THE ENGLISH WITNESS (27 page)

“His injuries? Not gospel. Just a story
on the street that everyone has heard and nobody has ever challenged. Why do
you…”

“No time to go into it. Any chance of
getting hospital records from that far back?”

“No chance at all, I should think. And
anyone old enough to have treated Adolfo as a child is probably dead by now. But
I’ll do what I can.”

“Yes please. But before I go, can you
think? Just suppose Adolfo did have an avenger or a disciple, somebody who knew
his life story and shared his obsessions. Can you think of anywhere that might
have special significance? Especially somewhere with a connection to Jimmy?”

“Hmm. Thinking. The monastery, of course.
And there was a confrontation down at the youth hostel in Anoeta. God, we’re
getting so old. My brain isn’t what it used to be. But it all started when Jimmy
witnessed something he shouldn’t have. He saw a hit going down just weeks after
helping you get across the border. And that was where he crossed paths with Adolfo
for the first time. I never heard the full story, and I’m racking my brains to
remember where it happened. It was somewhere remote, but I know he went on foot
because he told me he was exhausted and in shock and no one would offer him a
lift. You’ll have to help me, Txako; I’m not a local. He had to make a long climb
on foot and catch some sort of cable car. Can you think of anywhere like that?
Hello?”

But Ángel was already pulling
on his helmet and cocking a leg over the BMW. He raced up the centre line of
the road towards the seafront, jumping red traffic lights and hooting at pedestrians.
Once on the seafront, he turned left and accelerated along the curving road
towards Monte Igeldo. He wound up the Igeldo road at a homicidal speed. Then
halting behind the hotel, he gazed down across the car park. The black Mercedes
people carrier in the bottom corner pf the car park confirmed to him that he
had come to the right place, but he was terrified that he would be too late.

“Why did you have to shoot the dog walker, Julio?”

“Witness, obviously. If my father had
killed you when he should have, things would have been very different.”

“Your father? I’ve no idea who you’re
talking about.”

“Then you’re more stupid than I thought
you were. My father was Txema Gallego. Or Adolfo, to give him the name that
defined him. Or José María as he styled himself more recently.”

“Now I know you’re lying. It was you who
killed him, or at least left him a basket case. And he couldn’t have children
anyway; he got castrated as a kid.”

Julio kept the long, silenced automatic
pointing at Jack, but quickly glanced around the cove. He was sitting closer to
the Englishman than he liked, and he knew Jack had been smart enough to
outmanoeuvre his father. On the other hand he had to talk, and the thunder of
the waves on the rocks was too intense to allow conversation at a greater
distance. It was important to him that that Jack should know why he had to die
and why his father had had to be punished.

“Adolfo had a child. He had me. He wasn’t
maimed in quite the way he wanted people to think. He didn’t have the means to
satisfy a woman, but with minor surgery he was able to… let’s just say he made a
deposit at the bank. A woman was impregnated and I was born. I dug all that up
later; my adoptive parents knew nothing about it. And it was my father himself who
put about the story that he’d been emasculated. It was all part of covering up
my existence.

“Can you imagine what it was like growing
up? Finding out about my real father. Admiring him from afar. Wanting to be
with him. Wanting to
be
him. And hating him, because he just saw me as a
weak spot in his armour. But at least he was a strong man, a leader, a warrior,
even if latterly he had to send others out to fight.

“Then he reinvented himself, and he was going
to reinvent the country with mere words. The maimed warrior became what he’d
always hated, always despised, always destroyed: a politician. What do you
think it was like, Jack?”

Jack looked at him, and now he thought he
could see a family resemblance. Something about the mouth and the cheekbones.
But there it ended. In fact, the rest of him actually reminded Jack a little of
Miguel, and that was just freaky. “Can’t have been pleasant, Julio, growing up
torn between an adoptive family and a biological parent whom you admired. On
that you have my sympathy. Then again, you could have chosen to admire him as a
man but reject the hatred and violence.”

“I don’t need your sympathy. I certainly
don’t need your smug lecture. But it doesn’t matter. You can patronise away,
but you’ve only got minutes to enjoy it. If it helps, I’ve actually enjoyed
your company over the last few days, but that doesn’t change anything. You were
marked for destruction from the minute you stepped off the train.

”It was all so complicated, Jack. You
must have guessed that I’m more than a chauffeur. Does the name CIFAS mean
anything to you? We’re like your MI5. I’ve been monitoring Antonio for years as
a potential domestic terrorist. God, he was up to some stuff. And officially I’ve
been on secondment to the police to assist – in other words keep an eye on them
– in the investigation of his death. But I never bore them any ill-will, him or
my half-brother Miguel, neither of whom knew about me. And once I knew the
score I was happy to help them destroy
my
father—God knows Txema had it
coming.”

“So tell me about your mother, Julio.
Does she approve of the life you’ve chosen?”

“You can’t get to me by talking about my
mother, Jack. I’ve come to terms with what happened. And I don’t even mind
telling you, as you’re going to be dead within a minute or two. My real mother
– not my adoptive mother in San Sebastián – was married to Antonio. She bore
him two children—you met them all on your travels. But he was a sick, violent…”

“She must have taken them away from him,”
interrupted Jack. “That’s why his apartment hadn’t seen a woman’s touch in
years.”  

“He had other homes, including an armed
compound out in the desert. In recent years his place in Almería wasn’t been much
more than a post box. But you’re right: she took the children away from him, and
in the process she removed herself and them from the protection of his paranoid
security protocol. And when Txema found out about Antonio’s role in the deaths
of three legionnaires, she was a soft target. He knew exactly how to use her in
inflicting the maximum pain and dishonour on Antonio. He impregnated her,
disfigured her and then let her go, knowing that as a strict Catholic she’d
never consider an abortion. But within days of delivering me, she’d taken her
own life.”

“I’m sorry. That’s terrible.”

“As I said, I don’t need your sympathy.
Just your death will do.”

“I came to like and admire you. I still
will if we can get past this.”

“No chance. My father may live or die,
but he had to be punished—both for what he’d become and for what he did to my
mother. And I was more than happy for my half-brother Miguel to use you as bait.
It was you who made my father what he became: a physical and a mental cripple. Besides,
Antonio was right about one thing: you really do know too much.”

Julio raised the long barrel of the
pistol he was holding, which Jack now recognised. Remove the suppressor and it
was the same weapon that Jack himself had once carried for several hours.

“Nice weapon. Adolfo’s of course.”

“Yes, his Ruger. Only .22 calibre, and I’m
afraid it may not kill you very quickly, particularly with the silencer
attached.”

Jack closed his eyes. He knew
this was the end, and he was beyond fighting. He heard the gunshot and waited
for the pain.

Afraid that the BMW’s noise would attract attention, but aware that
he could not spare the time or the strength to walk, Ángel kept the engine at idling
speed and used gravity to draw him down the slope. For minute after minute he
coasted on down the side of the cliff at barely jogging pace, using the front
brake lever to hold the machine back. It was not an easy surface, and the BMW
was poorly suited to off-road use, but he made progress.

A few hundred metres down, he saw a large
dog running loose amongst the scrub. He thought it was a Labrador, but the
light was fading too much to be sure. Then he came to the body in the middle of
the path and his heart skipped a beat. It was not Jimmy, but exhaustion and
confusion were creeping up on him. At one point the path sloped up a little,
and he had to use the engine to keep the bike moving, but he thought the lie of
the land would deflect the sound over the heads of anyone down in the cove.

As he neared the bottom of the path, he
realised that he need not have worried about the sound of his engine. The roar
of the waves on the rocks might not mask a gunshot, but it was enough to drown
out the refined purr of his engine. He switched off the ignition, propped the
bike on its side-stand and opened the long bag that had been making his
shoulder ache for hours. He hoped the contents had not been damaged in his
minor accident on entering the city.

There was a deep scuff mark on the
polished wooden stock, but he did not think the damage was more than cosmetic.
Taking two ammunition clips from a separate compartment in the case, he pushed
one into the rifle and slipped another into his pocket. Then, working the bolt
action and holding the weapon at the ready, he set off in a tired and uneven
gait across the rock-strewn beach.

He saw the two men within a couple of
minutes. They were positioned sideways on to him, and in the fading light of
late evening he doubted either would have seen him. However, he knew that in
poor light conditions peripheral vision is sharper than direct, and that the
eye and brain are particularly alert to movement. Therefore he moved very
slowly as he knelt behind a large rock and rested the barrel across it.

Averse as he was to causing harm to
another, he knew that he needed to disable the gunman and took careful aim. But
his vision seemed blurred, his coordination tired and clumsy, his resolve to shoot
wavering. And at first, he hoped that he would not have to take the shot at all.
There seemed to be a two-sided conversation going on, and he dared to hope that
the two of them would resolve their differences.

Then the tall, slender man with the gun straightened
his arm into an unmistakeable firing stance. The sudden tensing in the other
man’s posture indicated that he also expected the gun to fire.

Fearing that he had delayed
too long, Ángel aimed for the gunman’s arm and fired, but knew even before his
trigger finger had completed its movement that he was going to miss. As the
heavy report reverberated around the rocky cove, he worked the rifle’s
double-action bolt to chamber another round. But Julio’s right arm was quicker,
swinging out towards the muzzle flash and squeezing off two quick shots. The
first ricocheted off the rock behind which Ángel was kneeling, but the second
snatched at his upper left arm on its way past. He knew from the shockwaves
travelling through his nervous system that he had been hit in the muscle, and
that like all real life bullet wounds it was a serious injury. Whether he lived
or died depended on whether major blood vessels had been torn.

Jack had opened his eyes by the time the second shot sounded. The
tall man’s feet and body were still positioned square on to him, but his head
was turned sideways and his right arm was extended in the same direction. He
fired his second shot, and a dark shape stumbled out from behind a rock a few metres
away. Julio swung the pistol back towards Jack. “Don’t go anywhere,” he
snarled. “I’ll get to you in a minute.” 

Julio stalked across the uneven surface
with his gun held out in front of him. Jack saw him pick up something long,
dark and heavy. He hurled it away, and it hit the nearby rocks with a clatter.
Then he hauled a kneeling man to his feet. That was the point at which Jack got
his wits back and dived behind a large, seaweed covered rock. He reached into
his trouser pocket and attempted to pull out the snub-nosed pistol he had been
carrying ever since his final one-sided conversation with Gallego. He did not
dare waste time ejecting the magazine to see how many rounds were left; he just
had to hope that there was at least one. He saw that it was still cocked, and
so he simply clicked the safety off, held the weapon in a two-handed grip, and
waited.

“You need to come out, Jack,” he heard
Julio call out. “I have a friend of yours here, and he won’t tell me who he is.”
Jack did not move. He had no idea who else could be there on the beach, let
alone a friend. “I think I’ll start putting some holes in your friend,” came
Julio’s voice again, “and maybe his screams will bring you out.”

A vaguely familiar voice called out, “Jimmy,
don’t do it.” It was followed by the sound of a heavy blow, clearly audible
even over the noise of the sea.

“Who is it?” shouted Jack. “Tell me who
it is.”

There came the sound of another blow, and
the same voice said. “It’s Txako, Jimmy. Do you remember? The cause of all your
troubles.” There was something wrong with the voice. It was recognisably
Txako’s, but it was slightly distorted—lazy, almost slurred. “He’ll kill us
both,” the speaker added. Then there was another hard blow and he went silent.