Force of Fire (The Kane Legacy) (15 page)

'–
quickly
,'
McFadden said.

Denton picked up the brown
ceramic pitcher to refill their glasses. 'There’s something the two of you
don’t understand. Nothing happens quickly in Spain.'

Just then a fleshy gypsy woman
appeared at their table. Mark was taken aback. He hadn’t seen her come in. But
he had noticed the others.
Bullish men at the corner table
making a half-hearted attempt at a game of cards.
Mark was certain he’d
seen them in the Plaza, pausing to study the menu tacked to the wall just
beyond their table.

The gypsy smiled broadly,
exposing one gold tooth among several brown ones.
'Flores
para
los senores.'

She laid down her wilting
bouquet, flattening her thick chest against Denton’s back as she leaned in
toward the table.

Denton thanked her, reaching
into his hip pocket for his billfold.

'Damn –' he mouthed,
lunging for a swatch of her colored rags as she melted into a group of
departing students.

Mark and McFadden both laughed.

'Let’s hope she delivered more
than flowers,' Mark said, finishing his drink. The men in the corner were still
playing the same hand.

'Certainly paid enough for this
sad bunch –' McFadden was picking up the flowers when a black slip of
paper fell out from beneath the large ribbon that bound them. It looked like a
wine label that had been peeled from its bottle.

Mark slid it across the table,
cupping it into his hand. 'Sherry?' he asked, lowering his voice and raising
his eyes.

McFadden craned his neck to
take a look. 'Delgado Brand?' he whispered. 'That label’s out of commission.'

Denton followed Mark’s gaze to
the corner table, then motioned for him to hand over the label.

'Jesus H. Christ,' he said in
an equally hushed tone, 'That’s Delgado as in Carlos and Maria.'

Mark and McFadden looked at
him.

'Ana’s
grandparents.
If that line’s been discontinued, it’s been within the last
ten years. Ana took me to that warehouse. I know exactly where it is.'

Denton recalled there was a
regular train that left for the southern coast at midnight. They had less than
forty-five minutes to grab their bags and make the connection.

They swung back through the
Plaza Mayor, exiting on the side of the
Puerta
del
Sol, Madrid’s bustling version of New York City’s Time Square. In Spain, the
night had just begun. Traffic was humming.

It wasn’t long before they saw
a black and red taxi headed in their direction, its
libre
sign aglow. McFadden stepped into the street and raised his right arm.
Instantly, the cab’s driver floored the gas and the taxi veered toward them at
break-neck speed.

Mark lunged out of the way,
pulling the other two with him as he crashed into the concrete curb. The
high-pitched squeal of tires echoed in their ears as the cab missed McFadden’s
leg by a fraction of an inch. He scrambled to his feet, wiping his sweaty
forehead with the back of his arm.

The heavy smell of burning
rubber hung in the air.

Denton stood shaking, scraping
the dirt from his jeans. 'What in the hell was that?'

Mark wiped off his trousers and
checked the security of his piece. He saw the twisted humor, but didn’t dare
smile. '
Carnova’s
idea of the Welcome Wagon.'

When Ana came to, she found
herself prone on an earthen floor, her ragged fingernails clawing the dirt.
Grateful her hands and legs were free, she pushed herself into a sitting
position to examine the creases of her dusty palms.

Two lives, the old gypsy said
– one before, one after.

She’d been only seventeen. The
old woman had accosted her and Emi in the Seville airport. Read both their
palms. Not that she ever believed such nonsense. Her sister had talked her into
it and had hers read first. Emi was told she’d marry young, have a set of
twins, then a little girl.

A shiver raced down Ana’s
spine. That much had come true.

Ana’s forecast had been more
enigmatic – something about an early death. Something in the way her
lifeline split and forked to the right.
A spiritual conflict
perhaps or potentially something more dire.
It had frightened her and
she’d refused to hear more, brushing it off as an old woman’s lunacy.

A hint of sunlight crept
through a slatted window high on the far wall of her stone prison. She rose and
made her way weakly to the huge oak door. Her limbs ached as she pulled at the
doorknob in frustration.

They were pigs.
Sick, perverted pigs.
Heaven help the Spaniards if
Carnova
and his men were to realize the plan she’d heard
them discussing with El
Dedo
.
Carnova's
thick French accent had bothered her from the start. The way he spoke Spanish
was so affected. Something about the way he pronounced his vowels tugged at the
back of her mind. She had heard that type of intonation before – with
Scott. Yes, northern Spain.
Carnova
was Basque! How
could she have missed it? It seemed so obvious now. He must be connected to the
LPP.

Ana had known about the LPP
that year she studied in Spain, but had kept her distance like all the Americans
had. It was easy, of course, with her program located geographically in the
south. She had ventured into the northern territories just once. Part of her
mother's family had come from Galicia and she had to see it, know it in a way
one can't do through photographs. Knowing Jerez, as she had all her life,
wasn't enough. Seeing Scotland, as she had the winter before, was only half the
picture – her father's half.

It meant something to her to
walk through the mossy hills of northwestern Spain, and embrace the distant
wail of a bagpipe. It made her feel connected. And, the unexpected part was,
she could finally see how two halves of the whole fit so neatly together. Both
sides of her family had come from parts of the world settled by Celtic tribes.
And though the traditions that had evolved in each country over the centuries
had diverged, they still held true to a common core of sustenance and
determination. A certain single-mindedness that could weather any climate, draw
the dew of prosperity from even the driest stone.

She had been so sure her father
would be proud of her pilgrimage, of her interest in tracing her roots, but he
was livid. And Ana could count the times on one hand that her father had been
angry with her. 'For goodness sakes, child! What in heaven's name are you doing
in Galicia
?!
' The way he had lit into her, and for no
apparent reason. How she’d regretted calling him, even if it had been his
birthday.

She crossed the small cubicle
to the window and stood there thinking as the breath of morning curled in. Her
senses were teased by the fragrance of spring, new flowers, and – what
was that familiar smell? Ana turned and pressed her back into the chill of the
wall. She let her feet slip slowly toward the center of the room until she was seated,
legs outstretched. She closed her eyes and welcomed the puzzling
deja
vu.

What she smelled was fruit, the
fermentation of fruit like the pungent semi-sweetness of apple orchards just
before harvest. It was the smell of her own childhood back yard where she’d
scaled the pear trees to pluck their sappy fruit. The smell of home...

Ana recalled the rush of
excitement that had driven her and Emi to the door every time Daddy returned
from a long tour of reserve duty in Washington. Even as a little girl, she could
somehow understand his need to maintain a military affiliation. His Army
friends were always coming around, sometimes in uniform, sometimes not. But she
knew they were Army and not university. The university
people
were faddish, outlandish sometimes in their dress and demeanor, but a bit of
eccentricity was
accepted in the college community. The others were
quiet men with close-cut hair.
Men who would come and go at
odd hours and meet with her father behind his closed office door.
It
hadn't seemed strange at the time, but now
Ana
wondered.

She remembered with a jolt the
other time she had seen her father really angry. Though she had never before
made the connection, she now realized that earlier time also had something to
do with northern Spain.

She was eight years old and her
father had been meeting in his office with a man she had been instructed to
call Uncle Tom. Ana's mother was out that night, and she had come downstairs
after being put to bed to ask for a glass of water.

She was so afraid to go to sleep
at night, especially when Mother wasn't there. Her father tried to keep the
nightmares at bay but they came anyway. Mother had a special way about her that
made
Ana
feel calm and cared for. Her father loved
her, she was sure, but he was always preoccupied. It was hard for Ana to tell
sometimes what came first in his life.

The door had been open just a
crack, the yellow light from his desk lamp stretching into the hall. Uncle Tom
sounded angry. He was shouting obscenities, words Ana couldn't understand and
knew she wasn't supposed to. Her father was becoming agitated, urging Tom to
keep it down.

'My God, Tom, do you want to
give us away?'

'Children, Al,' Tom was saying,
'only children.' Ana didn’t like the way he said this.

'Little pitchers –' her
father warned.

Ana stopped
cold. If she knocked at the door now, they'd think she'd been eavesdropping.

Their discussion continued in
hushed tones, but she could tell from the rise and fall of the pitch the two
men were arguing. She hesitated a moment, then tiptoed to the door.

She could see the grit of Uncle
Tom's teeth on his cigar as he snarled at her father. What was he saying?
So many letters that didn't spell words.
They slid across
the polished floor like marbles, landing one by one at her feet – SOBs?
DOS? WDP? LPP
?...

Suddenly, the door flew open
wide and the glare of light hit her eyes. Her father looked down at her, his
gaze disapproving. 'Young lady, what are you doing out of bed?'

She turned in fright and
practically flew up the stairs.

Neither she nor her father ever
spoke of the incident again.

Those Army men, Uncle Tom, the
trips to Washington – it had seemed like nothing at the time, nothing
more than a part of her father's mysterious grown-up world. But now Ana was an
adult and could assess things differently.

Could the things these bastards
were saying be so far off the mark? Did these virtual strangers know more about
her own father's past than she did? Maybe her father's affiliation with the
Defense Department hadn't been as tightly sewn
up
as it
had seemed. Maybe there were loose ends she had never been aware of, loose ends
used to string her father along until they'd dragged him to an early grave.

She always regretted she hadn't
been home when her father died. It had been Easter weekend and she should have
been there, but she’d been forced to make a last-minute trip to close out the
project office in Ecuador. The Ambassador, she was told, was streamlining
allocation for US assistance funds and her contract had been pegged a low
priority. She was new to the international development world and had accepted
the defeat for what it was.

'Nothing personal,' her boss
had assured her, 'you did a bang-up job. We just lost funding, that's all. It
happens.'

Her mother told her an old Army
buddy of her father's had fortunately been in the house and had been able to
rush Albert to the hospital. But, by the time they got there, there was nothing
more the doctors could do.

Ana never had the chance to say
goodbye to her father. The body was cremated, even before she could fly home.
She knew he’d wanted it that way; he’d mentioned it several times before.
Personally, Ana found it a gruesome way to terminate a dignified life.

A host of sharp voices rang out
in the courtyard beyond the window, jerking her back to the present. They were
speaking of the prisoner – about her.

Suddenly, the knob of her cell
door began to turn
.

El
Dedo
appeared, accompanied by a young gypsy woman. 'Take her and get her clean!' he
ordered with a grimace. 'Her stench will give us away!'


The young girl, who couldn't
have been more than eighteen, waved a pistol in Ana's direction
.

'
Ven
!'
she
directed, leading a tentative Ana out the door.

The train wound its way through
the sleepy, whitewashed villages of southern Spain, wild sunflowers flanking
the track, swinging their obedient faces to the sun. Mark woke gently to a
lavender sky and the soft, steady lull of churning wheels. The scenery was dry,
yet dramatic: small ivory towns perched like doves on the crests of brownish
hills.
Here and there, a nest of olive branches reaching for
the sky.

When they approached the first
of the vineyards, Denton advised the others they were nearing Jerez de la
Frontera
.

Denton had been here once
before with Ana to visit her ailing grandmother. He told Mark and McFadden that
Maria and her husband Carlos had co-founded the Delgado winery, one of the
biggest in Spain. But to hear Ana tell it, it was really her grandmother who
got the business off the ground. Carlos, it seemed, had had a penchant for
drinking and squandering their earnings on common whores. It was a family
disgrace, but one Maria played off with uncanny form. She ignored his
dalliances and focused her energies on building the business. She parlayed
their small operation into a multi-million dollar industry, thanks to the
export agreement she signed with the British.