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 Begoña, where I hail a cab and instruct the driver to loop anticlockwise around the Parque de la Paz en route to Vía Límite. 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 Bülow,’ 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 car 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 Sofía.
‘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 Sofía 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 Sofía 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 Sofía?’
‘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 Colón 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 Cervecería Santa Barbara in Alonso Martínez. 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.