The Ignorance of Blood. Robert Thomas Wilson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ is where his daughter now works. This new world makes me feel old, Javier.’

      ‘There are a lot of well-fed people out there who are still hungry,’ said Falcón. ‘You should have seen the reaction to all that money in the back of the Russian's car.’

      ‘You got it all, though, didn't you?’

      ‘Who knows if a few packs were lifted before I arrived?’

      ‘I'll call you when Vicente Cortés gets here and we'll have a meeting in my office,’ said Elvira. ‘Maybe you should go home and get some sleep.’

      They came for Alexei just before dawn and couldn't raise him. One of them had to scramble down the side of the small villa and get into the garden over a low wall. He broke the lock on the sliding window, let himself in and opened the front door for his friend, who took out his Stechkin APS handgun, which he'd hung on to since leaving the KGB back in the early 1990s.

      They went upstairs. He was in the bedroom, wound up in a sheet on the floor with an empty bottle of whisky next to him, dead to the world. They kicked him awake. He came to, moaning.

      They stuck him in the shower and turned on the water, cold. Alexei grunted as if they were still kicking him. The muscles trembled under his tattoos. They kept the water trained on him for a couple of minutes and let him out. He shaved with the two men in the mirror and took some aspirin, swilled down with tap water. They walked him into the bedroom and watched him while he got dressed in his Sunday best. The ex-KGB man sat on the bed with his Stechkin APS dangling between his knees.

      They went downstairs and out into the heat. The sun was just up, the sea was blue, there was barely any movement, just birds. They got into the car and drove down the hill.

      Ten minutes later they were in the club, sitting in Vasili Lukyanov's office, but with Leonid Revnik behind the desk smoking an H. Upmann Coronas Junior cigar. He had short grey hair, cut en brosse with a sharp widow's peak, big shoulders and chest under a very expensive white shirt from Jermyn Street.

      ‘Did you speak to him last night?’ asked Revnik.

      ‘To Vasili? Yes, I got through eventually,’ said Alexei.

      ‘Where was he?’

      ‘On the road to Seville. I don't know where.’

      ‘What did he have to say?’ asked Revnik.

      ‘That Yuri Donstov had made him an offer that you wouldn't have given him in a million years.’

      ‘He's right there,’ said Revnik. ‘What else?’

      Alexei shrugged. Revnik glanced up. A hard fist clubbed Alexei in the side of the head, knocked him and the chair over.

      ‘What else?’ said Revnik.

      They hefted Alexei and the chair back to vertical. A lump was already up on the side of his face.

      ‘“What the fuck,”’ said Alexei. ‘He had an accident.’

      That had Revnik's attention.

      ‘Tell me.’

      ‘We were talking and he suddenly said: “What the fuck is this …” then BANG! and the sound of tyres screeching, a thump, a crash and then it all went dead.’

      Revnik hit the desk.

      ‘Why the fuck didn't you tell us that last night?’

      ‘I was drunk. I passed out.’

      ‘You know what that means?’ said Revnik to no one in particular, but pointing across the room. ‘It means that what was in there is now in the hands of the police.’

      They looked at the empty safe.

      ‘Take him away,’ said Revnik.

      They took him back out to the car, drove up into the hills. The smell of pine was very strong after the cool of the night. They walked him into the trees and the ex-KGB man finally got to use his Stechkin APS.

       2

       Outside Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 08.30 hrs

      The sun had been up for twenty-five minutes over the flat fields of the fertile flood plain of the Guadalquivir river. It was close to 30°C when Falcón drove back into the city at 8.30 a.m. At home he lay on his bed fully clothed in the air-con and tried to get some sleep. It was hopeless. He drank another coffee before heading into the office.

      The short drive took him down by the river, past the spearhead railings and gates to the Maestranza bullring, whose whitewashed façade, smooth and brilliant as the icing of a cake, had its porthole windows and dark red doors and shutters piped with ochre. The high phoenix palms near the Toro de Oro sagged against the already bleached sky and as he crossed the San Telmo bridge the slow water was almost green and had no autumnal sparkle.

      The emptiness of the Plaza de Cuba and the shopping streets leading off it was a reminder that it was still a summer heat beating down on the bludgeoned city. Sevillanos had returned from their August holidays to find their new vitality sapped by suffocating apartments, drained by power cuts and the old city centre crammed with hot, unbreathable air. The end-of-summer storms, which scrubbed the cobbles clean, hosed down the grateful trees, rinsed the uninspired atmosphere and brought colour back to the faded sky, had not arrived. With no respite since May, ladies' fans no longer opened with the customary snap and their wrists trembled with a fluttering palsy at the thought of another month of endless palpitations.

      Nobody in the office at 10.15 a.m. The paperwork from the 6th June Seville bombing still stacked knee-high around his desk. The court case against the two remaining suspects was going to take months, possibly years, to construct and there was no guarantee of success. The wall chart pinned up opposite Falcón's desk with all its names and links said it all – there was a gap in what the media were calling the Catholic Conspiracy, or rather, not so much a gap as a dead end.

      Every time he sat at his desk the same five facts presented themselves to him:

       1) Although the two suspects they had in custody had been successfully linked to the two ringleaders of the plot – all four were right-wing and staunch Catholics, hence the name of the conspiracy – neither of them had any idea who'd planted the bomb, which on 6th June had destroyed an apartment building and a nearby pre-school in a residential area of Seville.

       2) The ringleaders themselves, Lucrecio Arenas and César Benito, had been murdered before they could be arrested. The former had been shot just as he was about to dive into his swimming pool in Marbella and the latter had had his throat so brutally chopped with the blade of a hand that he'd choked to death in his hotel room in Madrid.

       3) Over the last three months a plethora of agencies, at the behest of the board of directors, had gone through the offices of the Banco Omni in Madrid, where Lucrecio Arenas had been the Chief Executive Officer. They'd interviewed all his old colleagues and business contacts, searched his properties and grilled his family, but had found nothing.

       4) They'd also gone through the СКАЧАТЬ