‘And Carlos Puerta didn't report the shooting?’ asked Parrado.
‘He's a junkie,’ said Pérez, by way of explanation.
‘What about El Pulmón?’ asked Falcón. ‘He being our most valuable witness of all.’
‘I spoke to Serrano and Baena before I came here and they've come up against the same brick wall,’ said Pérez. ‘El Pulmón was late with his product, so there would have been plenty of his clients out on the street. He'd also have been running and with Estévez's blood down his front. There must have been fifty people who saw him. Only Carlos Puerta has come forward.’
‘So why was Puerta prepared to talk?’ asked Parrado.
‘He said he was a friend of El Pulmón,’ said Falcón. ‘He was very upset about the girl, Julia Valdés, getting killed. There's more to his story than he's prepared to admit, but getting it out of him is a different matter.’
‘I'll go back to him later this evening or tomorrow with the Narcs,’ said Pérez.
‘So, Puerta is unreliable, which means we have to find El Pulmón,’ said Parrado.
‘If I was El Pulmón, I would go to ground as far away from my regular haunts as possible,’ said Ramírez.
‘We do know he owned a car,’ said Pérez, ‘but it's not in Las Tres Mil any more. Traffic are looking for it.’
‘In that case he could be out of Seville by now,’ said Ramírez.
‘He used to be a novillero,’ said Falcón. ‘Find the name of his sponsor and see if he has any old friends in that community.’
‘He hasn't been in the bullfight game for years,’ said Pérez.
‘Work back, Emilio,’ said Falcón. ‘He's not going to go anywhere near his drug contacts. Family is equally unlikely. So it's old friends, and the ones from the bullfight game are the most likely to stick by him in his hour of need.’
‘Especially if they've got gypsy blood as well,’ said Ramírez.
‘I'd like the DNA from the blood samples belonging to the nine-millimetre shooter,’ said Cortés. ‘If, as I'm hoping, we've still got Sokolov's DNA on file and we can get a match, that would put him at the crime scene in Las Tres Mil and then the girl who saw him in Calle Bustos Tavera would put him at the Marisa Moreno scene, too.’
‘I'm not sure the witness we've got, who saw him and his two “comrades” in Calle Bustos Tavera, is reliable enough for court,’ said Ramírez.
‘Why not?’ asked Parrado.
‘Saturday night – she'd been using drugs.’
‘If we can put Sokolov there, it will at least inform us,’ said Cortés.
‘Both Marisa and El Pulmón had direct contact with Russians. We believe that Marisa had been coerced, through threats to her sister who was working for the Russians as a prostitute, to start a relationship with Esteban Calderón and fulfil certain tasks related to the 6th June bomb conspiracy,’ said Falcón.
‘And El Pulmón?’
‘I don't think there's a connection between him and the 6th June conspiracy,’ said Falcón. ‘This was just business. But it looks as if Nikita Sokolov, the weightlifter, was involved in clearing up the loose end of Marisa Moreno, and he's now made a mistake in failing to kill El Pulmón. If we can find El Pulmón, we can use him to locate Nikita Sokolov, and if we can charge Sokolov with the two killings in Las Tres Mil, that will give us some leverage in the case of Marisa Moreno.’
‘Matching DNA from the paper suits to unknowns on a database is going to take longer than seeing if we have a DNA sample for Sokolov and matching the samples from El Pulmón's apartment,’ said Parrado. ‘So let's do that first.’
‘We've still got the problem of finding either of them,’ said Ramírez.
‘Nikita Sokolov will be very keen to find El Pulmón. He's the only credible witness we might get who'd be willing to place him in his apartment as the shooter,’ said Falcón. ‘I'll talk to my brother, Paco, as well. After his own accident in the ring he's always tried to help injured toreros.’
The meeting broke up while Parrado was called out for an urgent consultation on another case. Everybody turned on their mobiles, went to the windows to make calls.
Falcón called his bull-breeding brother, worked through the excuses for not having gone out to the farm for months.
‘Paco, a question for you on your specialist subject,’ said Falcón, hurrying things along. ‘Do you remember a novillero called El Pulmón?’
‘Roque Barba, you mean. El Pulmón was the name they gave him after his accident,’ said Paco. ‘I remember it. Got a horn in the chest. When they moved him back to Seville after his initial surgery, I went to see him. I told him if he needed any help to call me. That was three years ago. I saw him a few times in the months after he first came out of hospital. I tried to persuade him to come up to the farm to work. Then we lost touch.’
‘A lot has happened since then, Paco, and not much of it good,’ said Falcón. ‘He became a heroin dealer in Las Tres Mil.’
‘A dealer? Shit, that's bad.’
‘The thing is, we need to find him.’
‘This sounds like trouble.’
‘He is in a lot of trouble, but not from us,’ said Falcón. ‘He's gone into hiding after a Russian gangster tried to kill him.’
‘I've just seen something on Canal Sur about a shooting in Las Tres Mil. Two people dead,’ said Paco.
‘That was the incident. And now we need to find him before the Russian gangster does.’
‘Well, he's not here, if that's what you're asking.’
‘I want you to use your contacts to find out if he still has any friends from his novillero days. Somewhere he could hole up and get watered and fed,’ said Falcón. ‘That's all I want you to do. I don't want you to talk to him, Paco. That's important. I just want some ideas about where he might be, and we'll do the rest.’
‘He didn't kill either of those people in his apartment, did he?’
‘No,’ said Falcón. ‘The gangster did that.’
‘What's the worst that can happen to him?’
‘That the gangster finds him first.’
‘And from your side?’
‘We want to protect him because we want him to testify against the gangster. The worst charge against him will be possession of an illegal firearm.’
‘I'll see what I can do.’
Falcón went back to the table. The others finished their calls. Parrado came back into the room. The meeting resumed.
‘Anything else we should talk about now?’ asked Parrado.
‘I've just heard that the hair and semen deposit from the paper suits does not match any of the Russian DNA we have on our CICO database,’ said Díaz.
‘That was quicker than you thought,’ said Parrado.
‘The database is smaller than I thought,’ said Díaz.
‘I spoke to the Sex Crimes squad in Málaga and Nikita Sokolov was definitely Vasili Lukyanov's partner in the assault on that local girl. He beat her up and held her down, but insisted he did not have sex with her,’ said Cortés. ‘The good news is that they do have a sample of Nikita Sokolov's DNA.’
‘Felipe in Forensics has confirmed that he'll have the DNA from the blood samples of the unknown in El Pulmón's apartment generated by eleven p.m. tonight,’ said Pérez.
‘Good. Get that together with Cortés,’ said Parrado. ‘Now we know the direction we're heading in, let's find Nikita Sokolov and El Pulmón before they find each other.’
18
Santa María La Blanca, Seville – Monday, 18th September 2006, 20.15 hrs
They were sitting outside in the square in front of the church of Santa María La Blanca, which had just turned golden in the late evening light. Jackets were on the back of their chairs, top buttons undone, ties loosened. Beers stood in frosted glasses in front of them and a girl offloaded plates of jamón, fried anchovies, patatas bravas in a piquant tomato sauce, and some bread and olives. The talk was of Nikita Sokolov, but it was vague, amused, slightly fatigued after a working weekend and a
long Monday.
‘OK, so let's think about this scientifically,’ said Ramírez. ‘How tall do you think Sokolov is?’
‘He's small – one metre sixty-six,’ said Cortés. ‘The closer you are to the ground, the less distance you have to lift the weights. And he's probably at least ten kilos heavier than he was in his Olympic days. I'd say closer to ninety kilos. I think a .38 is the bare minimum you'd need to knock someone like that over.’
‘How high is the table in El Pulmón's apartment, Emilio?’
‘Seventy-five centimetres.’
‘Add two for the gun, that's seventy-seven,’ said Ramírez. ‘Where would a bullet have hit a guy one metre sixty-six tall?’
‘In the leg or hip, if you're normal,’ said Falcón. ‘But Carlos Puerta didn't describe Sokolov as limping when he got into his car after the shooting.’
‘Puerta's not reliable.’
‘He could have been hit on the hand or wrist,’ said Falcón.
‘But would a hand or wrist injury have knocked him over?’ asked Cortés.
‘He might have dropped to the floor as a reflex action to the shock of the noise,’ said Falcón. ‘It was hot, no air-con in the apartment; El Pulmón would have been in a shirt, nowhere to pack his gun, so he hid it under the magazine. All he wanted was a bang to distract everybody in the room and make his move. Sokolov hit the deck as an evasive action.’
‘But he was hit,’ said Ramírez. ‘A wrist or a hand shot is a better explanation of the dripping blood. Bleeding from the leg would get soaked into the trousers, the drips wouldn't be so consistent in the room or going down the stairs.’
‘All the drips were on the right-hand side of the stairs going down,’ said Emilio.
‘OK, right hand or wrist, maybe right leg or hip,’ said Ramírez. ‘The next question is: who is Nikita Sokolov working for?’
‘If he's a friend of Vasili Lukyanov, and we think Lukyanov was defecting from Leonid Revnik to Yuri Donstov, then …’ said Falcón.
‘And we haven't seen Sokolov on the Costa del Sol for a while.’
‘My intelligence source told me that Yuri Donstov had set up a heroin-smuggling route from Uzbekistan to Europe and chose Seville as his centre of operations,’ said Falcón. ‘El Pulmón was a heroin dealer. The Narcs say that the heroin coming into Las Tres Mil always used to be Italian product, then things started changing. It looks to me as if Nikita Sokolov was trying to create an exclusive market for Donstov's product in Las Tres Mil and, for one reason or another, El Pulmón was not in agreement.’
They worked on the tapas for a few minutes, drank beer. Ramírez ordered more.
‘Do you think it was Revnik or Donstov who was involved in the 6th June bombing?’ asked Cortés.
‘CICO in Madrid think Yuri Donstov has been operating since September 2005, which is about nine months before the 6th June bombing,’ said Falcón. ‘I'm not sure that's long enough to develop a conspiracy of that complexity.’
‘All they had to do was plant a small bomb,’ said Pérez.
‘But a lot had to be put in place beforehand. Think about the political element: the Fuerza Andalucía party, the creation of their new leader,’ said Falcón. ‘I don't think a businessman like Lucrecio Arenas would have allowed anybody into the conspiracy who he hadn't been doing business with for quite some time. I always thought that he was dealing with people whose money he'd moved around the world while he was working at the Banco Omni, but maybe I'm wrong.’
‘So you favour Leonid Revnik as the perpetrator?’ asked Díaz. ‘Except that he'd only been in place since his predecessor fled to Dubai in June 2005.’
‘I suppose I do. There's no reason why Revnik and his predecessor shouldn't have been in contact with each other,’ said Falcón. ‘But having just learnt about Yuri Donstov, I'm beginning to think he might have found a role for himself in a new conspiracy that has its roots in the 6th June bombing. That was an attempt to gain political power in the whole of Andalucía. Now I think the sights have been lowered. Donstov seems to be shaping up to run a major criminal enterprise. The delivery of the disks by Vasili Lukyanov was a crucial element, not just in the enterprise, but in a more localized project. The disks are going to give him leverage, especially with I4IT and Horizonte, whose executives had been filmed in compromising situations.’
‘What is this project?’ asked Díaz.
‘I don't know,’ said Falcón. ‘But I think this time it's not about political power but more about money.’
‘We didn't talk about the money,’ said Ramírez. ‘I forgot to mention that this afternoon Prosegur took away the money found in the boot of Vasili Lukyanov's Range Rover. It's in the Banco de Bilbao now.’
‘How much?’ asked Díaz.
‘Seven million, seven hundred and forty-eight thousand two hundred euros,’ said Ramírez. ‘I was there when Elvira signed it off.’
‘You know, Javier, if you're looking to nail the Russians for the June 6th bombing I doubt you're going to be able to do it through Nikita Sokolov,’ said Cortés. ‘I don't think he's the sort of guy who's going to talk. You might be able to stick him with the murders in Las Tres Mil, but that's not going to help you. He's a vor-v-zakone, and their code, like the Sicilian mafia's omerta, is silence.’
‘And the big names we're talking about, they're invisible men,’ said Díaz. ‘We only got a photograph of Revnik's predecessor at the beginning of 2005. We have no shot of Leonid Revnik and only the old gulag shot of Yuri Donstov. All these guys could walk past us in the street and we wouldn't know.’
‘And not one of the current charges against Revnik's predecessor is murder,’ said Cortés. ‘He was arrested for money-laundering, falsifying documents, fraudulent bankruptcies and being a member of a criminal organization. No drugs. No people-trafficking. No extortion. No murder.’
A mobile vibrated. Pérez took the call.
‘Do you have anybody on the inside of Revnik's gang?’ said Falcón, looking at Cortés and Díaz.
‘We have informers,’ said Díaz.
‘How high up the ladder?’ said Falcón. ‘All these gangster-owned businesses must be run by local people.’
‘But none of them get anywhere near Revnik,’ said Cortés.
Díaz exchanged a look with Cortés, whose shake of the head was barely perceptible in the dying light in the square.
‘That was Traffic,’ said Pérez. ‘They've found El Pulmón's car in Calle Hernán Ruiz. There's a bloodstained T-shirt on the back seat. I'd better get down there.’
‘Take Felipe from Forensics with you,’ said Ramírez, sighing. ‘I'll come too; it's on my way.’
Falcón paid the bill, exchanged phone numbers with Cortés and Díaz, who were still finishing their beers. He headed back to the Palacio de Justicia to pick up his car.
They caught up with him in the Murillo Gardens.
‘Sorry about that, Javier,’ said Cortés. ‘We just had to get clearance before we talked to you about our informers and we didn't want to do it in company.’
‘We have just developed an informer close to Leonid Revnik,’ said Díaz. ‘She's a twenty-five-year-old woman from Málaga…’
‘Who is completely fucking gorgeous,’ said Cortés. ‘She could be having the time of her life with any footballer or film star you'd care to name, but she, the poor stupid bitch, has chosen a gangster by the name of Viktor Belenki.’
‘I've heard that name before,’ said Falcón, remembering Pablo from the CNI mentioning him. ‘He's Revnik's right-hand man and runs all his construction companies in the Costa del Sol. So, why does the girl inform on him?’
‘We're still right at the beginning of developing her,’ said Cortés. ‘Last month we found her brother on a yacht with some of his stupid friends and seven hundred kilos of hashish, and he's not the sort of kid who'd last very long in a high-security prison.’
‘Does she have a name?’
‘At the moment we're calling her Carmen,’ said Díaz.
&nb
sp; The light was out over the doorway to Falcón's house on Calle Bailén. He reversed up and left the car on the cobbles between the orange trees. As he went up to the door he stumbled and a streak of fear flashed through his guts as someone came from the shadows and caught him by the arm.
‘Steady on, Javier,’ said Mark Flowers. ‘Been drinking?’
‘I've had a couple of beers, but not nearly enough,’ said Falcón. ‘I was wondering when you'd come…’
‘Crawling out of the woodwork?’
‘To see me.’
‘Well, here I am,’ said Flowers. ‘Shall we go in?’
Falcón never knew where he stood with Mark Flowers, but then, that was the way Flowers liked it. He wanted to be unreadable. What was the point of being a Communications Officer in the American Consulate in Seville if the whole world could tell that you were really a CIA operative reporting to Madrid?
Flowers was a handsome fifty-four-year-old, much married and divorced. His hair had thinned dramatically over the last couple of years so that he'd had to resort to the comb-over. The hair should have been grey, too, but he dyed it. And Falcón suspected that, during a long vacation in the United States, Flowers had resorted to some plastic surgery around his eyes and neck.
‘Are you in mourning, Mark?’ asked Falcón, now realizing the reason why he hadn't been able to see Flowers outside was that he was dressed completely in black.
‘It makes me look slim,’ said Flowers, shaking the loose short-sleeved shirt out over his thickened stomach. ‘You get to my age and weight and you need all the help you can get.’
They came into the patio of the house, the bronze boy was running across the fountain, the water was as flat as a mirror.
‘Shall we sit out?’ said Falcón. ‘You'll want a whisky. I suppose you've already eaten.’
‘You know me, Javier. I'm all done by six thirty.’
‘Glenlivet?’
‘That's a nice change from the usual peat bog you serve.’
‘As you know, I went to London,’ said Falcón. ‘And I'm always thinking of you.’
‘Ice, no water,’ said Flowers.
Falcón went to the kitchen, came back with the drinks. A cold beer for himself. Some olives. A bowl of crisps.