Box 88 : A Novel (2020)

by Cumming, Charles

  She turned the shoe towards Jason and showed him the little rust marks and the dots of paint. The strange seaweed smell had become even more pronounced.

  ‘Seawater,’ he whispered, realising that Cara had just identified where they were holding Kite. ‘Good job,’ he said, slapping her so hard on the shoulder that she almost fell over. On comms he said: ‘I need live and archive satellite imaging of every dock and basin in Canary Wharf for the past twenty-four hours. Subject is on a boat, I say again, a boat. Recently arrived from the open sea. Look for anything bigger than a dinghy. People getting on, people getting off. We are moving to the helo. We will find Kite.’

  55

  Kamran stuck a gun in the small of Kite’s back and pushed him down the corridor, steering him towards his cell. He told Kite to open the door then put his free hand on his back and shoved him inside.

  ‘I need to piss,’ Kite told him. ‘I need the bucket.’

  ‘Wait,’ Kamran replied.

  Walking backwards towards the bathroom, his eyes always on Kite, the Iranian opened a door on the opposite side of the corridor. A long-handled mop toppled out, brushing against his shoulder as it fell to the ground. In the second that it took Kamran to bend down and pick it up, Kite took the nail out of his hip pocket and concealed it in the palm of his right hand. Kamran looked at him, the gun still pointed at Kite’s chest, then momentarily looked away a second time so that he could retrieve a blue plastic bucket from the cupboard. Kite adjusted the position of the nail.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to let me use the bathroom?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  Holding the bucket in one hand and the gun in the other, the chauffeur walked back down the corridor towards Kite’s cell. Kite turned his back on him, feigned to miss a step then spun around as Kamran stepped into the room behind him. Pushing the gun away from his back so that it was pointed at the wall, he grabbed the Iranian’s jaw, drove it backwards and rammed the nail into his neck so that it buried in the throat up to the palm of Kite’s right hand. In the same continuous movement he slammed down onto Kamran’s forearm in an effort to shake the gun from his grip. The Iranian was retching, gasping for air, blood spurting from his throat onto Kite’s skin and clothes in thin, pulsing strands. He cried out, but his voice was muffled and strained. He doubled over and managed to fire the gun. The bullet missed Kite’s foot by less than an inch, lodging in the carpet. In the cramped steel room the noise of the shot was deafening. It spurred Kite to greater speed and violence. Kamran was trying to fight back, at once clutching his bleeding throat and flailing at his assailant with the gun, but Kite drove his knee into his jaw, grabbed his hair and repeatedly smashed his head against the wall, forcing the gun from his grasp. It fell to the floor and fired. A second shot whistled past Kite’s ear. He bent down, seized the gun, stepped back and fired two shots into Kamran’s head.

  He had no time to pause and assess what to do next. He was not avenged nor somehow purified by the act of killing Kamran. Kite had been planning how to get off the ship since the moment he had woken up in his cell. Stepping over the body, he ran down the corridor, away from the interrogation room, opened a heavy steel door and found himself in a makeshift gym. There was a television bolted to the wall above a treadmill and a weight-lifting machine. Kite crossed the room, opened another connecting door and entered a sleeping area with bunk beds three-high on either side. The beds were all neatly made up. He did not know how many more men were on the ship, but had not yet heard any reaction to the gunshots. With Kamran dead and Hossein on his way to the cottage, Torabi might be the last man on board.

  Then the sound of a door slamming behind him and the voice of a man calling out in Farsi. It did not sound like Torabi. Kite opened the next door and found himself in a bathroom. He moved quickly across the linoleum floor, again with the impression that the room was not being used: the sinks and mirrors were clean, the tiling in the shower area dry. As he was pushing open a swing door leading out into a narrow passage, there was a crashing sound behind him. Kite turned to see a man stumbling from the sleeping area into the bathroom. He was brandishing a gun. Kite fired two shots, hitting the man in the chest and stomach. He fell to the ground.

  ‘Put it down!’

  Kite froze.

  ‘Drop the fucking gun!’

  Torabi was behind him. Kite had no choice but to comply, letting the weapon drop to the floor. If he made any sudden move, however quick, Torabi would shoot him. It was a miracle that he had not yet put a bullet in his back.

  ‘Face me!’

  Slowly Kite turned around, his hands in the air. Torabi’s feet were wide apart, planted on either side of the narrow corridor. He was aiming a gun at Kite’s chest.

  ‘You fucking killed Kamran. You killed two of my men.’

  ‘They were going to do the same to me.’

  Torabi was slightly out of breath, as if he had heard the gunshots and run back to the ship.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘It’s me who is going to do the same to you. On your knees, you fucking liar, hands behind your head.’

  Kite sank to the ground. ‘At least tell me that Isobel is free,’ he said.

  The Iranian looked at his watch and smiled.

  ‘Hossein will be there now,’ he said. ‘Putting a bullet in her brain. I wish you could watch.’

  ‘There’s something you should know.’

  Kite had one more card left to play. He felt extraordinarily calm, though he was about to break the one rule that he had vowed never to break.

  ‘Yeah? And what’s that?’

  ‘Ali Eskandarian lives in London. He has been here for the past fifteen years. I can take you to him. He can answer all your questions. You were right. I did lie to you. Your father is still alive.’

  56

  It was after midnight by the time the French police had concluded their interviews and allowed the Bonnard family to return home. Vence was by then deserted. The entire square had been cordoned off, all restaurants closed, traffic prevented from entering the town. Jacqui, who was deeply upset, went home with Martha and Rosamund. Luc drove Xavier and Kite back to the villa.

  Nothing was said on the journey. Xavier knew that his father had been a coward. Luc was wrestling with the inerasable shame of his inaction; he had run when he should have stood his ground. He had abandoned his wife, his daughter, his son just at the moment when they needed him most. Kite, by contrast, had tried to fight back and was nursing a swollen jaw for his efforts. The comparison was stark. The incident with the Nintendo seemed to have been forgotten. It felt to Kite as though it had taken place in a different dimension of time.

  Luc followed Rosamund from Vence and they reached the villa only minutes apart. Jacqui immediately went to bed. She hugged her mother but not her father. She said nothing to Xavier but embraced Kite in the hall before going upstairs. Martha could see that she was needed and went with her, kissing Kite goodnight. Xavier found a bottle of red wine in the kitchen and was about to take it out to the pool when his mother told him that it was late, that everybody needed to get some rest and should go to their respective rooms. Kite and Xavier were suddenly children again and did as they were told. Xavier embraced him on the first-floor landing and held him for a long time.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. The apology sliced through Kite like a cut to his eyes. ‘It was meant to be fun. It was meant to be a good holiday for you …’

  Kite could hardly stand what he was hearing.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said, stepping back and holding Xavier by the shoulders. He looked at him with as much sincerity as he could find. ‘Nobody knew this was going to happen. We’ll all get over it. We’ll look after each other.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a dead body before.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Kite. Even this was a lie. He thought of his father laid out on a stretcher at the hotel, a sheet covering his face. The eleven-year-old Kite had pulled it back and seen the cuts on his cheeks,
the skin chalk white, all the laughter and vitality withdrawn from his eyes.

  ‘See you in the morning.’ Xavier went into his room. ‘Poor Ali. Mum’s worried sick. What do you think they’ll do to him?’

  ‘I dread to think,’ Kite replied.

  He slept deeply, woke up before seven, put on his running shoes, a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and went out outside. He still had the roll of film and took it with him. This time there was no Rosamund drinking English Breakfast tea in the kitchen, no Abbas parked at the end of the drive. Kite jogged down the road, checked that nobody had followed him, then ducked into the garden of the safe house.

  The Peugeot was not parked outside. Kite stood in the shaded porch and knocked gently on the door. Nobody answered. He remembered the smell of fried bacon on his first visit to the house, barely a week earlier. There was no breeze, only the trilling of cicadas and birdsong. The olive trees lining the whitewashed wall were perfectly still. Kite knocked again, this time more loudly. Again there was no response.

  He stepped towards the closest window and looked inside. No shoes in the hall, no keys on the table or jackets on hooks. He walked round to the living-room window, stood on a concrete ledge and peered through a gap in the curtains. The room looked as if it had been cleaned. The cushions on the sofa and armchairs were plumped up and the books on the coffee table divided into two neat piles. Peele and Carl had gone. Kite was sure of it. There was nobody home.

  He returned to the front door and knocked again. He walked around to the back of the house, looked through the window and saw that the kitchen had also been thoroughly cleaned. It was like changeover day on a summer rental; the existing tenants had left, a maid had been in to wash the sheets and hoover the carpets, a new family would be arriving later in the day.

  Kite jogged back to the house. He stopped at the gates and saw that the chalk mark had been removed from the wall. He felt utterly isolated, still in a state of shock about Abbas’s murder and the kidnapping of Eskandarian, and now bewildered by the vanishing act of BOX 88. Peele had not written him a note, made a call to the house nor given Kite any indication that he was clearing out. Perhaps this was the way it would always be. At some point in the near future, when it was safe to do so, Peele would explain why he had left the safe house so quickly and without warning. It was undoubtedly because his mission had failed. He and Carl were most likely already on their way to The Cathedral, ready to face the music.

  It was decided that Martha and Kite would fly home from Nice at lunchtime. Back at the house, with Luc eating breakfast alone and his children still asleep in their beds, Kite packed up his belongings and left a fifty-franc note in his room as a tip for Alain and Hélène. The Nintendo had been left on his bed, like an admission of defeat. Kite wondered what to do about the lamp in the attic, the ghetto blaster by the pool. He assumed that someone from BOX 88 would come to the house and deal with them as soon as the coast was clear. He felt that they were not his responsibility.

  The police came as Martha and Kite were leaving by taxi for the airport. Three cars, six men, no sirens. Kite knew that they intended to arrest Luc. Martha was oblivious to the accusations against him and assumed that the police had come to the house merely to further their investigation into the awful events of the previous evening. They sat in the back of the cab holding hands, talking about Jacqui and Xavier, about who may or may not have been responsible for kidnapping Ali. Kite was of course obliged to feign ignorance, to claim that he had no more idea who was behind the attack than she did. He did not feel bad lying to her; he did not want to expose Martha to any more suffering. What troubled him was not being able to discuss his own very complicated feelings. He needed someone in whom he could confide. Kite felt that he was being forced to deal with the ramifications of what had happened without any support or guidance at all.

  At Nice airport he telephoned his mother, using the operational number he had dialled in order to fly the signal a day earlier. The same answering machine picked up. Kite left a brief message saying that he was flying home early, giving the number of the British Airways flight and the time it was scheduled to land. He hoped that the Falcons were listening, but could not shake the feeling that he had been used by BOX and now abandoned. Martha told him that her brother was coming to pick her up and that they could give him a lift into town if his mother wasn’t available. She asked where Kite was going to stay. He lied and said that his mother had rented a flat in Chelsea. He bought Martha lunch at a café in the airport, picked up a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of Jim Beam in Duty-Free, and slept most of the way to Heathrow.

  There were no delays at Passport Control. They collected their luggage and made their way out of the baggage hall. Martha’s older brother, a tall, dark-haired Morrissey clone in black jeans, Doc Martens and a moth-eaten turtleneck, was waiting for her in Arrivals wearing a look of studied apathy. Kite assumed that he knew what had happened in Vence, but he offered no evident signs of sympathy nor showed any interest in his sister’s well-being.

  ‘Jack, this is Lockie. He was staying at the house. Can we give him a lift?’

  Kite shook Jack’s clammy, indifferent hand and looked around for his mother. There was no sign of her. All around them people were hugging, yelping and kissing. A few bored taxi drivers were leaning on a metal rail holding up signs with names scrawled on them in marker pen. ANDREW & JAMES RAMSAY. MR V. BLACKETT. DYLAN PATHMAN SPENCE. Kite looked along the rail. Beneath a poster advertising Concorde flights to New York, a Sikh man in his mid-fifties was reading a copy of the Financial Times. When he looked up and saw Kite, he produced a small rectangular card on which he had written: ‘MR L. KITE’.

  ‘Ah, my mum’s sent a taxi,’ he said, his spirits instantly lifted. He waved at the driver and indicated that he would come over as soon as he had said goodbye to his friends.

  ‘I’ll call you tonight,’ he told Martha.

  ‘Or I can ring you,’ she said. ‘What’s the number at the flat where you’re staying?’

  Kite said that he didn’t know. They hugged one another and kissed briefly, aware of Martha’s brother standing only feet away moodily smoking a roll-up and clicking his tongue to the rhythm of a song in his head. Kite waved Martha off in the hope that he would see her within a few days, as soon as BOX 88 had concluded their debriefing. He made his way over to the driver.

  ‘Master Lachlan?’

  ‘Lockie, yes.’ He didn’t like being called ‘Master’. It reminded him of flying south from Scotland as an unaccompanied minor, British Midland stewardesses fussing over him at the end of the school holidays.

  ‘I am Janki. The Financial Times is a very interesting newspaper. My car is this way.’

  Kite had the good sense not to enquire how Janki had known what flight he was on; BOX 88 would have heard Rosamund booking the tickets on the phone. Instead he asked where he was being taken.

  ‘The Cathedral, of course,’ Janki replied, turning and catching Kite’s eye. ‘I understand this is to be your first time?’

  57

  If Kite had been entertaining any thoughts of quitting in the aftermath of Luc’s arrest, they evaporated as soon as he learned that he was to be welcomed into the inner sanctum of BOX 88. The unmoored, rootless feeling that had dogged him all summer vanished. His period of probation was over; he had finally been accepted as a bona fide intelligence officer. The operation in France may have ended in chaos, but his own role in it was surely blameless. Peele and Strawson had seen what Kite could offer. He had done what had been asked of him. That Eskandarian had been kidnapped by the exiles was the fault of Carl and Peele and their associates, not of Lachlan Kite. If they had been given advance warning about the kidnapping and alerted him, perhaps Kite might even have been able to do something to prevent it.

  ‘Do you know this part of London?’ Janki asked as they were coming off the A4 at Hammersmith.

  ‘Not really,’ Kite replied. ‘I’m from Scotland. Whenever I stay in London, it’s usual
ly further east, in Kensington and Chelsea.’

  ‘Ah yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Where the Alford boys live.’

  They parked in front of a church in a square that Kite did not recognise. He got out of the car and looked around for a street sign, but couldn’t see one.

  ‘Just in here,’ said Janki, locking the car and leading him towards the church.

  They walked up a short flight of steps and the driver knocked on the door. Without waiting for a response, he turned the handle and indicated to Kite that he should go inside. Kite moved forward, waiting for Janki to join him. It was dark and cold in the vestibule. To his surprise, he saw that the driver had turned around and was already walking back in the direction of the car.

  ‘I just wait here?’ he called out.

  Janki did not respond. Kite turned and peered down the aisle, wondering if Peele or Strawson were waiting for him in one of the pews. There appeared to be nobody in the building save for a rotund, middle-aged vicar standing at the altar within touching distance of a vast silver cross. He was wearing clerical robes and shifting from foot to foot.

  ‘You must be Lachlan,’ he said as Kite approached him. He had a cut-glass English accent and an open, friendly manner. ‘Anthony Childs.’

  ‘Lockie,’ Kite replied, shaking his hand.

  ‘Good flight? Everything OK at Heathrow?’

  ‘Everything was fine, thank you.’

  Kite felt a sense of unease, as if Childs was going to sit him down and explain that, regrettably, BOX 88 had decided to dispense with his services. Instead he said: ‘I’m to show you the way,’ and put his hand on Kite’s arm, guiding him towards a door in the side of the church. ‘Forgive all the cloak and dagger. There are a number of ways in and out of The Cathedral, but all first-timers get the full Monty. Bit of a tradition. Everything will make sense in just a moment.’

  Childs unlocked the door using two separate keys, invited Kite to step forward, then studiously bent down to secure the locks again before continuing. They were now in a short corridor leading to an office. Inside the office Kite could see an antique wooden desk piled high with coloured booklets and magazines. There was a typewriter on the desk and a half-finished jug of orange squash next to some plastic mugs of various colours. Kite was reminded of Sunday school classes at the church in Portpatrick. Instead of going into the office, Childs unlocked a second door, again using two keys, and beckoned Kite to follow him.