‘Didn’t you ask Xavier that in Paris? Before you killed him?’
Torabi feigned mock outrage. ‘I didn’t kill your friend,’ he said. ‘Your friend killed himself. He was dying from the moment you betrayed him in France.’
‘We’ve been over this.’ Kite stayed in character, stung by the accusation and privately conceding that it was at least partly true. Everything that went wrong in Xavier’s life went wrong from that moment onwards. He said: ‘I was amazed by what happened between him and Hana. I told him he was crazy, that it was a stupid risk, but they were just drunk kids looking to have a good time.’
‘But she was so much older than he was,’ Torabi argued. ‘It is Hana who should have been more discreet, no?’
‘I agree.’ Kite was baffled that Torabi was so concerned about the incident. By cuckolding his father, had Xavier somehow humiliated Torabi?
‘Did my father ever find out?’ he asked.
‘Not to my knowledge, no.’
This, too, was true. Kite had never mentioned it to him. There was a knock at the door. Kamran entered holding a piece of paper and a small bottle of Volvic, both of which he passed to Torabi. Torabi read the note, scrunched it up and let it drop to the floor.
‘Where’s my wife?’ Kite demanded. ‘What’s happening out there? Was that message to do with her?’
He was worried that the trail had gone cold. Wherever he was being held, MI5 had not been able to locate him. The Iranian unscrewed the Evian and drank the contents in four long gulps.
‘Never mind about that,’ he said, dropping the bottle at his feet. It landed within a few inches of the balled-up note. He ordered Kamran to leave the room then said: ‘Why did you take me to the attic?’
‘Excuse me?’
It was the single flaw in Kite’s account, the one anomaly in what had otherwise been a watertight version of the afternoon’s events.
‘Why did you want to hide in the attic?’ Torabi shrugged his shoulders and frowned mockingly, as if to suggest that he had finally cornered Kite in a lie from which there was no logical escape. ‘There was the whole house – the ground floor, the upstairs bedrooms. Why did we go to my father’s quarters?’
Kite gambled that Torabi’s memory was not as detailed nor as vivid as his own.
‘Because we were playing hide-and-seek! We wanted to win. Ali – sorry, I mean your father’s – rooms were a mystery to everyone in the house. Martha had never been up there. I wondered if she and Xavier would even think to look in the attic. It felt like it was out of bounds. It seemed the perfect place to hide.’
‘Then why did you leave me alone?’
‘I didn’t leave you alone! You were a nine-year-old boy. I was trying to make sure you had fun. There were two rooms up there so it made sense for us to split up. As I remember, you were excited by the idea of being on your own. Don’t you remember that?’
Torabi ignored this. ‘What did you do in the opposite room?’ he asked. ‘What was in there?’
Kite had to be careful. If Torabi had a memory of the noise of a camera taking pictures, if the young José had come out onto the landing and pressed his ear to the closed door or even looked through the keyhole or a gap in the frame, he was finished.
‘I’ve already told you. It was your father’s office. I had sat with him the previous afternoon telling him about Bijan.’
‘So it was not a mystery to you?’
Kite shook his head, as if to suggest that Torabi was twisting his words. ‘I said the attic was a mystery to Martha and Xavier, not to me. I didn’t think they’d come up and look for us. They’d assume it was out of bounds.’
‘You did not take photographs?’
Kite summoned a look of outrage.
‘What? Photographs? No. Why?’
Kite looked up. Kamran seemed to understand something vital about the nature of the conversation. It felt as though the two men were suddenly going to produce some ghastly rabbit out of a hat which would expose every lie and double-cross Kite had worked so hard to conjure.
‘It is what a spy would do,’ Torabi said quietly.
‘Is it? Take a risk like that while playing a game of hide-and-seek with a little boy? An eighteen-year-old waiting for his A-level results? I don’t think so.’
Kite still did not know with any degree of certainty whether or not José had heard the noise of the camera. Perhaps he had, but now had no recollection of it. Perhaps Xavier had told him something about Kite’s mysterious, emerging passion for photography that summer which had led Torabi to draw the obvious conclusion.
‘So you just hid in the room? Behind the chair? On your own?’
‘No, I was in there with Bono and Meryl Streep. Yes! I was on my own. What else was I supposed to be doing? Making a cup of tea?’
To Kite’s surprise, Torabi appeared to accept this. He nodded at Kamran, issued an order in Farsi and the chauffeur left the room.
‘When did you find out that Eskandarian was your father?’ Kite asked. He wanted to try to regain control of the conversation.
‘You don’t ask the questions. I ask the questions.’
‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘So go ahead and ask.’
‘Was it true, your description of my father’s reaction? When I cut my head? That he embraced me, he embraced my mother?’
Kite finally saw what it was all about. Absent fathers. Absent love. A missing life. Torabi was on a mission of revenge against the people who had betrayed Ali Eskandarian. If Kite could persuade him that he understood that, that he had played no part in what had happened to his father, he might yet survive.
‘It’s all true,’ he said, playing on the Iranian’s sentimentality. ‘He loved you very much, Ramin. Should I call you Ramin or do you prefer José?’
‘You call me Ramin. That is my name now.’
Kite continued, improvising: ‘Knowing what I know about fathers and sons, he must have hated the fact that another man was raising you as his own. What happened to your mother’s husband, by the way? Is he still alive? He didn’t come that day.’
‘Don’t fucking patronise me.’ Torabi’s patience had suddenly snapped. ‘You think I’m stupid? You think I can’t see through you?’
Kite tried to respond, pulling at the bonds on his hands, but Torabi shouted him down, crossing the room.
‘You’re a trained liar. You pretend to be the innocent man, but you were the snake in that house, the rat betraying your friends. Does Martha Raine know who you are? When I get to her, when I find her in New York, will she tell me who Lachlan Kite really was?’
‘You leave Martha alone.’
Torabi came to within a foot of Kite’s chair and screamed into his face: ‘Who was my father?! Was he the man you say he was?!’
His spittle was all over Kite’s face. Kite tried to wipe it off on his shoulder but could barely touch it with his jaw. He spat on the ground to clear the saliva from his mouth.
‘What’s the point?’ he said. Torabi backed away. ‘You think I’m lying. You think I’m making things up—’
The Iranian turned again, shouting.
‘Was he a terrorist? Tell me!’ Kamran burst into the room, but Torabi screamed at him to leave. ‘Did he betray my country?’ His face was flushed with angry despair. ‘Was my father a murderer? Was he?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Kite was worried by how much Torabi potentially knew. Surely it wasn’t possible that somebody had sold him the files on Eskandarian? ‘Your father was the man I have described,’ he said. ‘How could he have been a terrorist? How could he have betrayed Iran?’ He saw that Torabi’s need for answers was not in any dimension political. It was personal, a question of family honour. ‘Your father loved you,’ he said. ‘I saw it with my own eyes.’
‘Did you know what was going to happen to him? To Luc?’
Again Kite thought of the files, of the deeper truth about Eskandarian, but he concealed this from Torabi, saying only: ‘Of course I didn’t. You’re ver
y confused, Ramin. Let me tell you what happened, at least from my point of view. Let me tell you what I came to understand after everything was over. Perhaps I can put your mind at rest.’
The Iranian was breathing heavily. He abruptly sat down on the sofa, looking around for more water.
‘The note,’ he said, indicating the balled-up piece of paper on the floor.
‘What about it?’ said Kite.
‘Hossein contacted me when he reached your village. He will call again in one hour. You have this time to answer the last of my questions and to tell me the truth about my father. Sixty minutes. No more.’ Torabi tapped his head and nodded ominously. ‘I have remembered everything you have told me so far. I am comparing it with what I already know. If anything else in your account is out of place, if I suspect again that you have misled me, you will not leave this room alive.’
47
The raid was on.
Jason turned towards CARPENTER, cocked his weapon to chamber a round and started jogging towards the road. Cara heard the order on comms.
‘STONES, KAISER, we’re mobile. See you in the house.’
She walked into the barn and stood behind Wal and Fred. Rita was beside her, staring at the laptop screens. Cara kept thinking about the photograph of Hillary and Obama watching the bin Laden raid in the White House. Their own surroundings seemed absurd by comparison: a filthy farmyard, a disused barn, drizzle falling in the English night.
People were going to die in front of her. The camera on Jason’s helmet would be a second-by-second snuff movie playing out in real time. What she was about to see was what had been happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Syria and Somalia, since she was a young girl. It was just another operation to Jason and CARPENTER, just another gig for KAISER and STONES. To Cara, it was both shocking and extraordinarily exciting.
She could already make out the front door of the cottage, the paint blue-black in the infra-red lens of Jason’s camera. There was a sequence of clicks like Morse code. STONES and KAISER blew the back door with plastic explosives a split second after Jason and CARPENTER came through the front. Wal was feeding live positional information on comms as Cara heard a quiet burst of gunfire and saw a glowing body drop to the ground in the living room. Jason shouted, ‘Isobel! Get behind me!’ and a second figure, surely Kite’s wife, moved forward and disappeared to the right of the screen. Simultaneously the helmet camera moved fractionally to the left and a second Iranian dropped to the floor in a slow, dayglo blur of gunfire.
‘Two left,’ said Rita, her voice preternaturally calm.
There was a gentle tap-tap, soft as a child blowing through a straw, and a third man slumped against a wall inside the house. He had been shot in the head and chest. The helmet cam on STONES showed a fourth Iranian coming down from the first floor, shouting threateningly, as all the others had shouted. STONES took him out and he fell to the bottom of the stairs.
It was already over. Jason continued to snap commands, the helmet camera showing doors opened, cupboards searched, rooms cleared of threats. STONES and KAISER went back up the stairs and did the same, kicking open the bathroom door and bursting into a second bedroom. Cara heard Jason say, ‘Location secured,’ but they all knew that it had ended once the fourth man had been killed on the stairs. CARPENTER had taken Isobel outside and was walking her towards the barn. Cara could see shaky footage of the lane from his helmet cam. Rita patted Wal and Fred on the back, said, ‘Good job, lads,’ and turned away from the screens. She indicated to Cara that she should follow her.
They went out onto the road. Cara was surprised by what she found. Kite’s wife was not shaking. She was not in tears. The American soldier was with her, but he was not supporting her on his arm nor calling for immediate medical assistance. Isobel looked tired, unquestionably, but there were otherwise no outward signs that she had been affected by the nightmare she had just endured. Her face was unmarked, and she was moving normally. If Cara hadn’t known differently, she might have assumed that Kite’s wife had gone for an evening stroll along the lane and was making her way back from the shops after buying a pint of milk.
‘Isobel,’ said Rita quietly. They embraced. CARPENTER looked at Cara and dropped his eyes, as if they were witness to a private moment that did not concern them. Cara could see that they knew one another well.
‘Thank you, Rita.’ Isobel wiped her mouth with her sleeve as she stood back. ‘How long have you been out here? God almighty, that was horrible.’
Cara could see that she was in shock, but at the same time capable of functioning normally. She was beautiful in a healthy, big-boned, Scandinavian way, what her mother would have called a ‘handsome woman’.
‘This is Cara,’ said Rita. ‘She’s been helping us.’
‘Did they hurt you?’ Cara asked.
‘I’m fine,’ Isobel replied, smiling warmly.
‘And the baby?’ Rita asked.
Isobel tapped her belly and said: ‘He’s fine. Where’s Lockie? What’s happening? Is he all right?’
Rita didn’t dress it up, didn’t say that everything was going to be all right and that Isobel had nothing to worry about. She told her the truth.
‘We think he’s being held by a group of rogue Iranian intelligence officers somewhere in Canary Wharf. They wanted to scare him, so they took you. You’re free now. What do you need? Can we get you to a doctor?’
In normal circumstances, Cara reflected, the area would have been sealed off and the road swarming in cops and ambulances. But these were not normal circumstances. BOX 88 had barely made any sound, no song and dance, had raided the house and got the job done.
‘I’m just tired,’ Isobel insisted. ‘We need to help Lockie.’
‘That’s what we’re trying to do,’ Rita told her. ‘We’re hoping the men in the house can lead us to him.’
48
The injury to José and the very public flare-up between Eskandarian and Abbas changed the atmosphere of the afternoon and brought the Bonnard lunch party to a premature end. Jacques left within ten minutes, Paul and Annette following soon afterwards.
‘Is it true José is Ali’s son?’ Kite asked Luc. They were standing at the entrance to the terrace, within range of the Walkman.
Xavier’s father cast a venomous admonishing glance at his son, as if he had breached a confidence by telling Kite. ‘That’s a private matter.’
Kite, duly reprimanded, picked up the Walkman and his copy of The Songlines and went upstairs to his room. He was carrying a packet of cigarettes in his back pocket. He took the tape out of the Walkman and put it in a drawer where it lay among several other blank cassettes and various Gameboy cartridges. In the morning he would take it to Peele, along with the rolls of film. He opened the shutters and laid a red T-shirt on the windowsill. Kite then grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and locked himself in the bathroom. He noticed that Abbas’s door was closed and assumed that he was sulking after the dressing-down from Eskandarian. He did not give him another thought.
He sat on the toilet seat, tore the piece of paper in half and wrote the note using a Biro, balancing the Chatwin on his knee as a surface to lean on. Peele had taught him how to make his handwriting so small that it was almost illegible.
AE has son (9). José. Mother is ’79 fiancée: Bita Zamora.
Lives in Sarrià, with politician husband. Daughter Ada (3).
Other guests: Jacques (banker, Paris, c55). Serious, intellectual. Friend of LB.
Paul Mouret (film industry, Paris, c35).
PM didn’t know AE or Jacques before today. Knows LB well. Not RB.
Wife Annette Mouret, also c35. 2 kids. Have photos.
Document in AE office mentions Forman/Foreman + Berberian. Have photos.
Kite wrote on both sides then folded the note twice so that it was the same size as a large postage stamp. He picked up the cigarettes and inserted the note behind the paper lining at the back of the packet. To the untrained eye, it would be impossible to tell that the
packet had been tampered with. He threw the other half of the notepaper into the toilet, flushed it and went back to his room. Abbas’s door was now open. There was no sign of him. Kite had been concentrating so hard on writing and concealing the note that he had not heard him leave.
He carried the Chatwin downstairs, passed Luc and Rosamund in the sitting room and walked outside with a lighter, the Biro and the packet of cigarettes in his back pocket. He could hear Xavier and Jacqui messing around in the pool. Kite’s swimming trunks were on the table near the entrance to the terrace. He went back inside, picked them up, then walked through the garden in the direction of the pool. He was in a state of vivid concentration, akin to the feeling of batting against a moving ball, completely focussed and yet at the same time oddly free. Kite was drawing on his training but hardly aware of doing so.
Halfway to the pool, he turned sharply left and took the path towards the orchard at the northern end of the garden. Kite could still hear Xavier shouting and splashing around in the pool but had seen nobody else since leaving the house. He reached the wall which formed a boundary between the Bonnard villa and the access road, took out a cigarette and turned to face the house. There was nobody in sight. The wall was six feet high. It was covered in jagged, protruding shards of coloured glass sunk into a layer of weathered concrete. Kite had been here only once before, walking the gardens with Xavier on the first day. As casually as possible, he tossed the swimming trunks, the Chatwin and the packet of Marlboros on top of the wall, then turned around to light the cigarette.
He began to smoke in what he hoped would look to any passing member of the household like a moody teenager taking time out with his troubles, pondering the mysteries of the universe and the vagaries of solitude at the bottom of a French garden. As far as Kite could tell, he was alone, yet it felt as though he was being watched from some hidden corner of the garden, perhaps by Alain or the always suspecting Abbas. A gecko slipped up the wall a few inches from his feet, causing Kite to start. He stepped back. The tip of the cigarette brushed against the leaves of an olive tree and he had to relight it.
Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 37