by Blake Banner
Helen nodded, but she didn’t say anything. I had been watching the brigadier throughout, and throughout he had held my eye.
Now I asked, “What do we know about the inside of the building?”
The colonel said, “Practically nothing. There are three buildings, each with two floors and an attic space. It seems that the northernmost of those buildings is the living quarters, the other two are labs and admin.”
“So what about Julian Ferrer? He runs the place but he lives across the road. What do I do with him?”
It was Helen who answered. It was surprising and we all turned to look at her. She said, “Kill him. I’ll do it myself. That bastard stole everything I worked for all my life.”
I watched her a moment and said quietly, “I’ll take care of any killing that needs doing. You just observe the material and transmit.”
She blinked at me. “Just make sure you take that bastard out.”
I ignored her and turned back to the brigadier. “Is there anything else?”
“Not unless you have something to add.”
I nodded briefly. “This is not going to be a slick ninja operation. This is going to be brutal and fast. We have to make up for the lack of intel by employing overwhelming, brute force. We have to go in like a firestorm and be out in five minutes maximum. That means the crucial aspect of this operation is firepower, firepower, firepower. I am going to need a PG3 mounted on a HK416, with a lot of grenades. And I am going to need lots of C4. I am talking about fifty pounds, twenty-five kilos.”
I saw the colonel cover her eyes with her hand, but the brigadier nodded and said, “That’s not a problem, Harry. Make a list and give it to me by twelve noon. It will be available by tomorrow.” He glanced at the colonel, who had turned to stare out of the window as though she might find some divine patience out there. “Jane, anything else?”
She shook her head. “No.” Then she turned to me. “Just… Please, come back, Harry.”
“I’ll do my best.”
The brigadier said he wanted some last words with Helen in private about what she was going to do once the operation was over. The colonel said she had some things to attend to and I said I’d go to the yacht and bring our things ashore so we could pack for Malaga.
After that Helen and the brigadier went into town to buy some luggage and I sat in the bar and made a list of stuff I was going to need. I had a plan worked out, but now I needed to go over the details with a fine-toothed comb, over and over again. The brigadier, for a man who had spent so many years with the Regiment, had a worrying habit of setting up jobs that went against everything the Regiment taught you. Namely: minute preparation followed by minute preparation followed by detailed rehearsal and then go back to the beginning and start it again.
While I was sitting there, with a cup of coffee and my eyes closed, going over in my mind once again the sequence of events, a voice made me open my eyes. It was the colonel, standing over my table looking down at me. She was smiling and looked unsettlingly nice. She said, “Hi.”
“I’m not sure how to answer that. Should I just say hi, or should I say, ‘Hi, honey’?”
“May I sit down?”
“Please do.”
She pulled out a chair and carefully folded herself into it. “I came to apologize.”
“What for? Will you have a drink?”
“No, thank you. I have a lot to do still. For kissing you.”
“That has never happened to me before. I have sometimes had to apologize for kissing a girl. But it’s the first time a woman has apologized to me. There is no need. I don’t feel my virtue has been soiled, and I am sure you will still respect me tomorrow.”
“Do you have to make a facetious joke about everything?”
“The brigadier accused me of that the other day too. I told him as soon as I had looked it up I would be offended.”
“Harry?”
I sighed. “Why are you apologizing for kissing me?”
“Perhaps a better question would be, why did I kiss you?”
I gave a small laugh. “That would be a pointless question, Colonel. I know why you kissed me. I am not so naïve that I think you harbor feelings for me. You kissed me so that Helen would walk in on us and you could break any possible relationship that was developing. You were instructed to do it by Buddy and you have been playing up to me ever since whenever she was around.”
She raised her eyebrows and gave a small shrug. “I think that deserves an apology.”
I gave my head a small shake. “Not really. It was a good idea, and I enjoyed the kiss.”
She sighed and after a moment stood. “It’s a shame you’re such an asshole, Harry. You’re a good man and you’re very attractive.”
I smiled. “Does that mean you enjoyed it too?”
She shook her head, but I like to think it was more despair than denial, because she said, “But you are such an asshole!”
At shortly before twelve noon the brigadier appeared and we all foregathered in the lobby. We dumped our brand-new luggage in the back of his dark blue Range Rover and headed for the airport, where a Gulfstream jet was waiting to take us to Malaga. We discussed last-minute details, like the yacht.
“I’ll square it with your chum in Cadiz, and have somebody sail it back. Might even take it myself. How about it, Jane?”
I saw him grin at her in the rearview.
“Thanks, Alex, but no thanks.”
And where we were going to stay, near Zahara.
“Quaint little hotel in Olvera, Fuente del Pino, just outside the town, hour and a half from Malaga, Cadiz and Seville, if you need to shift fast, twenty minutes from Zahara and the lake, the location is perfect and it’s a sleepy little village with a resident foreign population, where nobody will look twice at you.”
Half an hour later we were being ushered through customs and our luggage was being taken aboard the sleek, twin-engined G4.
The brigadier gave Helen a peck on each cheek and gave me a firm, manly shake of the hand. “Take care of yourself, old chap. See you in a week or so back in New York. Come over for dinner.”
I told him I would and turned to the colonel, who had lingered behind. Helen turned and made her way across the tarmac toward the jet. I looked down at the colonel. There was the makings of a smile on her face, so I offered her one of mine to help it along.
“I’ve done a lot of thinking for both of us since coffee this morning, and it all adds up to one thing: I’m getting on that plane with Helen, where I belong.” She raised an eyebrow and drew breath but I interrupted her. “Now you listen to me. Have you any idea what you’d have to look forward to if I stayed? You’d regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life. We’ll always have Sao Miguel.”
She threw her head back and laughed. “You absolute asshole!” she said.
I smiled, but not a lot.
“How does it go? Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world… Here’s looking at you, kid.”
The laughter faded from her eyes. Not completely, but a bit. I bent and kissed her and she placed her hand on my cheek. “Be careful, Harry. You’re an asshole, but I’d hate to lose you.”
I turned, and walked through the bright sunshine toward the jet, and Malaga.
Twenty-one
Olvera was a very steep hill with a 12th-century castle perched at the top and a 16th-century church just below it. The town, gleaming white, was like icing that had been dribbled down one side.
It was set in the midst of a broad valley, high in the Sierra de Cadiz, within glancing distance of the Castillo del Hierro—the Castle of Iron—in Pruna, and Zahara, where our attention was focused.
The hotel, Fuente del Pino, the Fountain of the Pines, was a cute old country house converted into a hotel, proba
bly some time after Franco died and things got tough for the privileged few. It had a broad, white, friendly face with a terrace out front and a big swimming pool out back, and it was set, as the name suggested, among vast, peaceful pine trees.
Inside it was dark, cool and quiet. The floors were dark wood, the walls were whitewashed and partly paneled, and the ceiling was high and supported by dark wooden rafters. The dining room was on the right, not a separate room but an area sectioned off by dark, wooden-slatted screens. Opposite was the very large, dark wooden bar and behind it were three smiling waitresses in black-and-white uniforms. If their eyes and hair were anything to go by, they were cute, but their faces were all hidden behind blue and white masks whose function seemed to be to make the waitresses breathe their own carbon dioxide, while allowing any COVID-19 virus that happened to be around free passage.
There was no reception desk so we checked in at the bar, carried our cases up to our room on the second floor, unpacked and went down for coffee at the bar. There, Helen asked the waitresses what was interesting in the district. They told us about the castle in Olvera, which had a small museum attached, they told us about Ronda, with its famous aqueduct, and about the Sierra de Gracalema nature reserve. They also mentioned the lake at Zahara and we carefully ignored it and decided vociferously that Olvera Castle and Ronda were the way to go. As subterfuge goes, it wasn’t much, but every little bit helps.
We showered, changed, had a light lunch and took the Range Rover down the main road that ran from Antequera to Jerez. The intense heat that affects Andalusia in high summer had passed, leaving the air pleasantly warm and the sky a gentle blue. Recent rain had taken the scorched gray and ochre out of the land and replaced it with lush green, and the high peaks all around the broad plain where Olvera was located were thick with dense pine forests. Instead of the AC, we had the windows open and the pleasant air gently battering our faces.
We followed the road for ten or fifteen minutes, plunged through a long, dark tunnel and came out to an intersection that took us through a three-hundred-sixty-degree loop and finally south, toward Ronda and Zahara.
Another fifteen minutes and we arrived at another, far more rudimentary intersection. Right took us down to a large, pale turquoise lake set among pinewoods, left took us up to a tiny, white village named Gastor, set not among woods but dense forest. Helen, who was looking at her phone, said, “Not this one, the next.”
Five minutes later we came to a bridge on the right that spanned one long limb of the lake. She said, “Here,” and, as I turned onto it, I had to slow to stop and stare. It was maybe four and a half miles away across the lake, with steep, forested hills rising either side: an almost perfectly conical hill, with a gleaming white village spilling down its sides, and a tall, sandstone castle perched right on the top.
“Zahara,” she said, in a dead kind of voice.
“Eight miles to the town, the exit to the lab is three miles before that. We’ll make a drive-past first and go visit the town, have a beer and come back this way.”
“Fine.”
We moved off, winding along the banks of the lake below. After a while she said, “Does it have to be a beer or can it be something else?”
I glanced at her and frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Is that what she drinks, beer? Bit of a tomboy, a man’s woman?”
“What?”
“Don’t you think you might have told me about her before we hit the sack? You know, as a courtesy, to her and me? Or maybe she’s not the jealous type.”
I sighed, praying that we might be ambushed by a division of fanatical jihadists, while calling a black curse down on the colonel and the brigadier.
“Look, I’m sorry. I am no good at this kind of thing. When you live the kind of life I have always lived, relationships tend to be cursory…” I hesitated, searching for a word. “Fleeting!” I nodded and repeated it. “Fleeting…” I glanced at her. She was rolling her eyes out of the window.
“Warrior, macho bullshit.”
I shrugged and thought about it. “It happens to be true. I tried once to have a serious, long-term relationship. It just didn’t work.”
She scowled at me. “Because of your work…”
“Yeah.”
“You just banked several fortunes in a matter of a few hours. You never need to work another day so long as you live. The reason you can’t hold down a serious relationship is the same reason you have this job in the first place.”
I asked, “What’s that,” but I didn’t want to look at her.
“Because you don’t know how to commit to anything long-term. The only way you know how to commit is if it is immediate, fast, intense and your damned life depends on it. But a lifelong commitment that is quiet, calm, thoughtful and truly, genuinely for life…” She shook her head. “You wouldn’t know where to begin.”
I was quiet, winding along the narrow black ribbon, thinking about what she’d said. “That’s pretty harsh. You would?”
“Would?” She shifted in her seat to look at me. “Would? I did! Before I was fifteen I knew I had to devote my life to quantum physics. By the time I was sixteen I knew it had to be nano-technology, you know why? Because there is only one way to remove suffering from human life, and that is by exploiting the potential of nano-technology to the full. And from the day I took that decision until today that has been my one, single, overriding commitment. To develop nano-technology so that we can cure disease and physical suffering, but above all so that we can heal our society’s apparently incurable sickness of exploitation, where less than one percent of humanity lives off the sweat and the needs of the other ninety-nine point nine, filling their heads with bullshit about democracy while controlling every damned little thing they do with either legislation, social coercion or brainwashing!”
“Wow…”
“Wow? Seriously? You have to go to school!” She almost screamed it at me. “Why? Because you have to get a job! Why? Because if you don’t got no fuckin’ job you can’t pay your fuckin’ taxes! So what? I don’t want to pay taxes! Well if you don’t pay your fuckin’ taxes, you gonna go to jail!”
I was beginning to smile, looking at her with renewed interest. “You’re an anarchist.”
She snorted. “Maybe I don’t got no label, mister. And besides, if you don’t have a job so’s you can pay your fuckin’ taxes, that means you ain’t making the shoes, the pants, the shirts, the light bulbs, the sacred screens—TV, telephone, tablet and computer—that do keep our society connected to the hive mind. And if you are not making these things, then they cannot be sold, and if they are not sold, then your employer cannot get rich.” She paused a moment for breath. “Do you know what ‘employer’ means? Do you know what ‘employ’ means?”
“Of course.”
“Of course you do. It means ‘use.’ Your employer is your user.”
“I had no idea you were so passionate about politics.”
“I’m not. I hate injustice. If I must have a label, I am a free thinker. And I am very aware of the fact that we live in a society that is founded on the needs of the many. And there are a very few who exploit those needs and force the vast majority to work for them to produce goods, which they then sell back to the people who made them for more than it cost to make them.”
“I get the idea, but you kind of lost me.” I was slowing because I could see a sharp fork in the road approaching ahead, and checking the milometer I could see we had traveled about five miles. “That is the turn right there.” As we passed I leaned back out of the window to read the road sign. “Arroyomolinos, that’s the one. And right there is the wall.”
Running along the side of the road, about fifteen feet high, was a concrete wall. It had been faced with stone and had creepers growing up the side to mask the gray cement, but there was no mistaking it was there to keep people out. And in case you were in any doubt, the barbed wire along the top made it clear.
I settled back in my seat an
d accelerated slightly again toward Zahara, taking the sharp bends at a leisurely pace, enjoying the spectacular, wild scenery. After a while I said:
“So people are essentially bad and don’t give a damn about each other. All relationships are about power and pain is built right into the very fabric of the universe…”
She was nodding. “Yes, it is.”
“I know, but how are you going to change that with nano-technology?”
“For a start, with nano-technology we can produce everything anybody will ever be likely to need, clothes, housing, food, entertainment—everything! We can even develop technologies to explore the solar system and maybe beyond. So there will be no need for exploitative industries that make some men and women obscenely rich at the expense of others! Nano-technology is the cornucopia that brings abundance to everybody at the expense of nobody!”
“And you think that if people don’t need, they will stop being bastards.”
“Yes.”
I shook my head. “Sorry, but that is not my experience. People like power for power’s sake, and people are cruel because it makes them feel powerful.”
She nodded. “Sure. But if Darwin taught us anything, it was that people adapt to new conditions. And if we can create conditions where there is no need and no hunger, and people are praised and rewarded for sharing and being kind, then who knows where it might all end!”
We had come to a roundabout. And one of the roads led up toward Zahara. I went all the way around and headed back the way we had come.
“I’ll tell you where it would all end, in a nightmarish utopia, or dystopia, where human beings live to a thousand years with body parts growing in jars to replace the bits that wear out, nobody ever has kids because nobody ever dies, and nobody ever has to care for anybody except themselves. So we would evolve into a nasty, weak, narcissistic egotopia where nothing is ever new or exciting and the whole focus of society and science would be on producing new and different types of orgasm, because every other sensation had become so used up and tedious, and even orgasms and sneezing would be passé.”