by Lex Lander
‘Linda!’ I called, starting forward. There was no break in her stride, and I was immediately blocked by the army officer. He was slight of build and quite a bit shorter than me. I could have slapped him aside without flexing a muscle but discretion got the better of doing the Pridhams a favour.
‘Stay where you are – please.’ His eyes flicked leftwards and I followed them. Two unusually large species of homo sapiens gazed bovinely back at me, near identical in their olive green shorts and T-shirts, and cropped hair-dos.
The penny dropped. These three were protecting Linda Pridham! But how come the military, and how had she magicked them to her aid?
The Mustang bumbled off. No glances for Warner. Linda Pridham had set her dogs on me and wasn’t sticking around to witness the savaging.
The officer took my arm. His grip was slack yet confident.
‘You will come with me.’
‘Now wait a second, pal …’ I said, disquiet giving way to outrage.
‘No talking, please.’
The two big fellows were closing in. I might outpace them in a hundred metre dash and then what? If the army wanted me, they would have me sooner or later, hard or soft. Still opting for discretion, I let the officer lead me to the door used by Linda Pridham. Shoppers were milling all around me. None of them showed interest in my plight. Again I considered making a run for it and trusting that they wouldn’t gun me down. After all people don’t get gunned down in broad daylight in a busy street.
Do they?
Behind the door lay a long corridor with stairs branching off and another door at the far end. With the officer leading and the junior ranks stepping on my heels, we went out through this second door which opened onto a parking and loading area for the hotel. It was deserted apart from a few cars. I was bundled into the back seat of an olive-green overheated Seat sedan. The officer slid in after me, nudging me along. I tested the door on my side; no joy there, the safety lock had been set.
‘Thank you for being so sensible,’ the officer said as the door on his side slammed shut.
‘I don’t know what your game is,’ I said, trying not to splutter, ‘but you’d better have a fucking good explanation for it.’
‘So,’ he returned quietly, eyes glinting like wet pebbles, ‘had you.’
The heavy platoon piled into the front seats causing the car’s suspension to sink noticeably. The engine rumbled into life and we reversed in a series of jerks. The officer rattled off a command, the cropped head in front of me bobbed, and we edged out into the street, opposite the parking lot where I had left the BMW.
‘My car …’ I started to say, then realised how fatuous it would sound. Whatever trouble I was in had to be lot bigger than an abandoned rental.
The officer’s lip twitched as if he read my mind. He had a slender moustache, the sort of embellishment that died in America with Errol Flynn. Maybe it was meant to age him. If so, it didn’t work. He still looked like a teenager playing at being grown up.
We were on the ramp back up to the A7, tagging on behind a garbage truck. The driver kept his speed down, taking no chances and making no attempt to overtake. Cars flipped past, some going at well over the 100kph limit, those bearing British and German plates being the most inveterate sinners. Whenever this happened the officer clucked and shook his head. Finally he said, ‘You foreigners. No wonder so many of you die on this road.’
‘I haven’t noticed your lot winning any prizes for skill and courtesy,’ I retaliated, adding, when he made no comment, ‘And would you mind explaining what this is all about?’
‘Yes,’ he said evenly. ‘I would mind.’
After that I shut up. Why give him the satisfaction of putting me in my place. If only I knew what my place was.
At an intersection in the middle of nowhere we left the freeway onto a single track road. No signpost. The position of the sun, reddening now, told me we were headed approximately north-west. The knowledge was not a lot of use to me.
The cell phone in my hip pocket vibrated. I didn’t pick up in case my captor decided to confiscate it. It was probably Liza, so I wouldn’t have answered it anyway.
The road snaked through cultivated fields and the occasional avocado or citrus plantation. Once, we bisected an abandoned vineyard. As we came to the foothills, the twists in the road became more frequent and more severe. The terrain changed from bleached green to dead-looking ochre. To our right the whole coastal plain was spread out as on a map, with Fuengirola a smudge under the faint evening haze away to the east. The sea was that rich ultramarine that comes with the approach of night.
We came up behind a tractor and were slowed to a crawl until we reached a village – no more than a huddle of shacks under the shadow of an escarpment – where we made another turn, to the left now, immediately descending via a spiralling road, skirting the escarpment and crossing a high plain, a step in the mountainside. The road was rough and dusty and we trailed a brown pennant that must have been visible from a satellite.
Dusk fell. I was hot, tired, and in need of a leak. If I could persuade them to stop I might yet make a break for it.
‘Look, I need … er … toiletto,’ I hazarded to the officer.
The soldier in the front passenger seat sniggered. The officer gave a sympathetic nod.
‘Servicios,’ he corrected. ‘No problem, señor – we are almost there.’
I faced frontwards. Coming at us, straddling the road, was an archway not unlike the giant Dunlop half-tyre replica that used to be a feature of the Le Mans racetrack. Except that this archway was stone and decorated with massive seashells that spelled a name I failed to decipher before we passed beneath it. About a hundred metres beyond the arch we came to a halt alongside the inevitable gatehouse, a prefabricated building the size of a large shed. A soldier came hurrying out, stiffened to attention, saluted.
‘Comandante!’
The officer returned the salute with a languid pivot of his forearm. The Seat moved on and I screwed round to look through the rear window, noting the high mesh fence topped by coils of barbed wire that ran from either side of the arch towards the horizon, to be swallowed up in the fading light. This was one big hunk of real estate we were driving through. The road was vastly superior to the dirt track we had just left: full width and a proper paved surface. Serious money had been spent here.
Journey’s end came five minutes later when a pyramid rising out of the sunset-splashed plain turned into a roof, then expanded into a great sprawl of buildings, most notably a house with a balcony at first floor level that extended the full frontage of the building and around both sides. A number of vehicles, including two jeeps, were drawn up before it in an open asphalted area, seriously floodlit, though it was not yet dark. Beyond, a military helicopter was parked inside a white landing circle, its rotor throwing a long shadow shaped like a crucifix. We stopped next to the jeeps. Acting in concert, the two heavies vacated the car and released the “Comandante” and me. I climbed stiffly out, flexed the cramp from my legs.
On this, the sunless side of the building, the windows were black, like empty eye sockets. As if to welcome me, as I stood there flexing, wrought iron lamp standards spaced along the front of the house and around the parking area came on.
What struck me most about the place was the stillness. No movement, no sound other than the hum of what was probably a generator in some outbuilding. The sky behind was lurid, like a frozen explosion, the sun lost behind purple clouds that hugged the horizon. The setting was almost eerie.
A hand pressed between my shoulder blades, propelling me forward. Again I contemplated escape. If only there was somewhere to escape to. The terrain offered no cover for any creature bigger than a field mouse.
The Comandante walked me to the house, more in the manner of a genial host than a jailer. The junior ranks again brought up a discreet rear, well-schooled in how to behave in the presence of a prisoner and equally, I didn’t doubt, in half-a-dozen ways of killing a man with th
eir bare hands. My SIS training had left me well-supplied with unarmed combat skills, I just wasn’t quite ready to take on odds of three-to-one against. Not to mention the weaponry they were wearing.
We followed a footpath around the side of the house, coming upon another asphalted area, big enough to serve as a parade ground. A single-storey building with heavy-gauge wire mesh over the windows awaited us. Lights blazed from all corners. My stride slackened. Once inside there I was finished. Military prisons are hard to break out of.
‘Follow me,’ the Comandante said briskly. The terrible twins had closed in, ready to foil any escape intentions on my part.
If it hadn’t been for the guns I might have chanced it. But where would I run to, even if they didn’t put a bullet in me? I settled for the line of least resistance, in other words no resistance at all, and mounted the two concrete steps. Inside, a vestibule, not quite square, furnished only with a steel desk, a plastic chair, and a sweaty NCO who erupted to attention when the Comandante entered ahead of me.
I was checked in and marched to a bare, windowless room in a basement. The two goons, plus two more, awaited me. The Comandante joined us, standing to one side, and ordered to me strip. I refused. I was grabbed from behind. I struck out at the soldier standing in front of me, rammed an elbow into yielding flesh behind me. Impact negligible. They didn’t hit back, just forced me to the floor by weight of numbers. I was forcibly stripped, the ultimate humiliation. Another officer, older than the Comandante, entered and examined every cavity of my body for concealed machine guns and mortars, his only utterances grunts and nods. Examination complete, he withdrew. My clothes, the worse for their enforced removal, were emptied of belongings, including Canadian passport, cell phone, credit cards, and a few hundred euros, then returned to me. My belt, watch and wallet were withheld. Nobody spoke. Except me.
‘I’ll get you for this,’ I said to the Comandante as I pulled my torn T-shirt over my head, my voice shaky and off-key.
‘I doubt it,’ was his bland response. He was thumbing through my passport, his brows contracted in a frown. Maybe he was having trouble with the long words.
My bladder was close to bursting by now. Swallowing my humiliation, I told the Comandante. He made some remark from the corner of his mouth to his underlings, who chuckled and marched me to a modern flush toilet and watched over me while I discharged the afternoon’s beer intake. I had barely zipped up my shorts when I was towed away to another room, grey-painted and as cosy as a derelict igloo. From the nature and positioning of the furnishings – a small table with a chair on either side – I recognised it as an interrogation cell. It wasn’t the first I had been in over the years.
I sat meekly as ordered, on the interviewee’s side of the table, my back to the door. A lot of stuffing had been knocked out of me by that forced strip-search. André Warner, hit man, former SIS operative, was temporarily hors de combat.
‘I want a drink,’ I said.
‘Later.’
The Comandante departed leaving the two goons to watch over me. It was quieter than a tomb and almost as cold. Even this far south the nights can be chilly in the January. I tried not to shiver, failed. Behind me, my two guards sniggered. To while away the minutes I studied my surroundings. A piece of grey plaster had broken away from the ceiling, next to the light globe, leaving a white patch the shape of a short fat fish. Otherwise the grey was uniform. No bloodstains, which I suppose was something. Unless they were painted over after every session.
Distant footsteps intruded on the stillness. Two sets, one very brisk and decisive, soles and heels snapping on bare concrete. Coming closer.
The door flung open. I rotated in my seat. A man stood in the doorway. He wore a uniform, the upper parts of which were heavily braided and blazing with badges of rank and a double row of medal ribbons. Lower down, jodhpurs and brown riding boots, the latter polished to a dazzling gloss.
‘Good evening, Mr Warner,’ he said, in a voice that managed to combine civility with menace. ‘I am General Julio Irazola …’
Chapter Three
In my borrowed cashmere suit I descended the sweep of the staircase to the entrance hall, passing under a chandelier which for sheer tinsel extravagance rivalled those in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. A servant of some kind, wearing white gloves, inclined a wrinkled, lizard-like head towards a set of double doors with painted panels that depicted some biblical scene. I fumbled briefly for my shirt cuffs before I remembered the shirt, also borrowed, was short-sleeved.
‘El Señor Warner,’ the manservant intoned through the double doors. I strode in as if I were there by birthright, and never mind that the suit, which belonged to the General’s son, was too tight all around and made me look like a once-fit man gone to seed.
‘Ah, good evening, Mr Warner,’ General Irazola trumpeted, taking my arm almost possessively and tugging me into the drawing room. The grey-brown uniform was gone, replaced by a pale grey lounge suit of immaculate cut. ‘Come and meet my children.’
Far removed from his attitude of two hours earlier, when we had glowered at each other across the steel table, like stags with antlers locked. Then, when he had said ‘Good evening, Mr Warner,’ it had had the ring of a threat. ‘You are Mr Warner, are you not? It says so in your passport.’ His English was near-flawless.
‘Then that’s who I am,’ I had growled, refusing to be intimidated.
‘It will, in any case, do for the time being.’ He had settled his medium-sized frame in the chair opposite me and laid, very precisely on the table between us, my passport and the photograph of Linda Pridham, the latter now looking a little tired from too long in my wallet. He studied me through a swirl of acrid smoke from his large cigar, from which he had not removed the gold band.
‘I believe in coming straight to the point, Mr Warner.’ He sucked gently at the cigar, simultaneously tapping the photograph. ‘Please explain to me why you were pursuing Miss Pridham?’
At least we were now getting to the substance of the matter, progress of sorts.
‘Only if you first explain to me what the hell it has to do with you.’
He frowned. His was a handsome face: on the long side with a firm jaw, lightly tanned. His hair was that rather attractive tawny colour you occasionally find among Latins. Age, somewhere between forty-five and fifty.
‘Do not make your situation more difficult than it already is. Let there be no misunderstanding, Mr Warner. I shall have answers to my questions or you will not leave here alive.’
This had to be some kind of sick joke.
‘I thought the days of Franco were long gone,’ I protested. ‘Isn’t Spain a democracy, with human rights and all that?’
General Irazola exchanged a glance with the Comandante that I can only describe as pitying.
‘There are democracies and there are democracies. Some live, some die, some are transient, some are merely surface dressing. Here in this room, on this estate, there is no democracy. There is only me. And I have the power of life and death.’
‘Like being God, is it?’
Irazola sighed. He stood up and did a couple of circuits of the little grey room, his head shrouded in a swirl of cigar smoke like the top of a skyscraper obscured by low cloud. Whenever he disappeared from my line of vision I tensed, expecting a chop to the back of the neck, or hands at my throat. Eventually though, he resumed his seat. Laid the cigar very precisely on the edge of the table. Stared at me broodingly.
‘I am making allowances for your English sense of bravado.’
‘Half-English’ I wasn’t trying to be funny. It was a reflex, product of years correcting impressions.
‘It’s the same. I spent six years in England and two in America when I was a young man.’ This would account for his command of the language. ‘It would not be truthful of me to say I have much … ah … affection for the Anglo-Saxon race. We have warred too bitterly in the past, and many English and Americans fought for the Government forces du
ring our Civil War. At heart we are neither friends nor allies. We will cross swords again someday, you will see. Spain has a casus belli in Gibraltar…’ He frowned again, the dark eyebrows almost meeting across the bridge of his nose.
I didn’t automatically spring to Britain’s defence. Keeping things friendly between me and the man who had the power of life and death over me was first priority. Supporting the wrong side in the Gibraltar imbroglio was guaranteed to make an enemy of him.
‘If I had my way, if I were making the policies, we would drive your pathetic British forces out tomorrow!’ The cigar found its way back into his mouth. ‘Regrettably Spain is run by old women. Even King Felipe speaks less of our claim to Gibraltar than his father used to, and curries favour with your Royal Family.’ The thin-lips twisted with distaste. He jabbed with the cigar in the direction of the Comandante. ‘Ask Navarro here. Ask the younger generation what they think.’ Comandante Navarro coughed in a slightly embarrassed way, and Irazola grimaced self-depreciatingly. ‘You have brought out the political beast in me, Mr Warner. Let us leave the subject of Gibraltar. You and I alone will not remove that thorn from the side of Spain. You will please now answer my question or I will extract the information forcibly from you. Do you understand?’
All too well. I had been down a similar route years before, in Afghanistan. It would be senseless to antagonise him further, so I nodded. As far as I was aware there was no reason – and certainly no security reason – why I should not tell General Irazola the truth. Only the Warner creed of old that resented giving something for nothing drove me to barter.
‘If I tell you,’ I said, trying to sound as if it was still remotely possible that I wouldn’t, ‘will you tell me what your interest is in the girl?’
‘Afterwards? I might. If I judge you harmless.’
I hugged myself to contain what little body heat was left. Irazola didn’t seem to notice my discomfort. But then he wouldn’t; he was dressed for the conditions.