Box 88 : A Novel (2020)

by Cumming, Charles

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Then tell me about Eskandarian.’

  ‘I’ve already said. I don’t have the special information you need. Xavier knew more about what happened that summer than I do. It was his house, his catastrophe. I was just a guest.’

  ‘A guest who was a spy for MI6.’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous.’

  At least they appeared to have no knowledge of BOX 88. That was one small consolation. Torabi picked up a sheet of paper from behind the television. His physical movements were still eerily smooth and precise. Standing with his legs slightly apart, his back straight, he proceeded to read from the document in a manner that reminded Kite of the priest at the Brompton Oratory.

  ‘Does the name Abolghasem Mesbahi mean anything to you?’

  Kite was possessed of an extraordinary facility for deceit, honed over three decades in the secret world. If something was black, he could persuade a person that it was white; if it was round, he could convince them it was flat. He lied with every instrument at his disposal: his movements and gestures, his words and actions. It was therefore very easy for him to deny ever having heard the name Abolghasem Mesbahi when he knew very well that he had been a senior Iranian intelligence officer who had defected to the West in 1996.

  ‘I’ve never heard of him. It means nothing to me.’

  ‘And Ahmed Jibril?’ Torabi asked. ‘Do you know this person?’

  Again, Kite knew the name very well. Jibril was a former Syrian army captain and erstwhile leader of the PFLP-GC, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He had led one of the many terrorist groups blamed for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988. His name had also been linked to Ali Eskandarian.

  ‘Do I know him?’ Kite replied. ‘No, I don’t know him. Friend of yours?’

  ‘I take it you have heard of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi?’

  That one was too obvious to lie about. Anyone with a passing knowledge of current affairs in the last thirty years knew the identity of the Libyan intelligence officer who had been convicted by a Scottish court of planting the Lockerbie bomb.

  ‘Yes, of course I’ve heard of al-Megrahi. Why are you asking me about Lockerbie? Surely that’s ancient history?’

  It hadn’t been ancient history in 1989. Eskandarian had been suspected of being a key player in the plot to bring down Pan Am 103, an American airliner which had blown up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 11 people on the ground and all 259 passengers and crew. But why was Torabi digging it up now, more than thirty years later?

  ‘Tell me this. When Ali Eskandarian arrived at the house in France, had you been told by MI6 of his links to the PFLP?’

  Torabi was reading names and dates from the sheet of paper, asking Kite questions around which he could duck and weave with the ease of a boxer evading telegraphed punches.

  ‘That’s one of the strangest questions I’ve ever been asked. I feel like it’s almost a waste of time denying it. You obviously don’t believe that I wasn’t working for MI6.’ Hossein was standing beside Kite and stepped into his eyeline. ‘Of course I didn’t know Ali Eskandarian was in the PLO – or whatever it is you just referred to. Do you think my mother would have let me go on holiday with a Palestinian terrorist?’

  Torabi nodded at Hossein, who immediately struck Kite hard across the jaw, catching him a second time on the opposite side of his face as he recovered from the first blow. Too disorientated to speak, Kite instinctively tried to raise his hands to protect himself but felt the wire biting deep towards the bones of his wrists.

  ‘Enough lies,’ Torabi snapped. ‘What did William Peele tell you about Eskandarian’s relationship with the CIA? Did you know that he became friends with Luc Bonnard in Paris in the 1970s?’

  Kite was appalled that Xavier had given up Billy Peele. Somehow he had to stick to his story, but could no longer be sure of how much, or how little, Xavier had told him.

  ‘You think Billy Peele was involved? My fucking history teacher who was on holiday in France? Are you serious? That’s Xavier’s cocaine-induced conspiracy theory. He blamed him for everything, just like his dad blamed the Yanks. Peele was on holiday in the same town as us. Xavier took so much coke in the next fifteen years he convinced himself that one of his old teachers from Alford was watching the house for MI6! Pure paranoia. Now he’s thrown me into the mix as well, from the silence of the grave. It’s total horseshit.’ Torabi glanced quickly at Hossein, as if he was in danger of losing face in front of the prisoner. ‘Yes, it’s true that Luc and Eskandarian became friends in Paris when they were both living there in the seventies. So what? If you want to know what the CIA knew about Eskandarian’s links to the PLO, ask the fucking CIA! How should I know? I was eighteen years old. When I wasn’t stoned, I was drunk. When I wasn’t drunk, I was trying to sleep with girls.’

  Christ, he thought suddenly. Martha. Had they gone for her as well?

  ‘Not the PLO,’ said Torabi, catching Kite’s deliberate mistake. ‘The PLFP. You know very well that in 1988, an Iranian civilian airliner was shot down by the USS Vincennes, an American aircraft carrier operational in the Gulf. All two hundred and ninety people on board, including sixty-six children, were killed. You know very well that according to the confession of Abolghasem Mesbahi, in retaliation for this act of terror the Iranian government of the late Ayatollah Khomeini engaged Ahmed Jibril, a Syrian terrorist, to target an American airliner carrying at least the same number of innocent civilians. You know that with the assistance of his comrades in the PFLP, including Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, Jibril successfully brought down Pan Am 103 by smuggling onboard a barometric pressure device, hidden inside a cassette recorder, which exploded over Lockerbie.’

  ‘Do I know that, Ramin? Do I? You make a habit of assuming a hell of a lot about what I know and don’t know, about who I am and who I used to be. I was working at my mother’s hotel in Scotland when the plane exploded over Lockerbie. If the bomb had gone off ten minutes later, it would likely have come down over my home town. That’s the extent of my memory of what happened. I had no idea Eskandarian was suspected of involvement in the plot until you just brought it up. The last time I thought about Megrahi was when the British government agreed to send him back to Libya to die. I thought that was disgusting. I still do.’

  Torabi was briefly silenced. Kite felt the heat in his swollen jaw from Hossein’s blows. He could not tell if his performance was working or if his lies would lead to yet further misery for Isobel, but he decided to ramp up his denials.

  ‘What is the purpose of this? My wife is pregnant. You are holding both of us against our will. I can’t help you when what you seem to be interested in finding out is so far outside my area of expertise. I will tell you whatever I can remember from France. Perhaps there will be a detail which you can add to something Xavier said which will help you to piece together whatever it is you seem so desperate to know. But, please, release my wife. Let her see a doctor. I’m begging you. This can’t go on much longer.’

  Torabi remained unmoved. He muttered something in Farsi to Hossein, who left the room. Kamran hawked a ball of phlegm into the back of his throat. Kite wondered if he was going to spit it on his neck. He looked around, trying to think of ways of freeing his wrists. There was so little he could do. He remembered the metal bar in the bathroom, the nail protruding from the wall. They were all he had.

  ‘Listen to me,’ said Torabi. He lit a cigarette then suddenly pulled Kite forward, dragging him by the collar so that the chair came with him, scraping across the floor. ‘An hour ago I sent one of my men to kill someone. A weak man who risked my entire operation. His mistake was to be stupid. Your mistake is to treat me as if I am stupid. Here’s what I’m going to do.’ Torabi grabbed Kite’s head and held the lit cigarette against the back of his neck. The ember seared his skin. ‘I am sending that same person to the place where we are holding your wife. If in less than two hours you have not told me everything you and the Britis
h government know about the life and career of Ali Eskandarian – his links to the PFLP, his relationship with the CIA and with Iranian exile groups in France – he has orders to cut open your wife and to kill the child inside her. For all I care she can watch it die as her own life ebbs away. Do you understand what I am telling you?’

  Torabi released Kite’s head and stepped backwards, throwing the cigarette on the ground. The back of Kite’s neck felt as though it had erupted. Tears formed in his eyes, not from fear but from pain. There was a stench of burned hair.

  ‘I understand,’ he gasped.

  He closed his eyes. He was not a man to pray, to believe in divine intervention or the possibility of miracles, but if his hands were somehow to have been untied in that moment, he would not have hesitated to kill Torabi. Kite tried to forget what had happened, to ignore the burning sensation on his skin, to believe that he could save Isobel.

  ‘What is your decision?’ Torabi asked.

  It was the first rule that Strawson and Peele had drummed into him all those years ago. Never confess. Never break cover. Somehow he had to keep talking long enough to give MI5 time to find him without giving away the truth about Eskandarian.

  ‘My decision is the same as it has always been,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you everything I know. Everything I heard about what happened in France when I discussed it with MI6 later.’

  Torabi studied Kite’s face very closely, weighing up whether or not his offer was sufficient to meet his needs.

  ‘In return, I’ll need several things,’ Kite continued. ‘I want the pressure on my wrists to be reduced because I can no longer feel my hands. I want the wires cut and no more torture.’

  ‘Torture?’ Torabi replied, as if he had no idea what Kite was referring to.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he said, twisting his head to expose the flesh that Torabi had burned.

  ‘What else?’

  Kite involuntarily shook his head from side to side in an attempt to ease his pain. ‘I need water. I need something to eat. And a chance, when I’m finished, to speak to my wife, to be reassured that she is safe.’

  ‘Bring him some water,’ Torabi replied flatly, speaking to Kamran in English. ‘Find him something to eat.’ He leaned over, picked up the lit cigarette and extinguished it in an ashtray. ‘As for your wife, you’ve already spoken to her. You don’t speak to her again.’

  26

  The young Lachlan Kite was rarely lost for words, but as he stood in the doorway of the private room at Colenso’s, he could think of nothing to say which might adequately express his surprise and confusion. Billy Peele was grinning at him. Michael Strawson, last seen climbing into a taxi at Killantringan, was suddenly a friend of Peele’s who had materialised at what was supposed to be a private dinner arranged to celebrate the successful completion of Kite’s A levels. Most baffling of all, the timid black woman from the Glasgow train was now a strikingly well-dressed associate of both men, striding towards Kite with a glint in her eye, a glass in her hand and a beaming smile.

  ‘I owe you an explanation, Lockie,’ she said. There was no longer any trace of a West African accent. ‘Blame my colleagues. They wanted me to see what kind of man you are. They wanted me to test you.’ She stuck out her hand. Kite shook it as if in a trance. ‘Rita,’ she said. ‘Thank you for looking after me. Plenty of others would have turned the other cheek.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Kite replied, looking up at Peele for answers.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ he said. ‘Why would you? Hall of mirrors. Come and sit down and have a drink. We’ll explain everything.’

  There was a fourth place laid at the circular table. Kite moved gingerly into his chair, like someone suffering with a bad back. He thought about the TV show Game for a Laugh and looked around the room, searching for hidden microphones and cameras. Perhaps Peele had arranged a surprise party and Xavier and Des were about to appear from a concealed room somewhere in the restaurant. He remembered his mother’s affection for Strawson and briefly speculated that she was going to show up to congratulate him on finishing his exams.

  ‘Wine?’ Peele asked.

  ‘Definitely.’

  Strawson boomed a hearty laugh. Peele could see that Kite was struggling and had the good grace to look slightly ashamed of himself. As he poured the glass of wine, he endeavoured to explain what was going on.

  ‘I haven’t been entirely honest with the boys about my life pre-Alford,’ he said. Rita sat down and flapped a napkin into her lap. She was wearing perfume, a smell as rare and as coveted by Alford boys as bottles of vodka and packets of cigarettes. ‘For Royal Marine, read soldier turned spy. Sixteen years ago I was recruited into—’

  ‘You’re a spy?’ Kite replied. He did not fully understand what this meant – he had an image in his mind of Ian Ogilvy in The Saint – but understood enough to know that what Peele had once been was rare and extraordinarily exciting.

  ‘Of a sort,’ Peele replied.

  ‘Are you all spies?’ Kite asked, looking at them in turn.

  Strawson remained impassive. Kite remembered the money on the floor in Churchill, the riddle of the light switches, the lamp teetering over the edge of the bath. The whole thing must have been some sort of test. But how was it possible for these people to have arranged for three skinheads to scare the shit out of him on the evening train to Ayr?

  ‘We’ll get to that,’ said Strawson, appearing to enjoy his own reply.

  ‘We work for a special alliance of British and American intelligence,’ said Rita. ‘We work for BOX 88.’

  ‘BOX 88,’ Kite repeated quietly. He thought of phone booths, of Post Office deposit boxes, of the year 1988. He was utterly confused. ‘What is that? I’ve heard of MI5, of MI6, the CIA—’

  ‘We are all those things,’ said Strawson. ‘And more.’

  Peele smiled over the rim of his glass. ‘From time to time the Metropolitan Police have referred to MI5 as BOX 500, to MI6 as BOX 850. We’re something rather different. Nothing to do with 1988, nothing to do with neo-Nazis.’

  ‘Neo-Nazis?’ Kite asked.

  ‘The number eighty-eight has been co-opted by certain elements in the far right. Something to do with Heil Hitler, where the number eight stands in for the letter “H”. Never mind.’ He put the glass down. ‘Before we go any further, Lockie, we need to ask you an important question.’

  Strawson nodded solidly, prompting Peele to continue.

  ‘We’re considering the possibility of involving you in an operational capacity. This will require of you a great sacrifice as well as an absolute guarantee that, when you leave this room, you never speak to anyone – not your mother, not Xavier, not anybody – about what has been said here today.’

  Why was he bringing up Xavier? Kite gulped his wine and almost lost control of the glass as he put it down on the table.

  ‘What kind of sacrifice?’ he asked, wondering if they were going to ask him to break the law. He wouldn’t have minded doing so – in fact, the idea of being involved in something illegal was oddly thrilling – but he needed more detail.

  Strawson leaned forward. ‘Do we have your guarantee that you will never speak of this, or any subsequent meeting that might take place, ever again?’

  Kite felt that he had no choice other than to agree. He looked at Peele, as if his tutor might offer him some much-needed words of advice or encouragement, but realised that nothing was going to happen until he promised to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘Sure,’ Kite said. ‘Yeah. I won’t tell anyone.’

  He meant it. He had the evolving sense that these people were capable of anything. Whatever they were about to tell him, he knew that it was something extraordinary from the world, beyond Alford, a secret much larger than school or Killantringan or drunken parties in London. Kite recalled the feeling of being a small child overhearing the whispered conversations of grown-ups in adjoining rooms.

  ‘You want to serve your country? You want to protect your fel
low citizens, keep them safe in their beds?’

  Strawson’s questions unbalanced Kite still further. He could scarcely understand how he could serve his country or protect people from harm in the way that the American had suggested. But again his instinctive response was to agree.

  ‘Of course. Who wouldn’t?’

  ‘Excellent!’ Peele exclaimed. ‘So let’s get on with it, shall we?’

  Kite saw that he had misjudged him; or, more accurately, had failed to detect the secret Peele was hiding even from those closest to him. He was a teacher and a friend, yes, but he was also plainly a man of violence and lies. Kite understood Strawson to be potentially even more devious, packed with American charm and bonhomie but possessed of an iron will and ruthlessness as plain to see as the squalid perversions which lurked inside Lionel Jones-Lewis. As for Rita, what did he know? That she was a convincing actress. That she smelled of the promise of release from Alford, of future summers with girls. It occurred to Kite that she was the only black woman he had ever spent any length of time with in his eighteen and a half years on the planet.

  ‘What kind of things would you need me to do?’

  ‘Good question,’ Strawson replied. But then they had to pause, because two waitresses walked into the room and served the food – a starter of smoked salmon arranged inside neatly cut triangles of crustless brown bread. Only when they had left the room and closed the door behind them did Strawson continue. Even then he showed little interest in answering Kite’s question directly.

  ‘BOX 88 is unknown to both the Metropolitan Police, MI5 and all but a select few government officials and civil servants on both sides of what Billy here likes to refer to as The Pond. We straddle the Atlantic.’

  Kite looked at Rita, remembering that she had described BOX 88 as a ‘special alliance’ between British and American intelligence. He glugged a mouthful of wine.

  ‘The intelligence community in the United States hit a brick wall some time ago,’ Strawson continued. ‘I don’t know how much you know about the CIA, but let’s just say that the Agency hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory since the Second World War. Something had to change. We were operating ideologically, obsessed with the spread of Communism, obsessed with the Soviet threat, neglecting to take a long-term view. As a consequence, we failed to anticipate significant global shifts and political earthquakes. You could cite the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a prime example.’