The Seven Sequels bundle

by Orca Various

  “When?”

  “When we were brought in here and pushed against the wall.”

  I had said I loved her. “Yes. I did mean it. I thought they were going to shoot us.”

  “So you love me,” Laia said, a hint of laughter in her voice, “but only when you think we’re about to die.”

  “No. I mean, yes.” I took a deep breath. “I love you all the time,” I said. “When I’m sleeping and awake, eating, studying for exams, on planes with boring people like Chad and when I think I’m about to die.”

  Laia leaned into me and rested her head on my shoulder. “And I love you too,” she said.

  Despite our situation, in that moment I was blissfully happy. But this was new emotional territory for me. What was I supposed to say next? Before I had a chance to think of anything, I heard tires crunching on gravel nearby and doors opening and closing.

  “¡Párate!” We struggled to our feet.

  “Quite el antifaz.” A new voice, softer than the others, was giving orders. Someone moved toward us and removed our blindfolds. The first thing I did was look at Laia. She was even grubbier and more disheveled than before, and there was a bruise forming on her cheek, but she was looking at me and smiling. I smiled back.

  “Young love. How romantic.” I looked at the source of the voice. We were in the remains of a square stone building, the ruined walls no more than two meters high. Across from us, in what had once been a doorway, an old man stood and stared at us. He was well-dressed and leaned on an elaborately carved walking stick. He had a full head of hair, but it was snow-white, and his face was heavily wrinkled. He only had one arm.

  “I am sorry to keep you waiting,” he said in heavily accented English, “but I do not get around as easily as I did in my younger days. I hope you have not been too roughly treated.”

  “What do you want?” I asked as confidently as I could manage.

  “Ah, the impatience of youth.” The man took a step into the room and said something over his shoulder. One of the men who had bundled us into the van appeared and set up a folding chair. The old man sat down and placed his stick between his knees. “We shall get to what I want in the fullness of time, but first I must tell you a story, and for that I need to sit. You shall remain standing.

  “I was a twelve-year-old boy in Barcelona when the Fascist army rebelled in 1936. My parents were both Anarchists. My father was killed at the barricades in the street fighting in Barcelona in the first days of the war. My mother joined Buenaventura Durruti’s militia column and was killed in the fighting for Caspe in Aragón.”

  Despite talking about the death of his parents, the old man spoke in a monotone, as if he were giving us a lecture on ancient history. I had no idea why he was telling us all this, but I listened intently. The shallow grave was still in the back of my mind.

  “The Anarchists were brave, but they were stupid,” the man went on. “They were good at street fighting, but they were a rabble. You do not defeat an army by sending poorly armed women and boys with no tanks or planes against regular soldiers with machine guns. For that you need organization and discipline. I never forgave the Anarchists for the death of my mother.”

  The old man fell silent, and his gazed drifted off. Laia and I waited patiently. I wondered what would happen if our storyteller died in the middle of his tale. Would our captors let us go or kill us? Fortunately, I didn’t have to find out.

  “The Communists were the answer,” he went on eventually. “They were organized, and their discipline was like iron. I was living on the streets, and they took me in. I lived in their barracks as a kind of mascot. During the fighting in Barcelona against the Anarchists in 1937, I was a messenger, helping keep the central authority and the fighting units in contact. I was proud to be a part of the destruction of those who had been responsible for my mother’s death.

  “In 1938, things were not going well for us, and I persuaded the commissar to allow me to join a unit and take part in the great attack across the Ebro River. I was assigned as a replacement to the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the Fifteenth Brigade.”

  My head snapped around to look at Laia to see if she had picked up the reference to the unit Grandfather had fought with. She nodded and continued to stare at the old man.

  “I see you have heard of that unit,” he said. “It was very famous. I was honored to be a part of it and to help in the attack that would turn the tide in the war. This was not going to be like the attack that killed my mother two years before. We were a real army, and I thought we would win. Unfortunately, we did not, and I did not get a chance to be a part of it.

  “I crossed the river with the second wave on the morning of July 25th. We were organizing ourselves to continue our advance when a Fascist shell exploded on the hillside nearby. Several men were killed, but I was lucky.” He waved the stump of his missing arm. “I only lost an arm.”

  A vague memory of something Laia and I had read in Grandfather’s war journal was struggling to surface in my brain. Before it could, the old man went on. “I was in shock, of course, and disappointed that I could not be a part of the battle, but as I was being led back down the slope to the boats, I passed a young Canadian International Brigader. He was not much older than me and he looked scared, but our eyes met and the look of sympathy he gave as I passed is something I will never forget. It was only later that I learned that this young Canadian soldier was your grandfather, David McLean.”

  SIXTEEN

  “How?” It was all I could manage to stammer. There were so many questions swirling around my head that I wasn’t even sure which one I was asking. How did he know it was my grandfather? How did he know I was coming to Palomares? How did it all tie together with the coded notebook?

  “You have many questions,” the man said. “That is normal. All will be answered in time, but first I think we should drink.” He turned to one of the younger Spaniards who had been hovering nearby. “Agua por favor.” The man stepped outside and returned with three bottles of cold water. He handed one to the old man. I thought for a moment that he was going to untie our hands so we could drink, but he simply uncapped the bottles and held them to our mouths. It was messy, and much of the water splashed down my shirt front, but it tasted good.

  “Gracias,” I said before I realized I was thanking someone who had kidnapped me and quite possibly had worse in store.

  “De nada,” the man said as he walked away.

  “I regret that I cannot untie you,” the old man said, “but I find it is usually best to take a minimum of chances.”

  “Who are you?” Laia asked.

  “That is a very good question. I have had many names. Perhaps I shall tell you some as a part of my story. For the moment, should you wish to be sociable, you may call me Gorky.”

  “Gorky!” Laia and I exclaimed. This old man sitting across from us was the mysterious man that Grandfather had hidden the bomb from. The man who must not find it because it was too dangerous.

  “I see you know the name,” the man said with a faint smile. “I know that you are Steve and your companion is Laia, so now that we are introduced, I shall continue with my tale. I did not think so at the time, but I was very lucky on the banks of the Ebro that day in 1938. Had I not been wounded, I doubt I would have survived the weeks of fighting that were to come, and had I not been wounded so close to what few medical facilities we had, I would have bled to death long before a doctor saw me.

  “As it was, I was ferried back across the river I had crossed with such high hopes less than an hour before. At the field hospital, a doctor cleaned the stump of my arm and tied off the severed blood vessels. I was sent back to Barcelona in an ambulance, a journey that I have little memory of, thankfully, and put in a hospital on the Ramblas to recover.

  “For the first few days, I was feverish, but my arm healed well. Imagine my surprise when I became aware of my surroundings and found that I was in the bed next to the young Canadian soldier who had looked at me so sympat
hetically. He had made it all the way to Gandesa, as far as any of our forces made it in that battle, and had been wounded much less seriously than I. He had broken ribs and gave up his bed to a more serious case within a few days.

  “He was there with a companion who had a piece of shrapnel in his shoulder, and they and a young nurse attended to my needs most generously. I think you might know who these people were?”

  I nodded. The young Canadian was my grandfather, his friend was Bob (the other survivor of their group at Gandesa), and the nurse was Maria, Laia’s great-grandmother. “David, Bob and Maria,” Laia said under her breath.

  “Exactly,” Gorky said. “We became quite close, and I was sorry when David and Bob were repatriated. Maria continued to care for me, but it was a long recuperation. By the time I had recovered, the war was almost over, and I joined the flood of refugees heading for the camps in France. It was obvious that I could not return to Spain, so I prepared for a new life in France. I contacted the local Communists and, when France fell to the Nazis, took to the countryside to work for the Resistance. On one side, my lost arm was a handicap. But on the other, I could play the role of a disabled veteran, which gained me sympathy and made me seem unthreatening.

  “I survived the war by good luck and spent several years drifting. I was still a young man, but what could I do? I was disabled and had no training other than war. I could pass for a Frenchman easily enough, but I was always aware that I was far from home. I survived through odd jobs and petty crime, changing identities as it suited me.

  “By the 1950s, the Cold War was at its height. I still kept in touch with other Spanish refugees and with the Communists, but did not particularly care that America was now the enemy. One evening I went to listen to a Canadian, Robert Carlyle, speak about his experiences in Spain. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be Bob, your grandfather’s friend from the hospital in Barcelona. After a few drinks and some reminiscences about the old times and what we had done with our lives since 1938, we parted.

  “I never expected to see Bob again, but several months later there was a knock on the door of the seedy apartment I was living in in Marseilles. It was Bob, carrying a bottle of expensive Spanish brandy. Over the bottle, he explained how he had become disillusioned with democracy and become a dedicated Communist, working for the Soviet Union. He told me there were networks of spies and sleeper agents throughout the British and American governments, and that he was a recruiter for these networks.”

  “Did he mention my grandfather?” I blurted out. Ever since Gorky had mentioned meeting Grandfather, Bob and Maria in Barcelona, I had been riveted by his story, hoping that somehow it would solve the mystery of the money, passports and notebook behind the wall at the cabin.

  “He did,” the old man said, “but only in the vaguest sense. He gave the impression that David McLean was involved in the network that Bob was running, but without saying specifically what his role was.

  “In any case, he offered me support in creating a network of Spanish refugees who could be given new identities and sent back home to spy and carry out works of sabotage. This would have the double advantage of both undermining Franco’s Fascist regime and hurting the Americans, who at that time were the only ones supporting Spain, something they did in exchange for the use of Spanish air bases for nuclear bombers.”

  Gorky’s story was long and convoluted—my shoulders ached and my hands were going numb from being tied tightly together—but what I was hearing was all beginning to fit in with what we had discovered in Grandfather’s coded notebook. Both Laia and I fidgeted from foot to foot, trying to keep our blood circulating, but our full attention was on Gorky.

  “I had no difficulty recruiting men and women for the tasks Bob gave me. At first we were very amateurish, and most of those sent over the mountains in the first years were captured and executed fairly quickly, but I learned, as did those who survived their first missions, that patience was the key. Instead of sending parties of saboteurs over with equipment and orders to blow up this bridge or that railway line, what we needed to do was create networks of sleepers within Spain. Dedicated men and women who survived under their false identities, did not attract attention to themselves and waited.” Gorky looked at Laia. “Your great-grandmother Maria was one.”

  I snapped my head to the side to see Laia staring, open-mouthed, at Gorky. “Maria,” she managed to gasp out eventually. “Maria was a spy? A saboteur?”

  “You see,” Gorky said with a smile. “Life turns out to be more complex than you assume. A saboteur? No. Maria made it very clear when I recruited her that, however much she hated the Fascists, she would do nothing to harm another human being. She accepted my offer as a way of returning to her beloved Barcelona with her young child, and agreed to undertake things that did not conflict with her strict moral code. I respected that. After all, she had nursed me through my injury, and I owed her a great deal.

  “A spy? Not in the sense that you think. She did not run around stealing state secrets and putting them in drop boxes in hollow trees, or chase down the enemy like James Bond. Her undermining of the system was much more subtle. She taught and educated young women to be teachers and nurses, to care for other human beings. It was not openly political, and yet her work was subversive. If you teach someone to care for other human beings and to respect life, they will not become Fascists.

  “The other thing that Maria did was quietly collect stories. Stories of knocks on doors in the middle of the night, stolen babies, bodies discovered at dawn by cemetery walls, the locations of forgotten graves. She knew that one day Spain would change and that remembering would become important once more. I think the work that Felip does owes much to what Maria did all those years ago.

  “But I am becoming distracted, and my tale nears its end. By the mid-1960s I had an extensive network of sleepers in place across Spain, and I felt the time was right to undertake a major act of sabotage—one that would shock the world. I suggested several possibilities to Bob, but he felt the time was not right and refused to give me support. Eventually, I decided to act on my own—after all, what was the point of our work if nothing came of it?

  “My prize sleeper was a young man called Arturo. He was an orphan from the war, but he was also from the Basque provinces in the north. The Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA, a Basque separatist group, was just beginning its campaign of violence in support of independence for the Basque country, and this made Arturo the perfect candidate. If he was captured, the Fascists would assume he was a Basque terrorist, and attention would be diverted from my organization. Also, Arturo had managed to get himself a job inside the American air base at Morón.

  “Without informing Bob, I traveled to Spain under a false name and delivered a small package of explosives to Arturo. I knew that the Americans refueled their B-52 bombers in Morón, and I conceived the idea of bringing one down and, if possible, triggering a nuclear explosion in Spanish skies. Such an event would be the perfect gesture. It would shock the world, discredit Franco’s regime and force the Americans to remove their already unpopular air bases in Europe.”

  I stared at the wrinkled old man sitting across from me. He was talking in a monotone about an act that could have killed thousands of people, turned vast areas into a radioactive wasteland and quite possibly triggered a world war. Laia and I exchanged horrified looks.

  “You’re insane!” I said. “You might have destroyed the world.”

  The old man laughed, a dry, bitter sound. “It is not I who is insane,” he said. “It is the world that you seem to think so highly of. A world that destroyed my childhood, took my arm and left me with nothing. What do I owe this world?”

  SEVENTEEN

  So the explosion over Palomares had been sabotage, Arturo was the saboteur at the air base, and Gorky was his controller. It all fit, but where was Grandfather in all this?

  “Think of the effect had one or all of those bombs exploded.” Gorky was staring up at the empty sky, an almost
wistful tone in his voice. “Each bomb was seventy times as powerful as the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima in 1945. Think if all four had exploded that morning.” Gorky was old and frail, but his eyes gleamed with an unnatural light as he thought of the devastation that might have been wrought in the skies over Palomares. “Then the world would have had to pay attention to us.”

  Gorky blinked rapidly and calmed down. “I was a fool,” he went on. “In those days, I had no idea how hard it is to trigger a nuclear explosion. Without the bombs being armed, the explosives around the plutonium core will not go off at the same time. My vision was not possible, but the explosion presented me with an opportunity that I have pursued relentlessly to this very day. An opportunity that you will help me realize.”

  “What do you mean?” Laia asked. She sounded angry, and that made me nervous. I didn’t think it was a good idea to annoy this guy. “What makes you think we’ll help you?”

  At that moment, I thought we were going to die. Gorky stared at us, a cold look very much like what I imagine a mouse sees before a snake strikes. Then he laughed. “Plucky—I like that. Maria was the same. I could never persuade her to do anything she did not wish to do.”

  “Just as I will never help you,” Laia said defiantly. I was immensely proud of her. I didn’t have the courage to stand up to Gorky, mostly because I didn’t think it would make any difference. I was beginning to suspect what Gorky wanted from us, and the stakes were so high that I doubted he would stop at anything to get what he wanted.

  “Commendable,” Gorky said with what appeared to be genuine admiration, “but I have a question for Steve.” He looked at me with his cold gaze. “How much pain can you stand?”

  I couldn’t think of an answer, and it was all I could do not to collapse and plead for mercy under that relentless stare.

  “A difficult question,” Gorky acknowledged, his tone suddenly conversational. “A quick blow to the face, a broken nose, cracked ribs—I imagine you could handle a beating that involved those types of injuries, but they are crude. The secret to true pain is anticipation. A sudden blow hurts, but it is soon over. There may be fear of the next blow, but that takes time to build up, and we do not have too much time.