THE ENGLISH WITNESS (26 page)

“Are we going all the way back to
Alzaibar?” asked Jack.

“Definitely not,” answered
Julio with a grin. “But there have been one or two side roads. We’ll have to be
quick; if that rider’s worth his salt he’ll soon see that he’s lost us. Then
he’ll turn round and see the trail of dirt we left on the road. And he can
outpace us easily on a winding road like this. We need to get off it as soon as
we can.”

Ángel gradually picked up speed as he sought to regain contact
with his quarry, but quickly realised that he had been given the slip. It was
the work of a few seconds to turn the bike round and check the mileage reading,
and after seven kilometres he came upon the spray of dirt and pine needles where
the Viano had exited from the forestry track. He did some quick mental
arithmetic. At the speed the vehicle would be travelling now it must have a lead
of about twelve kilometres, and in the time it was going to take Ángel to catch
up it could cover another forty or more.

The next question Ángel asked himself was
where they would go. They would not want to stay on a winding road that gave
him such a speed advantage. They would look for a side turning, and there was a
cluster of settlements down by the river they had crossed some forty minutes
ago.

Ángel thought they would reach the
populated area before he could catch up with them. And they would follow the
signs to a town or village offering concealment and a possible change of
vehicle. But they would not pick the first turning; that would be too obvious. There
were no guarantees, but Ángel was happy to play the odds. He would take the second
turning, and if that did not yield results he would try something else.

Julio pulled the Viano off the road and tucked it behind a
dilapidated apartment block that was studded with satellite dishes and
festooned with drying laundry. He and Jack slid wearily out of the vehicle. The
Englishman took several seconds to straighten up, but his mind was still sharp.
“OK,” he said. “We need a different car, and we need to look different.”

“I don’t know what sort of world you live
in, Jack,” answered Julio. “Stuffing a cushion up your shirt is one thing, but commandeering
a vehicle is a different game altogether. The details could be circulating on the
police band in minutes.”

“Well, we’re sitting ducks here. Can’t
you contact your HQ for support?”           

“Not on an open radio or phone line. Not
without shouting ‘here we are’. Incidentally, I hope your mobile’s dead or that
could give our position away.”

“No worries. The battery’s as flat as a
tortilla
.
But we need a car and a makeover.”

“You got any ideas?”

“I once read that the art of a good
disguise is subtlety. You need to understand the brain’s recognition process,
and alter things just enough that somebody will think, ‘That looks a bit like so-and-so
but it’s not really him’. It saved my life forty years ago.”

“Clever, but how.”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Our
biggest problem is the car. Once he recognises that, he’ll take a closer look
at the people inside. But if he finds it ditched he’ll check out every vehicle
he passes.”

“OK, so we don’t want him to find the
Viano dumped. And we can actually carry on using it if there’s a way to make
him ignore it.”

“Exactly. But we need to change our
appearance as well. He may still peer inside.”

“Good thinking,” replied Julio. “That’s
what I’d do instinctively if I saw a similar car to one I was hunting. So, what
do we do to the car? We can switch number plates easily enough. And what about
a re-spray?”

“Too big a job. But how about
this: a lot of these people-carriers are used by car-hire firms for airport
transfers and the like. Let’s hunt around. In a town this size there has to be a
signwriting firm. And hopefully an outfitters.”

Ángel had no doubt that his quarry was headed back into San
Sebastián, and after a fruitless trawl round a series of drab villages he
decided to press on towards the city. He was burning up the final stretch before
hitting the coastal motorway when he rounded a bend and saw the black Viano
ahead of him. Pushing the motorcycle still harder, he quickly closed the gap
between them.

Then came disappointment. The
model was identical, but the view through the back windscreen was obscured by
bold white lettering: AERO-TAXI followed by a phone number. He was suspicious
at first. He pulled alongside the vehicle, matched speed with it and glanced in
at the windows only to have his disappointment confirmed. In the front sat a
dour-faced chauffeur in a green jacket, white shirt, black tie and peaked cap.
In the rear, on the same side of the vehicle, sat a horse-faced elderly lady in
a black mourning dress. The upper half of her face was obscured by a heavy lace
veil, and beside her on the seat lay an ornate floral wreath. He was about to
take another glance at the driver, when the front window slid smoothly down and
a gloved hand extended a rigid middle finger at him. Furious, Ángel opened the
throttle and pulled ahead.

Jack felt a burst of elation as the motorcycle and its noise
receded into the distance. He was not entirely comfortable in the enclosed rear
compartment, having recently been imprisoned in an identical vehicle, but the
seat was comfortable and he was tired. In any event, they would soon be joining
the motorway, and he calculated that they should be in San Sebastián in less
than half an hour. With the crisis the Legion was now facing, he trusted that
he and Julio would have a quiet run across town to the police HQ.

In due course Julio turned off the
motorway into the Amara district, and for the first few minutes he seemed on
track. Then it dawned on Jack that instead of taking a cross street they were
heading straight up towards the sea front. For another minute or two he found
this unremarkable, and simply took in the half-familiar sights of the city he
had once known so well. Then it occurred to him that Julio had been quite
uncommunicative since they had completed the makeover, and for the first time a
faint warning bell rang in his mind.

Reaching forward, he tapped on the glass
screen. There was no response. He tapped again harder, and still the driver
failed to acknowledge his presence. Then paranoia hit him with full force. As
they stopped at a traffic light, he ripped off his hat and veil, undid the seat
belt, slid across to the nearside seat and banged on the window. A young family
on the pavement saw the strange person in the back of the limo thumping and
gesticulating. For a moment they looked mildly alarmed, but then their faces
broke into smiles and they waved back.

Jack considered getting out the compact
pistol he was still carrying in his pocket, but thought better of it. He had
never checked how many rounds were left in the magazine, and he feared that a round
from such a short-barrelled weapon might simply ricochet around the compartment.
Inexorably the car made its way up onto the seafront and turned left. It
followed the curve of the Concha beach, and then commenced the slow winding
climb up Monte Igeldo.

By now, Jack could guess where
they were heading. He had no idea why that was Julio’s chosen destination, but his
suspicions were confirmed when the driver finally turned into the car park
behind the Hotel, coasted down to the deserted lower end and switched off the
engine.

More by luck than judgement, Ángel’s last-ditch strategy worked
like a charm. He arrived at the motorway turn-off for San Sebastián sooner than
the Mercedes could possibly have covered the distance. He knew the occupants
would be looking out for him, and after driving round the interchange twice he
discovered a spot behind a signboard where he would be largely shielded from
view. Switching off the engine, he kicked down the side-stand, climbed stiffly
off the machine and gingerly lowered himself onto a knee-high patch of banked
up earth.

He thought back over the pursuit. The
strangest incident of the day had been his encounter with the airport taxi. It
had left him with a nagging sense of unease. All the evidence had confirmed
that it was a different car carrying different passengers. And yet with
hindsight his heart was saying something else.

He tried to picture the car in his mind’s
eye. Apart from a couple of long scratches along the driver’s side, it had been
identical to the vehicle he had followed from the monastery—even down to the
structural modifications. There had been nothing unusual about the occupants,
but would someone going to a funeral wear a hat and veil all through the
journey?

Suddenly the black Viano with the white ‘Aero-Taxi’
signage was there on the road. And as Ángel levered himself stiffly to his feet
and swung a leg over the saddle of the BMW, he realised what was unusual. He
could just make out the shape of the woman in the back seat, and she was
sitting on the same side of the car as the driver. A chauffeur would normally
hold open the rear door on the passenger side. Would the sort of lady who wore a
black veil to a funeral get in on the driver’s side?

Although not conclusive in itself, it was
odd enough to keep Ángel’s suspicions alive. And then something else occurred
to him: there was no airport anywhere down that road. The funeral must already have
taken place, and the woman would have been on her way back to San Sebastián for
a flight out of the region. That would fit with the time of day. And yet her
floral tribute had still been lying on the seat beside her.

By this point in his train of thought, Ángel
was already accelerating into the outside lane, keeping the car in view but
staying far enough back that he would hopefully not be noticed again. And then,
coming off the ramp in Amara, an inconsiderate driver cut across in front of
him.

He was concentrating so hard on the Viano
in the dense traffic that he only saw the Volvo at the last moment. He braked sharply,
his wheels drifted on the greasy surface, and the bike went over. He managed to
control his own fall and kick himself clear of the heavy machine as it slid along
the ground in a shower of sparks. The long leather case that he was carrying
took the brunt of his impact with the ground, and his injuries were no more
than could be treated with a hot bath and some ibuprofen. And damage to the
bike itself was only superficial. But by the time he had it upright the
Mercedes and its occupants were lost to view.

As he remounted the BMW, Ángel almost
gave up and headed back to the monastery that was now his home. But he thought
of what Jimmy had once done for him and knew he could not give up the chase
until all was lost. And as he thought of Jimmy and Steve and Gina, he realised
why he had felt that sense of unease at his first sight of the woman in the
‘Aero-Taxi’. Even as a kid, Jimmy had been into disguises; he had worked some
of that stage magic on him, Brother Ángel, back in the days when he had been
the confused and lonely Txako Ibarra.

Jimmy and his friends had saved Txako
from himself—not from his aspirations to be a working class hero, but rather
from the fear and lethargy that had reduced him to breaking point in the
aftermath. And their hare-brained plan had suggested new possibilities to him:
a kind of activism rooted not in violence but in sacrificial love. The change
had been a slow one; as part of the Basque community in exile he had trained
hard as a fighter. But time and providence had done their work, and when the
change of regime had at last allowed him to return to Spain, he had come not as
a warrior but as a monk.

Now, like Jimmy, Txako was in his sixties.
Age and the recently diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease were already robbing him of
his physical and mental energy, and one day they would take everything. He knew
this would be his last mission and welcomed whatever the Lord might send. But
as his strength and mental clarity declined, it was his more recent identity as
a mystic that was fading. He had begun to believe that it was his destiny to go
out blazing. And after the rigours of his ride up from Alzaibar, he knew that
if he was going to fight it would have to be soon. 

Ángel knew that the key to finding Jimmy lay
in the connection between hostilities past and present. Who was the tall man?
And where could he be taking Jimmy? He strove to push aside the foggy emptiness
that was invading his mind and assemble the pieces of this four-dimensional
puzzle.

He started again from the beginning. The
two wounded gunmen he had treated in the infirmary had been quite informative.
As mercenaries, they had nothing to gain from loyalty to a dead employer. He
knew now who the dead men were, and for whom they had been working. But so many
questions remained unanswered, and the big unknown quantity was the tall
stranger who had been seen driving away with Jimmy. Was he a friend, or was
Jimmy still in danger? Where did the newcomer fit into this melting pot of police,
politics, and hatred that spanned generations?

That last thought prompted a further
question: What were the family connections here? Something other than police
work had surely drawn the detective to his death at the monastery. Ángel had
seen his car race onto the grounds and observed the reaction of Antonio
García’s mercenary thugs to Miguel’s appearance. He had watched the overweight
man sprint across the plaza, and a few seconds later heard the exchange of
fire.

Acting on impulse, he turned into a quiet
residential street, removed his helmet and took out a mobile phone. “Hi,” he
was saying a few moments later. “Yes, it’s me. How are things, old friend?”

“It doesn’t get any better,” came a
familiar but weary voice from the other end. “The days are OK. The nights aren’t
so good. Is it going well over there?”

“No, it’s not good here. I’ve lost them. Yes,
it was careless of me. I’m trying to track them but I need some information. I’m
sure you know that a very bad man checked out today. I need to know if he had a
son in the Donostia police.”

“A son? No, Adolfo was childless. He was emasculated
in a ghastly sectarian attack as a young boy. Definitely no offspring.”

“That’s horrible, but I didn’t mean Gallego.
I meant García López, the Mister Big from Almería. I heard that a cop named
García Ruiz went down in the same exchange of fire, and I think my informant
was holding something back. García is a common enough name, but a family
connection would explain some things, and perhaps give us a lead on where
Jimmy’s gone.”

“OK, Txako, I’ll get on it. Sorry, I
meant…”

“Doesn’t matter, Juantxo. But you’ve made
me think. If there is family history wound up in all this, could you get
somebody looking into any possible family connections with Gallego? You said he
couldn’t have children, but there’s something really dark going on. I’m certain
it’s about more than politics.”

“You think there’s someone else
involved?”

“Either someone, or some thing. A pattern
of obsession that points back to the past. I know something about Adolfo. And
I’m thinking Avenger. Or maybe even Disciple. Until you get back to me, I’m
working on the assumption that García Ruiz was the son of García López. But
that gets me wondering about parallels with Adolfo. You said he was castrated as
a boy. How definite is that?