The Spanish Game am-3

by Charles Cumming

  But then Alfonso, the concierge at the Hotel Carta, rings the Telefonica mobile with a piece of information that immediately tests my resolve.

  ‘Senor Thompson?’

  ‘ Si, Alfonso. Que tal? ’

  ‘Abel Sellini is checking out.’

  ‘Checking out?’

  ‘Five minutes ago he stopped to talk to me in the lobby and asked for a taxi to take him to Barajas airport at five fifteen.’

  That’s in just under two hours.

  ‘O?. Thanks for letting me know.’

  In truth, I don’t even consider the consequences of not continuing my surveillance. You might as well ask me to cut off an arm. I am designed for this.

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘No, sir. I just thought you might want to know.’

  At the very least I can tail Sellini to the airport, find out what flight he’s on, try to work out a final destination. That is the sort of information that would be useful to the police. This is the individual, after all, who most probably murdered Mikel Arenaza. I have a responsibility to follow him. A duty.

  So I sprint in bright sunshine from the cathedral all the way down the eastern edge of Segovia to the space where I parked the car off Plaza de Azoguejo. It’s about a half-mile run and by the time I have unlocked the doors and thrown my coat in the back of the Audi my body is drenched in sweat. There are lines of traffic at every set of lights leading out of the city but I horn and barge and cut my way to the front of the queues and make it out onto the carretera by ten to four. By five, having driven at a steady 170 kph all the way home, I’m passing through Moncloa. With luck I should be outside the Carta within a quarter of an hour.

  ‘Has he left yet?’ I ask Alfonso in Spanish, dialling his mobile from a set of lights on Gran Via.

  ‘ Si, Senor Chris,’ he says, sounding rushed and anxious. ‘He came downstairs five minutes ago to pay his bill. He asked me to have the taxi waiting and I don’t know what to do. There’s a rank directly outside. There are always cars there. I will have to go down and flag one.’

  ‘Well, at least get me the number plate. At least try and stall him. Have a chat before he leaves and ask where he’s going. I’ll be there in less than ten minutes.’

  As it turns out, I’m there in five and park the Audi in a slot immediately behind the taxi rank, about fifty metres short of the slope leading up to the hotel. Alfonso isn’t answering his phone and there’s no sign of Sellini. I walk slowly up towards the lobby doors, prepared at any moment for either one of them to emerge. A second porter, whom I don’t recognize, is operating the main door and I walk past him into the lobby. Sellini and Alfonso are engaged in conversation near reception. Alfonso looks up, registers my presence with a shift in the eyes, and then proceeds to drag a trolley laden with luggage out through the main entrance. Turning away from them, I walk back outside and down the slope towards the Audi. There are two cabs on the rank and the chances are that Sellini will get the first of them. Then it will just be a simple question of following him out to Barajas.

  But there’s a problem. Looking back down the street I see that a silver-grey Citroen C5 has double parked beside my Audi, completely boxing it in. The hazard lights on the Citroen are flashing but there is no sign of the driver. If Sellini leaves now, I will not be able to follow him. Alfonso is coming down the ramp behind me and he hails the first of the two cabs, which leaves its station and drives quickly up the slope towards the entrance of the hotel. Then, just as I have made the decision to abandon my car and follow by cab, a man wearing a pin-striped suit steps into the back of the second taxi and drives off.

  Why did I think I recognized him?

  This is now serious. Turning to face the oncoming traffic I begin a desperate search for another taxi. Two come past, both occupied. If the driver of the Citroen doesn’t appear in the next thirty seconds I will lose Sellini. He may not even be going to Barajas; he may have told that to Alfonso simply to set a false trail. His cab is coming down the slope from the entrance of the hotel and preparing to make a right-hand turn north along the Castellana. Sunlight reflects off the back windows but I can still make out his slumped silhouette. As he pulls out, I open the driver’s door of the Audi and press on the horn, more in anger than in expectation, but still the driver of the Citroen does not appear. Another full cab whips past as Sellini’s disappears into the distance. The sound of my horn is deafening, long blasts followed by short, incensed bursts that begin to draw stares from passers-by.

  At last a pedestrian comes ambling up the pavement dangling a set of car keys in his left hand. Relaxed and oblivious. This must be him. I release the horn and stare as he makes guilty eye contact and quickens his step. He’s about my age, with brown hair and puffy, freckled skin, wearing jeans and a white cotton shirt. At first glance I would say that he is a British tourist but I speak to him initially in Spanish.

  ‘ Ese es tu coche? ’

  He doesn’t respond.

  ‘Hey. I said is this your car?’

  Now he looks up and it’s clear from his expression that he failed to understand what I was saying. To avoid a confrontation he may walk past and pretend that the Citroen does not belong to him. I won’t let him get away with that.

  ‘Do you speak English?’

  ‘Yes I do.’ The accent takes me by surprise. British public school with the privilege stripped out of it. BBC. Foreign Office.

  ‘I think this is your car. I think you blocked me in.’ We are facing one another on the pavement just a few feet apart, and something about the man’s level gaze and apparent lack of concern for my predicament serves only to deepen my sense of anger.

  ‘What seems to be the problem?’ he says. The question is just this side of sarcastic.

  ‘The problem is that you blocked me in. The problem is that you prevented me from doing my job.’

  ‘ Your job?’

  He says the word with a slight edge of ridicule, as if he knows that it’s a lie.

  ‘That’s right. My job. So do you want to move? Can you get your car the fuck out of my way? What you did was illegal and stupid and I need to get going.’

  ‘Why don’t you calm down, Alec?’

  He might as well have dropped a low punch into my stomach. I feel winded. I look into the man’s face for some distant trigger of recognition – Was he a student at LSE? Did we go to school together? – but I have never seen this person before in my life.

  ‘How do you know that? How do you know who I am?’

  ‘I know a lot of things about you. I know about JUSTIFY, I know about Abnex. I know about Fortner, I know about Katharine. What I don’t know is what the hell Alec Milius is doing in Madrid. So why don’t we hop in the back of my car, go for a little drive, and you can tell me all about it.’

  25. Our Man in Madrid

  ‘Before I get into anybody’s car, I want to know who the hell I’m talking to.’

  ‘Let’s just say that you’re talking to a Friend,’ he says, employing a standard SIS euphemism. A woman walks past us and looks at me with a twist of worry in her face. ‘Better if you keep your voice down, no? Now let’s get in the car and head off.’

  Once inside he frisks me – shins, calves, back of the waist – and seems to take a perverse pleasure in asking me to fasten my seatbelt. I try to summon a suitably hostile look to meet this request, but the heat of sweat and panic I can feel in my face has stripped me of any authority. I drag the seatbelt down and clunk it into place.

  ‘My name is Richard Kitson.’ On closer inspection he looks closer to forty than thirty, with a face that I would struggle to describe: neither ugly nor good-looking, neither smart nor stupid. A vanishing Englishman. ‘Why don’t we head up to the M30 and drive around in circles while you tell me what’s on your mind?’

  For the first couple of minutes I say nothing. Occasionally Kitson’s eyes will slide towards mine, a sudden glance in traffic, a more steady gaze at lights. I try to stare back, to meet thes
e looks man to man, but the shock of what has happened appears to have robbed me of even the most basic defensive reflexes. After six years on the run, it has finally come to this. I am shaking. But why was Sellini involved? What did he have to do with it?

  ‘What’s your interest in Abel Sellini?’ Kitson asks, as if reading my mind. ‘You buying drugs, Alec? Acquiring some weapons?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You don’t know who he is?’

  ‘I know that he probably killed a friend of mine.’

  ‘Well, you see, that’s exactly the sort of thing you and I need to talk about.’

  ‘You first. What are you doing here? How do you know who I am? How do you know about JUSTIFY?’

  ‘One thing at a time, one thing at a time.’ A black BMW overtakes us on the blind side, gliding past my window. Kitson mutters, ‘Bloody Spanish drivers.’

  ‘O?. One: how do you know my name?’

  ‘Took a photo. Pinged it back to London. You were recognized by a colleague.’

  Jesus. So I was right about the surveillance. In a simultaneous instant of horrifying clarity I recall exactly where I saw the man in the pin-striped suit who got into the cab. At the Prado. With Sofia. Lead on, Macduff.

  ‘How long have you been following me?’

  ‘Since Friday last week.’

  The night I tailed Rosalia to the Irish Rover.

  ‘And this colleague who recognized me, what was his name?’

  If Kitson doesn’t come up with something I recognize, I can assume he’s an impostor.

  ‘Christopher Sinclair. Chris to his friends. Happened to be passing a desk in Legoland when your JPEG popped up. Nearly dropped his cappuccino. Sends his regards, by the way. Sounded very fond of you.’

  Sinclair was Lithiby’s stooge. The one who drove me to the final meeting at the safe house in London on the night they killed Kate. Said that he admired me. Said that he thought I was going to be all right.

  ‘So you’ve read my file? That’s how you know about JUSTIFY?’

  ‘Of course. Ran your name through the CCI and got War and Peace. Well, Crime and Punishment, anyway.’ Kitson seems to have a supercilious sense of humour, as if he would be incapable of taking anyone, or anything, too seriously. ‘Quite a story, hadn’t heard it before. You had them in knots for a while, Alec, and then you did the runner. Nobody knew where the hell you’d gone. There were rumours of Paris, rumours of Petersburg and Milan. Nobody pinned you to Madrid until last Tuesday.’

  I do not know whether to be offended that Kitson had never heard of me or delighted that six years of anti-surveillance has paid off. I am generally too shaken and confused. ‘And that’s why you’re here? To bring me in?’

  Kitson frowns and glances in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, is that why you’re here? To bring me in?’

  ‘Bring you in?’ He takes the first exit onto the M30, heading clockwise towards Valencia, looking at the road ahead as if I am delusional. ‘Alec, that was all a long, long time ago. Water under the bridge. You haven’t made any waves, you haven’t been a problem. You kept your end of the bargain, we kept ours.’

  ‘You mean you had Kate Allardyce murdered?’

  There is a moment of silence as he weighs up his options. He must know about Kate, unless they covered it up. It occurs to me that our conversation is almost certainly being recorded.

  ‘You were wrong about that,’ he says finally. His voice is very quiet, very firm. ‘Quite wrong. John Lithiby wanted me to make it clear. What happened to your girlfriend was an accident, end of story. The driver was drunk. The Office, the Cousins, neither one of us had anything to do with it.’

  ‘Total bullshit.’ I stare outside as an endless sequence of concrete apartment blocks, road bridges and trees flick past. Someone has hung a banner over the motorway scrawled with the black slogan ‘ETA – Non!’. ‘You don’t know the full story. They don’t want you to know the full story. The Yanks had her killed and Elworthy was told to cover it up.’

  ‘Peter Elworthy is dead.’

  ‘ Dead? How?’

  ‘Liver cancer. Two years ago.’

  I have been away so long.

  ‘Then ask Chris Sinclair. He knows what really went on.’

  ‘I don’t need to. I have the proof.’ Kitson’s response here is quick and well rehearsed. He moves into a slower lane of traffic as if to emphasize the seriousness of what he is about to tell me. ‘When we have the opportunity I can show you the accident report. There were people at the party who urged Kate not to get into the car. Her friend – William, was it? – had done a lot of Colombian marching powder and drunk his way through the best part of two bottles of wine. He was a 23-year-old idiot, pure and simple, and he got the girl killed.’

  ‘Don’t talk about Kate like that, OK? Don’t even begin. If there was alcohol or drugs in Will’s bloodstream, they were put there by the CIA. It was a standard cover-up operation to protect the special fucking relationship. They tampered with the brakes and a car drove Kate and Will off the road. End of story.’

  Kitson remains silent for a long time. He knows that what he has said has both angered and upset me. He probably knows, too, that I want to believe him. Alec Milius was once a patriot who thought that his government didn’t kill people for political convenience. Alec Milius wants to be brought back in.

  ‘So why are you interested in Sellini?’ We are south of Las Ventas by now, the sky beginning to darken and headlights coming on all around us. I don’t want the conversation to founder on Kate’s death. Not yet. ‘What’s this about him selling drugs and weapons?’

  ‘Abel Sellini doesn’t exist.’ Kitson takes a cigarette from a packet of Lucky Strike on the dashboard and invites me to help myself, lighting his own as I decline. ‘It’s a nom de guerre. Sellini’s real name is Luis Felipe Buscon. He was a former fighter for the Portuguese Secret Service, served in Angola, now an international hired hand with more pies than fingers. Mr Big of no fixed address, operates as a middleman for any criminal or terrorist organization that can afford to put him up in nice hotels like the Villa Carta. We’ve been tracking him ever since we were tipped off about a consignment of illegal arms he’d purchased from an organized crime group operating out of Croatia.’

  For Six to be involved, that consignment must be on its way to the British Isles. But how does Rosalia fit in?

  ‘Tipped off by whom?’

  Kitson glances across at me and says, ‘That information was brought to us by a protected source. Now, what’s your interest in him?’

  ‘Not yet. I need to know more. I need to know why I was being followed and why you’ve pulled me in.’

  It is hard to tell if Kitson is impressed by this show of stubbornness, but he answers the question with a candour which would suggest that he trusts me and knows that I’m instinctively on the side of the angels.

  ‘I’m here as part of an undeclared SIS op tracking Buscon. Local liaison knows nothing about it, so if they find out, I’ll know who to blame.’ I get a scolding, smoke-exhaling stare with this remark, a switch in Kitson’s demeanour which is actually frightening. ‘The Mick and the Croat get along like a house on fire. Always have. Call it a shared antipathy towards their neighbours. For the Irish, the bloody Brits, for the Croats, the murdering Serbs. So they have lots in common, lots to talk about over a pint of Guinness. We had a tip-off that Buscon had become involved in what was euphemistically described as a humanitarian project in Split. Only Luis wasn’t interested in feeding the poor. What he was interested in was the consignment of weapons sitting in a hayshed in the ultra-nationalist hinterland that wasn’t being put to suitably romantic use. So, on behalf of the Real IRA, he ordered a takeaway.’

  ‘And now the weapons are here in Spain? In Madrid? They’ve gone missing?’

  ‘Again, I’m not at liberty to discuss that. All I can say is that Buscon has contacts in organized crime groups with structures all over Europe. T
hese weapons could be on their way to the Albanian mafia, the Turks in London, the Russians, the Chinese. Worst case scenario, we’re talking about an Islamist cell with enough high explosive to blow the door of 10 Downing Street into Berkshire.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Quite. Which is why we need to know what you were doing listening in on Mr Buscon’s conversation with Rosalia Dieste at the Irish Rover last Friday.’

  ‘You were there?’

  ‘We were there. Had command of Buscon and couldn’t tell if you were liaison or just a lonely tourist who liked Bon Jovi.’

  ‘Where were you sitting?’

  ‘Not too far away. We had ears at the table, hours of prep, but the mike failed at the last minute. I was actually rather jealous of your proximity. Not to mention anxious to find out who the hell you were.’

  ‘And the two guys outside in the green Seat Ibiza? They were A4?’

  Kitson accidentally swerves the car here and has to check his steering. ‘Very good, Alec,’ he says. ‘Very good. You’ve done this before.’

  ‘And the older man who took the second cab at the hotel? Grey hair, pin-striped suit. He was tailing me at the Prado last weekend.’

  ‘Quite possibly. Quite possibly.’

  Kitson likes me. I can sense it. He hadn’t expected such a level of expertise. My file is most probably wretched, Shayleresque, but this is pedigree.

  ‘So what were you doing there? What’s your relationship with the girl?’

  ‘I think she might be involved in the murder of a politician from the Basque country. Mikel Arenaza. A member of Herri Batasuna.’

  ‘The political wing of ETA?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’ Kitson’s reply is blunt, but you can tell the brain is already running through the implications. ETA. Real IRA. Weapons that have gone missing.