THE ENGLISH WITNESS (22 page)

Low on the eastern horizon, almost lost
in the glare, was the unmistakeable head-on profile of a large helicopter. It
loomed ever closer as he watched, coming in to hover almost directly overhead
at height of about thirty metres.  Then it sank vertically downwards until
it sat in the centre of the plaza, it’s engine note sinking and the whirling
rotor blades slowing to a halt.

For almost a minute after the engines
were silent there was no sign of any movement on board. And around the plaza
there was a corresponding lack of reaction as the few remaining visitors
watched with idle curiosity. Behind the scenes, however, there was a flurry of
activity. And at one edge of the plaza, Brother Ángel slipped back into the
cover of the cloisters and waited.

Without warning the side door
of the helicopter slid open, and one by one a dozen armed men in battledress
jumped down onto the cobbles. Brother Ángel peered out from the shadows. He
recognised the squad leader, a enormous blond-haired body-builder with a
massive chest and bulging arms and thighs, but he looked in vain for any
distinguishing marks on the battledress. Within seconds, the entire squad was
lined up beside the helicopter. Reaching into the pile of laundry he had been
pushing, Brother Ángel drew out a stubby machine pistol and clicked off the
safety catch before laying the weapon back down on the unwashed clothing.

Jorge Hernández Cuervo guided the specially modified Viano smoothly
off the coastal motorway and headed south into the Cantabrian Mountains. He
peered at the grey-haired passenger in the rear seat via the interior mirror.
As he did so, the passenger put down the English paperback he had been reading
and looked out at the landscape for the first time since leaving the city.
Hernández guessed that any time now he would notice that that things were not
proceeding as expected. Then the relaxed demeanour would quickly be replaced by
a rising tide of panic, and the modifications to the vehicle would come into
their own.

Sure enough, the passenger leaned forward
and extended an arm to open the reinforced glass screen that guaranteed political
or business clients their privacy. The driver reflexively flicked a glance down
at the non-standard neon embedded in the console to check that secure mode had
been engaged, then returned his eyes to the road. The steel bulkhead below the
screen faintly transmitted the sound of repeated clicks as the Englishman
worked away at the switch, but the driver gave no indication that he had
noticed.

Predictably, the next thing Hernández
heard was a brisk tapping of knuckles on the screen just behind his head. He
patiently ignored the sound for several kilometres. Then he reached forward, unclipped
a microphone from the dashboard, and in heavily accented English delivered the announcement
he had rehearsed so carefully: “Please sit back in your seat and refasten your
safety belt, Mr. Burlton. I am not authorised to make unscheduled stops, and
your compartment is sealed for your protection.”

With that, the driver saw the passenger
lunging left and right in turn as he tried the window buttons followed by the
door handles, but the security mode had been engaged and it was to no avail. Finally
the passenger started banging on the screen. There was no way he could have
broken his way through without a sledgehammer, but it was an annoyance and one
that the driver was equipped to deal with. He snatched the steering wheel
briefly from side to side then momentarily applied his foot to the brake pedal.
The sudden change in momentum was enough to send the Englishman tumbling from
side to side across the seat before throwing him forward and bringing his
forehead and cheek bone into sharp contact with the screen.

Hernández watched in the
mirror as the passenger levered himself back into the seat and refastened the
safety belt. He was certain there would be further histrionics later – as soon,
in fact, as it became clear where the vehicle was heading – but for the time
being a touch of diplomacy made for a quieter drive.

The scene was silent in the way that only a coniferous forest
glade can be. The soft carpet of brown needles and the bushy branches – coming
down to the ground in places – swallowed the soft incidental sounds made by
wildlife so that only the scarcely perceptible hush of the breeze in the
treetops remained.

As the air began to warm up, another
sound fought to make itself audible in the oppressive silence: the steady drone
of an engine running at just over idling speed, punctuated by the occasional
snap of a dry branch under the vehicle’s tyres. A sharp-eared listener might
have heard an additional heavier sound: the sporadic thump of clenched fists
against leather and glass.

As the vehicle entered the lonely glade,
the sound of its engine abruptly died away. The thumping from inside was now
more clearly audible over the steady tick of cooling metal. The precise German
engineering emitted only the tiniest metallic click as the driver’s door came
open, and a lean, sinewy man climbed out. In one hand he held an automatic
pistol fitted with a bulky silencer; with the other he wrenched the sliding
rear door open and gestured the passenger out.

At first the man inside stayed put, and any
witnesses would have heard him pleading desperately for mercy with a slight
foreign accent. The driver swiftly reached inside and dragged at him by the
collar. The victim started to move but something was holding him in place. The
driver struck him once, twice, three times in the side of the face, being
careful not to spill blood inside the car. The passenger scrabbled at the
seat-belt release, and there was a subdued click as it came free. Once again
the driver hauled, and this time the passenger flew out of the door to land in
a heap on the carpet of old pine needles.

The driver kicked the crumpled figure to
his feet, herded him a few metres away into a thicket of trees, and forced him
to his knees. Then, for the first time in several weeks, the forest reverberated
with a clearly audible noise, for even with a silencer fitted a firearm
produces a considerable report. The first shot, delivered to the upper back, shattered
the victim’s heart. But before the dying man could topple forward, a second
shot was placed in the back of his neck from point blank range. Then, as he lay
hunched over with his head twisted at a grotesque angle, a third bullet was
discharged into his temple. Satisfied at last, the driver returned to the dark
Mercedes and calmly drove away.

Brother Ángel hovered in the cloisters, the machine pistol within
easy reach. At the moment he did not have a target, and there was no point in
breaking his cover until he could strike a decisive blow. Meanwhile, there was
no further movement in the immediate vicinity of the helicopter. The squad of
paramilitaries remained in formation a few feet beyond the radius of the rotor,
and the pilot sat motionless in his seat.

At length, the sound of an engine was
audible. It grew in volume until a black Mercedes Viano came into view. The
vehicle slowed for the speed ramps on the monastery drive, then headed straight
across the plaza until it was within 30 metres of the helicopter. There it pulled
smartly to a stop, its engine fell silent and the driver’s door opened. A
hulking figure climbed out and closed his door behind him. Then he went to the
rear door and opened it. A moment later a stocky, grey-haired man was hauled
out into the sunlight. From his vantage point at the back of the cloisters,
Brother Ángel saw the action and had to stifle a sharp intake of breath as he
recognised the passenger.

He had no time to dwell on this
development, however, because something was happening at the helicopter. Half
the squad fell out from the line-up and positioned themselves in a semi-circle
around the helicopter door. They faced outwards, their assortment of short and
long-range weapons at the ready. Then a hoist was extended above the open
doorway. Suspended from it was an elaborate electric wheelchair. In the wheelchair
was a distinguished man who appeared to be in his late seventies or early
eighties. The face was symmetrical and dignified—the sort of face people would
trust. But it was a cruel, hard face—one that had both experienced and
inflicted suffering.

Brother Ángel’s own face set hard at the
sight, and his hand moved towards the machine pistol, but he knew that the
range was too long for accurate shooting with the kind of weapon compact enough
to conceal in a pile of clothes. And he had not expected the Legion to show in
such numbers. Most of the man’s body was shielded. At that distance, and
against a dozen armed men, a chance shot would be suicidal as well as
ineffective.

Once the wheelchair had been lowered to
the ground and disengaged from the hoist, the remaining Legionnaires fell out
and filled in behind it as it rolled forward. By the time it was passing the
tips of the rotor blades, the armed men had formed a phalanx completely
surrounding it. An officer stood to one side, supervising the manoeuvre. The
formation kept moving until it was within a few metres of the people-carrier,
where it stopped. Two men in the front of the phalanx stepped smartly sideways,
leaving a gap through which the passenger from the car was unceremoniously
pushed. He stumbled and sprawled headlong on front of the wheelchair as the gap
closed behind him.

The man in the wheelchair looked down
condescendingly at the figure prone on the ground before him. “
Kaixo
, my
little friend James,” he croaked. “It has been a long time since our last
meeting. And I seem to remember that we have some unfinished business to attend
to. Whether we take up where we left off rather depends on you. Come, get up.
Walk with me.”

As Jack pulled himself to his feet, his
pulse racing and his heart in his mouth, he heard the reassuring voice and
looked into the warm, smiling eyes of a consummate politician. And he knew that
but for a miracle he was doomed.

Miguel put down the telephone and sat
back in his chair. His face was white, and the hand that had gripped the handset
was shaking. He had suspected from the start of this case that his career would
be in ruins by the end of it, but now he recognised that his self-respect was
mortally wounded as well. He was not sure how he would live with the memory of
the orders he had recently issued and the report he had just received—let alone
the blowback from an operational disaster on this scale.

He had once been a good policeman, he
knew that. He had achieved more than anyone could have expected had they observed
his start in life: the cramped, sweltering apartment; the obsessive-compulsive
father whose violent outbursts had left the entire family with scars both
physical and emotional; the interfering billionaire grandfather with the
wandering hands; the little brother who hadn’t made it to adulthood; the mother
who had disappeared from his life one day, never to be seen again.

Miguel thought again about his father.
The old man had never stopped making demands, and whether by bullying or
manipulation he had never lost the art of getting his own way. His unrelenting
determination and obsessive attention to detail had made him a fearsome
adversary. The huge family fortune he had come by when his wife’s ruined body was
found had given him the means to indulge his whims. His skill as a researcher
and manipulator, his acumen as a dealer in mercenaries and weaponry – not to
mention the cadre of battle-hardened veterans with which he could now afford to
surround himself – had made him hated and feared throughout Europe and northern
Africa. The detective had no idea where his father was actually living now, and
provided it was a long way from San Sebastián he did not much care. He detested
him more than anyone else in the world. But in Miguel’s family, when Father
spoke, you obeyed.

Poor Jack Burlton. Miguel had genuinely liked
him. Now, as a result of his treachery, the Englishman was likely to die
without ever knowing how thoroughly he had been used: how two of Miguel’s superiors
had been coerced by Father into giving the detective free rein on this so-called
investigation; how a threat, supposedly from the Legion, had been staged with
the help of Father’s hired guns.

The purpose of the subterfuge had been to
keep Jack isolated from Gallego’s stooges at police HQ while he was milked for
information—primarily on Gallego himself. And now that the Englishman’s memories
had been milked dry, he was expendable. But what a splendid lightning rod he
had turned out to be. His mere presence in the city had been enough to draw
fire from Gallego’s private army, the real Condor Legion. Their show of force
on the day of his arrival, and their persistent harassment in the following
days, had utterly eclipsed Miguel’s own modest set piece.

Now the Englishman’s final role would be
to draw Gallego himself out into the open. Miguel secretly hoped that Jack might
survive the encounter, but he knew all about Father’s tidiness compulsion. And
as for the military intelligence agent with whom he had been saddled on the
orders of someone high up in government, the detective had no such compunction.
Impressive? Definitely. But their orders were to co-investigate the death of
Antonio García López, and Miguel had reasons for keeping that particular hand of
cards very close to his chest. Fortunately, as the decoy in the first Viano, Julio
had even less chance of survival than Jack himself.

In the balance, then, Miguel
could not complain about the way things had panned out. All the same, this was
a wretched business, and it was with a heavy heart that he reached into the
pedestal cupboard beneath his desk and took out a bottle of Soberano. Pouring a
hefty measure of the fiery liquid into an unwashed glass that was already
sitting on his desk, he tilted the chair back and put his feet on the desk. As
the room slowly went dark around him, he assembled his thoughts and attempted
to draw up a damage limitation plan.

“Don’t be nervous, James,” said the familiar, soothing, reassuring
voice. “Not yet, anyway.” The smile was still on his lips. The eyes, in contrast,
were no longer warm but cold and taunting. “Not with all these monks around,
wherever they’re hiding. Of course, what happens later when there are no
witnesses is in your own hands. What’s the matter, struck dumb, are we? Aren’t
you pleased to see me again after all this time? We established quite a bond, you
and I, back in the day.”

Jack allowed him to keep talking, to
revel in the moment. He knew that a time would come when silence would only
bring him a world of pain, but for the moment he felt that anything he said
might provoke a spiteful retaliation. He could not forget the cruel injuries he
had personally inflicted on his captor in sabotaging his seatbelt all those
years ago. And he had been instrumental in getting the paramilitary leader shot
in the small of the back with his prized handgun. It suddenly struck Jack with
a shock that Gallego – the former Adolfo – had been confined to a wheelchair
throughout the forty years since. Oh God, what manner of revenge must be lying
in wait?

They had entered a recently built visitor
centre, and on the left-hand side of the main corridor they came to a small
conference suite. The armed escort detail stepped aside, enabling Jack to enter
the room closely followed by the man in the wheelchair. One burly bodyguard
entered with them, while the other three took up positions in the corridor
outside.

“Sit down, James. There’s no need for you
to stand on ceremony, since I obviously cannot.” He smiled wryly at his own
joke, and nudged the joystick on his chair to wheel himself up to the
conference table. The bodyguard stood to one side, his back to the venetian
blinds covering the large, toughened glass window that cut them off from the
corridor beyond.

“You did me a kind of favour, you know,”
he said softly. “If I’d still been able-bodied, I’d have remained a no-account
urban guerrilla staging the occasional terrorist atrocity and making no
difference to the country or the wider world whatsoever. It was dealing with my
enforced sedentary lifestyle that drove me into politics, and what fertile
ground that has been. Thanks to you I am twice the man I was.” His eyes glinted
dangerously. “However, the pain I have endured over the decades is crying out
to be shared with you. And you will have to be very cooperative if I am to do
what a senior statesman such as myself should do, and allow you to go on your
way in peace.”

Jack looked at him blankly. He found it
difficult to believe that the man he had known would do any such thing. But for
obvious reasons he wanted to keep him at the monastery as long as possible. As
long as there were witnesses around he was relatively safe, and he hoped that
even now help might be on the way.

It was as if the man in the wheelchair
could read his thoughts. “Don’t go indulging in delaying tactics in the hope
that the cavalry will arrive, my friend. The monks hate what I stand for, of
course, and some of them may even have heard stories about my past. But now I
am the establishment, and the police are mostly loyal to me—apart from your
friend Miguel, of course, and his rebel crew. Your stunt double is dead, by the
way, as Miguel himself will be as soon as he ceases to entertain me.”

Jack was shocked to hear that his
stand-in was dead. He had known of the plan to send a double to the monastery, but
had not been told the name of the officer who had volunteered. He felt it was
time to speak, to be diplomatic, to appear to take the bait. “OK, if you’re
really prepared to do a deal I appreciate it. I just can’t imagine how I can be
of any assistance to you.”

“James, or perhaps I may call you Jack
now, I want to know two things. First, I want to know everything you can tell
me about your old friend, Antonio García López. You’ve been led to believe that
he’s dead, and that I killed him. Let me tell you, killing him would have given
me great pleasure. He cheated me of taking you, but worse than that he
needlessly murdered three of my best men in cold blood. Yes, I know now that you
weren’t responsible for that. I won’t apologise, but I will proffer that as
justification for the savagery with which I hounded you.”

“If you think I’m going to listen to
excuses, you’re mistaken. What’s your excuse for butchering my lovely friend in
Valencia, or executing the priest in San Sebastián? He was the one friend I had
at the time.”

“Jack, Jack, you must try harder to
distinguish fact from fantasy. You saw me terminate Ignacio, so I can’t deny
it. But he was a ruthless man in his own way: a savage abuser of young men, who
made my early life hell and was grooming you with paranoid fantasies to cement
your dependence on him. And yes, I saw you the day I terminated that sadistic
bastard Gato. But he had it coming after what he did to me—no truth stays
buried forever, Jack. And I had to shoot the boy because he popped up unexpectedly
and saw me. I could just as easily have taken care of you, but you hadn’t seen
me, and I fired a shot or two to chase you away. But here’s the big thing. You
won’t believe me, but it makes no difference whether you do or you don’t. I had
nothing to do with the girl’s death—I give you my word.”

“But you had me watched. And your goons
tried to abduct me.”

“We were keeping an eye on you, because
after seeing you with Gato I thought you might lead us to bigger fish in the
Basque underground. But that was official CSP business, and when we realised
you’d been back to Britain it was standard practice to pick you up for
interrogation. Heavy-handed, but that’s how the
Cuerpo
worked.”

“So I should just have gone along with
them?”

“Perhaps, although not everybody survived
questioning by my more enthusiastic colleagues. But by the time you reached
Valencia I was indeed out for your blood. I blamed you for the deaths of those
three colleagues. And yet the carnage in Guadix, it turned out that it was not you,
and when I finally discovered who the real culprit was I dealt with it in another
way. And the carnage in Valencia, that was not me. I think someone was playing
games with both of us. And with the meddling of dissident Basques and the
lecherous, paranoid delusions of your late friend Ignacio, we became locked in
a duel to the death. Of course, your own passive-aggressive scheming was all
part of the story.”