I’m sorry you’ve had to take time off work. There are people fixing the cottage, they’ll be finished by tonight. Let’s talk about all that over dinner.
I love you.
L x
Kite was aware that his actions might seem reckless or even uncaring, but he calculated that his wife and the baby were both fine and that his own injuries were negligible. He felt justified in leaving Isobel in the flat. What mattered now was the security of BOX 88. He compartmentalised his life in this way, dividing work from family. He had done so for years.
Rita had left a report on his desk. As far as Kite could deduce, there were two areas of immediate concern: the MI5 investigation, which needed to be shut down as quickly as possible, and Ramin Torabi’s access to sensitive information relating to Ali Eskandarian. The murder of Zoltan Pavkov, the bodies on the boat, the fracas in South Quay were of secondary importance. With time, and a little imagination, they could all be explained away and, if necessary, covered up. A team from BOX 88 had already visited the ship and taken wallets and phones from the bodies of the slain men as well as a laptop belonging to Torabi. Turings had wiped forty-eight hours of CCTV from the dock and were working on a Transport for London camera which had recorded the vehicles while they were parked outside South Quay station. Vetting requests had been sent to BOX personnel in New York and Dubai for information relating to Ramin Torabi; the London office was in the process of analysing the laptop and phones with a view to piecing together Torabi’s movements in the weeks leading up to Xavier’s funeral.
Kite decided to deal with MI5 first. Rita had left a number for Cara Jannaway, with whom Kite had spoken only briefly the previous evening. His assistant caught her on the way to work and asked her to ring back from a telephone box so that she could speak to Kite without Five scooping the call. It took Cara less than two minutes to do as she had been asked.
‘Mr Kite,’ she said when she was put through.
‘Call me Lockie. I just wanted to thank you again for everything you did yesterday.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ she replied. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Absolutely fine.’
‘And your wife?’
‘Left her sleeping.’ On his desk, Kite kept the small silver box given to him by his father in 1971 as a christening present. He lifted the lid and read the inscription inside: To Lachlan, from Da. He twisted the box in his fingers as he weighed his next remark. ‘You could be very useful to us, Cara.’
‘Us?’ she said.
‘You know who we are.’
‘Do I?’
Kite liked it that she wasn’t deferential. Her voice sounded confident, even slightly amused. In her report Rita had described her as ‘sassy, quick on the uptake, not easily panicked’.
‘Tell me about Robert Vosse.’
‘What do you want to know?’ It was the reaction Kite had been hoping for: Cara was instantly suspicious of the motive behind Kite’s question, instinctively loyal to her boss. ‘He’s a good guy. Experienced. Decent. Thorough.’
‘Tessa Swinburn?’
‘Tess is lovely.’
‘Matt Tomkins?’ Kite asked.
‘Honestly?’
‘Honestly.’
‘Bit of a prat,’ Cara replied.
Kite suppressed a laugh. ‘And how much do they know about what went on yesterday?’
‘Not much.’ There was a momentary silence. ‘Rita asked me not to tell them.’
‘I’m assuming you spoke to Vosse last night.’
‘I did,’ Cara replied. ‘Told him there was nobody at the cottage. He still thinks you’re kidnapped.’
Kite put the silver box back on the desk and tapped out an internal message to his assistant: Get me a number for Robert Vosse.
‘What’s the scale of your investigation?’ he asked.
‘Small. Internal. Far as I know, just us and the DG.’
‘Far as you know …’ Kite picked up the box again and opened it. ‘I’m going to have a word with Vosse about shutting your unit down.’
‘OK,’ Cara replied evenly.
‘And I’d like you to hand in your notice.’
Silence on the line, then: ‘My what now?’
Kite smiled. ‘You have a choice, Cara,’ he said. ‘Walk off into the sunset, keep quiet and nobody will ever bother you again. Or meet me in Canary Wharf this evening with Robert Vosse to discuss your future.’
‘Our future where?’
‘At BOX 88.’
There was method to Kite’s madness. Cara’s potential was plain to see: she was young, brave, quick on her feet. As for Vosse, he could join the handful of serving officers inside MI5 who were already active in support of BOX 88. With Vosse’s assistance, Kite intended to find out the identity of the whistle-blower who had tipped off the director general, setting in train the investigation.
‘I’m flattered,’ Cara replied. ‘Thank you. What about Matt and Tessa?’
‘Don’t worry about them.’ If it came to it, BOX 88 had ways of making sure that people like Matt Tomkins and Tessa Swinburn kept their mouths shut. ‘Just go back to work this morning. Charge up my mobile. I’ll call it around midday, that way your team will know I’m back in circulation. When you have the chance to speak privately to Vosse, tell him I want to meet up. He’ll agree.’
‘You sound confident.’
Kite didn’t have the opportunity to reply because Rita had appeared outside his office, knocking on the glass door, gesturing Kite to let her in.
‘I have to go,’ he said.
‘What about your wallet and shoes?’ Cara asked. ‘We found lots of your stuff in a skip at the car park. Suit jacket, keys, your watch.’
‘Bring them tonight.’
64
Everything was resolved as Kite had planned it. With a skill and subtlety that surprised both Kite and Cara, Robert Vosse persuaded the director general of the Security Service that Lachlan Kite was an oil executive working under non-official cover for MI6, that the whistle-blower was a fantasist and the internal investigation into BOX 88 a wild goose chase.
Matt Tomkins, still rattled by the Pavkov murder, gratefully seized the opportunity to join a new MI5 team investigating a Russian money-laundering operation in Manchester. A week before announcing that she was pregnant, Tessa Swinburn was promoted to run a counter terrorism unit inside Thames House, taking Kieran Dean with her. All three filed reports detailing their experiences on the BOX 88 investigation. These were intercepted by Vosse en route to the DG and redrafted to remove what was euphemistically described as ‘unnecessary content’. Any record of the kidnapping of Lachlan Kite, the murder of Zoltan Pavkov and the arrest of Ramin Torabi was wiped from the historical memory.
It remained only to deal with Torabi. Kite had neither the time nor the inclination to spend days interrogating the Iranian in his cell. What he needed to know could be disinterred by colleagues, all of whom would leap at the chance to work Torabi over. There was no belief in torture at BOX 88, only in a forensic study of intelligence and the steady accumulation of facts. If it took weeks for Torabi to break, so be it. Kite would wait. If he was ready to spill his guts, so much the better. Either way, his life as he had known it was over.
Kite had made a comprehensive list of subjects on which to question Torabi – How had he known the location of the cottage? Why had Torabi referred to Cosmo de Paul as an ‘associate’ of Kite’s? Was he responsible for the death of Xavier Bonnard? – and discussed them at length with the interrogation team. As they embarked on several days of initial questioning, Torabi began to show signs of depression. The humiliating failure of his operation had settled on him. He spoke constantly about Kite’s promise to take him to Marble Arch and demanded to know when he would be released so that his wife could be reassured that he was safe from harm.
‘Pity you didn’t extend the same courtesy to me,’ Kite muttered, watching the interrogation on a live feed.
On the subject of Xavier’s murd
er, Torabi pleaded innocence. A technical analysis of the Iranian’s movements in the days leading up to his death, coupled with a report obtained from a BOX 88 source in French intelligence, persuaded Kite that Torabi had indeed left Paris two days before Xavier had taken his own life. It was scant consolation: to imagine his oldest friend in a suicidal despair, alone and broken in a Paris apartment, was hard to take. Kite knew that there was nothing he could have done to help Xavier in his hour of need, just as he had been unable to help him in any meaningful way throughout their twenties and thirties. He had long believed that it had been right and just to put Luc Bonnard behind bars. Nevertheless, he shared the widespread view that Luc’s disgrace, the public exposure of his crimes and venality, had accelerated Xavier’s descent into addiction. In this respect, Kite bore partial responsibility for the way that his friend’s life had turned out. He had betrayed him in France. There was no getting away from it.
Ten days after his release from captivity, Kite finally paid a visit to the gallerist in Mayfair who had obtained the painting by Jean-Paul Riopelle which he had intended to view on the afternoon of Xavier’s funeral. Ever since he had bought a small brush and ink Pierre Soulages in 1993 with his earnings from a job in Russia, it had been his habit to buy a picture at the end of an operation. But what had happened with Torabi did not feel like an operational success. Kite had not bid for the Riopelle, instead offering the Soulages to the dealer. He had paid 30,000 francs for it in 1993 at a gallery on the Rue de Seine, the equivalent of about £3,000. For its current market value of around £90,000, Kite could set some money aside for Rambo and take Isobel to the Caribbean. She would need time to recuperate from her ordeal. Kite knew that keeping his past a secret from her would no longer be possible: his wife would want answers. They had a lot of conversational ground to cover.
Coming back to BOX 88 headquarters at around five o’clock, he caught sight of a bearded man standing alone outside Canary Wharf station. The man appeared to be waiting for someone. Nothing unusual about that at the start of the rush hour, but Kite did a double-take. It was John, the American with whom he had smoked at the funeral. He looked up as Kite came towards him.
‘Lachlan.’
‘I get the feeling this isn’t a chance encounter.’
‘Was told you would pass this way.’ The American extended a huge, hairy hand and clasped Kite in a vigorous handshake. ‘Ward Hansell. I’m over from the Stadium.’
The Stadium was the Service nickname for BOX 88 headquarters in the United States, so called because of its proximity to the home of the New York Giants. Kite was astonished that Hansell was a colleague: he had been convinced that the bearded, unkempt ‘John’ at the Oratory was a bona fide addict and friend of Xavier’s.
‘Sorry I didn’t introduce myself at the funeral. When you approached me asking for a smoke, I thought it was a bump. Didn’t know who you were until I put two and two together.’
‘That’s all right,’ Kite replied, conscious of the extent to which his guard had been down on the morning of the funeral. Was he getting sloppy? Were his sharpest days behind him? ‘What are you doing in London?’
‘Let’s walk.’
It transpired that Hansell had taken an interest in one of the mourners at Xavier’s service: Cosmo de Paul. That Kite’s nemesis and sparring partner should again pop up on his radar struck him as an eerie coincidence: Torabi had twice brought up de Paul’s name on the ship.
‘How long have you been watching him?’ he asked.
‘Three months.’
De Paul had been recruited by MI6 out of Oxford in 1994, eventually leaving the Service in 2008 to take up a position in the private sector. As someone who had known de Paul both operationally and personally over a period of thirty years, Kite assumed that Hansell wanted to speak to him on background.
‘We think he may be a security risk.’
‘To BOX or the wider population?’ Kite asked.
He hadn’t intended to make a joke, but Hansell chuckled. Evidently, he had already spent enough time around de Paul to know that he was a disruptive, unpredictable opportunist.
‘You guys getting any heat from Five?’ the American asked.
‘You could say that.’
Kite wondered how much or how little Hansell knew about the Vosse unit.
‘De Paul has been talking to Rebecca Simmonds, saying things he shouldn’t be saying.’
Of course. Suddenly it all made sense. Simmonds was the director general of MI5. De Paul was the DG’s whistle-blower. He had known of Kite’s involvement in BOX 88 for more than twenty years and had long resented his own exclusion from that most elite of clubs. But why choose this moment to pour poison in Simmonds’s ear?
‘What sort of things?’ he asked.
‘Well that’s what I don’t fully understand,’ Hansell replied. ‘You have an old girlfriend living in New York, right? Martha Raine?’
Kite came to a halt. Of all things, he had not expected this. He felt the tide of the past rushing up to meet him, the bitter memories of Martha’s years at Oxford, the spectre of de Paul’s bizarre, private obsession with Kite, incubated at Alford and continuing to the present day.
‘Martha?’ he asked, as if Hansell had made a mistake. ‘What does she have to do with any of this?’
There was a corporate bar across the square filled with office workers grabbing a drink before heading home. At the church, Hansell had possessed the wild, dishevelled appearance of an Old Testament prophet; now, in the pale evening light of Canary Wharf, his beard trimmed and hair neatly cut, he could have passed for one of the mid-level executives queuing for a pint at the bar. He nodded towards the entrance, laying a heavy hand on Kite’s back.
‘Let’s get a drink,’ he said. ‘You and I need to talk.’
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Acknowledgements
With thanks to: Julia Wisdom, Kathryn Cheshire, Finn Cotton, Ann Bissell, Roger Cazalet, Kate Elton, Liz Dawson, Anne O’Brien and everyone behind the scenes at HarperCollins. To Will Francis, Kirsty Gordon and the team at Janklow & Nesbit. To Harriette Peel, Perdita Martell, Christopher de Bellaigue, Sarah Gabriel, TC, Nick Green, Natasha Fairweather, Boris Starling, P, Benedict Bull, JF, Olivier Bonas, Laila D, KS, Dr Charlotte Cassis, Angus Maguire, Ben Barrett, JJ Keith, Nick Lockley, Christian Spurrier, Ben Higgins, Charlie Gammell, Nicholas Griffin, Peter F, Nick S, Rupert Harris, Debbie Winfield, Ian Cumming and Caroline Pilkington. Jamie Blackett’s ‘The Enigma of Kidson’, Ryszard Kapuscinski’s ‘Shah of Shahs’ and Reza Kahlili’s memoir ‘A Time to Betray’ were all very helpful.
C.C. London 2020
About the Author
Charles Cumming was born in Scotland in 1971. Shortly after university, he was approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), an experience that inspired his first novel, A Spy by Nature. He has written several bestselling thrillers, including A Foreign Country which won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller and the Bloody Scotland Crime Book of the Year. He lives in London.
@CharlesCumming
/AuthorCharlesCumming
/charlescummingbooks
By Charles Cumming
THE THOMAS KELL S
ERIES
A Foreign Country
A Colder War
A Divided Spy
THE ALEC MILIUS SERIES
A Spy by Nature
The Spanish Game
OTHER WORKS
The Hidden Man
Typhoon
The Trinity Six
The Man Between
(published in the United States as The Moroccan Girl)
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 45