THE ENGLISH WITNESS (7 page)

Apart from the icy detachment of the man
in the larger car, there was nothing remarkable about the incident in itself. It
simply brought to my attention a man and a vehicle that I wouldn’t otherwise
have noticed. And I’d never have thought of it again, but for the fact that a
similar car was parked in the same spot when I walked past on my way to college
the next morning. There was a different man inside, but as I looked in his
direction he caught my eye for a moment before hastily looking away. That
spooked me a little, but not as much as when I closed the shutters that night
and again saw a dark car parked a few yards from along the street, the tiny
glow of a lighted cigarette fidgeting inside.

By this time I was worried. All other
things being equal, nobody in their right mind would assume they were under
surveillance based on such flimsy evidence. But all other things were not
equal. I was still haunted by my experience down among the rocks, still hearing
that whip-crack as I went off to sleep most nights, still half-expecting dire consequences.
And with my heart in my mouth I took a course of action that I’d been putting
off ever since fleeing from the crime-scene: I went to see Father Ignacio.

He encouraged me to open up about anything
that was troubling me, and it quickly became clear that this wasn’t his first
conversation of the kind. Once I’d told him the full story he spent a couple of
hours coaching me in personal security: avoiding certain places, spotting surveillance,
planning escape routes and so on. It was rushed, but this was the first of
several sessions I’d spend with him before new developments forced me to put it
all to use. Finally, he left me alone in his study for several minutes before
returning with a safe address I could go to in an emergency. But his most
immediate and predictable piece of advice was that I should go home to England
and stay there.

JACK

“And how did you react to that?” asked Miguel. The red neon on the
recorder continued to flash, but Julio put down the pen with which he’d been
making notes and looked up at Jack expectantly. “To be told to go and not come
back?” continued Miguel. “That must have come as a slap in the face”.

Jack looked round the room before replying,
taking in the pastel walls, the chintz upholstery and the framed prints on the
walls. It had been a good session, he thought. This was a more comfortable setting
than the last supposedly safe house—less institutional, more personal. After
the violence at their previous base he wondered if he would ever feel really secure
again, but the soft colours and pleasant furnishings were somehow reassuring.
And from the outside, the place was much more anonymous—not an isolated
facility, but a proper house in a walled and gated community of similar
detached homes. He brought his thoughts back to the present. “Sorry, you were
saying?”

“How did you react to being told you were
persona
non grata
?” asked Miguel with a touch of impatience.

“I don’t think I saw it that way. At
least, not at the time. He was concerned for my safety, and he didn’t think I‘d
be safe as long as I remained in the country. If he had an ulterior motive, it
was that my presence was a focus for trouble in which others could get hurt.
The region had enough anger and hurt of its own, he said, without outsiders
getting involved. And here was the shutdown: if I provoked others to violence
when I could so easily remove myself from the picture, I’d share the moral
responsibility for whatever happened. After a great deal of soul-searching I
took his advice.”

“You went home to England?” asked Julio,
his face expressionless. His torso had been re-bandaged and the bleeding
stopped, but he still looked grey. “Then how…?”

“I came back again,” interrupted Jack.
“After a mere two weeks. Within minutes of stepping off the plane at Gatwick I
discovered what it must feel like to be a foreigner in Britain. At first I put
my feelings down to exhaustion, but as the days unfolded I still felt like an
alien. Everywhere I looked, I seemed to see pallid and furtive people, litter,
drab colours, haste, lack of eye contact. And my alienation were compounded
every time I turned on the TV, listened to the radio, or met old friends and
neighbours with whom I had nothing left in common. As for my family, I never
doubted their love and loyalty, but there was a new barrier between us that was
tearing me apart. I was…”

“Hang on, this is all very touching,” interrupted
Miguel with more than a hint of sarcasm, “but can we roll the tape back a bit?
You’re asking us to believe that no more than two or at the most three weeks
after witnessing a double murder, you found yourself under surveillance by some
kind of men in black. I have to say that under Franco there were half a dozen
different agencies it could have been. But assuming all this is true, why on
earth did you come back? Surely you’d been through enough.”

“Seriously, I did consider not coming back—perhaps
even dropping out of university altogether and getting a job. One of the things
that kept me on track was the betrayal my family would feel; I knew the kind of
sacrifices they’d made to put me there. But I was getting to the real point
when you interrupted me. I think the main reason was psychological. Nowadays,
with so many kids doing a gap year, the signs of cultural confusion are more
widely recognised. ‘Going native’, we used to call it. I don’t suppose that’s
politically correct enough for today.”

“
Choque cultural inverso
,” responded
the detective. “Whatever that translates to in English. The kind of alienation you
experience in a hostile foreign culture, but in your home country. Returning
exiles get it, and sometimes gap year students. You wouldn’t believe the stuff
a poor cop has to read these days.”

“That makes a kind of sense, but hindsight
is a wonderful thing. Back then I was totally in the dark. All I knew was that
I belonged
here
rather than
there
. And I guess that confused
sense of belonging explains some of the reckless choices I made in the weeks ahead.”

“I gather you went on the run.”

“I’ll get to all that, but can we take a
break. It’s been a bad day for me, and I know it has for you. I’m so sorry
about Alonso.”

Miguel’s face went distant. “I’m
absolutely gutted. He could be difficult—he was an old-fashioned hard man who
felt a kind of culture shock at modern life. But he was an outstanding cop and
a man of great integrity. He was with me for years. And sorry in advance, but
that makes me all the more determined to sweat you for any information that
might help us break this case open.”

“Well, I need a break,” said Jack sharply.
“And if you’ll excuse me saying, I think there are other matters with a higher
priority. I could have got myself wiped out tonight, and I want to know how the
Legion knew where we were. There was no phone or radio contact and we were in
the middle of nowhere. And if they could get to us there, how do we know they
can’t get to us here?”

Miguel looked embarrassed. “The enquiry
has already started, and it didn’t take long to come to an interim conclusion.
I’m afraid we’ve been complacent. We have a logistical department that manages facilities
like the one we were staying at. Few of them are in constant use, and when one
is needed there’s a certain amount of work involved. Power has to be switched
on, provisions delivered and so on. In the case of a proper witness protection address,
that stuff’s all secure. And that’s where we’d have taken you if there’d been
time. But we went to the only place in the area that was available at short
notice. It should have been safe enough. I don’t think anybody figured the bad
guys would have such a hard-on for you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Alonso, and
sorry you were exposed to danger. I’m glad you got out safely.”

“Thanks for that. And thanks to you again,
Julio, for getting me out.”

“Pleased to be of service to you both,”
answered the tall, thin man with a hint of a smile.

“The thing is,” asked Jack, “can we be
sure we’re safe here?”

“As safe as anywhere can be,” answered
Miguel. “This actually is a witness protection house. I have to tell you, it
took some negotiating because right now we don’t have a case to prosecute. And
until you come up with something substantive we won’t have one. Someone is
directing these bastards, and that someone really is out to get you. We have to
crack that connection. It’s our only lead in a murder case and a major breach
of law and order.”

Julio leaned forward at this point, patiently
waiting for a nod from the detective before he spoke. “I have a question, Jack.
You used the word ‘legion’ to refer to whoever is harassing us. It’s an odd
term to use, and in your case I can’t just write it off as bad Spanish. Have
you had dealings with them before, by any chance?”

He looked at Jack, but Jack was now gazing
into space. “Oh, my God,” he responded at length. “I didn’t even notice what
I’d said. Look, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve told you about the flashbacks I get—random
words or sensory impressions that surface without warning, a lot of it stuff
that I’ve managed to avoid thinking about for years. Well, there’s other stuff
in my head: stuff that I’ve drawn a veil over for so long, I don’t know half of
what’s there. But yes, I remember now: they
were
the Legion. The Legion
something
.
Something to do with the Nazis.”

Jack got up to leave the room, but then froze
suddenly.
Condor.
The word flashed into his mind, provoking a physical
reaction clearly visible to the others. He was shivering now, but he managed
one last contribution before excusing himself and hurrying out. “That was it: the
Legión Condor
. The Condor Legion.”

“So we have a name at last,” declared Miguel in a
soft voice when Jack had reappeared and helped himself to a large glass of brandy.
“The original Condor Legion was the
Luftwaffe
division that Hitler
assigned to Franco during our civil war—the one that was u
sed in the carpet-bombing of Gernika. But
the fact that these people adopted a name with those connotations tells us
something about them. Julio, get on to HQ and see if they can dig anything up.”

“Forgive me,” countered Jack. “If these
men are the Legion that I encountered, the posse of rabid home-grown terrorists
that ran black operations for the Franco regime, then you won’t know whom to
trust within your own ranks. For all I know you could be one of them yourself.
And another thing: how can you expect to run an investigation cooped up here in
a place that’s to all intents and purposes off the map?”

There was silence in the room for almost a
minute, an uncomfortable silence. Then Miguel spoke in a low voice, his eyes
averted from both Jack and his own colleague. “I can’t,” he admitted. “And
you’re one step ahead of me, Jack. My next question to you was going to be the
difficult one. The one I’m embarrassed to ask. The one I’ve been ordered not to
accept a ‘no’ to.”

A glance at Jack revealed that he was once
again gazing blankly into space. And when he spoke, there was a weariness in
his voice that had not been there before. “Oh my God, let me guess. You’ve been
told to use me—probably as the bait in a rat trap. And let me hazard another
guess: you know that your line of command has been compromised, and you’ve got
no more idea who can be trusted than I have.”

“You’re a shrewd judge of situations, Jack,”
replied the detective, staring at the table lamp beside him. “And if you really
want to refuse, I’ll let you give us the slip. It won’t do my career any good,
but there’s no reason you should care about that.“

“And what’s the catch if I do back out?
There has to be one.”

“The problem from your viewpoint would be
this: if you go, there’s no more we can do for you. You’ll be on your own, and
I don’t think that getting to the border and across it will be as easy as you
think, even now that routine passport checks are a thing of the past. And with
apologies for the moral blackmail that’s coming, we so need a break in this
case. I’m sure you realise that your friend’s murder is one tiny corner of a
very big and very nasty picture. Still, I expect you need time to think. Do you
want to go to your room?”

“I’ve got a family, you know,” said Jack
quietly. “A wife and kids and grandchildren. They’d be worried sick if they
knew what was going on, and that’s without them knowing a fraction of what I
went through here as a kid. Yes, I do need time to think. But I’m just as happy
sitting here as going off by myself. Do you mind if I put the television on?”

“Go ahead,” agreed Miguel. “And Julio,
will you make some tea?”

Inevitably the TV picture came up in the
middle of a commercial break, but by chance the next programme was a regional
current affairs slot. “What does the comeback of right-wing big hitter José
María Gallego mean for the Basque Country?” intoned a melodramatic voice over
the opening credits. “Will he advance the fight against domestic terrorism, or
will he fan the flames? We investigate.”

“Good man,” muttered Julio from across the
room. “One of us,” he explained, catching Jack’s eye. “First, a Basque or at
least half-Basque who may command some respect in this part of the country. Second,
a hard man who’ll hopefully shift the balance of power away from the
law-breakers and back towards the law-makers.” Jack turned to look at Miguel,
and could read that he was less enthusiastic about his new chief executive.

They watched the programme for almost half
an hour before Jack lunged for the remote and switched it off. His face was
white. “I can’t stand any more,” he spluttered. “It’s your country, not mine,
but this bastard’s going to take you back to the bad old days: secret courts,
imprisonment without due process, trampling on civil rights. Anyway, I’ve
thought. This is your country, not mine, and I have my own life and family to
think of. I ruined what should have been the best years of my life getting
dragged into other people’s politics, and I’d be mad to do it again. If you
could drive me to the border crossing that would be great. Failing that,
anywhere with a railway station will do. I’ll take my chances.”

“Fair enough,” replied Miguel gloomily. “I
can’t expect any more than that. As soon as intelligence confirms that it’s safe
to leave here, we’ll take you up to Irún. But until then, please carry on with
your story. And you need to cut to the chase; isn’t that what they say in
movies? Because I doubt if we’ll be here for more than another few hours.“

JAMES

I was back in San Sebastián by the third week of July, only to find that
in the space of barely two weeks much had changed for the worse. The college had
closed for the summer, depriving our little expatriate clique of any focus beyond
the occasional bar-crawl. Many of the British contingent had already gone off sight-seeing,
while most of our local friends were away on family holidays or doing seasonal
work. And the weather had become humid and oppressive; the roll of thunder was part
of the soundtrack to every day, constantly threatening the violent storms for
which the Bay of Biscay is infamous.

But these were minor grievances compared to
one tremendous blessing: I no longer seemed to be under surveillance. At first
I kept my eyes open for danger signs, but as the days went by the whole issue began
to fade from my consciousness. Armed with a peace of mind that I’d forgotten
was possible, I began to settle back into the life of the city. After all the
tensions I’d lived through earlier in the summer, and the bitter disappointment
of my fortnight back in England, I finally felt that I belonged somewhere once
again.

By the time the abduction attempt took
place, I was experimenting with the idea that the whole surveillance scenario had
been no more than a figment of my imagination. It was fortunate that Father
Ignacio had taken my fears seriously. At his urging I’d walked the streets and
alleys for hours planning how I would deal with one kind of threat or another.

All this had faded from the forefront of
my mind in the peaceful days following my return from England. Then, walking
along the street early one afternoon, I noticed with alarm that the black car
was back in its old place. But there was something wrong, and it took me a
moment to figure out what was different. The car was facing the opposite way
from usual—the way I was walking. And for the first time the driver was not
alone; there were two larger men sitting front and rear on the passenger side.

At first, like someone feeling the
symptoms of an old illness after a period of remission, I couldn’t accept that
their presence was any reason for concern. But as I walked past them I heard
the engine start. That was when I fully woke up and began to run through the
mental checklist the priest had drilled into me. I began to tick boxes in my
mind: change to routine…engine running…street almost deserted…force of numbers…

I was off, running down the alley between
two adjacent blocks leading to the parking area. I heard an engine bellowing,
quickly followed by the squeal of rubber on tarmac, but the area behind the buildings
was choked with parked cars. As I vaulted over a low fence into the grounds of
the apartments on the next street, I heard a second squeal of rubber as my
pursuers were brought up short.

I carefully checked left and right before
emerging onto the next street and slipping into a general store. Ten minutes later,
I emerged wearing a white working man’s shirt. Sunglasses and a traditional Basque
beret obscured part of my face. A tiny plastic toy inserted in one shoe gave me
a consistent limp as I walked along the street, and a little cushion inside my
shirt gave me an instant pot-belly. I flinched as I heard an engine revving,
but I kept hobbling along and the sounds of pursuit quickly died away.

Although the immediate danger had passed,
I needed to get to the safe address in the Old Quarter. I thought the quickest
and safest route would be up the Mundaiz peninsula and along the sea front. I began
limping in that direction, and I was within metres of the bridge when I saw
that there was a car parked just beyond it, almost hidden by a bend in the
approach road. At that moment I heard a second car coming up fast from behind,
and I knew that my disguise wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Wincing now at the jagged object in my
shoe, I hobbled up onto the unfenced track bed and set out across the viaduct.
Timing was even closer than I’d realised – there was a train on its way down
from the station – and I did the only thing I could to give my pursuers the
slip.

Nearly every weekday morning for three
months, a group of us had been using that same catwalk as a shortcut to our college
behind the sea front. It was predictably Steve who had spotted the maintenance
shelf—a narrow ledge surrounding the concrete buttress that supported the
viaduct in midstream. The ledge was only four or five feet below the level of
the sleepers, and some steel rungs had been provided, but the climb looked
slippery and treacherous. On one occasion, in response to a lot of daring and
double-daring, we had climbed down to it—scrambling up like lightning a few
seconds later at the first hint of vibration in the rails.

Now, without pausing to think about the
risks, I hobbled as quickly as I could to the middle of the catwalk and stepped
onto a wooden sleeper that was already vibrating under my feet. With no more
than seconds to spare before both the car and the oncoming train would sweep into
view, I lowered myself between the sleepers and wedged myself into the angle of
the ledge.

By the time it began to get dark I was wet
and rank from being showered with effluent, shivering with cold and barely able
to drag myself back up between the sleepers. When I finally reached the Old
Quarter the nightlife was well under way, but I no longer wanted any part of it.
A gaunt, black-haired woman. who might still have been in her thirties, opened
the door and froze briefly at the sight of an unfamiliar face. Then her
expression softened. Introducing herself as Reme, she let me in to the tiny
studio flat, put a pan of water on to boil and vacated the living area while I
washed.

“Where are the rest of your things?” she asked
the following morning, as I sat wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket on the
dilapidated couch where I had spent the night. “Someone will have to get them
for you.”

“I’d rather go myself,” I replied. “I
can’t leave without saying goodbye to my flat-mate and giving my landlady
notice.”

“Now listen to me,” she said firmly. “I
don’t believe you understand the risks. And all the time you’re here, you’re
putting others at risk. How much have you got?”

“Not a lot. Just a suitcase of clothes and
a few books.”

“Then if I’m honest, I think you might as
well say goodbye to it. You won’t want to be weighed down with it, and you
won’t be coming back here. Not ever, if you’ve got any sense.”

Fortunately, she was able to
provide me with some underwear and a change of clothes belonging to her absent
son, together with a few slices of cold potato omelette and a battered rucksack.
Her son was a little taller and slimmer than I was, and at one point I was
about to ask her if he’d mind, but she didn’t seem in the mood for further
chatter and all that remained was to sit in the dank, musty apartment waiting
for darkness to fall.

I stood at the southern edge of the city in the dead of night, tears
running down my face as I watched the red taillights disappear into one bore of
the Amara tunnel while pallid yellow and white headlights emerged from the
other. Then, hitching the modest backpack of food and clothing over my shoulders,
I scrambled down the bank onto the carriageway, earning a blast on the horn
from a driver speeding out of the tunnel. Then, grimacing at the realisation
that was I was about to do was reckless and possibly suicidal, I pressed myself
against the curved sidewall of the tunnel and marched into the darkness under
the hill.