Read Online THE ENGLISH WITNESS by John C. Bailey - Free Book Online

story.”
    “I think you’d better spit that information out now,
my friend.”
    “Look, you’re going to have to trust my judgement on
this. If I just tell you what you think you want to know, you’re likely to get
a distorted picture. You’ll start jumping to premature conclusions, and…”
    “Hey, coño ,” interrupted Alonso. “Watch who
you’re talking to. You want me to loosen him up, Chief?”
    Miguel held up a hand and shook his head
dismissively. “No need. We can play it his way. For now.” He looked fixedly at
the Englishman before adding, “I’m sure he’ll get to the interesting stuff
quite quickly.” Alonso simply grunted in response.

CHAPTER 4
     
    Joining
the police had been a good move, even though it had meant abandoning the name by
which he had been known since infancy. A uniform lends the face anonymity; it
opens doors that would otherwise be closed; it provides a cover for dirty work
and an alibi afterwards.
     
    Best of
all, policing had brought him into contact with some very useful people. And it
had enabled him to draw his life passions together: his career, his very
focused political vision, and that other passion. The growing one. The only
thing in his life he was frightened of. The only thing that made his life
bearable.
        
    He stood
at the bar now with the music pounding in his ears and a cuba libre in his
hand, watching the young dancers with bitter-sweet longing. It frustrated him
that neither the girls nor the boys ever seemed to split up. They even visited
the restroom in twos and threes. That made his job harder, but not impossible.
     
    “Do you have any update on the location of Red Leader
or his vehicle?” Captain Gómez was a thickset man of only medium height but with
a distinct military bearing . Clean-shaven,
brown-eyed, hair steel-grey, he had a commanding presence and was known as a brutal
disciplinarian. The displeasure with which he greeted the response to his
question was thus a source of considerable distress to Seve Torres, call-sign
Red Two.
    Torres scarcely knew what to hope for as he clipped the
radio handset back onto the dashboard of his car. He disliked the missing
Serrano intensely and he feared Martí, the squad leader’s hulking partner. Just
as importantly, promotion in the Legion tended to involve filling dead men’s
shoes, and nothing would improve Torres’ prospects more than Serrano’s
elimination. But on the other hand, the Captain had ordered him to locate the
current Red Leader and failure would weigh heavily against him. He reached
forward to pick up the microphone again, but before he could reach it a burst
of static broke the silence. Then a voice issued from the loudspeaker suspended
under the dash—a male voice, high-pitched with stress: “We’ve found Red Leader.
Repeat, we’ve found Red Leader.”
    Torres’ immediate reaction was disappointment that his
immediate superior was still in action, but then he noticed the tension in the
speaker’s voice. A follow-up transmission a moment later confirmed that his guesswork
was accurate: “Red Leader is down. Repeat, Red Leader…” He ignored the rest of
the transmission as he feverishly calculated how this development affected his
prospects. Was he actually next in line to lead the squad? Or was Martí ahead
of him in the promotion stakes. And if Serrano was dead or injured, where the
hell was Martí?
     
    Martí
was lying in a rank, derelict barn trying to sleep. He was exhausted and in
shock, and as he gazed up at the sagging timbers and rusty corrugated iron his
heart was still beating much too rapidly in his chest.
    In a grudging way, he was grateful to the middle-aged
detective for turning him loose once they were up in the hills. Martí had seen the
police at work often enough to grasp that something unconventional and possibly
quite dark was going on here. And so he had not expected to be taken to a
police cell (from which the Legion would have procured his release