Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Read online

  Vosse was a man who liked to pace around as he spoke. His underlings, all of whom were as mystified by BOX 88 as their boss, variously stared at surveillance photographs of Kite, copies of the GCHQ transcript, half-eaten bars of Chunky Kit-Kat. Their investigation had come about as a result of a private conversation between the director general of MI5 and a disgruntled former MI6 officer who claimed that Kite had been recruited by BOX 88 as a teenager.

  ‘“Are you still doing those things you used to do?”’ Vosse muttered. ‘What is “that life” if not the life we are investigating? What could this Martha Raine possibly have been referring to if not our man’s thirty-year career as an industrial-strength spy? Drug-pushing? Is that it? Was he secretly a crack dealer? No. Lachlan Kite was running his own little Mission: Impossible unit without any of us knowing.’

  ‘Allegedly.’

  This from Tessa Swinburn, at thirty-nine a contemporary of Vosse, in every way his operational and intellectual equal, who had nevertheless been overlooked for promotion due to fears within Personnel that she would soon become pregnant by her new husband and likely spend at least eighteen of the next thirty-six months on maternity leave.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Vosse asked.

  ‘It means we still don’t have proof. It means we still have to keep following him around. It means until we can actually catch Lachlan Kite in the act of spying, we can’t do anything about it. We can’t arrest him. We can’t interrogate him. We certainly can’t prove the existence of BOX 88.’

  ‘How do you catch somebody in the act of spying?’ Vosse asked, a question which, given their vocation and operational remit, took all of the team by surprise. ‘He’s not going to sit on a bench in Gorky Park and share a cigarette with Edward Snowden. We’re not going to film him orchestrating a spy swap on the Glienicke Bridge.’

  ‘Then why are we here, doing what we’re doing?’ Tessa asked.

  ‘Because we’re assembling evidence. Following leads. Building a case against a man, bit by bit, step by step.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Matt Tomkins.

  Tomkins, who always liked to agree with Vosse, had been employed by the Security Service for almost six years. The Kite operation was the first job that had taken him permanently away from Thames House. He was one of only five employees who knew about BOX 88; the DG didn’t want to look like a fool if the investigation proved to be a wild goose chase. Socially withdrawn, but clever and ambitious, Tomkins spent an hour every evening pumping weights at a gym in Hammersmith, another three on weekends throwing people onto crash mats at a ju-jitsu class in Barnes. Though not yet thirty, his hair had already started to recede at the crown, giving him the look of a particularly humourless and unpleasant trainee monk.

  ‘If the men say so,’ Tessa sighed.

  She looked out onto Acton High Street. She had always been suspicious that the MI6 whistle-blower was a fantasist. It seemed implausible that BOX had existed for almost four decades without anyone knowing. Who was paying their bills, for a start? Where was it based? Was it a rogue unit or – as the DG feared – an arm of the Deep State operating with the tacit approval of Washington and Downing Street? The one-bedroom flat was situated two floors above a dry-cleaner’s. Tessa could see a clump of teenagers in school uniform on the top deck of a bus. They were gathered around the screen of a mobile phone in a way that made her think of families in pre-war London huddled in front of the wireless listening to speeches by Neville Chamberlain. She looked at her watch. It wasn’t even two o’clock. Why weren’t they in school?

  ‘So here’s what we’re going to do,’ Vosse announced. ‘Matt, you’re going to find out everything you can about this Martha Felicity Raine. Sounds posh. What’s a nice, well-brought-up English girl doing in New York, besides marrying a Yank called Jonas and walking her kids to school? Are they Kite’s kids? What does she do for a living? Housewife? Art dealer? Spy? How does she know our man? How far back does their relationship go? Sounded to me like she was pining for the old days, jealous of Dr Isobel and our man’s comfortable life in Sussex.’

  Tomkins nodded, agreeing, writing everything down.

  ‘Tess,’ Vosse continued, pivoting towards Tessa Swinburn. ‘If you can tear yourself away from gazing at the splendours of Acton High Street, spend the rest of the afternoon on the corpse. Get onto Paris. Get the coroner’s report. Overdose or foul play? Furthermore: who, what, when, why and where is “Lena”? If she owns a house in Onslow Square, that says money to me, lots and lots of money. Any link to Kite? Also “Jacqui”. Who she? Sounds like a relative of the poor bloke who topped himself. What’s she doing in Singapore? I want the whole Bonnard family tree, dead and alive. I want detail. Don’t give me a trunk and a couple of branches. I want it to look like one of those big healthy sycamores you see in ads for health insurance. Massive. Now what’s left?’

  Vosse briefly consulted the transcript. He had long, thick fingers and tufts of black hair on the backs of his hands.

  ‘Funeral,’ came a voice.

  Cara Jannaway was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She was twenty-six and new to MI5 and already unremittingly bored by the job. Hadn’t anticipated the sheer mundanity of keeping tabs on the same target, day after day, moving rumours around a room, mousing files on a computer, lying to her friends about working at the Ministry of Defence, telling boys on Tinder and Bumble she was a chef, a make-up artist, a personal trainer.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Vosse.

  ‘Somebody should keep an eye on ATLANTIC BIRD at the funeral. See who he talks to.’ ATLANTIC BIRD was Kite’s operational codename, typically shortened to BIRD. ‘Maybe Martha will find a new au pair and fly over from New York. Maybe I could talk to her, find out what she meant.’

  ‘Meant by what?’ said Tessa. She was still looking out of the window and only half paying attention.

  ‘Are you still doing those things you used to do?’ Cara replied. ‘What did she mean by that? What does she know about Kite’s past that she could tell us?’

  Vosse looked up. He had found a true believer. There was a smudge on one of the lenses of his thick-rimmed spectacles.

  ‘You got a black dress, Miss Jannaway?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Pair of sunglasses?’

  ‘Lots.’

  ‘Good. Then dust them down, pick out a pair of heels.’ He examined a tea towel of dubious hygiene and laid it out on the windowsill. ‘It’s your lucky day, Cara. No office drudgery for you. You’re going to a funeral.’

  2

  Lachlan Kite woke at sunrise, crept out of bed, changed into a pair of shorts and running shoes and set out on a four-mile loop around the hills encircling the cottage in Sussex. The news of Xavier’s death had hit him as hard as anything he could recall since the sudden loss of Michael Strawson, his mentor and father figure, to a cancer of the liver which had ripped through him in the space of a few months. Though he had seen Xavier only fitfully over the previous ten years, Kite felt a personal sense of responsibility for his death which was as inescapable as it was illogical and undeserved. Usually, pounding the paths around the cottage, feeling the soft winter ground beneath his feet, he could switch the world off and gain respite from whatever problems or challenges might face him upon his return. Kite had run throughout his adult life – in Voronezh and Houston, in Edinburgh and Shanghai – for just this reason: not simply to stay fit and to burn off the pasta and the pints, but for his own peace of mind, his psychological well-being.

  It was different today, just as it had been on the afternoon of Martha’s call when Kite had immediately left the cottage and run for seven unbroken miles, memories of Xavier erupting with every passing stride. The stillness of the morning was the stillness of dawn at the Bonnard villa in France, thirty years earlier, the eighteen-year-old Kite sneaking back to bed after a stolen night with Martha to find Xavier passed out in his room, a bottle of Smirnoff tipped over beside him, a cigarette burned down to the filter in his hand. The ris
ing sun was a memory of Ali Eskandarian smoking a Cuban cigar in the gardens of the house, laughing uproariously as Xavier lost to him once again at backgammon. The pain in Kite’s lungs was Strawson and Billy Peele in the safe house in Mougins, master spies urging Kite to greater and greater acts of treachery against his friend. No matter how hard he tried, whatever tricks of mental discipline he summoned, Kite could not shake off the memories. They were as clear to him as home movies projected onto the Sussex hills and the English sky. He was suddenly a prisoner of a summer three decades earlier when his life, and that of Xavier Bonnard, had been inverted by BOX 88.

  Kite jogged home, showered and changed into a dark lounge suit, slipping a black wool tie into the side pocket of the jacket. He had only one pair of black shoes in the cottage and they were scuffed and dirty. He spat on the leather, rubbing the shoes with the sweat-soaked T-shirt he had worn on the run before drying them with an old handkerchief he had found in the pocket of the trousers.

  ‘Classy,’ said Isobel, kissing the top of his head as she passed him on the stairs. She was already dressed, the bump of her pregnancy visible beneath a blue cotton dress.

  ‘Old army trick,’ Kite replied, remembering his father polishing his shoes in the pantry at the hotel in Scotland, telling tall stories about a deranged sergeant-major at Sandhurst.

  ‘You were never in the army, were you?’

  ‘Dad was. They kicked him out.’

  ‘What for? Having dirty shoes?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Patrick Kite had died when Kite was eleven years old. Hearing the note change in her husband’s voice, Isobel turned at the bottom of the stairs and smiled up at him with the look of quiet understanding she employed whenever they were confronted by the myriad complications of his past. She knew that when it came to Kite’s father, ‘something like that’ could mean anything – fighting, drinking, even desertion – but did not press him for details. Kite’s long life in the secret world was a place as mysterious and concealed to her as her own background was to him. They had met six years earlier at a party in Stockholm and fallen in love with the tacit understanding that they should avoid mentioning the past as much as possible. For Kite, this was a simple matter of Official Secrecy: he was forbidden to disclose the existence of BOX 88. For Isobel, there were elements of her past – former lovers, former selves, betrayals and mistakes – of which she was ashamed. It made sense that they should both want a clean slate. Isobel had been vetted and cleared to know that Lachlan Kite was an intelligence officer, supposedly working for MI6. Her file sat on a computer, but Kite had never accessed it, both out of respect for Isobel’s privacy and because he did not want to think of her as just another source or asset. They had built a life together separate from the secret world, a life that was as precious to him as the child now growing inside her.

  ‘Want some breakfast?’ she called out from the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Kite replied, walking in moments later. ‘I’ll get something on the train. You go to work. You’ll be late.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  He stood behind her and kissed the back of her neck, his hand resting on her stomach.

  ‘Rambo just kicked,’ she said. ‘You missed it.’

  ‘Really?’ Kite dropped to his knees in a pantomime of frustration, pressing his ear against Isobel’s belly. He turned to address his unborn child. ‘Hello? Are you there? Do it again!’

  Isobel laughed as Kite stood up and grabbed an apple from a bowl. She looked down at her stomach and continued the conversation.

  ‘Your daddy is crazy,’ she said. ‘But he looks very sexy in his suit.’

  ‘My whole life was designed so that I don’t have to wear one of these things,’ he said, briefly wrapping his arms around the suit as if it were a straitjacket. He took a carton of grapefruit juice from the fridge and set it on the counter.

  ‘How was your run?’ she asked.

  ‘Strange.’ As Kite poured the juice into a glass, biting into the apple, he thought again of Strawson and Eskandarian, of the long-ago summer in France. ‘Whatever the opposite of Zen is, that’s how I’m feeling. It’s the funeral. Can’t get used to the idea that Xav’s gone.’

  ‘You haven’t told me much about him,’ Isobel replied, picking up her car keys. ‘He was at school with you?’

  ‘Yes. For a long time he was my closest friend. He was around when I was recruited.’

  ‘OK.’

  Ordinarily, that would have been the end of the conversation, but Kite wanted to tell Isobel at least something about their relationship.

  ‘The nature of the job took me away from him. Xav went to university, and I was travelling in my twenties. He got into rave, Ecstasy, all that Gen X stuff. Like most of the wealthier boys at Alford, he had a trust fund. Half a million on his twenty-first birthday, a flat in Chelsea, an Audi Quattro for the residents’ parking. No need to work or to prove himself. He just wanted to have a good time. He was wild and he lived well. People loved being around him. From eighteen onwards he was basically an addict spending most of his money on coke, vodka, parties – whatever would make the pain go away. None of us were wise enough to be able to persuade him out of it. He was having too much fun.’

  Kite was circling around the truth. He was looking at the woman he loved, trying to explain what had happened, but holding back key facts. To tell the story of the life of Xavier Bonnard was to tell the story of Xavier’s father, Luc, and of Ali Eskandarian, the Iranian businessman who had come between them. Kite could not and would not do this because the story belonged to BOX 88. It was all in the files. One day – when they were old and grey and nodding by the fire – he would tell Isobel the whole story. There were times when he wanted her to know everything about him; others when he wanted never to speak of the past again.

  ‘Sounds like a classic fucked-up posh boy.’

  ‘He was definitely that.’

  ‘Too much money. Too little love.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘That school,’ she said, sounding exasperated. ‘One part Hogwarts, one part Colditz. What did that writer in the Guardian call it? “A gateway drug for the Bullingdon.” Why do the Brits send their kids to these places?’

  ‘I’ve been asking myself that question for thirty years.’

  ‘No way Rambo’s going there. No way, José.’ Kite met her eyes. Though her father was American, Isobel had been born and raised in Sweden, where only diplomatic brats and royalty went to boarding schools. She said: ‘I can come with you today if it’s going to be difficult.’

  He touched the side of her face. ‘You’re kind. There’s no need. You have work.’

  ‘When will you be home?’

  The funeral was at eleven. Kite was due at a gallery in Mayfair at four where his usual dealer had a Riopelle he wanted him to look at. If the Eastbourne train was on time, he would be home to make dinner.

  ‘Eight?’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t be any later than that. If I run into problems, I’ll call you.’

  3

  Robert Vosse had given instructions that the Kite cottage wasn’t to be touched.

  ‘No car or van or drone or pushbike is to come within half a mile of the place. Get too close on foot surveillance and Kite will smell a rat. Follow his car for more than a couple of miles and we might as well put stickers on the headlights saying MI5 Is Following You. If Lachlan Kite is even half as experienced and thorough as we’ve been led to believe, he’ll sniff out a microphone or a camera in less time than it took Matt to make my cup of tea this morning.’

  Vosse was addressing the troops at the Acton safe flat. It was a Tuesday afternoon. They had spent the day poring over the various reports the team had assembled on the Bonnard family and Martha Raine.

  ‘Kite’s hardly likely to blab about BOX 88 within earshot of his pregnant wife,’ said Vosse with a nod of agreement from Matt Tomkins. ‘He’s a thirty-year veteran of the intelligence world, hard-w
ired for secrecy and discretion. Man like that gets wind we’ve rigged his love nest for sight and sound, he’ll do a Lucan. Let him go for his jogs unmolested. Let him have his lunches at the Dog and Duck. The funeral’s all we need. Cara’s going to pop him in her pocket, aren’t you, love?’

  * * *

  It wasn’t quite how things worked out.

  Just to be on the safe side, on the day of the funeral Vosse positioned a two-man team outside Lewes station in a plain-clothes Vauxhall Astra. Officer Kieran Dean followed Kite onto the London service while Tessa Swinburn drove ahead and boarded the same train twenty minutes later at Hayward’s Heath. Dean disembarked and picked up the Astra as Swinburn settled in a carriage adjacent to Kite and tracked him to Victoria station. After buying a pain au chocolat and a double espresso at Caffè Nero under the watchful eye of Matt Tomkins, BIRD was observed boarding a District line train to South Kensington. By eleven o’clock, Lachlan Kite was standing outside the Brompton Oratory surrounded by the great and the good of the European elite on a cold February morning blessed by clear blue skies. Wearing Nina Ricci sunglasses and a long black overcoat (both sourced on expenses from TK Maxx), Cara Jannaway approached the mourners from a starting position outside Harrods. Watching her grudgingly from a patisserie across the road, Matt Tomkins told Vosse by phone that Cara certainly looked the part, but was ‘too tall, and too striking, for effective surveillance work’.

  ‘You think?’

  Vosse had finely tuned antennae both for the toadying of ambitious junior officers and for any carefully worded slights against colleagues. He liked Cara, always had, and didn’t want to hear a bad word against her, especially when she wasn’t around to defend herself. Vosse had known from day one that Matt Tomkins was a triple-dyed shit of outsized ego, possessed of boundless tenacity and cunning. Such characteristics were always an asset to any team, but he hoped that Tomkins would be smart enough to learn when to talk and when to keep his mouth shut.