Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 7

  Cara had made Zoltan a cup of tea and discovered that an unidentified Iranian man had paid him three grand in cash to shut the car park for twenty minutes and to turn a blind eye to whatever went on. She suspected that Zoltan had made similar arrangements with the same man in the past, but did not press for details. Instead she asked for a description of the Iranian’s appearance and manner, neither of which matched her memory of the man with whom Kite had been talking outside the Oratory. Released from the torture of telling lies, and perhaps hopeful that his full cooperation might mitigate against the need for arrest, Zoltan described the Iranian’s behaviour and movements immediately prior to Kite’s arrival in the Jaguar. Three men had been left in the car park at half-past twelve – all Middle Eastern, all without names – while Zoltan had gone for a cigarette and a cup of coffee at a branch of Caffè Nero near Green Park station. By the time he got back, the Jaguar was parked underneath the poster and only two of the men remained.

  ‘What were they wearing?’ she asked.

  ‘Smart,’ said Zoltan. ‘White shirts. Suit jackets.’

  ‘Officer Hawtrey.’ It was Vosse, using one of Cara’s cover surnames as he came down the ramp. ‘So this is him, is it?’

  Zoltan stood up, unsteady on his feet. Vosse wasn’t dressed in police uniform, but that didn’t seem to concern the Serb, who nodded his head obsequiously as Vosse approached.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Cara. ‘Zoltan Pavkov.’

  Vosse addressed the suspect.

  ‘My name is Galloway, Mr Pavkov. Chief Inspector Galloway of the Metropolitan Police.’ Cara caught his eye and grinned while Zoltan was looking the other way. ‘I’m here to ask you some subsidiary questions. I understand from Officer Hawtrey that you have a sum of money on the premises that you’d like to show us.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’ Zoltan hurried into the security hut, emerging moments later with a Harrods carrier bag stuffed with twenty- and fifty-pound notes.

  ‘And this was given to you by the Middle Eastern gentleman this afternoon?’ said Vosse, taking the bag and inspecting its contents.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Can I speak to you for a moment in private, Chief Inspector?’ Cara asked.

  ‘By all means.’

  Leaving Zoltan alone at the base of the ramp, Cara and Vosse walked towards the Jaguar.

  ‘Any sign of the van?’ she asked.

  ‘Kidson Electrical? Not yet.’

  Vosse touched the roof of the Jaguar and peered inside. ‘Looks spotless. They probably wiped it for DNA and fingerprints. Have you checked the boot?’

  ‘Locked,’ she replied. ‘What about BIRD’s phone?’

  ‘Still down.’ Vosse turned through three hundred and sixty degrees. ‘Which means we could well be standing right on top of it.’

  They looked around. Cara’s eyes immediately settled on the black skip with ‘Commercial Waste’ written on it. Vosse followed the direction of her gaze and arrived at the same conclusion. The lid on the skip was closed and appeared to be locked.

  ‘Mr Pavkov,’ he called out. ‘Do you have a way of opening that?’

  Zoltan looked beyond the section of torn plastic pipe and said: ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could you do that, please?’

  It was just as they had both feared. Inside the skip, thrown on top of a heap of old rags and plastic bottles which reeked of vomit and mould, was a dark suit jacket and a pair of black leather shoes. Vosse gasped at the stench as he leaned in to retrieve Kite’s belongings, finding his wristwatch, house keys, wallet and mobile phone in the pockets of the jacket.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Cara.

  ‘Fuck indeed,’ Vosse concurred.

  Cara didn’t need telling that Kite’s shoes, watch and wallet had been abandoned for the same reason that the kidnappers hadn’t wanted his phone: any or all of them could contain a tracking device which would lead BOX 88 to their door. Wherever Kite had been driven, he had been taken there in a new set of clothes or his naked body dumped in a landfill, never to be seen again.

  Vosse’s phone sounded in his back pocket. He took it out and looked at the screen.

  ‘Tell me something I didn’t know,’ he sighed.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Cara asked.

  ‘Pegah Azizi doesn’t exist. Or should I say: Pegah Azizi n’existe pas.’

  ‘Fake driving licence?’

  ‘And credit card.’

  A car came down the ramp. Zoltan waved it away shouting: ‘We are full!’ as Vosse put the phone back in his pocket and picked up Kite’s wallet.

  ‘Brian’s trying to get the CCTV from Europcar, but I wouldn’t hold your breath,’ he said. ‘Ten to one “Pegah” was wearing sunglasses and a hijab. We’d have an easier job finding Amelia Earhart.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ Cara asked. For the first time in her relatively short career, she had felt the blood rush of operational excitement, but was suddenly at a loss for ideas. She knew that formally arresting Zoltan risked exposing the secret investigation into BOX 88, but couldn’t think how else to proceed. ‘Do we call it in? Tell the police? Contact Six?’

  Vosse took his time responding. He was flicking through Kite’s wallet litter, pulling out Visa and Oyster cards, dry-cleaning receipts, a driving licence. A burglar alarm was going off somewhere in the neighbourhood and he looked up, grimacing at the noise.

  ‘We do nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Cara was trying to remember her training. It frustrated her that she wasn’t able to work out why Vosse was suggesting such a course of action. Was she going to be asked to cover up Kite’s disappearance? Was Vosse going to stand down the investigation into BOX 88? He saw the confused look on her face and put her out of her misery.

  ‘We let him go,’ he said, nodding in the direction of Zoltan Pavkov, who was pacing at the bottom of the ramp, rubbing his hand over his head and massaging the back of his neck. ‘We keep his money, but we send him back to work. Tell him he’s been a lucky boy. Tell him he has nothing to be afraid of. The world needs good car park attendants and he’s one of them.’

  Cara wondered out loud if it would work.

  ‘Of course it won’t work.’ The beaming grin which accompanied Vosse’s reply was the cheeriest thing Cara had seen all day. ‘He’ll panic. He’ll call his paymaster. And because we’ll be all over Zoltan’s phones, because you and Cagney will be sitting outside his flat tonight, and because Eve and Villanelle are going to be following said Mr Pavkov home this afternoon and waiting for him when he comes into work tomorrow morning, we’ll find out inside the next twenty-four hours who the fuck has kidnapped Lachlan Kite.’

  6

  When Kite regained consciousness he found himself lying on a hard bed in a small, windowless room fitted out with little more than a solitary bulb and a stained hessian rug. There were no pictures on the walls nor any other furnishings, save for a low plastic table close to the door on which someone had placed a bottle of water. As far as Kite could tell, there were no surveillance cameras. He was still wearing his shirt and suit trousers, but the jacket had been taken and his shoes were missing. There was no sign of his watch, wallet or mobile phone. Kite felt in his trouser pockets for his house keys, but they too had gone. All this was just as he had expected, just as he himself would have done in similar circumstances. The Iranians had been thorough. He was surprised that they had left the wedding band on his left hand; perhaps it had proved too difficult to remove.

  The absence of a camera troubled him for two reasons. Firstly, it suggested that the security outside the room was watertight and that Kite’s captors were not concerned about the possibility of escape. Secondly, it indicated that they wanted to leave no record on film of what was about to happen to him. Kite leaned on what he could remember from his SERE training but knew that survival would depend mostly on a mixture of intuition, experience and blind good luck. He had been held captive once before, but in a different context and with no genuine risk to
his life. He was brave, but he was also pragmatic. He understood the psychological demands of long-term confinement and accepted that few people can withstand the sustained sadism of a trained torturer, just as no person can survive indefinitely without food and water and rest.

  As soon as he tried to move off the bed he felt a stabbing pain in his right thigh. He pressed his hand against the muscle, remembering the fight in the car. He was hungry and thirsty. Crossing the room, he broke the seal on the plastic bottle and drank from it. The top of his head was almost touching the bulb in the ceiling and there was no more than a few feet on either side of him in which to stretch and move. As he turned the metal handle of the door, finding it locked, Kite felt an ache in his kidneys but was otherwise free of pain. He recalled pressing his fingers into the driver’s eyes. He hoped that he had done him lasting damage.

  Kite sat back on the bed and closed his eyes. There was no discernible smell in the room except for his own stale sweat: no damp, no food, no cleaning products. It was possible that the Iranians had smuggled him into their London embassy, but more likely that he was in a safe house on UK soil. Moving Kite to an aeroplane and attempting to fly him back to Iran would have been too risky.

  He listened for sounds that might give him some clue as to his whereabouts. It was extraordinarily quiet. All he could hear was the low hum of a ventilation system. Kite knocked against the wall with his knuckles and felt the dull, unyielding thud of what was probably brick or fibreglass. If the room had been soundproofed, that might indicate that it had previously been used for the purposes of torture, or simply that he was being held in a built-up area where any noise from the room might alert a passer-by. That Kite was not yet dead was an obvious sign that the Iranians intended to interrogate him. It was then that he recalled what Fariba had said in the car.

  I need your memory. When you wake up, I want you to tell me everything you can about Ali Eskandarian.

  Was it his imagination or had Fariba also mentioned Martha? Kite thought of Isobel and the morning they had spent at the house, Rambo kicking against her belly, the child he had craved for so long and might now never see nor touch. He remembered his conversation with Fariba outside the church and cursed himself for telling him that Isobel was pregnant. There was no precedent for hostile states harming the spouses of targeted MI6 and CIA officers, but in the age of Trump and Putin, of Xi and Assad, all bets were off. During periods when he was not overseas on an operation, Kite was usually in touch with Isobel several times a day. Without knowing the exact time, he knew that many hours had passed since he had last texted her. When he failed to return home, she would inevitably ring around their friends, eventually calling the emergency number he had given her which connected to the desk at BOX 88. By morning, there would be a team of Turings combing CCTV and signals intelligence for clues to his whereabouts. By then, however, it might be too late. Kite knew that Fariba’s team would kill him as soon as they had extracted whatever information was required; you didn’t grab a British intelligence officer on UK soil then spit him back once you were done. He needed to buy some time, to conjure a story about Eskandarian which would satisfy the Iranians while protecting the sanctity of BOX 88.

  Why now? Why come for him thirty years after the events in France? The British had played no role in the assassination of Qasem Soleimani; it was implausible that the Quds Force were embarked on revenge. Kite could only assume that word of the ongoing backchannel negotiations between BOX 88 and the Iranian leadership had leaked to elements in MOIS, Iran’s intelligence service. Personnel from the United States had been secretly meeting senior government ministers from Tehran at a hotel in Dubai without the knowledge or approval of the White House. Perhaps Fariba assumed, incorrectly, that Kite was a member of the negotiating team? But why the specific interest in Eskandarian? Was there a mole inside BOX 88 with access to the file from 1989? Perhaps Fariba’s interest was just a bluff, an opening move in a much longer game of interrogation. It was impossible to know.

  Lying back against the flat, hard pillow, Kite remembered the woman outside the Brompton Oratory and the glimpse of the Vauxhall Astra tailing his Jaguar from Kensington. It was a slim ray of hope. If ‘Emma’ had been part of a larger surveillance team, it was possible that several vehicles had followed him onto Hyde Park Corner. If the Jaguar had been sighted on the ramp leading down to the car park, there was a chance that Kite’s absence had been noted. Unless he could somehow fashion an escape, his odds of survival depended on who had been following him. If Emma was private sector, he was out of luck. She would go back to her office, write up a report on Kite’s disappearance and head home for pizza and Netflix. If, on the other hand, she was MI5, Thames House had both the experience and the resources to probe more deeply into what had happened. Access to CCTV, number plate recognition cameras and cell phone activity might lead to a rescue attempt. Kite acknowledged the irony: BOX 88 had survived undetected for decades. That the Security Service might come to Kite’s aid in his hour of need would be a welcome, if awkward slice of good fortune.

  Yet he could not rely on outside intervention. The Iranian team that had grabbed him were thorough and professional, gaining control of the car park, likely making the switch in dead ground and transporting him, apparently without interference, to a safe house prison which was under their command. Kite considered his options for buying time. That he would deny he was a serving intelligence officer was a given: it was the golden rule Strawson had drummed into him at the age of eighteen. Never confess, never break cover, never admit to being a spy. Xavier may have told Fariba that Kite was MI6, but Kite would insist that he had stopped working for British intelligence many years earlier. They had the wrong man. They had made a mistake. I remember nothing about Ali Eskandarian. Let me go.

  Kite rolled onto his side and stared out into the room. There were other tricks he could employ, though it would be risky to do so against trained MOIS personnel. He could complain of suffering from high blood pressure or diabetes and insist that medication be brought to him. He could feign psychological breakdown. Sticking to his cover as an oil executive, Kite could tell Fariba that he was insured against kidnapping and offer a release fee of several million dollars. But he doubted that such an approach would work. There had been something targeted and specific in Fariba’s behaviour. It was obvious that he wanted information, not money.

  The noise of a key turning in the lock. The door opened. Kite sat up to find the chauffeur pointing a gun at him. To his satisfaction, he saw that he had developed a black eye the colour of a ripe aubergine, the stain spreading across the bridge of his nose. In his left hand the driver was holding a clear plastic bag containing three aluminium boxes.

  ‘Eat,’ he said, placing the boxes on the table.

  The chauffeur turned to leave. He had a look on his face of distilled contempt.

  ‘Any chance of a knife and fork?’ Kite asked with an edge of sarcasm.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he replied.

  ‘I thought you didn’t speak English?’

  Kite smiled as the driver slammed the door. There was a portion of boiled rice in the first box, some moussaka and several cubes of grilled chicken. Kite ate the chicken, waited for the rice and moussaka to cool, then scooped them into his mouth using his fingers. He wiped his hands on the tails of his shirt and lay back on the bed, wondering about Isobel. She was not a person prone to panic or anxiety, but he did not like the idea of her worrying about him while she was pregnant. He entertained the foolish idea that Fariba would listen to what he had to say, thank him for his time and let him go, but it was a forlorn hope.

  The key turned again in the lock and the door opened. A well-built man in his thirties whom Kite did not recognise came into the room. He had a thick beard with no sideburns and addressed him in heavily accented English.

  ‘Come with me.’

  The man was dressed in a similar fashion to the goons Kite remembered from the ramp: dark trousers, white shirt, black shoes. As Kite s
tood up, he was sure that he saw a trace of cocaine in the base of the man’s nostril: a tiny fleck of white powder caught in a damp nest of hairs. The man did not meet Kite’s eye, nor try to bind his hands or prepare himself in any way for the possibility of an escape attempt. Instead he turned his back on the prisoner, leading him down a narrow, low-ceilinged passage lined with framed reproduction watercolours of European birds and flowers. Kite realised that he was on board a boat of some kind, almost certainly a large ship, likely not at sea because he had sensed no lateral movement in the water. The carpet was cheap and thin, and there was a very faint smell of diesel. The realisation gave him renewed hope. Ships have flares. Ships have hidden rooms and passages. Ships have radios.

  ‘In here,’ said the man, opening a door at the end of the passage.

  Kite was shown into a room with blacked-out windows lit by two anglepoise lamps. Vinyl plastic sheets had been taped to the floor. For the first time he was afraid. There was a couch against the far wall covered in a white dust sheet with a wooden coffee table in front of it. Several cardboard boxes had been piled up in the corner of the room next to a television with a cracked screen. Two chairs were stacked on top of one another nearby. The guard lifted off the first of them, turned it in the air and set it down in the centre of the room, close to a metal toolbox.

  ‘Sit,’ he said.

  Kite had no choice but to do as he was instructed. He waited for the guard to grab his hands and bind them, but he did not do so. Instead he left the room by a door in the facing wall and told Kite to wait. Kite looked around. Anything could happen in this place. Teeth. Toenails. Fingers. They had prepped the room. It would take all of his courage to withstand what was coming. He had to try to stop thinking about Isobel and to trust that she would be OK. He had to have sufficient faith in himself that he would not reveal the identities of BOX 88 agents and personnel under torture. If they were going to kill him, he hoped that his son would never find out what had happened here. And he prayed that it would be over quickly.