A Silent Death

Chapter Forty-Four

Paco cursed his luck. He hated Cleland with a vengeance. Shooting him in the leg had been no part of the deal. ‘I had to make it look real,’ Cleland had told him later. ‘Just a flesh wound. Avoided the bone and the femoral artery. You’ll live.’

Yes, in constant bloody pain! The price he was paying for Nuri’s treatment. He screwed up his face as he hobbled around the side service road to access the garden. There was no way, it seemed, to reach it from inside. All doors leading out were firmly locked.

He toyed with the idea of going back and telling Cleland that he had found Mackenzie, and that he was well and truly dead. But what if he wasn’t? Cleland was unpredictable. Brutal. Mad. There was no telling what he might do.

A service ramp sloped down to a shuttered cellar beneath the gardens where the pumps that powered the spa and the pool were housed. From the pavement, steps led up to a padlocked gate with spiked railings and barbed wire that gave on to another level. Yet more steps rose to the garden itself.

Paco climbed to the gate, leaned his crutches against the wall and unclipped Cleland’s wire-cutters from his belt. They sliced easily through the chain, and he let the links and padlock fall away. The gate swung open with a rusty complaint, and he grabbed his crutches to help propel himself up the last half-dozen steps to the garden itself.

The grass was almost waist-high here, the dead fronds of untended palms dangling in profusion all around and rustling in the breeze. The moon was rising now over the roof of the hotel, casting deep shadows in the empty pool. Paco pushed his way through barbed branches and tangling hedge. Thorns scratched his face and arms. The hanging leaf of a banana tree slapped him heavily in the face, and he had trouble keeping his balance.

He looked up and saw that he was directly below the terrace from which Mackenzie had fallen. That smug fucking Scotsman. At least he had got what was coming to him. But there was no sign of the body. Just the crushed leaves and snapped branches of thick foliage that must have broken its fall. Where the hell was he?

As Paco looked up again to check that he was in the right place, a shape took shadowed form and emerged from the darkness with such force that it knocked him from his feet, landing on top of him with full crushing weight to force the air from his lungs. A fist slammed into his face. He felt teeth breaking and sinking into the soft flesh behind his lips. Another blow. Blood bubbling into his mouth and spurting from his nose. He swung desperate fists in the dark and struck solid bone. He gasped and gurgled and squirmed his way out from beneath the weight of his attacker. Whatever damage Cleland’s bullet had done to Mackenzie, it had not killed him.

Paco scrambled to his feet, crutches discarded, and went charging off through the undergrowth, ignoring the fire in his wounded leg. Fear launched him blindly into darkness until his shins struck a low stone wall at the perimeter of the garden and tipped him forward into space.

His fall ended abruptly and in searing agony. It seemed to consume his whole body for just a second. Before darkness took him. And the pain and everything else went away.

Mackenzie staggered after the hapless Spaniard, legs buckling beneath him. He was half crippled by pain. But unlike Paco’s, Mackenzie’s pain wasn’t going away any time soon. He reached the wall and dropped to his knees and peered down to see Paco staring back at him. The man lay full-length along the top of the railing below, spikes protruding from his chest and stomach and groin, skewered like a sardine in readiness for the flames. Dead eyes gazing into the firmament, and to eternity beyond.

The lights of a vehicle sent shadows firing off into the night as it swung around a bend in the service road below, and by the reflected light of the headlamps Mackenzie saw, as it passed, Ana’s pale frightened faced pressed against the passenger window.

The bleary-eyed medic on the desk at Helicopteros Sanitarios looked up from his computer as the outside door slid open. His eyes opened wide as the dishevelled figure of a tall, fair-skinned man with a blood-stained white shirt staggered in out of the night. He was on his feet in an instant. ‘Señor, what’s happened?’

Mackenzie responded through clenched teeth. ‘I’ve been shot.’

The medic helped him through to a treatment room at the back and sat him up on the examination table. He was obliged to inform the police of any gunshot wounds, but that could wait until he’d made an assessment of the damage.

Mackenzie winced as the medic peeled away the shirt from his chest, and the ruined remains of his iPhone fell to the floor. It had left an almost perfect reddish-purple bruised impression of itself on his chest.

‘Jesus,’ the medic whispered. ‘Man, have you any idea how lucky you are to be alive?’

‘I don’t feel so lucky right now.’ Mackenzie’s voice was hoarse.

The medic grabbed a pair of tweezers from his kit of sterilized tools and started picking tiny pieces of glass and circuit board and phone body from the deepest area of abrasion right behind where the bullet had struck the phone. ‘Not seen anything like this since I was with medical staff in Herat.’ He glanced up at Mackenzie and clarified. ‘Afghanistan. Part of Operation Resolute Support. Saw quite a few injuries like this. Behind body armour injury. Backface deformation they call it.’ He chuckled. ‘Never saw a bullet stopped by an iPhone before, though.’

Mackenzie didn’t see what was amusing about it. ‘Has it busted any ribs?’

‘I doubt it,’ the medic said. And he pressed gently around the area of bruising, causing Mackenzie to gasp. ‘A young guy like you. The cartilaginous portions of your ribs there are still soft. Another fifteen or twenty years and it’ll all have turned to bone, and that would almost certainly have shattered.’ He smiled. ‘The good news is you’ll live. The bad news is, once I’ve dressed up the wound I‘m going to have to report you to the police.’

Mackenzie gasped his frustration. ‘I am the bloody police.’

It was a full forty-five minutes before Mackenzie was back on the road, bandaged and strapped up and feeling like death. The medic had been reluctant to let him go, but couldn’t stop him, and Mackenzie had left him phoning to report the incident to the authorities.

He had tried calling the Jefe’s number several times from Helicopteros. Without success. He debated going straight to the police station. But that would entail lengthy and complex explanations to junior officers on night shift. God only knew how long it would take to get a more senior-ranking officer involved. He needed to talk to the chief, and decided to go directly to his house.

The moon was well up in the sky now, washing its bloodless light across the hillside. The dust that rose around him as he powered the Seat up the dry forest track drifted in ghostly illumination like mist. At the top of the hill he turned his car down the steep incline to the Jefe’s finca only to find the house itself swaddled in darkness. There was no sign of the Audi.

Mackenzie banged the heels of his hands against the steering wheel, then let his head fall forward to rest on it. He closed his eyes and let despair wash over him. Where in God’s name was the Jefe?

He sat back, then, in the driver’s seat and forced himself to breathe at a measured rate. He needed to think clearly. It seemed to him he had two choices. Go straight to the police station and raise the alarm. Or get Cristina out of her bed. At least he had some kind of traction with her.

But he had no idea where Cleland was going, and he had Ana with him. What could any of them do? They would have no idea which way to turn. He knew he was going to have to report the shooting and the death of Paco, but all that was only going to throw up flak and serve as a distraction.

With reluctance he decided that Cristina was his best option. She had a vested interest in cutting through the red tape. He glanced down at the shirt that hung off his shoulders in bloody tatters and realized he would need to stop at the Totana on the way to her apartment for a quick change of clothing.

He swung the Seat through a three-point turn and accelerated back up the hill. The moon seemed to sit on the rise directly above him, shining straight into his eyes. He snapped down the sun visor and tutted his annoyance at the irony.