‘Mine too,’ Kite replied.
He thought about MOIS sweeping the house and considered the scale and complexity of BOX 88’s interest in Eskandarian. Kite wondered if Luc had any idea about his friend’s alleged links to Lockerbie and the PLFP; did he know that he was spending his summer holiday with a man who could be aiding and abetting terrorism? Xavier came back to the table. Kite shuffled to one side to make room for him and returned to his food. Jacqui was talking to her mother.
‘So we’re meeting Martha in Cannes?’ she said. ‘You’ve spoken to her parents?’
Both Xavier and Kite looked up, dogs on a scent.
‘Martha’s coming?’ said Xavier, gulping wine to cover his surprise.
‘Martha Raine?’ said Kite, a chunk of choucroute briefly lodging in his throat. ‘She’s a friend of yours?’
To dozens of pining boys at Alford, Martha Raine was a mythical beauty, a goddess as unattainable as Katherine Ross or Emmanuelle Béart. Kite had glimpsed her only once, at a party the previous summer, tried to engage her in conversation over a bowl of rum punch – and failed miserably. Later, smoking on the balcony as the party was winding down, he had watched her slipping into the passenger seat of an Alfa Romeo Spider driven by an old Alfordian who had once bowled him out for a golden duck in a house cricket match. The image of her driving off in the car, soft-top down, the man’s hand caressing the back of her neck, had remained with Kite as a glimpse of another world as rarefied and as dazzling as the dining room at La Coupole. He could not believe that she was coming to the villa and that her visit would coincide with the surveillance attack on Eskandarian. Had Strawson and Peele known this and yet said nothing?
‘Yeah, we were at school together when we were younger,’ Jacqui replied. ‘Do you know her?’
Xavier played it cool. ‘She’s all right,’ he said.
‘I was talking to Lockie.’
Kite swallowed the chunk of choucroute with a glug of Sancerre.
‘Me? No. Don’t know her. Met her once briefly. At a party. We talked for ten minutes. She was with a boyfriend. It was last summer, I think. Yeah, last summer.’
Rosamund hid a grin behind her hand, aware of Martha’s beauty and immediately intuiting the impact she had made on Xavier’s friend.
‘She had a boyfriend?’ Jacqui asked, screwing up her face.
‘Yeah, some guy with an Alfa Romeo. Older than us. Left Alford three years ago.’
‘He wasn’t her boyfriend, Lockie. He was just a twat from your school.’
‘You seem to know a lot about her,’ Xavier added.
‘Not really.’ Kite felt his face flush with embarrassment. Christ, if he couldn’t conceal a schoolboy crush on Martha Raine, how the hell was he going to keep his activities for BOX 88 a secret from the Bonnards? ‘We just had a good chat. About books.’
‘What books?’ Rosamund joined in the fun.
‘I don’t remember.’
Xavier began to hum the theme to ‘Our Tune’, a popular slot on Radio 1 in which the DJ, Simon Bates, related a saccharine romantic story sent in by a listener. Kite would have told him to fuck off but because he was wearing a jacket and tie and eating dinner in La Coupole courtesy of the Bonnards, he remembered his manners.
‘Very funny,’ he said. ‘How long is she coming for?’
‘Long enough, I would imagine,’ Rosamund replied, catching her husband’s eye. ‘Long enough.’
33
Cara had sat on the hay bale for an hour watching the light fade and the boys on the laptops working their magic. Rita had told her that they were transmitting text messages into the cottage purporting to come from whoever was in charge of the Iranian operation.
‘There are three men in the house holding Isobel,’ she said. Cara had the impression that Rita had known Kite and Isobel for years and was deeply concerned about them. ‘They’re all Farsi-speakers, taking it in shifts to watch her. The house isn’t rigged with explosives, these aren’t martyrdom, virgin-waiting-for-me-in-paradise bozos. It’s personal, using Isobel as leverage. They want something from Lockie. Their boss is interrogating him, says he’s getting somewhere, getting what he wants.’
‘Do they know that?’ Cara asked. She was uncharacteristically nervous talking to Rita, didn’t want to sound ignorant or out of her depth. ‘Do the people guarding Isobel know that Kite is talking?’
‘Who said he’s talking?’ Rita replied sharply. ‘He’ll be telling them what they want to hear. No way he gives up operational secrets. No way.’
‘Of course …’
‘To answer your question. No, they don’t know what we know. They’ve been blind for the past two hours waiting for a message from London. We’ve given them no signal at the cottage, killed the wi-fi. They still think it’s a local problem, not a bubble. We put together a sequence of texts in Farsi matching the style and character of what they’re used to. Released them fifteen minutes ago, along with some genuine texts from the boss. They got them in bursts, like the weather cleared up and the signal suddenly found an extra bar, then lost it, then found it again. Understand?’
‘I understand,’ Cara replied. ‘Mix’n’match. They won’t know what’s genuine, what’s not.’
‘We’ve told them everything’s fine in London. All going according to plan. That way they start to relax. Could be one of them’s allowed to go to sleep, someone else fancies a wash. Either way they start to let their guard down. Jason wants them dozy before he goes in.’
‘Shock and awe,’ said Cara.
‘Shock and awe,’ Rita repeated. She looked out towards the road.
‘Why don’t you just tell them to release her?’ Cara suggested. ‘Send in a text ordering them to abort?’
Rita’s eyes wrinkled in satisfaction. ‘I like your thinking,’ she said. ‘But what if they kill Isobel before they go? She’s heard their voices, maybe even seen their faces. They’d be leaving a living witness.’
Cara felt chastened. ‘Fair enough.’ she said. ‘So when’s Jason going in?’
Rita looked at her watch. ‘Waiting for sunset.’
‘Do you have a clearer idea of where they’re holding Kite?’ Earlier Cara had seen Rita talking to Jason, looking at a map of East London.
‘Only to within half a mile,’ she replied. ‘They’ve been careful. The genuine texts are always coming from different places. They’re leaving wherever it is they’re holding Lockie, messaging the cottage from random locations, then putting a Faraday around the phone so we can’t trace the signal. Trouble is, this half a mile has a hundred thousand people inside it. You were right, by the way. The metadata is all coming out of Canary Wharf.’
Cara had a mental image of Kite somewhere in the bowels of a high-rise, his hands tied, his mouth gagged.
‘Can they find him?’ she asked, gesturing towards the laptoppers.
Rita shrugged and said: ‘Eventually.’ She looked up at the sky. It looked as though it was going to rain. ‘Ideally, Jase goes into the cottage and talks to one of them, gets an address, narrows things down.’ Cara glanced up at Jason, who was putting on full Special Forces battle rig at the edge of the barn. She wondered how he would go about ‘talking to one of them’. She didn’t imagine it would involve a handshake and a cup of tea. Another soldier had arrived on foot in the previous twenty minutes, also American. He was standing behind Jason carrying a set of night-vision goggles. Cara had the absurd thought that they both looked overdressed.
‘Who are these guys?’ she asked, not expecting an honest answer. ‘SO15? 22?’
‘Our guys,’ Rita replied and looked away. ‘22’ was the colloquial term for the SAS. SO15 was Counter Terrorism Command. As far as Cara knew, Americans were not permitted to serve in either unit.
‘Do they have jurisdiction to do this on UK soil?’
‘Can do it on any soil they like.’
‘There’s no police to make arrests,’ Cara observed. ‘Or are they coming later?’
Rita looked at
her as though she was being naive.
‘No police,’ she said. ‘Not that kind of job.’
Robert Vosse had called Cara an hour earlier, asking for an update. Rita had ordered her to tell him that there was nobody at the cottage, nothing to report, that she was coming back to London on the next train. It was the first time Cara had ever lied to him. Since then, she had felt like a child observing the grown-ups going about their mysterious business, watching and waiting, powerless to help.
‘Status?’ Jason asked.
‘Isobel’s in the lounge, two alongside,’ said Fred, the laptopper from the north of England. On one of his screens Cara could see a live, infra-red, worm’s-eye view of the eastern side of the cottage. Jason had told her the images were coming from the cam net of a Special Forces soldier, codenamed STONES, concealed in a tree line a hundred metres from the back door of the property.
‘Third enemy?’ Jason asked. Behind him, the American soldier put on a battle helmet. The identification tag CARPENTER was sewn into his uniform.
‘Upstairs,’ Fred replied. ‘Movement on the first floor. Could be resting.’
‘Sweet dreams,’ Jason replied. ‘Send the seventh.’
Everybody looked towards Wal, the younger of the two technicians. He was wearing a beanie and looked no more than twenty or twenty-one. Cara hadn’t known what Jason meant by ‘the seventh’ but assumed it was another dummy text message. She was suddenly sick with worry. She had never been involved in an operation of this kind nor been so close to the possibility of success or failure, life and death.
‘Confirm?’ said Wal.
Cara looked at the infra-red images moving back and forth on the screens. A radio in the barn crackled.
‘Vehicle.’
‘Wait!’ Jason snapped, raising his hand. Wal took his hands off the keyboard, like a pianist pausing mid-phrase. Cara had recognised the voice on the radio as a fourth SF soldier, codenamed KAISER, positioned behind a hedgerow further along the road. No cars or vans had driven past the farm since she had been intercepted more than two hours earlier.
‘Description, KAISER,’ Jason whispered on comms.
‘Skoda saloon, blue. Driver alone. Unknown if enemy or local.’
‘Hold the seventh,’ Jason replied. ‘I say again, do not send the seventh message.’
He knew what Cara knew. That whoever was in the car could be an Iranian who would immediately tell the men inside the cottage that the communications coming in and out of the property had been compromised.
‘We stop him?’ CARPENTER asked, just as the car swept past the farmhouse.
‘Too late,’ Jason replied. They all waited in silence, staring at the laptop screens, at the worm’s eye view of the cottage. The headlights burned the infra-red as the vehicle turned into the drive in front of the house. ‘That’s not a delivery guy from Amazon,’ he said. ‘That’s enemy.’
34
‘You’re wasting my time,’ said Torabi. ‘I don’t need to know about your journey to Paris, where you ate, where you smoked cigarettes with Xavier. I need to know about Eskandarian.’
Hossein had left the room, taking Kamran’s gun. It was obvious that he wasn’t coming back. Kite was sure that he was the man Torabi had dispatched to the cottage to kill Isobel.
‘You said you wanted to hear everything about France,’ he said. He had no choice but to keep drawing out the story for as long as possible, giving MI5 time to find him. ‘I’m telling you everything that’s important.’
‘You are taking too long.’
‘Let me speak to my wife. I want to know that she’s safe.’
To Kite’s surprise, Torabi looked at his cell phone and said: ‘That is no longer possible.’
‘Why?’
He did not need an answer to the question: it was written in Torabi’s face. They had lost contact with the house.
‘Luc was with you all the time?’ Torabi asked. The change of subject was further confirmation that something had gone wrong. Kite assumed that BOX had put an electronic bubble around the cottage. ‘What was he doing in Paris before you arrived?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘You drove with him to the house?’
‘Yes,’ Kite replied. ‘We had two cars. If I remember correctly, Luc was driving a Mercedes, Rosamund had a Citroën or a Peugeot. Both rented. She and Jacqui collected Martha from the airport in Cannes.’
Torabi’s phone vibrated. He checked the screen and shook his head, irritated by what he had seen. As he tapped out a reply, he said: ‘Why is that important?’
‘Why is what important?’
‘Collecting Martha from the airport?’
Kite sensed an opportunity to kill more time.
‘It’s important because when I look back to that summer, the first person I think about is her. Not Xavier, not Eskandarian, not Luc. I think about Martha Raine. You should know that, if you’re interested in understanding what I was thinking.’ Torabi set the phone to one side. ‘In spite of everything that happened, Martha became the most important person in my life for the next fifteen years. Xavier and I remained friends. What happened to the others was a tragedy, yes, but it just became a sad story, something I only thought about from time to time.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Torabi replied.
Kite decided to lay it on thick.
‘Surely you remember that feeling you’d get when you were a young man? That crazy, dizzying sensation of longing? I can still picture the first time I saw Martha at the house, as if it was yesterday. What she looked like, what she was wearing. And I recall how embarrassed I felt telling her that we’d met before at a party. She didn’t remember me. At the time I thought: “I’m just another chump. I’m going to be spending a week with this girl in the South of France and it’s going to be torture.” But it didn’t turn out that way. In fact thanks to the encouragement of—’
Torabi stopped him.
‘I get it,’ he said. ‘You fell in love. You’re trying to tell me that it would have been impossible for you – maybe even forbidden – to have an affair with this woman while you were working for MI6.’
‘Exactly!’ Kite replied, pleased that Torabi had understood what he was trying to do. ‘Xavier was deluded. Whatever he told you was bullshit. It would have been impossible for me to spy on Eskandarian. I was just an innocent bystander.’
The Iranian lit a cigarette. For a moment Kite was concerned that he was going to burn him again; he could still feel the sting of the wound on his blistered neck. Instead Torabi remained in his seat, smoking impassively. He was once again the man of the boardroom, as relaxed as he might have been sitting in the lounge of an Abu Dhabi sports club or enjoying an after-dinner cigar with clients in Milan. Kite shifted the position of his leg and felt the weight of the nail against his thigh. If he moved too much there was a risk it would fall out of his pocket onto the floor.
‘If you lie to me, I will know,’ Torabi told him, drawing on the cigarette. ‘Keep talking.’
35
Rosamund and Jacqui drove south in the Citroën. Luc took Xavier and Kite in the Mercedes. They left Paris just after nine o’clock on Thursday, 3 August.
Kite sat in the back seat listening to his Walkman, which still continued to function in the normal way, allowing him to listen to the music – Eurythmics, Supertramp, Tears for Fears – for which he had been ridiculed by his friends at Alford for years. Only if Kite inserted a specially tailored blank cassette, provided by the Falcons, would it also record up to twelve hours of conversation on a set of fresh batteries.
A few miles beyond Clermont-Ferrand, Luc stopped for petrol at an aire on the autoroute. Kite looked around to see if Rosamund had followed them off the motorway, but the Citroën was nowhere to be seen. There was a queue for petrol. As Luc waited to fill up, Kite and Xavier walked towards a makeshift picnic area on a stretch of grass outside the service building. It was a humid afternoon. Clouds were blocking the fierce heat of the sun as they sat a
t a wooden table smoking. Kite could hear the low roar of the motorway, the crying of a small child nearby. He looked back at the petrol pumps, but there was no sign of Luc. He was probably still in the queue. Parents were dragging tired, squabbling toddlers back and forth from the service building. At the next table a family of Germans were eating slices of pizza from paper plates.
‘What were you listening to?’ Xavier asked.
‘Dylan,’ Kite replied, remembering that Blood on the Tracks was the last tape he had inserted in the Walkman. ‘You?’
‘Was just chatting to Dad. Long way. Keeping him company.’
‘Sure.’
A man wearing a black baseball hat was standing directly in Kite’s eyeline at a distance of about twenty feet. He slowly turned around until he was facing the table at which Kite and Xavier were seated. Kite clocked him but looked away without studying his face. An elderly woman was preparing a bowl of water for a panting dog. The man took a step forward. Kite saw that he was carrying a copy of the Financial Times. He was electrified.
‘Need a slash,’ he said, stubbing out the cigarette only two-thirds through. ‘Meet you back at the car?’
‘Sure,’ Xavier replied.
Kite walked towards the entrance to the service building, passing within touching distance of the man. His heart was galloping with the adrenaline surge of making contact with a member of the team. He was trying not to move too fast, too conspicuously. Had BOX been following the Mercedes all the way from Paris? Had something already gone wrong?
Kite moved through a set of sliding doors, remembering what Peele had taught him about meetings in the open. There was a large shop to his left stocked with puzzle books and magazines, bottles of wine and sunhats. Immediately ahead, crowds of people were queuing in a long line for hot food. Above their heads, illuminated signs advertised pizzas and burgers and plats du jour. A buxom woman had set out bowls of olives and cubes of local cheese at a wooden stall in the centre of the hall. There was a smell of burned bread. Kite kept walking, passing an amusement arcade where a man in a white singlet was furiously thumping a fruit machine. Where to go? If he went into the toilets, he might be spotted by Luc or Xavier. If he went into the shop, he could be seen from the picnic area. Kite came to a halt, allowing the man to pass him. Surely there was somewhere in this vast, crowded place where two men could talk and not be disturbed?
Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 25