“Lucia?”
She nodded. “The very same.” She tried to smile but nothing came. Time might have changed her appearance beyond recognition, but her voice was unchanged, and her accent was true sevillana. Harry looked again at her hands and saw the traces of dried blood on them. She had clearly tried to clean them up but in her haste had made a pretty bad job of it.
He raised his eyes from the bloody hands to her eyes. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake hands, even after all these years.”
“Please, Harry — I am desperate. I need to talk with you at once.”
“What is all this about?” he asked her. “I thought we were meeting for dinner?”
“There was no time to call you. Something happened to Pablo.”
“Your boyfriend?”
She nodded.
Things began to get a little clearer.
“Where is he?”
“Please, Harry — you don’t understand. Something terrible has happened.”
Harry saw a look of genuine anguish on the woman’s face. “What?”
“We were attacked in the apartment.”
She looked like she was about to faint. He took a step toward her and reached out to steady her. “When?”
“Just now. I came here immediately because I knew you were here.”
“I’d given up — as you saw. What the hell is all this blood, Lucia?”
She began to cry. “It’s Pablo’s.”
“Is he all right?”
The woman looked terrified. He noticed her hands were shaking a little and her mascara was smudged by her tears. “I’m scared, Harry. Pablo is dead.”
FOUR
For a moment Harry wondered what the joke was, but the look in Lucia’s frightened eyes told him there was nothing funny about the situation. He studied the anguish on her face and was suddenly aware that the other people in the bar were staring hard at the two of them.
“Come with me,” he said, and gently steered her away from their prying eyes.
They stepped out of the casino and he looked into her eyes once again. She was still flustered and the expression of fear on her face was impossible to misjudge. As he watched her, she kept looking over his shoulder at the busy street as if she were searching the traffic for an imminent threat.
He sighed and searched his pockets for a cigarette, an automatic reaction to the rise in adrenalin. Iraq’s Rumaila oil fields had taught him how cigarettes calmed nerves. “First, are you certain he’s dead?”
Lucia raised her bloody hands to her face and swept her hair from her face. “It’s true — I swear it! You have to believe me.”
Behind Harry, a car horn blared loudly and Lucia jumped back and gasped. “Mierda!” she said, and mumbled a few words in Spanish.
Harry Bane had seen enough people under pressure to know Lucia Serrano was either telling the truth or she was the best damned actor he’d ever seen. He decided to go with the story and give her a chance. “How was he killed?”
“I don’t know — I came home from work early and he was fine. I took a shower and when I came out he was dead on the floor with his throat cut…” she began to sob and break down once again.
“All right, how long ago was this?”
“Just a few moments ago. The apartment is very close to here.”
“Does anyone else know about this?”
She nodded her head. “I came straight to you, but one of the neighbor’s said he was going to call the police.”
“Then we have to hurry.”
Rafael Ruiz awoke with a start. He sat up in the bed and fumbled at the telephone. He almost knocked it over onto the floor, but caught it just before the ringing woke his wife. Being woken in the middle of the night was never very popular with her, but she tolerated it because she knew that was the fate of a security official’s wife, especially the wife of a senior CNI officer.
He knew the sacrifices she had made, but at least her job as a photographer meant she could lay in. The Centro Nacional de Inteligencia was the Spanish equivalent of MI5 or the FBI. Originally formed in 1935, but curtailed because of the Spanish Civil War, the latest manifestation of the Spanish Secret Service was formed in 2002 and was headquartered in the Moncloa-Aravaca district in the west of Madrid.
As was the case with so many of his colleagues, most of Ruiz’s career had been spent focussed on the traditional hotspots in Spanish foreign policy — North Africa and South America, but this latest assignment was very different.
Ruiz rubbed his eyes and moved the phone to his ear. “What is it?” He kept his voice low.
The voice on the other end was calm but commanding, and he recognised it at once as that of Inspector Jefe Cristina Fernandez, the head of Madrid’s Municipal Police Force. “Good evening, Rafael.”
“Cristina — hello. Why are you calling me at this hour?”
“Someone called a murder in — a bungled apartment robbery — and I was asleep too, if it makes it any easier.”
Ruiz sighed. “An apartment murder? That’s your world, not mine.”
“When they ran the address through our database they realized it was flagged. That’s why they woke me.”
Ruiz straightened up and took a long breath. “Flagged?”
“A little note telling us that anything to do with the place is CNI.”
“The address?”
Cristina Fernandez casually read out the details. “You recognize it?”
“It sounds familiar — the name?”
“Reyes.”
“That’s right — I think he’s on some kind of watchlist. Is he the victim?”
“No, a neighbor was killed by a man who later broke into Reyes’s apartment. According to another neighbor the killer exited the apartment a few minutes later.”
Ruiz was now wide awake and officially hooked. “When was this?”
“A few moments ago.”
“I see. I don’t want the police on the scene until our people are there.”
“I understand… that’s the purpose of the flag.”
Ruiz was suddenly very anxious. He had placed Reyes on a watchlist a few days ago due to the nature of his online research. It was above Ruiz’s paygrade to understand exactly what that research was, only that his superiors had told him it had grave consequences for the future of humanity.
They had also told him that there were other agencies just as interested in the work of Señor Reyes as they were, and Ruiz was tasked with not only monitoring Reyes’s research but also ensuring it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Tonight was starting to look like he might have failed on both counts, something he knew his superiors would not tolerate.
“Seal the road off and put an armed response team together.”
“Of course.”
“And meet me at the address,” he snapped. “I’m on my way. Get some officers outside that building immediately — no one is to go into that apartment until I am on the scene.”
He climbed out of bed and padded across the dark room to his clothes, which he had hung over the back of a chair less than an hour ago. Rafael was a tall, lean man, with short black hair, grey now at the temples, and dark brown eyes, usually covered by contact lenses but in tonight’s rush they were hidden behind a pair of Versace tortoise shell glasses his wife had picked out for him last Christmas in Barceolona. He threaded his tie through his collar, picked up his jacket and kissed his wife.
“These late nights are killing you, Rafa,” whispered his wife. She kept her eyes closed and pushed down further into the bedsheets. “The CNI will put you in an early grave.”
“Go back to sleep, querida,” Ruiz replied, and kissed her again. It’s not the CNI I’m worried about… he thought as he closed the bedroom door gently behind him and made his way downstairs.