SPANISH ROCK

by Lex Lander

‘At that rate twelve bombs will empty the coffers.’ Which placed Maurice in charge of the Treasury.

  ‘Twelve bombs will be enough,’ Vella interposed, adding, in the ensuing hiatus: ‘Perhaps more than enough.’

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ I said. ‘Ordinarily I would expect a bonus on completion – say fifty thousand.’

  ‘What!’ The exclamation came from several quarters at once. Only Peter showed unconcern. He gulped his lager, leaving a moustache of froth which he licked away slowly, like a cat after a satisfying lunch of mouse.

  ‘However …’ I said, with pause for effect, ‘I am prepared to make the bonus conditional on your achieving independence, if that will help. Once you’re in power you’ll have all the resources of government to call on.’

  Vella left his chair and, hands thrust in the pockets of his immaculate navy-blue pants, walked half the length of the room and back. His silver hair sparkled as the multi-branched ceiling light played over it. On the floor below, a dog, perhaps roused by his footfall, started barking.

  ‘Suppose we say two hundred and fifty thousand total, for six weeks work.’

  ‘Open-ended, you mean?’ I made a face. ‘I couldn’t agree to that, especially as I’ll be supplying the materials – explosives don’t come cheap. There has to be a limit to the number of incidents.’

  ‘All right then.’ This from Peter, embarrassingly anxious to seal the contract. ‘Twenty bombings, absolute tops.’ He glanced worriedly at Vella, as if fearing he had overstepped the mark. ‘All right, Michael?’

  Vella shrugged in resignation.

  ‘All right with you, André?’ Peter demanded.

  ‘It’ll have to be,’ I grunted, ‘if that’s the best you can come up with.’

  Still manifestly unhappy at the prospect of violence and the likelihood of collateral fatalities, Vella went and stood before El Jefe in a final appeal.

  ‘Jefe … ever since I was capable of thinking for myself I have been against violence. I have observed the Irish Republican Army, the Basques, the Corsicans, Baader-Meinhof, Isis, and all those other Muslim terrorist groups. In no case … no case … could I bring myself to even condone it, let alone sympathise or approve. In fact, I have always despised them and their indiscriminate bombings. Now you ask me to commit our political movement to as many as twenty bombings of our own. To destroy what we wish to build up and nurture. Even to kill. Because there will be deaths, there are always deaths … innocent people. I have led you this far without recourse to such methods –’

  ‘And see where it’s got us,’ Peter snorted.

  ‘Now you ask me,’ Vella went on, addressing only El Jefe, ‘to lead us along a path of planned, premeditated destruction with no certainty of success. How can you expect it of me?’

  El Jefe ruminated at some length. ‘My friend,’ he said finally, ‘this matter is not about people or buildings. Our aim is independence, the chosen vehicle is GIBESTÁ. People are incidental. Even you, son of my closest friend, are incidental. You are liked, respected, admired. No one is better qualified than you to lead us through what will be difficult times. No one is more likely to keep the respect and admiration of our people when all around is violence and death. But you are not indispensable. We have voted, you have lost. You must either accept the voting of the Inner Council or you must go.’

  Vella’s head bowed.

  ‘You are right,’ he said with a tremor in his voice. ‘I must shut my eyes and my ears and steer a straight course towards our goal.’

  ‘It is the only way,’ El Jefe agreed.

  Spoken like true fanatics.

  There they sat, the battle-scarred sage and the peace-loving idealist. The one having long lived by the creed that mountains are moved only by deeds and moved fastest of all by deeds of violence; the other, his conscience giving him hell, yet, being human, attracted by the power that would accompany success. I pitied him. Win or lose, let there be a single innocent victim and he was doomed to lifelong torment.

  ‘This is all very moving,’ I said, with a fabricated yawn, ‘but we’ve yet to settle the method of payment. I don’t give credit. I want ten per cent up front and instalments of ten more after every two bombings. Agreed?’

  Peter took it upon himself to agree and Vella, by his reticence, underwrote the commitment.

  ‘Good,’ Peter said, smacking his palms together ostentatiously. ‘Let us now proceed with the practical arrangements.’ He had a handwritten list before him. ‘These buildings are all soft targets …’

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was after two in the morning, the streets lifeless, glossed with rain, clean-smelling. Down in the dockyard the glare of floodlights. Beyond, across the blackness of the bay, the lights of Algeciras twinkled. My footsteps were unnaturally loud, drowning all other sounds. So much so that I slowed every fifty paces or so to listen.

  I was rounding the corner into Europa Road, just a few hundred metres short of The Rock Hotel, when I spotted him. Or them. A shadow, flitting across a patch of light under a streetlamp. Muggers? I kept going.

  ‘Muggings don’t happen here,’ Mike Manders, front desk manager at The Rock had assured me smugly.

  If I accepted that and accepted too that I wasn’t about to become a blemish on that admirable statistic, I had to conclude that I was under professional surveillance. Possibly friendly. I suspected Toby wasn’t above keeping tabs on me.

  Crossing the road, hand in pocket nonchalantly jingling a few coins, I psyched myself up to deal with enemy action. I was weaponless though the Aston was close enough to rectify that omission if I made a run for it. Above The Rock Hotel’s long flat roof the real Rock towered, black against the indigo of the night sky. Around the summit clouds clustered, made luminous by the moonlight.

  The hotel was served by an uphill ramp. There I came to an abrupt halt, pivoting on my heel. A tall figure didn’t react quite fast enough, ducking behind a low wall.

  No use keeping up the pretence of unawareness now. I went up the slope to the hotel parking lot at a fast lick, unlocking the car from twenty paces. I started up, over-revved in my urgency, reversed fast out of the line of cars to swoop back down the road to where the snooper had gone to ground.

  There was some loose gravel on this section and I made a lot of commotion by braking harshly. I sat there with the doors locked, the engine chugging and my foot hovering over the accelerator pedal while I scanned the area where I had last seen the mystery man. A couple of wheeled garbage bins stood behind the low wall. I waited, I watched.

  Either my Mr X was still there, crouching behind the bins, or he had cut and run. If he was still there, he might be armed, he might be prepared to use it. Confrontation meant commotion; maybe some public-spirited soul would summon the police. If by then I had a corpse on my hands, my cover here in Gib would be just as dead.

  I opted for discretion, much as running away went counter to my instincts. I gunned the Aston back up the ramp and parked back in my slot. Out of the car, I listened, heard nothing, looked around and saw nothing, and went inside.

  It was a warning to be heeded. Interested parties were sniffing around. Be they British, Gibraltarian, or Spanish. The rules of the game had been rewritten. To stay in business I would have to adapt to them.

  The snag was, I didn’t yet know what the rules were.

  * * * * *

  The evening after my recruitment as official bomber to GIBESTÁ the organisation put on its biggest most impressive demonstration yet: over three thousand people were estimated to have flocked to Convent Place to hear an inflammatory speech by Vella. I watched, from the semi-darkness of an upstairs room of the Governor’s residence, in the company of Lennox Ribble, Signals Corps major, who was also my link-man. Vella’s pulpit eloquence flowed through the open window, into the room and around us, and it was potent stuff. Advance notification, if you could read between the lines, of hard-line tactics to come.

  ‘If circumstances require we should take a violent road we
will not shrink from it!’ This was received by a gale of cheering and hooting. The guy was a gifted orator, all right.

  Ribble, a pale, ginger-haired man, short of stature, with a calm efficiency that impressed me, clicked his tongue.

  ‘Listen to them. Put a rabble rouser with a cause in front of any crowd in the world and they’ll howl for war.’

  ‘Until they get it, then they’ll start howling for peace. Why don’t the police break them up? Causing an obstruction or something.’

  A wan smile formed on his pale face.

  ‘You should know better than most. Vella’s to be left alone. In any case you don’t stop a man like that by gagging him.’

  Vella spoke for nearly an hour. When the speech and the succeeding near-hysterical ovation were over, the crowd, instead of dispersing went on what appeared to be an impromptu march, off down Main Street, towards the shopping mall. Only Vella, with a few adherents, one of whom I recognised as Maurice, remained in the square, holding an outdoor conference. A solitary helmeted policeman circled them, the rest of the law’s representatives having left with the mob. Two men in overalls were loading Vella’s mike and a collection of amplifiers into a station wagon, and two others were dismantling the platform from where he had delivered his speech.

  ‘It’s going to get worse,’ Ribble observed, ‘before it gets better.’ He cocked his head towards the window. ‘You hear that?’

  Mingled with shouts and cheering was the smash of glass breaking, not once in isolation but a succession of shatterings and with each of them the cheering swelled in volume.

  Ribble drew the plain green drapes and switched on the ceiling lights.

  ‘You’re not going to make matters any better, are you?’ he said morosely. ‘It’s all right for you – you can scuttle off back to wherever you came from when you’ve settled with Vella. The ones who are left behind will have to pick up the pieces and stick them back together again.’

  ‘Yours and mine not to reason why, Major. You’ve got three days to make a fully paid-up bomber of me, starting tomorrow.’ I sketched a farewell. ‘Now I must wish you buenas noches. Do I leave the same way as I entered, or do you have a choice of secret exits?’

  ‘If I was to tell you that they wouldn’t be secret any more,’ Ribble countered, which was as near as he had come to humour all evening.

  * * * * *

  The damage was superficial but extensive. I walked Linda down a sun-warmed Main Street and glass crunched underfoot. Teams of labourers were sweeping it into heaps in the gutter. Police were everywhere, mostly prodding around in looted shop windows. A shop selling radios, cameras, and suchlike had been gutted, the stock reduced to lumps of congealed plastic. Passers-by ogled the scene in a kind of stupefied disbelief.

  ‘You said Gibraltar wasn’t at all like England,’ a well-dressed elderly woman was heard to complain. ‘No football hooligans you said, no vandalism, no teddy boys …’ Her voice, petulant, accusatory, dwindled away in the distance, and was superseded by static from a patrolling constable’s short-wave radio.

  ‘Roger,’ the policeman acknowledged into the mouthpiece. ‘I’ll proceed up City Wall Lane and report back in five minutes. Over and out.’

  ‘It sure is a shame,’ Linda said, clinging tightly to me for fear of slipping on the glass. ‘It’s a pretty little town. People are shits, aren’t they, when it comes down to it?’

  ‘Some have more failings than others,’ I conceded. ‘Some are easily led.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She seemed genuinely distressed. A social conscience was a side of her I hadn’t come across. I hadn’t really given much thought to her deeper emotions, to what made her tick. Even pregnant, she was nice to look at, nice to make love to, and I felt an obligation to see her through a difficult period. Deeper motives, if any, hadn’t yet surfaced.

  She glanced up and caught me looking at her as we walked. She grimaced. ‘Look like hell, do I?’

  ‘Shucks, no,’ I said, which made her laugh. ‘You look … swell.’

  She patted her bulge. ‘Well, I’m swelling for sure.’

  She was wearing a knee-length patterned shift, that smoothed out the bulge without eliminating her other curves. Modestly heeled shoes with ankle straps flattered her legs and at the other extremity, her hair, now of a length to sweep her shoulders, was tied back with a broad red band. No beautifying aids. She could do without.

  Her real pleasure at the compliment was there in the wide white smile and the glow that came to her cheeks. Yet to her it was natural to hide it behind some throwaway remark.

  ‘What are you after, Warner?’

  ‘Stop playacting, Linda,’ I said. ‘There’s no need for it with me, not anymore. I’ve got you sussed, so you can let the real you out of the bottle.’

  The eyes that were the blue of the ocean deep widened. For once she was caught with her guard down. She stopped, her arm pulling free of mine.

  ‘Who is the real me, Warner?’ she said, her tone vicious. ‘The dupe who screws around until some jerk puts one up the spout? The easy lay? The stripper? Are all of those the real me?’

  Some youths sitting on a bench goggled at her. I piloted her past them. She was stiff as a waxwork and inclined to dig her heels in.

  ‘How do you get off coming the caveman?’

  ‘Shut up,’ I growled ‘and don’t be so fucking sensitive.’

  Her resistance vanished. She squeezed my arm.

  ‘You told me off once for bad language. So I stopped.’ She had too. Why hadn’t I noticed? ‘Now you’re doing it.’

  ‘I apologise. Come on, let’s have a coffee – if we can find a bar that hasn’t been looted.’

  We found one at the bottom of Main Street, near the market. Outburst forgotten, Linda took it upon herself to quiz me over what I was doing here on the Rock. Her tone was bantering, yet she couldn’t entirely hide her real curiosity.

  ‘Where do you keep taking off to? Is that Toby creep your boss? You didn’t talk to him as though he was.’ She tapped her coffee spoon against her teeth while keeping me under scrutiny. ‘Is it to do with all this independence baloney I keep hearing about?’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ I said easily, and took her hand in mind. ‘Don’t ask, and don’t want to know. Stay clear, stay clean.’

  ‘Clean!’ Her voice was a derisive hoot. ‘You’re about fifteen years too late, fella. I got derailed while I was still in eighth grade and I’ve never looked back since.’

  ‘I’m not talking about morals, dummy, I’m talking about politics, about governments. About craze for power, and manipulation and exploitation.’

  ‘Big woyds for a gal from Noo Joysey.’

  ‘Is that where you come from?’ Glad of the change of subject.

  ‘Where I was born. Most of my life we jetted between California and Washington DC.’

  Her hand squeezed mine. She was smiling, relaxed, could have passed for any conventionally happy mother-to-be. Her flare-ups burned out fast.

  ‘You know something, Warner … I kind of like you.’

  It was my first glimpse of the inner Linda. Of the kernel inside the shell she had built up around herself. She had more to say, I sensed it, so I stayed quiet, encouraged her with my eyes and my touch.

  ‘Yeah, I guess I owe you one hell of a lot. You’re a nice guy under the tough cookie shell. Shame about the beard.’ She gave my chin growth a mild tug. ‘In fact …’

  ‘More coffee, sir?’ the waiter’s timing was right on the nail. It saved Linda from getting in deeper than either of us was ready for. By the time our cups had been replenished the mood had flown and she was back behind her armour plate, back to the scathing witticisms.

  ‘No pow-wows to attend today?’

  I shot a glance at my watch. I was due to meet Ribble at one, to begin re-learning about how to blow things up.

  ‘I’ll be tied up after lunch until about six, then I’m yours to command until the same time tomorrow.’

  A briefing with V
ella and the others had been set for Monday next. The bombing itself was provisionally booked for the following Friday. Plenty of opportunity in between times to work out my plot within a plot, the downfall of GIBESTÁ.

  We left at a quarter to twelve for Linda’s appointment with a Doctor McGrail, whose surgery was down near the Queensway Quay Marina. As we strolled along the sunny dockside, bustling with boat owners and early season tourists, Linda said, with casual and disarming innocence: ‘Any chance we’re being stalked?’

  My instinctive reaction was to look over my shoulder. I suppressed it.

  ‘That’s a strange question,’ I stalled. ‘One of your secret admirers?’

  She sniggered. ‘I can always hope. I don’t seem to rate much of your time.’ She twisted her head round to look behind. ‘There was a tall fair-haired guy with a short fat woman. Ha-ha-ha! It just occurred to me they’d make a dandy stage act. They went by the coffee bar a couple of times. You were sitting with your back to the street, you remember.’

  Lax of me. It was basic teaching for all undercover operatives: keep your back to the wall and your front to the wide open spaces. It used to come natural to me to watch my back, but since I moved into the hospitality business the discipline had atrophied.

  ‘Are they tailing us then?’ I said.

  ‘They were. They’ve gone now. Funny looking pair. We used to meet quite a few East European diplomats when Dad was working in Washington. They all seemed to look alike: fair or light brown hair, blue eyes, badly dressed. One of them took a special liking to me.’ She shuddered. ‘He tried to entice me into an empty office – I was eight at the time. I don’t actually remember it, thank God.’ She pulled me to her, laughing gaily in her innocence of the schemings of governments. ‘Anyway it’s ridiculous. Why would a comedy act be interested in us?’

  * * * * *

  With Toby off my back I restored Linda to the Caleta Hotel. To keep some kind of faith with his no-cohabitation ruling, I booked her in a separate room, just a few doors down from mine.

  ‘You and your goddam security,’ she groused, when I gave that as an explanation for our apartheid. ‘It’s like starring in a spy movie. We aren’t, are we? In a movie, I mean.’