Donaldson wiped a hand across his brow. It came away damp with sweat. ‘The days of rules are well past. On the face of it I will obey the rules — of interview, of Human Rights, of fairness — but underneath I will be operating on a different level, like the feet of a duck.’ Donaldson wiggled the first two fingers on his right hand to imitate a duck’s feet. ‘I will throw you to the wolves if you don’t cooperate with me.’
Fazil eyed him cynically.
‘I can be your friend or your enemy. Your choice.’
‘Mr Donaldson.’ Fazil smashed out the stub of his cigarette in the ashtray. ‘I have killed a Maltese police officer in a firefight. I will be found guilty of that and I will be incarcerated on this stinking island for many, many years. Even that thought will not make me talk to you.’ His dark eyes looked down and his wide nostrils flared.
Donaldson caught the first BA flight from London Gatwick to Palma later that morning, three years before. Don Barber met him at the airport, hustled him through customs into a waiting car, which was driven for less than ten minutes to the beach front restaurant in Can Pastilla where the shooting had taken place the evening before.
The bodies had all been removed but otherwise the scene was as it had been, and the road in front of the hotel was cordoned off to through traffic. The local police scientific team was working the scene as professionally as anything Donaldson had ever witnessed.
He and Don Barber were allowed under the tape and Barber walked him through what had happened with the permission of the senior police officer present, who could only speculate as to why two FBI agents were here.
‘Hell,’ Donaldson said afterwards. ‘Where are the bodies now?’
‘Palma mortuary.’
‘And do we have anything?’
‘Only the names of all three victims.’
‘What about evidence from the scene itself?’
‘We could have something,’ Barber said, consulting a flip over notepad he had with him. ‘From the waiter, who despite being in shock, has given us a pretty good description of the shooter — which I’ll come to later — it seems that another customer went to the restroom, which was then visited by the shooter. He then returned to the table, then opened fire. Bam!’ Barber said bitterly. ‘Paella everywhere. But don’t get excited, we don’t know if the shooter left any traces in the john or at the table. I reckon it’s doubtful, but I’ve got our own crime scene guys on the way from Madrid and I’ve asked the locals to hold back a bit — not that I’m saying they aren’t doing a good job. But obviously they are very interested as to why the FBI is sniffin’ around, though.’
‘As they would be.’ The two men looked at each other knowingly.
‘Anyway, pal, back to basics,’ Barber said. ‘Just before our shooter visited the john, another customer went in a few minutes before him, then afterwards immediately left the joint.’
Donaldson blinked.
‘I might be adding up to five here,’ Barber said, ‘but I’m guessing this could be the delivery man — and he was sitting right there.’ Barber pointed dramatically to a table in the back corner of the restaurant. ‘And his stuff hasn’t been cleared away, which could be useful, scientifically.’
‘That’s supposing he was involved in some way.’
‘If he isn’t, fair enough… but we’ll see what comes of it.’
Donaldson imagined the crime taking place, based on how it had been described to him. Suddenly he felt quite ill.
Shark wasn’t his man, not directly, but he knew him, knew what his task was, but above all knew what it felt like to lose an undercover agent. He patted Barber on the shoulder and said, ‘I’m real sorry, man.’
‘Yeah,’ Barber snorted, his eyes moist. Barber was Shark’s controller. ‘Fuck,’ he added. Then, ‘I want you to find the killer, Karl. I’ve cleared it with your boss. Hope you don’t mind.’
‘I can prove you were at the scene of a multiple homicide in a restaurant in Majorca three years ago — and I know you were the person who delivered the weapon to the man who carried out the murders.’
Fazil chuckled derisively.
Donaldson went on, ‘You were sitting at a table in the same restaurant. You went to the toilet a few minutes before the killer. You secreted a weapon underneath the lid of the toilet cistern.’
Fazil shook his head.
‘I can prove it,’ Donaldson said again.
The lone, mystery diner had not been as careful as he should have been. The glass of wine and glass carafe on his table revealed an array of partial fingerprints, as did an examination of the porcelain cistern lid. These were run through the automatic fingerprint recognition system and Fazil’s details were eventually thrown up. He was positively identified from the lifts, but there was not enough detail to support an ID at court.
Fazil shrugged.
Donaldson did not speak, but regarded the man who could be the key to cracking the case he’d been working on solidly for eighteen months — as well as the rest.
Following his appearance at the scene of the shooting in Majorca, Donaldson had been diverted to other tasks through no fault of his own. One of these was the protracted manhunt for the terrorist Akbar that culminated many months later in a tiny square in Barcelona, where Donaldson had come face to face with him and took a bullet that almost cost him his life — though Akbar fared much worse. Donaldson had endured a long period of recuperation and eventually returned to work, picking up the threads of the investigation into the Majorcan murders.
By that time, Fazil had been identified from the traces he’d left at the scene and a full profile had been pulled together on him. He was a Turk involved in people smuggling and drug dealing across the eastern Med. At the time of the murders he was working freelance for a Camorra Mafia family from Naples and was suspected by the Italian police of being a man who collected, delivered and disposed of firearms used in the commission of crimes by that particular clan. Crimes that included murder — and in that part of the world he was kept constantly busy because murder was rife between warring factions.
But Fazil was an elusive man, always on the go, rarely in one place for any length of time. Although he was circulated by Interpol as wanted for questioning in connection with the Majorcan murders, he was never caught.
It was a frustrating time for Donaldson and the FBI, who had a vested interest in apprehending him because the man going by the codename Shark had been deep undercover for years and they wanted to nail the bastard who killed him, who it was believed had been hired by the head of a rival Mafia clan.
Other than occasional snippets of information about the assassin — a man who went by the moniker of ‘The American’ — Fazil was the best lead they had to the shootings, if only they could catch him.
‘We have your fingerprints and’ — here Donaldson stretched the truth a little — ‘your DNA from the scene.’
Fazil shook his head.
‘We can protect you if you speak to us,’ Donaldson assured him, hoping his body language didn’t say anything different. ‘If you admit your part, tell us who you worked for and who pulled the trigger, who set up the hit — everything — we will protect you.’
‘I don’t speak to the law.’
It had taken almost three years for Fazil to surface and that had been only by pure chance and bad luck on his part. He had been involved in running a rigid inflatable boat, an RIB, full of contraband from the southern tip of Italy to Malta and back, and a low-level snitch blabbed to the police in Valletta. He told them that a night run was due to take place to drop off drugs on St Paul’s Bay on the island’s north coast.
Fazil was accompanied by three other men, all Turks.
The police were waiting in ambush. Unfortunately, what should have been a well-planned and executed reception turned into a bloodbath. Fazil and his heavily armed colleagues opened fire on the police in a desperate attempt to evade their clutches and get back out to sea. The only miracle was that Fazil was left standing after the broadside, as his three mates were riddled with bullets and one cop felled by Fazil’s MP5 and almost beheaded by the stream of bullets.
It was the second time in Maltese history that Turkish blood had been spilled in St Paul’s Bay, the last time being in 1565 when hundreds of Turkish soldiers were slaughtered as they lay siege to the island. Their blood made the waters run red.
