It was half past four on the morning of the 24th and the coup had still not ended, but its nature had definitively changed: until then it had been a political and military problem; from then on, once Milans and Armada’s soft coup had failed and so had the attempt at conversion there and then into Tejero’s hard coup, it was now just a problem of public order: everything consisted of finding a non-violent way to get the hostages released. And the reality was that by that time in the morning — after the King’s appearance on television as cascades of condemnations of the coup poured forth from political and professional organizations, trade unions, regional governments, municipalities, county councils, the press and from a whole country that had remained silent until it glimpsed the failure of the golpistas — the interior of the Cortes began to be ripe for capitulation, or that was at least what those who were directing the blockade were thinking now that they’d abandoned the idea of assaulting the building with groups from special operations out of fear of a massacre and had concluded that they just needed to allow time to go by so the lack of external support would make the occupiers succumb: except for the party leaders, isolated for the whole night in other rooms of the Cortes, the parliamentarians were still in the chamber, smoking and dozing and exchanging contradictory bits of news in low voices, more sure with each minute that passed of the defeat of the coup, watched over by Civil Guards who tried to make them forget the outrages of the first moments of the occupation, treating them with more and more consideration because they were more and more demoralized by the evidence of their solitude, more decimated by drowsiness, fatigue and discouragement, more repentant of having embarked on, having let themselves be embarked on, that odyssey with no way out, more frightened of the future awaiting them and more impatient for it all to be over as soon as possible.
Towards dawn the first attempts to negotiate the surrender of the rebels began. The first came from the Captaincy General of Madrid (or perhaps from the Zarzuela) and the one in charge of carrying it out was Colonel San Martín; the second came from Army General Headquarters and in charge of carrying it out was Lieutenant Colonel Eduardo Fuentes Gómez de Salazar. Both attempts sought to get Pardo Zancada out of the Cortes (the theory was that, if Pardo Zancada left, Tejero would soon follow), but, although San Martín seemed to be the ideal person to achieve it, since he was Pardo Zancada’s friend and immediate superior and because many might have suspected that he was somehow involved in the coup, the first attempt failed; not the second. Lieutenant Colonel Fuentes was an officer stationed in the Exterior Intelligence Division of Army General Headquarters and an old friend of Pardo Zancada’s: both had worked under San Martín’s orders in Admiral Carrero Blanco’s intelligence service, both were on the editorial board of the military magazine Reconquista and both shared radical ideas; that night Pardo Zancada and he had spoken by telephone on several occasions, haranguing each other, but towards eight in the morning Fuentes had accepted that his friend’s remaining in the Cortes no longer made sense and he decided to request his superiors’ permission to speak to him and try to get him to desist. His idea was well received at Headquarters, they granted him permission and, after passing through the command post of the blockade at the Hotel Palace — where Generals Aramburu Topete and Sáenz de Santamaría demanded he accept only surrender conditions he judged absolutely reasonable — shortly after nine he approached the Civil Guards watching over the access gate to the Cortes and asked to speak to Pardo Zancada.
Thus opened the epilogue of the coup. By then it had been several hours since the country had awoken to a rather belated antigolpista fervour, the newspapers were selling out of their special editions with front pages crackling with enthusiasm for the King and the Constitution and invective against the rebels and, although all the cities recovered the hustle and bustle of any winter morning following calls for normality sent out by the Zarzuela and by the provisional government, in Madrid more than four thousand people thronged the area around Carrera de San Jerónimo, disturbed during the night by far-right gangs, cheering for liberty and democracy; by then the occupiers were barely dominating the situation inside the Cortes any more: around eight in the morning the parliamentarians had refused amid shouts of protest to eat the provisions they offered them for breakfast — milk, cheese, sliced ham — around nine the Civil Guards had to put down with the threat of arms the beginnings of a riot led by Manuel Fraga and seconded by several of his associates, and there was still a little more than an hour to go before Tejero would allow the deputies to leave and several dozen Civil Guards would hand themselves over to the loyal forces by jumping out the window of the press room of the new building of the Cortes on to Carrera de San Jerónimo. These symptoms of stampede explain how, unlike Colonel San Martín a few hours earlier, Lieutenant Colonel Fuentes would find a Pardo Zancada predisposed to agree a finale. The negotiation, however, was long and laborious. Pardo Zancada asked to leave the Cortes at the same time as Tejero, he asked to do so at the command of his unit and to be able to hand it over at Brunete headquarters, he asked that only he and none of his men be held responsible, he asked that there be no photographers or television cameras allowed to film the moment of leaving. Fuentes considered all the conditions acceptable except for one. They won’t allow the captains to remain at liberty, he objected. All right, answered Pardo. Then from the lieutenants down. Fuentes left for the Hotel Palace, where they hurried to approve what he’d agreed, as did General Gabeiras from Army General Headquarters, and the lieutenant colonel went straight back to the Cortes to try to convince Tejero as well. After meeting with his officers and guards, Tejero endorsed Pardo Zancada’s demands, but qualified some and added others, among them that it should be General Armada who vouched for the accord with his presence. Fuentes wrote it all down on a sheet of paper, and as he left for the Hotel Palace again he met General Aramburu Topete a few metres from the entrance gate accompanied by General Armada, whom he’d summoned to reinforce the negotiations. There were more secret discussions, more comings and goings between the Cortes and the Hotel Palace, and by about half past one the surrender was complete: on the patio that separates the new building and the old building, on the roof of one of Pardo Zancada’s Land-Rovers, in the presence of him, Tejero, Fuentes and Aramburu Topete, General Armada guaranteed the fulfilment of the points of the pact by signing the sheet of paper where Fuentes had written them down. Half an hour later the evacuation of the Cortes began. It was carried out in an orderly fashion: the Speaker closed the session in due form and the parliamentarians began to file out; a final humiliation awaited them on the patio, however, where Pardo Zancada had lined up his column of soldiers three deep to force them to pass in front of it, ravaged by the anxiety of the sleepless night and observed from afar by the crowd waiting outside the doors of the Hotel Palace, before walking out into freedom on Carrera de San Jerónimo.