Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Read online

  ‘I just think she’s standing out a bit too much,’ he said. ‘Needs to talk to somebody, sir. Needs to blend in.’

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ said Vosse, and hung up.

  * * *

  Kite had given up smoking on his fortieth birthday and nowadays lit up only when he needed to for cover. Standing amid the Bonnard mourners on the steps of the Brompton Oratory, he caught the smell of a cigarette on the morning air and walked towards its source.

  ‘You couldn’t spare one of those, could you?’

  The man holding the cigarette was at least six foot six and heavily bearded. Kite did not recognise him, though he had spotted several of Xavier’s friends and former colleagues in the crowd.

  ‘Sure.’ The accent was American, the cigarettes a brand Kite didn’t know. The packet was mercifully clear of gruesome images of babies on ventilators, of lungs and throats decimated by cancer. Kite took a long, deep drag.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Needed that.’

  ‘Me too. Bad day. You knew Xav a long time?’

  ‘From thirteen. We were at school together.’

  ‘What’s that, the famous place? Alford? Students go around in tailcoats, like they’re dressed for a wedding the whole time?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Fifty-six prime ministers and counting? Every prince and king of England since 1066?’

  ‘Pretty sure Prince Charles went to Gordonstoun, and hated it, but otherwise you’re right.’

  The American suppressed a broad grin, as though it would be tasteless to be seen enjoying himself on the steps of a funeral.

  ‘How about you?’ Kite asked. ‘How did you know Xavier?’

  ‘AA,’ the American replied, and tested Kite’s reaction with his eyes. ‘Did time together in Arizona. Dried out in South Africa. Attended meetings in London, New York, Paris. We were what you might call a travelling double-act. They should put up one of those blue plaques in the Priory.’

  That explains the unmarked cigarettes, Kite thought. Bought by the carton in Cape Town or Phoenix duty-free.

  ‘Had you seen him recently?’ he asked.

  The American shook his head. ‘Not for a year or so. I met a girl, moved back home. Xav kind of vanished, like he always did. No way he took his own life though. Not a guy with that much spirit. Must have been accidental. You?’

  ‘I hadn’t seen him for a long time.’

  Kite looked out among the gathering crowds, the stiff-backed grandees and the poleaxed mourners. He was sure that his friend had taken his own life but didn’t want to explore that theory with a stranger who knew things about Xavier from therapy that Kite himself had never been privy to. One day he would get to the truth of what had happened, but not today. A tall woman in a long black overcoat was walking towards the church beside a short, bullish man in a pinstriped suit. With a thud of irritation, Kite recognised him as Cosmo de Paul. From Alford to Edinburgh, from MI6 to Royal Dutch Shell, de Paul had been a malign presence in Kite’s life and a consistent thorn in the side of BOX 88. Kite doubted that de Paul had spent more than fifteen minutes in Xavier’s company since the turn of the century. That he should attend his funeral merely demonstrated that he valued the opportunity to network more than he valued his friendship with the deceased.

  ‘Who’s the girl?’ asked the American, indicating the tall woman in the long black overcoat. She was wearing a pair of oversized Jackie O sunglasses, drawing attention to her own grief while at the same time challenging anyone to speak to her. If she was de Paul’s latest wife or mistress, Kite sent his condolences. If she was a friend of Xavier’s, it was the first time he had set eyes on her.

  ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Time to go in. Thanks for the cigarette.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  Cara’s basic cover, agreed with Vosse, was to role-play a friend from Cape Town who had got to know ‘Xav’ while he was drying out at a clinic in Plettenberg Bay. Research carried out by Tessa Swinburn had shown that Bonnard had enjoyed two separate stints at rehabilitation centres in South Africa, most recently in Mpumalanga. It was plausible that he had befriended ‘Emma’, an English teacher from East London, while passing through Cape Town. Cara hoped that by referring obliquely to Bonnard’s struggles with narcotics and alcohol, she would prevent anyone she happened to speak to from testing her legend too closely.

  She was aware, of course, that Xavier had been to Alford College, a place she knew only as the school which had produced at least three of the Conservative politicians who had done so much to damage British public life in the previous decade. Looking around, she saw men in their mid-to-late forties whom she assumed were Bonnard’s contemporaries. Some of them, with their signet rings and their Thomas Pink shirts, looked like dyed-in-the-wool Tory whack jobs pining for the halcyon days of Agincourt and Joan Hunter Dunn; others seemed no different to the bland, blameless middle-aged men who haunted the corridors and conference rooms of Thames House and Vauxhall Cross. Cara had never fully understood the widespread British prejudice against public schoolboys. It wasn’t exactly their fault that at the age of eight, their parents had seen fit to pack them off to boarding school with not much more than a tuck box and a thermal vest. To Cara, who had grown up in a happy two-parent, two-sibling house in Ipswich, attending the local grammar and partying on weekends like Gianluca Vacchi, spending five years at Alford sounded like a prison sentence.

  ‘Hello there.’

  She looked down. A squat, vain-looking man with a cut-glass accent was introducing himself.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘You look a bit lost.’

  If there was one thing designed to instil in Cara Jannaway a prejudice against posh, entitled ex-public schoolboys, it was being told by this silver-spooned creep that she looked ‘lost’.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I was just about to go in.’

  ‘Me too,’ the man replied. ‘I’m Cosmo. Cosmo de Paul.’

  ‘Emma.’

  They shook hands. Was it a set-up? Had Lachlan Kite become suspicious and sent him over to check her out?

  ‘Are you a friend? Family?’

  ‘Friend,’ Cara replied, grateful for her sunglasses as she looked around for BIRD. She hadn’t been able to spot him among the dense crowds moving into the Oratory and wondered if he was ahead of her, in all senses. ‘You?’

  ‘Xavier and I were at school together.’

  ‘And where was that, Alford?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Ah. Good for you.’

  Cara found herself walking alongside de Paul, making halting small talk about London and the weather. She was glad to be free of the miserable, drip-drip inertia of the Acton safe flat but didn’t like it that a stranger had latched onto her in this way. She had heard that a certain type of man preyed on a certain type of woman at funerals, hoping to usher hysteria and grief into the bedroom; if this little runt with his snub-nose and Rees-Mogg pinstripe tried it on, she’d push his face into the baptism font.

  ‘Are you here alone?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know anybody here. Just came to pay my respects.’

  All around her, middle-aged men and women in scarves and overcoats were embracing one another, recognising faces from yesteryear and nodding respectfully. It was as if the funeral of Xavier Bonnard was not merely an occasion of great solemnity, but also a reunion of sorts for a generation of men and women, schooled at St Paul’s and Roedean and Oxbridge, whose paths had diverged some thirty years earlier, only to be brought back together by the sudden, tragic death of a mutual friend. Like the posh weddings Cara had occasionally attended, impeccably mannered ushers in morning coats were handing out the Order of Service and shepherding older members of the congregation to their seats. She fancied that she could spot the addicts and party boys among them: they were the ones with unruly hair and the Peter Pan glint in their eyes, the hand-me-down tweed suits and look-at-me patterned socks. That was the thing about upper-cl
ass druggies: they had the money to go on and on. Get hooked on smack in Ipswich and chances are you’d wind up dead. Get addicted to coke on an Alford trust fund and you could afford to get addicted all over again, just as soon as Mummy and Daddy had checked you out of rehab.

  ‘How did you meet Xavier?’ de Paul asked, accepting an Order of Service from a good-looking man in his twenties who looked as though he’d walked straight off the set of Four Weddings and a Funeral.

  ‘Out in South Africa,’ she said.

  ‘I see,’ he replied, absorbing the euphemism.

  One of the mourners passed de Paul and touched him on the back, saying only: ‘Cosmo’ in a low murmur before settling into a pew. Cara told de Paul that she would prefer to be alone ‘at this difficult time’ and was glad to see him take the hint.

  ‘Of course. It was charming to meet you.’

  ‘Likewise,’ she said, and moved quickly along the nave.

  She was staggered by the opulence of the church. Tessa’s research into the Bonnard family had revealed that Xavier’s mother, Rosamund, was the daughter of a duke whose family appeared to have owned, at one time or another, most of the land between Cambridge and Northampton. Perhaps it took that kind of old school clout to secure the entirety of Brompton Oratory for a midweek funeral. Certainly it looked as though the church was going to be three-quarters full. There were already at least four hundred people filling the pews and many more still shuffling in through the entrance. Cara stopped halfway along the aisle and turned to look for Kite. To her astonishment she saw him immediately, standing no more than ten feet away beneath a sculpture of St Matthew. It was the first time that anyone on the team had been that close to BIRD. She was struck by how easily she recognised him from surveillance photographs: the dark hair, greying slightly at the temples; the narrow blue eyes, catching light from a window in the southern facade; a face at rest, giving nothing away, but with the faintest hint of mischief in the lines around his mouth. Not a noticeably handsome man, but striking and undeniably attractive. Cara had a habit of comparing people to animals. If Robert Vosse was a cow, plodding and decent, Matt Tomkins was a vulture, circling for carrion. If Cosmo de Paul was a weasel, sly and opportunistic, Lachlan Kite was not the bird of his codename, but rather a leopard, lean and prowling and solitary.

  She sat at the end of a vacant pew, removed the sunglasses and immediately took out her mobile phone.

  He’s here, she typed to Vosse, glancing up at Kite as she accidentally pressed ‘Send’ too early on WhatsApp. To her horror, she realised that Kite was looking directly at her. Cara returned to the message, her heart beating so fast that her hand began to shake as she held the phone. Dark grey suit, tailored. Slim. Six foot max. Appears to be alone.

  The service was scheduled to begin in five minutes. Cara decided to return Kite’s gaze. If she could forge a connection with him, however briefly, it was more probable that he might talk to her in the aftermath of the funeral. That was the Holy Grail as far as Vosse was concerned: to get alongside BIRD and to cultivate a relationship with him.

  She put the phone back in her coat pocket, composing herself. But when she turned and looked back towards the statue of St Matthew, Kite had disappeared.

  Walking into the church, Kite was suddenly confronted by the sight of Martha talking with a crowd of university friends. He had not expected her to make the trip from New York. His heart thumped as she turned around – and he realised that he had been mistaken. It was just a trick of the light. The desire to see her, of which Kite had barely been conscious, had momentarily scrambled his senses.

  Looking up at the vast, vaulted ceiling, the grandeur of the Oratory reminded him of the great chapel at Alford, religion on a scale Kite had never before experienced as a bewildered thirteen-year-old boy, arriving from the wilds of Scotland in an ill-fitting suit in the late summer of 1984. That first year at his new school had thrust him into a world of privilege and wealth with which at first Kite had struggled to come to terms. More than thirty-five years later, every second face in the Oratory was a pupil from those days or a friend of Xavier’s whom Kite recalled from the 1990s. The intervening years had not been kind to most of them. Kite was blessed with a photographic memory, but some were barely recognisable. The eyes remained constant, but the features, like his own, had been bullied by time. Everywhere he looked Kite saw slackened skin, thin, greying hair, bodies warped by age and fat. To his left, Leander Saltash, once a lean, aggressive opening batsman, now a bald, stooped television director with a BAFTA to his name; to his right, a man he took to be the diminutive, acne-ridden Henry Urlwin, now transformed into a six-foot beanpole with a chalky beard. Even Cosmo de Paul, that creature of the yoga retreat and the dyeing salon, looked washed out and slightly overweight, as if no vitamin supplement or exercise regime could reverse the inevitable decline of middle age.

  ‘Tell me. Did I fire six shots or only five?’

  Kite felt two fingers pressed into his lower back, a hand clamped on his shoulder. It was a voice he hadn’t heard in years, a voice he had hoped, in all honesty, never to hear again. The voice of Christopher Towey.

  ‘Chris. How are you?’

  Years ago, at Alford, Towey had obsessively watched the films of Clint Eastwood, quoting ad nauseam from the Harry Callaghan series to anyone who would listen. Every time Kite saw him, Towey made the same joke. He did so again in response to Kite’s reply.

  ‘Well, Lachlan, to tell you the truth, I’ve forgotten myself in all this excitement.’

  Kite was in a bleak, uncooperative mood, thinking of Martha and Xavier. He didn’t recognise the quote and smiled as best he could, hoping they could skirt around Dirty Harry and Sudden Impact and talk like grown men.

  ‘It’s good to see you.’

  ‘You too, mate,’ Towey replied. ‘Christ, doesn’t everybody look so bloody old?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Age has withered us,’ he said. With dismay, Kite remembered that they had studied Antony and Cleopatra together for A level. Towey was still locked in the classroom, a man of forty-eight stalled for ever in his school days. ‘Custom has staled our infinite variety.’

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ Kite felt obliged to say, and suddenly wished that he had taken Isobel up on her offer to come with him. ‘People are probably happier now than they were twenty years ago. There’s a lot to be said for not being young. Fewer choices, less pressure. You look great, Chris. How’s married life?’

  ‘Divorced life nowadays.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’m bonking like a madman. Best-kept secret in London. If you’re a moderately well-financed middle-aged man with a British passport and some shower gel, the world’s your oyster. Poles, Brazilians, Uzbeks. Some days I can hardly walk.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘So what have you been up to lately, eh? Last time I saw you, you were working in Mayfair. Oil or something.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, BOX 88 had been mothballed. Kite had taken a long sabbatical, then worked in the oil business for a small private company financing exploratory research in Africa.

  ‘Still doing that?’

  ‘Still doing that,’ Kite replied.

  It was a lie, of course. Kite and Jean Lorenzo, his opposite number in the United States, had revived BOX 88 in 2016. In one of his final acts as president, Barack Obama had approved intelligence budgets totalling more than $90 billion, 7 per cent of which was diverted to ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’, a euphemism for BOX 88. Kite was now director of European operations working out of the Agency’s headquarters in Canary Wharf.

  ‘Tell you who thinks you’re a man of mystery. Remember Bill Begley? Always reckoned you were a spy.’

  Kite had lived so long with the triplicate lives of the secret world, never settling down, always packing a bag and moving on, working one day in London, the next in Damascus, that people from time to time had suggested t
o his face that he was a spy. He had a well-honed response for such occasions which he used on Towey now.

  ‘I confess,’ he said, raising both hands in mock surrender. ‘Get the cuffs.’

  Towey, never the brightest button in the Alford box, looked confused.

  ‘To be honest, I wish I had gone into that life,’ Kite added. ‘Lot more interesting than the work I’ve been doing the last ten years. But from what I understand, it doesn’t earn you any money. Foreign Office pays peanuts. Are you still in the City?’

  Towey confirmed that he was indeed ‘making investments on behalf of private clients’ but was soon drawn into a separate conversation with a married couple whom Kite did not know. He grabbed the chance to leave. As he crossed the aisle, Xavier’s children, Olivier and Brigitte, walked in front of him. Kite had not seen them in years and was staggered by Olivier’s likeness to his father; it was as if the seventeen-year-old Xavier had walked past and failed to recognise him. Nearby, Kite spotted a senior French diplomat talking to a member of the Bonnard family; Kite knew that MI6 had recruited his number two in Brussels as part of the broad intelligence attack on EU officials during the Brexit negotiations. Two pews beyond them, Lena – Xavier’s long-suffering wife, herself a recovering heroin addict – looked at Kite as she sat down. He had written a letter of condolence to her within hours of Martha’s call, but could not tell from her reaction if she had read it. He raised a hand in greeting and Lena nodded back. She looked shattered.

  A sudden silence settled on the congregation, punctured by organ music. Kite felt eyes on him. He looked up to find the woman he had seen walking alongside de Paul – still wearing oversized sunglasses and the black overcoat – staring in his direction. Had she recognised him? She sat down and began texting on a mobile phone.

  ‘Lachlan?’