A Silent Death by Peter May (book recommendations website txt) 📕

His phone vibrated and pinged in his hand. It was a Facebook alert. He went into the app and saw a red dot attached to the double head-and-shoulders icon that represented friend requests. He tapped it. A single name appeared. Sophia Mackenzie. Confirm or Delete. His heart filled up with love for the little girl who just forty-eight hours ago had unfriended him.

He tapped Confirm.

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