by Blake Banner
D’Arcy flopped back in his chair and stared at Timmerman. “You’re serious,” he said. “You are actually quite serious.”
“I am very serious, Mr. D’Arcy. And believe me, Mr. Walker is doing you no favors by making you aware of our existence.”
“Why…” He glanced at me, frowning, trying to get his head around what was happening. “Why are you telling me this? Why are you here?”
Timmerman looked at me with interest. They were the questions he was asking himself too.
I said, “You don’t need to know that, D’Arcy. I will give you the names of Omega’s operatives in the U.K. In exchange, you help me.”
“Help you how? What do you need?”
“I need to dye Timmerman’s hair and change his clothes. We had to leave our weapons in Paris, so we need a couple of automatics, and a few hours’ sleep. I need to use the house in Torre de Olvera. And above all, I need your word you won’t alert the authorities.”
For the next hour, D’Arcy debriefed Timmerman on the subject of Omega, and in particular Omega’s position on Britain’s departure from the European Union, Omega’s activities within the U.K. to attempt to sabotage that departure, the Union’s plans for militarization and the creation of an alternative NATO. He filmed the interview on his laptop, the debriefing was thorough and detailed, and some of the people he revealed as being on Omega’s payroll surprised even me.
By the time we had finished, D’Arcy looked as shattered as Timmerman. He sat shaking his head and looking at the notes he had taken on the table in front of him. “This is science fiction,” he said. “How can you get away with this? How is it possible…?”
Timmerman, ragged and exhausted, suddenly erupted, “Va te faire foutre! Imbécile! Come on!” He slammed his hand on the table. “If Mexican peasants can organize the Sinaloa cartel, infiltrate the American judiciary, the FBI! The Senate! Utilize the major banks to whitewash billions of dollars every year! You don’t think a coalition of the richest, most powerful men and women in the world can make an organization like Omega? Tu est fou!” He stood and looked at me. “Kill me, if you have to, but now I am going to bed.” To D’Arcy, he snapped, “You have a room for me? Or I must sleep with the dog in the garden?”
D’Arcy blinked. “Of course not. Up the stairs in the patio. The second door.”
“Eh bien! Good night!” He left muttering something under his breath that sounded obscene and probably was.
As he disappeared, I said, “There is more, D’Arcy. A lot more. This is just the tip of the iceberg. You think this is like science fiction…? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
We talked for another half hour and finally, as the sky was turning pale outside the kitchen window, I stood, then hesitated a moment.
“What are you going to tell Head Office?”
“I’ll tell them you acted in self defense. But they won’t be very interested, not when I present them with this.”
“Thanks.”
I left D’Arcy in the kitchen and made my way up to bed. It was six o’clock. I figured if I could sleep till ten, we could leave after an early lunch and be in the sierra of Cadiz by early afternoon. I let myself into the third bedroom along the galleried landing, fell on the bed and slipped immediately into unconsciousness.
* * *
As it was, I was up and showered by nine o’clock and went next door to wake Timmerman. He was already awake and dressed, so I banged on Njal’s door and the three of us went down to the kitchen for breakfast.
I was surprised to find a woman at the sink. She was in her late fifties and had an apron on. She turned as we came in and froze. She put her hands to her mouth and screamed. I shook my head at her and smiled. “Amigos,” I said, “Amigos de Señor D’Arcy.”
Either my Mexican Spanish was no good here, or she just didn’t believe me, but she inched around the table and fled through the door, calling, “Señor D’Arcy! Señor D’Arcy!”
I started making coffee and out on the patio, I could hear D’Arcy laughing and talking consolingly to the woman, who I guessed was the Maria he had mentioned earlier. I heard the street door close and then D’Arcy came in, looking tired and drawn.
“I’m sorry about that. I sent her a message at six this morning not to come in, but she hadn’t switched on her phone. I told her you were friends visiting from England and sent her home. What’s your plan, Lacklan?”
I put the coffee percolator on the cooker and said, “Brunch, dye Jean-Claude’s hair, dress him less conspicuously, out of here by eleven, twelve-thirty the latest. You have something for me and Njal?”
He nodded, reached in his jacket and pulled out two automatics. They were Glock 17s, the new standard issue for the British Army. The magazine held 17 rounds and he had two spare magazines. “Unless you’re planning to start a war, that should be enough.” He handed them over and I took them. “And this,” he added, and tossed me a large bunch of keys. I grabbed them.
“The house in Torre?”
He nodded.
“Thanks.”
I turned to Njal and Timmerman. “OK, let’s get this done and get out of here.”
We stuck Timmerman’s head in the kitchen sink and started following the instructions on the pack. Meanwhile, D’Arcy went upstairs to look for casual clothes that might fit him. He found a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, a sweater and a pair of shades.
He brought them down and dumped them on the table while we fastened a plastic bag around the top of Timmerman’s head and sat him in a chair to wait for the dye to take. He looked mad, like his dignity had been injured.
“If somebody tells me yesterday morning that today I will be sitting in a kitchen in Cordoba, dying my hair, with a plastic bag on my head, I will laugh at him!”
I couldn’t help smiling. For a moment, it was hard not to see him as just a human being. I put a cup of coffee in front of him and a plate of toast, then went to load our things in the back of the SUV. After that, I went to sanitize the bedrooms and returned to the kitchen. Njal had removed the bag from Timmerman’s head and was combing his hair. Timmerman scowled at me.
“It is humiliating.”
“There are worse things than a bit of light humiliation, Jean-Claude. Get dressed. We’re going.”
I picked up the clothes D’Arcy had left on the table and threw them at him. He caught them, stood and began to take off his suit. He had his jeans on and was pulling on his sweatshirt when the intercom buzzed. There was somebody at the gate. I stared at D’Arcy. He shrugged.
I said, “Answer it.”
He picked up the phone and the screen above it came to life. It showed two Guardia Civil and a plain clothes officer. I pulled the Glock, cocked it and put it to D’Arcy’s head.
Njal said to Timmerman, “Put your glasses on. Put your suit in the rubbish. Fast!”
D’Arcy said, “I have no idea what this is about.” He pressed the talk button and asked in Spanish what the problem was. The cop answered in passable English.
“Mr. D’Arcy. May we come in and talk to you, please?”
“What’s it about? It is not very convenient at the moment.”
“We have a report that there are fugitives in your house.”
“That’s ridiculous. There is nobody in my house but me and some friends from London.”
“Mr. D’Arcy. I must insist. This is a very serious matter. The fugitives may be terrorists. If you do not let us in, I will assume you are in danger.”
D’Arcy looked at me and mouthed, I have to let them in. I nodded. He said, “Very well, but this really is ridiculous.”
He buzzed the gate open and hung up the phone. “Lacklan, I swear I have no idea what this is about. It must have been Maria. She must have recognized Timmerman from the news.”
I waved the Glock toward the door. “Answer it. Persuade them to go away, but if they insist, invite them in.”
“Lacklan, you can’t kill them!”
“Just do it. Now!” To Njal I said, “W
ith me. You know what to do?”
He nodded. I grabbed a couple of dishcloths, threw one to Njal and tied the other around the bottom part of my face. I looked at Timmerman and he understood what the look meant. The doorbell rang and we moved across the central patio to the door. Njal and I stood on either side of it, in the shadows. I mouthed to D’Arcy, Make them go away.
He opened the door with a smile on his face that said they were being tedious.
“Good morning. As you can see, I am perfectly all right and there are no terrorists hiding in my house.”
“Señor D’Arcy. We would like to come in your house and make a search. It is necessary.”
“It really is very inconvenient.”
“Are you hiding something, Mr. D’Arcy?”
“No, of course I’m not!”
“Then you have no problem if we come in.”
He sighed. There was nothing he could do. He stood back. “Very well, come in and see for yourself.” He stepped away from the door and walked into the patio, saying, “Where do you want to begin?”
They came in after him, looking around, but not looking behind. When the last of the three had crossed the threshold, I moved fast, closing in on the nearest uniform, and smashed the butt of the Glock into the back of his head. His legs went wobbly and he slumped to the floor.
The other guard heard and reacted fast. Njal was closing on him, but he swung around, shouting, pulling his piece from his holster. Njal covered him and said, “No!” But the plainclothes man had turned and was charging me. I should have shot him, but in my book, you don’t shoot the good guys. Instead, I stuck the muzzle of my Glock in his face and hoped he would stop. He didn’t. He grabbed the barrel of the weapon with one hand and my wrist with the other and tried to disarm me. It was a stupid thing to do. It didn’t work and there was panic in his eyes,
I ripped the gun from his hands, kicked him hard in the knee and slammed the butt of the Glock into his chin. The last remaining Guardia Civil had his hands up and looked really scared. Njal said, “What do you want to do with him?”
D’Arcy was standing immobile, watching us. I didn’t look at him, I said, “Leo, charge me.” I raised my gun and aimed at the Guardia.
He got on his knees and begged, “No, por favor, le suplico, tengo dos hijos, por favor, tenga piedad…”
I heard Leo roar, “No!” and charge me. I turned and shot him in the left shoulder. He went down. I stepped over and smashed the pistol into the Guardia’s head. I pulled the dishcloth from my face and snapped: “Get Timmerman. Let’s get the hell out of here.” Njal made for the kitchen and I knelt by D’Arcy’s side. “You got your cell?”
He nodded. “Fuck, it hurts.”
“I’m sorry. It hurts less than twenty years in a Spanish prison.”
He nodded. “I know. Listen, in the garage, under the toolbox, number plates. They’re magnetic. They clip on.”
“Thanks, D’Arcy. I’m sorry. Give me five minutes.”
“Don’t be. Just get the hell out of here.”
Njal led Timmerman out to the SUV and I let myself into the garage. I found the toolbox and underneath it, I found two sets of plates. One was French, the other was Portuguese. I went out to the driveway, climbed in the driver’s seat as the gates rolled open and backed out onto the road. There was nobody about, so I handed Njal the French plates and said, “Put these on, fast.”
Five minutes later, we were cruising down the hill toward the city center, retracing the route we’d followed the day before. At the Parque de Colon, I stopped at a red light. Two ambulances and three Guardia Civil cars crossed the intersection and went screaming past us with their sirens wailing and their lights flashing. I watched them in the mirror, crossing the two avenues and heading up the hill. Ahead, the lights changed to green and I pulled onto Ronda de los Tejares, toward the avenue and the bridge of San Rafael, and the freeway south, toward Malaga. At Antequera, we would turn west, toward Cadiz, and Torre de Olvera.
And there I would put my question to Jean-Claude Timmerman.
And he would give me his answer.
I felt a hot pellet of adrenaline in my gut. It was part rage, part triumph—and part as though I could smell change on the air, the coming of something new, a new age, a new world. It was a feeling I didn’t understand and couldn’t articulate. It was a feeling of awe, of fear, of excitement, all mixed together into a volatile, explosive mixture.
From the back, I heard Timmerman laugh quietly. I glanced in the mirror. “What? What’s the joke?”
“Your face, Mr. Walker. You can feel it. You can feel it coming, and you want it as much as we do. You belong with Omega. You know that. Like your father, like your brother, you are one of us.”
“Really, Timmerman? I’m one of you? If I were one of you, there would be four dead men back at D’Arcy’s house. You know why I am not one of you? Because I believe in humanity, and you want to destroy it.”
It sounded lame, even though I meant it. He laughed softly again, then repeated what he’d said before:
“You are one of us.”
THIRTEEN
The heat, even in September, was oppressive. We kept the windows closed and the A/C on. Outside, the landscape, though it was all farmland, was like a desert: raw earth and dust in shades of rusty red, dirty chalk and gray, stretching out for miles toward the distant peaks and sierras in the south and west. The car thermometer said it was thirty-eight degrees, a hundred Fahrenheit, and it was barely noon.
It was seventy five miles to Antequera. We did it in forty-five minutes, during which my eyes were on the rearview mirror more than the road. But I didn’t see any cops, or any other vehicles that seemed to be tailing us, and at the interchange just north of the city, I slowed and took the exit for Seville. A couple more interchanges and pretty soon we were on the A385, heading west through empty miles of yellow stubble toward the Sierra de Cadiz, a row of jagged, blue hills that rose like broken teeth out of the horizon. Njal spoke for the first time in almost an hour.
“You put a couple of saguaro out there, maybe you are in Arizona, or southern California.”
The road was rough. You couldn’t do more than fifty or sixty on it without risking either getting stopped by the Guardia or hitting some guy riding a burro. After half an hour, we came to the town of Campillos, where we stopped and bought some basic food supplies at the local supermarket. I also bought six pairs of boot laces and two bottles of Jameson’s whiskey. Then we continued on our way.
Everywhere you looked, the earth was some shade of gray, and out of the parched, gray soil, twisted olive trees grew in regimented lines, in their thousands. The road twisted on for another fifteen minutes till we came to the town of Almargen. After that, the landscape changed and we started to climb through rolling hills. The temperature started to drop and the gray slopes began to be populated by pine trees, eucalyptus and cyprus bushes. Ten minutes later and we were climbing among steep hills abundant with grass, meadow flowers and trees. The mountains here were not the regular saw teeth of the sierra, but wild, jagged peaks, abrupt among broad, flat valleys; and as we rounded a sweeping bed in the road and came out over a wide plateau, in the distance, we saw the castle of Torre Olvera silhouetted on a solitary hill, no more than two miles distant.
Timmerman, who had not spoken since we’d left Cordoba, said, “This is where you are taking me?”
“Not exactly.”
We followed the A385 down out of the hills and came, after five minutes, to an intersection. Here I turned left and we wound along a road that had been overdue for repairs ten years earlier. It climbed and dipped and twisted around blind corners, through pine woods and olive groves, past a tiny village called La Torre—the Tower—and there crossed a bridge over a river. The blacktop came abruptly to an end and suddenly we were on a broad road of beaten earth.
Now we were down to twenty miles an hour, bumping and kicking up clouds of chalky dust behind us, among dense sugar cane groves that towered
fifteen and twenty feet into the stark, blue sky.
Another intersection and I turned off the broad, dirt track onto a narrow one, pitted and eroded by the torrential winter rains that ravage that part of Spain. Here we were down to crawling at barely five miles an hour. The car jerked and jolted through potholes and over rocks, twisting through empty allotments, orchards and olive groves until we came at last to a ford in the river. We crossed through it, climbed the track and stopped outside a large, iron gate. Here, Njal climbed out to let us through and close and padlock it behind us.
We followed the track a little farther until we came to a sprawling, three-story house with irregular, whitewashed walls and a terracotta tiled roof. The windows were concealed behind green wooden shutters and the building itself was hidden from the road by a dense wall of eucalyptus trees. All around us, there were steep hills, and fifty or sixty yards from the door was the river, shrouded in dense, green sugarcane.
Beside the house, there was what must once have been a stable and tackle room, but was now a large garage with big, green, wooden doors. I pulled up and looked at Timmerman in the mirror. He looked sick.
“You are going to torture me.”
“I hope I won’t need to torture you, Jean-Claude, or your family. I hope tomorrow I can drive you to Seville airport and send you home.”
He stared back at my reflection in the glass. “There is an evil to you, Mr. Walker. There is a darkness in you.”