Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 8

  The door opened. Fariba walked in. He had changed out of the suit and was now wearing blue designer jeans and a white collared shirt. He smiled at Kite as if to reassure him. He still looked every inch the international playboy, fit and lean, as relaxed as if he had just walked off a yacht in Miami Beach and ordered a round of cocktails at the Delano. Kite wondered what had become of the real Jahan Fariba. It would have been simple enough for the Iranians to prevent him from attending the funeral and for the man standing in front of him to have assumed his identity.

  ‘Lachlan,’ he said breezily, as though Kite was an old friend whom he’d kept waiting for an unnecessary length of time. Fariba raised an apologetic hand and gestured at the vinyl sheets lining the floor. ‘I’m sorry about all this. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Just wonderful, thank you. Never been better.’

  Fariba checked that the door behind Kite was locked and said: ‘Sure.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Kite asked. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Who am I?’ Fariba seemed to find the question amusing. ‘Well I’m not Jahan Fariba, that’s for sure.’

  ‘What’s your real name?’

  ‘My real name is Ramin Torabi. You may choose to believe that. You may choose not to believe that. I don’t care either way.’

  The Iranian’s American-accented English was already beginning to grate. Torabi removed the dust sheet from the couch and sat down. The cushions were finished in cheap black leather. He made himself comfortable and stared at Kite with apparent fascination.

  ‘Wow. It’s quite something to have you here. Xavier told me so much about you.’

  ‘Did you kill my friend?’

  ‘Did I kill Xavier?’ The Iranian tried to sound affronted by the accusation, but his reply was deliberately provocative. ‘Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. It’s not particularly important.’

  ‘It’s particularly important to me.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s the case, buddy, but like I told you, I really don’t give a shit.’

  If there was one thing Kite hated being called, it was ‘buddy’. He wanted to get up from the chair and finish what he had started in the car, but knew that as soon as he attacked Torabi, half a dozen armed Iranian goons would come rushing through the door to his rescue. This time there was a camera in the room, a dome lens in the ceiling. They were watching what was going on. Kite looked down at the metal toolbox. In one movement Kite could open it and use whatever was inside as a weapon. He knew that it had been placed there to tempt him.

  ‘Seriously,’ Torabi continued. ‘I don’t want to keep you here any longer than I have to. Truth is, we didn’t think you’d react in the way you did. You were good! You sensed the danger. You kind of forced our hand when it came to getting you under control, you know?’

  Kite saw that he was expected to reply, so he said nothing.

  ‘I want to say something important before we start out. I understand how a situation like this works from your point of view. You’re a professional. You’ve been brought here. You’re trained for situations like this.’ Torabi produced a glib, insincere smile, lit a cigarette and blew a lungful of smoke at the ceiling. ‘You’ve been taught never to reveal anything about what you do. The first and the last rule of intelligence work – the same goes for Iranians as it does for Brits – is never confess. It’s like Fight Club! The first rule of spying is you never talk about spying!’ Torabi laughed explosively at his own joke, apparently under the impression that he was the first person to have made it. ‘Men like you and I respect those rules. But I want us to take a time out and go past all that bullshit if we can. I know who you are, I know what you’ve done. So the sooner we dispense with the usual “I’m-innocent, you-have-the-wrong-guy” shit, the quicker we can get this thing over.’

  ‘Can I speak?’ said Kite.

  ‘Not yet. I’m not finished.’ Torabi swept a hand through his carefully combed hair, inhaling on the cigarette. ‘You must have seen so many changes throughout your career.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Starting out as a young intelligence officer in the last years of the Cold War, seeing the Berlin Wall come down, the collapse of the Soviet experiment. The West triumphant. You had won! Then suddenly nothing to do. No role to play any more.’ Torabi waved the cigarette in the air and made a face of mock disappointment. ‘What was the purpose of MI6 when you had nobody to spy on? You and men like your associate, Cosmo de Paul, you must have been so lost. I would love to speak to you about all this when we’re done. Really I would.’

  De Paul’s name fell like an axe on Kite. What had Xavier said? Why did Torabi assume that de Paul was his ‘associate’? Perhaps it was a deliberate tactic, the name casually planted to see how the prisoner would react. Kite maintained a poker face. It was clear that Torabi had prepared his speech in advance, intending to unsettle or confuse Kite while simultaneously calming any nerves of his own that he might be feeling.

  ‘Ramin,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve mistaken me for somebody else.’ Kite knew that his denials would fall on deaf ears, but it was nevertheless essential to buy time by playing the innocent. ‘My name is Lachlan Kite, I’m an oil—’

  ‘Please!’ Torabi raised a hand and stubbed out the cigarette. ‘I already told you. This is what I don’t want us getting into. So much bullshit, it insults the hard work and sacrifices we’ve both made during our careers. Let’s not waste time denying who we are, huh? Tell me what it’s been like, seeing everything change. One quiet day in the 1980s, no cell phones; the next, just a few years later, everybody is carrying one. Same thing with the Internet. No Facebook, no email, no apps; then suddenly everything is available online for the world to see. Spying has changed! I’m younger than you by – what? – ten years. I came into our profession long after the true Cold Warriors had left.’ Torabi accompanied this remark with the same self-satisfied smirk with which he had reacted to his Fight Club joke. ‘Your generation must have found it so difficult doing your job in the way that you’d been trained to do it. No more IRA to fight. No more ETA. No polite telephoned warnings to a newspaper from the latest Sunni group before they blow themselves up on the Central line. No more travelling under alias. No more false passports, no more dead drops and one-time pads. You’ve witnessed a generational change. It’s like talking to someone who lived through the age of steam and found himself travelling on a fucking space ship! How have you survived all this time? You’re a dinosaur, man. What a privilege to be sitting with you. Truly. What a privilege.’

  Coke, thought Kite. He’s high on something. These guys are all using. They need it for their nerves, to get through whatever it is they’ve been ordered to do. The guard who came to the room was on it. The chauffeur was probably jacked up on a couple of lines when he drove the Jaguar to Cheshire Street. That was the anxiety Kite could feel coming off them just before the fight. He thought of Xavier’s troubles with drugs, of all the summer nights in his early twenties with Martha at raves outside London, Strawson berating Kite for ‘wrecking his brain with Ecstasy’.

  Torabi was still banging on:

  ‘What fascinates me is, for all that time – thirty years of international diplomacy, Thatcher, Blair, Reagan, Clinton, Trump – you guys continued to hate my country. The British, the Americans, they knew the Saudis had bankrolled ISIS and 9/11. They watched as Sunni – not Shia – suicide bombers brought carnage to London and Paris and Madrid. You let the fucking Jews build a wall around Palestine and drive Arabs into the sea. But it was all still the fault of Iran.’ Torabi gave a contemptuous laugh. ‘We were the bad guys! We were the ones you punished, the nation you tried to destroy. Not the Saudis. Not the Russians. Not the Chinese. Why little old Iran?’

  Kite was as fascinated by Torabi’s impassioned, sophomoric argument as he was perplexed by its purpose. Was his captor hoping to use Kite to broker a peace deal, unaware that BOX 88 was already doing just that with his own government’s ministers in Dubai? Or was Torabi’s heartfelt outpourin
g nothing more than an attempt to justify whatever violations lay in store for Kite in this chamber of horrors? Either way, he had no choice other than to continue to play the mystified innocent.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I agree with almost everything you’ve just said,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never understood why the Americans have targeted Iran for so long, unless it’s revenge for the humiliation of the embassy siege, which happened outside the living memory of more than three-quarters of the population. Maybe it’s because you stoked the insurgency in Iraq or bankrolled Hizbollah for thirty years. How do I know? The Iranian government hates Israel. A lot of Americans don’t hate Israel. I’m not clairvoyant, but could that have something to do with it? There’s no point in asking me these questions. I’m not a politician, Ramin. I’m just a guy who reads the Economist and the New York Times. There’s no point in keeping me here if you think I’m some kind of spokesman for the British government. These are questions you should be asking in Downing Street or, better still, Washington.’

  Torabi met Kite’s denial with a slow, disappointed shake of the head. He looked down and scratched at a non-existent mark on his jeans. Kite stuck to his strategy.

  ‘When you say that I’m a spy and I’ve somehow been trained for this eventuality, that I get kidnapped in broad daylight all the time and this is somehow a normal day for me, the only truthful thing I can tell you is that you really do have the wrong person.’

  Torabi sighed heavily and looked along the couch, as though a third party in the otherwise empty room might have heard what Kite had said and been similarly disappointed.

  ‘You see, buddy, this is what I didn’t want us to go through. Next thing you’ll be telling me you need urgent medication for Type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure or whatever they teach you to say to buy yourself time—’

  ‘If I could just finish—’

  ‘Sure. Go ahead.’

  Kite moved towards a more detailed denial using what he knew about Xavier’s personality.

  ‘I genuinely don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘I don’t have diabetes. I don’t have high blood pressure. You mentioned Martha in the car.’ Torabi looked up expectantly. ‘You mentioned Ali Eskandarian. You were with Xavier in Paris and clearly asked him what happened when we first left school a very long time ago in the summer of 1989. Is that right?’

  ‘The summer in France. Yes.’

  Kite knew that he was on the right track. He took a deep breath.

  ‘Because I’ve spent so much time in the last thirty years travelling overseas, Xavier always believed that I worked for MI6. He wasn’t alone. A lot of people have come to that conclusion. In fact there was even a guy I spoke to at the funeral who told me he thought I was a spook. I’m not, Ramin. Never have been. You’re barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘So where did you learn to fight like that?’

  It was the obvious flaw in Kite’s strategy. He had reacted quickly and violently to the Iranians in a way that was highly unusual for an ordinary citizen. An instinctive lie jumped to his rescue.

  ‘I didn’t say I couldn’t defend myself,’ he said. ‘I was mugged when I was thirty and I’ve been doing martial arts ever since. You obviously weren’t who you said you were. I recognised the word “jakesh” and was pretty sure your driver was calling me a “pimp”. You weren’t familiar with Alford, despite claiming you’d been there as a boy. You were driving away from the restaurant and taking me into a car park with a bunch of heavies in black suits waiting on the road. I got scared. As you no doubt know, I’m a rich man. I travel in South America and the Middle East. My company takes out substantial kidnap and ransom insurance for its employees. I thought you were after my money.’

  Torabi appeared to have stopped listening. He turned towards the door and shouted: ‘Kamran!’

  The chauffeur walked in. This time he was wearing sunglasses to cover the black eye. Kite would have found it funny had Torabi not stood up, walked behind his chair and put his hands on Kite’s shoulders.

  ‘Ask the prisoner if he works for MI6,’ he said. ‘If he denies it again, break one of the fingers on his right hand.’

  7

  Five hundred miles away, Xavier Bonnard’s good friend Jahan Fariba woke up in a Frankfurt hotel room with no idea of the time and no memory of having gone to bed. He felt exceptionally well rested, but anxious and uncertain. Bright sunlight was visible around the edges of the curtains. There was a light on beside the television, another in the bathroom.

  He looked towards the bedside table but could not see his phone, which he usually left charging overnight. It was only then that he discovered he was still partially dressed. Pressing his feet together under the duvet, Jahan realised that he was wearing a pair of socks. Pushing back the duvet, he saw that he was wearing the same shirt he had worn on the previous day for the meeting with the Iranians. He always took his watch off last thing at night, but it was still on his wrist.

  He looked at the time. It was just after three o’clock. At first Jahan assumed that it was three o’clock in the morning, but the sunlight outside contradicted this. Perhaps his watch had stopped? But the second hand was moving as normal and the date had moved forward. It was the day of Xavier’s funeral. Jahan had been due to catch a 7 a.m. flight to London. With a mixture of bewilderment and intense frustration, he realised that he had overslept.

  How was it possible? He sat up in bed and looked around for something to drink. Padding into the bathroom, he drank several mouthfuls of lukewarm water, scooping it into his mouth from the tap. He looked at his reflection in the mirror, trying to remember what had happened the night before. He had met the Iranians in the lobby. Early evening drinks had turned into dinner, dinner had turned into … what? He had no recollection of anything that had taken place after they had sat down in the restaurant. There had been beers during the meeting, then probably some wine with the meal. Jahan was not a heavy drinker but he could usually hold his liquor. Certainly he had no memory of the night descending into cocktails and digestifs. Christ. Had he collapsed and been dragged to the room by the Iranians? Had they quietly called the front desk and arranged for Mr Fariba to be escorted back to his room? If that was the case, it was probably the end of the business deal.

  Jahan found his suit jacket in a heap on the floor. He picked it up and went through the pockets, looking for his phone. There were four messages from his wife in Rome, half a dozen from various friends, as well as a text from the airline noting that he had failed to make his flight. A couple of old Alfordians who had been expecting to see him at the funeral had written to say that they had looked for him, without success, at the Brompton Oratory.

  Jahan downloaded his emails. There were no messages from the Iranians. Should he write to them and try to find out what had happened? Maybe not just yet. It would only embarrass both parties. Better to wait and to contact them in a couple of days. Jahan realised that he had no memory of what they had discussed at the meeting, only that both men had seemed enthusiastic about the rebuilding project in Syria.

  He was annoyed to have missed the funeral. Xavier’s death was a tragedy and Jahan had wanted to pay his respects to one of the most interesting and amusing men he had ever met. He tried to load Facebook on his phone, but the password on the account wasn’t working and – to his confusion – there was only a blank space where his profile picture had been. Instead he wrote an email to the friend in London with whom he had been due to stay that night:

  Gav, I’m really sorry. I overslept and missed my flight. Missed the funeral too. Not like me to be so disorganised. I think I must have eaten or drunk something last night that didn’t agree with me. I’m so sorry, but I’m not going to be coming to stay with you guys. Still stuck in Frankfurt and will just go straight home to Rome. Please accept sincere apologies for messing you around. Send my love to Kitty and the kids and hopefully see you soon. Jahan x

  8

  The chauffeur stood in front of Kite. With a blunt
, joyless expression on his face, he said: ‘Do you work for MI6?’

  Kite leaned on years of tight scrapes and crises, slowing everything down, trying to breathe evenly, trying to think of a way to stop what was about to happen. He clenched his hand into a fist, wondering how Kamran would go about breaking the fingers. With pliers? With a hammer from the toolbox? Certainly with pleasure: it would be more than adequate revenge for the black eye.

  ‘Kamran,’ he said, trying to sound as calm as possible. ‘I’m sorry about your eye. I was frightened. I was trying to defend myself. I apologise.’ His words had no discernible impact on the driver, though Torabi looked interested. Kite kept going, determined to deny both men the satisfaction of knowing that he was afraid. ‘It’s difficult to answer your question. Yes, it’s true, when I was a very young man, I worked for MI6.’ Torabi’s eyes flicked up. ‘That’s why your boss may be confused. Even by telling you this, I’m committing treason, but I don’t want a broken finger.’ He tried to laugh. ‘I value my hands!’

  Kamran looked at Torabi, who indicated that they should continue to listen.

  ‘By the time I was twenty-five, I quit.’ Kite prayed that what he was saying was going to work. ‘In fact, if I’m completely honest, I was sacked. So the answer to your question is this: I do deny that I work for MI6 because I haven’t worked for them since 1994. And I’ll keep on denying it until I don’t have any fingers left.’