Chapter Forty-Three
The persistent single trill of the telephone penetrated troubled dreams that vanished from recollection the moment he awoke. It took a second to remember where he was, and then another to reach for the bedside phone.
‘Yes?’
The voice that sounded in his ear could almost have been computer-generated. It was monotone and curiously stilted, as if the speaker were trying to disguise it. And if it was someone Mackenzie knew, he was making a good job of it. He spoke in Spanish. ‘Condesa Golf Hotel. Thirty minutes. Come alone. Simple exchange. You for the blind lady.’ And the caller hung up before Mackenzie could even respond.
He sat upright on the bed. Perspiring, breathing hard. He could feel his heart punching at an already tender rib cage.
He ran every possible eventuality through his head at high speed, and each one led him to the same conclusion. However clumsily contrived, it was clearly a trap. But an oddly honeyed trap, almost as if its architect knew how irresistible it would be to Mackenzie. The chance to make amends for his father’s mistake all those years ago. Sacrificing himself to save the hostage. But how could anyone know about that? And how could anyone think he was stupid enough not to realize that a trap was a trap. In contradiction of the popular aphorism, there was no honour among thieves, so there was no guarantee that the promise of any exchange would be respected. Cleland simply wanted to kill him. He knew it in his bones.
But what to do?
He weighed everything in his mind. He could not involve Cristina. She had more than enough to contend with. But he had a location. The Condesa Golf Hotel. It was just possible that Cleland might actually be there. Mackenzie had noticed it the other day, sitting up above the A7 overlooking the sea half a mile short of the Eroski Centre. Green-smoked glass and pale yellow walls. An air of abandonment. Closed shutters, overgrown gardens, and two letters dangling at odd angles from the name of the hotel above the front entrance. Of course, it was perfectly possible Ana wasn’t even there.
But what to do?
He took his own phone from the charger and called the police station. A sleepy-sounding duty officer responded, and took more than a moment to realize who Mackenzie was.
‘I need a number for the Jefe,’ Mackenzie said.
‘Well, isn’t there something I can help you with?’
‘No, I need to talk to the Jefe.’
He heard the officer sigh, then after a moment he read out a number. ‘He won’t be happy to hear from you at this time in the morning.’
Mackenzie hung up and dialled. He was not going to make a decision on this by himself. Unlike his father, he would defer to a higher authority. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the phone ringing in the dark of the Jefe’s home somewhere up in the hills. He rehearsed what he was going to say. But the phone just rang and rang, until finally Mackenzie hung up and his carefully thought out words scattered in the winds of uncertainty.
‘Shit!’ His own voice whispered back at him from the walls. He glanced at the bedside clock. It was 4.17 am, a good five minutes now since the call. The caller had said thirty minutes. Time was running out. By the time he got to the police station and explained himself to the duty officer, that thirty-minute window would have closed. He had to go now.
Cursing under his breath, he dragged on a pair of jeans and pushed his feet into white trainers. His only fresh shirt was a white one. He would be seen coming a mile off. He shoved the shirt tails into his jeans and dropped his phone into the breast pocket, then took a moment to steady himself, fingers pressed into the soft flesh at either side of his temples. He forced himself to take a deep breath, then ran silently down the stairs to search for his car in the underground garage.
There was no traffic on the A7 as Mackenzie pulled off it, slipping his car into neutral and drifting to a halt in front of the golf club. He cut the engine. The hotel itself stood at the top of a short rise beyond the clubhouse and languished in profound darkness. He glanced at his watch. The thirty minutes were almost up.
He stepped out of the car and stood listening. All he could hear was the creak of cicadas, and an offshore breeze that rattled the fronds of palm trees overhead. A waning moon and a star-studded sky provided enough light to see by.
He ran cautiously up the hill staying close to the retaining wall, then sprinted for the deep shadow of rusted canopies that raised themselves above the overgrown slots of an empty car park. From here he surveyed the front entrance to the hotel, half hidden by foliage. It all seemed closed and secure. There were no lights inside.
Keeping to the shadows, he moved around the far side of the building to where a spa occupied the basement on a lower level. The hotel was built in wings enclosing an overgrown garden. Steps led up to a gated entrance. Everything was padlocked.
Mackenzie drifted across the access road, and found a path that curved back around the slope towards the front of the hotel. He pushed through tangling bushes to reach steps that climbed to a side entrance. There he stopped and stood quite still. A chain hung from the padlock that Cleland had severed and the door itself stood half open.
He listened intently. But the cicadas, like tinnitus, drowned out everything else. All that he could hear above it was the sound of his own blood pulsing in his ears. He stepped forward to push the door carefully into darkness. And moved silently into the interior.
For several long moments he stood motionless, letting his eyes accustom themselves to what little light there was. Moonlight fell feebly from an atrium high above reception, and in its cold wash he saw the tracks left by many feet in the dust that lay thick on the floor. Some old, some fresh. They led across marble tiles to a staircase that descended to the spa. Mackenzie moved slowly in the footsteps of whoever had gone before him and started down the stairs.
It was darker here. Light from street lamps in the access road filtered through glass doors to cast deep shadows across empty pools. Mackenzie followed the footprints in the dust, past locker rooms and abandoned massage tables, to double doors obscured by gloom at the far side of the spa.
Now he was in one of the residential wings. Hands painted on the walls of the stairwell pointed up towards numbered rooms on the floors above. He stopped on the first landing. A strangely invasive moan penetrated the darkness. Erratic, repetitive. An almost human sound. Although he knew that it wasn’t. But like chalk on a blackboard it sent an involuntary chill through his body.
This was madness. What could he possibly achieve by coming here on his own, walking straight into a trap so crudely set? He was unsure if he had ever been in greater fear for his life. Perhaps he should have gone to the police station after all. But it was too late for second thoughts. In the end, it seemed, he had been just as foolish as his father. There was nothing for it now but to push on.
As he reached the second landing the moaning grew louder. It came to him from somewhere beyond double doors that led into what must once have been a guest lounge. Settees and armchairs and coffee tables hid like phantoms beneath discoloured dust sheets, and Mackenzie slalomed between them towards a wall of glass with sliding doors that stood open. Outside, a covered terrace overlooked the garden.
Once on the terrace he identified the source of the almost human moaning. The remains of a flag dangled from a pole overhead and swayed gently back and forth in the breeze that blew up from the shore, causing a steel rope to swing on a rusted retaining hinge. An endless eerie refrain heard only by the ghosts of guests past. And those in whose footprints Mackenzie had followed.
He stepped across the terrace and peered over the rail into the shrubbery below. Weeds pushed up through cracked tiles around an empty swimming pool where myriad blue mosaic tiles had flaked off to lie scattered across its debris-strewn floor like glitter.