The Andalucian Friend Read Free Page B

Europop. Some guy was singing, through a broad smile, it sounded like, and there were electronic strings in the background, a predictable melody. Leszek picked up words like “mountaintop,” “family ties,” and “edelweiss.” There was something sick about this country that he could never quite put his finger on.
    He sat there with his hands in his lap, breathing calmly. It was a beautiful morning, mist in the air. The sun’s rays were shining through the foliage, casting a yellowish glow over the scene. He thought it was beautiful, almost painfully beautiful.
    He looked down at his hands, they were dirty. Installing the bomb had been a messy job. He’d done it before, a long time ago during his years in the security service. It had been easier then, less time consuming, easier to get at compared to today’s modern, self-contained engines. He stretched and shut his eyes for a moment.
    When he opened them again he could just make out the shape of someone coming out of Christian’s house, behind the trees, down toward the road. Leszek tried to make out who it was. He grabbed the Swarovski binoculars from the passenger seat and raised them to his eyes. The person behind the trees was a woman, a fairly young woman. Leszek glanced at his watch: quarter to eight. The woman opened the iron gate in the wall and stepped out into the road. Leszek found the focus with his index finger. She was blond, maybe twenty years old, maybe twenty-five, with long hair; large, dark sunglasses; ripped designer jeans; and high-heeled boots, and she was walking toward the car, a handbag over her shoulder. She looked expensive. Leszek quickly trained the binoculars on the house. Where the hell was Christian? He looked back at the woman who was crossing the road toward the BMW. Instead of getting in the passenger side she opened the driver’s door and slid in easily behind the wheel, putting her handbag on the passenger seat. Leszek turned the binoculars toward the house again, no sign of Christian Hanke anywhere.
    The seconds that followed ticked past slowly. Leszek felt an urge to blow his horn, open the door and wave at her, get her attention by doing something dramatic, something odd. But instead he just sat there, aware of how pointless it would be to try to change an already predetermined course of events. With his field of vision enlarged ten times through the lenses of the binoculars, with the smarmy German’s voice singing in the background, he watched as the beautiful fair-haired woman did that little thing you do when you start a car, one hand on the wheel, leaning forward slightly to turn the key.
    In the millisecond that the electricity traveled from the battery to the starter motor, an electrical wire captured it along the way and ignited a detonator, which in turn set off the explosives fastened beneath the car.
    The force of the blast threw the woman up against the roof and broke her neck as the car lifted almost two feet off the ground. And at that moment the container full of napalm that he had fixed inside the car caught light and transformed the twisted wreckage into a blazing inferno.
    Leszek watched through his binoculars as the woman caught fire. Sitting there completely still, burning inside the wreckage. How her beautiful hair disappeared, how her lovely fair skin disappeared … How her whole being slowly disappeared.
    Leszek made his way out of Grünwald, found a deserted spot in the forest where he could set fire to the stolen car. Then he made his way into Munich and called Guzman, leaving a short message to say that it hadn’t gone according to plan, that Guzman should stay alert and have friends at his side. He dumped the phone in a drain in the street, then meandered aimlessly around the city for a while to reassure himself that he wasn’t being followed.
    When he felt safe, he flagged down a taxi and went to the airport. A few hours later he was on his way back home to his master again.

     
    From the day