‘Here in Zaragoza. I was looking at some property. Saul is thinking of buying a place up here. I said I’d help him while he was back in England. Some men attacked me when I went to my car.’
‘Saul was with you?’
‘No. No. He was coming out from London later on. I just left the hospital today. Tell Julian, all right? I don’t want him to be angry.’
It feels bad to be doing this, but I don’t have any choice.
‘Alec,’ she says sweetly, touching my heart with her voice. I think of the barn, of that blackness under the hood, and squeeze my eyes tight to reply.
‘I’m all right now. It’s just some bruises. But I’m so angry, you know? I think if I saw those men again, I would kill them.’
‘I know, I know…’ She is crying.
‘I long to touch you,’ I tell her. ‘I miss you so much.’
‘Me too,’ she says. ‘I will book the hotel. We can talk about it then.’
‘Yes. But don’t cry, OK? Don’t be upset. I’m fine.’
‘I just feel so bad…’
There is a knock at the door. This startles me perhaps more than it might once have done, but it’s just room service. Saying goodbye to Sofia I stand up slowly off the bed, securing my dressing gown as I look through the fish-eye lens in the door. There’s a waitress on the other side, very pretty and alone. She seems struck by me when she walks in, a reaction that may be sexual, which may be shock. I cannot tell. She places a tray on the bed.
‘ Buenas tardes. Senor Milius.’
Out of nothing, a dream of sex pulses inside me. I would gladly lie down with this girl on my bed and sleep next to her for days. Anything just for the gentleness and peace of a woman’s touch. I hand her a five-euro tip and wish she wouldn’t leave.
‘Thank you, it was my pleasure,’ she says, and I am on the point of asking her to stay when my head suddenly splits with pain. She has gone, closing the door behind her, and I drop like a stone on the bed, wondering how many more pills, how much more water and whisky I will have to drink before this all goes away. I am angry as I look at my broken body, knowing that it was wrong to have arranged to meet Sofia so soon. The bruising on my legs and stomach will terrify her. I wish the girl had stayed. I wish I was not alone.
Like an invalid, I manage to eat only half of the sandwich before vomiting its contents into the toilet. Something is wrong with me, something more than just shock and exhaustion. It’s as if they poisoned me back at the farmhouse, as if they put something into my blood. I fall into a hopeless sleep, waking up wired and distraught at four in the morning. I leave the lights on in the room for comfort and get dressed slowly, taking a walk around the centre of Zaragoza for more than an hour. Then, back at the hotel, unable to sleep again, I check out at six, eat breakfast, and head back on the road to Madrid.
31. Plaza de Colon
Kitson is awake at seven when I call him from a petrol-station landline. He does not sound surprised to hear from me.
‘Been away, Alec?’
‘Something like that.’
I tell him that we need to get together as soon as I return to Madrid and suggest a two o’clock meeting under the waterfall at Plaza de Colon. He does not know the place, but I describe it to him in detail and ask him to come alone.
‘Sounds intriguing.’
The drive takes about seven hours. I have to rest repeatedly because my eyes ache with a persistent migraine. Painkillers have numbed my reflexes and I feel foggy with the consequences of what I am about to do. Back in the city, aware that ETA will now almost certainly know where I live, I drop the Audi in Plaza de Espana, take a quick shower at the flat and follow the counter-surveillance route around the barrio up to El Corte Ingles. It’s vital that I am not observed meeting Kitson, who will demand assurances that I have not been followed. There’s no visible tail at the bank on the corner of Martin de los Heros, and nobody follows me into the trap on the first floor at the post office. At Corte Ingles I use the switchback escalators and try on several items of clothing while checking for surveillance. Again, nothing. As a final safeguard, I limp downstairs into the metro at Arguelles, get onto Line 4 and step off at the last moment at Bilbao station, waiting for a second train in case I was followed onto the first. For three minutes I have the platform to myself, then a schoolgirl of thirteen or fourteen comes down the stairs with a friend. Both of them are clutching satchels. ETA have either lost me or decided not to plant a tail. If they have put a tracer in the car it will lead them only as far as the garage. If they have triangulation on the mobiles that will only pin-point my apartment.
Plaza de Colon is a vast square on the eastern side of the Castellana about a kilometre north of the Museo del Prado. A vast Spanish flag flies in the centre of the square beside a statue of Christopher Columbus. At its base, run-off from an elaborate fountain system forms a waterfall which pours down across the facade of a hidden, subterranean museum. The entrance to the museum can be reached only by walking beneath the waterfall via a set of stairs at either end. It is thus a natural environment for counter-surveillance, a long, narrow corridor with a wall of water on one side and a public building on the other, invisible to outsiders. Our meeting can proceed unmolested.
When I appear at the bottom of the southern staircase Kitson looks up but does not react. He is sitting towards the far end of the corridor on a low brick wall which runs beneath the waterfall. Water roars in a smooth, viscose arc behind his back, gathering in a shallow pool. Opposite his position is a map of Columbus’s journey to America sculpted in high relief on the museum wall. I consult it for some time before turning round to join him. When I sit down he offers me a pellet of chewing gum from a packet of Orbit menthol.
‘Do I need it?’
He laughs and apologizes for breaking last week’s engagement.
‘It didn’t matter. I couldn’t have come anyway.’
‘Now why was that?’
I take a deep breath. I have made a decision, against all my instincts for self-preservation, to tell Kitson the truth about what happened after Valdelcubo. It was a paralysing choice. To lie to him might have worked in the short term, but if he were to discover at a later date that I had been kidnapped and tortured by ETA, all trust between us would break down. That would mean the end of any future career with Five or Six, not to mention the personal cost of failing our intelligence services a second time. And I need Kitson for what I have to do; I need Kitson for revenge. Yet if I confess what happened, he will be concerned that I might have told my captors about his operation in Spain. Buscon’s name came up several times in the barn, where I was repeatedly accused of being a British spy. I am almost certain that I did not mention anything about Kitson or MI6, nor the consignment of arms Buscon procured for the Real IRA in Croatia. Had I done so, they would surely have killed me. I cannot be certain about this. I may have told them everything; there are patches of the torture that I simply do not remember, as if they wiped my memory clean with some mind-warping chemical.
‘I did what you asked me not to do.’
‘You went to Arenaza’s grave,’ he says quietly.
‘I’m afraid so.’
The water behind us is like the roar of an applause which never dies. It almost drowns out his words. In a calm voice, he says, ‘And what happened? Why are you limping, Alec?’
So I tell him. I sit there for half an hour and describe the horror of the farmhouse. By the end I am shaking with anger and shame and Kitson rests a hand on my shoulder to try to calm me. This may be the first time that we have made actual physical contact with one another. Not once does his face betray his true feelings; his eyes are as gentle and contemplative as a priest’s. He is shocked, of course, and expresses his sympathy, but the professional reaction remains obscure. I have the sense that Richard Kitson understands exactly what I have been through because he has been unfortunate enough to have encountered it in his career many times before.
‘And how do you feel now?’
