Free The Hidden Assassins by Robert Wilson

some news.’
    ‘Hold it.’
    Falcón ran past the receptionist, the mobile pressedto his ear, listening to Ramírez’s feet pounding down the corridor and up the stairs and people shouting in the Jefatura. The traffic had stopped everywhere. Drivers and passengers were getting out of their cars, looking to the northeast at a plume of black smoke.
    ‘The reports we’re getting,’ said Ramírez, panting, ‘is that there’s been an explosion in an apartment block on the corner of Calle Blanca Paloma and Calle Los Romeros in the barrio of El Cerezo.’
    ‘Where’s that? I don’t know it. It must be close because I can see the smoke.’
    Ramírez found a wall map and gave rapid instructions.
    ‘Is there any report of a gas leak?’ asked Falcón, knowing this was wildly optimistic, like the so-called power surge on the day of the London underground bombings.
    ‘I’m checking the gas company.’
    Falcón sprinted through the hospital. People were running, but there was no panic, no shouting. They had been training for this moment. Everyone in a white coat was making for the casualty department. Orderlies were sprinting with empty trolleys. Nurses ran with boxes of saline. Plasma was on the move. Falcón slammed through endless double doors until he hit the main street and the wall of sound: a cacophony of sirens as ambulances swung out into the street.
    The main road was miraculously clear of traffic. As he crossed the empty lanes he saw cars pulling up on to pavements. There were no police. This was the work of ordinary citizens, who knew that this stretch of road had to be kept clear to ferry the wounded. Ambulances careered down the street two abreast, whooping anddelirious, with lights flashing queasily, in air that was filling with a grey/pink dust and smoke that billowed out from behind the apartment blocks.
    At the crossroads bloodstained people stumbled about on their own or were being carried, or walked towards the hospital with handkerchiefs, tissues and kitchen roll held to foreheads, ears and cheeks. These were the superficially wounded victims, the ones sliced by flying glass and metal, the ones some distance from the epicentre, who would never make it into the top flight of disaster statistics but who might lose the sight in an eye, or their hearing from perforated eardrums, bear facial scars for the rest of their lives, lose the use of a finger or a hand, never walk again without a limp. They were being helped by the lucky ones, those who didn’t even have a scratch as the air whistled with flying glass, but who had the images burned on to their minds of someone they knew or loved who had been whole seconds before and was now sliced, torn, bludgeoned or broken.
    In the blocks of flats leading up to Calle Los Romeros, the local police were evacuating the buildings. An old man in bloody pyjamas was being led by a boy, who had realized his importance. A young man holding a crimson-flashed towel to the side of his head stared through Falcón, his face horribly partitioned by rivulets of blood, coagulating with dust. He had his arm around his girlfriend, who appeared unhurt and was talking at full tilt into her mobile phone.
    The air, more dust-filled by the moment, was still splintering to the sound of breaking glass as it fell from high shattered windows. Falcón called Ramírez again and told him to organize three or four buses to act asimprovised ambulances to ferry the lightly wounded from all these blocks of apartments down the road to the hospital.
    ‘The gas company have confirmed that they supply buildings in that area,’ said Ramírez, ‘but there’s been no report of a leak and they ran a routine test on that block only last month.’
    ‘For some reason this doesn’t feel like a gas explosion,’ said Falcón.
    ‘We’re getting reports that a pre-school behind the destroyed building has been badly damaged by flying debris and there are casualties.’
    Falcón pressed on up through the