Robert Wilson - The Hidden Assassins

Fernando blinked, his brain fluttering like torn flags, trying to remember his PIN. It came to him and he thumbed in Gloria's number. He stood up from his kneeling position and walked towards the wreckage. He held a hand up as if demanding silence from the world. From his left came the faint, tinny sound of some Cuban piano.

'That's her,' he roared, moving left. 'She was on this side of the building when…when I last saw her.'

Falcon got to his feet and made a futile attempt to dust himself down just as his homicide squad turned up. He stayed them with his hand and moved towards the tinkling piano, which he recognized as a song called 'Lagrimas Negras'-Black Tears.

'She's there!' roared Fernando. 'She's in there!'

Baena, a junior detective from Falcon's squad, ran back and fetched a rescue team with a dog. The team pinpointed the spot from where the ringing tone was coming and managed to get Fernando to tell them that his wife and daughter had been on the fifth floor. They gave him steady looks when he released that information. In the face of his radiant hope not one of them had the heart to tell him that the fall, with three storeys coming down on top, meant that, at this moment, they were praying only.

'She's in there,' he said, to their still, expressionless faces. 'That mobile is always with her. She's a sales rep. "Lagrimas Negras" was her favourite song.'

Falcon nodded to Cristina Ferrera and they guided Fernando back to the pre-school and got a nurse to clean him up and dress his cuts. Falcon called the homicide squad into the school latrines. He washed his hands and face and looked at them in the mirror.

'This is going to be the most complicated investigation that any of us have ever been involved in, and that includes me,' said Falcon. 'Nothing is straightforward in terrorist attacks. We know that from what happened on March 11th in Madrid. There are going to be a lot of people involved-the CNI's intelligence agents, the CGI's antiterrorist squad, the bomb disposal teams and us-and that's just on the investigative side. What we've got to do is keep it clear in our minds what we, as the homicide squad, are trying to achieve. I've already asked for a police cordon to keep the site clear for us.'

'They're in place,' said Ramirez. 'They're working on getting the journalists out.'

Falcon turned to face them, shaking his wet hands.

'By now you all know that there was a mosque in the basement of that block. Our job is not to speculate on what happened and why. Our job is to find out who went into that mosque, and who came out, and what went on inside it in the last twenty-four hours, and then forty-eight hours, and so on. We do that by talking to every possible witness we can find. Our other crucial task is to find out about every vehicle in the vicinity. The bomb was big. It would have had to be transported to this place. If that vehicle is still here, we have to find it.

'At the moment the first task is going to be difficult, with all the occupants of the apartments evacuated from their buildings. So our priority is to identify all vehicles and their owners. Jose Luis will divide you up and you will search every sector, starting with cars closest to the collapsed building. Cristina, you'll stay with me for the moment.

'And remember, everybody here is suffering in some way, whether they've lost somebody or seen them injured, whether they've had their home destroyed or their windows smashed. You've got a heavy workload and you're going to be under a lot of pressure, with or without the media on your backs. You'll get more information by being sensitive and understanding than by treating this as the usual process. You're all good people, which is why you're in the homicide squad-now go out there and find out what happened.'

They filed out. Ferrera stayed behind. Falcon washed his hair under the tap and then wiped his face and hands.

'His name is Fernando. His wife and daughter were in the collapsed apartment block, his son was one of the children killed in the blast. Find out if he has any other family and, if not, any close friends. Not anybody will do. He left home after his breakfast to find out, half an hour later, that he's lost everything. When it comes home to him, he's going to lose his mind.'

'And you want me to stay with him?'

'I can't afford that. I want you to make sure he's safely delivered into the hands of a trauma team, who should be along any minute. He needs his predicament explained, he's lost the ability to articulate. He'll want to stay here until the bodies are found. But don't lose track of him. I want to know where he ends up.'

They left the latrines. A bomb squad team was picking its way through the shattered classroom, like mineral fossickers looking for valuable rocks. They filled polypropylene sacks with their finds. There were two more teams outside, working furiously so that the machinery could move in to start the demolition task and the search for survivors.

Cristina Ferrera went into the classroom where the nurse was just finishing dressing Fernando's cuts. She knew why Falcon had chosen her for this job. The nurse was doing her best with Fernando, but he wasn't responding, his brain was teeming with bigger, darker fish. The nurse finished and packed up. Cristina asked her to send someone from a trauma team as soon as possible. She sat on a chair by the blackboard, at some distance from Fernando. She didn't want to crowd him, even though it was obvious that he was living inside his head at an intensity that excluded the outside world. Grief darkened, as quickly as hope lightened, his face, like clouds passing over fields.

'Who are you?' he asked, after some minutes, as if noticing her for the first time.

'I'm a policewoman. My name is Cristina Ferrera.'

'There was a man before. Who was he?'

'That was my boss, Javier Falcon. He's the Inspector Jefe of the homicide squad.'

'He's got some work on his hands.'

'He's a good man,' said Ferrera. 'An unusual man. He'll get to the bottom of it.'

'We all know who it is, though, don't we?'

'Not yet.'

'The Moroccans.'

'It's too early to say.'

'You ask around. We've all thought about it. Ever since March 11th we've watched them going in there and we've been waiting.'

'Into the mosque, you mean? The mosque in the basement.'

'That's right.'

'They're not all Moroccans who go to mosques, you know. Plenty of Spaniards have converted to Islam.'

'I work in construction,' he said, uninterested in her balanced approach. 'I put together buildings like that. Much better buildings than that. I work with steel.'

'In Seville?'

'Yes, I build apartments for rich young professionals…that's what I'm told anyway.'

Fernando's head had been turned upside down and now he was trying to put the furniture straight. Except that, occasionally, he noticed the furniture's emptiness and it tipped his mind back into the abyss of loss and grief. He tried to talk about building work but got lost in moments of imagination as he saw his wife and daughter falling through steel and concrete. He wanted to get out of himself, out of his body and head and into…where? Where could the mind go for respite? A helicopter battering the air overhead knocked his thoughts into another pattern.

'Do you have children?' he asked.

'A boy and a girl,' she said.

'How old?'

'The boy's sixteen. The girl's fourteen.'

'Good kids,' he said; not a question, more of a hope.

'They're both being difficult at the moment,' she said. 'Their father died about three years ago. It's not been easy for them.'

'I'm sorry,' he said, but wanting her tragedy to bury his own for a while. 'How did he die?'

'He died of a rare type of cancer.'

'That's hard for your kids. Fathers are good for them at that age,' he said. 'They like to try things out on their mothers to give themselves the confidence to rebel against the world. That's what Gloria told me, anyway. They need fathers to show them it's not as easy as they think.'