Another pause. ‘We have contacts in HM Customs in Gibraltar. I’ll alert them.’
Chapter Forty-Eight
From here the bay of Gibraltar seemed circled by lights. Strings of them like luminous pearls followed the curve of the coastline. Black waters dotted with tankers and freighters sending shimmering spears of light to pierce the depths. Long, illuminated wharves reached out like protective arms from docks and container terminals, providing safe haven in calmer waters for giant ships. At the far side of the bay, tucked in beneath the mountains, lay the Spanish port of Algeciras, and beyond that the ferry terminal at Tarifa where cars and passengers trafficked back and forth between Spain and Morocco. Immediately below, the lights of Gibraltar town cast their pollution into a sky still dark.
Cristina sat in numbed silence in the back of her taxi, trying to ignore the ramblings of the driver, a man more used, so he told her, to conducting circuits of the Rock with a car full of tourists.
The one-way road to the peak was overhung by dark trees and rose steeply through hairpin bends snaking up into the night.
‘You see those big metal rings set into the road?’ her driver was saying. ‘The British used them as part of a pulley system for hauling cannon to the top of the Rock. Sheer brutal manpower.’ When she didn’t respond he said, ‘Spanish?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thought so.’ He sighed. ‘So many of the young ones don’t even speak it now. My people were from Malta. Lot of Italians came here, too. Only twenty per cent of Gibraltarians are of British descent, you know.’
Cristina glanced at the back of his head for the first time. It was half-turned towards her. She saw dark Mediterranean features. ‘But you think of yourself as British?’
‘Oh, yes. Born under the union flag,’ he said proudly.
They slowed to take a bend in the road where it almost doubled back on itself, and for a moment Cristina had a view out across the strait. The first glimpse of dawn, burgeoning somewhere in the hidden east, cast its pale misted light across brooding waters. The darker outline of the mountains of North Africa were clearly visible, the shadow of a nearer peak cutting its silhouette against the palest of light in the sky beyond.
‘Ceuta,’ the driver said. ‘One of the Pillars of Hercules. Gibraltar is the other. Hercules is said to have cut through the mountains with a single blow of his sword and used his great strength to separate the two continents and create the strait.’ He chuckled. ‘I leave you to decide whether or not there is any truth in this story.’ It probably went down well with tourists, but was lost on Cristina, her mind already wandering.
The driver glanced at her in the mirror.
‘You know, there really is no point in going to the Skywalk. Like I told you, it’s closed for maintenance work. All you’re going to find up there are apes. And nothing else is open yet. St Michael’s Cave, the tunnels, the cable car...’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Cristina said. ‘Just drop me at the Skywalk.’ Her apprehension was so intense now that the shivering which had accompanied her across the border had become a deep, numbing chill. Her whole body was rigid as she sat gripping her seat in the back of the taxi.
The Spanish border town of La Línea was deserted apart from traffic on the arterial road leading to the frontier. As Mackenzie accelerated through a series of roundabouts, street lights cast a ghostly yellow across the dual carriageway, vehicles travelling in one direction only. On his right, beyond the marina, the waters of the Bay of Gibraltar reflected the lights of myriad ships at anchor. Vast areas of covered parking stretched ahead, and beyond that the tail lights of vehicles queuing to cross the border into Gibraltar. The queue had started early, as it always did, to process the more than 23,000 people who came from Spain to work on the Rock every day.
As Mackenzie joined the tail of the queue he cursed and glanced at his watch. If this was how it was early on a Saturday, God only knew what it would be like on a weekday. It was almost 7 am and he could see first light in the sky beyond the black shape of the Rock. He lowered his head to glance up, impressed by the scale of it rising sheer into the night, dwarfing customs and immigration buildings and the airport runway below.
His phone rang and he grabbed it. ‘Mackenzie.’
‘Sir, pleased to connect with you. Detective Sergeant David Greene. I’m with the serious crime squad of the Royal Gibraltar Police. I’ve been briefed by the NCA in London, and my colleagues in Customs and Excise have received an alert from GRECO in Marbella. Where are you, sir?’
‘I’m stuck in bloody traffic in La Línea, waiting to cross the border.’
‘Dump the car, sir, and come through on foot. It’s much quicker. I’ll meet you on the other side.’
Mackenzie pulled the wheel hard to his right and swung out of the queue. He turned into the entry lane of one of several car parks that sprawled behind mesh fencing, and snatched a ticket from the machine to lift the barrier. He slotted his car into the first available space, then took off on foot, trying to ignore the pain that jarred through his body with every juddering footfall.
People were arriving, it seemed, from nowhere now. Dropped perhaps from cars, or coming on foot from homes in La Línea itself. Gibraltar was a major local employer. Everyone was heading for passport control. Mackenzie pushed his way unceremoniously through the crowd.
On the far side of the entrance to customs and immigration, a huge animated billboard shone its advocacy of Watergardens Dental Care into the dark before dawn. Vehicles backed up in two lanes for several hundred metres, idling and belching fumes into the cool morning air, waiting to pass through laborious checks put in place by the Spanish to irk the British.
Mackenzie ran past rusted fencing, beneath twin arches that marked the crossing point for vehicles, and towards the single doorway that led to the immigration hall. Here a queue had already formed at a row of automated passport control gates. Mackenzie shoved his way to the head of it, ignoring a barrage of complaints, and made for the first available gate. From a window on the far side, inscrutable immigration officers eyed him suspiciously as he held his passport in the digital reader and waited for the flash of the camera to record his image. He endured what seemed like an interminable wait before the light ahead of him turned green and the barrier let him through.
Moving with the flow of people passing through the narrow opening from one hall to the next, he waved his passport at a bored British official sitting at a raised desk, a perfunctory pretence of passport control, and ran through a wood-panelled customs hall where uniformed officials were more interested in chatting than checking.
Immediately outside, in Winston Churchill Avenue, a stocky middle-aged man in a dark suit and open-necked white shirt loitered by an old-fashioned red-painted British telephone box. It seemed strangely incongruous here at the southern tip of Spain, just fifteen kilometres from the continent of Africa. The man glanced down at a faxed ID sheet in his left hand, then up again at Mackenzie. He stepped forward, his right hand extended. ‘Mr Mackenzie. Pleased to meet you, sir. DS Greene. I have a car over here.’
Greene’s silver-grey Honda Civic was pulled in at the back of a taxi rank where drivers stood around smoking and chatting among themselves, waiting for early morning business. Across the road, a huge expanse of floodlit tarmac stretched away to the new terminal at Gibraltar Airport.
Greene slipped a flashing light on to the roof of the Honda and started his siren as he pulled off into the stream of traffic heading for town. But even lights and siren did not give him precedence over the barriers that fell to stop traffic in both directions where the road crossed the runway. Greene tapped his wheel with impatient fingers as they waited for an early easyJet flight to take-off.