Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Read online

  ‘Why?’ said Torabi.

  ‘Why? Because it happens to be the truth.’

  The partial, if inaccurate, confession had a miraculous effect. Torabi and Kamran exchanged a few words in Farsi and the chauffeur left the room.

  ‘So it is true.’ Torabi closed the door behind him. Kite felt a droplet of sweat fall onto the back of his arm. ‘In the summer of 1989, while on holiday with the family of Xavier Bonnard and Iranian businessman Ali Eskandarian, you were working for British intelligence?’

  Kite lied again.

  ‘Not to my knowledge at the time, no. I was what you might call a useful idiot. The Americans took advantage of me. I was a friend of Xavier’s who became embroiled in what happened. Mr Eskandarian was a businessman with links to the highest levels of the Iranian government, yes, and was therefore a person of enormous interest to the CIA. At the tender age of eighteen, I was hardly aware of this. I spent most of that summer drinking wine, smoking weed and chasing girls, including Martha Raine. Afterwards, the Americans questioned me, pretending to be consular officials, and obtained my side of the story. One thing led to another and I was later put forward for a job at MI6 during my first year at university. The CIA had recommended me. I went to Russia, I partied a little too much, MI6 found out – and they sacked me.’

  ‘That’s not what I heard.’

  ‘And what did you hear, Ramin?’

  Almost everything Kite had said, with the exception of his youthful enthusiasm for red wine and Martha Raine, was an invention.

  ‘I heard that you knew what you were doing. That Xavier later found out about it and was upset. He blamed you for a long time. Isn’t that true?’

  Kite remembered Xavier’s rage and hurt, the lies he had been forced to tell as his friend’s world came crashing down. Thirty years on, he was using those same lies again on Torabi.

  ‘Xavier had the wrong end of the stick. His father got in his ear and blamed me for what happened. That wasn’t true. It was the Americans. Christ, it was all so long ago! Why the hell do you need to know all this now?’

  ‘All in due course,’ Torabi replied, tapping out a cigarette and offering one to Kite. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I should have asked before if you smoked?’

  ‘Only when I want to.’

  Torabi lit the cigarette and stood up. Kite also rose from his chair. The plastic floor rippled beneath his feet.

  ‘Enough for now,’ said the Iranian. ‘I have business to attend to. You will be taken back to your cell until I am ready to deal with you. When I come back we’ll start again. You’ll tell me everything you remember.’

  ‘About 1989?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kite assumed that Torabi would allow enough time to pass for his prisoner to fall asleep, then order his goons to wake him up.

  ‘Where am I?’ he asked.

  ‘That is not important.’

  ‘Are we on a boat?’

  Torabi looked surprised. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘The smell. The size of the rooms.’

  ‘Maybe you are. Maybe you’re not. Like I said, it’s not important. Hossein will take you to your room.’

  Kite could see that he would make no further progress.

  ‘My wife is pregnant,’ he said, hoping for a last-minute favour, but expecting nothing. ‘She’ll be worried. I’ll be perfectly happy to answer your questions, but I’d appreciate it if you would somehow get a message to her explaining that I’m OK.’

  Torabi opened the door, preparing to leave. Hossein, the man who had earlier escorted him to the interview, entered the room.

  ‘You’re OK for now, Mr Kite,’ Torabi replied. ‘Who’s to say if you’ll be OK later.’

  9

  Kite turned to Hossein and told him that he needed to use the bathroom. They were halfway along the corridor leading back to his cell.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The bathroom. The toilet. The loo.’ It was like a brief insight into the absurdities of the British class system: saying ‘loo’ meant you were posh; when Kite had used the word ‘toilet’ in his first term at Alford, the thirteen-year-old Cosmo de Paul had told him he was ‘common’. ‘Where can I find it?’

  There was a door at the end of the passage. Hossein was holding a two-way radio and used it to call Kamran. The chauffeur duly appeared and the two men instructed Kite not to lock the door as they stood outside the bathroom, waiting for him to finish.

  Kite used the time to assess what the room could offer. A small, blacked-out porthole confirmed that he was indeed on board a ship. He kept the tap running to provide a covering noise for a brief search of a cupboard beneath the sink. Inside he found two unused bars of soap, bottles of bleach and cleaning fluid, but not what he had hoped for: hydrogen peroxide hair dye or white spirit, something flammable and highly sensitive which could later be either forcibly ingested by the guards or used as an improvised explosive. There was an out-of-date box of codeine, some diarrhoea medication and a few pills for seasickness. Kite put six of the codeine tablets in the pocket of his trousers, closed the cupboard and switched off the tap. At the last moment, he noticed a nail protruding from the wall beneath the sink. He grabbed the head and moved it back and forth, trying to disturb the plaster, but had succeeded only in shifting it a few millimetres from the wall when there was a knock on the door.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Hossein.

  ‘Two minutes.’

  Kite looked around for other loose screws or nails which he could prise from the walls and later use in a fight. There were none that he could see. The shower curtain was held up on plastic hooks. A metal towel rail might come away from the wall easily enough if Kite needed to use it as a weapon. There was a towel draped over it. He flushed the toilet and went out into the corridor.

  ‘Everything OK, gentlemen?’ he asked.

  Neither man responded. Hossein waited until Kamran had closed the bathroom door, put a gun in the small of Kite’s back and walked him to his windowless cell. As he reached for the door handle, Kite glanced down at Hossein’s watch and saw the date and time. It was just after eleven o’clock at night on the day of the funeral. He wondered what Isobel was doing, how she was coping with his disappearance. Doubtless by now she had called the emergency number and whoever was on duty at BOX 88 had instigated a search.

  ‘Do either of you have a phone?’ he said, noting that neither Hossein nor Kamran had searched him as he came out of the bathroom. ‘If you could get a message to my wife—’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Hossein. Kamran had already turned and was walking back down the corridor.

  ‘I can pay you when I get out.’

  Kite held out no hope that Hossein would oblige; he simply wanted to find out what kind of man he was dealing with. A loyal colleague of Torabi – or a foot soldier? There was a momentary flicker of interest in his eyes, but his response was by the book.

  ‘You couldn’t afford me.’

  ‘Hossein!’

  Kamran had summoned him from the end of the corridor. Hossein pushed Kite through the open door, so that he almost tripped over on the low plastic table, then slammed it shut behind him.

  ‘Hey!’ Kite cried out.

  He heard the key turning in the lock, then the murmur of the two men as they spoke in Farsi outside. Kite walked over to the bed, put the codeine pills under the mattress and lay down. He was suddenly exhausted, yet knew that he would find it almost impossible to sleep. Torabi had organised everything so carefully: the car park, the ship, the switch of identity with Fariba. Kite knew what it was about Ali Eskandarian that the Iranians were so desperate to find out. What he could not understand was why it had taken MOIS thirty years to track him down.

  10

  The hours following the disappearance of Lachlan Kite gave Cara Jannaway her first opportunity to see the Security Service doing what it did best. For a woman who was not easily impressed, who had found her first year at MI5 to be peculiarly repetitive, even boring, it was
quite an afternoon.

  Within forty-five minutes of Vosse meeting Zoltan Pavkov, he had obtained a Home Office warrant to saturate the Serbian in round-the-clock surveillance. A technical team was dispatched to Zoltan’s flat in Bethnal Green, rigging the kitchen, bathroom and living room with listening devices and adding a live feed from the camera in his laptop computer for good measure. Zoltan’s shabby Fiat Punto was parked outside and received the same treatment: microphones were placed behind the dashboard and a tracking device in the recess between the boot and the back seat. Reaching an analyst at Thames House, Vosse instructed him to collate and analyse a file detailing Pavkov’s landline and Internet usage, as well as his online banking records. Threatening arrest, Vosse had told Zoltan to hand over his phone, then invited Cara to take him for a ten-minute walk around the block while he cloned its contents via Bluetooth and downloaded an application which would transmit all of the phone’s subsequent activity to a laptop in the Acton safe house. If Pavkov was dumb enough to call the Iranians, Cheltenham would catch every word.

  Even then, Vosse wasn’t done. Following a quick lunch in Mayfair, Kieran Dean and Tessa Swinburn were given instructions to follow Zoltan when he came off shift at four o’clock. Matt Tomkins was told to go home and get some rest, then to drive over to the Bethnal Green flat at 11 p.m. to take over the stakeout. Meanwhile number plate recognition cameras had spotted the white van in the City, moving east through Whitechapel. The last known sighting of ‘Kidson Electrical Services’ had occurred on East India Dock Road at 14.35, indicating that the vehicle was probably located within a one-mile radius of Limehouse.

  ‘Needle in a haystack,’ said Vosse, ‘but at least it gives us an area to aim for. Once we see some activity from Zoltan’s mobile, he’ll get us to within fifty feet of BIRD.’ Cara’s boss held up the cloned device in his oversized hand. ‘I’m going to look at his messages, check who he’s been talking to. We’ll call a few numbers, see who picks up. Unless the Iranians are being very, very careful with their comms, we’ll have BIRD back home by the weekend.’

  Cara didn’t necessarily share Vosse’s optimism but certainly admired his confidence and self-belief.

  ‘What about BIRD’s stuff?’ she asked, pointing to Kite’s belongings. Vosse had placed them on the boot of a nearby car.

  ‘BIRD’s shit?’ he replied, with a knowing look. ‘Good question. They left his wallet behind, his shoes, his phone, his watch. What does that tell you?’

  Cara liked it when Vosse taught her on the job. She knew that she could learn from him, that he enjoyed the feeling of being the veteran taking an apprentice under his wing.

  ‘Well, I suppose they’re worried about being tracked,’ she replied.

  ‘More than that.’

  Cara was stumped. She walked over to the car and picked up Kite’s watch.

  ‘Says Omega Constellation.’ She held it up for Vosse. ‘Looks genuine, looks expensive. Must be worth at least a grand. But they didn’t nick it.’

  ‘Quite,’ Vosse replied, looking proud of his pupil. ‘And the wallet?’

  ‘Plenty of cash inside. Same deal. They were in a hurry, didn’t have time to help themselves to a bit of easy money.’

  ‘Go through it,’ said Vosse. ‘Might be useful later. Photograph the bank cards, there might be accounts we don’t know about. Look at where he’s been going on his Oyster, use the driving licence to check if he’s hired any cars lately. There’s a couple of business cards in there. Make a note of the names, they might cross-reference with someone in the BOX 88 research. I looked earlier. There are four photos. Keepsakes. One is Isobel, find out who the other people are. There’s an old laminated picture of a cheerful-looking bloke standing behind a bar. Maybe Kite’s father? Another one of a woman who looks a lot like him, taken more recently. Could be his mother, his sister. Are they still alive? If we can match the faces, we can start to piece together where BIRD is from, who he cares about, who might have information for us. Speaking of which, have a look at the activity on Isobel’s profile for any sign of contact. Chances are she’ll start to worry when she doesn’t hear from him. Usually when he’s away they text one another. She might know something we don’t. Who these people are. Why they’re interested in BIRD. What they plan to do with him.’

  ‘What about the mobile?’ Cara asked.

  ‘Tricky.’ Vosse ran his tongue around his teeth, like someone at dinner fretting over trapped food. ‘Tried cloning it while you were walking the dog.’ He nodded towards the ramp, where Zoltan was smoking his ninth cigarette of the afternoon. ‘No dice. More firewalls than Xi Jinping’s underpants. Without the access code or a fingerprint, it’s a Cheltenham job. Could take days.’

  ‘Shame,’ said Cara. She was developing a sneaking regard for Kite’s tradecraft.

  ‘A phone is a thing of beauty, Cara, a joy forever. Its loveliness increases.’

  ‘Keats used a mobile?’ she said, wanting Vosse to know that she’d understood the reference.

  ‘Clever you,’ he said. ‘Imagine what we could get from that thing.’ Vosse looked down at the phone. ‘All those names and numbers, all those places BIRD’s visited, every message he’s sent, every Uber he ever ordered …’

  ‘A goldmine.’

  ‘But the men who took it didn’t want it.’

  Cara saw that Vosse had realised something critical. She couldn’t tell if the breakthrough had only just occurred to him or if he had been sitting on it for some time.

  ‘Didn’t even take the SIM card,’ he said, pointing at the slot in the phone. ‘Didn’t take his watch or his money. No, they want something that couldn’t be found in BIRD’s phone calls, his emails, his text messages.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Cara asked.

  ‘They want his memory.’

  11

  Kite lay back on the bed. He closed his eyes, taking his mind back to 1989, a place which held the answers to each of Torabi’s questions, a vault containing the operational secrets of BOX 88.

  The memories were as clear to him as they had been for thirty years – every encounter, every thought, every conversation – as if he had written a detailed account of his experiences at Alford, in Scotland and later in France, and was reading from it in the dark, soundless cell.

  * * *

  It is early November, the events of the summer three months behind him. The eighteen-year-old Kite is in Martha’s bedroom in Finchley, her parents away for the weekend, her older brother out at a birthday party. They have the house to themselves.

  Most of Kite’s friends had taken off on their gap years: picking fruit in Australia; taking South-East Asia on a Shoestring around Thailand and Indonesia; others burnishing CVs with teaching jobs at primary schools in Uganda and Tibet. Xavier was in Paris with his family, dealing with the aftermath of the summer. Strawson had asked Kite to stay put in London: BOX 88 wanted to put him through advanced training before he went to university the following year.

  ‘Tell me about your dad,’ said Martha. ‘You’ve never said much about him.’

  She was in bed rolling a joint, Kite sitting in a chair by the window watching people come and go in the winter street below. Ten days later, in that same house, he would be in the living room with Martha’s parents watching the Berlin Wall being torn down on the Nine O’Clock News. Had anyone else asked the same question, Kite would have shut them down. He had been avoiding the subject of his father for half his life. But Martha was different. He wanted to tell her everything.

  ‘Dad was called Paddy,’ he said. ‘Pierce Patrick Kite, but everyone knew him as Paddy. He wasn’t born in Ireland. My grandparents lived in London during the war and only moved back to Dublin in the 1950s. Dad must have been fifteen or sixteen at the time. He had a sister who died in the Blitz as a baby – Aunt Catherine – so like me he was a kind of only child by default.’

  ‘You had a sibling who died?’ Martha asked. She looked concerned, as if Kite had suffered a terrible loss about which she had know
n nothing.

  ‘No, no.’ He poked her leg with his foot. ‘I don’t have any brothers or sisters. It was just me and Mum and Dad.’

  Martha nodded, relieved, going back to rolling the joint. They had bought a packet of Rizlas and some cigarettes at a mini-supermarket on Regents Park Road. Martha had insisted on going to a place where her face wasn’t known in case the man who ran the corner shop at the end of the street told her parents she was smoking pot.

  ‘What did he look like?’ she asked.

  From his wallet Kite took out two colour photographs: the first showed his father proudly standing at the bar of the hotel in Scotland, arms folded, grinning from ear to ear; the second was a picture of his parents sitting on a picnic rug at the Wigtown Show on a bright summer day in 1978.

  ‘Wow, your mum is beautiful,’ she said. ‘They look happy.’

  ‘They were.’

  ‘Your dad’s got such a glint in his eye. Looks very kind, but naughty. Bit like you.’

  Kite turned from the window and watched as Martha lit a small lump of treacle-brown hash with her Zippo and crumbled it onto the Rizla.

  ‘Whenever people talk about Dad they say he was a typical hard-drinking Irishman who seduced the girls and flew down the wing for the first XV and liked to quote Keats and Bob Dylan when he was pissed. I don’t know how much of that is true. There are a lot of myths around Dad. I know he preferred Scottish whisky to Irish, Tennant’s to Guinness. His Dublin friends would come over on the boat from Larne and tease him about that. I grew up around bottles of Laphroaig and Lagavulin, six-packs of Kestrel lager and McEwan’s Export. There was alcohol everywhere. My father would hide half-bottles in the pockets of his suits and hang them in the cupboard. Whenever I smell booze on someone’s breath, I instantly think of him and kind of hate them for it. Even at school on weekends when we were getting pissed, it was enough to make me stop drinking if I smelled it on someone. One time, Xav drank a bottle of sherry from an off-licence in Windsor in the space of fifteen minutes and threw up in his room. A friend and I had to clear up the mess, get him out of his clothes and into bed before Lionel, our housemaster, found him. Would have been expelled if he’d got caught – he was on final warning. It was like parenting him. I’d parented my dad when he was drunk, so what was the difference? He’d be out of his head at three in the afternoon and say: “Don’t tell your mother, it’ll only upset her.” He’d pass out in different places. I remember Mum crying in their bedroom as she tried to wake him up for work. He was never violent or aggressive, but I can’t think of a single moment when he wasn’t drinking. At breakfast once, when I was about eight, I picked up his glass of orange juice by mistake, took a sip and it was full of vodka. He screamed at me to put it down, but it was too late. I spat it out and started crying.’