SPANISH ROCK

by Lex Lander

  At the barrier, I handed over a £20 note to gain access to the Upper Rock. From there I travelled by obligatory taxi to the Upper Galleries, part of the thirty miles of tunnel bored and blasted through the Rock by the British army.

  Peter had phoned while I was brushing my teeth. He urgently needed to meet me and it was peremptory summons, not a request.ne

  ‘Where?’ I said. ‘Better be discreet.’

  ‘St George’s Hall.’

  ‘Is that in the town?’ I asked, still unfamiliar with much of the geography.

  He laughed coldly. ‘It’s not a building. It’s part of the Upper Galleries, the tunnel system. Anyone will tell you how to get there. When you enter the tunnel just keep to the main thoroughfare, you can’t miss it.’

  When I pressed him to say what it was about, he clammed up.

  ‘Two o’clock, right?’

  It had begun to rain when the taxi dropped me at the observation platform by the entrance to the Upper Galleries. I wandered to the edge of the platform, to look out over the low wall, out past the airstrip and the frontier, to La Línea and beyond, the Costa del Sol lost in the mist and rain. The strip of beach where I had met Irazola was monochrome, and it was hard to tell where the beach ended and the sea began.

  A taxi crested the slope behind me, engine labouring in too high a gear. As I moved away from the wall it turned into one of the parking spaces, an old Peugeot with faded paintwork and a digit missing from its licence plate. No other cars; it was not a day for sightseeing.

  Inside the galleries it was well-lit, and I was greeted by a life-size model in a glass cage of a “World War 2 tunneller”, a member of the Royal Engineers whose skills had excavated most of the tunnels. Opposite, a blue plaque proclaimed this to be the Windsor Gallery, the work of a Sergeant Major Ince of the Military Artificers. It had been completed in 1783. Gibraltar was packed with history, inside and outside the Rock.

  The floor was uneven and sloped downwards. I passed several more effigies of garrison troops and engineers. It was cold and my breath steamed the air but by setting a brisk pace I managed to stay warm. At intervals I came across gun embrasures, in which huge naval cannon were installed. Plaques were also a regular feature. One self-congratulatory testimonial read:

  “When the great siege ended in February 1783 this gallery was 370 feet long with guns mounted in six embrasures. The Duc de Grillon, who had commanded the enemy forces, when shown the gallery later, said ‘These works are worthy of the Romans’. ”

  Behind me I could hear other visitors, their voices carrying down the tunnel in whispers. The sound effects were akin to the interior of a cathedral. I buttoned up my jacket, shivering a little, and plodded on, still descending.

  A vast chamber opened up on my left, having six … no seven gun ports. St George’s Hall. Another plaque commemorated the holding here of a dinner in honour of the visiting US General Grant in 1878. ‘Big deal,’ I could just hear Linda sneering.

  No Peter in evidence. That was okay, I was ten minutes early. I stepped over the rope barrier and did a quick scout of the chamber, working clockwise around the gun ports. The drop outside was sheer and the outlook stupendous – or would have been on a clear day. A dumpy jet airliner was lumbering along the runway to line up for take-off.

  The seventh and last gun port was narrower than the rest and overlooked the road to Catalan Bay Village and the Caleta Hotel. The precipice immediately below the embrasure shelved away from the opening at an angle of perhaps seventy-five degrees, forming a shallow V in which some small plants and tufts of wiry grass clung in defiance of all normal pre-requisites for growth.

  Behind me, in the chamber, a rush of feet. I turned away from the gun port, more in curiosity than alarm. I found myself in the midst of a group of figures. Before I could react my ankles were grasped and I was thrust upwards, backwards, and outwards through that hole in the mountainside, and into space.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I experienced a single blinding burst of terror as my head and flailing arms emerged into the damp air, my upper body gyrating in flight. The sky swung in an arc, the Rock’s summit appearing momentarily to be capsized, the sea now overhead like a solid expanse of cloud.

  An involuntary yell escaped me. Hard unforgiving limestone thudded into the base of my spine, expelling another, louder yell, of real pain. The sky ceased to tilt and my upended world of grey cloud and grey sea, flecked with white spume, stabilised. An upside-down ship was at anchor at the extreme limit of my vision, phantasmal in the drizzle. I was disorientated, no longer sure which was up and which was down. I felt dizzy then sick. My fingers scrabbled for purchase but found precious little in the slick black rock face.

  I became slowly aware that I owed my present precarious security to the same grasps on my ankles that had launched me out through the embrasure. I peered up between my legs. A pair of hands was wrapped around each of my ankles, their owners’ faces not on view. My pants bottoms had slid to my knees exposing my lower legs; my skin in that area was very white. Now I felt faintly ridiculous as well as afraid, a sign I was recovering from the initial shock. A face filled the space between my shoes, foreshortened by my angle of vision, but still familiar.

  ‘Hello, Warner. How do you like it down there?’

  Stay calm, don’t get panicky.

  ‘Hello, Peter.’ Being head over heels made it difficult to speak naturally. ‘Be a pal and pull me in, will you? I’m getting wet.’

  An unsympathetic snigger from Peter.

  ‘He says he’s getting wet,’ he relayed to unseen third parties, prompting a ripple of laughter.

  The clouds beyond the summit were in jumbled motion, an optical illusion perhaps, since it was a windless day. Nausea bubbled up (or was it down) again, and was harder to quell. It was as if I were standing on nothing, walking on air, defying gravity. If I tilted my head backwards I would be able to see the road far below. I tried it and was immediately hit by vertigo. I gulped air. Tried to compose myself, to still my fluttering guts.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ I yelled. Nobody was listening. Peter had withdrawn his head, and only the two pairs of hands remained, all that separated me from death by falling from a high place.

  To my relief, Peter’s face again appeared in the embrasure. ‘A confession will do.’

  ‘What confession?’ My searching fingers brushed against a tuft of grass clinging to a crack in the rock. I tugged it and astonishingly it held. It wasn’t much, the roots would be near the surface and it would never bear my weight. But it was better than thin air.

  ‘It’s game over, Warner. You planted those explosives in Michael’s flat, didn’t you? Admit it and we’ll bring you back inside.’

  At that moment I would have admitted to child murder if it would have satisfied him.

  ‘All right, all right,’ I croaked. ‘I admit it. Now for Christ’s sake pull me in.’

  The laugh was mocking now. ‘And have you deny it the minute you’re safe? We’re not simpletons, you bastard. You’ve given us what we wanted. Now you’re expendable.’

  One ankle was released, leaving me suspended from a single pair of hands.

  ‘No, wait!’ It was as near a scream as I had ever managed.

  ‘Goodbye, Warner.’

  The remaining hands released me and I began my slide: my feet slewed sideways, the corrugations in the rock face chafing the exposed calves of my legs, my body pivoting on the tuft of grass that was my only lifeline. By some miracle the tuft didn’t immediately tear loose. My lower half slithered further until I was near-horizontal. My arm holding the grass tuft was now at full stretch and the plant was bearing the greater part of my full weight. I sensed rather than felt it loosen fractionally. I grubbed frenziedly with my free hand for a hold: a crack, a nodule of rock, anything.

  ‘André!’

  My first inclination was to turn my head to the source of the call. But I was now so precariously balanced, with one foot caught on a slender le
dge, that I was afraid to make the smallest movement.

  ‘André – it’s Michael!’

  I groaned. Had he come to gloat over my demise?

  ‘André, I’m going to tie my belt and my tie together and make a line. If you raise your other hand you’ll just about be able to reach it.’

  I was too shit scared to speak even as hope flickered within. Then the tuft that was taking my weight began perceptibly to shift. Hurry, Michael! From my new horizontal position I could look straight down the side of the Rock. A miniaturised red car was travelling along the shore road leaving faint tracks on the wet surface. Rain sprinkled my face as the drizzle intensified. It served to emphasise the dryness of my lips, the constriction of my throat brought on by extreme fear. The roots of the tuft were tearing away, I could feel them snapping one by one, breaking free of the tiny patch of earth that sustained them …

  ‘Here – catch!’ Something flicked my cheek. ‘Get a grip on it – quick! That clump of grass is coming loose.’

  Didn’t I know it.

  Now, like it or not, I had to move. Gingerly I brought up my free hand to seize the trailing end of what turned out to be his tie, winding it around until all the slack was taken up. The tuft tore loose the very instant I put weight on my new lifeline, and to make matters worse the general disturbance dislodged my foot from the narrow ledge.

  ‘Christ!’ It seemed as if the whole mountainside was on the slide. Clods of earth and a cascade of small stones hit me in the face. Like a pendulum I swung free, held by nothing more substantial than Vella’s tie and the strength of his arms. Dangling, helpless, wholly reliant on a man I had tried to destroy. For poetic justice it took some beating.

  ‘Try and find a foothold!’ Vella’s voice was ragged. He was taking my full weight. ‘Hurry!’

  His urging was superfluous. My toes were already foraging for purchase.

  ‘There, to your left and above. There’s a small ledge of some sort.’

  My foot groped diagonally upwards and there it was, literally a toehold. But by laying my foot lengthways along it and pushing upwards I made a useful amount of vertical progress and took some of the strain off my saviour. Now I was able to look into Vella’s eyes; his handsome concerned visage was puce from the strain of bearing my weight. I pulled in more slack. What was the breaking strain of a tie, I wondered.

  Unaided I located a projection of rock at knee level. It wasn’t much but it sufficed to lever me to within arm’s length of the gun port.

  ‘If you pull … same time … I push,’ I wheezed, ‘I can .. reach the port.’

  ‘Right … right.’ His wheeze outdid mine. ‘Together then – now!’

  In conjunction we push-pulled. I went up like a launched missile, so fast that my forehead butted his chin and sent him sprawling backwards into the chamber.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, grinning fatuously and delightedly, the lip of the embrasure tucked securely under my armpits, my head and shoulders inside the chamber.

  ‘I’ve a good mind to let you stay there,’ he said ruefully, testing his jaw with cautious fingertips.

  From there on, exhausted though I was, I could have managed alone but I didn’t spurn his final helping hand. I fell into the chamber, cracking both knees on the floor and hardly feeling it. Vella collapsed, completely done in, his breath sawing, his chest going like a mechanical bellows.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, the word seeming drowned by the wild thud of my heart. It also seemed inadequate.

  He gave a shake of his head, sucked in a great lungful of air, then said: ‘Keep your thanks. It’s explanations I’m interested in.’

  * * * * *

  We cabbed back to the parking lot by the barrier and sat in the Aston, the drizzle making runnels on the windshield, nothing ahead but grey soggy space. The mountains of Spain across the bay were invisible.

  ‘I ran into Peter and the others leaving the gallery,’ Vella told me. ‘He claimed you admitted planting the explosives at my apartment. Is that true?’

  Now mostly recovered from the trauma I was again thinking like a devious, scheming Government stooge.

  ‘It’s true I admitted it, not true that I did it.’

  Bewilderment built up while he digested this.

  ‘You mean you admitted to something you didn’t do?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you in the same circumstances? Goddammit, I thought I was buying my life.’

  He thought about that for a good minute then a smile broke lazily through. ‘Perhaps I might have done the same,’ he agreed, ‘in the same circumstances.’

  ‘Thank God you came along when you did.’ I mopped ineffectually at my sodden hair with a Kleenex. ‘How did you come to be there anyway? I heard you were a guest of Her Majesty.’

  ‘I was released this morning. The police accepted that the explosives were planted in my apartment.’

  Poker-faced, holding back my dismay, I said, ‘Just like that? You mean the police think I did it too?’

  ‘No, you’re in the clear.’ A sad expression stole over his face. ‘Maurice confessed.’

  That rocked me. ‘Maurice! Surely he … but no, that doesn’t make sense. If he really was responsible Peter would have had no reason for doing what he did to me.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Rain drummed on the roof, a sudden intensifying. The cloud base had now descended so low we were sitting in it. The windows began to film over with condensation. I started the engine and the windshield defogger.

  Vella gave himself a sort of shake. ‘Maurice confessed purely and simply for the sake of GIBESTÁ. Because – and I speak in all humility – a change of leader now would be the end of us. He was prepared to go to prison so that I could continue leading the party.’

  To hell with Maurice for a self-sacrificing busybody, was my private professional reaction. Thanks to him my scheme was now blown. Vella, wrongly-accused, would stand higher than ever in the esteem of the people of Gibraltar.

  Then, through the frustrated rage, a reluctant respect for Vella began to penetrate. That a man could command such devotion that his followers were willing to offer themselves up as sacrifices. It humbled me. It also demeaned me and made me shabby. The bile of self-disdain rose in my mouth.

  ‘How did you come to be there, in the gallery, when they chucked me out? Not that I’m complaining, just wondering.’

  ‘Peter met me when I was released, said he was convinced you were the guilty party and that he was going to, er … make you talk, was the way he put it.’

  ‘You can’t fault his methods,’ I grunted.

  ‘I tried to stop him, but, well, Peter is an impetuous person. He dropped me at my place and went off in a great hurry. I was worried. I thought I should warn you. You weren’t at the hotel so I went to see Linda. She said you had left about an hour before, said something about going up to the Galleries.’

  To think I had so nearly lied to her about the venue.

  ‘Your persistence saved my life. So again … thank you.’

  ‘Even if it was you who planted those explosives, I couldn’t have let them kill you.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me.’ The lie, overlaid with the right degree of hurt and earnestness, wasn’t quite effortless. I despised myself anew. This game of deceit and counter-deceit had never been one that I enjoyed playing, even when it was part of my profession. At least killing was clean and straightforward and didn’t involve betrayal of people I liked and respected. ‘Believe me, Michael. All right, so I blow things up for money, so I’m short on moral scruples, but even people like me have codes of honour. We don’t cross our employers.’

  His cell phone trilled. He clucked, extracted it from its belt holster and frowned at the screen.

  ‘The bloody Chronicle again,’ he muttered. ‘Let them wait.’ He disposed of the cell and his eyes swivelled back to me. ‘It occurred to me … to us … that you may have other employers.’ He cleared his throat self-consciously. ‘Other employers, that is, with a prior call on yo
ur services.’

  ‘Peter made the same accusation.’ For a short while the only sound in the car was the whirr of the defogger fan, drowning the engine’s purr. The car throbbed faintly, the powerful engine chafing to be away. Like me. Away from Gibraltar, away from the mire of politics and plotting. ‘I think I can prove whose side I’m on, if you’ll let me.’

  ‘It’s not necessary. I’m willing to accept your word.’

  ‘No, I want to. But I need for you to meet someone … a Spanish girl and her brother.’

  ‘You want me to go into Spain?’ he said dubiously, as if fearing a trap.

  ‘No, I’ll get them to come here.’

  ‘All right, André. If you think it will do some good.’ He checked his watch. ‘I really must go now; there is much to do.’

  ‘Will you still need my services?’

  I hoped he would say no. I couldn’t see how going on posing as a bomber would help me succeed in my task. I had shot my bolt. The Warner cupboard of ingenuity was bare.

  ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow.’

  We arranged to meet. He got out and walked slowly to his car, parked askew across two spaces. And as he walked, a proud, statesmanlike figure, his silver hair glinting with moisture, it sank in how great was the debt I owed this man. The man whom I had betrayed, who had saved my life.

  Slower to penetrate came the uncertainty, tentative at first then ever more insistent, about my mission and my loyalties. Suddenly, I was no longer sure whose side I was really on.

  III

  A ROCK TOO FAR

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Toby called from London where, unlike Gibraltar, they were enjoying a heatwave.

  ‘Another foul-up, André?’ It was not a reproof. His voice, even from a thousand kilometres away, was tired, dispirited.

  ‘If the police here weren’t so quick at accepting false testimony Vella would still be safely in the slammer.’

  And I would be dead.

  ‘If-if-if. I’ve heard it all before. That man … what’s his name?’