Tight Lies

by Ted Denton

  ‘Don’t thank me. Save your thanks for Simon Prentice of MI6, Mr Hemmings. When it comes to doing the so called right thing, to which you alluded, MI6 never fails to disappoint. But, as you know only too well yourself, leverage only requires a single point of pivot.’ The statement was both cryptic and barbed. The cabin rocked to a halt and the doors swung open mechanically, signalling the conclusion of their circular trip.

  Chapter 29

  SPAIN. BAYFIELD MANDARIN GOLF COURSE. EUROPEAN TOUR: DAY FIVE. 19.29 HRS.

  I reached the caddy shack again, nestled amongst the eerie shadows of the truck park, door hanging open upon its hinges. Everything was as it had been left following the tear up. My eye followed a succession of discarded papers and upturned furniture leading to a massive, unmoving carcass, spread out like some freakish shop dummy twisted into an action pose. The body occupied a large portion of the free floor space. A chair balanced unevenly on three legs, the fourth impaling the eye socket of the dead man embedded firmly into his skull. A dark crimson puddle of viscous blood had seeped across the wooden floor, filling random cracks in the floorboards like spilt paint. Flies buzzed, circling the body in geometric oscillation. The pitiless scene would no doubt be discovered at some point soon. I needed to work fast. Gathering up pages of scattered documents and files from the floor I quickly leafed through them scanning the words as I went. Records of bets, odds for players finishing in specific positions in certain tournaments, names and numbers mostly. I didn’t have time for this, nor to bust open those stubborn filing cabinets in the adjacent office and trawl through their contents. That could take an age and I needed to get going fast or the body count was going to grow. With Daniel Ratchet possibly becoming the next name on that list.

  I checked around me in case I’d missed anything obvious. Something not necessarily in my nature but that I’d drilled myself to do in the field. Take a step back if you can before letting rip. So: empty coffee cups sat unwashed in the sink. Kitchen towels and drying up cloths lay folded, unused. A packet of biscuits spilled their contents across the counter at the back of the hut. The walls were bare except for a fat cork notice board hanging on the side wall. Score cards, a detailed yardage map of the golf course, an extensive list of tournament tee times and a calendar were pinned to it. A topless blonde woman in a golf visor as white as her teeth, perched precariously on the side of a red sports car cupping a pair of obscenely large and inviting breasts. The month of May was well represented. To the left of the calendar a hand-written note pinned to the board caught my eye. I walked over and examined it. It read:

  Pussy Palace! Carascalle, Mimbreras 4, 03201 ELCHE

  The mongrel in the car park had mentioned this place where some of the crew went to celebrate a good streak on the take with coke and whores.

  Pussy Palace circled in red with a residential address sounded like it must be that place. I tore the note from the board using my good arm, the other now hanging limply by my side as it throbbed in agony. A soggy, bloody angry mess. The pain scrambling my thoughts. Stuffed the paper into my pocket. Grabbed a wodge of kitchen towels from the counter. Dampened them under the warm tap and held the paper tight against and into the bullet wound in my shoulder. Stemmed the bleeding as I winced in pain.

  Noises now from outside. I piled out of the hut fearing I would be disturbed at the scene of a murder at any moment. Tipping down the steps, I clocked two burly television engineers, matching beer guts spilling out competitively from under sweat patched T-shirts. They were hauling heavy cables out from under one of the trucks. At the level they were stooped, if they happened to glance ninety degrees to their right under the adjacent truck, they would spot the bound, gagged and unconscious body of the oily-looking guard I had neutralised earlier. I turned and moved fast, heading in the other direction. Head down. The fewer people who could provide my description after the carnage in the hut was discovered, the better.

  I put some distance between us and redialled the latest encrypted contact number to reach HQ. Ella picked up right away as usual.

  ‘Hey soldier,’ she purred in her throaty, posh girls’ school, accent, ‘you making progress?’

  Sex on a stick.

  ‘Think so, Ella. Although I’ve gone and picked up some lead for my troubles.’

  ‘Are you injured Hunter? A bullet?’ she pressed urgently.

  ‘I’ll live. Although I need some space to get patched up before it properly slows me down. Don’t worry about me. Just get me some intel, will ya? I’ve got an address and I need you to process it. I think they may be holding Daniel there. Find out what you can. How far is it from here? Whose name is the deed of ownership in? Try and get a visual on it, different routes in, point of access, that kind of thing. I’ll check in with Mickey and then get down there as soon as I can.’

  ‘Give me a little time, Tom. I’ll check Google Earth but doubt it’s got the detail you need. If that’s so, then I’ll have to hack access to a US spy satellite system. I’ll come back to you when I can, but this stuff usually takes a few hours and I know we have to move fast. Use the time to get yourself patched up will you?’

  ‘Sure. Thanks. Find me a way in. There’s no point me just tearing off without preparing first. It won’t help Daniel if I get taken out before I can even get to him. And Ella, you’d better tell the Hand of God that his mate is dead. They’ve killed Bob Wallace.’

  The Range Rover was parked a mile down the road from the golf course behind some rusting oil storage tanks. I slumped into the front seat, breathing hard now and sweating. The throbbing hole in my shoulder clawed at my energy. I grabbed the medical kit, which Mickey had so efficiently provided, from out of the dash box. Tore the sleeve of my shirt off and tended to the wound. First I cleaned it gingerly with a sanitised wipe before taking a pair of small metal tweezers and fishing inside the hole of burnt, blooded flesh for pieces of shrapnel and bullet. The pain was immense. But bittersweet. At once like revisiting an old, unpleasant, yet strangely familiar place and being compelled to explore. I’d been here before and I knew the drill. Knew I needed to get the metal out of me fast, sanitise the wound, get stitched and bandaged up before I lost any more blood, before I’d become no use to anyone. Not to myself and least of all the Target. I worked nimbly and relentlessly. Clamped my teeth together to absorb the pain, pressure so tight on my jaw I felt the enamel itself might shatter. Proper job done and I’d felt every piece of it. I knew that most of the scraps of lead were removed as best I could. Black wiry butterfly stitches knotted in place. Only now could I risk numbing the pain. Before I dressed the shoulder, I fired up a hit of morphine and injected a weeping syringe needle direct into my deltoid. Then padded and bandaged it tight.

  The phone lay idle. Nothing yet from Ella. She’d be a while yet getting me the information I needed, so I sparked a Marlboro cigarette, inhaled deeply and smoked it slowly to the butt. Locked the doors of the motor. Eased back further in my seat, inclining it below the window line. I closed my eyes and allowed the deep flickering purple and yellow light to wash over me like coloured dye spreading over blotting paper. I welcomed the colours as they sunk into me, feeling myself falling deeper away piece by piece, letting go of the pain. Slipping away. Letting go. Despite knowing that it always ended in blood. Always so much blood. Maria.

  Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past

  I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast

  The slow repetitive click-clack, click-clack of the oversized ceiling fan as it lugubriously cycles above me. The sash window held open by an army boot, balanced on its heel and jammed tight between frame and ledge. The tread of its deep furrowed sole caked in dried flaking mud. Shouts and yelps and laughter from children playing on the road below. An old fashioned wooden cabinet. Drawers yawning open, crumpled clothing spilling out. The heavy framed mirror with its chipped corners, flecks of shaving cream splattered across it leaving an unintended language of indecipherable hieroglyphics. The old fashioned gramophone sits hiss
ing and spitting as it sticks, relentlessly scoring across the slither of vinyl held beneath its predatory needle.

  If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier

  She left here last early Spring, is livin’ there, I hear

  Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow

  She might think that I’ve forgotten her,

  don’t tell her it isn’t so

  We had a falling-out, like lovers often will

  And to think of how she left that night,

  it still brings me a chill

  And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart

  She still lives inside of me, we’ve never been apart

  Another drop of sweat scores its way down my forehead as if in slow motion, gliding over the contours of my cheek and jaw. Finally splashes onto my chest. I’m so sorry, Maria.

  Fucking wildly, uninhibited, in the hot sticky afternoon. The air thick and heavy. The room smells unmistakably of raw sex. She should have been teaching local kids that day, part of the UN Aid programme. But I’d persuaded her to play hooky. Craved her every moment, every chance I could. This beautiful, intense, passionate woman consumed me. She had helped me to heal, helped me to become human again. Even after all of the horror and damage that I’d seen. That I had caused. After all of the horror and damage that I had become.

  If you get close to her, kiss her once for me

  I always have respected her for busting out and gettin’ free

  Oh, whatever makes her happy, I won’t stand in the way

  Though the bitter taste still lingers on from the night I

  tried to make her stay

  I see a lot of people as I make the rounds

  And I hear her name here and there as I go from town

  to town

  And I’ve never gotten used to it,

  I’ve just learned to turn it off

  Either I’m too sensitive or else I’m gettin’ soft

  The fan spins. Relentless. Click-clack, click-clack. The gramophone still stuck on Dylan’s’ baleful lament. Imploring, reaching for one more touch, one more interaction with love lost.

  And I do see her. I see her tied with rope. I see the pain in her eyes, pleading, beseeching me to save her. But I do not. I do nothing. I don’t help her because I’m bound helpless myself. Each of my limbs tied and taped with clinical precision. No movement possible. And finally I am hooded. And in the dark recess of Hell that becomes me I strain to amplify every slightest sound, unable and defiantly unwilling to turn it off. I hear everything; the totality of barbaric detail. But I cannot help her. I’m fucking useless. Impotent. Maria.

  And they delight in my suffering with each grain of her agony. No perception of depth or space. Just pitch blackness. I hear slow and purposeful movements. Steadied and practiced as they take their time.

  Then the sudden violence of a rapid SHINK, SHINK slicing through the heavy air right next to my ear. I recoil from the savagery of the sound. Steel blade honed on whetstone. Guttural laughter sickens my stomach.

  Then scrabbling, clawing. Heavy blows as bone meets flesh. The sorrowful whimpers. An animal broken and in pain. My Maria.

  Silence, pregnant with meaning. Nothingness, an eternity in the pitted darkness that envelopes me. Until this is shattered with shards of screaming so primal that I may never quieten the sound again.

  And I listen to the screaming as I strain with all force against the bonds until finally, defeated, I lie exhausted. Maria’s begging has now stopped too, replaced only by a low imperceptible moan. Her suffering, the result of a series of sadistic cuts and intrusive insertions strategically executed, designed to administer the utmost pain possible to bear.

  And I cannot escape the reverberations of this endless torture even as the door closes firmly and stillness is sucked back into the room. The click-clack of the oversized fan above us. The hiss and spit of the old gramophone as it pours out its doleful lyrics. No noise from the street below now. And one sound cutting through it all. The persistent PAT, PAT, PAT that is hardly noticeable at first but that builds in deafening waterfall as comprehension washes over me. Maria bleeding out onto the wooden floor. I listen, haunted, as every splash takes her further away from me.

  Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past

  I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast

  If she’s passin’ back this way, I’m not that hard to find

  Tell her she can look me up if she’s got the time

  I am with her until the end, sharing in her pain and her suffering. I absorb it until it becomes my own. This is my fault. She is innocent. Punish me for God’s sake, please torture me instead. Maria, I’m so sorry.

  Our bloodied souls entwined, conjoined in anguish.

  And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart

  She still lives inside of me, we’ve never been apart

  Chapter 30

  SPAIN. SESEÑA. OUTSKIRTS OF FRANCISCO HERNANDO VILLAGE.

  A wall of heat hit Daniel hard in the face. The bright sunlight stung his eyes as he eased through the kitchen patio doors. He had to put distance between himself and the house quickly. It wouldn’t be long before he was discovered missing and the two thugs, who had been doing such a princely job baby-sitting him, came to take their retribution. He shivered in the sun, as he remembered the beatings. Running his hand tenderly across his throbbing ribs, Daniel prayed he wouldn’t have to take any more.

  The winding pathway that led away from the back of the house was made of smooth white pebbles, adorned on either side by a lush green lawn well-watered by a pulsating sprinkler system. Suddenly conscious of the loud crunch emanating from his footsteps Daniel stepped onto the damp springy Bermuda grass and broke into a jog. The garden was exquisite. Vibrant flowers of exotic reds, yellows and purples splattered across vast green bushes. Bendy fronds and stooping palms swayed together to some unheard rhythm all of their own making. Lemon trees dazzled with ripe yellow fruit nestled amongst a mess of dark green foliage. Humming birds and nimble bees busied themselves in the natural beauty, dancing and twirling under golden sunlight. It was a wondrous garden but Daniel was in no mood to appreciate it. He was scared. Dripping in sweat. Out of breath and racked in pain from the punishment he had absorbed in the preceding days. The aching in his ribs made it hard to suck oxygen into his lungs.

  Head down, Dan. Keep moving forward.

  The snap of a gunshot fired from the house cut through the sky, running through Ratchet like an electric shock. He ducked instinctively, although from the distance of the sound he knew the gun couldn’t have been aimed directly at him. It was a warning shot. The escape had been discovered and he was now being hunted. Pressing on, not daring to look behind, branches tore at his skin as tangles of undergrowth were hastily brushed aside in the desperate attempt to make distance from the hacienda. That distance wouldn’t hold for long though. Dogs barked, shouts and fractious voices abounded. A group had been rounded up to recapture him and he knew he would soon be surrounded from different sides.

  Adrenaline was pumping around Daniel’s ragged body as he set hard into a small copse of fruit trees, each encircled by a neat border of hay on freshly turned soil. He ducked and weaved through a tangle of dry caustic branches and pulled up clear in the shadow of an imposing dry stone wall at the back of the property. It encircled the grounds of the villa.

  Huge in scale it had obviously been there for many years, a hand-built monument to privacy and protection from outsiders. At this moment, however, with the bitter irony not lost on him, Daniel was on the inside and desperate to get out. The baying of dogs beyond the fruit trees grew louder. There was no gate in the wall and nothing immediately visible to help scale it. But the wall was constructed in the old Spanish artesian method of laying heavy stones on top of and surrounded by each other with no cement or binding agent. Held in place only by their collective mass under the relentless force of gravity; serving resolutely immoveable un
der the heavy yoke of this most irrefutable of masters.

  Daniel jammed his foot into a space between the stones and leveraged himself up using fingertips to claw at the vertical mass of rock above. Next step upwards he scraped his cheek on the rough wall and by the time he was able to haul his arms over the top, some fifteen feet from the ground, his fingertips were bloodied and his kneecaps swollen and split from scraping against the jutting chips of rock.

  ‘Freeze or I shoot!’ The shout came from below him. Daniel looked back into the garden to see a muscular brown-skinned man with a shaved head standing on the grass below, waving a semi-automatic machine gun in his hands. Two spiteful looking dogs snapped and scrabbled up at the base of the wall snapping at his dangling legs. Daniel hung there motionless. Heart pounded inside throat.

  ‘Capture him you idiot,’ came a barked order beyond, as the rest of the search party caught up. The muscled skinhead turned to look and Daniel took advantage of that brief moment with gun barrel lowered. Hauled his knee onto the top of the wall and without pause to look at what lay below, hurled himself straight over the edge and into the unknown.

  Suspended in time, stomach firmly in mouth, the beleaguered body dropped through the air like a stone. The landing was hard, first hitting with his shoulder and then jolting the side of his hip onto the hard ground below. He rolled into a crumpled heap and moaned. Spat the dirt from inside his mouth. He could hear an argument ensuing behind the wall. Pulling himself to his feet and brushing himself down, Daniel looked cautiously up and down the dirt track. It was deserted except for what looked like farm machinery parked behind several dishevelled out-buildings. A little girl in a long dirty pink T-shirt and flip-flops several sizes too big, was playing with a hoop about a hundred yards away. She was totally absorbed in what she was doing, hadn’t looked up. The drop had clattered him hard, knocked the stuffing out sideways. Daniel didn’t feel he had it in him to set off running again. But he had to get away now. His captors would scale the wall in no time and, if he was caught again at this point, he was dead meat. Thinking on his feet, he limped across the road and, checking that he was unobserved, pulled open the rotted wooden door of a rickety farm storage building. The dry boarding splintered in Daniel’s hands, flaking away from the door and he squeezed through the gap into a dark spacious void.