‘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.

‘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 Sofía. 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.