I pushed two more screaming steps then I saw them. Four ink-black silhouettes standing on the black crest of the hill. I felt hollow. I knew I couldn’t make it. I had no more to give, no more reserves, but I also knew I wouldn’t give in. They would have to kill me. I would die there that night. It was a good night to die.
I gritted my teeth and ran, staggering, roaring toward the nearest one. Then everything happened at the same time. All hell broke loose as three heavy machine guns erupted feet from my head. The flames, the smell of cordite and the noise were overwhelming. I swung my fist and a hand that seemed to be made of steel gripped my wrist and twisted with real pro skill. I fell and a knee pinned me down as I heard the choppers, one after another, explode under a hail of fire and lead, and crashed, burning, among the twisted olive trees. Below and behind me voices were screaming in pain. And in my ear I heard an English voice say, “Keep still, you daft Yankee git, or I’ll have to smack you!”
Chapter Sixteen
There is a brutal, clinical efficiency about the way the Brits conduct warfare and kill people. These guys were brutal, clinical and efficient. Within a minute they’d disposed of three choppers with mounted machine guns and at least a dozen men. Then they took me and retreated into the night, and the only evidence that they had ever been there was the carnage and the burning remains of three Sikorsky Hawks.
We walked through alternating rain and drizzle for maybe an hour. The only answer I got to my constant questions was a phlegmatic, “Never you mind, son.” At about four-thirty a.m. a black RAF Puma with no lights came out of the north and settled in a field ahead of us. We scrambled in under the blades and took off, banking sharply and heading back north. We sat in silence for about half an hour, flying low to avoid radar, skimming just a few feet over the treetops. Far to the east, there was an occasional flash of what might have been lightning, but I figured it was probably the battle for Andalusia.
After thirty or forty minutes, we started to gain height. Then the radio crackled into life and a soft red light came on in the cabin. It was the first time I had seen their faces, and they sat grinning at me through their camouflage paint. The big guy who’d knelt on me in the field and virtually dragged me on to the chopper said, “You look as though you’ve been through the wars.”
I nodded and smiled. “I owe you one, I think. Have I been rescued or kidnapped?”
“I wouldn’t know, mate. We just do as we’re told. But if you want my best guess, you’ve been rescued.”
I nodded, then shook my head. “What the hell were you doing there? You’re British Special Ops, right?”
“Are we? We get into all sorts of trouble, don’t we, lads?” The other three grinned at him. “Might ask you the same question.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “I was buying real estate.”
“Oil wells, was it?”
They all chuckled and I handed out the remains of my cigarettes. Another half hour and we were descending toward what looked like a military airfield. After we had disembarked, they all patted me on the back and bid me farewell. They seemed to think I was the funniest thing they’d seen since Benny Hill. I was shown by an orderly to a small room in a barracks. I had a shower then fell onto a bed. I was deep in a coma within seconds.
* * * *
I was awakened around ten the next morning by a knock on the door. I muttered something while I was rubbing my face and the door opened. It was a man of about fifty in field uniform, with his sleeves rolled up to his biceps and a blue beret on his head. He took his beret off and slipped it under his lapel as he spoke.
“Good morning, Mr. Murdoch. Mind if I sit?” He didn’t wait for an answer. As I hauled myself up against my pillow, he pulled up a chair and straddled it the wrong way round, leaning on its back and facing me.
I said, “Hi. Who are you? And while we’re at it, what the hell is going on?”
He smiled agreeably and said, “Brigadier Reggie Hook. Feeling a bit better? You looked pretty rough when they brought you in.”
“I’m fine.”
Before I could repeat my question, he was talking again, pleasant and easy, like we’d just met at a cocktail party. “Situation’s a terrible mess. Ghastly confusion. Europe doesn’t know where to get a hold of it. That’s the trouble these days, isn’t it? In my day there were good guys and bad guys, and each one was on his side of the curtain. You knew who to root for.”
I said, “What are you doing here? You’re British. Are you supporting Spain?”
“Heavens, no!” He pointed to his blue beret. “Part of a UN emergency peacekeeping force.”
“You always use the SAS in peacekeeping operations?”
He smiled pleasantly. “SAS?”
“I just saw four of your men bring down three Hawks and annihilate a dozen men without raising a sweat. They have SAS written all over them.”
“I don’t think you’ll find any official SAS presence here, Mr. Murdoch. As I said, we’re a peacekeeping force.”
I sighed. “Sure…”
He pulled out a silver cigarette case and offered me a smoke. We lit up. He inhaled and held it, watching me. “These days,” he said, letting out the smoke as he talked, “good guys and bad guys can be all mixed up together, on both sides. And you find ordinary chaps, career soldiers, asking themselves all sorts of existential questions about what terms like good and evil actually mean. Do you ever ask yourself that, Mr. Murdoch?”
I frowned at him, “Sure. I mean, what is morning coffee without a bit of Jean Paul Sartre, right, Brigadier?”
He chuckled. “Let good old Russell do all your soul searching for you, do you?”
I froze with my cigarette half way to my mouth. “What do you know about Russell?”
“Oh, Russell and I have been friends for years. Same prep school. Then Westminster. He went to Oxford and I went to Sandhurst, of course, but we’re members of the same club.” He paused, watching me. “We often meet, dine, chew the cud. We share many views on the modern world.”
I said, “The same club?”
“Yes, the same club.”
He sat forward. “I’ve arranged for you to be flown back to the UK in the next hour. RAF Brize Norton. There’ll be a chap there to meet you and take you to London. Name’s Lieutenant Bird. He’s solid. He’ll get you through without any delays.”
“Through what?”
He stood and walked to the window. I said, “What’s going on, Brigadier? How did you know I was going to be at the Zafarraya Pass? I didn’t even know myself.”
He said to the window, “While you were in Andalusia, did you make contact with the Seraph?”
“The Seraph?”
“Yes, Murdoch, the Seraph.” He turned to face me. “Did you make contact with him?” I guess he could tell by my face that I had. He nodded and, just for a moment, he looked sick—the way people look sick when their worst nightmare stops being a nightmare because it’s become a reality. “Did you give him anything?”
I stared at him a long while. Finally, I said, “No.”
I saw him relax. I was about to say more but he cut me short. “Good. Please don’t give me any more information. Grab some coffee in the mess. I’ve told them to put it on my tab. Probably won’t see you before you go. Maybe catch up through Russell. Do take care.”
He stepped forward and offered me his hand. We shook and he left.
I had a long, hot shower then strolled over to the officers’ mess where I had two generous helpings of eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, toast, butter and marmalade, with a large pot of coffee. I told myself one day I’d invite Brigadier Reggie Hook to brunch.
When I was finishing, a corporal came to tell me my flight was ready to take off. I was flown in a troop carrier across the shattered and shredded remains of Spain, over Biscay and France then to RAF Brize Norton, near Oxford.
I was met there by a young lieutenant who saluted me smartly, said, “Mr. Murdoch? This way, please, sir,” and he led me to an unmarked
military Range Rover with smoked windows. He had obviously been told not to talk, because he let me in the back, climbed in behind the wheel and didn’t say another word till we reached Church Street. There he opened the door for me, courteously bid me a good day then drove off.
When he’d disappeared from view, I let myself in and rode the elevator to the lower apartment of my duplex, on the fifth floor. I let myself in with one of my skeleton keys and walked through to the living room. The keys I’d given Maria were there on the table, next to the black box. There were still traces of her makeup on it, where the guardia had spilled it. I smiled. She’d earned herself dinner at the Ritz. At least.
I picked up the box and turned it over, and ran my fingers over it. The lock was invisible, but if you knew what you were looking for, it was not impossible to find, especially when you had geek friends with the right kind of scanners. I touched it and the box silently opened, then closed again.
What my body was telling me was that I needed twenty-four hours’ deep, painless sleep, after half a bottle of Bushmills to anaesthetize all the various types of pain that composed my existence right then. But there were still a couple of things I needed to do. And the first was something I really didn’t want to do. I found my Daemon where I had left it. I climbed in, fired her up and cruised over to Rupert’s place in Richmond. This time I allowed Forbes to lead me to his master in the proper manner, with his dignity intact. Rupert was in the library and climbed to his feet as I walked in. He looked surprised. And scared, “Liam… Lord… Hello…”
I said, “We need to talk.”
He nodded. “Of course, please, sit down. Sorry.”
I waited while he poured me a drink. He handed it to me and sank into a Chesterfield. He had dark shadows under his eyes and his skin looked gray. He looked beat. I leaned my ass on the edge of a writing desk and watched him a while, hating what I had to do. Finally I said, “I found Mary-Jane.”
His eyes went wide and he stared hard at the floor. I was saying the words he wanted to hear, but the way I was saying them was all wrong. He said, “Is she…”
I took a stiff drink and swallowed. “She’s okay. She’d been living in a beach house near Torrox.”
He frowned. It still didn’t make any sense to him. He rubbed his face. “Strickland…the gardener… He had kidnapped her…”
“Strickland is dead, Rupert. Remember? He died the night Mary-Jane disappeared. Sooner or later you’re going to have to face up to that.”
He reached down beside his chair for a glass. I realized he’d been drinking steadily. He took a generous pull. After a moment he said, “Yes, I see… Face up to it. That’s the thing.”
“Do you remember who introduced you to her?” He nodded. I said, “Was it Serafino del Roble?”
He looked up at me, a little surprised, frowning, “Yes, it was, as it happens. He was a business associate of my uncle’s. Do you know him?”
I managed a smile. “Yeah, we’ve met. Listen, Rupert, I hate to do this to you, but I have to tell you the truth. Mary-Jane is not what she seems. She is a grifter, a con artist. She knew Strickland from before.”
He turned his face away, staring at the wall like the wall might make things better. But there was no way back for him, no way of fixing things, so I had to press on. I said, “She was involved with a woman.” He stood up and walked away. Stood with his back to me. I said, “They used Strickland. They planted him here. He was a yegg.”
He turned on me savagely. “A yegg? What in God’s name is a yegg? You come here, telling me these…stories? This fucking nonsense! Talking about…about…”
He crumpled forward, folding in on his belly. His knees buckled and he squatted down on the floor. He was making a whining noise and he kept sobbing the words, “Yegg… Fucking yegg…” over and over.
I drained my glass and put it down on the desk. I said, “Take it easy, Rupert.” I took hold of him, lifted him gently to his feet then guided him to a chair. “Sit down. This is going to hurt, but there’s no way out of it.”
He groped his way back into the chesterfield. His face was wet from sobbing. He kept saying, “She’s good…”
I sat opposite him. “She’d met del Roble some time back. You may have known him as a big shot in the Opus Dei.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. “He was a friend, an associate of my uncle’s. He was an investor for the Opus.”
“But he was a lot more than that, Rupert. He is the head of the Brotherhood. The Hermandad de la Cabra. He is a political mover and shaker behind the scenes. He uses any means necessary to acquire political power, including blackmail…and theft.”
He groped for his drink, took a hefty pull and sat staring at his glass. I waited for him to respond but he wouldn’t, so I went on. “A long way back, he recognized Mary-Jane’s potential and recruited her. He used her on several jobs, but he had a special use for her with you. He planted her on you. And she and her friend recruited Strickland.” I waited, watching him to see if it was sinking in. “They recruited Strickland because he was a yegg… A yegg is a safe cracker, Rupert.”
I waited, but he still didn’t say anything. Finally, I asked him, “Don’t you want to know what she was planted for? Don’t you want to know why she needed a safe cracker?”
He shrugged. “Does it matter?”
I nodded. “It matters enough for an awful lot of men to have died so far, including your uncle. It matters enough for war to have broken out in Europe for the first time in eighty years. So yeah, it matters. You had something that del Roble wanted real bad. He planted Mary-Jane, and Mary-Jane took it from you, with Strickland’s help. Then she double-crossed del Roble. And del Roble is prepared to kill—and keep on killing—until he gets it back.”
He shrugged again and drained his glass. “People are like that, Liam. They kill for stupid things.” Then he looked up at me. He was beginning to slur. “I told you before. Mary-Jane has stolen nothing from me.”
I wanted to give him a backhand and tell him to wake up. I wanted to grill him and get the truth out of him. But I kept running up against the fact that I felt sorry for the schmuck. He had more money than most people saw in a lifetime. He had owned and lost something that Mary-Jane Carter, Catherine Howard and Serafino del Roble would kill and keep killing for, and he didn’t care. All he cared about was that he had loved, and the love he had received in return had been a chimera.
Dreams. They are never more dangerous than when they turn out to be just dreams.
I figured he’d been through enough and I couldn’t get tough on him. I didn’t know if it was true or just another lie, but I said, “If it’s any consolation, Rupert, I got the impression that she grew to be real fond of you and regretted doing what she did.”
After a moment he smiled, and there was a glimmer of hope in his eyes. I pulled out a new pack of Camels and started to peal it. He said, “Really? Truly?”
I nodded as I lit the butt. I was going to give it one last shot. “But there’s one thing I don’t understand.”
He gave a small laugh. “Just one?”
I thought about that and smiled. I refilled our glasses and returned to the desk. “No, not just one. I guess none of us will ever understand women, Rupert. They don’t operate the way we do.”
He smiled at me and he looked oddly grateful. “They’re from Venus, right? And we’re from Mars.”
I managed a small laugh. “Right. What I don’t understand is what he wanted her to steal. What is it that means so little to you and so much to him?”
His eyes drifted and he stared at the carpet. After a while he said, “What will happen to her, Liam?”
I stared at him, thinking it wasn’t only women who were impossible to understand. Men in love were about as crazy as a box of frogs dancing tango to a Mexican orchestra. Finally, I said, “That depends on what she’s done—or more to the point, what they can prove. And a lot of that depends on whether you press charges or not.”
He was staring through the window at the garden. He suddenly spoke too loud, “She used to love the garden. Most days we’d walk there, even if it had rained or if it was raining. She liked the rain. Or, if we were entertaining and the weather was good, she’d open up the pool room and sit by the water to choose the menu.”
I wondered how much further Mary-Jane thought she could get from her past than Rupert Ferguson-Medicci. I said, “She wasn’t who you thought she was.”
“Really?” He turned to look at me. He smiled. “Maybe I didn’t think she was anybody. Maybe I didn’t fucking care who she was. Maybe I just loved her. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out, even to the edge of doom.”
He stood suddenly and walked unsteadily to the French windows, speaking over his shoulder as he went. “She loved the garden above all.”
He stepped out and walked onto the lawn. I sighed, stood then followed him out. He was going down a short flight of steps to a paved area. The folding doors around the covered pool had been pulled back. I caught up with him, standing at the edge, gazing down into the turquoise water. I stood with him a while. Eventually I said, “I watched her shoot three men two nights ago. I watched her chase del Roble and try to kill him.” I waited, but he still didn’t say anything. Finally, I said, “What did she take from you, Rupert?”
He looked at a spot near my feet. He blinked a few times, but with no expression at all. When he did speak, his voice was real quiet. “As far as I am concerned, Liam, I don’t care where she’s from, who she’s involved with or what she has done. If she killed those men, then they probably deserved to die. She has stolen nothing from me, but given me everything. Do you— Can you understand that? Please don’t come here talking about yeggs, asking me what scam she was involved in or what she stole. Only one thing matters to me, that when I met her I learned to love, and I have never been happier than when I loved her. If she has ever taken anything from me—or from my house—she has taken it with my blessing. I only wish that she would come back to me, so that I could give her more.”
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