‘Yes. I’m just here in Madrid for a few months. You?’

‘Soy madrileña,’ she says, with evident pride. ‘Me llamo Carmen.’

‘Alex. Nice to meet you.’

We kiss in the traditional fashion and her cheeks feel dry and warm. It’s already clear that the first part of the strategy is working well: Carmen has been bold enough to follow me outside and to strike up a conversation, and she clearly doesn’t want me to leave. In time we’ll exchange phone numbers, just as Kitson hoped, and the relationship will be up and running. Then all I need to do is work out a way of finding her attractive.

‘You are enjoying yourself here?’

‘Oh I love it. It’s such a great city. I’d never been here before and everybody has just been so friendly.’

‘Like me?’

‘Like you, Carmen.’

A first tension-shifting laugh. It is a strange sensation, this falsified union, this charade, but as we exchange further pleasantries I find myself warming to her, if only out of a sense of guilt that my sole purpose here this evening is to take advantage of her decency and palpable loneliness. If I can bring a little happiness into her life, then where’s the harm?

‘So you’re here on holiday?’

‘No, not really. I’m supposed to be researching a PhD.’

‘You are student?’

‘Sort of. I used to work on a newspaper in Glasgow but I’m taking two years out, with a view to becoming an academic.’

The structure of this sentence is too complicated for her and she frowns. I rephrase it and tell her the title of my thesis – ‘The British Battalion of the International Brigades 1936-1939’ – and she looks impressed.

‘This sounds interesting.’ Then there is an awkward delay.

‘It’s cold and you’re not wearing a coat,’ I tell her, just to fill the silence.

‘Yes. Maybe I should get back inside.’

Don’t let her go just yet.

‘But when am I going to see you again?’

Carmen’s face twists with pleasure. This sort of thing rarely happens to her. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, can I telephone you? Can I have your number? I’d love to see you again.’

‘Claro.’

And it’s that simple. I scribble the number down on a blank page in the Orwell book and wonder if I should warn her, right here and now, that her life is about to be turned inside-out by a bunch of scheming British spooks. Instead I say, ‘You should go inside. It’s cold.’

‘Si,’ she replies. ‘My friend is waiting. Who are you meeting?’

Kitson anticipated that Carmen would want to know if I have a girlfriend or wife, so I have a preprepared response to the question.

‘Just somebody from my language class.’

‘Vale.’ Something like disappointment, even a shiver of panic, runs through her eyes, although I may be reading too much into this. At the risk of exaggeration it seems that she has already fallen for me.

‘Thank you for this,’ I tell her.

‘Qué?’

I hold up the scarf.

‘Ah. La bufanda. This was nothing, Alex. It was nothing.’

And we say goodbye. Two minutes later, when I have walked away from the bar and phoned Macduff to give him an update on the evening, a bus passes through the north end of Plaza de España. A banner is posted along one side advertising a new British film starring Rowan Atkinson. It looks like a Bond spoof – Johnny English. When I see the tagline beneath the predictably idiotic image of Atkinson wearing black tie, I have to smile:

‘Prepárate para la inteligencia británica.’

Prepare yourself for British intelligence.

36. Blind Date

Carmen’s conversation with María the following evening makes flattering listening. Macduff has isolated the relevant sections of dialogue, revealing the target’s excitement at the prospect of meeting me again, married to an anxiety that I will fail to call. María counsels caution – it’s in her nature to do so – but she shares Carmen’s basic view that I am ‘guapo’. Their only reservation, predictably, concerns my marital status, or the possible existence of a girlfriend back in Glasgow.

‘You always have to be careful with men from the UK,’ María warns. ‘They’re emotionally repressed. My cousin had a boyfriend from London once. He was very odd. Didn’t wash properly, never spoke to his family, wore terrible clothes. They dress very scruffily, the English. And they drink. Joder. This boy was always in the pub, watching football, buying alcohol. Then he would eat kebabs on the way home. It was very strange.’

I translate most of this for Kitson and Macduff, and it’s no use pretending that I don’t derive a significant amount of pleasure from Carmen’s crush. It lifts my spirits after the farm, and I think Kitson understands this. He seems satisfied that our plan is on course and we discuss the next step.

The following morning – Monday – I call Carmen’s mobile and leave a message expressing the hope that she will ring me back. When she does so, three hours later, she plays it cool but agrees to meet for a drink in Plaza Santa Ana on Wednesday evening. Kitson is not happy about the delay, but I assure him that things will move quickly once the two of us have spent some time together.

We meet beside the statue of Lorca at 9 p.m. under the watchful eye of the Hotel Reina Victoria, the façade of which acts as a physical reminder that I have yet to break off relations with Sofía. Carmen has dressed up for the occasion, as we expected she would, although her taste in clothes has not improved from Saturday night. She’s also wearing a new perfume that I don’t like, floral remnants of which linger in my nose long after I have kissed her hello.

‘You look great,’ I tell her, and the compliment is returned as she suggests walking just a few metres to the Cervecería Alemana, an old Hemingway haunt where I took Saul on his second night.

‘You have been here before?’ she asks.

‘Never.’

Carmen is easy to talk to, intelligent and eager to please, and at first I ask a lot of questions, to set her at ease and to establish that I’m a good listener. It’s what anyone would do on a first date, so the artifice feels natural and just. I hear about her work in Medellín, her friendship with María, and she speaks briefly about her job in the Interior Ministry. I deliberately let this slide and instead steer the conversation towards a discussion about the importance of the family in Spanish life, instigating a good ten minutes about Mitxelena’s skin cancer. Looking suitably sympathetic, I tell her that my own mother had a malignant melanoma on her leg which was successfully removed, with no further complications, in 1998. Then I talk about my PhD, my job at the Glasgow Herald editing copy written by drunken Scottish hacks and she laughs when I make up a story about a crime reporter called Jimmy who was caught screwing a work-experience girl on the editor’s sofa. She does not seem prudish or coy about sex, but has an astonishingly conservative view of society and politics, even for a servant of the Aznar government. When, in a second tapas bar, I venture a mildly critical opinion of the Bush administration, Carmen frowns and argues with some force that America’s mission in Iraq is not about oil or weapons of mass destruction, but a long-term crusade to create stable democracies right across the Middle East.

‘If we are strong,’ she says, ‘if we have the courage to see that young men will no longer wish to become terrorists because they live in these new democratic environments, then the world will be a safer place. We cannot continue to be isolated, Alex. Spain must move into the rest of the world, and this is where Aznar is taking us.’

Such an attitude is relevant to my operation inas-much as it reveals something about Carmen’s political affiliations. In due course, I will have to ask her for information which may help to bring down the government; her willingness to assist in that task will certainly be affected by her loyalty to the state. On this basis, it seems sensible to position myself in the same ideological neighbourhood.