THE ENGLISH WITNESS (25 page)

“You’re lucky. He must have liked you. He
slapped you with the flat of the stock rather than punching you in the jaw with
the butt.”

“Remind me to thank him.”

“You sound like your old self. Where’s
Miguel? I need to talk to him urgently.”

“Julio, I’m sorry. Miguel’s dead. Antonio
shot him.”

“
Antonio
shot him? García López?
What are you talking about? He’s…”

“Dead? He is now. He was here, alive, but
Gallego shot him a split second after Miguel went down. He had another gun concealed
somewhere on the wheelchair.”

Julio was going white. “Oh
God, I need to think,” he said. “Stay here with Gallego for a minute. But we’ll
have you facing the other way, Minister. With respect, I can’t risk having you
behind my back with God knows what hidden under your jacket.” Turning the chair
to face downhill, and carefully wedging a wheel against Abella’s blood-spattered
body, he walked a few yards up the slope.

Gallego watched as the tall man named Julio disappeared behind him.
There was something hauntingly familiar about the stranger that he couldn’t
place. He was reminded of himself as a young man: erect, proud and remorseless.
A few moments later, he heard the newcomer call out to Martí, the one man left
standing whom he could trust.

From his different vantage point, Jack
could see that the Legionnaire had recovered his rifle from the ground. He was
holding it in a relaxed two-handed grip, the barrel sloping downwards, but Jack
had no doubt that he could bring it to bear in a fraction of a second. Julio,
meanwhile, had taken a few steps up the slope towards Martí, and was now
standing with his feet well planted and his hand under his jacket.

“Hey, my big, strong friend,” shouted
Julio. “We can do this one of three ways: We can fight, like we did a few days
back, and I’m not carrying a fresh knife wound now. Or we can shoot, in which
case your brains will be covering the grass before you’ve got that cannon up to
horizontal. Or we can talk.”

Jack watched as two deadly fighters of
very different styles slowly lowered their weapons to the ground and warily
stepped forward to meet one another. From Gallego’s viewpoint, facing away from
the action, there was simply silence followed by a subdued murmur of distant conversation.

For five minutes or more, Jack watched
the two men talk. It was hardly very dramatic, with little of the gesticulating
that is a key part of most Spanish conversation. Then, without warning, Martí
turned away and walked up the hill to the plaza. Two minutes later, Jack heard
an engine start up and a squeal of tyres as a car pulled away. The tall man had
turned round and began to walk back towards them.

“Hey, well done,” enthused Jack. “What on
earth did you say to him?”

“I need to speak to Gallego alone,” was
Julio’s only reply.

Jack shrugged his shoulders and stepped
to one side. Julio took the handles of the wheelchair and trundled Gallego across
the grass. Stopping on the smooth pathway, he turned the chair so that its
occupant was facing down the slope. Then he bent and whispered something in the
old man’s ear, and for the first time Gallego’s body language showed signs of alarm.
Julio leaned forward and spoke again. Then without warning he took his hands
away from the wheelchair, which immediately began to roll forward on the smooth
surface. Moment by moment it gathered pace as the occupant yelled out in fury
and desperation. He belatedly fumbled for the brake lever, but it was too late.

The chair veered slightly, putting first
one wheel then the other onto the grass, but it was well engineered and coped
admirably with the uneven surface. By the time it struck the parapet it must
have been travelling at over thirty kilometres per hour, and Gallego was
screaming hoarsely. There was an audible crunch as his immobile knees struck
the wall perpendicularly and transmitted all the kinetic energy up his thighs
to the pelvis. A split second later his upper body was thrown violently
forward. The extended arms cleared the top of the parapet, and with a second crunch
– this time of shattered ribs – he came to rest slumped across it.

Julio watched dispassionately as a shiny
alloy wheel, suspended slightly clear of the ground, span down to a halt. As Jack
began walking down to the site of the impact, Julio was striding up towards the
plaza. They paused for a moment, not making eye contact.

“To answer your question, I offered the
Incredible Hulk a vision of what the Legion could be without the dead weight of
its former leadership,” he said quietly. “He’s an ambitious and capable man.
Ugly politics, but not the worst of them by a long shot.”

“You mean you just let him go? After all
they’ve done?”

“As I said, he’s not the worst
of them. And with the size of the power vacuum Gallego is leaving, there’ll be
as many claimants are there are members. I imagine he has a life expectancy of
about a week. I don’t want you talking about any of this, to me or anybody
else.”

As Jack reached the bottom of the slope, Gallego was trying to
scream but there was not enough air in his lungs. The Englishman crouched down
and picked up the little backup pistol, which had been shaken loose from its
cut-out in the seat cushion.

“Kill me,” the broken man managed to
whisper.

Jack walked round until he was in Gallego’s
line of sight, then extended his arm and pointed the gun at his forehead. “The
girl in Valencia,” he whispered. “The truth.” There was no answer at first, but
then for a moment the broken man’s eyes danced, and a trickle of saliva
appeared at the corner of his mouth.

It was enough. Jack uncocked the pistol
and slipped it into his pocket. “I knew you were lying,” he said, “and a
bullet’s too good for you. I don’t think you’ve got long, but I hope you see tomorrow’s
headlines before you die.”

Gallego had a question, unspoken but
written clearly enough in his eyes.

“Antonio built up a file,” Jack
explained. “A great big catalogue of torture and killing. Dates, places and
details, together with as much evidence of your movements as he could dig up.
I’ve seen it and it’s absolutely damning. He left it on a computer disk. I’ve
sent copies to all the national daily newspapers and RTE.”

Gallego was a strong man, and his upper
body was honed from reliance on it. He exerted every ounce of his remaining
strength in an attempt to drag himself over the parapet. He almost made it, but
the damaged tendons and ligaments let him down.

As Jack walked slowly up the incline, he
heard the whine of the chopper starting up, and by the time he reached the top
of the path it was already in the air. Many of the monks had emerged from hiding,
and were busy moving bodies or looking for signs of life. They backed away as
the Englishman drew near. One of them called out to him in a voice that contained
both compassion and alarm: “Can we help you? You have nothing to fear.”

“The tall man,” said Jack breathlessly. “Which
way did he go?”

“The black suit? Over that way, towards
the infirmary.”

“Look, is there a car I can borrow? I haven’t
done anything wrong, and I need to get away from here.”

“Yes, you should leave,” replied the monk
with impressive calm under the circumstances. “The police are on their way, and
if you don’t go quickly you’ll find the road barricaded at the bottom. You can
take our shopping car from behind the bell tower. Just lock the key inside when
you’ve finished with it. And if you have a chance to let us know where you left
it, so much the better.”

Pausing only to stammer his thanks, Jack turned
to cross the plaza to the bell tower. But at that moment a black Viano
identical to the one in which had been a prisoner came out from behind the
tower and sped towards him. He flinched and turned to run, but he was too late.
The car pulled alongside him and the driver’s window slid down to reveal the
smiling face of Julio. “Your carriage awaits, Sire,” he announced. “I’ve got to
take you back to HQ to give a statement. If you get in the back, you can stretch
out for an hour or so.”

“No, thank you,” answered Jack with some
feeling. “Nothing personal, but I’ve had enough of travelling in a fish tank.”

“Yes, I can understand that,” answered
Julio cheerily. Reassured, Jack walked round the car, opened the front
passenger door and climbed in. Julio set off, and barely a minute later they
were driving fast through the main gate. Twenty minutes later, as they rounded
a rocky spur that had hid the road ahead from view, they came to a police
roadblock.

Back up at the monastery, the monk to whom Jack had spoken saw the
tall and rather intimidating figure of Brother Ángel bearing down on him. “An
Englishman was here,” shouted Ángel when he was still several metres away. “I
need to find him.”

“I don’t know where he is now,” answered
the monk in a slow, patient voice. “But I know where he went. He was driven off
in a big, black car by a tall man in a black suit. I imagine they went down the
hill.”

“How long?” hissed Ángel with urgency in
his voice and manner.

“Not long. Between five and ten minutes. But
don’t worry; they’ll probably get stopped at the foot of the pass.”

Ángel waited to hear no more.
He sprinted back across the plaza in the direction of the bell tower and was
lost to view. It was not until five minutes later that the group of monks saw him
re-emerge. Clad from head to foot in black leather and polycarbonate, he was
riding a streamlined black motorcycle with a long brown leather case slung
diagonally across his back. The engine bellowed, the front wheel lifted
momentarily from the ground, and then he was accelerating towards the main
gate.

The Viano approached the checkpoint slowly. It was a hastily
erected affair: a line of concrete blocks and sandbags designed to funnel traffic
from either direction into a single-width channel in the middle of the
carriageway. At the mid-point of the channel was a steel hurdle on casters. It
would never have stopped a moving vehicle, but armed police stood on duty as a deterrent
to anyone tempted to smash their way through.

Julio did nothing rash. He simply drew to
a halt at the barrier, lowered the window and showed the policeman on duty a
document that Jack could not quite make out. A brief conversation ensued, then
with a squeal of rusty steel the makeshift gate was dragged open. Julio
accelerated gently away, but as soon as they were out of sight of the patrolmen
he put his foot down.

“How did you manage that?” asked Jack,
who had expected trouble.

“I simply showed them my police ID and
told them the truth, that I’m taking you to HQ in San Sebastián to make a
statement.”

Jack nodded at this
explanation, and sat quietly. He had an overpowering urge to telephone his
family, but the battery in his mobile phone had been flat for days. Noting that
Julio was indeed headed for the coast, he began to relax and eventually drifted
off to sleep.

Ángel saw the roadblock as he rounded the
last bend and swore under his breath. Then to his relief he saw that the
barrier was standing open. He did not have long; an officer was taking hold of
the steel hurdle, presumably to close it. He gunned the engine, the front wheel
lifted higher this time, and he flew down the remaining metres. The officer was
aware of him now and was racing to drag the barrier back into place. He nearly
managed it, but the bike was travelling too fast. For a moment Ángel feared
that his handlebar would make contact with the concrete to his right and be
pulled out of his hands. But then he was through. He just had time to take in
the fact that there was another officer talking into a radio mike beside a
parked police car, and again he swore. Then the scene was behind him. He
hunched down over the fuel tank to keep wind drag to a minimum and accelerated
up the road towards the coast. He fancied he could already hear the sound of
sirens over the rush of wind round his helmet and the roar of the engine
beneath him.

“Wake up, Jack.” Julio took one hand off the steering wheel and
used it to shake the Englishman by the shoulder. “Come on, wake up. We’ve got
company.”

Jack grudgingly raised his head from his
chest and looked across at the driver. “What do you mean, company?”

“We’re being followed—-a motorbike. He’s
staying well back and trying hard to look innocent. What’s going on, Jack? Got
any other enemies you haven’t told us, I mean me, about?”

Jack’s brow furrowed in thought, but he
remained silent. “I’ve no idea who it could be. Is anyone still in the game?”

“Good question,” answered Julio. “Not the
cops, at least not the
good
cops. And not the Legion either—as of today they’ll
be tied up with internal pissing contests. That leaves either the bad cops or national
security. And we mustn’t forget the Basques; they don’t like outsiders coming
in hot.”

“Who do you think, Julio?”

“No idea. Do you want to find out?”

“Not in the slightest.”

They had just rounded a sharp bend.
Without warning Julio stamped on the brakes and wrenched on the wheel. The
ungainly vehicle shot up an unmade forestry track, juddering and bounding on the
unsuitable surface. The driver pulled on the wheel again, yanked on the
handbrake and swung the Viano sideways behind a tangled stand of scrubby trees.
“Whoops, there goes my insurance bonus,” he muttered, and a second later they
heard the roar of the motorcycle out on the road. Julio deftly reversed out of
the hiding place and bumped back down the track. In a few moments they were on
the highway, heading back the way they had come.