The Spanish Game am-3

by Charles Cumming

  Tell your boyfriend to stop what he is doing or your nice English husband will find out that he is married to a Spanish whore.

  ‘There were photographs as well,’ Sofia says, beginning to cry again, and suddenly it all makes sense. None of what has happened has anything to do with Katharine or Fortner, with Nicole or Julian. Sofia hasn’t betrayed me. But my immediate elation is checked by the knowledge that Buscon knew about our affair. He and his colleagues must have been following me for weeks. ‘I destroyed them,’ Sofia is saying. ‘There were pictures of you and me in Arguelles, Alec, photographs taken through the window of your apartment when we were kissing, pictures of me walking beside you in Princesa. Who are you? Who would blackmail us like this? Is it something to do with your work for Julian? How do you know that I went to the hotel this morning? Have you been following me?’

  I have to construct a lie even as I am putting together the final pieces of the jigsaw. It has all been a terrible misunderstanding. I have to find a way of protecting Kitson’s operation.

  ‘It’s to do with the men in Zaragoza,’ I tell her. ‘I can’t tell you any more than that.’

  ‘The men that fought you?’

  ‘The men that attacked me, yes.’

  ‘ Eres un mentiroso.’ She shakes her head and looks away towards the window. ‘You lie all the time. I want to know the truth.’

  ‘I am telling you the truth. This is something private that I’m involved in. It’s a big real-estate deal. I’ve saved a lot of money since my parents died and if I invest it in this project I could make hundreds of thousands of euros. But there are people who are trying to stop me.’

  ‘This Luis Buscon? This Abel Sellini?’

  ‘ Exacto.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘They are businessmen, Sofia. Sellini and Buscon work for a Russian company in Marbella.’

  ‘For the mafia? ’ She looks aghast. I have dragged her into a nightmare.

  ‘I don’t know if they’re mafia. I suppose they are. I met them as part of my work for Endiom. But Julian doesn’t know anything about it. You can’t tell him.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell him,’ she spits. ‘You think I am going to tell my husband about us? You think so, Alec? Is this what you would do? Show me what these men did to you. Show me the marks on your body.’

  ‘There are no marks.’

  But she is tearing at my clothes, tugging at the buttons so that one of them falls loose and flies free of my shirt. It is quite dark in the room and her reaction to the bruising on my chest is not as awful as it might have been. She just bites her lip and juts out her chin, eyes stung by shock.

  ‘ Dios mio, que te han hecho? ’ Sofia arrives at an immediate decision, shaking her head. ‘You have to stop this thing now, Alec. These people are very serious. I do not want any more letters. I do not want any more photographs. I do not want them to hurt us. They will kill you next time, no? I want you to promise me that you will stop this.’

  ‘I promise you that I will stop this.’

  And we are finished. It is over between us. I cannot see you any more.’

  I suppose I am touched by the fact that she trips on these words, but a stubborn part of me won’t let her leave. I need her now, more than I have ever done, if only to be comforted by her. I cannot be alone any longer.

  ‘Don’t say that. Please don’t overreact. If I pull out of the deal they’ll leave us alone.’ I attempt to hug her, but she twists her body away from mine as if I am still hateful to her. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ She looks at me with such contempt. ‘You think I want to touch you after you involve me with this? You have never told me the truth about anything.’

  But in the same movement she returns to me, placing her arms around my back so that I can pull her towards me. She is suddenly beautifully still, defeated, her face turned against my chest. Her hair smells so beautiful as she tries to find her breath. I kiss her head, breathing in the sweet caress of her forgiveness, saying, ‘ Lo siento, mi amor, lo siento. Por favor perdoname, ’ but wondering all the time if this woman is still playing me for a fool. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ I tell her. ‘I had no idea that they would threaten you.’

  And she says, ‘I need you, Alec. I hate you. I cannot leave,’ and tilts her head to kiss me.

  34. House of Games

  I sleep for thirteen hours straight, beyond Sofia’s leaving, beyond check-out at the hotel. It is the middle of Tuesday afternoon by the time I wake up, as if from a coma, wrapped in a warm sweat of deep relaxation. For a long time I simply lie in bed staring at the bad paintings on the walls, enjoying a rare sensation of total restedness. Kitson asked me to call him with an update on the Sofia situation, but I run a bath first and order coffee and scrambled eggs from room service before dialling his number.

  ‘Best if you come direct to the safe house,’ he says, ‘the flat in Tetuan.’ He texts the address to my mobile.

  Kitson’s team have set themselves up in a cramped apartment block in Barrio de la Ventilla, about two kilometres north-west of the Kia towers. I take the Line 10 metro two stops beyond Plaza de Castilla to Begona, where I hail a cab and instruct the driver to loop anticlockwise around the Parque de la Paz en route to Via Limite. There’s no surveillance problem, but I walk the last two blocks just to be certain and arrive a short time after five o’clock.

  ‘Sleep well?’ Kitson asks as he greets me at the door.

  ‘Like Sonny von Bulow,’ I reply, and he smiles, ushering me into the flat.

  Four spooks – two men, two women – are gathered around a small Formica-topped table in the kitchen. I recognize two of them immediately: lead on Macduff, and the woman from the tyre garage near Moby Dick. All four look up from cups of tea and smile, as if at an old, familiar friend.

  ‘You’ll all recognize Alec Milius,’ Kitson says, and I’m not sure if this is just small talk or a dig at my counter-surveillance technique. Either way, I’m irritated by it; it makes me look second-rate. Macduff is the first to respond, rising from his seat to shake my hand.

  ‘Anthony,’ he says. ‘Good to meet you.’

  I was expecting something altogether different, a voice to match the bustling military gent encountered at the Prado, but that was obviously cover. Anthony has a scrambled accent – Borders, at a guess – and is dressed in stonewashed jeans with a black Meat Loaf T-shirt. Tyre lady is next, too boxed in at her seat to be able to stand, but honouring me with a look of real admiration as she stretches to shake my hand.

  ‘Ellie,’ she says. ‘Ellie Cox.’

  The other man is Geoff, the woman, Michelle. The latter is under thirty and on secondment from the Canadian SIS. Kitson mentioned running a team of eight, so the other four must be out tracking Buscon. I am offered tea, which I accept, and sit down on a low pine bench at the head of the table. To my surprise all of them look a little bored and washed-out, and there’s a strange end-of-term atmosphere to the gathering. If they are suspicious of me, they do not show it; if anything, they seem grateful to welcome a new face into their world, somebody unknown whom they can analyse and work out. Bottles of gin and mineral water and Cacique are lined up along a narrow shelf above Ellie’s head, with cans of baked beans, some Hob Nobs and a pot of Marmite peeking out of a cupboard near the cooker. Geoff has a British car magazine open on the table in front of him and spills a little milk on it as he pours my tea. Plates and mugs are drying on a metal rack beside the sink and behind me there’s a clothes horse swamped in laundry. It must be a tight squeeze living in here with four colleagues; they must get on each other’s nerves.

  ‘So you’re the ones I’ve been seeing in my rearview mirror?’ I ask, an unplanned joke that successfully breaks the ice.

  ‘No. That was just Anthony and Michelle,’ Kitson replies, and we chat amicably together for five minutes until he says, ‘Alec, come with me next door,’ and one by one they nod and quietly go back to their cups of tea. Geoff opens the ca
r magazine, Ellie sighs and plays with her mobile phone, Macduff picks at his ears. It’s like the end of visiting hours in a hospital. I am led down a short corridor to a bedroom at the rear of the apartment with clear views over the distant Sierras. When we have both sat down in chairs next to a television by the window, Kitson takes out a pad and a piece of paper and asks what happened with Sofia.

  ‘She has nothing to do with it.’

  He looks understandably suspicious, as if I’m protecting her. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. It was a misunderstanding.’

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  Once again I have to admit a professional failing to Kitson. This is becoming a habit.

  ‘Buscon must have spotted me following him back from the Irish Rover. He put some of his government friends on my tail and threatened Sofia when they found out about our affair.’

  ‘What do you mean, “government friends”?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure. Men involved in the dirty war. Guardia Civil, CESID, Mercenaries Are Us. Buscon left the package for Sofia under the name Abel Sellini. She picked it up thinking it was connected to her work and found this inside.’

  I pass the note to Kitson. He has difficulty translating the Spanish, so I do it for him.

  ‘Can you be sure this is from Buscon?’

  ‘Who else could it be from?’

  Kitson’s expression hints at infinite possibilities. He looks faintly annoyed, as if I have let him down one too many times. ‘So there’s a chance that they could still be following you?’

  The logical sequence of events would certainly imply a serious threat to the integrity of his operation. If Buscon had me watched long term, there’s a risk that one or more of my meetings with Kitson was compromised.

  ‘They’re not following me,’ I assure him, with as much force and sincerity as I can muster. ‘I’ve been clean every time we’ve come into contact.’ Thankfully, Kitson seems to accept this.

  ‘And Sofia?’

  ‘She was very upset. I told her that the note was from some Russian property developers.’

  ‘Mafia?’

  ‘That’s certainly what I was hinting at.’

  ‘And she believed you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  At this point a phone rings in Kitson’s pocket. He checks the read-out and frowns.

  ‘I have to take this,’ he says, and leaves the room in order to do so. Ellie comes in after a minute, ostensibly to offer me more tea, although I suspect that she has been asked by Kitson to make sure that I don’t snoop around. There’s a framed photograph next to the bed, shot in middle-class black-and-white, a sharp-eyed woman whom I take to be Kitson’s wife holding two small children. This must be where he sleeps. The shirt he wore to our last meeting at Colon has been dry-cleaned and is hanging near the window and there’s a carton of Lucky Strike lying on the floor. I’m rubbing the bruise on my knee when he returns to the room and asks me to come back in the morning.

  ‘Something’s come up. I’m sorry, Alec. A lead on de Francisco. We’ll have to finish this thing tomorrow.’

  But it’s another seventy-two hours before we are able to meet again. I go back to the safe house the next day, only to be told that Kitson has been ‘unavoidably detained’ in Lisbon. Geoff and Michelle are the only members of the team at home and we share a genial cup of instant coffee at the kitchen table while I recommend bars in La Latina and an Indian restaurant where they can get a half-decent chicken dhansak.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Geoff says. ‘Christ I miss a good curry.’

  That night, doubtless while the two of them are flirting over sag aloo at the Taj Mahal, I join Julian in an Irish pub near Cibeles, at his invitation, to watch a football match between Real Madrid and Manchester United. United lose and I find that I am pleased for Real, consoling Julian with an expensive shellfish dinner at the Cerveceria Santa Barbara in Alonso Martinez. Otherwise the time passes slowly. I try to rest as much as possible, to go to the cinema and relax, but my sleep is corrupted by nightmares of capture, vivid small-hour screenings of torture and abuse. A private doctor in Barrio Salamanca prescribes me some sleeping pills and I have blood work done for peace of mind, the results of which come through as clean. It’s noticeable over this period that Zulaika has not published anything in Ahotsa about the dirty war and I wonder if SIS have silenced him, with either threats or a bribe. Nor is there news about Egileor, or any fresh developments in the killing of Txema Otamendi.

  Finally Kitson calls and pulls me in at lunchtime on the 25th. We go immediately to his bedroom and it is just as if nothing has changed in three days. He is wearing the same clothes, sitting in the same chair, perhaps even smoking the same cigarette.

  ‘I’ve been doing some thinking,’ he says. ‘You’re not going to like it.’

  I see that his expression is very serious. This is the thing I have dreaded. He has brought me here to cut me out. SIS has reflected on events and decided that I have made too many mistakes.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I think it would be best if you stopped seeing Sofia. Monday night was your last night together. OK? You work for us now. No more off-piste activities. It’s just too dangerous.’

  I agree immediately. If that’s all he wants, if that’s all it takes to win this thing, I’ll do it.

  ‘It also makes sense in the light of what I’m about to discuss with you, but we need Anthony in here before I can do that.’

  Right on cue there’s a knock at the door. Kitson says, ‘Yes,’ and Macduff enters the room. I had no idea he was even in the flat. When I came in, Geoff and Michelle were on their own in the sitting room eating bowls of cereal and watching Friends on DVD. How did Macduff know to come in at exactly that moment? Was he listening from another room?

  ‘That’s odd,’ Kitson tells him, voicing my own doubt. ‘I was just coming to get you. Been eavesdropping, Anthony?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  He sits on the bed. He is slimmer than I thought, about five feet ten. Strange to hear a man in his late forties refer to Kitson as ‘sir’. What are perceived as his weaknesses that he should have been overlooked for promotion?

  ‘Have you seen the news?’

  It takes me a beat to realize that Kitson is talking to me. ‘No,’ I reply, and he leans over and switches on the television. Macduff mutes the sound with a remote control which he has picked up off the floor. A gameshow is ending on Telemadrid.

  ‘Two bars in the Basque country were shot up at dawn today,’ he says, ‘one in Bayonne, the other in Hendaye. On the French side.’

  I can feel Macduff’s eyes studying me as he waits for my reply. In the absence of a specialist, am I regarded as the resident expert on ETA and the GAL? He wants to know how good I am, how quickly I can analyse and react to this new development. For the first time I feel a sense of pressure from one of Kitson’s team and realize that I have something to prove.

  ‘Bars used by ETA?’

  ‘That’s what they’re saying,’ Kitson replies.

  The link is obvious. ‘Then it’s a new front in the dirty war. The GAL regularly shot up bars and restaurants on the French side in the 1980s, targeting terrorist exiles. They’re employing the same tactics. Anybody hurt?’

  ‘Nobody. It was pre-breakfast.’ Kitson has one eye on the television, waiting for the evening news. ‘An old man drinking coffee got a shard of glass in his hand, the barman in Hendaye felt a bullet buzz past his head.’

  ‘Sounds nasty. Who speaks Spanish?’

  Neither of them understands my question.

  ‘I mean, where are you getting your information? Who speaks Spanish well enough to understand the news?’

  ‘Geoff,’ Macduff replies. They both look a little sheepish, as if it’s embarrassing that the two most experienced members of an SIS task force in Spain are not fluent in the local language. ‘A Basque journalist went on TV claiming that one of the cars involved in the shooting had Madrid number plates.’

  ‘Did
you get his name?’

  Kitson has to flick through the pad. He has trouble reading his own handwriting. ‘Larzabal,’ he says finally. ‘Eugenio Larzabal.’

  ‘And you say he was a Basque journalist?’

  ‘For Gara, yes.’

  I say that I have never heard of him and take the name down in some notes of my own, trying to look professional. ‘What about Zulaika?’

  ‘What about him?’ Kitson asks.

  ‘Have you been following him? Do you know if he plans to go into print with the dirty-war story?’

  ‘Zulaika is going to keep his mouth shut for a week or two. That’s been arranged.’ So they did get to him. ‘But he’s not the only journalist in Euskal Herria. A kidnapping, a murder, a car with Madrid plates. It all starts to add up. Somebody somewhere is going to make the same sort of links. And once that happens, we’ll be playing catch-up.’

  ‘You mean you’ll have to tell the Spanish authorities what you know?’

  ‘I mean they’ll probably already know as much as we do.’

  I try to gauge the operation from a political perspective. How does SIS gain from failing to report the existence of the new GAL to the Aznar government right away? Perhaps Kitson’s superiors care nothing for the legitimacy of the Spanish state, only for the terrorist networks that can be traced by pursuing Buscon. The dirty war is a sideshow in which I am a bit-part player. But then Kitson says something to challenge that assertion.

  ‘Over the past few days we’ve been looking into Javier de Francisco’s background, trying to get a fix on his motives. Anthony’s come up with a plan.’

  This is Macduff’s cue. He’s more deferential in front of Kitson, less self-assured than he was on Tuesday with the others. Sitting up straighter on the bed, he gets the nod from his boss and embarks on a well-rehearsed monologue.

  ‘As you know, Alec, Mr de Francisco is the secretary of state for security here in Spain, to all intents and purposes the number two at the Interior Ministry under his old friend Felix Maldonado. Now if what you were saying last time is correct, senior figures in ETA believe he may be organizing this dirty war against them.’ Kitson sniffs and turns in his chair. As I think was explained to you last time, we don’t have the manpower here to embark on a full-scale investigation of whatever elements in the Spanish government may or may not be up to.’