by Robin James
That was not to say that Arsenio did not have a soft spot for London. He enjoyed it for its theatres and cinemas, its great variety of architecture, its frequent elegance, its pubs, its multi-cultural society in which he could disappear like a shadow in the shade, its parks and wide open spaces, and its brashness and cynicism.
Arsenio had spent a great deal of time in other cities of the world. He would elect to be anywhere that was not enclosed by prison walls, but given the choice he would be in either London or Barcelona – and if he were obliged to pick one or the other it would be Barcelona.
It was eight days after his spectacular break-out. He never had fulfilled his promise to Kirsty in the Duke of Wellington to remove his false beard and moustache. It was too much trouble to replace and it was crucial that he be heavily disguised at a time when he was being looked for all over Europe. Kirsty did not much like it – but it was her macho lover Alberto hiding behind it and that was the only thing which really mattered. By now a good, thick stubble had pushed its way through beneath it and he could risk getting rid of it.
Arsenio’s hidey-hole in Barcelona was smallish, like that in Soho Square, unassuming, and owned by him in the name of Alberto Mondini, for whom – as he did in several other identities, including the one who controlled his numbered Swiss bank account – he possessed a full set of false but perfectly documented identity papers, including a driving licence. To maintain each flat he had a local bank account in which he never had less than enough funds to cover three years’ overhead expenses – such as local taxes – and all costs, including that of a cleaner, were covered by standing orders. Whenever he moved from either of his two flats he always took the precaution of telling neighbours and the cleaner that he expected to be away for an extended period, perhaps more than a year, thus covering the eventuality of a sojourn like that at Parkhurst without raising suspicion in anyone’s mind.
He had telephoned his cleaning lady before leaving London, and he and Kirsty had walked into a flat perfectly aired and smelling of the three dozen freshly picked roses the woman had bought on his instructions. Kirsty found the place agreeable enough, though its situation, in the area of Las Ramblas, was akin in atmosphere to how Soho had been in the sixties. It had been cleaned up by the police for the 1992 Olympic Games so as not to tarnish Barcelona’s image to the world, but now the area had returned to its old self with a vengeance as a centre of sex clubs, pornography, prostitutes and transvestites, thieves and con artists – a sleazy vitality which Arsenio happened to like having outside his front door.
The flat was in a slightly run-down turn-of-the-century building possessing a tawdry sort of elegance. Arsenio’s flat on the third floor overlooked the regular pitch of rent boys and the same overweight whore – now even more overweight than ever – who had patrolled that part of the central, traffic-free, kilometre-long stretch of bars, bookstalls and stands selling anything from exotic birds to esoteric sex aids the last time he had been in residence almost two and a half years before.
Arsenio and Kirsty were having a tough time getting rid of his false beard, but it was gradually coming away. It was not the cheap theatrical variety hanging by hooks from his ears; it had been stuck on, as had the moustache, clump by clump, and getting it off, especially now that there was a real growth of whiskers beneath it, was a painstaking and painful process. They had been at it for half an hour, Kirsty applying frequent fingers of solvent, Arsenio, not trusting her, tugging away and ouching like a baby.
‘You’ve been very closed-mouth about why we’re here,’ she was saying. ‘Can’t you tell me now?’
He shrugged, then grimaced as another clump of hair came away from his chin. ‘Truth is, I don’t know,’ he said, dropping the hair into a waste-paper bin. ‘Except that England is not a good idea with every copper in the land after my blood. And that this is as good a place as any from where to contact a few colleagues. Also, it’s an easy drive from here to Switzerland, where I want to check out my account and make some fresh arrangements.’
She worked more solvent into a patch of beard. ‘But I can hardly go to work here. I’m not set up for it. I could try, of course, but I’m sure to get nicked.’
He treated her tightly mini-skirted backside to a resounding slap. ‘You, my darling, are going straight.’
She pouted. ‘I shall get bored.’
‘No you won’t. For the moment you have Barcelona to explore. It’s a wonderful city. Then, in a week or so perhaps, we might go down to the Costa del Sol, to Marbella. Soak up the sunshine. Meanwhile I shall be looking for an opening.’
She frowned at him. He was beginning to resemble some moth-eaten rat with his beard and moustache half off and the new growth beginning to appear. ‘Opening?’ she said. ‘What do you mean, opening?’
‘Funds are dwindling, Kirsty. All right, I have enough to keep us in luxury for two or three years . . .’ – it was already understood, as much as if they had just got married, that they were going to stay together – ‘but that does nothing but worry me. I would prefer to invest the funds in one big job to make enough to keep us for the rest of our lives. Settle down in the Caribbean somewhere, perhaps.’
She shook her head at him. ‘No more terrorism, please?’
‘Too dangerous. Terrorism is exactly the area they’ll be looking for me. And there’s sure to be some bastard ready to sell me out.’ He smiled flatly at her. ‘I was thinking about crime, mi amor. Good old-fashioned crime. A bank robbery perhaps. A bullion truck. The crown jewels. Who knows? Anything with a massive pay-off. I’m more prepared to pull something like that off than most of your common criminals – and I have some very experienced friends who I’m sure will be delighted to join me if I can come up with the right deal.’ He grunted with pain once more as false whiskers came away, almost uprooting some fresh beard as they did. ‘From now on I’m fishing, Kirsty – and you can fish with me.’
El Asesino would have been astounded to know that, within the short space of two hours, he was to stumble across the very idea that, successfully pulled off, stood to make him the fortune he was looking for. Or, rather, Kirsty was to unwittingly suggest it.
After lunch they took a table in the shade very close to the flat, where they ordered coffee and anis and settled down to watch the world go by. After a while, Arsenio left Kirsty to buy a newspaper. He bought a couple of magazines for her, one of them the sensational rag Interviú, noting as he did so that hard-core pornographic magazines – legal in Spain since shortly after the death of General Franco – such as the Swedish-owned Private, were not simply on sale, but were offered in great piles, albeit each little feast of porn was modestly shrink-wrapped. He was tempted to purchase one, then changed his mind; sex with Kirsty was dynamite, and some tawdry magazine or other was hardly going to improve it.
Settling down again with the newspaper El País, Arsenio felt relaxed and positively at home; sleazy the area might have been, but then he enjoyed that sort of ambience. The sun was bright and just short of hot, the shadow of the sunshade over their table made the temperature just perfect, and the sweet smell of orange blossom pervaded the air. With his false beard removed, he felt like a new man in his heavy black stubble. He had practically no fear of being recognized, having changed the colour of his eyes from luminous blue to pale brown with contact lenses, and slightly fattened his cheeks with wads of cotton wool – and even if some bright policeman did think he bore a passing resemblance to El Asesino, he was carrying his false Spanish national identity card complete with photograph and all the papers to back it up. Arsenio had merged perfectly into the seething bustle of Barcelona.
Lighting a Camel, he took two puffs at it, then, disgusted with himself and his lack of will-power where the deadly weed was concerned, he slung it to the pavement and ground it out with the sole of his shoe, angry with its hold over him.
An activity with which Arsenio was familiar, and which he always found entertaining, got under way almost directly in front of them. He watc
hed with interest as a small, well-worn trestle-table was set up on the flagstones. It was, of course, going to be one of those floating – and illegal – gambling games. A man in his thirties, a funny-looking fellow with long, pointed sideboards and patchy hair which looked as if it had been dyed black, produced three halves of walnut shells and a dried pea. He then proceeded to shift the inverted nutshells and the pea around, covering the pea, uncovering it, moving fast as a gypsyish-looking woman clutching a fistful of paper money watched him. For a while, neither of the two said a word; nevertheless a few people gathered around, quietly watching.
Arsenio left the table to get a closer look. He was familiar with this scam, as he was with most – he could even perform it – and he loved to watch it in action. The woman, waving her bundle of money around, began to encourage people to make bets on which shell the little pea was under. Nobody moved. Arsenio, vastly amused, waited for what he knew was going to happen. And there she was, he was sure of it – the third conspirator. A typical overweight housewife or charlady in a greasy apron. She produced a thousand pesetas – and won her bet, doubling her money. She bet the two thousand, won again, then she bet the four, and won yet again. The small crowd was growing, and the punter was communicating her excitement. ‘Come on, it’s a doddle,’ she was saying in Spanish. ‘Anyone can beat this clown.’ She added two thousand to the eight in her hand and then guessed the location of the pea correctly again, doubling the ten to twenty. When she wanted to bet the twenty it was refused and she went away, grumbling loudly about the unfairness of life.
Now that the shill – for shill she surely was – had departed, two men wanted to bet. The pea man let them both win a couple of times, then encouraged them to wager heavily – whereupon they lost. And that was the end of that pitch. A policeman was approaching, the table was folded up in a flash, and the team were on their way, some twenty-four thousand pesetas – £120 – richer, and all earned in ten minutes.
As Arsenio went back to the table and sat down, he was chuckling. ‘God,’ he said, ‘people are such fools. The oldest scam in the world and they’re falling for it all day, every day, all over the world.’
Kirsty grinned at him, flashing her perfect teeth. ‘Sort of why I gave up making an honest living, darling,’ she said. She had Interviú open at its centre pages. Passing it to him, she said, ‘Will you look at this. Diana must be simply furious.’
He studied the photos. Diana on skis. Diana almost submerged. Carolyn Parker-Reed handing Diana her bikini top from the boat. Diana struggling aboard, sexy close-up of her bikinied bottom. Her top coming loose. Close-up of the royal breasts. Arsenio smiled.
‘Where were they taken?’ asked Kirsty. ‘What does it say?’
He told her, then he said, ‘Just two days ago. They really rushed it in. Must have paid a fortune. She’s a guest aboard a private cruise ship called the Mirabelle. The boat took off in a big hurry. Nobody knows where to.’ He handed her back the magazine.
‘They really hound the poor cow, don’t they, those sons of bitches?’ she observed, studying the pictures again.
‘Good luck to them.’
‘I don’t see what’s so sensational about a pair of tits. Even hers. Well, as long as they only take photographs I suppose it doesn’t do her any real harm. They’re not out to kidnap her or something.’
Arsenio grunted. He had been only half listening, his eyes on a busty, sexy, heavily painted young woman who was teetering by on six-inch stiletto heels in a tight little mini-skirt, and whom he was certain, judging by the size of her hands and feet, was a transvestite. He switched his attention back to Kirsty. ‘Did you say something about kidnapping?’
‘I said, at least no one’s trying to kidnap Diana.’
‘No.’ An amused, thoughtful expression shadowed his face. ‘Show me that again,’ he asked, taking the magazine from her. He skipped through the prose. ‘Heading north-west,’ he muttered. ‘Destination unknown.’ He looked up at Kirsty. ‘Which would mean, as a consequence of having been hounded by the rat-packs, that the Mirabelle is probably right now in very isolated waters.’
‘Yes?’
‘She sneaked out of England, it says. She was spotted at Stansted with just the kids and a friend, it says. That would mean she has no security men with her.’
‘Yes?’
‘She’s somewhere, unprotected, on a luxury cruiser, off the coast of Spain, or maybe Portugal, or even France.’
‘Yes?’
He glanced up at her from the magazine, his eyes deeply thoughtful. He fished in his pocket for some small change to settle the bill.
‘Let’s go upstairs and take a close look at my maps, shall we?’ he said.
6
Joseph Hantash flew in from London that very evening, following a brief afternoon telephone conversation with Arsenio. He stayed the night in the Las Ramblas flat and by nine o’clock the next morning he and Arsenio were boarding a flight to Santander, a busy port in a heavily industrialized area, four hundred kilometres across the north of Spain from Barcelona. By ten-fifteen they were picking up the private helicopter which Arsenio had booked the previous afternoon by telephone, and by ten-forty they were airborne, just the two of them, Hantash at the controls.
Arsenio had decided it was unlikely that the Mirabelle, having, according to the Interviú report, made off in a north-westerly direction, had then turned around and headed north-east towards the coast of France. He told Hantash to fly west, following the spectacularly beautiful, rugged coastline of Asturias. Twenty minutes after take-off, when they reached Gijón and, just past it, Salinas – where the American tycoon’s yacht had last been at anchor – the Palestinian headed north until they were some twelve kilometres into the Bay of Biscay. From there they followed the coastline more or less due west, at around 460 metres, their view encompassing all the shipping below them within a binocular range of more than seventy square kilometres.
They did not converse very much, these two highly trained terrorists bent on their first-ever wholly criminal enterprise. Hantash, who had unshakeable faith in Cruz Conde, and would join him at the crook of the Venezuelan’s finger on any mission, nevertheless was harbouring the opinion that this latest idea was madcap from many angles. In the first instance, he doubted whether they would even discover the Mirabelle, never mind succeed in the wildly ambitious stunt of kidnapping no less a personage than the Princess of Wales. And yet since Arsenio was putting up all his expenses, Hantash was happy to go along with him, and was not about to express such misgivings.
Within an hour they had travelled two hundred kilometres and were passing Punta Candelaria on the coast, beginning to round the north-western tip of Spain, travelling south-south-west. They had seen only three large yachts, which might have been private cruise ships; one had turned out to be a ferry boat, the other two passenger-carrying pleasure cruisers. They had used up just over half a tank of fuel. Sixty kilometres further in, Arsenio told Hantash to turn inland to refuel at La Coruña airport. They were in a gloomy, polluted industrial area from where once, in 1588, the Spanish Armada had set sail for Britain and a routing by the British fleet commanded by Sir Francis Drake, and where now the sunshine filtered through a thin pall of smoke.
As the chopper’s fuel tanks were being topped up, Hantash remarked, ‘I don’t like to say this, but it looks as if we are on a bit of a wild-goose chase. That ship could be anywhere, even headed for America. She might be way out in the Atlantic by now.’
‘I doubt that,’ said Arsenio. ‘It’s a family holiday. A rest. If Diana wanted to go to America she’d fly, my friend. But I figure that she’d want to move quite some way from where they were spotted.’ He opened the map of the Iberian peninsula and its coastal waters. ‘Look. What is it now – almost three days? The furthest they’re likely to get at a comfortable cruising speed is . . .’ – he traced his finger around the map – ‘Lisbon. And I’m betting they haven’t gone that far. I’m certainly not giving up until we have – mayb
e not even then.’
‘Don’t let it turn into an obsession, Arsenio.’
Arsenio considered that remark as Hantash restarted the rotor. The Palestinian was right, of course. As soon as the wild idea of kidnapping Lady Di had entered his head, it had lodged there, filling his mind; he had even dreamed about it last night. What fired him was more than the potentially massive financial reward of such an enterprise successfully carried out – it was the sheer enormous challenge of it, the excitement which made him feel he was living his corrupt lifestyle to the hilt. Almost two years without a woman had been easy to make up for. Two years without the rush of adrenalin which, curiously, lay beneath his outward icy calm when involved in something like the attack on the House of Lords, was more difficult to catch up on. Never mind the ransom money – he needed to tackle the huge problem of finding then kidnapping the Princess of Wales unharmed.
At that moment, the Mirabelle was far closer than Hantash – who actually did not believe they were going to find her – could possibly have imagined.
The yacht was in unusually calm Atlantic waters, at anchor just twelve nautical miles north-north-west of La Coruña, on the edge of busy fishing grounds. The boys were in the small pool on the main deck, and Diana was playing backgammon with Travers Bonnington, whose wife was sunbathing and chatting with Carolyn. Two stewards were beginning to lay a table for lunch, beneath colourful sunshades by the pool. It was a scene of super-rich, pampered tranquillity. At La Coruña airport, the man who was planning to wreck that tranquillity if he possibly could, was being airlifted once more by his hardened terrorist sidekick.