‘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 in an effort to reach me. Taking most of my weight on his shoulders he then leads me into the bathroom and sets me down on the edge of the bath. He is surprisingly strong. I say that I am embarrassed by the sweat that has soaked through my shirt onto his arms.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry.’
But I feel dizzy and take a towel down from a rack above the bath, wiping my neck and face. Only after a couple of minutes do I ask what he meant about the girl.
‘What girl?’
‘You said there was another woman, a new problem. With somebody other than Rosalia.’
‘Oh yes.’ He looks directly at me. ‘Buscon left a package at the Hotel Carta this morning.’
‘Buscon is back in Madrid?’
‘Was. Checked out at eight. A woman came to pick it up about an hour later. Somebody we didn’t recognize. You sure you’re all right, Alec?’
‘I’m fine.’
He goes back into the bedroom and I hear him searching around in his jacket. I am still hot and out of breath, but the pain has mostly passed. ‘Careful,’ he says as he passes me what looks like a photograph that has been colour-photocopied onto a sheet of A4. ‘I had surveillance in the lobby and security faxed this through. Do you recognize her?’
I turn the paper over and it falls limp in my hand. I cannot believe what I am seeing.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ he says, registering my reaction. ‘So you know her?’
‘I know her.’
The woman in the photograph is Sofia.
32. Black Widow
‘Sofia Church? Your boss’s wife?’
A nod.
‘You want to tell me more?’
I did not think it was possible to feel angrier and more unsettled than I already do, but Sofia’s treachery is an all-new humiliation. I feel utterly bereft and strung out, as if my heart has been broken and left for years to grieve. Kitson is watching me all the time and I know, at the very least, that we cannot hold this conversation while I am sitting in the bathroom. I ask him to assist me and we walk slowly back into the bedroom. I have to stretch out flat on the nearer of the two beds and prop up my head with a pillow. It must be a pathetic sight. I do not even have the strength to lie about this.
‘She’s Spanish,’ I tell him, as if that’s a start. ‘They’ve been married for five years. That’s all I have, Richard. That’s everything.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
He knows. It’s obvious. All about the affair with Sofia, all about Julian, all about the whole damn thing. They saw us together at the Prado. Kitson’s eyes are telling me to come clean before there’s a breach of trust. Don’t let me down. Don’t keep making the same mistake.
‘Look, switch off the tape.’
‘What?’
‘Just do it.’
He walks over to the table, sits down and appears to shut off the mechanism. I do not have the guts to ask if I can double check this.
‘Sofia and I have been seeing each other for a while. We’ve been having an affair.’
‘OK.’
In the bathroom, a tap drips.
‘Are you married, Richard?’
‘I’m married.’
‘Children?’
‘Two.’
‘What does your wife do?’
‘She does everything.’
I like this answer. I am envious of it.
‘It’s not something that I’m particularly proud of.’
‘It’s not something that I’m particularly here to judge.’ There is a beat of understanding between us. ‘And now you think that she might have played you?’
It is the spy’s deepest fear; to be betrayed by those closest to him. Kitson’s question is in itself a slight; an officer of his calibre would never have allowed himself to be so blatantly manipulated. I am trying to understand what the hell Sofia might have been doing at the Carta picking up an envelope left by Luis Buscon, but all I can think is that she has been using me all this time. It must have something to do with Julian’s past in Colombia, with Nicole. Are they part of the dirty war? Sofia hates ETA, but no more or less than most Spaniards. She disapproved of Arenaza, but not enough to have him killed. Christ, I tasted her, I made her come; there were times when we seemed to vanish into one another, so intense were the feelings between us. If all that was just a game to her, a woman’s ploy, I do not know what I will do. To lie within human intimacy is the greatest sin of all.
‘Maybe it’s not her in the picture,’ Kitson suggests, as if sensing my shame. It is embarrassing to hear him try to comfort me. ‘Maybe your eyes were playing tricks on you.’
‘Can I see it again?’
But it’s her. The image is blurred and shows only the back of a woman’s head, but the figure, the height and posture are exactly Sofia’s. She’s even wearing clothes that I recognize: a knee-length tweed skirt, high-heeled leather boots. I am consumed by rage.
‘Jesus Christ, what an idiot.’
‘You don’t know that. There might be another explanation.’
‘Can you think of one?’
Kitson struggles to reply. He can’t answer without knowing the facts. So, for the second time in a matter of hours, I have to strip myself of all obfuscation and tell him, in humiliating detail, all about my relationship with Sofia: the initial meetings; the endless lies to Julian; the stolen afternoons and the rows. God knows how I come across. And all the time I am trying to put the pieces together, trying to work out their long-term strategy. Why did they lure me in? Why would Buscon and ETA, Dieste, Julian and Sofia, target an Englishman abroad if not to set him up as a patsy? But why me? Why Alec Milius? I tell Kitson about Nicole and Julian’s life in Colombia, asking him to check their file, but can only conclude that this is an American operation, orchestrated by Katharine and Fortner as revenge for JUSTIFY. At the same time, it is impossible to see more of the trap which has been set for me. In spite of everything that I now know, I still can’t sense what they might have in store.
33. Reina Victoria
I go back to Calle Princesa. Perhaps it would have been best to pack everything up, to find a new apartment in Madrid, even to move to a different city, but that would have felt too much like defeat. I would rather suffer the final humiliation of witnessing the plot’s success, of seeing the look of triumph in Katharine’s eyes, than give up now. It is more important to me to do my best for Kitson, to see this thing through, than to cut and run. In any case, he has said that he still needs me, and with our knowledge of Sofia’s involvement in the conspiracy we now have a crucial advantage. We can turn the tables. I can start using her.
‘See her, sleep with her, habla con ella, ’ Kitson advised. ‘Act like nothing has changed. You haven’t seen the photograph, you haven’t any knowledge of any dirty war. And don’t for God’s sake start telling her about Patxo Zulaika and ETA. If she knows about them, she knows. If she’s in on the conspiracy, she’s in on the conspiracy. Far as you’re concerned, the marks on your body came about as the result of a punch-up. Real-estate deal turned sour. A bunch of Zaragoza estate agents taking the phrase “two up, two down” a bit literally. Next thing you knew, you were in hospital.’
So I keep to our meeting at the Reina Victoria. I did not sleep on Sunday night because the Danish boy upstairs began his banging, his toy-hammering, just as I was dropping off at dawn. As a result, I feel obliterated by tiredness. I can no more pretend to Sofia’s face that nothing has happened between us than I can make the bruises and the cuts on my body disappear. This is rage, as much as anything else: it is what Katharine must have felt when she discovered that I had lied to her for the best part of two years. In all probability, my deceit ruined her career, yet the knife in the back of her self-respect would have been far worse. In this sense, it’s possible to see my pain as a kind of moral payback. Only I never kissed Katharine. I never slept with her.
Sofia is in a room on the third floor facing away from the square. It’s too late to try to change it and, in any case, I don’t want to make her suspicious about my motives.
Things seem wrong from the moment we first set eyes on one another. When I knock on the door, she answers it fully dressed. No negligee, no suspenders. No pigtails, no perfume. None of the visual paraphernalia of an affair. Instead, Sofia looks anxious and washed-out, a sheen of tears in her eyes, and I feel immediately wrong-footed.
‘What’s the matter?’
I follow her into the room and sit down next to her on the bed. Straight away she stands up and crosses to an armchair by the window. I worry that Julian has found out about us, even though such concerns are no longer plausible nor even relevant. Christ, perhaps she is pregnant. Then she wipes her eyes on a Kleenex and stares at me. Can this be part of an act? She has not yet spoken, but I feel a wall between us which I cannot breach. She starts sobbing and, in spite of everything, there is still the desire to protect her.
‘Sofia, what’s going on? Why are you crying? Why are you upset?’
Her eyes are black as she looks back at me through the tears. Then she says, ‘Who are you, Alec?’
The question is like a curse.
‘What?’
‘Who are you?’
She stops sobbing. I do not know how to respond. Kitson didn’t prepare me for this, nor could I have anticipated that she would be feeling this way. It has been so long since I played the professional game of lie and counter-lie that I feel ring-rusty and bewildered by what is happening. I can’t see the angles. She must be playing me, but why the anger? I was expecting a routine evening of sex and champagne, of faked orgasms and room service, not the double bluff of a woman’s tears.
‘What do you mean, “Who am I”? Why are you crying? Sofia, please…’
‘I mean what I say’ She discovers a new strength in her voice. ‘Who is Alec Milius?’
‘Well, I could ask you the same question. Who is Sofia Church?’
Her neck seems to slip here, her face a desperate mask. ‘ What? ’ Something is terribly wrong or I am simply not reading this correctly. ‘What do you mean by that?’ she says.
‘I mean I want you to tell me what’s going on. Let me help you.’ I pass her a tissue from the box beside the bed but she swipes wildly at my arm. This angers me, perhaps because I am so tired, and I lose my temper. ‘Well, what then? What is it that you want?’
And she starts screaming at me, as crazed as I have ever seen a woman. The change in her mood is terrifying and I wonder if the frenzy is designed to cover something up. Standing out of the chair, she comes towards me and lands a pathetic fist on my chest, then slaps me repeatedly around the face. Words are blazing out of her mouth, few of which make any sense to me. It is as if she has lost her mind. I try to envelop her body in my arms in an attempt to control her physically, but she merely screams, ‘Let go of me, you fucking liar!’ and the insults continue like poison. A part of me worries that we will be heard in next-door rooms, but my hands are too busy up around my head, protecting my face from her rage. Then I lose all patience.
‘Why the fuck are you hitting me?’ I am on the point of pinning her against the wall. ‘Why are you angry with me when you’re the one doing the lying? Why were you in the Hotel Carta this morning? Why?’
That stops her. I had not meant to betray Kits
on, but it was necessary. Sofia is suddenly calm. In fact she looks stunned.
‘You know about this? How? How do you know?’
Is this a confession of guilt on her part or more of the masquerade? If only I was not so exhausted. I took a triple shot of vodka before leaving the flat but it has done me no good. Are we being recorded? Is this little scene another element in Katharine and Former’s grand plan?
‘Of course I know about that. And I know about Luis Buscon. So I want to know why you were picking up packages from him. Are you working together?’
She steps further away from me, shaking her head. She appears to lack the strength to cry again. Indeed she looks, to my eyes, like somebody who is going slowly mad. It is awful to see this in a woman whom I once cared about.
‘Who is Luis Buscon?’ she asks, trying to breathe deeply, trying to control herself. ‘Who is Luis Buscon?’ I am about to answer her when she adds, ‘I get a phone call at work last night telling me to come to the Hotel Carta this morning to pick up a box of samples left by somebody called Abel Sellini. He says that he represents an Italian designer. I didn’t know who he was. He said it was important. Who is Luis Buscon? Alec, what is this about?’
It starts to make sense. ‘What was in the package?’ I ask. ‘Tell me. What was in it, Sofia?’ I am hurrying her as she stares at me, desperate to have her betrayal disproved. She watches every tic of my face as she retrieves her handbag from the floor. Inside there is a letter which she takes out of an envelope, thrusting the single page into my hands like evidence of an adultery.
‘What is this?’
‘ Leelo, ’ she says.
Read it.
The letter is unsigned and badly typed. It consists of one simple sentence, written in Spanish:
The Spanish Game am-3 Page 25