THE ENGLISH WITNESS (3 page)

“Make it two hours,” answered Steve, a
calculating look in his eyes. “Better still, two and a half. Don’t forget we
still need to get hold of a passport. Gina, could I have a word before we split?”

It had been my idea to borrow a passport for Txako and
shepherd him across the border in a group of British students. I’d also
volunteered some ideas on how to disguise his appearance – including a rather
frivolous suggestion that perhaps he should go in drag – but I’d left the
details for Steve and Txako to work out. And so, when I finally reached the
station, I failed to realise that I was the last to arrive. I saw Steve and
Gina standing by the ticket office, but Txako was nowhere in sight. Then a
tall, angular blonde who’d been standing alone a few metres away sidled over.
Without any warning she hugged me and gave me a big wet kiss on the lips. I raised
my hand to wipe it off, but she took my wrist and subjected it to a grip like
an all-in wrestler.

“Ees me, Txako,” she whispered. I must
have looked shocked.

“Act natural, Jim,” whispered Steve as he
came up behind me. Then he continued in a louder voice, “This is Sally. Sally,
meet my friend Jimmy.” His voice dropped to a whisper again, “We’ve got you a
ticket, and there’s a train to Irún in a quarter of an hour.”

I peered sidelong at Txako in his tight
cowgirl jeans, chequered blouse, pointed boots and wavy blond wig. The final make-over
had been judged to perfection, more daringly than anything I could have
imagined. I was struck by how feminine he looked: somehow too delicate to be a
bloke, and revealing improbable poise and dignity. I decided not to ask
questions, but he saw me looking. “You thought you knew me,” he said with a
smile, and I left it at that.

The journey up to Irún went off without
any more drama, although every time someone came through from the next car my
heart skipped a beat. The robotic mentality of an unknown passport inspector now
seemed a hopelessly fragile lifeline, and by the time we left the train at the
frontier I felt sick with dread. However, we were not stopped when we walked
through passport control into France as two couples: Steve went first, hand in
hand with the primly buttoned-up Txako. Gina and I followed close behind,
relying on Gina’s studied carelessness in buttoning her blouse to distract the
official from looking too hard at Txako. In the event she even got a smile.

We waited with our friend beside the next
train to Bayonne. We knew there was a sizeable community of political exiles
there who would take him in, but I think we were all wondering what life now
held for him. As the departure time approached he hugged each of us, tears
running down his face and streaking the expertly applied make-up. Then he
climbed aboard and made his way to a seat, but just as the train was starting
to move he rushed back to the door and pulled the window down. He was waving something
at us: a dark rectangle. “Oh God!” breathed Steve before running to the moving
train and taking the object.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

“Getting the passport back,” smiled Steve
with relief.

“Hey!” I exclaimed. “That’s a British one.
Whose is it?”

“My, my, James, you are quick on the
uptake today. It was your idea, remember? And anyway, how many blondes do you
know called Sally?”

“Well, there’s the Sally on our course, but…
No!”

“Oh yes,” confirmed Gina, her face deadpan
but her eyes giving something away. “The boys must have been very persuasive.”

“Steve?” I turned towards him as I spoke.
“How on earth did you get Sally to hand over her passport? And where did the
wig come from?”

Steve was silent for several moments, a
sly smile playing on his lips. “Gina borrowed the wig from a friend,” he
replied. “As for Sally, Txako and I worked on her together.”

JACK

“I think we have a file on that name.” Miguel was finishing off a second
cup of coffee, and to Julio’s obvious displeasure he was polluting the
apartment with a cheap, foul-smelling cigar. “We’ll check it out when we get back
to HQ. But if I’m remembering correctly, Santiago Ibarra kept going as a
separatist agitator on the French side of the border for years—small fry,
always going to ground at the first sign of trouble. After the restoration of
the monarchy he came back to Spain, and as far as I know he’s stayed out of trouble
since then. Either that or he’s playing a much cleverer game. But enough
chatter; we’ve a lot of ground to cover. And while I think you were immensely naïve
and stupid, I don’t understand how your little adventure could have put you in such
serious danger.”

“Shall I go on?” asked Jack. “I’m not sure
how relevant all of this is.”

“If you want me to be honest, a lot of it isn’t.
I’d rather suffer a bit of overkill than have something significant left out,
but you have to remember that this is a criminal investigation. What we need to
get to is who was involved and how they’re connected to one another.”

Jack nodded, but as he drew in breath to
resume his narrative the apartment’s phone rang. Alonso reached it first,
answered curtly, then passed the handset to his superior. Miguel barked a
question and listened intently for two or three minutes without interrupting.
Finally, having obtained a brief answer to one further question, he hung up and
turned to address the other three people in the room. From what he had been
able to glean from Miguel’s side of the conversation, Jack was not surprised to
see anxiety on his face. Less easy to understand was the half-concealed look of
puzzlement that accompanied it.  

“Gentlemen, we have a situation,”
announced the detective gravely. “It seems the cavalry have turned up, found
the Indians mobilised in greater strength than expected, and sounded the
retreat. On the plus side, our best intelligence is that they don’t have the numbers
for a door-to-door search of the neighbourhood. We’re advised to sit tight.”

There was silence in the room for a full
minute. Then the normally taciturn Alonso spoke. “With respect, Chief, whatever
our best intelligence is, we need to make a move.”

“Explain, Alonso. You’re the ops man.”

“They don’t need to go from door to door. They
must have found the car by now, and they’ll know we can’t be far away. They’ll
be monitoring the police frequencies. And any outfit that can stage a
demonstration on this scale probably has access at the telephone exchange as
well.” He paused before continuing in a lower, mildly apologetic tone. “You
were on the phone for over five minutes.” His words were calm and confident,
but even Jack noticed something edgier in the body language.

“Good thinking, Alonso,” replied the
detective in a tone of voice that kept an unspoken dialogue going behind the
measured words. “Keep watch on the street. Everyone else, stay away from the
windows.”

Alonso flattened himself against wall
beside the window and peered diagonally down at the street. “Clear at the
moment. Instructions, Chief?”

“Just keep watching. And this is your
speciality. What do
you
think?”

“Still clear, but we need to get out of
this apartment. I suggest we bluff our way into one of the units on the first
floor. I’m betting they’ll come up here first, but when they find us gone they’ll
work their way down through the block one floor at a time. It’s still not a
great position to be in, but if they’re careless we may be able to slip out via
the fire escape. Still clear.”

There was a pause of several seconds,
during which Jack tried hard to come up with a helpful suggestion. “No, wait,”
hissed Alonso before the Englishman had a chance to collect his thoughts. “There
is
something going on down there.”

Miguel looked Alonso in the eye for a long
moment, then his face set hard. “OK, move,” he ordered. “Down four floors, then
we’ll knock somebody up and tell them we’re investigating a complaint. Go.”

Keep moving. Keep your head down. Don’t
make a sound.
A voice
from an earlier decade reverberated inside Jack’s head as one by one they
hurried through the front door of the apartment and down the stairs.

Reaching the first floor, they slipped
through a door onto the landing just as they heard heavy footsteps on the
stairs leading up from the foyer. Miguel rang the nearest doorbell,
simultaneously rapping on the wooden door with the knuckles of his other hand. He
gestured at Alonso, who started across towards one of the other apartments.
Then the first door opened, and Miguel found himself looking into the face of a
big and florid middle-aged man in white shirtsleeves.

“Police,” barked Miguel with
urgency in his tone. “We need to come in and talk to you.” Then, without more
ado, he shouldered his way past the bewildered occupier and beckoned the others
to follow. Alonso was the last man through the door, and barely had time to push
it quietly shut before sounds filtered through from outside.

“Report, Red Leader,” demanded the voice on the radio.

“Negative outcome, Captain,” replied the
squad leader nervously. “Target residence shows signs of recent occupation but was
vacant at the time of entry. All the same, Captain, brilliant idea of yours,
cross-checking the…”

“And naturally you searched the
neighbouring apartments,” interrupted his superior.

“Indeed, Captain, the entire block. And we
thought at one point that we’d found them. But it was just a group of friends
playing cards.”

“Unacceptable, Red Leader. I’ve
considerably overplayed my hand. I committed all the resources you said were
needed to guarantee the outcome. I will now have to deal with the fallout.”

“Captain, I’m recommending that we remain
in the field. The targets must be on the street by now, and we still have a
chance of intercepting them.”

“You’ll need the cover of darkness to
withdraw, so you have a little time in hand. Don’t waste it, Red Leader. For
all our sakes and particularly for yours.”

The captain cut the radio connection and
reached for his mobile phone. “Bird has flown,” he tapped in as a text message,
“but hawks are still in the air.” He knew that in the event of failure he was
in every bit as much danger as his squad leader.

Several hundred kilometres to
the south, a powerful man read the message and scowled. Just like Jack Burlton,
he could not believe that events four decades in the past could still be
causing so much trouble.

“Smart work,
Engleesh
,” panted Alonso with only the merest trace
of a grudge in his voice and perhaps even a hint of respect, still adjusting
his uniform as they walked. “But we’re fortunate that Julio’s mother’s friends recognised
him and played along. And that the guy’s clothes more or less fitted me.”

“Skill is knowing how to turn fortune to
advantage,” wheezed Jack over his shoulder. He was somewhat out of condition
even for a man of his age. “It’s what kept me alive forty years ago when better
people didn’t make it. Sorry if that sounds smug, but I’ve always been an
opportunist.”

“Silence!” It was Miguel, calling back to
them as they made their way across the shadowy parking area behind the
apartment block. Surrounded as they were by concrete and brickwork, even his
hoarse stage whisper echoed back at them jarringly.

They regrouped by the exit ramp and spoke
in whispers. “I’m going to call in for support,” announced Miguel, “but we need
to arrange a safe rendezvous. The radio won’t give our exact location away like
the phone lines, but it can be triangulated, and they’ll be able to hear every
word I say. We need a clever way of communicating our location—something our people
can decode that will keep the bad guys guessing.”

”Don’t you have a mobile?” asked Jack. “I gather
they’re harder to tap than exchange lines.”

The three officers looked at one another
briefly, and Miguel hesitated before replying. “We’re not carrying them. Too easy
to track. And not really that hard to tap if you know the phone’s number or
location. What about you?”

Jack put his hand in his pocket and pulled
out an iPhone in an orange silicon case. “It’s dead,” he replied after a moment.
“It hasn’t been on charge since I left home.”

“Then we need a code, as I said in the
first place. Any ideas?”    

“It depends who the bad guys are. Are they
likely to understand Basque.”

“Probably not,” admitted Miguel, “but none
of us can speak it, and I don’t suppose anyone at HQ can either.”

“Shame,” replied Jack. “I know a few
words. Well, it’s not safe here. Perhaps we should focus on finding a safer
location, then think about telling your colleagues where we are.”

“Fair enough. Any ideas?”

“Possibly. I’m assuming the bad guys are
more dangerous in their cars than on foot.”

“To a degree, yes.”

“So we need somewhere that’s only accessible
on foot, but not too far from the road. I’ve got an idea. Shall I take the
lead?”

Miguel hesitated a moment too
long before replying, and before he could ask questions Jack was on the move. He
advanced in a peculiar hunched posture – not unlike a competitor in a walking
race – as the voices in his head resumed their clamour for attention:
Keep
moving. Keep your head down. Don’t make a sound
. The three officers followed
in growing puzzlement as he led them on a zigzag route through the ever-darkening
streets.

Jorge Serrano, the Red Leader, swung the wheel of his deliberately bland,
forgettable Japanese SUV hard into a U-turn. He had progressed half way to the
city centre as he and his partner scanned opposite sides of the road for anyone
on foot. But it was as if a curfew had been declared. The people of this region
had a nose for trouble, and the streets were all but deserted.

He pulled over and turned to his partner,
a fair-haired body-builder from Barcelona. The big man preferred fighting to
thinking, but he was an old street-gang kid with reliable instincts to go with the
prison tattoos.

“Hey, Martí, you want to think about
something for me? Suppose you were stranded down in the
ensanche
and
there were people out on the streets looking for you. What would you do?”

Martí gave no outward sign of having heard
a word, but the leader knew better than to speak again. His junior partner
outgunned him on every level – strength, aggression, resourcefulness, ambition
– and barring a nasty accident would almost certainly outrank him within months.
There was unbroken silence for a couple of minutes during which Serrano thought
wishfully about nasty accidents, then came the response: “I’d stay put as long
as possible. But when I decided it was time to move I’d want to neutralise the
main advantage that we have now.”

“Which is?”

“Transport. And the kind of firepower
that’s hard to handle on foot.”

“OK, so what does that suggest? What are
the worst obstacles to a vehicle like this? Not paved road, obviously, and not
open ground either. Come on, man, think!”

Wondering why his squad leader did not
invest more energy in thinking for himself, and inclined to think that having
someone else to blame for failure was part of the picture, Martí hesitated
before replying: “The river,” he said finally. “The road bridges are well
spaced out. There’s a lot of space over on the Mundaiz peninsula. A lot of
fences too. We can’t drive through many of them.”

“Good thinking, but which way would they
go?”