I was about to turn back and saddle up when I heard another sound, somewhere below me and to my right. I stood stock still for a couple of beats and heard it again.
An owl.
No.
A not very good impression of an owl.
And, though I didn’t know much about the private life of birds, I was pretty sure they preferred trees to ditches.
I slid down the bank and moved carefully along the bed, doing my best to avoid disrupting loose rocks and scrub.
I’d gone about ten metres when my path was partly blocked by a couple of lacerated bin bags, a pile of empty cans and a discarded mattress. I sensed rather than saw a figure pressed against the earth behind it. It didn’t move as I eased myself around the pile of crap.
‘
Nick
…’
She didn’t know that the sound of a whisper often carried further than a murmur. She hadn’t had much practice at this sort of shit.
As she stepped towards me I could see that her Puffa had a tear and her jeans were ripped across the knee – not too bad for someone who’d spent the last couple of hours evading hostiles and legging it across unfamiliar territory.
‘Let’s move.’
I wasn’t about to stop for a chat. We could play catch-up later.
14
I didn’t thrash it until I’d stitched a line along the base of the berm and we’d hit tarmac. The GS’s stability was legendary, but I’d rolled one or two on loose terrain in my time, and it was no fun for whoever was riding pillion. And there was a gate at the corner by the road, so I didn’t have to do the Steve McQueen trick with the barbed-wire barrier.
I didn’t go straight to the Santa Cristina either. I jinked the GS around the backstreets of Otura first, to make sure we didn’t have an escort from the Crvena Davo or their mates.
Ella was the perfect passenger: she didn’t try to squeeze the life out of me when I throttled up, despite the shit she’d just been through. If she hadn’t done this stuff before, her trans-European marathon with Jesper had been the best kind of training.
The construction cranes reached silently for the sky and the karate kids had shut up shop for the night, but the golf clubhouse was awash with light. There was still business to be done at the nineteenth hole. A few Seats were scattered around the place, but none of them was mine.
I pulled up on the far side of the parking area, beside a clump of cypresses and firs that edged the fairway. I cut the engine and the headlamp but we didn’t dismount. I wanted to be able to take off immediately if there was a drama before the Arctic Ranger showed up.
She loosened her grip around my waist but her face and shoulder muscles were taut as bowstrings. ‘Jesper?’
She was dreading the answer.
‘He’s good. Should be on his way here now.’
She heaved a sigh of relief.
‘Ella, what happened back there?’
‘Two of them were waiting for us in the bungalow. With guns. A third followed us in from a car outside. Needless to say, Jesper didn’t go quietly. While they were trying to deal with him, I ran for it – that’s what he’d told me to do – before they had time to get organized. I didn’t think I’d get a second chance.’
‘He wasn’t wrong.’ I half turned towards her, still keeping eyes on the entrance and scanning for other observation points. ‘What made you decide on the owl thing?’
She managed a smile. Some of the tension of the last few hours was starting to leak out of her. ‘Jesper took me through a whole range of possible scenarios. He told me we needed a signal that only we would recognize. I remembered something Sam had told me about his dad’s favourite party tricks.’
I smiled too. ‘Harry’s owl impression was even worse than yours.’
‘Sam says he did pigs and cows and dogs and sheep as well.’
‘Yeah. They were all shit.’
‘Of course they were. One of your most important jobs as a dad is to embarrass your kids, isn’t it?’
I thought about that for a moment. ‘I guess. My stepdad pretty much left me to embarrass myself. I didn’t let him down.’
We listened to the night sounds and the occasional burst of laughter from the clubhouse. The party was hitting its stride.
She gestured towards the warm glow from the windows. ‘Does it ever feel weird doing the things that you have to do – things like this – while the rest of the world carries on regardless?’
‘I never wish I could spend more time with people in very loud diamond-patterned pullovers, if that’s what you mean.’
She didn’t do the eyebrow trick, but came close. ‘You know very well that’s not what I meant …’
She went quiet for a moment, but I could see she needed to fill the silence.
‘Sam says he can’t remember Harry talking much about the Regiment. And Trev didn’t either. He thinks maybe they were hoping he’d try something else.’
‘Well, that worked a treat, didn’t it?’
‘He says they both talked about you, though.’
‘Shouldn’t you have taken that as a warning?’
She shook her head. ‘Does everything have to be a joke with you guys?’
Anna used to ask me much the same question. I gave Ella much the same answer. ‘It’s what keeps you going when things can’t get any worse. You know that.’
She nodded slowly. ‘So what happens now?’
There were at least a dozen responses on my list. I went with the simplest. ‘We both shut the fuck up and wait for Jesper. We’ll give him another half-hour.’
15
We didn’t have to wait that long.
The Seat turned in through the main gates, drew to a halt about ten metres away from us and flashed its main beams. Jesper emerged from the driver’s door and raised a hand. He went round to the rear hatch for the side boxes as Ella and I got off the bike.
She leaned in to me as we moved forward. ‘Is he really OK, Nick? He seems …’
The words died on her lips as we got close enough to see two other figures in the wagon.
Shaky was rigid, eyes wide, facing forwards in the passenger seat. He had a pistol stuck in the back of his head. I couldn’t see much of the guy holding it, but I could tell he wasn’t fucking about.
A third figure stepped out of the hatch, and he wasn’t fucking about either. He pointed the muzzle of his suppressed weapon at Jesper’s centre mass. I’d been wondering about the complete absence of hostiles in the olive grove. Now I knew the reason why.
Jesper walked back towards me, his hands linked behind his neck, obscuring the second hostile. His head wound was still leaking and blood dripped from another couple of gashes in his cheek onto his shirt. They’d obviously tried to persuade him to talk, but the glance he gave Shaky told me which of them had given away the RV.
I sensed Ella tensing herself, preparing for her second runner of the evening. Surrender wasn’t on her agenda.
A heavily accented Middle European voice came from behind Jesper’s left shoulder. ‘Tell the girl that if she tries to escape again, we will shoot you and both of your friends.’
Ella didn’t need Jesper to pass on the message. It was already loud and clear.
Jesper’s captor instructed him to lie face down beside the wagon, hands behind his back. That was when I got my first really good look at him. I’d never seen him without his
niqab
, but I’d have recognized those ugly little boot-button eyes anywhere. I guessed his mate in the wagon was Heavy Breather.
He told Ella to sit down and put her hands on her head, then threw a couple of plasticuffs onto Jesper’s back and motioned me towards them with the muzzle of his Llama. ‘Wrists. Tight.’
I knelt over Jesper and messed around with the ties for a moment, hoping Niqab would make the mistake of coming within reach. He didn’t. He’d underestimated the opposition once tonight. He wasn’t going to do it again.
‘Tighter.’
When the cuff had begun to bite into Jesper’s flesh I was told to lie alongside him. The tarmac was still warm from the day’s sun, but it could have been cold enough to freeze my bollocks off for all I cared.
Shaky was hauled out of the Seat by Heavy Breather and put on plasticuff duty. The boy was shitting himself. Even in the shadow of the wagon I could see rings of sweat beneath his armpits as he stood over Ella. He was trembling so badly it took him two or three attempts to engage the plastic tongue into the teeth of her clasp and draw it through.
When her wrists were secure, it was my turn.
Shaky was a bit quicker with the cuff this time. Niqab kept an eagle eye on the process, but never came close enough for me to have a crack at him.
Heavy Breather manhandled Ella into the passenger seat and got back in behind her. I got the strong impression that he had a score to settle. She’d made him look like a dickhead a couple of hours ago, and any chance he got to hurt her from now on, he’d take.
16
Once both doors had banged shut, Niqab told me and Jesper to get to our feet and walk towards the clump of trees behind the GS. We were directed to a bare trunk a metre inside the treeline and ordered to stand either side of it. Shaky looped another plasticuff around our ankles, then Niqab lobbed a roll of gaffer tape at him and told him to wrap us in it, back to back, starting with our mouths.
As he peeled off the first six inches and raised it to my cheek, Shaky gave me an agonized look. I knew he wasn’t just thinking about the two of us: he was flapping big-time about how the rest of his day was going to pan out.
Shaky circled the tree, binding the two of us in a spiral of tape. Niqab motioned for him to step back when he reached our waists. He finally came so close to me I could smell his last couple of meals, and turned up the wattage in those shiny boot-button eyes. Then he punched me hard in the gut and kneed me in the bollocks.
I couldn’t bend an inch, either to protect myself from further attack or bring up my knees to stop him doing it again. I tried to suck as much air as I could through my nostrils, and did my best to ignore the pain that kicked off precisely where he’d connected and then spread fiercely, down my legs and up to my throat. A stream of hot bile threatened to invade my nose and mouth, but I somehow managed to force it back.
Shaky carried on with the job. By the time he’d reached our ankles he’d used most of the roll and we weren’t going anywhere fast. But at least we could breathe, and I was pretty sure they weren’t going to go to this much trouble, then put a round into us.
I could no longer focus on Niqab, but sensed that he was now well pleased with his evening’s work. And as my nerve endings gradually settled back into position, I consoled myself with the thought that, if he and Heavy Breather were close mates of the Leathermen and Sniper One, I’d got off very lightly.
Shaky’s final task was to whip the GS’s keys out of the ignition and destroy the valves on both tyres. When he’d finished, Niqab escorted him to the Seat, gave him the plasticuff treatment and bundled him into the boot.
Two more doors slammed and seconds later the wagon pulled a U and headed back towards the main.
Jesper gave a grunt and we both tried to twist and wrench our way out of our gaffer-tape cocoon. But Shaky had done his job far too well. It looked like we were going to have to rely on the lads in the diamond-patterned pullovers to get us out of the shit. I hoped they weren’t settling in for the night.
17
Santa Cristina, Otura
Thursday, 9 February
The golfers at the Santa Cristina finally stumbled out of the bar at one thirty in the morning. Finding a Brit and a Swede tied to a tree at the edge of their car park was a bit of a bonus.
The lads were still pissing themselves with laughter after they’d unpeeled us, and we joined in the hilarity. They assumed we were the hapless victims of a stag-party stunt, and we played right along with it. We all agreed that, when you’re in the right mood, there’s nothing funnier than having your mates bind you from head to foot in gaffer tape and let the air out of your tyres.
As soon as the golfing team had gone I called the hire car company to report the theft of the Leon. They were pretty relaxed. The local police had already found it abandoned on the main to Jaén.
We left the Santa Cristina and hotwired the first wagon we came to without an immobilizer. Jesper drove me back to the campsite. We agreed that he’d head for Jaén and try to pick up Ella’s trail. Wherever they were taking her, we reckoned that it would probably be by road. Getting onto a plane or a train without her raising the alarm would be impossible. She’d already shown them what she was made of.
A roll-on roll-off ferry would work, if they drugged and hid her, but we both reckoned they’d go overland. Niqab and Heavy Breather weren’t going to garrotte her and dump her body, or they would have done it by now. I was pretty sure she was more valuable as a hostage. Whoever had her could stop Sam telling the truth about the CQB Rooms.
I didn’t have time for a wild-goose chase across southern Spain. My best chance of getting Ella and Sam off the hook was to ambush Jack Grant while he was still in Cyprus – which meant taking the first plane I could out of Málaga.
Jesper asked me a couple more questions before he made for the
autovía
. ‘How many times have these Serbs got close to you?’
‘Six.’
I knew what was coming.
‘So why have they not taken the opportunity to kill you?’
‘The first two times, I killed them instead. The next three they were interrupted. Then they decided to tape me to a Swede. Maybe they thought that was enough punishment.’
A cab pulled up at the front entrance to the campsite at pretty much the same time Jesper left. The passenger door burst open and Shaky stumbled across the gravel. He didn’t know whether to be in deep mourning for our friend or just plain relieved that he wasn’t lying in a ditch with a bullet in his head.
He jabbered away in a mixture of Spanish and English. From what I could make out, the Madre de Dios had smiled upon him in her infinite kindness and Niqab and Heavy Breather had dumped him by the roadside on the northern edge of Granada, cut the plasticuff off his ankles but not off his wrists, then left him to it.