They weren’t tailing Buscon because of a consignment of Croat weapons. They were tailing him for something else. That explains why Kitson slipped up about Guantánamo. I try to maintain a physical dignity in this public place, but my body has cooked to a fever-sweat. It feels as if every part of me is shaking.
‘You see what happened, Alec? Is it starting to make sense? Luis was connected to A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist. A big player, in other words. Tried to sell uranium-enrichment equipment to the Libyans. Now we can’t have guys like that roaming the quiet European countryside, can we? He wasn’t looking out for a box of rifles for the Real IRA. Christ, you were so gullible.’
Her voice is exactly how I remember it, not a note change, not a day gone by. America’s seductive trap. Where is she speaking from?
‘You had no idea about the dirty war until I told you?’
‘Oh, that was such a bonus.’ Somebody laughs in the background. Fortner? ‘We must confess that without your help we would never have established a link between Luis and the Spanish government. The war would have gone right ahead and chances are that democratic Spain would now be on its knees.’ She pauses. ‘And we want to thank you for giving us that golden opportunity, Alec. Really we do. I needed a break. The Agency needed a break. You see how invaluable we are now to the Europeans? You guys can’t live without us.’
Questions start forming in my mind. Do they know about Carmen? I cannot work it out while Katharine is still talking; every one of her sentences seems to noose and tighten around my rage. Does the CIA know that Maldonado and de Francisco were Basque spies? Does that theory even hold any more? Again the British couple look up at me and I realize that I am breathing so loudly it must be audible to the nearby tables.
‘So here’s the deal.’ Katharine has cleared a slight catch in her throat. I can sense the coup de grâce and she delivers it with bitter precision. ‘There’s no job for you with MI6, OK? No precious work and no future for Alec Milius. Nobody has forgiven you for what you did and John Lithiby does not offer redemption. It was all for nothing. You suffered for nothing.’
With this my mood subsides in a switch to pure hatred. ‘I don’t care about the job,’ I spit. It is like the torture again, the same defiance in the face of my tormentors, as if I have been freed by the shame of defeat. There is nothing left to lose.
Yes you do,’ she replies, startled. ‘You care about the job. It’s all you’ve ever cared about -’
‘You killed Kate,’ I tell her.
She stops talking. There’s silence on the line, as if we have been cut off by poor reception, a glitch of technology. Then, very quietly, ‘I don’t ever want to hear that accusation repeated. We are not murderers. You believe what you want.’
She’s still angry about what happened, even after all these years. That gives me strength now. Later, when I am alone and going back over Kitson memories, the jar of Marmite at the safe house, the Hob Nobs and the car magazines, then I will feel humiliated. But at the moment it is enough to deny Katharine the triumph of her plan, just as Carmen and her accomplices were ruined by the failure of theirs. ‘You killed Kate,’ I repeat. ‘You killed two innocent young people with their whole lives ahead of them.’
‘Let me tell you something about that, Alec’ There is a hiss of stubborn control, a tone I remember from our final conversation in London, all those years ago. ‘Let me tell you about your girlfriends. Right now Sofía Church is looking at photographs of you and Carmen Arroyo rowing your nice little boat in the Parque Retiro. Right now, Sofía Church is looking at shots of her boyfriend kissing another woman…’
This flattens me. Why would they hurt Sofía? The CIA have tapes of me in bed with Carmen. What will they do with them? I will never be free of this foul trade.
‘You fucking bitch. You didn’t need Carmen, did you?’ This, too, has occurred to me in the last few seconds, a subconscious realization beneath the raw shock of Sofía’s pain. It explains why Kitson was so laissez-faire about the cover-up. The intel I brought him was always second-hand; the CIA had eyes and ears in every orifice of the Interior Ministry. ‘Why did you make me do that?’
‘To humiliate you,’ she says. The frank admission, so coldly stated, is sickening. ‘To show you how low you could sink. Why else?’
‘Is it because I didn’t fuck you in London? Is that what this is about?’ I am losing control. I have to maintain my dignity. The bald Englishman again looks at me but his warning glance does nothing to settle my rage. ‘Did you never get over the fact that I wouldn’t fuck you, Katharine? Did you leave the note for Sofía at the hotel so that you could break her heart as well?’
Now both of them fire disapproving stares at me and I suddenly find that I am embarrassed to have spoken like this, to a woman, in public. The strange, civilizing reflex again kicks in. So that I can speak my mind, I put a ten-euro note on the table and walk out of the restaurant, past the distracted waiters and the legs of jamón, holding the phone by my side as if the Americans’ triumph might somehow drop onto the floor.
‘What about Anthony?’ I ask, out on Calle Libertad in a freezing wind. If I turned through 180 degrees it feels as though they would all be standing behind me.
‘What about him?’ she asks.
‘He was British. They were all British…’
‘It was a house of games.’
A car comes quickly up the narrow street, making me jump. For a moment it’s hard to hear what Katharine is saying. I hold the phone tight against my ear, cold and alone, bitterly angry. She says something about Macduff working in the private sector, being ‘a chameleon, a freelance’. It was a long con, a Spanish prisoner.
‘You spent all that money, all that time, just to get back at me?’
‘It wasn’t so difficult. It wasn’t so expensive.’ Her voice is calm, matter-of-fact. ‘You were a luxury, a convenience. It was just like swatting a fly. And the ends more than justified the means.’
She seems to laugh as I ask about ETA. ‘Did you do that? Did you make the farm happen?’
‘Oh no. We’re not inhumane, Alec’ Again, a commotion in the background, the sound of a man savouring revenge. ‘Our intel at the time pointed to Zulaika, for what it’s worth. Matter of fact we used that to silence him.’ She lets this sink in, the easy cruelty of American power. ‘Like I said, you just dropped into our laps. You were a bonus. We didn’t have plans for you. Matter of fact, after Milan a lot of us felt you’d gotten away. And then it was just like a miracle. Let’s just say that you were a guilty pleasure which none of us in these difficult times could resist.’
I do not reply. I have heard enough. The events of the last two hours have turned me completely inside-out, a switchback of unimaginable complexity, and there is now nothing that I can say to Katharine, no further taunt I can deliver which would improve my situation one bit. Best just to be done with it. Best just to admit defeat and move on.
‘Well, it looks like you’ve got some thinking to do,’ she says, as if going back to the script. Are they watching me, even now? Were the couple in the restaurant part of her team? ‘You should observe the sight of all your hard work gone to waste. You should think about the two innocent women who are suffering tonight because you put your own personal satisfaction before theirs.’
‘Go fuck yourself, Katharine.’
And I hang up before she has a chance to reply. Two more cars come towards me on the street and I step aside, bewildered as a drunk, walking down the hill as they pass. I need a bar. I have to drink. It dawns on me as a desperate, irreversible fact that I must now leave Madrid. I have no choice. I will have to abandon my furniture and my belongings and start a new life away from Spain, still away from England, with just a bag of money hidden behind a fridge. It is what I have always dreaded. I did not know what it was to love a city until I lived in this place. What an idiot I have been. What an amateur. The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.