Robert Wilson - The Ignorance of Blood

Falcón looked around the darkened room. Their situation – meeting in an anonymous Madrid apartment to discuss unseen dramatic developments – was so far removed from real life that he was suddenly desperate for the surface; but like the diver surrounded by sharks, who still needed to decompress, he had to hold the line, not panic.

‘You envisage a situation where you will give us information about an imminent attack, which will enable us to intercept Abdullah's group and arrest him, but…’

‘It will irrevocably undermine my position in the GICM and I will be immediately executed.’

‘No,’ said Falcón.

‘Yes,’ said Yacoub. ‘It's the only way.’

‘But you realize all that will happen is that Abdullah will end up in jail, where he will gravitate to the radical elements which exist in Spanish prisons, and he will come out even more zealous than he went in. Having done his time he will be welcomed back into the group, and all you will have achieved is your own death,’ said Falcón. ‘You have to let me draw on some experience in this matter. Pablo and others in the CNI must have come across this type of situation before. They will have ideas on how to handle it.’

‘You're my friend,’ said Yacoub. ‘I'm in this because of you. By that I mean I wanted to do this and you were the only one I could trust. I don't want you to start talking to others. As soon as you do that, I lose control and they start to run the situation; and believe me, they will look after their own interests, not mine. Before you know it, we'll be in a hall of mirrors, not knowing which way to turn. And this is my son , Javier. I can't allow him to be sucked in, manipulated, turned into a piece of the game, a fanatic's mass murderer, who will imagine in his adolescent mind that in killing and maiming…’

‘Yacoub, you're letting this get out of control in your mind.’

‘This is my Moroccan side,’ he said, leaping to his feet and pacing around the room, scratching at childhood scars on his head which had been laid bare by the severity of his haircut. ‘I get very emotional. I can't seem to calm myself down, or rather, I can calm down. I do calm down. And you know how I do it?’

Falcón waited for him to come back into his line of sight, but Yacoub leaned over the back of the armchair, his face so close the tobacco breath was sharp in Falcón's nostrils. ‘I imagine Abdullah safe … away from all this … this madness. I imagine myself under a funeral shroud and able to see the sun coming through the cotton, the breeze playing over the material, and I am at peace for the first time in my life.’

‘Try an alternative vision, Yacoub. Don't be so fatalistic. Imagine yourself at home with Abdullah, his wife and your grandchildren on your lap. Try achieving that instead of your death and his incarceration.’

‘I would, if it wasn't such an absurd dream, an impossible ideal, Javier,’ said Yacoub. ‘The boy is already a part of their organization. He has no thoughts for girls, wives, children. Normal life has become a miserable existence to him. He despises his carefree childhood. He mourns the lost hours spent on his Gameboy. His whole adolescence is a tragedy of unconsciousness to him now. There's no question of bringing him back. The irony of it all is that, in joining himself to this new world, he has, to me, become a lost soul. He wanders a world of death, destruction and martyrdom. While my stomach heaves at the thought of a market in Baghdad with two hundred dead women and children, the whole area a blackened, smoking charnel house, Abdullah smiles beatifically at the imagined grace of the martyr who has committed this godless atrocity.’

‘So you've seen him again since he went to this training camp a week ago?’ asked Falcón, confused at how Yacoub could have known all this.

‘The purpose of admitting me to the GICM in the first place was primarily to make one of their international attacks possible,’ said Yacoub inconsequentially, buying himself some time. ‘This means, as you know, I have unprecedented access to the military wing of the GICM. As soon as Abdullah told me his news, it was arranged for me to be shown his training camp. I spent some time there. We had a couple of evenings together in which I was able to see the profound change wrought in his young mind.’

‘But you didn't manage to see the commander of the military wing?’

‘No, as I told you, he wasn't there,’ said Yacoub, turning his back on Falcón to stare at the drawn curtains. ‘I had to convey my gratitude for this honour through one of his officers.’

Was that how it happened? thought Falcón as he joined Yacoub by the window. They embraced and he caught sight of his own confused face over Yacoub's shoulder in the only mirror in the room.

‘My friend,’ said Yacoub, his hot breath on Falcón's neck. ‘You know me so well.’

Do I? thought Falcón. Do I?

AVE from Madrid to Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 22.00 hrs

If on the train journey from Seville to Madrid he'd been slightly feverish with paranoia, then the ride back saw a serious multiplication of the uncertainty parasites in his bloodstream. The darkness rushing past outside meant that all he could see was his disconcerted visage reflected back to him and, with the movement of the train, it seemed to tremble like his vacillating mind.

Not only had Yacoub forbidden him to talk to any of the intelligence officers from the CNI, but he had also already set in motion a plan for extracting Abdullah from the ranks of the GICM. Yacoub had begged the senior officers in the military wing to ask their commander to send his son on a mission as soon as possible, with the condition that he be responsible for its planning, logistics and execution.

‘Why did you do that?’ asked Falcón. ‘The one thing we need in this situation is time.’

‘More important than time, at this stage,’ Yacoub said, ‘is to show them how honoured I am that my son has been chosen. Delay would have meant that suspicion would have come down heavily on me and I would have been excluded from my son's future. This was the only way for me to keep my foot in the door.’

The high command were thinking about it. Yacoub had told Falcón that the following morning he would be flying back to Rabat, where he expected to be told of their decision. None of this was exactly calming, but it wasn't the cause of Falcón's paranoia. That had started with those cramps of fear in his gut. He'd tried to ignore them, like the man with acute appendicitis who'd convinced himself it was just wind, but they'd made him very apprehensive. One moment he was sitting in front of a man who'd become his closest friend, with whom he shared a level of intimacy he'd only ever experienced with the man he'd believed to be his father – Francisco Falcón. And the next there was a person he no longer completely trusted. Doubt had been interposed. That last embrace in front of the closed curtains had been an attempt to reinforce the relationship, but it was as if some impenetrable barrier, like a Kevlar skin, had come between them.

Perhaps that had been the fatal flaw; the only other time he'd experienced this level of intimacy, it had been based on lies and fraudulence: his father had tricked the five-year-old Javier into becoming the agent of his own mother's death. But how could it have been so quick with Yacoub? Suspicion had ripped through him. But why? He replayed the meeting in minute detail, almost frame by frame, to extract every nuance.

The haircut was part of it, or had it become part of it? Was that retrospective suspicion? Yacoub had always liked to keep his luxuriant hair long. Maybe he was just getting into role. In fact, before the haircut was the apartment. He hadn't asked him about it. Whose was it? He'd have to find that out. He called an old detective friend from his Madrid days who was in a bar on his way home. Falcón gave him the address, told him to keep it to himself. He wanted the owner's identity and background and he was to speak to Falcón only, no messages left in the office.