Peele spent many hours explaining to Kite precisely how he was going to help once he reached Mougins. BOX 88 needed as much information on Eskandarian as possible. That meant Kite reporting on any visitors to the house and providing detailed accounts of the Iranian’s conversations and general behaviour. He was to befriend Eskandarian and earn his trust. Prior to Kite’s arrival, a team of Falcons would arrange for the villa to be bugged, but he would be taking equipment of his own and would be required to assist the Falcons if anything went wrong with their technology. BOX 88 had rented a property several hundred metres from the Bonnard villa which was to be used as a listening post; that is to say, as a location from which agency personnel could run the operation against Eskandarian. Every morning – or whenever he felt it necessary to file a report – Kite would put on his running gear, jog round to the safe house and knock on the door. A member of the BOX 88 team would be there to receive him.
‘Xav doesn’t really think of me as a jogger,’ Kite had pointed out when the plan was first mooted. ‘Isn’t he going to find it a bit weird?’
They were sitting in the Hampstead safe flat playing backgammon. Peele brushed his concerns away.
‘You used to go for runs at Alford, yes?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Kite still occasionally referred to his former schoolmaster as ‘Sir’, a habit which he would quickly grow out of as the summer progressed. ‘I mean, yes. But only in the rugby season. In the winter.’
‘So start going for runs again. Let Xavier know you’ve been keeping yourself fit over the summer. You want to play rugby at university, you enjoy the feeling of being in good shape.’
‘Why don’t you just bug the Bonnards’ house and record everything Eskandarian says? Why do you even need me?’
‘Because it’s not just what Eskandarian says that’s of interest to us. It’s how he behaves, how he treats people, who he meets, what he conceals. Besides, the property will likely be swept in advance of his arrival. The MOIS will want to know that the house is clean and that no interested parties have planted naughty microphones in naughty places.’
‘The MOIS?’
‘Iranian intelligence.’ Peele lit a cigarette and rolled a double-five. ‘They know people like us are going to be keeping an eye on people like Eskandarian, sniffing his bottom, going through his underwear drawer. They know that their top business people are vulnerable to approaches from foreign intelligence services. They’ll want to know that Ali’s letters aren’t going to be steamed open, that the only bugs in his bedroom are spiders and flies, not microphones that record every sweet sentence of his pillow talk.’
‘So he’ll be coming to the villa with other people? With bodyguards? His wife?’
‘No wife – not married. Bodyguard possibly. He might send someone in advance. He might travel with a security detail. He may even have these things forced on him by Rafsanjani. At this stage we simply don’t know. My guess is that a few hours before Eskandarian reaches Cannes, various Iranian gentlemen of limited charm will spend several hours checking every orifice of Luc’s villa for things that shouldn’t be there.’
‘What about staff? The Bonnards are bound to have a cook, a maid, all that kind of thing.’
‘Good question.’ Peele took one of Kite’s checkers and placed it on the spine of the board. Kite swore and wondered aloud how the hell Peele kept getting such lucky dice. ‘The same Iranian gentlemen of limited charm will likely want names and dates of birth of everyone who comes regularly to the house, as well as a reassurance that the chef hasn’t been slipped a hundred thousand francs by the DGSI to put mercury in Ali’s oeufs en cocotte.’
‘What’s the DGSI?’ During classes at Alford, Kite had loved Peele’s way with words, but there were times now when he wished he would speak more plainly. Sometimes it was hard extracting a coherent meaning from his former tutor’s flights of rhetorical fancy.
‘I occasionally allow myself to forget how inexperienced you are, Lockie.’ Peele took another checker and laid it alongside the first. ‘The DGSI is Frog liaison. Domestic intelligence. The French equivalent of MI5, of the FBI in America.’
‘So the French government know that Eskandarian is coming to France?’
‘We must assume so, yes.’ Kite groaned as he rolled a one and a two, unable to release his checkers back onto the board. ‘It’s not unusual for wealthy Iranians to holiday in the South of France, but Eskandarian certainly won’t have wanted to advertise the fact in advance. We have reason to believe he’ll be travelling on a French passport because there’s been no visa requirement at the Iranian end. In any event, it hardly matters. Saturation surveillance from the Frogs might work in our favour. Likewise, if the MOIS become concerned that their man is being watched, they’ll think it’s on the orders of Paris or Washington. The last person they’ll suspect of going through Ali’s dustbins is little old you.’
Kite soon lost the game of backgammon, just as he lost four in every five matches they played. Sometimes they would take the board to a pub in the neighbourhood, other times they might set up in an outdoor café on the Heath. It was all part of his training: Eskandarian was known to be a keen backgammon player and being able to challenge him to a decent game would put Kite at a slight social advantage. Every detail had been worked out by BOX 88, right down to the system of signals with which Kite and the team would communicate once he arrived at the villa. In the absence of a pager – the possession of which Kite would never have convincingly been able to explain to Xavier – they were going to have to rely on what Strawson described as ‘Moscow Rules’.
‘We’re going to want to talk to you and you’re going to want to talk to us,’ the American explained over a fillet steak at Wolfe’s, the hamburger restaurant behind Harrods which was his home away from home. ‘There needs to be a way of doing that which doesn’t involve one of us coming to the villa and knocking on your door, or you going outside and using Luc’s car phone to ring the safe house.’
‘Sure,’ Kite replied. ‘So what do I do?’
‘If you need to tell us something, and you can’t find a legitimate reason to go for a run, put an item of red clothing in the window of your bedroom. We’ll be watching the house. We’ll see it. Then write us a note, fold it up, stick it inside a packet of cigarettes. Billy can teach you how to do all this.’ Peele, who was sitting beside Kite working his way through a cheeseburger and a glass of Côtes du Rhône, nodded. ‘Then you have a choice. If you’re stuck at the house and can’t get into Mougins, use the dead-drop site. There’s a small orchard at the bottom of the garden, at least a hundred yards from the terrace, where you can go for a smoke. Leave the cigarette packet on the wall. It forms a boundary with the access road. We can grab it from the other side. Again, you can rehearse all this with Billy.’
‘What if I can get into Mougins to see one of you in person?’
‘Well that would make life slightly easier,’ Peele interjected through a mouthful of chips. ‘We’ll see you leave, someone will follow you into town – or wherever it is you happen to be going – and will make it very obvious to you that they’re one of us.’
‘How will they do that?’
‘You know the FT? Pink, easily spotted. They’ll be carrying one. Depending on who’s around and who may or may not be watching, you can either pass them the packet in broad daylight or do it in brush contact.’
Kite had long since finished his lunch. He found that he rarely ate as much as his two older companions, preferring to ask questions and digest their answers whenever he found himself sharing a meal with them.
‘What about in an emergency?’ he asked.
‘What kind of emergency?’ Peele looked as if he was finding it difficult to imagine what could possibly go wrong.
‘I dunno. I get rumbled. Eskandarian suddenly leaves.’
As with most things, Strawson had a solution at his fingertips.
‘If the shit has well and truly hit the fan, fly the signal. Use the phone in the house a
nd telephone your mother. If you ask her if there have been any letters sent to you by Edinburgh University, we’ll know that’s a code, that you’re in trouble and we’ll find a way of getting you out. How’s that?’
‘What if she’s not there? What if she doesn’t answer?’
‘Makes no odds. Leave what sounds like a message with the same question. Have there been any letters sent to you by Edinburgh University? That’s a last resort though, Lockie. We don’t envisage circumstances in which you would find it necessary to do such a thing. Fallback only.’
Kite took that as a tacit warning not to compromise the mission unless it was absolutely critical. The American had a way of oscillating between moments of avuncular tenderness and strict, almost dictatorial control; this was certainly an instance of the latter. Kite felt locked in a master-servant relationship with Strawson and saw that Peele was also somewhat in his shadow.
‘And if you need to get hold of me?’
‘Same principle,’ Peele replied. An attractive waitress drifted past the table and smiled at him in a way that made Kite slightly envious. ‘If you see a man or woman lurking with an FT, follow them to a secure place and hear them out. They may want to speak to you directly, they may want to pass you a message. Again, that message will most probably be inside a packet of cigarettes. Read it, absorb it, flush it down the toilet. Try not to go mad and think that every passing stockbroker at Heathrow airport carrying a rolled-up copy of the Financial Times is BOX. You’ll recognise them when you see them. They’ll have a way of making themselves known.’
‘And what if I’m not able to go out? What if it’s raining or we’ve all decided to spend the day at the villa?’
Strawson sounded a sudden, booming ‘Ha!’ and said: ‘You’ve thought it all through, haven’t you, Lockie?’
‘I just want to be thorough.’
‘Quite right too.’
Peele honoured Kite with a proud smile and explained the correct procedure.
‘If you’re stuck at the villa, wander down the drive. Look at the wall on either side of the gates. If it’s marked in chalk, that’s a signal that we need to talk to you. Find an excuse to go for a run or, better still, walk into Mougins to buy a coffee or some aspirin. We’ll find a way of letting you know what we need to let you know.’
As the days passed, such responses became commonplace, both from Peele, whom Kite saw all the time, and from Strawson, whose appearances were more infrequent. After the meal at Wolfe’s, for example, Peele role-played a number of different scenarios so that Kite became comfortable with the writing of secret messages, brush contacts and clandestine meetings. He found the work intensely interesting and rarely felt out of his depth. It was only when Strawson turned up at the Hampstead flat to talk about bugs that Kite began to feel he was at risk of getting in over his head.
‘They’re not like the movies,’ the American explained, ‘however much we’d like them to be.’ He was wearing chinos and a pressed shirt and was gregariously combative in a way Kite hadn’t seen since Killantringan. ‘I can’t just leave a wristwatch on a bookshelf and hope it’ll pick up three weeks’ worth of conversations. At BOX we like to call these things “tentacles”. For a tentacle to work, it needs to be connected to a power source. That’s why so many of them are found in light fixtures and televisions.’
This had all been news to Kite, who quickly realised that Strawson was preparing him for what would undoubtedly be the most risky part of his assignment.
‘You have a Nintendo Gameboy you use all the time, right?’
‘I do,’ Kite replied.
‘Something like that the Falcons can refit as a voice-activated microphone. It’ll maybe last two days on modified battery power. Same applies to your Walkman. Anything that can be left lying around in plain sight, hidden in a cupboard or drawer, which won’t seem out of place to passers-by if they happen upon it. These are the kinds of things we’ll be looking at when we put you in place. Another idea we had for the Bonnard villa was a ghetto blaster.’
‘You can’t call it that!’ Peele exclaimed. Kite started laughing. ‘Nobody calls it a “ghetto blaster”, Mike. You mean a tape deck. A stereo.’
‘I’m the boss here and I prefer ghetto blaster.’ Strawson tacitly acknowledged that the term sounded ridiculous. ‘We can leave one at the villa, make it look like something the great-uncle used to own. It’ll be converted to relay conversations when connected to a power source.’
‘Won’t the MOIS find it if they sweep the house?’ Kite asked.
He had remembered what Peele had said about Iranian officials coming to the villa prior to the Bonnards’ arrival.
‘They will if we leave it there for them to find it. Trick is to take advantage of the window of time between the MOIS giving the place the all-clear and the Falcons arriving at the house with whatever tentacles they’ve cooked up. That might be a two-day window, might be two hours, we don’t exactly know yet. We have a number of devices we like to use in these situations – lamps, hi-fis, anything with a power cable – that we’ll hope to have in place by the time you get there.’
‘And if they’re not in place?’ Kite asked.
‘Then we work out what to do next. You turn up with a Gameboy and a Walkman, no way anybody’s going to ask to take them apart. We fail to fulfil our side of the bargain – let’s say there’s not enough time or opportunity to rig the house before the Bonnards arrive – then maybe yes, we ask you to get inventive and move some items into place.’ Kite was not at all sure precisely what Strawson was asking him to do. It sounded vague but perilous. ‘The most important thing is this. You don’t take any unnecessary risks.’ The American’s eyes widened in expectation that Kite would understand the importance of what he was being told. Kite, still wary, produced an encouraging nod. ‘You never do anything until you’re a hundred per cent convinced the coast is clear. You don’t get up, creep around in the middle of the night. You don’t sneak out during dinner and hope that nobody notices you’re gone. You’re not Bruce Willis. You’re sure as shit not James Bond. We’re not putting sedatives in the iced tea so that Special Agent Kite can go about his business undisturbed. You have something to do for the Falcons, you wait until everyone is out of the house. And I mean everyone. This doesn’t work any other way.’
Kite tried to imagine circumstances in which he was left alone in the villa while Xavier and the rest of the Bonnard family took off for the day with Eskandarian. He couldn’t think of one, but didn’t envisage that it would be too difficult to plant a bug without being seen by a third party. He could fake an illness, pretend to be suffering from sunstroke or a bad back. The possibilities were limitless.
‘What about photographing stuff?’ he asked. From day one he had hoped that he would be given a miniature camera, like something dreamed up by ‘Q’ Branch. ‘A couple of days ago Billy suggested you might need me to copy documents, that kind of thing.’
Strawson responded with another strong caveat against taking unnecessary chances.
‘Look, Lockie: again, only if the place is empty and you can guarantee being left undisturbed. Even then, is it likely Eskandarian is going to be leaving sensitive documents lying around the house? Maybe, maybe not. You own a camera?’
‘I do,’ Kite replied. ‘Olympus Trip.’
‘That’s a 35 mm, right?’ Strawson looked quickly at Peele. ‘We’ve had a lot of success with those in the past. Modified lens for close-up work. Trips are good because they’re small enough to fit into your pocket. If you do get the chance and the coast is clear, we’d be interested in Iranian and Libyan ministerial papers, documents in Arabic, Russian or Farsi, anything and everything that relates to subways, airlines, technological components, blueprints, diagrams of any kind. Mail is likely to be sent to the house, there may be government communiqués, bank statements and so forth. You see anything from Malta, you holler.’
‘Malta? Why Malta?’
‘Just holler.’ Strawson again caught P
eele’s eye but, as ever, it was impossible to decrypt the secret that passed between them. ‘It’s an outside chance Eskandarian will leave anything out, but it’s worth at least giving ourselves that possibility. I’ll make a note to talk to the Falcons, and Billy can give you more detail once the camera is ready.’
By the time July drew to an end, Kite had been given a complete picture of what his work in France would entail. He was under no illusions that his friendship with Xavier, not to mention his reputation as a decent and trustworthy human being, would never recover should he be exposed. Everyone at Alford would know what he had done; the scandal would affect him for the rest of his life. This realisation in itself did not leave Kite feeling particularly anxious; if anything, he was exhilarated by the challenge BOX 88 were setting him and convinced that he could meet it. What concerned him was that Strawson and Peele weren’t being completely candid about the risks he was facing.
It was perhaps for this reason that Kite’s subconscious began to get the better of him. On at least four separate nights in Hampstead he was beset by dreams of inadequacy. In one textbook scenario, he marched out to bat for Alford in a cricket match at Lord’s only to discover that he had failed to put on his pads and gloves; in another, he was trapped in a spotlight on stage in front of an expectant audience of his peers with no clue as to what role he was playing nor what lines he was supposed to have learned. Needless to say, he said nothing about these dreams to Peele, instead consoling himself with Strawson’s views on the chances of being caught.
‘They’re never going to catch you because you’re never going to do anything suspicious. They find a microphone, you didn’t put it there. They search your room, somebody planted whatever they found. Carrying something incriminating? Same deal, you have no idea how it got there. You left your bag unattended, your room unlocked, bad people took advantage of that and tried to frame you. You’re just nice guy Lachlan Kite, son of Cheryl, old Alfordian, friend of Xavier Bonnard. Nobody knows your real mission is preventing the deaths of tens of thousands of people on the New York subway. There are no circumstances in which you can admit to working for BOX 88. Understand? Never confess, never break cover, never admit to being a spy.’
Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 23