Zulaika remains seated, watching my face intently for the reaction to what he is about to say.
‘You think that I have not already tried this?’ he says. ‘How can I? Senorita Dieste has disappeared.’
29. Taken
We have parked our cars some distance from the restaurant. Zulaika waits outside while I go to the bathroom and then accompanies me round the back of the building, speaking for the second time to someone in Basque on his mobile phone. I am holding Xavi and use the child as a means of avoiding any further conversation about Rosalia or the dirty war. When Zulaika looks at me, I start to coo; when the baby kicks, I grip his little feet and wiggle them, telling Daddy that his son is going to be a striker for Athletic Bilbao. We cross a deserted expanse of dusty tarmac, passing behind a line of articulated lorries, and I am conscious of the roar of traffic on the motorway. Zulaika stares ahead, as if deep in thought, then opens the boot of his car. He piles his briefcase and Xavi’s bags inside, places the baby in a chair on the back seat, and starts the engine.
‘So, you are in a hurry, you have to go to Marbella,’ he says, ‘but remember what I tell you. If you want to talk about anything, if you think of something you might want to discuss in relation to the girl, you have my number. Day or night, Alec, day or night. Whatever you prefer.’
I make the right noises and wave him off, saying, ‘Of course, Patxo, of course.’ I consider it something of a success that our meeting has ended without any serious capitulation on my part. Zulaika may suspect that I am concealing important information, but he was unable to break through the wall of my feigned innocence. I sing, ‘Bye bye, Xavi, be a good boy now’ in a light, easy voice and pat him on the head. Zulaika drives off, turns into a slip-road up ahead and has soon disappeared. I think he gave me one last glance as he left. It is warm and a helix of flies spirals wildly into the sky as I place my jacket in the boot of the Audi.
They must have come from behind me, from between the parked lorries. Their speed and their strength is overwhelming. I experience a sensation of weightlessness as I am lifted from the ground and bound by forearms of extraordinary power. There are at least two of them, both men. Something wet is pressed against my mouth and a panic-fever surges through my body which quickly turns to sweat. I am aware of the sky and of the speed of things, of nobody talking, nobody saying a word. Very quickly, almost in one movement, I am bundled into the boot of a car, not my own, and slammed into darkness. There is an intense pain both in my shoulder and across the left side of my head, but my hands must have been tied because I cannot reach up to feel for blood. In the boot there is a smell like the burning odour of drilled teeth. I think that Zulaika did this to me. I blame Kitson and then I blame Buscon. We are moving off and I can hear voices coming from the inside of the vehicle. A woman is talking. The voices slip and fade.
It could be hours later, it could be days. I am lying on top of a bare, dusty mattress in what would appear to be an upstairs room. Something about the height of the sky through the window, the light. There is no furniture, no carpet or lino on the splintered wooden floor, no sink or toilet. And I am naked. It takes time to realize this but the sense of shame is powerful, like a child who has wet the bed. I cover myself briefly with my hands, sitting up and looking around for a sheet or piece of clothing, anything with which to recover my dignity. There is nothing. The pain at the side of my head, just above the left temple, returns with the rhythm of a heavy pulse. It is cold and I do not know where I am.
Outside, birdsong. A steady chorus. So it is either early in the morning or late in the afternoon. My watch has gone, my two phones, also my wallet and keys. I try the handle of the door but it is locked. There is no spy-hole, nor any other way into the room. I cross towards the window. A stained, motheaten blanket has been tacked up with half a dozen nails to shut out the light, but it has fallen to one side, revealing fresh smears of white paint on cracked glass. The room would appear to be at the top of a two-storey building looking out over a deserted field. Probably a farmhouse. There are no people in sight. The sky is damp and low and grey. The Basque country. With dread I realize that I have been taken hostage by ETA.
After ten minutes I hear voices downstairs, then the scraping of a chair. They must know that I have woken up. My bones seem to contract and it is an effort to fight my own cowardice, to straighten up and to face them. Someone is walking up a flight of stairs. A man, judging by the weight of the footsteps. He places a key in the door, the handle rattles and turns and I stand naked in the middle of the room, ready to face him. I will not be afraid. He is wearing a black balaclava and the sight of this is enough to push me a step back towards the window, as if sucked by fear. There is a mug of either black tea or coffee in his hand. Wisps of steam lick around his wrist. He is wearing a red sweatband and an old leather-strapped watch.
‘Drink,’ he says in English.
For some reason I think it important not immediately to ask where I am, not to find out why I have been taken nor who they are. I do not want to show fear to these people. He holds out the mug and encourages me to step towards him. And then I am screaming.
He has hurled the coffee into my face. The boiling liquid sears against my skin and in my eyes. The shock is so great that I cry out. I want to stop at nothing to hurt him, but a single punch as I move forward drops me to the ground and I vomit like a dog at his feet. He says three words in Basque and is gone. Voices echo up through the floorboards and I think that I hear a woman. She is angry. I can hear her shouting.
For five minutes I lie like this, no better than an animal, cold and humiliated. I lick my own arms to clean them. Please God, don’t let me be scarred. My shoulders are red with the heat of the coffee, but they are neither raw nor burned. He must have waited until the drink cooled a little and then come upstairs to confront me. Planning. Why didn’t they want to scar me? Why didn’t he let me see his face?
An hour passes, perhaps two. The light outside does not change. I move away from the sick on the floor and lie back on the bed. There were beans in the contents of my stomach; the fabada was still in my system. This, at the very least, gives me a timescale. It must be the morning following the lunch with Zulaika. It will be another twenty-four hours before anybody realizes that I have disappeared. When I fail to materialize at the safe house tomorrow, Kitson will become suspicious. But what can he do? He will not jeopardize his operation by launching a search for Alec Milius. He may even have betrayed me himself.
Try to remain calm. Try to be logical. It is bewildering that after six years I have nobody in Madrid who will miss me, no woman or neighbour, no friend. It could be days before Sofia notices. I sit near the window for warmth and watch through the smears of paint for movement in the field. I do not want to shout out for clothing or for food. I do not want to give them that pleasure. Instead I will wait patiently and bear anything that they do to me. At the back of my mind is the persistent optimism that the guard covered his face with the balaclava. If they were going to kill me, he would not have taken that precaution.
But by the late afternoon I am cold and very hungry. I need to urinate and the blow to my stomach has left a welling bruise at the base of my ribs. A damp wind has started flowing through a narrow gap in the window and the sun has moved away. I try to sleep, but the smell of the sick near the bed is appalling and I can only lie with my eyes open, shivering, staring at the ceiling. Once or twice I hear movement downstairs, but I might otherwise be completely alone in the house. As dusk approaches I tear the blanket down from the window with five hard tugs. It rips and falls over my head, scattering insects and dust. Moments later a car comes to the house, moving along a track that I cannot see. The sound of this is exhilarating; it proves the presence of life elsewhere. The car parks on the far side of the building and a single door slams. Boots on hard earth, then the faint murmur of a conversation. After no more than two or three minutes, the engine starts again and the vehicle moves away. The house is once again enveloped in sile
nce. Unable to wait, I go into the corner of the room and piss against the wall.
It must be eight or nine o’clock when a different man comes back up the stairs. There is now very little light outside.
‘Move away from the door,’ he says, and I crouch on the floor near the window, ready to spring if he attacks me. The lock clicks, the handle twists back and a plate of food is pushed inside. I do not see a face, only a pale, hairless forearm. The voice says, Tucking stink here,’ and then is gone. He locks the door again and walks away.
There is no cutlery, nothing to drink, but I devour the food with my filthy hands, wrapped in the blanket which causes my skin to itch and catch. It is a tasteless stew, made with rice and carrots and old meat, full of fat and gristle, good for nothing but salt and energy. I make a spoon with the three middle fingers of my right hand and shovel the glutinous sauce into my mouth with demented speed. It appals me how quickly I have been reduced to an animal state. Somehow a fly has made its way into the room and it buzzes around the food and the piss before settling in my encrusted vomit. Why don’t they come for me? Why don’t they ask me any questions?
With all that I have suffered, the anguish over Kate’s death, all the years of solitude and the stupidity of exile, this is the absolute lowest point. I breathe and inhale an abject terror. The men and women of ETA are ruthless in the pursuit of their cause and they will not hesitate to harm me unless I give them what they want. But what is that? What has brought me here? In the numbed panic of capture I can assume only that Zulaika was responsible for this, that he is the creature of these people, their stooge and propaganda tool. He made two telephone calls, both in Basque, while we were eating. He must have been guiding them to me, setting me up. Zulaika ordered lunch not to prolong our interview, but to give ETA more time to reach the garage.
It becomes a pitch-black night with no moon. The birds have stopped singing and there are no more cars. Very occasionally a dog will bark far in the distance, but I never hear any of my captors. The sense of isolation is compounded by the noise of aeroplanes flying high overhead, the last of which passes at perhaps eleven or twelve o’clock. I remember as a child at boarding school in England staring up at planes as they flew out of London and envying the passengers their freedom, their luxury. I imagined myself a prisoner, unable to escape and join them in far-off lands. All that seems ridiculous now. I cannot begin to conceive of the journey, of the decisions taken, which have led me to this terror, to this improbable end.
Then the woman comes. She waits on the other side of the door and instructs me to stand by the window with my back to the room.
‘If you move towards me, we will kill you,’ she says in Spanish, and the threat is so commonplace, so stark and inhumane, that I have trouble associating it with a woman. She forces me to reply by saying, ‘Do you understand?’ and I speak my first words to my captors.
‘I understand. I’m standing beside the window.’
The lock clicks and the handle turns, something is placed on the floor, and then she withdraws from the room. I think I heard her sniff and even choke at the stench. The door is locked again and, from the other side, she says, ‘Drink that if you want to sleep.’ But the sudden intrusion of light from the stairwell has bruised my eyes and it is some time before I can adjust to the darkness again. I almost kick over a glass of water on my way to the door and my toes land on a piece of cloth. They have left me a pair of ripped cotton shorts. I pull them on, swallow the water in two long gulps and lie back on the bed. I dream of Mum and of Kate. I dream of home.
There must have been some kind of sedative in the water. I am woken in the black of Tuesday night by a turbulent noise. Two men are in the room with me and a bright light is being directed into my face. They are both wearing balaclavas and tear the blanket from my body, screaming, ‘Wake up! Get out of fucking bed!’, then lifting me, hooking my arms and slapping my face. Just as quickly, they are gone. Darkness as the door is locked again and their footsteps fade. I can neither see nor hear anything now. My brain is dizzy and numb. Dimly, it occurs to me that these will be the first stages of a sleep deprivation. If that is the case, they will come again in half an hour, then again before dawn, and repeatedly into tomorrow. The idea is to disorientate and to terrify, to take the prisoner to the very edge of unconsciousness and then to wake him, so that he begins to fear even sleep itself.
I lie down and try to be strong. I have to fight this. But I am so disorientated that I can barely concentrate. How long did I sleep for? How many hours of rest will I need in order to keep my wits about me when the torture begins? For the first time I confront the possibility of my own death and almost welcome it. If I had stayed with Lithiby and Hawkes, if JUSTIFY had succeeded, would Five or Six have trained me for something like this; would I have been better prepared? I catch the smell of piss and sick in the room and feel another desperate urge to urinate, lying still on the bed to try to make it pass. And then it must be another hour before they come again, the same two men, the same noise at the door so that this time I am ready for them, already awake when the torchlight is shone in my face. I reckon it a small triumph that I manage to sit up before they have the chance to manhandle me, and perhaps it is their revenge for this that they say something accusatory about tearing down the blanket, about my destroying the room, and one of them punches me hard, twice, around the kidneys. I am sick again, instantly. I drop my face over the side of the bed and must have hit their feet with the vomit because I am whipped, knuckle-hard, on the back of the head.
‘Fucking spy,’ a voice says, but the meaning of this, the implication, does not immediately sink in. The vomiting has left me breathless and I hear quick and savage laughter in the stairwell. My nose stings, an acid link with the back of my throat. For some pathetic reason I crave the presence of the woman now and find myself on the edge of tears. Do not cry, Alec. Do not pity yourself for what has happened here. I make a point of sitting up again, of moving away from the bed towards the window, still wrapped in the blanket, trying to steady myself by taking deep fresh breaths of air.
But they have me. They have total control. Throughout all of the following day, through the appointed meeting with Kitson, the long hours of sunlight and a car coming again to the house, I am kept awake. I have to shit and piss in the same disgusting corner of the room where flies now swarm in numbers and buzz around my body. Where did they come from? The woman offers me food which I am too cowardly and hungry to refuse. Occasionally I will drink water, neither knowing nor caring where it came from nor what it contains. In time, only one of them comes upstairs and keeps me awake simply by pounding on the door, rattling the handle and shouting obscenities that evaporate in the squalor of my prison. Not once do I call out to them, not once do I reply. I retain at least this small dignity. But I am otherwise broken, an ended man. If Kitson does not come for me soon I fear that I will simply never leave this place.
*
It must be the third day, or the fourth, by the time they come in, all three of them, and lead me out into the light. A pale half-naked Englishman, a spy, stumbling into a muddy courtyard surrounded by farm buildings in the rain. We do not linger long and I see only fragments of the green surrounding hills. In their balaclavas they take me into a barn about fifty metres from the front door and order me to stand against the far wall with my hands above my head.
I know what’s coming.
The freezing hosed water blitzes against my stomach and is then sprayed wildly in a narrow jet by the smaller of the two men. When I try to swallow it, to follow the liquid with my mouth, to taste the sublime fresh water, he shouts at me, ‘Not for drinking. Clean yourself,’ and I begin to wash my crotch, my arse and feet, then slowly under my arms, taking off the soiled cotton shorts because I long ago stopped caring about the embarrassment of nakedness. I have not slept in days but these first moments are quite clear, the water tasting of rain and waking me up. A small pink bar of soap has been thrown onto the ground and I can smell t
he shit and the puke and the shame sluicing off me as I use it. The woman, who is thin and wears cheap leather boots and light blue jeans, has sat down in a metal chair in the centre of the barn. The third man has slid the door shut and stands beside it holding a handgun. He too is wearing jeans, with a pair of white trainers, and is almost certainly the one who threw coffee in my face. All three of them have black, motionless eyes. There is straw and dried mud on the floor and a stale smell of manure, but it would appear that the farm has not been worked for years. Stained blue tarpaulins cover various rusted objects near the far wall, at least twenty metres away from where I am standing. A single bright bulb is suspended from the ceiling, but slits and spots of light are still visible through the roof and the walls.
As soon as the hose is switched off I am shoved wet and naked into a small wooden chair to which my hands and feet are bound tightly by lines of electric flex. I do not struggle or complain. My body is covered in welts and bites and they start to itch now with the water. Then a hessian sack is jammed over my head and tied across my shoulders with what feels like a very narrow piece of string. When they bundled me into the boot, they knocked my left shoulder on the car and it is into this bruise that the string now bites like a cheese wire.
‘What is your real name?’
The woman has spoken. She is clearly the leader. I hear the man who bound me moving back towards the door.
‘My name is Alec Milius.’
I can see nothing inside the sack, which is already very hot, yet these first moments are oddly calm. I know that my body is weak and pale, that my nakedness is emasculating, but somehow the intense tiredness and hunger I feel actually help me.
‘Who do you work for?’
‘I’m a private banker. I work for a bank. Endiom.’ It takes me a long time, perhaps too long, to spell out the letters. ‘E. N. D. I. O. M. It’s a British company with an office in Madrid.’
The Spanish Game am-3 Page 22
