"Suspense can be synonymous with hope," reflects Basque writer Katixa Agirre (Vitoria, 1981). The reader who delves into the pages of her new novel, Internal Service (La Segona Perifèria/Tusquets), translated from Basque to Catalan by Pau Joan Hernández, knows perfectly well that the story does not end well, but the four protagonists trust until the very last moment in a good ending. They are Bittori Etxeberria, Delia Lauroba, Itziar Mujika, and Tere Verdes, who risked everything to help imprisoned comrades, support the Basque Government in exile, and stand up to Francoism. Together with other agents, they wove one of the most effective espionage and evasion structures in the north of the Iberian Peninsula: the Álaba network. They did so in a context of terror, because by mid-1937, the Basque Country had been massacred from the air, the coup plotters had occupied it, and the government of Lehendakari José Antonio Aguirre had gone into exile.

It didn't take long for the French to investigate who had collaborated with the Nazis. In December 1944, four months after the liberation of Paris and as World War II continued on various fronts, the new democratic authorities of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, headed by General Charles de Gaulle, sought to determine responsibility for the persecution of the exiled Republican officials in 1939. One of the arrests they investigated was that of the president of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys.