They stood. She brushed herself down, sat on the edge of the desk.
‘I'll get hold of the disks,’ said Falcón.
She could see the damage it was doing him to go against the grain, but that he was willing. From her side there wasn't a scintilla of doubt.
‘You know that once we've taken this road there's no going back,’ said Falcón. ‘And there might be no coming back either. You've got two other sons to …’
‘Do you want me to sign a release form?’ she said, eyes locked on to his.
‘I'm not going to fail you, Consuelo,’ said Falcón. ‘I would corrupt myself. I would even hand over the money, if I had it. I would ruin my career. I'd let them drum me out of the force to spend the rest of my days in jail and ignominy, if I could be certain that Darío would come out of this all right.’
She held his face, kissed him.
‘So we call Revnik,’ said Falcón, righting the chair, sitting her down.
‘I'm sorry, Javier. I know what this is costing you,’ she said, and dialled the number, put the phone on loudspeaker with the dictaphone running.
‘Diga,’ said the voice.
‘We spoke to Yuri Donstov's people,’ said Consuelo.
‘And?’
‘He said I would have to raise the money myself.’
‘How long did he give you?’
‘A week.’
‘Interesting,’ said the voice. ‘He must be suffering. What about the disks?’
‘He wants them by midday, and he insisted on the originals.’
‘Of course, things can be cut out of copies,’ said the voice. ‘Did you speak to your son?’
‘When I asked for proof of my son's welfare, he responded by cutting off his toe.’
‘It was probably just a bit of theatre,’ said the voice.
‘You didn't hear the screams.’
‘Does this mean you would like us to act for you in this business?’
‘Some questions,’ said Consuelo. ‘Do you know where my son is being held?’
‘Not yet, but we have our people on the inside.’
‘And they don't know?’
‘Donstov is being very careful about who knows what. All we know is that the boy is not being held in Donstov's headquarters in Seville. Once we get inside, we will find the answer.’
‘What is the “small reward” you mentioned before?’ asked Consuelo.
‘The original disks.’
‘Wait,’ said Consuelo.
She put the call on hold, clicked off the loudspeaker, clenched her fists and rested her forehead on her wrists. The torment of impossible decisions.
‘I know that I'm being given three options,’ she said, before Falcón could get a word out. ‘The monstrous Donstov, the impenetrable Revnik, or the slow, indecisive forces of law and order. The first one is unacceptable. The third is precluded by the first because we have been given less than twelve hours. That means we have to go with the second option with all its unpredictabilities. We can agonize but it won't change anything.’
They looked at the phone. She hit the hold and loudspeaker buttons.
‘We'll bring the disks to you when you've made Darío safe,’ said Consuelo.
‘We would need the disks in advance,’ said the voice.
‘Unacceptable,’ said Consuelo.
‘Hold the line.’
The phone went dead.
‘They'll need the disks featuring the I4IT and Horizonte people prior to six p.m.,’ said Falcón. ‘Without them they can't affect whatever the deal is between the consortium and the mayor's office. Offer them a random selection of half the disks. See what they say.’
The voice came back.
‘Each disk is numbered in felt-tip pen from one to twenty-seven. We will accept half the disks, from one to eight and twenty-two to twenty-seven inclusive.’
‘When do you plan to act?’ asked Falcón.
‘Call this number again in fifteen minutes.’
The line went dead. They sat back, exhausted.
‘What's on the disks they've just asked for?’
Ramírez was in bed when Falcon called. He told him all he could remember was that the first unidentified guy was on the first disk and that the final two disks were ‘locked’, requiring a password and encryption software. The techies were working on it. He hung up.
Falcón and Consuelo mused about the nature of the valuable data locked up on the last two disks and lapsed into silence again – the tension so unbearable that talk was becoming an irritation. The restaurant noise reasserted itself like a subliminal tease, reminding them that this was the life they should be having.
Her mobile rang in her handbag.
‘It must be Donstov's people,’ she said, and took the call.
‘Any progress, Señora Jiménez?’
‘You'll have the disks by midday.’
‘So you've already been in contact with Inspector Jefe Falcón?’
‘He's here now.’
‘Señor Donstov would like to give you an incentive to act quickly,’ said the voice. ‘If you can bring us the disks before dawn today, Señor Donstov will release your son on receipt of just four million euros and you still have a week to raise the money.’
‘Will I be able to see my son?’
Falcón scribbled on the pad, shoved it in front of Consuelo.
‘Yes,’ said the voice.
‘You have to understand, too, that at such short notice we might not be able to supply all the disks. The last two are in a different department, which the Inspector Jefe does not have access to.’
‘Hold.’
Consuelo tugged a tissue from a box on the desk, wiped the sweat from her eyes and face.
‘When can you get hold of the last two disks? Earliest time?’ asked the voice.
Falcón wrote on the pad, underlined an earlier question she hadn't yet asked.
‘Ten a.m.,’ said Consuelo. ‘And where shall we meet?’
‘Hold.’
They held for what seemed like an interminable amount of time. They didn't speak. Life was suspended. Consuelo imagined herself as a foetus with no concept of time, waiting to be born without even understanding that this was what waiting was.
‘Once you have the first twenty-five disks in your possession,’ said the voice, ‘you will make your way north of Seville on the road to Merida. There is a petrol station where the N433 branches off in the direction of the Sierra de Aracena and Portugal. You will wait for further instructions there.’
The car park was empty, the Jefatura dark and silent. The heat of the day still radiated from the tarmac as Falcón let himself into the back door of the building. He ran upstairs to his office, booted up all the computers, took the key to the evidence room and went back downstairs. He brought all the disks up to the Homicide squad's offices and started burning copies, five at a time, on all computers.
Reasoning that Donstov wouldn't know the difference between the original and a copy of any of the disks, he hunted down a black felt-tip pen. Time, having been unbearably stationary when he was with Consuelo, now raced past at an ungovernable speed. He found a pen in Elvira's secretary's office and sprinted back down to the Homicide department, nearly lost his footing on the stairs, slowed himself down, didn't want to end up with a cracked skull, lying on the landing for the cleaners to find in the morning.
Thirty-five minutes later and he was on the fourth set of copies. Why wasn't technology faster? He numbered the disks. Sweat poured off him. No air-con and the night-time temperatures still in the thirties. There came a point when all he could do was wait. He swore horribly at the unconcerned computers. He gripped the arms of his chair, wondered what had happened to him. One moment he was drinking beers in the square outside Santa María La Blanca and the next he was going against everything he stood for, but with no gunman holding a barrel to his temple, no lunatic with a knife to his ribs, no fanatic with a bomb strapped to his waist. And yet hell seemed to be imminent. H
is mobile vibrated.
‘Where are you?’ asked Consuelo.
‘Nearly there.’
Final copies. He breathed down the stress. Got the numbers right with the felt-tip pen. Back down to the evidence room, put the originals back in the safe, locked it. Pocketed the evidence-room key. Ran out into the car park. Threw himself into the car, hands slick with sweat, slipping over the gear stick and steering wheel. He turned up the air-con. The cool blasted into his chest. He drove back into town, pulled up outside the restaurant. Consuelo tore open the door, got in. He pulled away.
‘What?’ he said to her questioning eyes.
‘What have you been doing?’ she asked. ‘You're soaked to the skin.’
‘There's a shirt in the back seat,’ he said. ‘Revnik. The voice. What did they tell us to do?’
‘They came back with a different plan,’ said Consuelo. ‘Fortunately the same as ours. They wanted us to offer Donstov the disks early. I told them it had already been done. They took it well. They're on the move.’
Falcón drove alongside the river, with the old Expo '92 site on the Isla de la Cartuja just across the water.
‘They do know that we've been sent to this petrol station precisely so that Donstov can make sure we're not being followed.’
‘Revnik's voice told me that he has two ex-KGB men working for him,’ said Consuelo. ‘And four years ago the Russian Interior Ministry disbanded a group called the SOBR, a special rapid-reaction unit. All these highly trained guys were suddenly out of a job on a small pension. Revnik has three of them working for him now.’
‘You had quite a conversation with the voice.’
‘He opened up when I told him you'd left to get the disks,’ said Consuelo. ‘I got a guided tour of the Russian mafia. You know, it's not so different to Seville. If you have friends in the right places, it all works.’
‘The town hall hasn't got round to killing people yet.’
‘But most of the Marbella town council are in jail for corruption.’
‘Did the voice tell you anything practical, like how they were going to follow us?’
‘He said they had “listening equipment”. With my mobile number they can pick up my signal and listen in,’ said Consuelo. ‘Doesn't it make you despair when you see such contempt for the forces of law and order?’
He didn't answer.
She squeezed his arm. Falcon turned left, crossed the river over Calatrava's harp bridge, headed away from the lights of the city, past the Olympic stadium and into the darkness.
Barely any traffic. The odd truck. The new motorway bypassing Las Pajanosas was smooth and empty. The lights studding the tarmac were an odd comfort, a show of someone's concern. Consuelo sat with her legs crossed at the ankle, hands in her lap playing with her rings. She had her head tilted back against the head-rest, eyes open, drinking in the illuminated road. Occasionally she took a deep, quivering breath.
‘I can hear you thinking,’ said Falcon.
‘What is said and demanded in business negotiations is one thing,’ said Consuelo. ‘But there's always a subtext.’
‘You mean, why did the brutal Donstov suddenly become a reasonable human being half an hour later?’ asked Falcón.
‘Is there any significance to him getting those disks seven or eight hours earlier than he originally asked?’ said Consuelo. ‘Why have they halved their demand to four million euros? Why is he being weak?’
‘Maybe the money is much more important to Donstov than we realized,’ said Falcón. ‘Revnik's man thought so.’
‘And it's much closer to the amount of money that he knows I can raise,’ said Consuelo. ‘Which is why I'm thinking: why did Donstov release the pressure on me?’
‘This doesn't feel like a release to me. If anything, he's racked it up. He's making us act quicker. He's given us less time to plan.’
‘What about this: when I told him that another group had claimed they were holding Darío, it made him suspect that we'd formed the sort of relationship we have.’
‘So, he gets us to speed up,’ said Falcón. ‘And, at the same time, he confirms that we still believe him and haven't fallen for the other side's bluff.’
They arrived at the petrol station where they'd been told to wait, Falcon filled up and extracted a couple of café solos from the machine, took them back to the car. They parked in front of the neighbouring hostal. He changed his shirt. They stared out into the dark and sipped coffee.
‘If we get through this I'm never going to the Costa del Sol ever again in my life,’ said Consuelo.
‘Nothing's changed in the Costa del Sol for the last forty years. Why withdraw your custom now?’
‘Because it's only now that I've faced up to what these people have being doing,’ said Consuelo. ‘Almost every apartment building, every development, every golf course, marina, fun park, casino – every source of recreation for visiting tourists is built on the profit from human misery. Hundreds of thousands of girls being forced to work in the puti clubs. Hundreds of thousands of addicts sticking themselves with needles. Hundreds of thousands of brainless, decadent fools snorting white powder up their noses so that they can dance and fuck all night long. And that's not counting any of the migrants, who are washed up dead on the glorious beaches. It makes me sick and I'm not going to do it any more. I'm not going to do it any fucking more.’
She jabbed her heel down in the footwell with each vehement syllable. Falcón reached out to calm her down and it was then that the mobile rang. She grabbed it off the dashboard. The irritating sound of an SMS arriving filled the car.
Donstov's man sending a text.
‘They're telling us to go north, direction Mérida.’
Falcón pulled away from the hostal with a squeal from the tyres and crossed the hot road, turning left.
‘Do you think our friends can “hear” a text?’ asked Consuelo, nervous, sneaking a glance at Falcón's impassive face.
‘Technology is not my strong point,’ he said, suppressing a sense of the complete madness of what they were doing. ‘We have to believe that they know their work.’
After ten kilometres they were told to leave the main road north and, following endless instructions from texts sent on the mobile, they drove down narrow rough roads with patched tarmac, through small villages with just a couple of street lights, up hills with deep blackness on either side while the smell of the rock rose, the stone pines cooling, the wild herbs and the dry earth wafted through the half-open windows. Consuelo writhed in her seat, staring out of the front and side, checking the rear-view mirror.
‘If Revnik's men were following us and we could see them, they'd be visible to Donstov's people, too,’ said Falcón. ‘So keep calm, Consuelo. Look ahead.’
‘Where the hell are we?’
The tyres rumbled over the roads. A sign. Castelblanco de los Arroyos. Turn left. Darkness again.
‘How long have we been driving?’ she asked.
‘Forty minutes.’
She rested a hand on his forearm.
‘There's nothing out there. There's nobody with us. There can't be anybody in this blackness. They'd see any headlights coming from kilometres away,’ she said, losing heart. ‘We're going to have to prolong this thing as much as we can.’
‘It'll take time for them to go through the disks,’ said Falcón.
The mobile rang, this time it was a call. Donstov's man.
‘You'll see a sign to the Embalse de la Cala on the left. Take it, and tell me when you get there.’
Four minutes.
‘We're here.’
‘Take the second track on the right.’
They came off the tarmac on to a dirt road.
‘Hand-painted sign: Granja de las Once Higeras. Follow it.’
They followed the signs through the tall grasses and low, wide-spread holm oaks. It went on for kilometres until they came through an open gate to a single-storey house. The headlights brushed over the whitewashed walls, the shutte
red and barred windows, the door with red paint peeling off it.
‘Put the car in the barn,’ said the voice. ‘Leave the keys in the ignition. Come out with your hands up … hold the disks on your head. Stand in front of the garage, legs apart.’
In the barn was a yellow rusting digger. Consuelo felt the warmth of its engine radiating towards her.
She and Javier stood a few metres from the back of the car, hands on heads. Two men in baseball caps, indiscernible behind their torch beams, approached the car. They had kerchiefs pulled up over their faces. One went into the garage while the other gave Falcón a thorough pat-down, put a sleeping mask over his eyes. He heard the boot pop open and, a few seconds later, close. The man came out of the garage, closed the doors. The second man moved over to Consuelo, crouched down behind her. She should have worn trousers. He started at her ankles, pen torch in his mouth.
‘You can see I'm not hiding anything down there,’ she said.
No response. The hands went up her skirt. She gritted her teeth as fingers and thumbs reached up to her crotch, over her buttocks, came back down again. Small of the back, stomach, cupped her breasts, a little grunt at her shoulder. He slipped a sleeping mask over her eyes, too.
‘Come with me,’ he said, and took Consuelo's arm.
The other man took care of Falcón. They headed for the low farmhouse. Their heads were pushed down as they entered the low doorway.
‘Sit.’
They were pressed down into chairs. The one doing the talking was the Cuban they'd spoken to on the phone. Falcón had the small box of disks on his lap now. He did not like the sleeping mask, had not been prepared for it.
‘I don't know how I'm going to be able to see my son with this thing on,’ said Consuelo, ‘so I'm taking it off.’
‘Wait!’ said the Cuban.
‘Careful, Consuelo,’ said Falcón.
‘I'm not doing this blindfolded,’ she said and ripped off the mask.
Falcón removed his as well, just so that the men in the room had too much to do at once, made them indecisive. Two of the Russians already had kerchiefs over their faces, the other two pulled down balaclavas with eye and mouth holes. One of these men stepped forward with a handgun, which he put to Consuelo's forehead. His hand trembled slightly, but with rage rather than fear. He had his finger on the trigger and the safety was off. Consuelo's eyeballs shivered, her neck tensed and ducked into her shoulder as she felt the barrel touch her skin. The Cuban spoke in Russian. There was a brutal exchange and the man stepped back.