by James Becker
‘So what do we do now?’ she asked.
‘For the moment, nothing. I’ve asked Billy to try to find out where the call was made from when I heard Stebbins on the line. If he can do it, that’s probably where we’ll find him, alive or dead.’
Angela shuddered.
‘Do you really think they’ve killed him?’
‘I don’t know,’ Bronson replied. ‘I’m hoping they might be keeping him on ice, because they must know that he’s now the only bargaining counter they have left. The one hope they have of finding us — or rather of finding you and the parchment — is if we try to rescue Stebbins.’
‘But if they are holding him alive somewhere, in a warehouse or house or somewhere, how the hell can we rescue him? There could be half a dozen or more armed men waiting there, just hoping that we’ll show up.’
‘Right now,’ Bronson said, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’
75
With nothing much else they could do but wait, they ordered room service and then lay side by side on the double bed, talking through the events of the day one more time and planning their next move.
After half an hour of what quickly felt like pointless speculation, Bronson asked if he could see the parchment, the cause of all the trouble they were in. They spent a few minutes looking at the ancient relic — which was actually a remarkably dull sight, just a piece of thick dark brown leather upon which a few letters or partial words could be seen — and studying the photographs of the object that had been taken by Ali Mohammed back in Cairo what felt like weeks ago.
‘Well, it certainly doesn’t look like much,’ Bronson remarked.
‘Nor did the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadi codices,’ she replied. ‘It’s what it says, and what the text actually means in today’s world, which is important. And until I get this relic back to the museum and subject it to a proper analysis, I won’t know exactly what event it’s describing.’
The screen on Bronson’s laptop suddenly changed, the screensaver vanishing as a Skype call came in.
‘At last,’ Bronson said. ‘That must be Billy.’
Bronson answered the call, and asked if the youthful hacker had found out anything useful.
‘I managed to pull some data, yes,’ Billy replied, ‘but it wasn’t easy. I had to run the hacking software through a bunch of proxies so nobody would be able to trace it back to me, and that slowed everything down. The good news is that if any of the Spanish security people decide to run a back-trace to try to find me, the trail will stop in Vienna. I thought that was kind of appropriate, Vienna being full of spies during the Cold War.’
Billy chuckled at his own joke for a moment, then got down to the business at hand.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘the phone number you asked me to investigate, the one that seems to belong to this guy Pere. The records only start from a few days ago, and he’s used it quite a bit, and from a bunch of different places in Madrid, so I guess he’s been out and about, probably looking for the two of you.’
‘That makes sense,’ Bronson replied.
‘You gave me a time, or a rough time anyway, when you wanted me to nail down his location, and that’s one of the places where he seems to spend quite a bit of time. I can’t be absolutely specific about where that is. It’s not anywhere near the centre of Madrid, so there are fewer masts to use for triangulation. But I’ve been able to pinpoint the spot to within about thirty metres.’
‘That’s brilliant, Billy. I’m ready to copy if you can read the location to me.’
‘With all this technology at your disposal,’ Billy scoffed, ‘you’re still using a paper and pencil? I’ve already sent the location to you. You’ll find it in your “My documents” folder on your hard drive. I’ve called the file “Bad guy”. If you want my guess, I think it’s probably a warehouse or an office on some kind of industrial estate, because of its position. It’s called Paracuellas de Jarama, and it lies pretty much halfway between the Barajas International Airport and the Torrejón Airport, and they’re both out to the north-east of Madrid.’
‘That’s excellent work, Billy,’ Bronson said. ‘I’ll make sure I see you as soon as I get back to England to settle up with you.’
‘You just do what you’ve got to do out there, my friend. I’m in no hurry. Oh, and the last time I ran the check through the system, the guy you’re looking for — or at least his mobile — was still at that location.’
76
‘So what do we do now?’ Angela asked. ‘Have you had any good ideas?’
Bronson didn’t reply for a few moments, just stared at the map of Madrid.
‘Right now, Angela, I don’t know what’s a good idea and what isn’t. But I do know that striking early is generally a good tactic. Think about it from the other side of the problem for a moment. The people who are trying to kill you and recover the parchment absolutely know that they’ve got us on the run. OK, there was a bit of a fiasco as far as they were concerned at the café. Unfortunately for them, I was there as well. But that didn’t really even slow them down. They tracked us to our hotel and sent along another hitman to finish off the job. We were lucky, because we’d already left the room and were on our way to the car when he identified us.’
He paused for a moment and glanced at Angela.
‘Given that all that’s happened today, I’m prepared to bet that the bad guys are still out combing the streets of Madrid looking for us, and they’ll be doing their best to make sure that we can’t leave the city. They’ll have a watch in place inside both the airports, and at the main railway station, and they’ll be looking out for the first sign that we’re on the move. In other words, they’ll be doing whatever they can to lock the city down tight, and they seem to have the resources necessary to achieve that.’
‘So you mean that if we try to go anywhere, they’ll find us?’ Angela asked.
But Bronson shook his head.
‘Not necessarily. My guess is that they’ll be expecting us to try to leave town. But they don’t know about Billy the Kid, and what he managed to do with a wireless network, a laptop computer, a handful of programs and some pretty dammed awesome hacking skills. They won’t have any idea that we know where they are. And even if they did have the slightest inkling of that, I think the last thing they would expect us to do is take the game to them.’
‘Attack is the best form of defence?’
‘Exactly. I think we should get out to this location that Billy managed to identify for us’ — Bronson tapped the map for emphasis — ‘and see what we can do there. At the very least,’ he finished, ‘that’ll be the last place in Madrid where they’ll be looking for us.’
Angela glanced at her watch.
‘Just one question,’ she said. ‘How do we get out there?’
‘I’m not sure we should be going anywhere. I’d far rather you stayed in the hotel. They can’t possibly have found out that we’re staying here, so you’d be safe.’
Angela shook her head.
‘I’ll make this really simple for you,’ she said. ‘If you’re going out, then so am I. There’s no way I could just sit here in this hotel room waiting for a knock on the door, hoping it’s you and dreading that it isn’t. And if you don’t come back, then what the hell would I do? No, if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it together, whether you like it or not.’
Sometimes wisdom lies in recognizing a fait accompli when you see one. Bronson knew that Angela was one of the most determined people he had ever met. And, in truth, in many ways he would rather that she was with him — in previous sticky situations she’d always proved a competent partner.
‘OK, if that’s what you want,’ Bronson said.
‘It is. So how do we get out there? Use the hire car?’
‘We’re not going anywhere near that car. If we drive around in that there’s a good chance we’ll be spotted by one of the bad guys out looking for us, or maybe even stopped by the police, because that car’s missing two
windows and there’s a gouge in the roof where I scraped it when we drove out of the hotel garage. We’ll have to hire another one.’
‘Right then,’ Angela said. ‘Let’s go. What about the parchment and our stuff?’
Bronson glanced round the room.
‘I think we have to leave it here. There’s no paper trail linking us to this hotel or this room, so it should be safe enough. And we’ll need to come back here afterwards.’
Bronson spent a couple of minutes using a cheap multitool he’d bought at Madrid airport to remove the plastic side panel from the bath, and then Angela slid the metal-lined briefcase into the space this revealed. Bronson replaced the panel and then fiddled about with some oversized paperclips he took from his computer case, bending them into different shapes.
‘And they are?’ Angela asked, as he slid them into his pocket.
‘Door keys, of a sort. Just some rudimentary lock-picks in case they’re not obliging enough to have left a door open for me.’
Finally, he checked the Beretta pistol. It was the M92 model in nine-millimetre Luger, the end of the barrel threaded to take a GemTech Trinity suppressor. Bronson checked the magazine.
‘Definitely a professional,’ he murmured.
‘What?’
Bronson showed her the magazine.
‘This holds fifteen rounds,’ he said, ‘and the man who shot at you fired twice, but there are fourteen bullets left. That means he fully loaded the magazine, then chambered the first round, took out the magazine and placed another round in it. So he had one round in the breech and ready to fire, and a full magazine in the butt. That’s the mark of a professional. You were very lucky.’
Angela gave a shiver.
‘You don’t have to remind me,’ she said. ‘I can still see that man in my mind’s eye.’
Bronson slid the magazine into the pistol, pulled back the slide and released it, to load the first round, then removed the magazine and placed it in his pocket. Then he inserted the full magazine, giving him a maximum of sixteen shots. The suppressor made the weapon far too bulky to be concealed, so Bronson removed it and slipped it into another pocket on his jacket. He tucked the pistol into the waistband of his trousers, made sure that it was invisible under his jacket, and then glanced across at Angela.
‘Right,’ he said, then echoed her statement of a few minutes earlier. ‘Let’s go.’
77
Finding a cab wasn’t difficult, even that late in the evening, and less than five minutes after they’d stepped through the front door of the hotel, they were sitting in the back of a rather battered Mercedes and heading towards the international airport.
When they arrived, Bronson paid the fare and then led Angela towards the arrivals hall. He was reasonably certain that any watchers would be covering departures, expecting that he and Angela would be trying to leave the city. As he’d expected, there were large groups of people milling around on the pavement outside the building, perhaps waiting for friends to pick them up, or just deciding whether to take a taxi or bus.
‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ Bronson said. ‘There are plenty of people around here, so just try to merge in with the crowds, and you’ll be safe enough.’
He kissed her lightly on the lips, then stepped to one side, strode across the pavement and disappeared inside the building.
Angela knew that what Bronson had said made sense. Of all the places in Madrid that they could have gone to avoid pursuit, the arrivals terminal at the international airport was one of the least likely. And he was right about the crowds. Granted, most of the women of about her age who were outside the building had the black hair and tanned complexions that were characteristic of Spanish nationals, and with her pale skin and blonde hair she stood out to some extent. But there were enough girls and young women with fair hair in the crowds for her to feel relatively inconspicuous. And she only needed to be there for about ten minutes or so, she hoped, before Bronson would reappear and then they could leave.
It was actually closer to fifteen minutes before he walked out of the building and beckoned to her to follow him. The two of them followed the directions which Bronson had been given, and made their way to the parking area reserved for vehicles belonging to the car hire companies operating at the airport.
‘It should be somewhere in this row here,’ Bronson said, depressing the button on the remote control.
He was rewarded by flashing indicator lights on a Renault Megane a few yards away, and stepped over to it, opening up the passenger door for Angela to get in. Then he sat down in the driver’s seat and familiarized himself with the controls before taking his satnav from his pocket and attaching it to the windscreen in front of him. When Billy had sent the information to Bronson’s computer, he’d supplied the recorded position of the mobile phone in latitude and longitude, and as soon as the unit was logged on to the navigation satellites, he input the precise location. By the time he’d started the engine, the satnav had already calculated the route.
‘You’re not going to just drive straight there, are you?’ Angela asked, buckling her seatbelt.
‘No.’ Bronson was studying their destination on the small screen of the satnav. ‘Depending on how accurate the triangulation was for that mobile phone,’ he said, ‘it looks as if the place we need to get to is a part of this industrial estate. It’s called the Polígono Industrial Los Planetas. So what we’ll do is get over there and drive past the building that is closest to the coordinates Billy sent me. Once we’ve checked the area and identified the most likely location, then we’ll work out a plan of campaign and decide the best thing to do.’
He put the car into reverse, backed out of the parking slot and drove away. It wasn’t a long drive, and within just a few minutes they were heading down a road that appeared to be recently constructed.
‘I think that must be it,’ Bronson said, gesturing towards a large building, presumably a kind of warehouse, the only building within a large plot. Three cars were parked outside, and a light was burning in the window beside the entrance door on the right of the building. Most of the rest of the frontage was occupied by two large roller-shutter doors, which obviously allowed large vehicles to enter the building for loading or unloading.
It looked as if the industrial estate hadn’t been quite as popular as the builders had probably hoped, because there were vacant lots on both sides of the road he had just turned into, each displaying a for-sale sign.
He carried on to the T-junction at the end, and then again turned right, his route taking him behind the building that Billy the Kid had identified. Time spent on reconnoitring, as Bronson knew only too well from his days in the Army, and to a lesser extent in the police force, was never, ever, wasted. Unfortunately, there wasn’t very much in the way of cover in the area behind the warehouse, no convenient stands of trees or even collections of shrubs or bushes that could be used to conceal his vehicle.
But there was a building occupying part of the adjacent lot. This structure was surrounded by a high wire fence, the small car park protected by a tall gate, which looked as if it was controlled electrically. An attempt had been made to impose some sort of order on the grounds inside the fence, but it all looked a little sad and unkempt. The sign above the building, giving an estate agent’s name and telephone number in large and hopeful letters, said it all.
The street on the opposite side of the building was, Bronson realized, ideal. The vehicle would be on the road, ready to be driven away, only about fifty yards from his objective, but completely out of sight.
‘This will do nicely,’ he said, pulling the car to a halt beside the wire fence surrounding the structure. Then he turned to look at Angela.
‘So what’s the plan?’ she asked.
‘For the moment, you stay here. Sit in the driving seat, keep the keys in the ignition ready to go, and the doors locked. Open all the windows about six inches so you can hear what’s happening outside. If anybody apart from me comes anywhere near the ca
r, just start it and go. Turn left onto the road in front of you, then take a right at the T-junction. According to the satnav, just beyond that there’s a biggish roundabout. Take the first exit, and park somewhere along that road, so I’ll know where to find you. If anyone you don’t like the look of comes anywhere near the car when you get over there, drive away and come back to the same spot ten minutes later.’
‘Got it,’ Angela said. ‘And while I’m driving around this area trying to avoid the bad guys, what exactly will you be doing?’
‘I’m just going to take a look around, that’s all. Watch the building for a few minutes, check where all the doors are located, that kind of thing. When I’ve done that, we can decide what our next move is going to be.’
Angela nodded.
‘Just make sure that’s all you do,’ she said. ‘Don’t try some kind of one-man assault on the building.’
‘Trust me, Angela. When have I ever let you down?’
‘Frequently,’ she replied, giving him a quick smile.
Bronson leaned across the car and kissed her, and in moments he’d vanished into the gloom of the late evening.
78
As soon as he had gone, Angela climbed nimbly into the driver’s seat, turned on the ignition to lower the electric windows, as Bronson had asked her to do, and locked all the doors. Then all she could do was wait. And hope.
She realized that there was a good chance they were wasting their time. It was quite possible that George Stebbins had already been dead for hours, and was even then lying in some anonymous ditch on the outskirts of Madrid. But her fervent hope was that Pere, which she thought was a deceptively pleasant name, would have decided to keep Stebbins alive for a while longer, just in case he could still be used as a bargaining counter. And if that was the reality of the situation, then the chances were that her colleague would be imprisoned somewhere in the building that was now just out of sight.