by P. S. Bridge
‘Who are you? Why are you following me?’
No reply came, and the stranger tried to get past Mark. With a lightning quick move, Mark blocked his path, grabbed his shirt collar and hit him hard over the back of the head with the butt of his Glock. Mark rifled through his pockets but was disturbed by a car pulling up, doors opening and people shouting in Spanish. It was time for Mark to leave as he holstered the Glock and calmly walked in the opposite direction. He hurried back to Pablo, who was anxiously waiting for him.
‘Trouble?’ he asked with a thick Spanish accent. Mark nodded and replied sharply.
‘We best be going.’
But before he could blink, Pablo was on board the Sessa and starting the two powerful Volvo Penta IPS 600 engines. He shouted to Mark, who was still stood on the Marina watching for the stranger and his ‘friends’.
‘Come on!’ Pablo called and Mark leapt onto the boat and Pablo hit the throttle, roaring out of the harbour and towards Cabrera Island.
Mark was relaxing on the deck of the Sessa C44 with a cigarette and a laptop loaned to him by Pablo and he noted to himself that the only thing missing was the twelve-year-old single malt. He was desperate to dig into the history of the Invictus Advoca organisation and find out as much as possible. Mark logged into his secure email and noticed Nial Atkinson had sent him an email with many large files attached. For an old guy, he really kept up to date with new technologies. Mark downloaded the attachments, showing senior members of the organisation who were long dead, and some who were not.
There was a history of the organisation, of which Atkinson was a crucial part at one stage. There were connections to the Vatican, German High Command, which explained why Kastner caught Mark in Holtenau, London and the head of the current organisation was a man by the name of Thomas Theodore Lundon. A picture was attached, which was a CCTV image or something a covert photographer had taken, but it was difficult to gauge where Lundon was. He was slim and elderly, with grey hair and a very expensive suit. He was flanked by two people Mark instantly recognised, Roman Vose and Hix Lomas. Mark scowled when he saw Vose there and gradually things seemed to fit together.
Azidi was subcontracted by Thomas Lundon to take delivery of a shipment of weapons while Kastner turned a blind eye, however, Azidi was planning to conduct a little scheme of his own and carry out terrorist attacks in Berlin right under Kastner’s nose.
‘So it was possible,’ Mark thought to himself, ‘that Kastner was part of Invictus Advoca but didn’t know what Azidi was up to on the sly and was about to bust it open!’
Mark was doing the same thing that night in Holtenau. It all made sense to Mark now, especially that it was Thomas Lundon who ordered the hit on Marie. NOW Mark had a name and a face. The face looked strangely familiar but he couldn’t place it. Perhaps he had come across him in his past and only subconsciously remembered it.
Mark had exactly what he was after now, except one thing: details of Lundon’s whereabouts and personality. Perhaps this El Toro could help provide information on exactly what type of person Mark was dealing with.
Soon, they past S’Estanyol De Migjorn Point and turned south and headed directly towards Cabrera Island. Soon, Mark could see the ominous castle loom up on the horizon. Pablo explained there are many ghost stories about this island and that few people came here. It was also a national park so there were wild animals roaming and he warned Mark to be careful. Mark, by now, had sheathed his new rifle in its leather carry case, pocketed the ammo in his various combat pockets in his trousers and flak jacket, holstered his knife and Glock and was carrying water.
‘Thanks for your help Pablo.’ Pablo smiled and nodded. ‘Anchor close by, I have a feeling you may be needed.’
Mark began the hill climb, which led up to the castle.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Within an hour of Mark and Pablo parting company, Mark had reached a rocky outcrop under the castle. Light was fading, and the temperature was falling. Mark used his binoculars to scope the castle walls to look for a way in when something glinted in the fading sun. Mark’s first instinct was to focus on it but then he saw the quick muzzle flash of a sniper rifle and ducked as the bullet chipped the rocks to the side of him. Hitting the deck hard, his first thought was that Lundon’s henchmen had followed him here and that they guy following him in Nazaret Harbour had found out their location. Mark crawled to a better vantage point and within two moves, had fixed up his rifle and was scoping the rocks where the muzzle flash came from.
Something caught the corner of his eye and he rolled, mid-air, behind a rock just in time for another bullet, then another to ping off the surrounding rocks. Mark’s blood was pumping now, and he realised he was pinned down.
‘What a bugger I didn’t bring any grenades with me!’ he thought.
He waited for a moment, correctly assuming the shooter was reloading, and made a run for it. His way was pounded by automatic gunfire and he realised either the shooter had NOT reloaded but merely changed weapon, or there was more than one shooter.
Just as he approached the wall of the castle, he heard laughter and saw the shooter stood on the wall high above him.
‘If I wanted to, you would be floating home right now!’
Mark did not take kindly to this.
‘I’ll shoot you off that wall if you don’t shut up,’ he threatened, trying to get a fix on the man, not wanting to be outdone by some deranged Spanish mercenary.
‘Ha ha!’ squealed El Toro, ‘no one has ever got the better of El Toro. You want I shoot you now?’ He continued to mock Mark.
‘So this is the contact Atkinson told me to come and see!’
Mark peeked out from his cover position and shouted that Atkinson had sent him and used his real name.
‘Reynaldo Clemente! A friend sent me!’
There was silence.
The nurse eased the frail old man into his electric bed in his room and dimmed the light down. His breathing was laboured and his lungs crackly. Nial Atkinson gave a sigh as if, in silent resignation, he contemplated his end of days. The nurse looked soulfully at him. She remembered the first time he came to this place, vigorous, full of life but hiding dark secrets and the scars on his body were testament to the life he sometimes described to her. If he didn’t have more medication soon, it would be too late for him to recover from this infection. Nial, being the man he was, sensed something was wrong with the nurse and took her by the hand, patted it and winked at her. She couldn’t help but smile at this sad gesture and realised he was probably a serious catch in his younger days.
‘Goodnight Major.’
Nial smiled.
‘Goodnight, my dear.’
She turned to leave, but not before she cleverly picked up the cell phone under the pile of hospital notes she had left on his table. She shut the door and made her way to the nurse’s station. Once there, she made her excuses to go on her break and grabbed her coat and cigarettes and disposable lighter and went outside. She walked around the back of the nursing home to the smoking area, out of sight of residents and other staff and drew the cell phone from her apron pocket. She picked it up, opened it and checked the last dialled number. She hesitated for a moment and braced herself before pressing ‘dial’ and putting the phone to her ear.
‘Mr King. Mr Mark King?’ she whispered with a tremble in her voice, ‘this is Susan, a nurse from Sunningdale where your friend Mr Atkinson is a resident.’ She paused again. ‘It’s about your friend.’
It was nightfall when El Toro and Mark sat in two armchairs front of a roaring log fire which crackled in its huge ornate fireplace. They raised their whiskey glasses, toasting each other, and Mark gazed up at the stag’s head above the fireplace as he ended the call from the cell phone Atkinson had provided for him. El Toro spotted Mark’s interest.
‘There was a priest hole behind the fireplace which led to tunnels deep beneath the castle and out to a small hidden harbour at the north end of the island. I have a boat there
.’
El Toro also noticed a deep sadness in Mark that was not there before. He asked about the worry written all over Mark’s face. Mark took a deep breath and began his story, right the way through from his court case battle with Mohammed Al Azidi, to Marie’s murder, and everything that had happened since. El Toro sat back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other whilst Mark lit a cigarette as he explained.
‘My life has changed so much in the past three months.’
It was quite a story and Mark wasn’t even sure if El Toro would believe him but something he saw in El Toro’s eyes, something which looked like familiarity, glimmered and gave Mark a good indication he believed his story.
Mark spent an hour explaining his life story as El Toro got up to put more wood on the fire and refill their whiskey glasses. Mark was very warm in front of the fire and it sounded like it was a rough night out tonight.
‘It is rough. When you live on an island, Mark, it’s what you have to put up with.’
Mark smiled, thinking this was somewhere he could get used to.
‘Sounds like paradise,’ he said distantly. El Toro looked at him, knowing he had seen sights he would rather forget. El Toro, being an expert interrogator in his former life, questioned Mark.
‘Bad news from home?’
‘A friend of mine is elderly and isn’t well but was refusing drugs and I don’t know why.’
El Toro’s eyes narrowed. ‘Señor Nial?’ he asked.
Mark looked puzzled.
‘How did you…?’
It was El Toro’s turn to tell a fireside story, so he unravelled the mystery surrounding how El Toro and Atkinson knew each other.
‘Nial and I go way back. We were captured together in Bosnia. Special Forces. They fed him many kind of drug to make him tell them what he knew. He did not crack.’ Mark was horrified. ‘That is why he no take a drugs now.’
‘He’d rather have the pain than the memories?’ Mark asked.
‘Wouldn’t you?’ replied El Toro, looking seriously at Mark.
As Mark listened, El Toro threw a lot of names into the conversation, some of which Mark had recognised from his research, and some were new to him. It was at that point that Mark reached into his bag and bought out the photograph of Nial Atkinson and others during their military days. El Toro chuckled.
‘I remember the day and night after that picture was taken. That is me,’ he said leaning over and pointing himself out in the picture and going left to right, naming all those he could remember.
His finger stopped on the man stood next to Atkinson and he trembled. He sat back in his chair as if he had seen a ghost and stared at it. He stared at it so hard Mark half expected it to burst into flames at any moment.
‘What’s the problem? Who is that?’ Mark asked, pointing at the man in the photograph, the man El Toro had not named.
El Toro looked shocked at Mark, as if he was dumbfounded that he didn’t know who that was. Mark turned the picture over and examined it in more detail. El Toro got up and leant against the fireplace. From behind the stag’s head, he pulled a picture in a cardboard frame and brought it over to the small polished oak carved table they were sharing. He pulled his double-barrelled shot gun closer to use to prop himself up. He placed the picture on the table purposefully, the way a secret service agent would place evidence or an offender file in front of someone in interrogation. Mark stared at the picture, identical to the one he had found. A few, if not all, of the people in the photograph, could hold a copy of the same picture. Mark stubbed his cigarette in the waist high stand-up three-legged ashtray and exhaled as he looked around the room, as if for some flash of inspiration. El Toro stood over him.
‘Why you want so much information?’
Mark was slightly intimidated by this but wasn’t about to let it show, not even to El Toro. He jumped up to face El Toro, who looked equally surprised at this as Mark was at having had El Toro stood over him. The two faced each other before sitting back down. El Toro stared at Mark for a long time before drawing in his breath.
‘Many of the people in that picture had formed part of the Invictus Advoca, initially as a justice group to defend those who felt they couldn’t turn to their governments or authorities for help, people who required strength outside the law.’
Mark scoffed at this.
‘Like the A-Team?’ he laughed.
El Toro didn’t share Mark’s humour and stared at him angrily. Mark realised he wasn’t joking and looked sheepish at having made a bad joke at a bad time. El Toro continued.
‘Many of them assisted because they believed in justice. Real justice, not the rubbish people try to be palmed off with through the courts!’
This comment hurt Mark, as he had always tried to be just when trying a case. El Toro neither cared nor stopped talking.
‘Soon, a few of them banded together privately to discuss how disgusted they were because Invictus Advoca was branching out to undertaking professional “hits” and murdering innocent people, taking over countries and supporting terrorist regimes. This angered us and we tried to leave.’
‘And went into hiding,’ Mark said, nodding.
‘Most were hunted down and killed by the then-head of Invictus Advoca, a man who had forced his way to the top to create corruption, murder, deceit and bribery.’
El Toro stopped, almost afraid to mention his name. Mark was getting impatient.
‘Who?’
El Toro stared Mark in the eye as his finger pointed to the man with his arm around a young Nial Atkinson.
‘OK, so they were friends,’ thought Mark as he looked just as puzzled. Puzzled, that was, until El Toro spoke his name.
‘Thomas Theodore Lundon.’
Mark’s eyes widened in horror as he went dizzy at the gravity of what El Toro had just told him.
He stomped around the hall in front of the fire with a whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other, shouting insult after insult while he comprehended the enormity of the situation. The man he was hunting, the man who ordered the murder of his wife, was the best friend of Nial Atkinson. Now he REALLY didn’t know what to do. No wonder Nial was so helpful towards Mark when he explained what he was doing. El Toro walked over to Mark and put both his hands on Mark’s shoulders to calm him down and stop him wearing a hole in the fire place rug. He spoke carefully and quietly to him, giving Mark no choice but to listen carefully to what he was saying.
‘Listen to me Mark, this man needs to be killed dead. The world is not safe while he lives.’
Mark was breathless and panicked. How could he have missed that? It made little sense. El Toro picked up the picture and stared at it again, not being able to place three or four other people in the picture.
‘Another picture exists of the ENTIRE Invictus Advoca organisation heads around the world.’
Mark looked up at him.
‘They meet once a year in secret to discuss their “empire” and if you want to take the organisation out, you will have to hit the entire organisation in one.’
Mark nodded. He agreed but El Toro, although he had suggested the idea, really didn’t think Mark would take up the idea!
‘Taking out the entire organisation is suicidal and impossible.’ Mark wasn’t for turning. ‘It would create a vacuum for other members to be promoted within the organisation and carry on its work in place of those you might kill.’
Mark looked lost and hopeless.
‘What am I supposed to do? What was the point in Marie’s death, what did SHE do to deserve to die?’
El Toro sat Mark down, passed him a cigarette and a brandy from a decanter on the table and explained exactly how the Invictus Advoca worked.
When he had finished, Mark was stunned. He was loaded with useful information about how to infiltrate them, but he was still stunned. El Toro added that there were four members of the organisation, heads of it, who were unaccounted for and probably had assumed names. Mark had no idea how to trace them if El Toro an
d Nial Atkinson didn’t know their names. Decades to change names, places, and hide; Mark felt lost. The only thing on his mind was the question of how he would pull the trigger on Thomas Lundon, being a friend of Nial Atkinson. Mark reached for his cell phone.
The nurse had returned to Nial Atkinson’s room whilst he was sleeping and returned his phone. It was lucky that she did as, shortly after the nurse closed the door, it rang. Atkinson reached with a trembling arm and answered the phone. His voice seemed no different to the caller than it did days earlier when they had sat and played chess face to face, discussing Invictus Advoca.
‘Nial? Mark. Tell me about the photograph.’
Atkinson’s face dropped, and he realised he would have to be, for the first time in his life, one hundred percent honest with Mark. He sighed, propped himself up on his pillow, and explained his relationship with Thomas Lundon, why Nial Atkinson wasn’t his real name, why he owned a nuclear ex-government bunker at an undisclosed location and why he was now in hiding under this assumed name, at Sunning Dale Nursing Home. None of this was easy to do for Atkinson, but seeing as he concealed himself from his family for their protection and had set up trust funds in their names, he couldn’t be traced and had little use in life left. This was his last confession.