The Armada Legacy

by Scott Mariani

  He heard a sharp yell from behind and turned to look. One of his pursuers had lost his footing on the loose slope, fallen and gone rolling down several yards. Cabeza saw the man stagger to his feet and clutch his ankle in pain, and he grinned to himself. But his grin quickly dropped as he saw the others moving on determinedly. He turned and stumbled on up the uneven slope, jittery with fear. A sudden gust of wind caught the underside of his hat’s brim and flipped it off his head. His precious hat! But he didn’t dare go back for it.

  Now he was panting hard and shaking all over. Just as the panic was threatening to overwhelm him completely, the ground levelled out under his feet and he realised that he’d made it to the top. The church loomed hugely overhead, surrounded by the craggy remains of the ancient castle walls. But his hope that there might be other people there was dashed. Silence and emptiness all around. It was just him, and four men who wanted to kill him.

  Cabeza dashed through the castle ruins towards the Iglesia de la Villa. The fifteenth-century building’s blend of Mudéjar, Gothic and Renaissance architectural influences was totally lost on him as he made for the arched entrance, praying that the heavy iron-studded door would be open and crying out with relief when it swung inwards with a shove. He darted through the doorway and blinked in the darkness of the empty church.

  Then, his heart in his mouth, Juan Fernando Cabeza searched for a place to hide.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Nico hammered the Subaru through the darkening streets, scattering pedestrians and sounding his horn at other cars. ‘Goddamned historians,’ he muttered. ‘They’re all the same.’

  Ben looked at him. ‘You’ve known a lot of historians?’

  ‘Sister married some museum curator. Another real fuckhead. Left her for another guy. You believe that shit?’

  ‘Just drive the car,’ Ben said.

  The Subaru’s suspension bottomed harshly at the base of a jarring cobbled slope, then with a screech of tyres Nico flew round a corner and they were speeding along the quiet road that circled the village. The church bell tower could be seen from anywhere in Montefrio, but as they drove on there seemed to be no road leading to it. ‘I can’t get close to the damn thing,’ Nico said, glancing up from the road at the mound. ‘Maybe we need to stop someone and ask, huh?’

  ‘Let’s just find Cabeza and get back to the house, all right?’ Ben said impatiently. ‘We’re wasting time here.’

  ‘This is no good. I’m gonna turn ar—’

  ‘No, wait. Pull up there,’ Ben said, pointing to the left, where the Subaru’s headlamps had picked out a path running up between the trees. Nico swerved across the road and skidded the Subaru to a halt on the dirt. Ben was the first to jump out of the car. He gazed up the path and saw that he’d been right: at the top of the sloping path, some three or four hundred yards distant, the church bell tower stood outlined against the early evening sky. This was the way. But something else about the dirt path perplexed him.

  ‘Cabeza doesn’t have a car, does he?’ Ben asked Nico, looking at the dark blue Audi that had been left empty, all four doors hanging open, where the trees narrowed on the path ahead.

  ‘Not unless he’s gone and borrowed one,’ Nico said.

  Frowning, Ben walked over to the Audi and laid his palm on the bonnet. It was still warm. He looked down and ran his eye along the scuff marks in the dirt where the wheels had locked under hard braking. He pictured Cabeza on foot. Pictured the car coming after him. Gazed up the path at the church silhouetted in the half-light. His thoughts were disturbing. ‘You’re sure this place is as safe as you said?’ he asked Nico, who was walking over to join him.

  Nico looked at the car and shook his head. ‘Come on, man, it’s a village. People live here.’ But Ben made no reply, because he was already heading through the trees and up the slope, his trot quickening to a run.

  ‘Shit, the bastard might be right,’ Nico muttered to himself, and followed. ‘Shit, shit.’

  As Ben climbed the rough slope he could see where some of the stones had been recently dislodged. That hadn’t been done by idle walkers. A few yards further up he found a clear shoeprint in the dirt and paused to examine it. It was still fresh and moist to the touch, and deeply indented at the toe by someone moving in a particular hurry. Then a short distance further up the path Ben came across something else. At first it looked like a patch of shadow, or a dark rock. On closer examination it wasn’t. He picked it up off the ground and showed it to Nico as the Colombian caught up with him.

  ‘I never saw that movie,’ he said, ‘but that looks like a pork pie hat to me.’

  ‘That’s Cabeza’s hat, all right,’ Nico breathed. ‘Then he did come up here.’

  ‘Not alone,’ Ben said, glancing down the hill at the Audi parked near the trees. ‘Looks like there are four men after him. Maybe your safe house wasn’t so safe after all.’

  ‘But how—?’

  ‘You might want to call your friend Morales in Bogotá,’ Ben said. ‘Check to see if he’s still answering his phone. If he isn’t, you’d better hope Serrato’s people don’t have him.’

  Nico suddenly looked anxious. ‘I left the SIG back at the house. Think I oughtta go back for it?’

  ‘No time for that now,’ Ben said.

  They ran on. The last glow of the sun was far below the western hills and the darkness was gathering fast, making it impossible to spot anything more in the way of tracks on the firmer ground approaching the top of the slope. The dark church walls were fully in view now, surrounded by what little of the Moorish castle its Christian conquerors had left standing. Ben led the way through the craggy remains and up to the church entrance. The heavy door lay wide open.

  Ben stepped inside. The air felt chill. Only the faintest of light was shining into the church through the doorway and the few small arched windows, just enough to make out the shapes of alcoves and columns and the great curving vaulted ceiling high overhead. Pools of black shadow lay everywhere and seemed to be spreading and deepening with every passing second. He wished he had the mini-Maglite with him, and cursed himself for leaving it in his bag at the house.

  He advanced slowly, with Nico behind. Their footsteps rang softly off the stone floor. Ben nudged Nico’s arm and put a finger to his lips. Nico nodded. They moved deeper into the shadows, treading lightly. Gradually, as their eyes became used to the darkness, Ben could make out more detail. It had been a long, long time since the church had been used for worship. What looked like a small museum exhibit sat to one side. Other than that, the place was completely empty.

  ‘There’s nobody here,’ Nico whispered impatiently.

  ‘Shh.’ Ben thought he’d heard something moving, but it was hard to pinpoint where the sound had come from in the shadows.

  ‘Come on, man,’ Nico said in his normal voice. ‘Let’s g—’

  His words were cut short by an explosion of noise far above their heads, a furious beating sound that echoed dizzyingly all round the walls. ‘Jesus!’ Nico said, flinching and covering his head with his hands.

  But as Ben looked up and saw the flapping shape in the dim light of a high window he realised the noise was a startled pigeon trapped in the dome of the ceiling and trying to find a way out. ‘It’s just a bird,’ he said. But was that all he’d heard a moment ago?

  Nico breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Scared the crap out of me. Look, we need to get out of— hey!’

  Ben hadn’t lowered his gaze from the ceiling, or he wouldn’t have seen the dark shape tumbling down from a great height. It was much larger than a pigeon, and it was plummeting straight towards them. Just in time, he hauled Nico backwards out of the way.

  The falling object landed at their feet with a crunch that resounded through the church. Ben had heard the stomach-churning sound of cracking human bones before. The dark gleaming mess that had suddenly covered the floor was blood, and the shapeless heap lying in the middle of it was a corpse.

  Ben took out his Zippo lighter, thu
mbed the flint striker and crouched down to shine the flickering orange flame over the dead man’s face.

  ‘Cabeza,’ Nico said after a beat.

  Chapter Forty

  Ben only needed a brief second to tell that the historian’s skull was crushed by its impact against the flagstones. In the same instant he also knew that it hadn’t been the fall that had killed him. No fall could produce such a razor-straight gash from ear to ear. Someone had sliced his throat, and not long ago.

  Ben quickly shut the lighter, snuffing out its telltale flame – but too late, because whoever had killed Cabeza and punted his body off some ledge high above them already knew he and Nico were there.

  The proof came with the pistol shot that filled the church like a thunderclap a second later. Ben caught a momentary glimpse of the orange-white muzzle flash overhead: in almost pitch darkness the jet of exploding gases lit up a section of wall and the stone stairway leading up to an arched alcove and what looked like a way through to the bell tower.

  Nico let out a yell of pain. Stone chips exploded from the floor between their feet. Ben yanked him close in to the wall, where they were directly below the gunman and out of his field of fire – at least for the moment.

  ‘It’s just a graze,’ Nico muttered, clutching his arm. ‘I’m okay.’ Even in the semi-darkness Ben could see how much blood was welling out from between his fingers. He quickly slipped off his belt and wrapped it round Nico’s arm. ‘Hold it tight. Keep your arm bent.’

  Nico drew in a sharp, sudden breath, and Ben thought it was a wince of pain until he realised the Colombian had seen something. Before Ben had time to react, a blinding light was shining on them both. He turned, shielding his eyes from the dazzling glare. He could just about discern a pair of figures behind the light. Two beams shining in his eyes, not one, each from the frame-mounted tactical torch of a pistol.

  Above them, the trapped pigeon was still flailing wildly around the dome of the ceiling. A voice snapped out harshly in Spanish, ‘Up against the wall and get your hands in the air.’

  Ben didn’t move. Footsteps were echoing down the bell tower stairway: the men who’d sliced Cabeza’s throat and pitched him from the alcove were coming to join their two colleagues on the ground. Three, four. In a matter of seconds the odds were going to double.

  ‘You. I said get against that wall,’ said the voice behind the light.

  Ben could focus better now on the shapes of the two men in front of him, their outlines visible if not their features. ‘What do you reckon, Nico?’ he said quietly, not taking his eyes off them.

  ‘I say fuck them,’ Nico replied in a savage undertone.

  Ben nodded. ‘That’s what I say too. I’m sick of getting shot at today.’ Then in one movement that was too fluid and fast for the men to register, he reached under his jacket, grasped the butt of the revolver that was stuck into his waistband behind the right hip, wrenched it out and squeezed the trigger without aiming.

  When he’d come across the handgun in the dresser drawer back at La Catalina, he’d guessed it was the one Nico had procured from the drug dealer in Granada. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it, he’d thought, and slipped it quietly into his jeans. The short-barrelled .44 Magnum revolver was even scabbier and more beaten-up than the Colt he’d got hold of in Belfast; and if it hadn’t been for the scorch marks on the cylinder from the two rounds Nico had already put into Serrato’s hired killer, Ben wouldn’t have been so sure he could rely on it. But as the hammer dropped on the next chamber in line, the gun went off like a grenade in his hand and the muzzle recoiled high in the air, haloed in white flame.

  The bullet caught the nearest man in the chest and cannoned him into his companion. Ben’s hearing was suddenly drowned in a high-pitched whine. The man he’d shot dropped his weapon and its light beam flew around to point at the wall. The other was staggering off balance, his gun-torch shining wildly all over the place. Ben pointed the Magnum blindly at a point somewhere above and to the side of the light source, pulled the trigger again and once more the world seemed to erupt in a wall of sound. The hand-filling wooden butt of the revolver kicked back at him like a jab from a heavyweight boxer. Blood flew in the light from the bullet strike. The second man went crashing down on his side and rolled over, his body spread-eagled.

  Ben didn’t need to check if the two men were dead or not. A handgun capable of knocking down large game at several hundred yards was overkill on a human target at extreme close range. Without a pause, he leaped over to the nearest of the fallen weapons and snatched it up to shine the light towards the stone stairway above him, just in time to see a fast-retreating figure make it to the top of the steps and disappear through the archway.

  Four revolver rounds gone, two to go. The gun attached to the torch was a Ruger automatic with a capacity of eight. He picked up the other and was about to toss it to Nico when he saw that the Colombian was slumped against the wall, bent over. With all the blood on the flagstones it was getting hard to tell one man’s from another’s; Nico’s injured arm was dripping with it and he looked pale. ‘You’re full of fucking surprises, aren’t you?’ he managed to grunt painfully at Ben, eyeing the .44 Magnum in his hand.

  ‘The things people leave lying around in drawers.’ Ben could hardly hear himself speak over the whining tinnitus from the gunshots. ‘You’d better stay down here,’ he said, flashing his light up the stone steps. ‘I don’t want you fainting on me.’

  ‘I told you, it’s just a graze,’ Nico said defensively, then slumped back against the wall. ‘Fuck, it hurts.’

  ‘Getting shot’s never easy,’ Ben said as he headed up the steps. He had the hammer of the .44 cocked in his right hand and was using the Ruger to shine the way ahead. The open-sided staircase climbed some fifty feet up the inside of the wall before it led through the shadowy archway from which Cabeza’s body had been dropped. There was more blood there too, a lot more, from where they’d slit his throat. The poor bastard must have tried to hide from them up here, Ben thought. The bloody knife was still lying on the floor.

  Ben’s hearing was beginning to return again, and he could make out the slap-back echo of the two men’s racing footsteps off the stone walls as he gave chase. There was only one way for them to go, and that was up the tower. Another stairway led steeply upward. Ben climbed it at a sprint. Beyond the reach of the Ruger’s tactical light he could see his quarry’s bobbing torch beams reflected on the stairway walls ahead. As he ran, one of the light beams suddenly swung round to point at him: there was a crack and a bullet ricocheted off the stonework, stinging his face with flying chips.

  Ben levelled both of his pistols and squeezed both triggers at once. The simultaneous crash of the gunshots was numbing in the confined space. The man crumpled and came tumbling down the stairs. Ben jumped aside to let him come rolling and flopping lifelessly past, then raced on upwards after the last man, who had reached the top of the steps and disappeared from sight through another low doorway.

  Ben reached the top step a second later, leaped through after him and found himself standing inside the church’s bell tower. The cold breeze coming in through its tall open-sided arches ruffled his hair and chilled the sweat on his brow. He looked around him but could see no sign of the man who’d just run in here ahead of him. The church’s massive bronze bell and its thick rope hung silhouetted against the sky and the dark hills in the distance. Montefrio was a speckle of lights around the base of the rock far below.

  Ben heard a sound from overhead. He looked up to see the man making his way frantically up the iron rungs of the ladder that led to the very top level of the tower: a heavily-built, dark-skinned guy in a black coat. Realising he’d been spotted, the man hung off the rungs with his left hand, aimed his pistol down at Ben and squeezed off two rapid shots.

  Ben felt the heat of the first bullet as it punched through the upper sleeve of his leather jacket. The second knocked the Ruger out of his left hand and sent it spinn
ing away through the open arch and into empty space.

  He dived for the cover of the bell as the man tracked him in his sights and fired a third shot. The bullet rapped sharply off the bell with an impact that set it swaying heavily on its mountings and filled the air with a quivering, juddering note like a hammer-strike on an iron gong. Ben’s left hand was numb from where the Ruger had been shot out of it. He checked his fingers. There was no blood, nothing broken. He took a breath, moved quickly out from underneath the bell, raised the .44 and fired the last deafening round in the cylinder.

  The man screamed as the bullet blew open his thigh. He dropped from the iron rungs, hit the swaying bell a glancing blow and went sprawling to the floor so close to the edge of one of the tower’s open sides that he would have fallen through it if Ben hadn’t grasped his coat and hauled him to safety. Blood was pumping from the ragged hole in his leg. But even with half his quadriceps blown away by the .44 hollowpoint, there was still fight left in the man. Ben saw the knife blade flash in the dim light and moved out of the way of the slash just in time. Repeating out of pure instinct a move he’d drilled and executed hundreds of times in the past, he trapped the blade, knocked it from the man’s hand and twisted the wrist to breaking point. The man let out a howl.

  ‘Who are you?’ Ben demanded in Spanish. ‘Who sent you? Serrato?’ He saw the unmistakable flash of recognition in the man’s eyes. ‘That’s right. You know that name, don’t you? And what’s yours?’ Ben rifled through the man’s jacket and wasn’t surprised to find that he was carrying neither a wallet nor ID. He pointed the .44. ‘One round left,’ he lied. ‘I said, what’s your name?’

  ‘Gutiérrez!’ the man whimpered, his eyes rolling wildly. ‘Armando Gutiérrez!’

  ‘I’ll bet you’re not from around here, are you, Armando? I’ll bet you go travelling all over. Been to Ireland recently?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’