by Alex Archer
“That sounds very vague. Are you sure about this?”
“I can send you shipping logs, as long as they can’t be traced back to me. They give the ship, date, time and the container number.”
“Ah, an anonymous tip-off. No problem, if that’s how you want to play it, but you could just have rung customs.”
“I could have, but I owe you. I don’t owe anyone in Spanish customs. Though I must admit, I rather like the idea of being in your debt.”
She laughed. He liked the sound of it. Maybe he wasn’t so tired, after all. It wouldn’t be a lot of effort to reroute the plane to an airport not a million miles away from The Hague. “And you really won’t tell me what we’re going to find when we open the container?”
“That would only lead to more questions I can’t answer. Trust me, you want to do this.”
“Okay, I can live with that. Send whatever you have to me and I’ll put something into action. I don’t suppose you’ve got anything on Martínez’s whereabouts?”
He thought about telling her and giving Garin something else to worry about, but ended up saying, “Sorry, I wish I did.”
EPILOGUE
00:00: The Port of Almería
The port swarmed with customs officers and armed police.
The threat was considered high enough to warrant extra support being drafted in. Once Elise had put the word out to Europol, everything had happened so quickly. Wheels that would usually have taken months to grease were in motion without a single squeak within moments of the alert going out. People took new leads on the activities of the Brotherhood of the Burning seriously, especially now that links to the fascist group and the courthouse bombing in Seville had been found. It was surprising the army wasn’t present, too, with orders to shoot to kill. The government wanted this cancer excised from Spain at all costs.
Enrique Martínez was public enemy number one.
As the first wave of officers boarded the ship, demanding to see the manifest, a helicopter circled overhead, an eye in the sky to keep watch for anyone attempting to flee. If Martínez was here, they were bringing him in or gunning him down.
The crew was assembled on the foredeck while the offending container was located and a crane used to lift it from the cargo vessel. The ship wasn’t going to be allowed to leave the port until the container had been searched and the captain had made a statement for the police. The same went for the customs officers who had checked the seals and overseen its loading.
“What’s this all about?” an irritable captain demanded, but the customs officers were there to carry out their instructions, not to engage in conversation. He would have to wait his turn. The crane lifted the metal container and carried it out over the water, moving slowly, since even the officials weren’t sure what they were dealing with. Eventually, the container was lowered onto the quayside, the scarred blue metal seemingly innocuous among the other thousands of containers that would pass through the port that day alone.
“Okay, let’s crack this bad boy open,” one man said.
In an office in The Hague, Elise just prayed that the container wasn’t empty. That wasn’t so much to ask, was it?
Bolt cutters were applied and at last the end of the container swung open. The contents of the simple wooden crate inside left them all breathless when it was finally prized open for all to see.
There was a knock at Elise’s door.
“You’ve got a visitor, ma’am,” her assistant said.
“Show him in,” Elise told her. “I think he’d like to see this.”
She heard a phone ringing. It wasn’t hers. Her visitor answered on the second ring.
“Well played, you old bastard” was all the caller said before hanging up.
* * * * *
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ISBN-13: 9781460344866
Death Mask
Copyright © 2015 by Worldwide Library
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Steven Savile for his contribution to this work.
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