeze were children's paintings-big suns, mad smiles, hair standing on end.

The man's feet crunched through the glass. He tripped and fell heavily over a twisted desk, but righted himself immediately and made for the paintings. He pulled one off the wall and looked at it with the intensity of a collector judging a masterpiece. There was a tree, a sun, a high building and four people-two big, two small. In the bottom right-hand corner was a name written in an adult hand-Pedro. The man folded it carefully and put it inside his shirt.

The three men went into the main corridor of the school and out through the entrance. The local police had arrived and were trying to clear a path for the ambulance to remove the four bodies of the dead children taken from the destroyed classroom. Two of the mothers kneeling at the feet of their children gave a hysterical howl at this latest development. The third mother had already been taken away.

A woman with a thick white bandage on the side of her face, through which the blood underneath was just beginning to bloom, recognized the man.

'Fernando,' she said.

The man turned to her, but didn't recognize her.

'I'm Marta, Pedro's teacher,' she said.

Fernando had lost the power of speech. He took the painting out of his shirt and pointed at the smallest figure. Marta's motor reflexes seemed to malfunction and she couldn't swallow what was in her throat, nor articulate what was in her mind. Instead her face just caved in and she only managed to squeeze out a sound of such brutality and ugliness that it left Fernando's chest shuddering. It was a sound uncontrolled by any civilizing influence. It was grief in its purest form, before its pain had been made less acute by time or more poignant by poetry. It was a dark, guttural, heaving clot of emotion.

Fernando was not affronted. He folded the painting up and put it back in his shirt. Falcon led him by the arm to the four small bodies. The ambulance was backing up, the rest of the crowd had been squeezed out of the scene. Two paramedics appeared with two body bags each. They worked quickly because they knew the situation would be better with those pitiful bodies removed. Falcon held Fernando around the shoulders as the paramedics uncovered each body and placed it in a body bag. He had to remind Fernando to breathe. At the third body Fernando's knees buckled and Falcon lowered him to the ground, where he fell forward on to all fours and crawled around, like a poisoned dog looking for a place to die. One of the paramedics shouted and pointed. A TV cameraman had come around the back, through the pre-school, and was filming the bodies. He turned and ran before anybody could react.

The ambulance moved off. The ghostly crowd surged after it and gave up, with a final spasm of grief, before dissolving into groups, with the bereaved women supported from all sides. Television journalists and their cameramen tried to force their way in to talk to the women. They were rebuffed. Falcon pulled Fernando to his feet, pushed him back into the pre-school out of sight, and went to find a policeman to keep journalists away.

Outside a journalist had found a young guy in his twenties, with a couple of bloody nicks in his cheek, who'd been there when the bomb exploded. The camera was right in his face, inches away, the proximity giving the pictures their urgency.

'…straight after it happened, I mean, the noise…you just can't believe the loudness of that noise, it was so loud I couldn't breathe, it was like…'

'What was it like?' asked the journalist, an eager young woman, stabbing the microphone back into his face. 'Tell us. Tell Spain what it was like.'

'It was like the noise took away all the air.'

'What was the first thing you noticed after the explosion, after the noise?'

'Silence,' he said. 'Just a deathly quiet. And, I don't know whether this was in my head or it actually happened, I heard bells ringing…'

'Church bells?'

'Yes, church bells, but they were all crazy, as if the shock waves of the explosion were making them ring, you know, at random. It made me sick to hear it. It was as if everything had gone wrong with the world, and nothing would be the same.'

The rest was lost in the clatter and thump of a helicopter's rotor blades, thrashing away at the dust in the air. It went up higher, to take in the whole scene. This was the aerial photography Falcon had ordered up.

He posted a policeman at the entrance of the school, but found that Fernando had disappeared. He crossed the corridor to the wrecked classroom. Empty. He called Ramirez as he crashed through the broken furniture.

'Where are you?' asked Falcon.

'We've just arrived. We're on Calle Los Romeros.'

'Is Cristina with you?'

'We're all here. The whole squad.'

'All of you come round to the pre-school now.'

Fernando was back at the wall of rubble and collapsed floors. He threw himself at it like a madman. He tore at the concrete, bricks, window frames and hurled them behind him.

'…rescue teams working on this side,' roared Ramirez, over the noise of the helicopter. 'There are dogs in the wreckage.'

'Get over here.'

Fernando had grabbed at the steel netting of a shattered reinforced concrete floor. He had his feet braced against the rubble. His neck muscles stood out and his carotid arteries appeared as thick as cord. Falcon pulled him off and they fought for some moments, tripping and floundering about in the dust and rubble until they were ghosts of their former selves.

'Have you got Gloria's phone number?' roared Falcon.

They were panting in the choking atmosphere, their sweating faces caked with grey, white and brown dust, which swirled around them from the chopper's blades.

The question transfixed Fernando. Despite hearing all these mobile phones ringing, his mind was so paralysed with shock, he hadn't thought of his own. He ripped it out of his pocket. He squeezed life into the starter button. The helicopter moved off, leaving an immense silence.