The Ignorance of Blood. Robert Thomas Wilson

      ‘Did you hear that, Vasya? I'm not breaking up, am I? Leonid Revnik is in Marbella.’

      ‘He wasn't supposed to be back until next week.’

      ‘He came back early.’

      Vasili opened the window a crack and sniffed the warm night air. It was pitch black, flat fields on either side. Only tail lights in the distance. Nothing coming the other way.

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

      ‘He wanted to know where you were. I told him you'd be at the club, but they'd just come from there,’ said Alexei. ‘They'd found your office locked and Kostya on the floor unconscious.’

      ‘Are you on your own at the moment, Alyosha?’ asked Vasili, suspicious.

      ‘Leonid already knows you've crossed over to Yuri Donstov.’

      ‘So what is this? A warning?’

      ‘It's me finding out that Leonid's not lying,’ said Alexei.

      Silence.

      ‘Something's gone missing from your office,’ said Alexei. ‘He told me that, too.’

      Vasili closed the window. Sighed.

      ‘I'm sorry, Alyosha.’

      ‘Rita took a heavy beating for you. I haven't seen her, but Leonid had that animal with him – you know, the one that even the Moldovan girls won't go with.’

      Vasili hit the steering wheel five times. The horn blared into the night.

      ‘Steady, Vasya.’

      ‘I'm sorry, Alyosha,’ said Vasili. ‘I'm fucking sorry. What more can I say?’

      ‘Well, that's something.’

      ‘It wasn't supposed to happen like this. Leonid wasn't supposed to be back until next week. I was going to talk to Yuri, get permission to bring you in. You were going to be part of it. You know that. I just had to …’

      ‘That's just the point, Vasya: I didn't know that.’

      ‘I couldn't tell you. You're too close, Alyosha,’ said Vasili. ‘Yuri made an offer that Leonid wouldn't have given me in a million years.’

      ‘But without me. You didn't want me protecting your back and … what the fuck does it matter anyway?’ said Alexei, trailing off. ‘What was that, Vasya?’

      ‘Nothing.’

      ‘I heard it. You're crying.’

      Silence.

      ‘Well, thank fuck for that,’ said Alexei. ‘At least you're fucking sad, Vasya.’

      Pepe was on the road, a little later than planned, with a few more drinks inside him than he'd intended, all because of the football: Sevilla FC winning a UEFA cup game in Athens. He'd got caught up in the post-match euphoria, eaten dinner with wine and brandy. Now he had the music on full blast and was singing along with his favourite flamenco singer, El Camarón de la Isla. What a voice. It was making him tearful.

      Perhaps he was driving a little too quickly, but there wasn't much traffic and the lanes of the motorway seemed as wide and well lit as an airport runway. The music drowned out the rattling of the steel rods. He was happy, bouncing up and down on his springy seat, looking forward to seeing his daughter and the babies. His cheeks were wet with emotion.

      And it was at that moment, at the very peak of his happiness, that the tyre beneath him blew. It was a noise loud enough to penetrate the cab. A muffled thump like distant heavy ordnance, followed by the crack and rip of the tyre peeling off the rim and slapping around the wheel arch. His stomach sank with the cab as it listed to the left. In the break in the music he heard the pieces of tyre smacking down the side of the truck, metal screeching on the tarmac. His headlights, which had been locked steady between the lanes, slewed across the straight white flashes, and although everything was slowing down so that no detail escaped his wide-open eyes, some deep instinct was telling him that he was going dangerously fast, in a cab with a very heavy load behind it.

      Fear sliced through his innards but the alcohol in his veins only gave him the presence of mind to grip the steering wheel, which had powers of its own. El Camarón started up again just before Pepe's truck smashed into the barrier of the central reservation. Only with that abrupt halt did he realize the full extent of his forward momentum as he was catapulted through windscreen glass into the warm night air. Over the agonized voice of El Camarón he heard a noise that was the last thing his befuddled brain managed to compute. Steel rods, now loose, taking off like a battery of launched spears into a tunnel of approaching light.

      And the reason Vasili was crying was that he'd just undergone that extraordinary human facility for compressing a life into a compact emotional experience. Seven times in six years of service in Afghanistan Alexei had protected his back. And now, having survived all those years fighting the Pashtoons, Alexei was going to get shot in the back of the head by one of his own in a forest on the Costa del Sol, for no other reason than that he was Vasili Lukyanov's best fucking friend.

      ‘Tell Leonid –’ he started, and stopped when he sensed something flashing towards him, a strange agitation in the air. ‘What the fuck …?’

      The steel rods, their tail ends quivering with expectation, entered the cone of light, as if attracted to him at its apex.

      They hit with explosive force.

      Tyres smeared their rubber on to the dark road, thumped against an unseen obstruction and the Range Rover took off into the abysmal black of the fields beyond. There was a momentary silence.

      ‘Vasya?’

       1

       Falcón's house, Calle Bailén, Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 03.00 hrs

      The phone trembled under the warm breath of the brutal night.

      ‘Diga,’ said Falcón, who was sitting up in bed with a file from one of the hundreds concerning the 6th June Seville bombing resting on his knees.

      ‘You're awake, Javier,’ said his boss, Comisario Elvira.

      ‘I do my best thinking at this time in the morning,’ said Falcón.

      ‘I thought most people our age just worried about debt and death.’

      ‘I have no debts … not financial ones anyway.’

      ‘Somebody has just woken me up to talk about death … about a death,’ said Elvira.

      ‘And why were you called, rather than me?’

      ‘At some time before eleven thirty-five, which was when it was reported, there was a car accident at kilometre thirty-eight on the northbound motorway from Jerez to Seville. In fact, on both sides of the motorway, but the deaths have occurred on the northbound side. I'm told it's very nasty and I need you to go out there.’

      ‘Something that the Guardia Civil can't handle?’ said Falcón, glancing at his clock. ‘They've taken their time.’

      ‘It's complicated. They originally thought there was just one vehicle, a truck, which had crashed into the central reservation barriers and shed its load. It took them a while to realize there was another vehicle, beyond some pine trees down a bank on the other side of the motorway.’

      ‘Still no reason to involve the Homicide squad.’

      ‘The driver of the northbound vehicle has been identified as Vasili Lukyanov, a Russian national. When they finally got round to looking in the boot of his car they discovered a suitcase had split open and there was a lot of money … I mean a hell of a lot of money. I understand we're talking about millions of euros, Javier. So, I