Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

The town beneath us five thousand feet and four miles to the west and the paramilitary police taking no prisoners, using dogs, whips, CS gas, and water cannon and this time the rioters were being rounded up like sheep. Fires burned and the helicopters came and went and it was ending now, we could tell.

“Agua,” we asked a herder and he showed us a stream and we followed it another thousand feet up into the hills where, at a stone wall, it formed part of the boundary of a hacienda. We vaulted the wall, got about a quarter of a mile before a man in a suit appeared on a three-wheeled motorbike and asked us what the hell we thought we were doing. And not about to let Goosey do the talking I explained that we were innocent kids fleeing a riot down in Playa de las Americas. The man adjusted his sunglasses and said something into a walkie-talkie. He escorted us up to the hacienda, where a beautiful woman in her forties sat us down at an oak table under pine beams and gave us water and brandy.

“Muchas gracias, bella señorita,” I said and the woman laughed and muttered something to the man in sunglasses and he went back outside and then she said to me in English that she was married and was no señorita anymore and not even beautiful either. To which I sincerely disagreed and she laughed again and asked me what exactly had been going on at the beach and I told her, leaving out our part in the proceedings.

She fed us and gave us directions to the town of Guia de Isora.

By the afternoon our supplies were gone and we were lost in a region that had an uncanny similarity to the place the NASA robots keep landing on the planet Mars. Rocks, stones, thin red soil. It grew unbearably hot. Goosey started swaying a bit, and all around us desert, black lava, and the baking sun. We sat under a rock and decided to move again at night. The sun set, it grew cold, above us we saw what God had made when he was getting things ready for the Earth. A million stars. A billion. Blue and red and Doppler-shifted ultraviolet.

I thought for a minute that we were toast, but we fell in the backbone of the night and its spell guided us safely through the wilderness. The sun rose over the sand hills and in the morning we were at a wire fence surrounding a banana plantation. We broke in and with comedy climbed a tree and gorged ourselves on green fruit. Nature was a civilizing influence and Goosey had given up plans for Clockwork Orange rampages and was now all for staying here forever in the great outdoors. We could build canoes and trade to Africa and be self-sufficient in meat, fruit, clothes. We could be outlaws and fish and roast our catch over charcoal fires. Live on the beach and dream our canoes out over the ocean. Steer by wave and swell and the stars like the Polynesians. His vision more Coral Island than Lord of the Flies and I said I’d write a letter to The Times suggesting a scheme whereby lager louts could be turned into Byronic pacifists just by letting them camp out a few nights in the wilds of Tenerife. Plutarch had called this place the “Fortunate Islands,” Darwin had raved about it, and two hundred years ago Alexander von Humboldt had had the same thoughts: “Nowhere in the world seems more able to dissipate melancholy and restore peace to troubled minds than Tenerife.” That’s the real reason I’d come here. Five years in the purgatory of the Witness Protection Program. The FBI and federal marshals dogging my every movement. I needed a vacation. I needed out of North America. And I’d been to Tenerife before and liked it, it was mellow and I even spoke Spanish.

Nice move. I’d been deciding between Spain and somewhere completely off the wall like Peru. I’d flipped a coin.Heads.

A lot of people were going to get screwed because of that coin flip.

Especially me.

There’s only so many bananas you can eat and outside the plantation we flagged down a car which unfortunately had three undercover cops inside. Our football shirts and accents were a bit of a giveaway and before I could say, “I want to see the British ambassador,” we were separated and driven to a cell block in an underground bunker near the airport.

The riot at Playa de las Americas all over now and the rioters being held under Spanish antiterrorism laws. A guard cheerfully told me that we were all going to get ten years.

The cell was deep underground, a yellow bulb in the ceiling giving off a little light. Cold, damp. Impossible to tell if it was day or night. But I’d been in worse. Much bloody worse. They fed you three times a day, there was a bog that flushed, and the fauna situation was manageable.

I was sitting on the cot reading How Stella Got Her Groove Back for the third time when the cell door opened.

I stood.

A man and a woman. A tall man carrying a chair and a water bottle. He was wearing a linen jacket, white shirt, Harrow tie. It was difficult to see in the dark but he looked about thirty-five, forty at the outside, hard-faced, blond-gray hair. He held himself like a high-ranking army officer: straight spine, shoulders back, stomach in. He unfolded the chair and sat down. A revolver peeked out next to his armpit. Interesting. The woman also had a chair. She was late thirties, wearing a sundress and sandals with red hair tied behind her in a ponytail. She was heavy but attractive-Rubens plump, not lesbian-biker plump. She took out a notebook and sat back in the shadows. He was the man and she was the assistant. They fell immediately into their roles, which wasn’t smart, but despite that I still didn’t like the look of either of them.

“You’re British,” I said to the man.

“That’s right, old boy,” he said in a plummy public school voice. Not for him the attempt to tone down the upper-crust accent and give in to the increasingly common Estuary English pronunciation. It told me a lot about him-arrogant, proud, the Harrow tie not a joke but a reminder of a birthright. A wanker, more than likely.

“I suppose you’re from the embassy,” I said. “I’m completely innocent, you know. I wasn’t involved in anything. I was on holiday. First bloody holiday in years.” “Beastly piece of luck, I’m sure. But the Spanish don’t care, you will be tried, you will be found guilty, you’ll get five to ten years, I suppose. The new prime minister, Mr. Blair, has said that he supports fully the Spanish government’s intention of making an example out of the soccer hooligans who once again have blighted the good name of England,” he said breezily.

“I’m not English,” I told him.

“It doesn’t matter,” the man replied quickly.

“It matters to me.”

“Well, it won’t make any difference. You will be convicted,” he said.

“Listen, mate, if you came here to give me a lecture you can piss off,” I said, lifting up my trouser leg and scratching under the straps that held the artificial foot to my calf. I’d lost the foot five years before in a lovely piece of jungle surgery in Mexico. It had saved my life and I was thoroughly unselfconscious about it now.

The man smiled, picked at a piece of fluff on his shirt, looked behind him at the secretary, cleared his throat.

“I imagine, Brian, that you do not want to spend the next ten years in some ghastly prison on the mainland,” he said softly.

“No, I bloody don’t,” I said, trying to conceal my surprise with passion.

He pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

“Do you smoke?”

I shook my head. He lit himself a cigarette, offered one to the woman, who also declined. But he had me now. It was an interesting situation and I had to admit that I was intrigued. No guard had accompanied the two Brits. They did not appear flustered, angry. There was no pompous talk. Something was going on. Were they releasing me? Maybe Dan Connolly from the FBI had heard about my predicament and pulled a few strings.