by Lex Lander
‘If that’ll make you happy – yes, we are making a movie.’
Wrong note – too patronising.
‘Don’t talk to me as if I was some snot-nosed kid!’ she blazed, dropping the dress she was hanging to slam me against the balcony doors.
‘Then don’t keep asking!’ I shouted back. ‘What you don’t know you can’t tell!’
She calmed instantly. ‘Is it that serious then?’
‘If it wasn’t, do you think I’d pay for two rooms when one would do?’
That tickled her sense of humour.
‘You sure do have a point there, Bonzo.’
* * * * *
I had mulled over sending a query to London about possible Russian interest in me and my mission but decided that to do so on such flimsy evidence (a Slavic-looking guy may be tailing me) would only invite some scathing riposte. Best leave it lie for now. Await developments.
Between moving Linda back into the Caleta and my rendezvous with the GIBESTÁ executive, I did little to justify my fee beyond learning anew how to construct a bomb, courtesy of Ribble. In my free time I toyed with ideas for rendering the movement defunct. I didn’t progress far, not with Linda in near-constant attendance, insistent on exploring the Rock. We did the things most tourists do: visited the ruined Moorish castle with its life-size models of who-was-who in ancient Gibraltar; rode the cable car to the Top of the Rock restaurant to see the city spread out below, clear and precise as in a street plan, the great hook of the bay, dotted with boats, the blue-grey mountains above Algeciras. Descending via steps, we fed the famous Rock apes with apples which they discarded after a couple of bites, and nuts which they spurned altogether. We walked the casemates – the battlements that were originally built along the along the sea’s edge but now stand hundreds of metres inland, thanks to ambitious and ongoing reclamation projects. We lunched on grilled swordfish at Le Trattoria del Pescatore and dined on king-sized T-bone steaks at Biancas. Most of all during these two days we explored each other, inside and out, cementing the growing bond between us.
So close had we become that when Monday evening came and I dressed – leather windbreaker, denim jeans, roll-neck sweater all in obligatory black – Linda tried to dissuade me from going, even to abandon ‘whatever the hell you’re mixed up in’.
I didn’t take her entreaties seriously. As a result, our goodbyes were frigid and I drove around to the other side of the island in poor humour, inwardly berating the female of the species. Resolving to untangle the entanglement before the bud became a flower and ending it became impossible.
‘You’re late,’ Peter, who answered the door at Vella’s apartment, accused.
‘Yeah, all of five minutes,’ I snapped back.
‘Never mix women with business,’ El Jefe chuckled as I took my place at the table. They were five as before, seated as before.
‘What are you talking about?’ I said belligerently.
He laid a thick, knobbled finger along the side of his nose, winked.
Was that a subtle admission that the comedy duo was in the pay of GIBESTÁ? If so, it was irritating but not beyond reasonable.
‘Take no notice of Eduardo,’ Michael Vella said. He looked tired this evening. The lines around his mouth were deeper and his skin looked grey, like old parchment. ‘He is only envious.’
‘I do not deny it,’ the old man said. ‘I am surprised, however, that our friend here should encumber himself, considering what he has come here to do.’
‘It was accidental,’ I said, thinking that El Jefe was a sight too perceptive for his and my good, and that some explanation would allay any latent worries. ‘It started out as a favour for a friend. It ended up as a bloody great commitment that I’m stuck with for now. Don’t worry, she knows nothing at all. And she doesn’t go wherever I go.’
‘Gibraltar is a small place,’ Peter pointed out. He directed a hard stare at El Jefe. ‘Too many ears flapping, too many old women gossiping.’
‘Eduardo is right to be concerned about security,’ Vella intervened. ‘Now, gentlemen, shall we get down to business?’
No drinks were proposed. This was not a drinking matter. Peter spread a blueprint across the table.
‘This is our first target – the Post Office in Main Street,’ he announced. ‘In my opinion the bomb should be sited about here.’ With a pencil he indicated some spot inside the main chamber.
I leaned over the plan, studied the various entrances and exits.
‘Technically I don’t see why not. Subject to my checking out the real thing, you understand.’
‘Of course,’ Vella said. ‘We presumed you would need to inspect it. This is why we chose the main chamber rather than, for instance, the sorting room. No need to break in to look it over, or take any risks.’
‘Thoughtful of you. Do you want the bomb to go off in daytime or night-time? And at what hour?’
They all looked blankly at me.
‘What I’m trying to establish is – do you want casualties? If so, how many? Two or three? Twenty or thirty?’
‘No!’ The word exploded from Vella like a bursting bag. He came up off his chair so fast it toppled backwards with a crash. The dog in the apartment below set up a yapping. ‘I want no casualties! None!’ His eyes swept the table like twin searchlights. Only Eduardo didn’t shrink from him. This was Vella at his most intimidating. The very strength of his opposition to violence set him apart from its advocates. Half of me wished he could convert them, even though this would make my services redundant. He deserved better than bombs.
With an effort that made his whole frame tremble he brought his emotions under control.
‘I am a realist,’ he said then, in a subdued tone. ‘If we use bombs, sooner or later people will get hurt, even … even killed. This I understand and, though I personally opposed the bombing campaign, accept. What I will not tolerate is any act of violence that deliberately targets any human being, be they friend or foe. Is that understood?’
This question, a challenge almost, was for the Council as a whole but it was especially directed at Peter – Peter the hawk, the hard-liner. Every movement has at least one. So long as they’re restrained they serve as a useful makeweight to the doves. It’s when the pacific policies fail and the lone hard-liner gains converts to his cause, and the clamour grows for more action less words, that the bombs and the bullets take over, and the spilling of blood begins.
I had seen it happen more than once as an officer of the SIS, and could see it happening here if I didn’t succeed in my mission to subvert it, whatever the outcome of the Madrid Conference.
‘You’ve answered my question,’ I said to Vella, hoping to remove some of the friction from the proceedings. ‘The bomb must go off when the Post Office is closed and the risk of any passers-by getting caught in the blast is minimal.’ Vella dragged his stare from Peter and brought it to rest on me. ‘Between three and five in the morning then,’ I concluded.
‘If that is your advice,’ Vella said, a shade huskily, as if his invective had strained his vocal chords.
‘Which means we can’t plant it inside the building?’
Vella’s silver eyebrows made interrogation marks.
‘Why not?’ Peter, less equivocal, demanded.
Maurice got in ahead of me: ‘We’d have to break in if it’s to be done at night.’
Peter’s shrug was eloquent. ‘So? Is breaking in so difficult?’
‘Post Offices,’ I explained without condescension, ‘are built along similar lines to banks. It would be goddamn near impossible to gain entry quietly. At that time in the morning any significant noise will carry all the way to Algeciras.’
‘Meaning?’
‘The bomb must either be left inside the building during the day, set to go off at the required time, or we must place it outside.’
‘Not inside,’ Vella said promptly and firmly. ‘If it malfunctioned, went off early …’
‘Also it might be discovered,’ El J
efe said, more focused on success than risk to life.
‘Okay,’ Peter conceded. His sole concern was that no obstacles should prevent the bombing from going ahead.
‘Outside the building then.’ Vella was making sure there would be no misunderstanding.
‘What will you use?’ El Jefe asked me. ‘For explosive.’
This interest in the mechanics of the task enhanced my suspicions that the old man had once seen active service in some form. At the time of the Spanish Civil War even his parents would have been infants, therefore it would have been in the sixties or seventies, perhaps as a mercenary in the Congo or Yemen.
‘Gelignite,’ I said, then, anticipating his request for specifics, elaborated: ‘A plastic water gel.’
‘How much?’
‘Say five kilos? Ought to make a big enough bang without spreading the damage over too wide an area.’
He didn’t disagree. Asked next about the detonators.
‘Tetryl. Electrically primed. I’ll use a delayed action, naturally – a timer.’
‘Naturally,’ El Jefe echoed with a chuckle that told of experience. ‘Where will you obtain your materials?’
My look alone was enough. He hadn’t seriously expected me to say.
‘You will need help,’ he suggested.
‘Yes,’ I said flatly. ‘You volunteering?’
‘I will help’ Peter’s offer was instantaneous.
‘You know explosives?’
That was too much to hope for.
‘You can teach me,’ he said with that fanatical eagerness of his. I agreed I could teach him. Might as well let the blind lead the blind.
‘Very well,’ Vella said, though no one had sought his assent. ‘Will you need anyone else, André?’
‘Look-outs. Front and back of the building, working to prearranged signals. Can do?’
Vella gave a slow nod. ‘I will come myself. Ben – what about you?’
Ben didn’t look wild about the prospect but nodded firmly enough.
‘Shall we proceed to the next stage then, gentlemen – the operation itself?’ There was a general murmur and shuffling of bottoms. ‘In which case I pass the Chair to André.’
I stood up and began to speak, wishing I had faith in what I was doing, a belief in the cause I was pretending to serve. In the recent past my world had been black and white. Contract offered, contract accepted, contract executed. One less transgressor in the world. Now I was in the thick of politics and governments, in amongst grey writhing mists of lies and trickery and betrayal. I served no one, no cause, beyond self-interest. Like an actor, I was working to a script, reading lines, following directions.
The covenant I had made was beyond recall. It was no longer a matter of money, it was about keeping faith and damage limitation. I would do what I had been told to do and groomed to do, and hope to come through with my integrity intact, maybe not quite smelling of roses but at least avoiding the stink of infamy
Chapter Sixteen
It was a fine night for a bombing: a clear sky, thick with stars like fluorescent smoke, the faintest nip in the air, leftover from a winter that in these southerly latitudes was never more than notional. Three o’clock on a Friday morning and Gibraltar was dead. Somewhere in the warren of streets the mewling of a baby’s cry. Down towards the docks there was activity, the desultory clank of machinery, the whirr of a crane’s motor, a pneumatic drill at work on some task that couldn’t wait until daylight.
‘The dockyards work around the clock,’ Peter remarked, voice hoarse with tension, as we huddled side by side in a recess in Bell Lane, a narrow passage connecting Main Street with the upper town. Though I was personally immune from arrest for the crime I was about to commit, my nerves were tauter than a tripwire. Failure tonight might mean failure of my mission. If my efforts were ever to bear fruit, the bombing was obligatory.
Nearby, in the general direction of Irish Town and the Central Police Station, a footfall. I held my breath. Doing it ‘under the noses’ of the police appealed to the hothead in Peter. I didn’t share his enthusiasm.
The footfall ceased. Someone coughed – a subdued, forced cough – once, twice, three times. All was clear along Irish Town. Almost immediately a nose was blown, so close I felt Peter twitch beside me. This was the Main Street signal, Vella’s watch, and the more dangerous of the two lookout positions. All clear there too.
‘Let’s go,’ I said, nudging Peter.
The five kilos of plastic explosive were contained in a New Balance-branded carryall, slung crosswise over my shoulder. I slipped around the corner into Main Street, hugging the shadow of the building. Peter, in charge of the detonators, the timer and such tools as were necessary, stuck close to me; so close my heel connected with his shin and prompted a snort of pain. His own fault, so I didn’t apologise.
His function as my “assistant” would amount to little more than handing me the right materials in the correct sequence, quickly and noiselessly. I had spent hours schooling him, ultimately with his eyes shut, forcing him to identify items by touch. To avoid detection we would have to work at high speed, to locate and prime the device in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. To linger would be fatal. I had timed us at sixty-five seconds dead in an artificial situation, both of us working blind. Under pressure we might well balls it up, nervousness might turn fingers into thumbs. Consequently, I was allowing a minute-and-a-half and keeping my fingers metaphorically crossed.
We scuttled into the doorway, crouched behind the joined pillars of the post boxes with their EIIR Royal Mail logos. Peter’s bag made a metallic clink as he set it down incautiously on the sidewalk.
‘Sorry,’ he breathed. I let it go. What else could I expect from an amateur?
The street was empty. A white plastic bag tumbled by, propelled by a flutter of wind that died as fast as it was born. In a Main Street jeweller’s doorway, about thirty metres from the Post Office, Vella was watching. We were totally reliant on his warning us of an interloper.
My bag joined Peter’s. It was pre-unzipped, because zippers make noise. I slid my fingertips under the block of jelly in its plastic container, lifted it clear. Respectful but firm was the technique, as explained by Ribble. Show it who’s boss, don’t be afraid of it. On its own it was inert.
The container was semi-transparent, the kind used to keep food fresh. Plastic in plastic, I mused irreverently. I prised off the lid. It came free noiselessly.
Peter was crouching beside me, almost imprisoning me against the double glass doors of the Philatelic Shop that shared the outside foyer. My finger tapped his knee and instantly there was cold metal in my palm: an all-aluminum tube, about ten centimetres long – a detonator. I would use two, the second as insurance, though Ribble assured me that British Army-issue detonators are not prone to failure. Oh, yeah? My MI6 experience disagreed.
Both detonators were already wired up. With the plastic box positioned at the base of the double doors, where they met, I pressed them into the gelignite, which consisted of fifty 100-gram slabs packed tight to form a single block. Plastic explosive has the consistency of putty and I had already excavated two holes to receive the detonators. It was therefore only a matter of thumbing them down into the plastic until they were flush with the top, leaving the wires protruding. The wires, or more accurately the integrity of their connection to the terminals, were the weakest links in the chain between trigger and explosion. I had made the connections personally, tested them to not-quite destruction.
Peter was holding the timer. His hands were trembling a little. Not fear, I was sure of that, more likely exhilaration. His first bombing. Wow! Now he was a true revolutionary, a partisan, a guerrilla even. I don’t believe he had ever stopped to weigh the consequences of what we were doing. He was carried along by the certainty of right-ness. The cause was just, the means therefore were justified. Amen.
I found myself wondering if Linda was lying awake, wondering in her turn about me. I had left at nine: ‘I
’ll be late – don’t wait up.’ Her farewell kiss had been lingering, designed to delay, dissuade even. On the outside she was all bravado as usual; within, I sensed a fearfulness. She was less secure than she pretended.
‘Don’t forget where’s home,’ she joked, yet her eyes held uncertainty not humour.
Most of the ninety seconds I had allowed had been used up. The timer was pre-set for ten minutes. Little enough time to get clear of the area, yet more than ample for the bomb to be discovered and the leads ripped from the timer. I offered the timer box to Peter. Let his be the symbolic hand to start it off. He divined the thought behind the gesture, his teeth flashing white.
This was the point of no return. No hesitating, no misgivings, he rammed the button down as if it were the plunger of a detonator box. We were committed. In just ten minutes we would make history and the front page of world’s press.
Then Vella showed, stepping out of his assigned doorway and setting off towards us. Just a man in a hurry to get home.
Also a warning. Someone was coming!
Peter and I gathered up our bits and pieces, slid along the wall past a shop with a boarded up window, a casualty of the recent demonstrations. It had a shallow doorway, the scantiest of refuges. Nevertheless, we had to chance it. Whoever was coming might well spot the bomb. Worse, might be within injury range when it went off.
Peter had been peeping around the edge of the boarded-up window for a sight of our night-time stroller. Now he let out an exclamation. ‘It’s a bobby!’
‘Easy now,’ I hissed sharply, dragging him back into the recess. I carried no lethal weaponry. Our self-defence system consisted of a sock and a few pounds of sand. Marry the two and you have a highly efficient blackjack, a trick among many taught by MI6.
The policeman was not suspicious. He was ambling, now and again testing some shop door. He was also on the opposite side of the street. So far, so good, but that white plastic box stood out all too starkly, only partially screened by the post boxes. A slip-up on my part, not to have used a darker container.