THE ENGLISH WITNESS (6 page)

In shock at my discovery, I stood for a
minute or two gazing distractedly at the corpse. I had no idea how to handle
this turn of events. I’d been brought up to trust the police, but the heavily
armed
grises
who cruised the streets of San Sebastián were infamously
harsh in their dealings with the public. I decided that the first step was to
consult my new friend Carlos; he’d set up the meeting and he seemed more
streetwise than I could claim to be.

Retrieving my backpack from the ground, I’d
just begun to pick my way back towards the foot of the path when something hit
me in the small of the back. Spinning round, I saw nothing at first. Then
another pebble came sailing through the air, straight towards my face. Dodging
the missile just in time, I stumbled angrily in the direction it had come from,
and was about to launch into a tirade of abuse when I saw Carlos hunched down
between two boulders. He was clearly in a state of shock.

“Hey, what the hell….?” I began, but then
saw that he had a finger to his lips while his other arm was frantically
gesturing at me.

“Just get down,” he called out, as loudly
as a hoarse whisper would allow. “They’re still here.”

“Who’s still here? What the hell is going
on?”

“I’ve no idea, but my… Gato… is….”

“Yes, I’ve seen him,” I acknowledged as I
squatted down beside him. “Come on, don’t we need to get to the police?”

Carlos looked at me wide-eyed. “The
police?” he gasped, hunching down even further between the rocks. “Don’t be
stupid.” He took a moment to recompose himself before continuing, “We can’t let
them find us. Don’t talk now; we need to get out of here.”

With that, he levered himself forward onto
his hands and knees and began crawling towards the path. As he did so, I could
see that something had fallen from his pocket; it was his national identity
card encased in a slippery plastic sheath. I snatched it up and slid it into my
own pocket, intending to hand it back with a flourish as soon as I had the
chance, then set off after him.

I could see only one route out of the
steep-sided, semi-circular cove: the same meandering path down which I’d so
recently strolled from the crest of Monte Igeldo. By the time we reached the
foot of the path my knees were raw, but a more serious concern was that we
would have to leave the cover of the rocks. A few dozen metres up the slope,
the scrubby trees would provide some cover for our movements. But for as much
as half a minute we’d be right out in the open. I looked at my friend and could
see even from behind that he was shaking. To my own surprise I was now as cold
as ice. I would have to give the signal to move.

I cautiously raised my head and looked
around, and then I was off, whispering to Carlos as I passed him that it was time
to go. He stayed put and I stopped in my tracks, aware that I was now fully
visible to anyone still in the area. “Come on,” I urged him. “We have to go.”
And amazingly, he moved. Awkwardly at first, stiffly, but with increasing drive
at every step, he came towards me. I turned, and we ran together up the steep,
uneven path. At every step I expected to hear gunshots, but at last to my
relief we reached the cover of the trees and stopped to get our breath back.

It was then that the sound came—not the
full-throated roar I would have expected, but something more akin to the crack
of a whip. As a former military cadet, with the passion for weaponry that other
kids of my age reserved for motorcycles or guitars, I recognised that noise. It
marked the passage of a small, light bullet – probably .22 calibre – travelling
faster than the speed of sound. The echoing quality was provided by the muzzle
report as it reached me a fraction of a second later. This was not a police or
military weapon—a .22 bullet doesn’t have enough destructive power for use in
combat. This was a lightweight precision tool, the stock-in-trade of a marksman
rather than a soldier.

The sound came twice in quick succession,
and then a third time. In a detached kind of way I began to think, ‘Oh no,
they’re shooting at us.’ I glanced across at Carlos, and he was looking
detached as well, as though the sound meant absolutely nothing at all. “Come
on, quickly!” I urged him, and reached out to pull at his arm, but once again
he seemed reluctant to move. “Quickly,” I repeated. Only then did he look at me
and open his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a trickle of blood that
ran down his chin and dripped onto his shirt. His eyes were now unfocused,
quivering, and beginning to turn upwards. A moment later he collapsed. I turned
and sprinted up the path in a panic, but after a few dozen metres another
whip-crack sent me diving off the path.

I don’t know how long I lay hiding in the
damp hillside undergrowth, or how much of that time I spent in haunted sleep,
but the light was fading from the sky as I scrambled up onto an unfamiliar
stretch of road. There, light-headed with exhaustion and dehydration, I stopped
by the roadside and vainly attempted to thumb a lift. Finally, as large, soft,
warm drops of rain began to fall, I found my way to the funicular railway. And
having once reached the base of the cliff I was able to get a taxi back to my
lodgings.

I lay awake most of the night, flipping
Carlos’ identity card over and over in my fingers as I listened yet again to
Steve’s wet snoring and fretted over the future. My problem was that there was
nobody I could trust to respond appropriately. If my parents actually believed
my account, they would press me to cut short my stay and return home. My fellow
students would treat it as either a joke or a melodrama, and either way my
reputation would haunt me until the day I graduated. The police might help, but
in Franco’s Spain they might just as easily have been involved in the killings.

More than once I was on the point of
waking Steve and confiding in him, but by morning I had decided to bide my
time. By midday, the story that a boy from the neighbourhood had gone missing
was all around the college. And by evening the death of two “ETA terrorists”
was on the national news. Life in the Basque Country went on.

JACK

It
was a tortuously slow telling, Jack’s emotional state becoming visibly more
disturbed and his narration more erratic as the story progressed. It chilled
Miguel to the core. He was used to encountering raw emotions during an
investigation: fear, grief, resentment, even anger. And all those were present
on Jack’s face as he told his story. But there was something else, something
darker, something the detective was not sure how to classify. He called a halt
to the questioning earlier than he had planned to, and suggested they resume in
an hour’s time.

Jack withdrew to his room, where he turned on the TV
and dozed off in the middle of a maiden news conference by the disabled but
impressive new Justice Minister. It seemed that the politician had big plans
for the reform of interrogation and jury trials, but by the time he got onto
the subject of anti-terror legislation Jack was dreaming of blood and thunder.

He woke up an hour or maybe two hours later with an
intuition that something was wrong.
Darkness. Silence. Presence.
He fought
off the ominous impressions crowding in on him, and spent a few moments
wondering if this was just a shadow of the disturbing dream from which he had
woken. But as he lay motionless in the pitch darkness he was able to identify
the real source of his unease. He had fallen asleep with the lights and the
television on. Now there was not so much as a glimmer from the television’s red
standby light. There had evidently been a power cut. It could have been a mere
service outage, but Jack was losing his faith in coincidence.

He quickly climbed into the ill-fitting pair of
trousers that had been delivered that morning together with a couple of shirts
and a selection of cheap underwear. Then he put on his shoes and listened
carefully for sounds in the building or outside. He desperately craved his own
clothes, but his suitcase had been abandoned along with the police cruiser that
had picked him up at the station an eventful thirty hours earlier.

Hearing nothing, he put his ear to the bedroom door
just as a key was inserted roughly from the other side. He jerked backwards in
alarm, but not quickly enough to avoid a sharp knock on the temple as the door
was thrown open. He stumbled backwards and sat down in disarray on the bed as
Alonso stepped into the room with his finger pressed to his lips.

“We’ve got to go,” announced the incompletely uniformed,
unshaven policeman. “They’re onto us.”

“How the hell…”

“No time. Just come.”

Alonso stepped back out into the corridor, only to be
hurled sideways as if by an invisible attack dog a split second before a short,
sharp noise reverberated down the corridor. Not a single shot, thought Jack,
but a short burst from a machine pistol.

He leapt from the bed, his pulse racing. He had the
presence of mind to wrench Alonso’s key from its position in the outer face of
the lock, before slamming the door shut and twisting the latch back to the
locked position. He was dimly aware of renewed gunfire in the corridor outside,
but by that time he was concentrating on his escape.

The first step was to haul the dressing table round
the end of the bed and brace it against the door. It was an exhausting task,
and the fact that he could move it at all meant that it would not present the
attackers with much of an obstacle. All the same it was quite heavy and solid,
and its removal from the window cleared a possible exit route. In a moment,
Jack had eased one of the internal steel shutters aside and pushed open the
glazed door onto the balcony.

Expecting at any minute to be met by a hail of shots
from below, he slipped out onto the railed concrete platform and tugged the heavy
steel shutter back into place. Finally he nudged the door shut. A moment later
he heard a crash from inside as the door to the corridor was forced open,
followed by a fresh burst of gunfire and the impact of bullets against the
shutter’s far side. 

One man down, Captain,” announced Seve Torres. “No
visual contact with the target yet, but there are others in the building.”

“Very good, Red Two. Carry on. But remember, a
mounting body count is no use to us without information. You need to take
prisoners.”

“Message understood, Sir.”

Torres signed off, and as he di
d so his posture slumped. The raid on the
compound had begun so well. A sympathiser working at police HQ had informed his
Legion contact that a secure facility up in the hills was in active use again after
standing idle for several weeks. The Captain himself had made a tentative
connection with the current operation and ordered a unit forward. The discovery
of the late Red Leader’s SUV in a barn near the house had been all the evidence
needed to justify an assault.

Torres should have waited for backup, but he was
impatient. He had been too keen to take Serrano’s place and had wanted a solid achievement
on his record. Confident of his strength and firepower, he had gone in. And
initially, the occupants had been taken by surprise. The uniform was dead, the
fat detective had been overpowered and cuffed to the plumbing, and all that
remained was to grab the placid-looking Englishman. Then things had taken a
turn for the worse. With two colleagues he would certainly have succeeded, but
with just his regular partner – the clueless Rodríguez – he had made himself a
hostage to fortune.

Rodríguez had gone down in the first minutes, tackled
hand-to-hand by a lanky brawler they had not known was on the premises. The
would-be squad leader had heard the unmistakeable and nauseating sound of his
partner’s neck breaking. He had opened fire, perforating the dead man’s remains
with unfelt bullets but missing his killer. He had made it through to the
accommodation wing just in time to see the uniform entering a room, bringing the
man down with a well-placed three-shot burst and dispatching him with a second
volley.

Then the true scale of Torres’ misjudgement had
become apparent. Without a partner to work a pincer movement, the main quarry had
eluded him. By the time he had worked his way past the barricaded bedroom door,
the Englishman had left the building via the balcony.

Torres turned and made his way back to the communal area.
He set his weapon down on the kitchen worktop and put some water on to boil. He
had one or two minor wounds that needed dressing, and in the absence of alcohol
he craved caffeine. Then there was a sound behind him. He whirled round to see Martí
standing in the doorway. He felt an overwhelming sense of relief that his
partner’s killer had not crept up on him.

“Oh, it’s you, Martí. Thank God. How on earth did you
know to come here?”

“I was able to contact base through a borrowed phone.
I was told you needed backup, and I came.” The blond man smiled, humourlessly.
“Their assessment was clearly on the money.” And here the smile broadened into
a leer. “But I’ll tell them you died bravely.”

Torres saw the way things were going and lunged for
the machine pistol on the work surface beside him. But Martí was recovered and
ready. He stepped forward, lowered his shoulder and put all his weight behind a
punch to Torres’ solar plexus. The weapon clattered to the floor and the victim
folded over, his vision fading to black as he struggled to draw breath. He was
unable to put up any resistance as Martí stepped behind him, put a bulging arm
around his neck and swiftly choked the life out of him.

Martí stopped to speak to the handcuffed detective
on the way out. “I haven’t got time for you, old man, and in any case I owe
you. But if you want my advice, go for a career change. It’s a different world
from the one you grew up in.” With that, he was gone.

Another
half-hour elapsed before Jack and Julio came in, found Miguel and freed him
from his own handcuffs. By the time the three of them emerged into the night,
Juana the midwife was at her patient’s side several kilometres away. And a
hundred metres along the road they came to an elderly SEAT hatchback that Julio
had taken from the hospital car park.

“I’ve never been so glad to see anybody in my life,”
said Jack with feeling as they climbed in. “I thought you were going to be out
of action for days.”

“I was,” smiled Julio. “But when I drove up I found a
situation in progress. I parked the car and came in on foot. I took out one
hostile, then I went round the back to find a way to get you out, and you were
already on the balcony. You showed considerable presence of mind in my view.”

“Cheers, but I’d never have tried to lower myself
down without you there to confirm it was safe and give me a pair of shoulders
to climb onto.”

“That’s enough mutual admiration for now,” scolded
Miguel. “Julio, are you back in service?”

“More or less. I caught a bit of a knock on my
stitches from that goon inside. Feels a bit damp under my shirt. I ought to
check.”

The driver peeled off his jacket, and the
shirt underneath was wet once again with fresh blood. “I must say, I feel a
little dizzy still. Anyone else care to drive?”

“Red
Six reporting. It was a total disaster, Commander,” reported Martí as soon as
he was clear of the ill-fated compound. “Red Two and Red Seven both down. One hostile
down. Target escaped. Orders, please.”

“Red Six, assume the duties of Red Leader, who as you
know is also a casualty. All units to fall back and regroup. Get some food and
sleep. Anything else to report?”

“Negative, Commander.”

“Your loyalty to your line of command is recognised
and warmly appreciated, Red Six, but let me ask you directly. Your captain. How
has he acquitted himself in this operation?”

“With respect, Commander, it’s not my place to pass
judgement on a senior officer. But if you’re asking about the operation, I
would have planned it differently. We’re now several men down and the target is
still at large. It was too big and nowhere near smart enough. If we’d kept a
lower profile they’d have tried to come in to police headquarters and we could
have neutralised them with just two units.”

“Thank you, Red Six. And in your opinion, is there an
explanation for the Captain’s error of judgement.”

Martí was silent at first, but when the question was
repeated in a sharper tone of voice he knew that failure to answer could be
suicidal. “Vanity,” he said simply. Then, after a pause, “Ambition. Closed
ears. Imported whiskey.”

“Last question, Red Six. Do you have two or three close
colleagues with whom there is complete mutual trust?”

“Two. Not three. But they’re solid.”

“Very well. At 0800 tomorrow you are to return to
base and relieve the Captain of his duties. All duties. Do I have to spell it
out for you?”

“No, Commander. Orders received and understood.”

Martí smiled to himself as he drove. He did not care
much for politics or doctrine. And unlike some of his colleagues he had no
interest in inflicting pain, fear or death. But he loved the Legion
for
its own sake, he did not suffer fools like Torres or Gómez gladly, and he liked
to be in control.

JAMES

It was towards the end of June that I realised I was being watched. By
that time I was just beginning to get over – or so I thought – the horror of
finding Gato’s body down behind Monte Igeldo. Even the experience of seeing my
friend Carlos shot down in cold blood seemed remote and unreal. I’d resumed
showing my face at college after a short break in attendance, and I’d just that
morning arranged to meet up with local friends at a nearby funfair. Neither place
held much appeal, and both were winding down. The academic staff were only interested
in clearing their desks for the summer or planning for the autumn, and the
Travellers were busy preparing for the road.

As far as the latter were concerned, the local
residents couldn’t wait to see the back of them. The crime rate had soared as
local lowlifes plundered the neighbourhood knowing that the outsiders would
reap the blame. There were reports of picked pockets, sexual assault and
fighting. Local bars and restaurants complained of lost business. Shopkeepers
told anyone who would listen of the losses they had incurred through pilfering
and vandalism.

It was getting towards dusk on the last
day of the fair when I spotted the watchers, and I owe it to one of the
Travellers that I did so. I’d spent the early evening in the company of local
friends, and we were sitting on the steps of an apartment block a few dozen
yards along the street from my own lodgings. I listened drowsily as they
discussed what they’d do for entertainment now that the fair was leaving town.

All of a sudden an old man came staggering
along the pavement towards us. I recognised him immediately; I’d seen him at
the fair earlier, guzzling red wine from a bottle and hurling abuse at a worn-out
woman whom I took to be his wife. He stopped level with us and stood swaying as
he looked backwards and forwards along the street. Then, to my disbelief, he lurched
between two of the cars parked diagonally along the kerb and got behind the
steering wheel of a little ‘600’. He sat in the vehicle for a minute—long
enough to give us hope that he wasn’t going to drive after all. Then he started
the engine, backed out too quickly and caught the corner of a black ‘124’
saloon in the next bay. Its driver was sitting there behind the wheel, and I
thought I knew what would happen next. Both drivers would get out, and there
would be a loud altercation with much waving of arms, perhaps even a scuffle.

In the event, the driver of the black car
acted as though nothing had happened. He just sat there minding his own
business until the Traveller came round and tapped on his window. Even then,
all he did was shake his wrist dismissively. Eventually the drunk shrugged, got
back into his car and drove away.