And then the beating starts again. After this I remember nothing. No more talk, no more questions, no fear nor even pain. I remember nothing.

30. Out

There is a Dutch film, The Vanishing, in which a man wakes up inside his own coffin. He has been buried alive. In the final scene he is left alone to suffer this terrifying end, this nightmare suffocation, and the audience drifts out into the night bewildered by fear. And so it is in the aftermath of my own terror as I wake into the total blackout of a living death. I am lying on my side. When I reach out with my right hand it hits a wall. When I stretch it above my head it collides with a hard plastic panel which sends a numb pain through my fingers and wrist. My feet can push out no more than two or three inches before they too are stopped by a hard, fixed surface. Everything around me feels completely enclosed. Only when I reach above my face, as if to search for the lid of the coffin, do I encounter open clear space.

My senses gradually awaken. I am wearing clothes. It is warmer than I can remember for a long time. There are shoes on my feet and my eyes are gradually growing accustomed to the light. But when I lift my head, trying to sit up, a migraine sears across my skull, lifting vomit into the back of my throat. The pain is so intense that I have to lie down again in the darkness, breathing hard for release, swallowing.

I feel again with my right hand, slowly tapping along the panel above my head. There is an odd, recognizable smell, a mixture of alcohol and pine, that same acid sting in my throat. My fingers curl around what feels like the handle of a door. Lifting my head, risking the pain, I pull it and a bright light immediately flares into the space. When I open my eyes against it I see that I have been lying on the back seat of a car parked inside a tiny breezeblock garage. I am inside the Audi. What am I doing here?

The agony of asking my twisted body to move is worse perhaps than any pain that I can recall from the interrogation. Every part of me aches: feet, calves, thighs, arms, shoulders, neck, blending into a single conscious suffering. I am wretched with thirst. I have to sit with the door open and my feet on the ground for as much as thirty seconds while I gather the strength to stand. There is terrible bruising around my stomach, a scarlet map which appals me when I lift my shirt to look at it. These are my clothes, the ones I wore to Valdelcubo; I am no longer wearing their rags. I try to put weight on my legs, but the pain makes it difficult to walk. After just two steps I open the passenger door and collapse into the seat.

The glove box is open. Inside I can see my wallet, the two mobile phones and their chargers. It is bewildering. The SIM cards are inside and I switch the phones on, but they are drained of power. Why would they give them back to me? The etarras have taken all but twenty euros from my wallet, but the credit cards, the photographs of Kate and Mum and Dad, are all there. Dangling behind the wheel I can see my keys in the ignition. The keys to Calle Princesa, to the PO box, even to the bedsit in Andalucía.

What is this place? A waiting room for death? My captors have clearly left, yet I have no idea where I am, of the time or date, of their reasons for doing so nor of my right to survive. I check my unshaven face in the rear-view mirror for signs of bruising and cuts, but it appears to be mercifully unmarked. They would not have wanted the public to see my beaten face if I went in front of the press. That would be bad for ETA’s support base. They were thinking all the time about the presentation.

Standing again, supporting myself on the open door, I walk very slowly, like an old and crippled man, towards the front of the garage. The air is stuffy and damp. I am aware of my own smell, of my sour breath and sweat. The door is not locked. When I turn the handle it slides up easily over my head, revealing a barren landscape of dust and low, pale hills. This is not the farmhouse. It is a different place. We have left the Basque country and come south into the desert. It looks like Aragón.

Finding more strength in the exhilaration of freedom I walk round to the back of the garage where there are nothing but old plastic sacks and pools of muddy water. A dead bird lies on a pile of wood. I can hear cars passing, the tarmac whisper of engines and tyres. A second, larger building is set back from the garage, ruined and open to the elements. I experience an overwhelming desire to leave this place and to be free. My stiff body is loosening up all the time, but if I do not drink something soon it will be almost impossible to drive. I have the presence of mind to bend down and to check under the car for a bomb and my thighs and back and migraine roar with pain as I do so. Then I lower myself into the driver’s seat, turn the key in the ignition and head out slowly onto the muddy road.

My eyesight seems OK. I haven’t checked the rest of my body for marks or scars yet but I can do that as soon as I find a hotel. The radio works. Just to hear human voices again, to reconnect with the world, feels like a blessed second chance. It is several minutes before I learn the day and the date – Saturday 19 April – but the clock on the dashboard puts the time at 4.06 a.m. That must be wrong; they must have played around with it. Then the news comes on Cadena Ser at 17.00. The anchorman talks at length about the Egileor kidnapping and the invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s statue has been torn down in the centre of Baghdad and some idiot Yank tried raising the Stars and Stripes in its place. A colleague of Arenaza’s has demanded a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding his death, but there is no mention of Dieste or Buscon, of Javier de Francisco or a dirty war. My own disappearance appears to have gone completely unnoticed.

Then, like a roadside miracle, I pass a stall selling drinks and fruit and swallow almost half a litre of water with unbroken, exhausted gulps. If my appearance or demeanour seems in any way unusual to the stallholder, she does not betray it. Taking my twenty-euro note, she merely frowns at the denomination, hands over a bundle of coins and sits back down on a low stool. I ask her to locate our position on a map and she points to a section of road between Épila and Rueda de Jalón, a two-hour drive south from the Basque border. They must have brought me over in convoy in the boot of a car, dumped me in the back seat of the Audi, closed off the garage and then headed back into Euskal Herria.

The road leads south to the NII autovía. If I turn right, I can be in Madrid by ten, but it’s a long drive and my body, despite the fuel of water, will not withstand the journey. I need to rest and clean up. I need to think. My knees are stiffening up on the pedals and a nerve pain, like a small electric shock, shoots infrequently through the back of my thigh. I require the anonymity of a big city, somewhere I can disappear and gather my thoughts and decide what the hell I’m going to do. I’m not ready yet to face Kitson or Sofía, to go to the police or to confront Zulaika. So I make the decision to drive east towards Zaragoza, booking into a four-star hotel in the centre of the city under my own name. Thank God I left the fake passports, the driving licences, all the stupid paraphernalia of my secret existence back in Madrid. Had the etarras discovered those, they would almost certainly have killed me.

The phones start to chime as soon as I have plugged them in. Message after message from Sofía, two from Kitson and Julian, a single text from Saul. Even Mum has called, and to listen to the gentle, oblivious cadence of her voice is to experience once again the miracle of my survival. I had expected Kitson to be worried, but he rang on Tuesday to cancel our meeting in Tetuán. That would explain why his manner is so unperturbed. His second message, left at midday on the 16th, merely confirms this, citing logistical difficulties in Porto’. Only Sofía sounds upset, her messages growing in intensity to a point where she shuts down in frustration, convinced that I am ignoring her calls in order to ‘spend time back in England with that girl’.