by Lex Lander
The mist absorbed the buildings and the pursuit. Ahead lay the open road, as straight as Route 66 and nothing to bar our passage; at least, until we got to the guard house with its barrier. The barrier didn’t worry me. The armed guards did.
‘He must have flipped,’ Linda said, her voice small with fright. ‘You really got to him, didn’t you, with all that crud about Gibraltar and recordings?’
‘My mistake. The material was good, the tactics faulty. If I was going to threaten him I should have done it on neutral territory, not in his own back yard.’
‘Too late now to change your mind.’
I felt her watching me but I kept my eyes on the road, as I belatedly locked my seat belt. Fortunately the road was straight but visibility was bad and worsening, the rain driving hard across the mountainside and lashing the side of the car as from a hosepipe.
‘What are you, Warner? Not some kinda …’ She sniggered self-consciously. ‘You know, like a … like a spy, or something.’
Good guess, Linda.
‘I’m doing a job for the UK Government,’ I said tersely.
‘Really? Cool. How did you get to hear about Julio plotting against Gibraltar?’
I switched the wipers onto fast-speed and left her question unanswered. A square of yellow opened up in the greyness ahead: light from the window of the guard house. My foot eased by instinct off the pedal. Vague forms took shape into uniformed guards.
‘You aren’t gonna stop?’ Linda said sharply, drawing the wrong conclusion from our slowing down.
‘Not a chance!’ I rammed the pedal down. The four hundred horses under the hood responded with alacrity, and the white pole of the barrier leapt at us. When we hit we must have been doing over eighty. The pole was flimsy. It shattered in several places, one whirling section glancing off the nearside windshield pillar, fortunately missing the glass. The two guards scattered in panic to the left and right, without firing a shot.
Linda squealed, excitement not fear. ‘Attaboy, Warner!’
I wasn’t kidding myself we were done with Irazola yet. If my reading of him was even half-right we wouldn’t just be allowed to head home as if we’d been on a picnic in the boonies.
We were now on the dirt road, the poor surface testing the Aston’s ride, the occasional rut making itself felt through the suspension. I slowed to a relatively sedate eighty kph. The rain was easing, the sky paler, but there was more muck in wait ahead, rolling down the side the mountain, obscuring the summit.
In the midst of this unwelcome weather window they caught up with us. In a helicopter.
It reared up in the offside door mirror, an ugly buzzing bug, and closed in fast, skimming the ground at a dangerously low level. The pilot was either brilliant or nerveless. It flipped away in a vertical climb and I lost it.
‘Was that a helicopter?’ Linda demanded, peering around me.
‘None other.’
‘Jeepers! They sure mean business.’
A draught of damp air brushed my cheek as she lowered her window a little. The stammer of the chopper became all-pervasive, battering the eardrums. A moment later she whooped, ‘They’re right above us! If they come any lower they’ll be sitting on our roof!’
A couple more minutes and we would be back in the murk. In front of us a great parapet extended across the skyline, and there lay invisibility. No helicopter could operate in that.
‘Señor Warner!’ The ululation boomed in the sky, distracting me so that I strayed off the road on to the raised shoulder.
‘Oh!’ Linda, even secured by her seat belt, was tossed sideways, her shoulder jarring against mine.
‘You all right?’ I was too busy wrestling the wheel to see to her.
‘Sure.’ Her voice was shaky. ‘You keep your eyes on the road, and don’t worry about me.’
She had guts all right. She was going to need them.
‘Señor Warner!’ The amplified summons momentarily drowned the noise of the chopper’s engine. ‘If you do not stop at once we are ordered to shoot.’
The ultimatum didn’t shock me. I had been more than half-prepared for it. I had grasped the nature of the beast I was up against even before I stuck my head between his jaws. Only now it wasn’t just my head but Linda’s too.
I fed fuel to the vee-eight cylinders. The car bounded forward like a pouncing cat. At the very same instant a cracking-whip sound reached my ears, indistinct but unmistakable.
‘Hey, they really mean it!’ Linda, worldly in many ways, naive in others, was more incredulous than alarmed. ‘That was a shot!’
I did the best I could within the limitations of resource and circumstance. The road surface was poor, made worse by the rain, and the Aston wasn’t cut out for cross country work. I began to weave from side to side, varying the frequency and angle of deviation, also alternating between acceleration and deceleration. More than once I came close to running off the road. The man behind the gun, if he had any skill at all as a marksman, would soon adapt to my dodging tactics.
The note of the helicopter’s engine suddenly surged and it dropped from the sky to fly alongside, on a parallel track just a few metres away. It was painted charcoal grey, relieved by the red-yellow-red military insignia at the rear of the fuselage.
‘This is your final warning, Warner,’ the megaphone blared. Linda reached past me and raised a defiant vertical finger at our pursuers. That would scare them off all right.
The bank of rain was rolling down on us. In less than a minute by my reckoning we would be in amongst it. A minute can be a long time when you’re under fire.
The helicopter was pacing us, like an obedient dog trotting to heel. I contrived greater variations of speed, but the pilot wouldn’t play. His priority now would be to maintain a steady gun platform for the marksman, easy to do in a chopper. Even as the thought struck me, a firefly of orange sparkled from the cabin and simultaneously the glass of my side window burst into fragments, spraying my head and shoulders with a thousand glass baubles. Linda yelled – she wasn’t the screaming type – as the bullet exploded her window too, but outwards, away from her.
Wind and rain tore at us from both sides through the partially glassless windows, creating turmoil inside the car, and making Linda’s hair do a crazy dance around her head. The helicopter had backed off a little. If that had been a warning, maybe it was the final one.
The choice was between surrendering or hitting back. I reached across Linda into the glove compartment. I operated the lever that lowered the built-in flap that wasn’t put there by Aston Martin. The SIG automatic dropped into the palm of my hand.
‘That’s a gun!’ Linda squeaked.
‘Your powers of observation do you credit, honey.’
Releasing the wheel just long enough to rack the slide, I shoved the gun between my thighs, where it would readily come to hand.
‘What are you doing with a gun?’ Linda said, tugging at my sleeve.
‘What I’m going to be doing, is giving that chopper a taste of its own medicine.’
‘What! You can’t do that!’
‘Why not? You’d prefer they shot you, would you? Lower your seat as far as it goes and lie back. I want you out of my line of fire.’
She caught on fast. Found the seat recline switch and operated it so that she was almost horizontal. Not a second too soon. The helicopter was closing in again. I gave the pedal a blip, felt the rear wheels drift on the wet, muddy surface. Battled with steering that seemed no longer to be connected to the wheels. The helicopter swelled in size until it filled then overlapped the whole of the side window.
I yelled at Linda to cover her ears; mine would have to live with the noise. I lifted the SIG and pointed it at the chopper over the mound of her belly. The range was so short and the target so large it would have been harder to miss it than to hit it. Without taking my eyes off the road, I squeezed off a half dozen unaimed rounds from the fourteen-round magazine, fast as I could. The crash of the gun in the car’s small interi
or, was eardrum busting. It wasn’t possible to watch my shots strike home while keeping the car from running off the road. The chopper suddenly sheered away, so I guessed I had made them think twice if nothing else.
We pounded on, swerving and sliding on the wet surface, my ears not just ringing but clanging. Then the rain came down like a shutter and blotted out the world and our pursuers with it.
* * * * *
Toby, being conditioned to nothing less than the best, was lodged at The Rock, Gib’s lushest and plushest hotel while I, preferring to keep a little distance between us, had taken a room at the Caleta, where I had spent a comfortable two nights during my earlier snoop around.
‘Four stars are enough for me,’ I had assured him. ‘Think of how the Chancellor will approve of keeping my expenses down. Better for security too, that we aren’t seen to be in cahoots’
Better still if he had stayed away from Gib altogether, though I didn’t say so. I suspected Toby had strict instructions about monitoring my activities. So no surprise when I rolled up at the Caleta around nine to find him at the front desk, haranguing a pretty girl receptionist.
The porter dumped my bags by the desk. Toby’s attention was caught by the act and relief lit up the lantern-jawed face for long enough to take in Linda’s proximity to me and her state of impending motherhood. Naturally, he would draw the wrong conclusion.
‘You were due here hours ago,’ was his first shot across my bow, followed by: ‘And who the devil is this?’
‘Linda Pridham,’ I said, very quickly to forestall a rude retort from the girl herself. ‘A friend. Linda, meet Toby Wyatt. You’re not seeing him at his well-bred best right now. But when he calms down – which he will when he’s heard what I’ve got to tell him – you’ll find he’s quite civil really.’
‘That’s why I’m a civil servant,’ Toby said unsmiling, not even acknowledging Linda. ‘I’ll be in the main bar. Join me in fifteen minutes. Now if you’ll excuse me.’ Remembering his manners, he tipped his head at Linda, made some brief comment to the front desk clerk, and went off to slake his ire.
‘He seems a bit peeved,’ Linda observed.
I snorted. ‘He’s just jealous.’
* * * * *
Alcohol, as expected, ironed the wrinkles out of Toby’s displeasure. Diplomatically cajoling Linda to stay in our room, I tracked him down at the bar, where he was gossiping with an elderly British couple. Through the long window the sea was like black silk, shimmering under the light of an unseen moon, the setting overlaid by the orange-hued reflected interior of the bar.
‘Brandy,’ I told the barman, who was coffee-skinned, moustachioed, and probably Moroccan, like most of the hotel and restaurant workers in Gib.
‘Brandy, yessir.’ It came up fast and golden, and instantly soothing. I shoved my index finger in my right ear and wiggled it around. The clanging had diminished, was now a continuous hiss, like steam escaping.
‘Well?’ Toby demanded, as we settled in a corner seat under concealed orange lighting that made him look anaemic. ‘Explain yourself.’
‘I’m overdue and I’m sorry. Fact is, I had a spot of bother with our General Irazola. I nearly didn’t get here at all.’
As expected and intended the mention of Irazola calmed his spleen.
‘Tell all,’ he commanded and gulped most of his brandy to fortify him against the worst. He always, he had once confided, feared the worst when professionals like him had to work with amateurs like me.
This was among the rare occasions when I settled for the straight truth. Toby, avidly attentive, didn’t interrupt once. He even forgot to finish his brandy.
‘Even when the weather closed in and they lost us I expected them to pick us up later, once it cleared. But it didn’t abate until after we reached the highway, so they were screwed.’
‘No difficulty at the frontier?’ Toby asked, swigging the last dregs from his balloon glass. ‘I would have expected them to alert the border police. Gib is a natural bolt-hole.’
‘None at all. Say, now that you mention it, it was kind of lax of Irazola not to instruct the police to hold us.’
The only trouble I encountered during our return to Gib was a harangue from Linda, about having a gun secreted in the car.
‘You expecting to kill someone?’ she had said, and I wondered if she had somehow learned of my past profession.
‘Ask no questions,’ I hedged, avoiding her accusing gaze. ‘Just stick it back in that compartment.’
‘Why don’t you just chuck it away?’
‘You never know when we might meet up with your friendly neighbourhood general again.’
She saw the funny side of that and subsided into semi-manic laughter. When, finally, she calmed down, she extracted the SIG from between my thighs, adding a caress or two in the process, and shoved it back in its home. The subject was dropped. Perhaps, on reflection, she realised it might have been the gun that saved us.
‘Weren’t the border police even curious as to how your windows got broken?’ Toby enquired.
‘I anticipated that. I knocked out all the residual glass so it appeared as if they were lowered, that’s all. The glass of one of the headlights was cracked from hitting the barrier, but the light was still functional and neither side even remarked on it.’
Our empty glasses were collected, another round requested. A pair of twittering old dears came and occupied the other half of my piece of couch.
‘Now tell me, André, what’s the idea of bringing a female companion?’
‘Are there rules against it?’ Before he could answer, I went on, ‘If it weren’t for her you wouldn’t have a useful piece of intelligence on Irazola.’
‘Is it so useful? It’s just speculative hearsay. There isn’t a deal I can do with it.’
I released a theatrical sigh, the kind that implies extreme denseness on the part of your audience.
‘You don’t consider his reaction extreme? You don’t believe the Spanish could be cooking something up for Gib?’
‘You’ve no solid evidence of that. I can hardly report the man’s over-reaction to your vague threat as a hard fact. Dash it, André, it’s barely even supposition.’
‘Charge it to Room 414,’ I said to the waiter as he delivered our brandies.
‘Civil of you,’ Toby murmured.
‘It’s all coming from the Treasury,’ I said, grinning, as I signed the tab and tipped the waiter a 5-euro note.
Toby humphed. ‘I’d quite forgotten you’re on the books now. Be sure to keep all the receipts, and don’t include your friend’s shopping expeditions in yours.’ He reached inside his blazer, drew out a well-worn but exquisitely-tooled leather cigar case. ‘Care for one?’
‘This is a no smoking zone,’ I said, indicating a discreet sign on the wall behind him.
He turned his head and glowered at the offending notice. The cigar case returned to its place of repose.
‘I still forget at times. It’s gone too far, this no smoking nonsense. What next – a licence to breathe air?’
‘So you’re not going to take any action on my report,’ I said, steering him back to business.
His shrug was elegant, as were most of his mannerisms.
‘Oh, I’ll put in a report of my own, all right. We never, as you well know, discount intelligence from whatever source and however questionable. Someone, somewhere, will set the dogs on General Irazola and find out what he’s up to.’
‘From our previous talk on the same subject I had the impression the dogs were already on him.’
‘You should know better than to draw conclusions. Now – to come to the nitty gritty of your, er … mission: I’m going to bring you and Michael Vella together.’
‘No, you’re not. I’ll do my own arranging. I told you – I’ve already met him.’
‘Time’s too short,’ he said curtly. ‘You have five weeks. We can’t afford any leisurely preparations.’
‘You don’t say. So how and when and w
here is this arranged meeting to take place?’
‘At a reception being held at my hotel tomorrow night on behalf of some fund-raising crowd. The Governor will be there and Peter Caruana, who was Chief Minister, and some people of influence in Gib society, including Vella.’
I digested this slowly.
‘I would have thought the Governor and Vella would be anathema to each other.’
‘Correct. But the Governor has to be seen there as representative of the UK government.’
‘And Vella?’
Toby gestured airily. ‘Outside of his politics and his involvement with this GIBESTÁ rabble he has many personal friends here. Furthermore, who’s to say he won’t succeed in his aims? Not even your machinations can guarantee his downfall. And if he does succeed everyone will want to be his friend. It’s called –’
‘Playing both ends against the middle, yeah,’ I concluded for him. ‘To be seen at the same bash as the Governor is to be pro-establishment. To chat up Vella is to secretly side with him.’
A woman’s neigh of laughter behind us usurped Toby’s riposte. He frowned his displeasure in the general direction of the disturbance, then said, ‘You’ll understand now why I wanted to be here for the kick-off.’
‘Will I? You’ve been very close-mouthed all along, Toby. Are you finally going to tell me what I’m supposed to be?’
‘Yes.’ His voice sank to a whisper and he bent his head to mine. The two old biddies at the other end of the seat ceased their chatter and their upper halves swayed towards us. ‘Vella has been told about you and that you’re here to offer your services as an explosives expert.’
I blinked at him. ‘A bomber? Little old me? So that’s why my knowledge of explosives was such a necessary qualification. Don’t forget that knowledge is pretty goddam rusty and I was never involved in the production side.’
His eyebrows squirmed furiously.
‘We’ll update you, never fear. A three-day elementary crash course has already been booked with an ex-bomb disposal officer in the Gibraltar Regiment.’
‘Can I learn how to make bombs in three days?’
‘The IRA trained their bombers in less.’ Toby gave his glass a swirl, imbibed generously from it. ‘Not to mention Isis.’