“Well, there’s the Sally on our course, but… No!”
“Oh yes,” confirmed Gina, her face deadpan but her eyes giving something away. “The boys must have been very persuasive.”
“Steve?” I turned towards him as I spoke. “How on earth did you get Sally to hand over her passport? And where did the wig come from?”
Steve was silent for several moments, a sly smile playing on his lips. “Gina borrowed the wig from a friend,” he replied. “As for Sally, Txako and I worked on her together.”
CHAPTER 2
It was still dark in the dormitory block. The cold, salty air pushing down across the Bay of Biscay seemed to find every crack in the masonry and timberwork. He shivered as he turned over in his narrow bunk, the small movement enough to draw a waft of chill air under the single blanket that covered him. He wondered for the thousandth time whether he dared speak to the nurse about what was happening, and as before he shrank from the thought.
Partly, of course, it was the humiliation of talking about such things that kept him silent. But more than that it was fear that gagged him: fear of bring branded a liar, fear of losing what passed as a home life, and fear also of what He would do when He found out. That He would find out, there could be no doubt. And who would believe a child’s word against that of a priest, let alone the word of a…? He could not remember the term for someone like himself, but he had heard it. It was an ugly word even when they were not using it spitefully, scornfully, the way they usually did. There was nobody he could speak to without making things worse.
The boy slept again for a few merciful minutes, but all too soon the bell sounded. All too soon he had to drive himself out into the draughty washroom with its ice-cold water and damp, mildewed towels. Then inspection followed by Mass and – unless he was very lucky – the horror of the confessional booth.
JACK
“I think we have a file on that name.” Miguel was finishing off a second cup of coffee, and to Julio’s obvious displeasure he was polluting the apartment with a cheap, foul-smelling cigar. “We’ll check it out when we get back to HQ. But if I’m remembering correctly, Santiago Ibarra kept going as a separatist agitator on the French side of the border for years—small fry, always going to ground at the first sign of trouble. After the restoration of the monarchy he came back to Spain, and as far as I know he’s stayed out of trouble since then. Either that or he’s playing a much cleverer game. But enough chatter; we’ve a lot of ground to cover. And while I think you were immensely naïve and stupid, I don’t understand how your little adventure could have put you in such serious danger.”
“Shall I go on?” asked Jack. “I’m not sure how relevant all of this is.”
“If you want me to be honest, a lot of it isn’t. I’d rather suffer a bit of overkill than have something significant left out, but you have to remember that this is a criminal investigation. What we need to get to is who was involved and how they’re connected to one another.”
Jack nodded, but as he drew in breath to resume his narrative the apartment’s phone rang. Alonso reached it first, answered curtly, then passed the handset to his superior. Miguel barked a question and listened intently for two or three minutes without interrupting. Finally, having obtained a brief answer to one further question, he hung up and turned to address the other three people in the room. From what he had been able to glean from Miguel’s side of the conversation, Jack was not surprised to see anxiety on his face. Less easy to understand was the half-concealed look of puzzlement that accompanied it.
“Gentlemen, we have a situation,” announced the detective gravely. “It seems the cavalry have turned up, found the Indians mobilised in greater strength than expected, and sounded the retreat. On the plus side, our best intelligence is that they don’t have the numbers for a door-to-door search of the neighbourhood. We’re advised to sit tight.”
There was silence in the room for a full minute. Then the normally taciturn Alonso spoke. “With respect, Chief, whatever our best intelligence is, we need to make a move.”
“Explain, Alonso. You’re the ops man.”
“They don’t need to go from door to door. They must have found the car by now, and they’ll know we can’t be far away. They’ll be monitoring the police frequencies. And any outfit that can stage a demonstration on this scale probably has access at the telephone exchange as well.” He paused before continuing in a lower, mildly apologetic tone. “You were on the phone for over five minutes.” His words were calm and confident, but even Jack noticed something edgier in the body language.
“Good thinking, Alonso,” replied the detective in a tone of voice that kept an unspoken dialogue going behind the measured words. “Keep watch on the street. Everyone else, stay away from the windows.”
Alonso flattened himself against wall beside the window and peered diagonally down at the street. “Clear at the moment. Instructions, Chief?”
“Just keep watching. And this is your speciality. What do you think?”
“Still clear, but we need to get out of this apartment. I suggest we bluff our way into one of the units on the first floor. I’m betting they’ll come up here first, but when they find us gone they’ll work their way down through the block one floor at a time. It’s still not a great position to be in, but if they’re careless we may be able to slip out via the fire escape. Still clear.”
There was a pause of several seconds, during which Jack tried hard to come up with a helpful suggestion. “No, wait,” hissed Alonso before the Englishman had a chance to collect his thoughts. “There is something going on down there.”
Miguel looked Alonso in the eye for a long moment, then his face set hard. “OK, move,” he ordered. “Down four floors, then we’ll knock somebody up and tell them we’re investigating a complaint. Go.”
Keep moving. Keep your head down. Don’t make a sound. A voice from an earlier decade reverberated inside Jack’s head as one by one they hurried through the front door of the apartment and down the stairs.
Reaching the first floor, they slipped through a door onto the landing just as they heard heavy footsteps on the stairs leading up from the foyer. Miguel rang the nearest doorbell, simultaneously rapping on the wooden door with the knuckles of his other hand. He gestured at Alonso, who started across towards one of the other apartments. Then the first door opened, and Miguel found himself looking into the face of a big and florid middle-aged man in white shirtsleeves.
“Police,” barked Miguel with urgency in his tone. “We need to come in and talk to you.” Then, without more ado, he shouldered his way past the bewildered occupier and beckoned the others to follow. Alonso was the last man through the door, and barely had time to push it quietly shut before sounds filtered through from outside.
“Report, Red Leader,” demanded the voice on the radio.
“Negative outcome, Captain,” replied the squad leader nervously. “Target residence shows signs of recent occupation but was vacant at the time of entry. All the same, Captain, brilliant idea of yours, cross-checking the…”
“And naturally you searched the neighbouring apartments,” interrupted his superior.
“Indeed, Captain, the entire block. And we thought at one point that we’d found them. But it was just a group of friends playing cards.”
“Unacceptable, Red Leader. I’ve considerably overplayed my hand. I committed all the resources you said were needed to guarantee the outcome. I will now have to deal with the fallout.”
“Captain, I’m recommending that we remain in the field. The targets must be on the street by now, and we still have a chance of intercepting them.”
“You’ll need the cover of darkness to withdraw, so you have a little time in hand. Don’t waste it, Red Leader. For all our sakes and particularly for yours.”
The captain cut the radio connection and reached for his mobile phone. “Bird has flown,” he tapped in as a text message, “but hawks are still in the air.” He knew that in the event of f
ailure he was in every bit as much danger as his squad leader.
Several hundred kilometres to the south, a powerful man read the message and scowled. Just like Jack Burlton, he could not believe that events four decades in the past could still be causing so much trouble.
“Smart work, Engleesh,” panted Alonso with only the merest trace of a grudge in his voice and perhaps even a hint of respect, still adjusting his uniform as they walked. “But we’re fortunate that Julio’s mother’s friends recognised him and played along. And that the guy’s clothes more or less fitted me.”
“Skill is knowing how to turn fortune to advantage,” wheezed Jack over his shoulder. He was somewhat out of condition even for a man of his age. “It’s what kept me alive forty years ago when better people didn’t make it. Sorry if that sounds smug, but I’ve always been an opportunist.”
“Silence!” It was Miguel, calling back to them as they made their way across the shadowy parking area behind the apartment block. Surrounded as they were by concrete and brickwork, even his hoarse stage whisper echoed back at them jarringly.
They regrouped by the exit ramp and spoke in whispers. “I’m going to call in for support,” announced Miguel, “but we need to arrange a safe rendezvous. The radio won’t give our exact location away like the phone lines, but it can be triangulated, and they’ll be able to hear every word I say. We need a clever way of communicating our location—something our people can decode that will keep the bad guys guessing.”
”Don’t you have a mobile?” asked Jack. “I gather they’re harder to tap than exchange lines.”
The three officers looked at one another briefly, and Miguel hesitated before replying. “We’re not carrying them. Too easy to track. And not really that hard to tap if you know the phone’s number or location. What about you?”
Jack put his hand in his pocket and pulled out an iPhone in an orange silicon case. “It’s dead,” he replied after a moment. “It hasn’t been on charge since I left home.”
“Then we need a code, as I said in the first place. Any ideas?”
“It depends who the bad guys are. Are they likely to understand Basque.”
“Probably not,” admitted Miguel, “but none of us can speak it, and I don’t suppose anyone at HQ can either.”
“Shame,” replied Jack. “I know a few words. Well, it’s not safe here. Perhaps we should focus on finding a safer location, then think about telling your colleagues where we are.”
“Fair enough. Any ideas?”
“Possibly. I’m assuming the bad guys are more dangerous in their cars than on foot.”
“To a degree, yes.”
“So we need somewhere that’s only accessible on foot, but not too far from the road. I’ve got an idea. Shall I take the lead?”
Miguel hesitated a moment too long before replying, and before he could ask questions Jack was on the move. He advanced in a peculiar hunched posture – not unlike a competitor in a walking race – as the voices in his head resumed their clamour for attention: Keep moving. Keep your head down. Don’t make a sound. The three officers followed in growing puzzlement as he led them on a zigzag route through the ever-darkening streets.
Jorge Serrano, the Red Leader, swung the wheel of his deliberately bland, forgettable Japanese SUV hard into a U-turn. He had progressed half way to the city centre as he and his partner scanned opposite sides of the road for anyone on foot. But it was as if a curfew had been declared. The people of this region had a nose for trouble, and the streets were all but deserted.
He pulled over and turned to his partner, a fair-haired body-builder from Barcelona. The big man preferred fighting to thinking, but he was an old street-gang kid with reliable instincts to go with the prison tattoos.
“Hey, Martí, you want to think about something for me? Suppose you were stranded down in the ensanche and there were people out on the streets looking for you. What would you do?”
Martí gave no outward sign of having heard a word, but the leader knew better than to speak again. His junior partner outgunned him on every level – strength, aggression, resourcefulness, ambition – and barring a nasty accident would almost certainly outrank him within months. There was unbroken silence for a couple of minutes during which Serrano thought wishfully about nasty accidents, then came the response: “I’d stay put as long as possible. But when I decided it was time to move I’d want to neutralise the main advantage that we have now.”
“Which is?”
“Transport. And the kind of firepower that’s hard to handle on foot.”
“OK, so what does that suggest? What are the worst obstacles to a vehicle like this? Not paved road, obviously, and not open ground either. Come on, man, think!”
Wondering why his squad leader did not invest more energy in thinking for himself, and inclined to think that having someone else to blame for failure was part of the picture, Martí hesitated before replying: “The river,” he said finally. “The road bridges are well spaced out. There’s a lot of space over on the Mundaiz peninsula. A lot of fences too. We can’t drive through many of them.”
“Good thinking, but which way would they go?”
“I’d use the railway viaduct,” announced the junior man. “Hell, they’d be inaccessible from the road. With care they could walk the tracks all the way up to the station. And there’s any number of places they could cut away—the university campus, maybe, or over the fence to the new riverside development.”
It was as well for the squad leader’s already shaky standing in the eyes of his subordinate that his face was in shadow; Martí could not see his complexion going grey. Serrano knew that time was running out, that any time now he would be expected to order a withdrawal.
“Thank you, Martí,” he said at length, opening the door as he spoke. “I need you to take the wheel and get me down to the viaduct. As quietly as you can, but quickly.”
As Martí stabbed at the accelerator and the big SUV lumbered forward, Serrano already had his phone out. It was not totally secure, but it was less porous than short-wave radio. “Get two units across to Mundaiz and take control of the road bridges from that end. And I want the crews from another two units inside the station on foot. They need to park discreetly, and keep a low profile pending further orders.”
As his partner brought the SUV smoothly to a halt alongside the railway line and killed the engine, Serrano leapt out and scrambled up onto the unfenced track bed. He saw in a moment that Martí had called it right but that an opportunity had been missed. There was just enough daylight left to make out movement on the viaduct, and resonating through the structure came the sound of multiple footfalls on the narrow steel catwalk that ran alongside the tracks. The river was not very wide at this point, but in the near-darkness the fugitives had a significant head start.
“They’re on the bridge,” he called back to Martí in a hoarse stage-whisper. “Get on the radio. One of the Mundaiz units to cover the tracks below the station, one to patrol between the tracks and the riverside development. Station units to deploy to the southern end of the platforms.”
As soon as Jack heard the roar of Serrano’s approaching SUV and his agitated voice carrying on the night air, he knew that they were not going to get away as cleanly as he had expected. His field of vision suddenly filled with roiling black smoke and flickering red light. For a moment the flashback eclipsed the reality around him, and he teetered dangerously on the narrow catwalk before regaining his balance.
He swore under his breath as his vision cleared, one blackness giving way to another. He had been anticipating a brisk march across the university campus and up the Mundaiz peninsula to the railway station. From there, he had intended a quick dash over the river, to vanish into the evening crush of the Old Quarter.
A moment later, Jack saw that history had thwarted his plan in advance. Where once there had been direct access to the campus across a strip of waste ground, now the way was obstructed by a high fence. Alonso and Julio would g
et over it in seconds, but for the ageing Englishman and the overweight detective it would be all but impossible. There remained the possibility of following the tracks all the way to the station, but in the darkness that could be suicidal. He turned to look at his companions.
“If you’d said what you had in mind, I could have told you about the fence,” muttered Miguel. “It’s been there for the best part of thirty years. And before you try to find it in the dark, the road bridge that used to run alongside the viaduct has been demolished. It’s what they call progress… Shhh! Listen!” As the talk abruptly died away, they could hear the shuffle of cautious footsteps transmitted through the metal of the catwalk. “Quickly,” whispered Julio. “Round the side.”
They hastily picked their way off to one side of the track-bed, putting the solid steel sidewall of the viaduct between them and the approaching threat.
Serrano crept on across the river, his automatic pistol held out in front of him, desperately peering into the darkness for a glimpse of his fleeing quarry. He approached the end of the catwalk confident that the old man and his mismatched police escort would flee up the tracks straight into the arms of the men he had ordered to cover the route. Suddenly he winced with pain, shock and disbelief as a heavy blow deadened the nerves in his extended right forearm and sent the Beretta spinning from his grasp.
Still Serrano felt in control of the situation. He retained enough use of his arm to slide a switchblade out of his right-hand pocket and transfer the weapon to his equally dangerous left hand. Proud and poised for combat, he looked back and forth for an adversary on whom to vent his fury. But at that moment something hit him hard under the ribs. The breath driven from his lungs, he staggered backwards with his arms flailing, vainly attempting to recover his balance before launching a counter-attack. But his hastily planted rear foot met no resistance whatsoever. He found time to swing the knife wildly in his assailant’s direction, and felt an all-too-brief sense of satisfaction as the blade struck and he heard a sharp intake of breath. Then his forward knee buckled and he plummeted through the gap between two adjacent railway sleepers. His head struck one of them as he vanished beneath the tracks, not hard enough to render him unconscious but more than sufficient to knock the fight out of him. He felt himself falling for what seemed an impossible length of time, but was reassured by the expectation that he would land in deep water and be able to swim to the bank.
THE ENGLISH WITNESS Page 3