Nothing from Jason. Nothing from the two men staring into their laptops. Cara filled the silence.
‘I spoke to Kite,’ she said. ‘Like you said, I was running an alias. Emma. Said I’d met him at the Frieze art fair. We know Kite collects paintings, it seemed like a good route in.’
Again, no response from Jason. Just an expressionless stare that demanded: Keep going.
‘He obviously saw through the legend. Didn’t trust me. Gave me the card, hoping I’d use it. I did just that. The rest is history.’
Jason appeared to be making an assessment of whether or not Cara was telling him the truth.
‘That was your only interaction?’
‘Face to face, yes. But a lot has happened since then.’
She asked for some water. He gave her a litre-bottle labelled Highland Spring which tasted as though it had come out of a tap on the farm. Cara told Jason about the Middle Eastern man at the funeral, the rented Jaguar, the switch at the car park, the kidnapping of Kite and the murder of Zoltan Pavkov. After fifteen minutes the older woman came back in the Skoda and introduced herself as Rita. Rita started listening to the story as well. Cara had the sense that one of the two men using the laptops was taking down everything she said. By the time she had finished, she was hungry. She asked for some food and was given a stale sausage roll. There was still no signal on her mobile phone. She asked if BOX 88 had put an electronic bubble around the house so that the people holding Isobel would have no way of contacting their team.
‘Exactly,’ said Rita. She seemed impressed that Cara had correctly deduced this. Either that or she just had one of those faces which was friendly in all weathers.
‘Fred is across their comms,’ Jason explained, scratching the back of his neck. Fred was the man with the northern accent who had come to Cara’s aid. He briefly looked up and smiled. ‘London is translating what they send in, translating what they send out. Whoever’s inside wants to speak to his boss, wants to know what to do with Isobel. We’re going to clone the incoming messages, assume the identity of whoever is giving them their orders, tell them to move the prisoner to a new location. When they do that, we go in.’
Go in, thought Cara, knowing what that meant but not wanting to look troubled by the prospect. She had realised that neither Rita nor Jason had any idea who had kidnapped Kite. Nor did they know where he was being held.
‘Stick to Canary Wharf,’ she told them. Rita shot Jason a glance. One of the laptoppers leaned over and scratched an itch on his ankle. On the furthest of the two screens Cara could now see infra-red images from the cottage. ‘That’s where the van was last seen,’ she said. ‘That’s where they killed Zoltan.’
‘Canary Wharf?’ Jason asked, as if Cara might have made a mistake.
‘Yeah,’ she told him. ‘Why?’
‘Nothing.’
Cara had been around spies long enough to know when someone was keeping something from her.
‘What’s in Canary Wharf that’s so important?’ she asked.
‘Mind your own business.’
28
Before the meeting in the Windsor restaurant, Lachlan Kite had thought of himself as a reasonably settled, confident person. He was not beset by many of the commonplace, day-to-day insecurities of the young and felt that he had adjusted well to the death of his father. He knew that he was slightly vain and self-aware, but these were hardly sins of great magnitude for a young man of his age. For example: Kite consciously tried to model his appearance on River Phoenix, growing out his hair as much as the Alford rules had allowed (nothing below the collar, no dyes, no buzz cuts) and letting it fall moodily across his eyes whenever a girl hoved into view. In this respect he was no different to many of his friends, who variously copied Morrissey or Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot in their attempts to look cool. Kite was hard-working, ambitious and looking forward to the future. He was fun to be around, loyal to his friends and a dutiful, if occasionally exasperated, son. Unlike many of his fellow students at Alford, he felt equally comfortable in the presence of men and women. He could look at himself in the mirror and feel sure that he was more or less on the right path and that he had every chance of living a long, happy life.
After the meeting in Windsor, Kite felt completely unmoored. It was as if everything he had imagined might happen to him in the future, his sense of himself, even his attitudes towards his friends and family, had been turned on its head. Saying yes in the restaurant had been easy: after all, who could turn down such an opportunity? Within a few days, however, the prospect of going to France and carrying out what he had agreed to do struck Kite as being morally reprehensible. He was being asked to spy, to deceive his oldest and closest friend. He was being invited to lie and to betray, to appear to be one sort of person when in fact he was quite another. Worse, he would be spying in a house belonging to a family who had nurtured and cared for him for five years. It was duplicity of the worst kind. Kite could not tell his mother what he was intending to do nor confide in any of his friends. Had his father still been alive, he too would have been ignorant of the choice his son had made. Would Paddy Kite have approved of what he was about to do – or been appalled that his son had so easily agreed to slip into a double life?
In the days that followed the meal in Colenso’s, there had been another stone in Kite’s shoe. Whenever he cast his mind back to the Easter weekend, he understood the purpose of Strawson’s visit to Killantringan and accepted that it had been necessary to test him: to organise the power cut, for example, and to ensure that his mother was delayed in Stranraer so that BOX 88 could analyse how he reacted under pressure. Yet at a distance of several weeks from these events he felt oddly humiliated, not to mention angry that Strawson had so carelessly jeopardised his mother’s business. A group of adults of vastly wider life experience had set him up. The feeling was not dissimilar to Kite’s memories of his first weeks at Alford when, as a guileless thirteen-year-old, Cheryl had thrust him into an ecosystem of mindboggling social and historical complexity, expecting him to come to terms with traditions and rules about which Kite had known next to nothing. Lionel Jones-Lewis had presented himself to Kite as a warm, friendly father figure, only to be revealed within a matter of weeks as the sort of man who had become a schoolmaster solely so that he could live his life surrounded by attractive teenage boys. Why should Kite do the bidding of people who had consciously manipulated him in such a way? He had believed in Rita’s predicament on the train and felt foolish for saving her from thugs whom Strawson confessed had been working for BOX 88. Kite was stubborn and determined and proud. He was intrigued by the nature of the French operation, flattered to have been singled out for such a prestigious job and drawn to these unusual characters from the secret world. Certainly he did not think that Strawson was in any way as seedy nor as deceitful as his former housemaster. Nevertheless, on several occasions he thought about knocking on Billy Peele’s door and calling the whole thing off.
What stopped him was the potential threat from Eskandarian. The idea that he might be able to play a role – however small – in preventing a terrorist atrocity in the United States convinced Kite that he should set his ethical concerns to one side and commit himself to BOX 88. At his second meeting with Strawson and Rita Ayinde in London’s Ravenscourt Park a few weeks later, Kite confirmed that he was happy to go ahead.
‘I’m relieved,’ said Rita. ‘We wondered if you might have been having second thoughts.’
‘It wasn’t an easy decision,’ Kite told her. ‘I don’t feel great about Xav.’
‘Of course you don’t.’ They were walking along a broad promenade in bright sunshine, Rita on one side of Kite, Strawson on the other. ‘Think of it as doing him a favour. If his family are giving shelter to a terrorist financier, the sooner they find out, the better.’
Kite was still unclear what was so important about Xavier’s ‘godfather’. As they made half a dozen circuits of the park, Strawson told him everything he needed to know.
‘Short of recruiting someone at the highest levels of the Iranian government, we couldn’t be looking at a more influential figure in Iran than Ali Eskandarian. Son of a wealthy bazaari who allowed him to run around Paris in the 1970s, he was a rich kid on the side of the Revolution. Worked in the oil ministry from ’79 onwards, moved to Health in ’83, starts spending more and more time in Russia, which is when he first appears on CIA radar. Langley didn’t think he was important enough to keep tabs on. The less said about that, the better. Maybe they were too busy on Iran-Contra. We have Eskandarian attending conferences all over the world. Gets himself a reputation as a westernised liberal even when MI6 see him making contact with the PFLP – that’s the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Even then the Brits don’t think he’s worth watching.’
‘More fool them,’ said Rita.
‘Eskandarian moved into the private sector in ’85, made a ton of money, but all the while he was maintaining links with senior people in the regime apparatus. Right now, we have him as the ten-million-dollar bagman for Lockerbie. We think he’s taking orders from the very top in Tehran.’
‘Why do you think that?’ Kite asked, not wanting to sound naive.
‘Eskandarian advises the new guy in charge, Rafsanjani, behind the backs of the senior clerics,’ Strawson replied. ‘Back in January he arranges a trip to France, wants to see his old friend from Paris days, Luc Bonnard. Khomeini apparently says no problem, go to Luc, go to France. Then Khomeini dies. They have an election coming up in Iran at the end of July. Rafsanjani is expected to win and be confirmed as the new president. Does Eskandarian cancel his trip? No, he does not.’
‘I don’t really get it,’ said Kite. So much information had been thrown at him that he was beginning to feel swamped.
‘The question is straightforward,’ the American replied. ‘What’s so important that Rafsanjani is prepared to let one of his closest friends and advisers, potentially the financier for Lockerbie, roam around France for two weeks in August, right after he might become president? What did Khomeini set in train that we don’t know about? The world has been looking at Tiananmen since the spring. Nobody is paying any attention to a highly influential Iranian go-between who arranged a so-called vacation in France six months ago and is sticking to it, regardless of the fact that the ayatollah is now dead and his country in turmoil. What is Eskandarian planning? Who is he meeting? And how does Luc Bonnard fit into all this?’
Kite had an almost photographic memory and could file away names and dates and events with relative ease. Nevertheless, he wished that he had been permitted to write notes on what he was being told.
‘Luc?’ he replied. ‘He’s involved in this?’
Ayinde caught Strawson’s eye, but neither responded directly to Kite’s question. Instead, Rita said:
‘Think of yourself as someone who is helping to fill in a corner of a very large canvas. There may be something you discover in France – something you’re completely unaware of but which nevertheless makes sense to us – which could later become crucial to our understanding of who exactly we’re dealing with and what their precise intentions are.’
‘So how do I go about doing that?’ Kite asked. ‘How do I fill in this canvas?’
They were standing in a tunnel beneath a railway line at the south-eastern entrance to the park. Strawson came to a halt as a train thundered overhead.
‘It’s easy,’ he said, obliged to step to one side as a child ran past them. He raised his voice so that he could be heard above the noise of the train, his words echoing in the dark tunnel. ‘We spend the next three weeks teaching you.’
29
How well can you ever know a person?
In the six years that Isobel Paulsen had been involved with Lachlan Kite – falling in love, getting married in Stockholm, becoming pregnant with their child – she had always known that a day like this would finally come. Eighteen months into their relationship he had told her that he wasn’t in fact an oil trader, that when he went to work in Canary Wharf he wasn’t going to the headquarters of Grechis Petroleum, he was instead going to a suite of offices occupied by individuals working in secret on behalf of British intelligence. The revelation in itself hadn’t particularly surprised her; Isobel had always suspected that Kite was hiding something from her. He was clever, physically fit, charming and unsentimental: it made sense that he was a spy. What troubled her was the realisation that his past would now remain hidden from her forever. There were vast tracts of his life about which she would know nothing: operations, successes, failures, lovers. He had spoken several times of a former girlfriend, Martha Raine, the woman who had telephoned him from New York with the news of Xavier’s death. Isobel came to understand that Martha had been inextricably linked with Kite’s early years as an intelligence officer; a woman she had never met had access to a greater intimacy with her husband than she did. Isobel was envious of this, no question. She tried to tell herself that Kite’s past was no different to anyone else’s. We all have secrets, she thought. We all have shame. We have all had relationships which have shaped us. Yet somehow what had passed between Martha and Kite was richer in Isobel’s imagination, more complex and meaningful, than any of her own entanglements.
When she saw her husband’s face on the screen of the cell phone, Isobel did not panic. She did not worry that Kite looked tired and shaken, that his life was at risk or that she might never hold him again. She had seen Kite at his most vulnerable – in illness, in grief, in personal tragedy – and knew that he was strong enough to withstand whatever was happening to him. She did not doubt him.
‘I’m fine,’ she had told him, trying not to worry him or make him fear for the baby. ‘Why are they holding you? You haven’t done anything. They think you’re a spy—’
He would have understood that she was trying to protect him. They were talking to one another without talking to one another, speaking intimately without the scum who were holding them understanding. Isobel was confused and worried, yes. She did not know why these men had taken her hostage, nor why Kite was being held captive by their associates. She did not know where he was or what they wanted from him. Yet she had never felt so extraordinarily close to him. This was their shared fate, their crisis, their test. It had nothing to do with the past, with Kite’s secrets, with Martha Raine. They would survive it together and emerge stronger and happier than they already were. They would have their baby.
Isobel made a conscious decision to think like this. Doing so was the one way she could help Kite and preserve her own peace of mind. Taking this approach was the best protection for her child.
It was a version of prayer.
30
By the middle of July, Killantringan had been packed up and sold off, leaving Kite effectively homeless. Rather than go to Sligo to stay with his extended family, he moved into a BOX 88 safe flat in Hampstead, telling his mother that he was staying with friends, telling friends that he was staying with his mother. Over the course of the next three weeks, Peele taught Kite how to clear a dead letterbox, how to discern if he was under surveillance and how to carry out a brush contact in a crowded place. All these were elements of tradecraft which, Kite was assured, would likely serve no useful purpose in France. Nevertheless, it was important for him to familiarise himself with the basic principles of espionage so that they became second nature to him, ‘like throwing a rugby ball or riding a bike’ as Peele put it. In his former teacher’s assessment, there was a ‘negligible chance’ that Kite would be placed under surveillance during the operation. After all, he was Xavier’s best friend, not a stranger to the family who had wandered in off the street. If the French or the Iranians were on the lookout for trouble, their lenses would be trained on Ali Eskandarian, not on Lachlan Kite. That was the beauty of it: Kite was going to be hiding in plain sight, reporting on everything going on at the villa, and all the while keeping up the pretence of being a diffident eighteen-year-old school leaver with nothing on his mind but lyin
g by the pool with a Milan Kundera, drinking beer and working on his suntan.
So much of what Peele taught him was, initially at least, confusing to the eighteen-year-old Kite. He had known that France, like the UK and a great many other countries, had highly sophisticated intelligence services capable of everything from surveillance to state-sponsored assassinations. Yet prior to his training, his knowledge of the secret world had extended to a handful of Ian Fleming novels and a rental of Defence of the Realm from the video shop in Stranraer. Kite had never seen the television adaptations of Smiley’s People and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He was too young to remember the public unmasking and subsequent reputational disgrace of Sir Anthony Blunt. He had seen spy movies in which people unscrewed the handsets of telephones and dropped bugs into the mouthpiece, watched Bond films in which Roger Moore or Timothy Dalton were strapped to chairs and interrogated under bright white lights. Such incidents belonged to a different world, a dimension of fantasy bearing little resemblance to the experience of learning at Peele’s knee and accumulating knowledge on the workings of BOX 88.
On the first day at the Hampstead flat, for example, Kite was instructed to memorise the names of every metro station on the New York subway in case they appeared as targets for attacks on a document at the villa or were mentioned during conversation. A memo from Strawson suggested that Kite should also familiarise himself with the city’s history and culture, on the basis that a codename for the alleged plot might make reference to some aspect of New York life of which Kite was unaware. Peele duly drew up a list of names and places – from DAKOTA to LIBERTY, from IDLEWILD to ROCKEFELLER – covering four sheets of A4 paper, front and back. He did the same for chemical and biological weapons, telling Kite to listen out and look for certain keywords – among them BIOPREPARAT, FERMENT, EKOLOGY – as well as scientific terms – ATROPINE, PRALIDOXIME, SARIN – which reminded Kite of sitting his chemistry O level.
Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 22