A Silent Death

by Peter May

  Mackenzie responded through clenched teeth. ‘I’ve been shot.’

  The medic helped him through to a treatment room at the back and sat him up on the examination table. He was obliged to inform the police of any gunshot wounds, but that could wait until he’d made an assessment of the damage.

  Mackenzie winced as the medic peeled away the shirt from his chest, and the ruined remains of his iPhone fell to the floor. It had left an almost perfect reddish-purple bruised impression of itself on his chest.

  ‘Jesus,’ the medic whispered. ‘Man, have you any idea how lucky you are to be alive?’

  ‘I don’t feel so lucky right now.’ Mackenzie’s voice was hoarse.

  The medic grabbed a pair of tweezers from his kit of sterilized tools and started picking tiny pieces of glass and circuit board and phone body from the deepest area of abrasion right behind where the bullet had struck the phone. ‘Not seen anything like this since I was with medical staff in Herat.’ He glanced up at Mackenzie and clarified. ‘Afghanistan. Part of Operation Resolute Support. Saw quite a few injuries like this. Behind body armour injury. Backface deformation they call it.’ He chuckled. ‘Never saw a bullet stopped by an iPhone before, though.’

  Mackenzie didn’t see what was amusing about it. ‘Has it busted any ribs?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ the medic said. And he pressed gently around the area of bruising, causing Mackenzie to gasp. ‘A young guy like you. The cartilaginous portions of your ribs there are still soft. Another fifteen or twenty years and it’ll all have turned to bone, and that would almost certainly have shattered.’ He smiled. ‘The good news is you’ll live. The bad news is, once I’ve dressed up the wound I‘m going to have to report you to the police.’

  Mackenzie gasped his frustration. ‘I am the bloody police.’

  *

  It was a full forty-five minutes before Mackenzie was back on the road, bandaged and strapped up and feeling like death. The medic had been reluctant to let him go, but couldn’t stop him, and Mackenzie had left him phoning to report the incident to the authorities.

  He had tried calling the Jefe’s number several times from Helicopteros. Without success. He debated going straight to the police station. But that would entail lengthy and complex explanations to junior officers on night shift. God only knew how long it would take to get a more senior-ranking officer involved. He needed to talk to the chief, and decided to go directly to his house.

  The moon was well up in the sky now, washing its bloodless light across the hillside. The dust that rose around him as he powered the Seat up the dry forest track drifted in ghostly illumination like mist. At the top of the hill he turned his car down the steep incline to the Jefe’s finca only to find the house itself swaddled in darkness. There was no sign of the Audi.

  Mackenzie banged the heels of his hands against the steering wheel, then let his head fall forward to rest on it. He closed his eyes and let despair wash over him. Where in God’s name was the Jefe?

  He sat back, then, in the driver’s seat and forced himself to breathe at a measured rate. He needed to think clearly. It seemed to him he had two choices. Go straight to the police station and raise the alarm. Or get Cristina out of her bed. At least he had some kind of traction with her.

  But he had no idea where Cleland was going, and he had Ana with him. What could any of them do? They would have no idea which way to turn. He knew he was going to have to report the shooting and the death of Paco, but all that was only going to throw up flak and serve as a distraction.

  With reluctance he decided that Cristina was his best option. She had a vested interest in cutting through the red tape. He glanced down at the shirt that hung off his shoulders in bloody tatters and realized he would need to stop at the Totana on the way to her apartment for a quick change of clothing.

  He swung the Seat through a three-point turn and accelerated back up the hill. The moon seemed to sit on the rise directly above him, shining straight into his eyes. He snapped down the sun visor and tutted his annoyance at the irony.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Cristina opened her eyes, startled. Something had wakened her, and in that foggy transition from sleep to consciousness she could not identify what it was.

  She sat up and realized there was a light in the room. Going to bed the previous night had been one of the most difficult things she had ever forced herself to do. Climbing into the space she had shared in intimacy with Antonio these last ten years. Lying between sheets that still smelled of him, making it harder to accept that he was gone. The shape of his head pressed into the pillow where last he had laid it.

  For a time she had debated whether or not to leave the light on. Something about the dark frightened her. Superstitions from childhood. Tales of ghosts. But she had told herself she was being foolish and turned it off. Only to lie sleepless in the dark for what had seemed like all night long, wondering how she would ever sleep again and willing the dawn to come.

  But somehow, at some time, she had drifted off, only to be startled awake now, blinking in the unexpected light. It was only when the light vanished that she realized what it was. The illuminated screen of her phone. That’s what had wakened her. The alert of an incoming message.

  She reached across the bed to lift the phone from its charger and saw that it was a text. It was 5.43 am. She sat up, sweeping the hair from her face and tapped the message preview to open up the window. And suddenly she was wide awake, heart hammering in the silence of the bedroom.

  GIBRALTAR SKYWALK FIRST LIGHT. TELL NO ONE – WE WILL KNOW. MACKENZIE DEAD.

  In the dark, the light of her screen burned itself on to her retinas, along with the words of its message. She was frozen in disbelief. Mackenzie dead? How? When? Before the full weight of this cryptic message bore down on her. Cleland had Ana. And now he wanted her.

  He was telling her not to expect any help from Mackenzie, but in any case she knew that there was no one who could rescue her from this dilemma. How could she not go? How could she simply ignore this message and leave Ana to her fate? How could she live with herself if she did?

  But if she went there could only be one outcome. Cleland would kill her, without any guarantee that he would spare Ana. It was perfectly possible that her aunt was already dead. And if Cristina were to die, then Lucas would have lost both his parents. How could she deprive him of his mother after the murder of his father? Who would care for him then? Nuri and Paco?

  She had never felt so alone in her life. Tell no one – we will know, they said. Which could only mean they had someone on the inside. Which meant that she couldn’t go to the Jefe or to any of her other colleagues in the police. There was no one to advise her, no one to help. And an impossible decision to make: die and abandon her child, or let Cleland murder her aunt, and live for ever with the guilt.

  She dropped her face into outspread palms and felt tears of despair fill her eyes. Her thoughts tumbled one over the other in a stream of confused consciousness. How was it possible that Mackenzie was dead? Maybe they were lying. Because he was the only one left in the world, it seemed, that she could trust.

  She wiped the tears quickly from her eyes and fumbled with her phone to find Mackenzie’s mobile number and tapped it to autodial. It rang four times before redirecting her to leave a message. Her voice was hoarse as she whispered into the phone, ‘Señor, they want to exchange me for Ana. The Gibraltar Skywalk at first light. If you get this, know that I have no choice but to do what they want.’

  When she hung up she realized that in crystallizing her thoughts in the words of her message she had made her decision. With a heart that was breaking, she slipped from the bed she had shared all these years with the father of her son, and went to rouse the boy from his sleep.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  It was a little after 6 am when Mackenzie pulled up outside the apartment at the top of Calle Utopía. At the hotel he had changed his jeans, and dug a used shirt out of the laundry. It had taken him some min
utes to clean the blood from his face and hands. There was little that clung more stubbornly to the skin than dried blood. It got into every crease, insinuating its way into every pore. His right hand was already bruised and swollen from having driven it with force twice into Paco’s face. The painkillers given him by the medic at Helicopteros had kicked in and his chest hurt less. But every muscle in his body was seizing up.

  He climbed stiffly out of the car. It was still dark.

  He pressed the buzzer on the door to the stairwell and waited. No response. He pressed again and held his finger on it for a full ten seconds. Still nothing. A pervasive sense of foreboding took hold.

  He stepped back on the pavement and looked up. There were no lights in the windows of Cristina’s apartment. But there was a light shining in one of the windows of the adjoining apartment. He went back to the door and pressed another buzzer. An irate voice barked through the speaker at him almost immediately.

  ‘Have you any idea what time it is?’ A woman’s voice.

  ‘My apologies, señora, this is an emergency. I’m trying to contact Officer Sánchez.’

  ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I saw her leave with the boy about ten minutes ago. That’s how.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you know where she’s gone?’

  ‘How would I know that?’

  Mackenzie reached for his phone to try and call her, before realizing that the shirt pocket was empty. His phone in pieces in the car. He pressed the buzzer again.

  ‘What!’

  ‘Would you call her mobile number for me?’

  ‘For Heaven’s sake, señor.’

  ‘Please, señora. Do you have it?’

  ‘Yes, I have it.’ Another sigh, then a long pause that seemed to stretch out forever. Then: ‘No reply. It went to the answering service.’

  ‘Shit!’ Mackenzie’s powers of processing went into overdrive. She had the boy with her. If she was going to keep some ill-advised rendezvous with Cleland, as he suspected, she wouldn’t take Lucas with her. He pressed the buzzer again.

  ‘If you don’t go away I’m going to call the police!’

  Mackenzie raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘I’m going. I promise. I just need Nuri’s address. Cristina’s sister.’

  The neighbour growled back. ‘I know who her sister is.’

  *

  Nuri and Paco’s apartment was on the east side of town, on the hill below the main street. It was on the fourth floor of an apartment block above a tapas bar, tables and chairs stacked on wooden decking in front of it. It took Mackenzie less than five minutes to get there. He pulled into a parking slot beside the deck and stepped out into cooling air. Finally the oppressive temperatures of the night were in retreat. But with the dawn, and the rising of the sun, the heat would build all over again, and another breathless day lay in prospect.

  Across the street, beyond a white wall, a patchwork of fields and vineyards fell away into the night before rising towards the foothills of the distant Sierra Bermeja. The lights of an occasional truck tracked a path through the dark on the motorway that crossed the plain below, its viaducts spanning dried river beds and volcanic valleys.

  A sign was pinned to the wall above the door of the stairwell. Se Vende, and a telephone number. Mackenzie pressed the buzzer for the top flat. A frightened woman’s voice answered almost straight away. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘My name’s Mackenzie. I’ve been working with Cristina.’

  A long metallic buzz signalled the unlocking of the door. Mackenzie pushed it open and forced himself to run up the four flights of stairs two at a time. He was breathless and perspiring by the time Nuri greeted him on the top landing. She was painfully pale, and Mackenzie saw that she had lost much of her hair. She held a pink nightgown tightly around a wasted body that seemed brittle enough to break if touched.

  ‘Is Cristina here?’

  ‘No.’

  His heart sank. ‘Do you know . . . ?’

  ‘You missed her by about ten minutes. She came to leave Lucas with me. But wouldn’t say where she was going.’ Her face crumpled. ‘Oh señor. My husband has been out all night without leaving any word. Cristina didn’t know where he was.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose . . .’

  Mackenzie’s mind was filled with the image of Paco impaled on the railings below the gardens at the Condesa Golf Hotel. How could he tell her that? And yet it bothered him to lie. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could say. And he was. Not for Paco. But for Nuri. ‘Was Cristina in uniform?’

  Nuri shook her head.

  ‘So she wasn’t armed?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She was very upset.’

  He exhaled his hopelessness. If she had gone to face Cleland without a gun she would stand no chance. But he knew, too, that she would have had to go to the police station to get it. He turned away to go back down to the car.

  ‘You’ll let me know, señor? If you hear anything about Paco?’

  He hesitated on the top step, and wanted to weep for this fragile creature, widowed without knowing it, and fighting a losing battle against the malignancy inside her. ‘Yes,’ he said, knowing that he wouldn’t.

  *

  The duty officer looked embarrassed when he raised his head from the desk to see Mackenzie pushing through the door from the street. He stood up. ‘Señor Mackenzie . . .’

  Mackenzie looked at his watch. It was 6.15 am. ‘When will the Jefe be in?’

  ‘He won’t, Señor. He’s at a conference in Malaga today.’ He sucked in his lower lip, steeling himself to make the confession. ‘I’m sorry. When you called earlier I forgot that the Jefe would not be at home. He left word that he was spending the night in Malaga to save himself an early rise.’

  Mackenzie closed his eyes. The time he had wasted! ‘Fucking idiot,’ he said in English.

  The officer frowned. ‘I’m sorry . . . ?’

  ‘Do you have any idea where Cristina is?’

  He shook his head. ‘No señor. I haven’t seen her since the funeral.’

  ‘She hasn’t been here, then?’

  ‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘That information you asked my colleague to request for you yesterday. From the telephone company.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It came in late last night from Movistar.’

  ‘Movistar?’

  ‘The telephone company.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I put it on the Jefe’s desk, señor, along with a lot of other stuff. He was here quite late last night, but I’m not sure if he saw it.’

  ‘Let’s take a look, then.’ Mackenzie pushed open the door into the lobby beyond reception. The duty officer emerged quickly from a door behind the counter. ‘You can’t just go barging into the Jefe’s office, señor.’

  Mackenzie said, ‘I can, you know. Watch me.’ And he opened the door to the Jefe’s office and walked in. The agitated duty officer followed him. The heads of two officers on night shift raised themselves from books in the office opposite to glance curiously across the hall.

  Mackenzie rounded the desk, and found the faxed information from Movistar on top of the pile. He had requested the source number for the two calls made to Cristina’s apartment on the afternoon of Antonio’s murder. The first corresponded, time-wise, to the call which must have sent him to the rendezvous at the Eroski Centre. The second to the call leaving the fake message from Cristina. Both came from a mobile number listed to Nurita Sánchez Pradell. Mackenzie closed his eyes and shook his head in disbelief. How inept had Paco been in his attempted deception? He had used his own wife’s phone to make the call which had sent Antonio to his death, and then again to leave the message he had somehow cobbled together, probably from messages Cristina had left for her sister.

  The duty officer peered at him, concerned for the first time. ‘What is it, señor?’

  Mackenzie opened his eyes. ‘Cristina is in serious danger. I think she’s gone to offer herself t
o Jack Cleland in place of her aunt.’ He almost barked his frustration at the Spanish policeman. ‘But I have no idea where.’ He reached for his phone automatically, before remembering again that it wasn’t there. ‘I need a functioning phone. Do you have a phone?

  ‘Well, yes . . .’ The duty officer’s affirmative was reluctant.

  ‘What kind of phone is it?’

  ‘It’s an iPhone X.’

  ‘Same as mine. I need to borrow it.’

  ‘But it’s not a police phone, señor, it’s mine.’

  ‘I’ll take good care of it,’ Mackenzie said, and had a thought. ‘Wait a minute, if my sim card is still in one piece, I could swap it for yours, then I’d also have access to all my contacts. Wait here.’

  He hobbled out to the car and returned a few moments later with the shattered remains of his phone. The duty officer had returned to his place behind the counter, and Mackenzie put his phone down in front of him.

  ‘Paper clip!’

  But the duty officer couldn’t take his eyes of the wreckage of Mackenzie’s phone. ‘Is that what you call taking good care of your phone, señor?’

  ‘Actually,’ Mackenzie said grimly, ‘it was the phone that took good care of me.’ He reached over to snatch a paperclip from the worktop behind the counter, straightened one leg of it, and used it to open the sim drawer in his phone. Miraculously, the card appeared to have escaped any damage. He snapped his fingers at the duty officer. ‘Come on, give me your phone.’

  Very reluctantly and with a deep sigh, the duty officer handed it over. Mackenzie extracted the sim card and replaced it with his own, then rebooted the phone. Almost immediately an alert sounded to signal a phone message. Mackenzie put it on speaker and tapped play. Cristina’s voice was clear and unambiguous, and Mackenzie could hear the fear in it.

  Señor, they want to exchange me for Ana. The Gibraltar Skywalk at first light. If you get this, know that I have no choice but to do what they want.