‘Tired. Angry.’
‘Have you been to see a doctor?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Guardia Civil?’
‘Do you think I should?’
This gives him pause. He lights a Lucky Strike and hesitates over his answer.
‘You’re still a private citizen, Alec, so you should do what you feel is right. I would expect you to go to the police. The men – the woman – who did this to you will be waiting for you to go to the police. In fact it might look suspicious if you don’t. From a personal point of view, however, we would prefer it if you didn’t go public. The blowback problem, etcetera. Yet the choice is absolutely yours. I don’t want you to feel that we have any control over that decision.’
‘And if I don’t go? What then?’
I want him to reassure me that his offer of co-operation still stands. I don’t want what has happened to affect our professional relationship.
‘The Office can certainly find you somewhere secure to live in the short term. We can relocate you.’
‘That’s not going to be necessary. If ETA had wanted me dead, they would have killed me at the farm.’
‘Probably,’ he says, ‘but it’ll be safer, none the less.’
‘I’ll be careful. And what about my job?’
‘With me or with Endiom?’
I was not expecting that. I was thinking purely about Julian. It may be that Kitson sees no reason that the kidnapping should affect my links with SIS; indeed, he may assume that it will motivate me to pursue Buscon and ETA with an even greater intensity. He is right about that.
‘I was only thinking about Endiom. Why? Do you still think that I’ll be useful to you?’
‘Absolutely.’ He reacts as if the question were naive, tilting back his head and blowing smoke up into the air. ‘But I need to know more about the dirty war. I need to know exactly what was said. The parameters within which my team are operating out here would be significantly widened by something like this. We need to get a full statement that I can telegram to London a.s.a.p. You’re going to have to try to remember everything that went on.’
To that end, we go immediately to the nearest decent hotel – the Serrano on Marques de Villamejor – booking a room using one of Kitson’s passports. He sets up a digital voice recorder which he produces from his jacket. I give him names and theories, chief among them that Luis Buscon has a long-term association with a high- level figure in the Interior Ministry named Javier de Francisco. Kitson takes extensive notes and drinks Fanta Limon from the mini-bar. From time to time he asks if I’m all right and I always say, ‘I’m fine.’
‘So what’s the long-term picture?’
‘If there’s another dirty war, if there are men in Aznar’s government who are covertly funding attacks on ETA, that’s catastrophic for Blair and Bush. How can you fight terror if it is the tactic of your allies to brandish terror themselves? Do you see? The whole relationship gets blown out of the water.’ These are the first heartening moments that I have known for days. It gives me a feeling of satisfaction that I should be able to articulate a view on the plot against ETA which will be listened to at Vauxhall Cross and perhaps even passed on to Downing Street and Washington. ‘The British and the Americans are either going to have to stop the conspiracy using covert means, or abandon Aznar as an ally. Now I don’t know how they do that.’ Kitson exhales heavily. ‘The biggest problem, as far as I’m concerned, is Patxo Zulaika.’ My knees start to ache as I say this and I rub them, a movement which catches his eye. ‘He’s a fervent Basque nationalist, he understands this dirty war as a hard fact. Before long he’s going to have enough evidence to publish the whole story in Ahotsa and then the dam is going to burst.’
‘And how long before he does that?’ For some reason Kitson thinks that I should know the answer to this question.
‘Piece of string. But if Zulaika is controlled by the people who kidnapped me, he won’t be interested in giving a balanced view. This is not a time to check facts and sources. He’ll just run it.’
Perhaps because the circumstances are almost identical to a similar debriefing that took place in 1997, I think back to Harry Cohen. It was in a hotel in Kensington that I told John Lithiby about Cohen cottoning on to JUSTIFY: a few days later, he was lying in a Baku hospital, beaten up by a bunch of Azeri thugs. In all honesty, if Kitson were to green-light a similar operation against Zulaika now, I would not object. I want him to suffer as I suffered. I want revenge for what he did.
And you believe Zulaika? You think this is really what’s going on? That Otamendi, Egileor and Arenaza are victims of a third dirty war?’
‘Look at the facts, Richard.’ That might sound patronizing on the tape. ‘There haven’t been disappearances and murders of this kind in Spain and southern France for years, then three come along at once. Egileor’s employer, ADN, is an office supply company. Segundo Marey, an innocent man who was kidnapped by the GAL in 1983, also worked for a furniture company that was accused of laundering funds for ETA. It’s like a bad joke. Then there’s Arenaza’s body, found in quicklime in a shallow grave, identical circumstances to Joxean Lasa and Joxi Zabala. The parallels are deliberate. Whoever is doing this thing is taunting the Basques. The organizers of the first two dirty wars, and we’re talking about individuals occupying some of the highest positions in the land, tried to protect themselves from disclosure by knowing very little about what was going on. To that end they hired right-wing foreign extremists to do their dirty work for them. Italian neo-fascists, French veterans of Organisation de l’Armee Secrete, Latin American exiles. These men were fiercely ideological, they hated Marxist groups like ETA, and almost all of them had a military background. Luis Buscon fits this mould precisely.’
‘He does,’ Kitson mutters. ‘Only in this case ETA are claiming that Buscon is a visible element in a conspiracy which goes as high as de Francisco.’
‘Why not higher?’ I suggest.
‘Who’s Francisco’s boss?’
‘Felix Maldonado, the interior minister. Next stop, Jose Maria Aznar.’
Kitson expels a low whistle and writes something down. Then, as if the observations are linked, adds, ‘We discovered evidence in Porto that Buscon hired mercenaries for the Croats during the Balkan war, hence his initial links to weapons smuggling.’
‘What’s happened to those, by the way?’
He looks up from his notes. It’s dark in the hotel room and the air is stuffy.
‘The weapons?’
I nod. Tellingly, Kitson reaches across to shut off the digital recorder. He wants to protect his IRA product from ears in London.
‘Situation pending. We have some of the weapons under observation, others appear to have taken flight. Of course, I’ve always thought it possible that the two investigations may be related. If what Zulaika told you is true, the Croat weapons may have fallen into the hands of the Spanish state for the purposes of fighting ETA. Buscon could have diverted them. That’s certainly something I’ll mention to London.’
‘And Rosalia Dieste?’
Something catches in my throat and I cough so violently that my ribs feel as if they will crack. Kitson frowns and offers me a bottle of water.
‘What about her?’ I ask, drinking it in slow, calming bursts. ‘Zulaika said she’s disappeared. Implied she might have been liquidated. Your people have anything on that?’
Kitson switches the voice recorder back on and appears to hide a smirk, perhaps as a reaction to my choice of vocabulary. Then he tips back the last of his Fanta, crushes the can and throws it in a perfect three-metre arc straight into the waste-paper bin.
‘Rosalia Dieste is on holiday,’ he says. ‘Rome. She hasn’t disappeared. Due back with loverboy this evening, no doubt with postcards of the Pope, some fava beans and a nice bottle of Chianti.’
‘Well, that’s good to know.’
‘Your Mr Zulaika must have been mistaken.’ I wonder if this is said for the benefit of Kitson’s superiors in London: he has let me have a good run on the tape; now he wants to remind them who’s boss. ‘Actually we have a different problem. A different problem with a different girl.’
I stand up to relieve some of the stiffness in my body and my left shin sends a cord of searing pain directly under the kneecap. I fall against the wall near the door, gasping. Kitson sees this and almost knocks over the table
