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Box 88
BOX 88
Charles Cumming
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Charles Cumming 2020
Cover design by Stephen Mulcahey © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover photographs © Marina Endermar/Dreamstime.com (church), CollaborationJS/Arcangel Images (man)
Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008200367
Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008200381
Version: 2020-08-19
Dedication
for Harriette
Epigraph
‘We have as many personalities as
we have friends’
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Index of Characters
21 December 1988
London, the present day
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Keep Reading …
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By Charles Cumming
About the Publisher
Index of Characters
The Kite family:
Lachlan Kite (‘Lockie’), intelligence officer
Isobel Paulsen, Lachlan’s Swedish-American wife, a doctor
Cheryl Kite (née Chapman), Lachlan’s mother
Patrick Kite (‘Paddy’), Lachlan’s father (d.1982)
The Bonnard family:
Xavier Bonnard, Kite’s childhood friend
Luc Bonnard, Xavier’s father
Rosamund Bonnard (née Penley), Xavier’s mother
Jacqueline Ward (‘Jacqui’), Xavier’s younger sister
BOX 88:
Michael Strawson, veteran CIA officer and co-founder of BOX 88
Rita Ayinde, senior officer (UK)
Jason Franks, head of Black Ops (a ‘Closer’)
Carl Fowler, surveillance officer (a ‘Falcon’)
Freddie Lane, computer analyst (a ‘Turing’)
Ward Hansell, senior officer (US)
James (‘Jock’) and Eleanor (‘Miss Ellie’) Carpmael, office managers at ‘The Cathedral’
The Reverend Anthony Childs, a vicar
Alford College:
Lionel Jones-Lewis, Kite’s housemaster, known by the initials ‘LJL’
Cosmo de Paul, joined Alford in the same year as Kite
William ‘Billy’ Peele, history teacher
The Security Service (MI5):
Robert Vosse, leader of MI5 investigation into BOX 88
Cara Jannaway, intelligence officer
Matt Tomkins, intelligence officer
Other Characters:
Ali Eskandarian, an Iranian
Abbas Karrubi, bodyguard to Ali Eskandarian
Hana Dufour, a friend of Ali Eskandarian
Ramin Torabi, an Iranian businessman
Martha Raine, a schoolfriend of Jacqueline Ward
Zoltan Pavkov, a Serb
Bijan Vaziri, an Iranian exile
They were just another American family heading home for the holidays.
A taxi had been booked to take them from their house in Pimlico, little Gaby facing backwards on the fold-down chair, her legs not yet long enough to reach the floor, every inch of the cab crammed with suitcases and boxes and Harrod’s carrier bags full of presents wrapped for Christmas. Mommy and Daddy were facing her, side by side on the back seat, her giant Hamleys’ teddy bear wedged between them. Whenever the driver braked, Gaby could feel herself pulled backwards and then forwards, weightless for an instant, like the feeling of being on the swings in Battersea Park and wanting to fly off into the afternoon sky. Her mother said: ‘Careful, sweetie,’ but there was no way she was going to fall, not with the suitcases to steady her and the handle on the door to hold onto. She loved the growl of the taxi’s engine, the Christmas lights receding in the back window, her father’s voice as he pointed out the Italian restaurant they had been to for Grandpa’s birthday, then the home of the Martins in Chelsea, the other American family they knew in London with their golden retriever, Montana, who licked Gaby’s face whenever she gave him a hug.
Mommy had told her that there were only three more bedtimes until Christmas Eve. One tonight, on the aeroplane which was taking them across the ocean to New York, then two in her bedroom at the house in Stamford. Gaby felt giddy with excitement. She would miss her friends from school – Claire and JenJen, Billy and Pi – but they had promised to stay in touch and write postcards to one another from wherever they were going.
Soon the taxi started going faster and they were on the freeway heading out to Heathrow. At the airport, the driver found a trolley. Gaby watched her parents pile the suitcases one on top of the other until Daddy insisted Mommy fetch a second trolley to cope with all the bags. He had given the driver thirty pounds saying: ‘Keep the change.’ The driver’s name was Barry. When he asked where they were going, Gaby told him: ‘New York. Pan Am flight number 103. Have you ever been to New York?’
‘’Fraid not,’ Barry replied. ‘You have a safe trip, sweetheart, lovely Christmas.’
There was a tree with tinsel but no lights near the desk where they queued with the trolleys. Afterwards Gaby showed her passport to a man wearing a turban who wished her a happy Christmas. She had to walk through a special door that detected metal while her rucksack and teddy bear went through the X-ray machine. A boy beside her was crying. Gaby couldn’t understand why someone would be crying when there were only three more bedtimes until Christmas.
Eventually, after Mommy had taken her to the bathroom and bought some earplugs in a pharmacy inside the terminal, they walked down a long corridor to a big room where the other passengers were waiting to board the aeroplane. Gaby heard American accents, lots of them, saw older children listening to music on Walkmans, a woman lying asleep, sprawled across three chairs. There was a family of Indians sitting in the corner of the lounge. The mother had a red spot in the centre of her forehead.
‘Flight’s on time,’ her daddy whispered, pointing outside to the waiting aircraft. ‘That’s the cockpit. Can you read that, sweetie?’
Words had been painted on the front of the plane, right beneath where the captain was sitting. Gaby could see him through the window, flicking switches above his head.
‘That’s easy,’ she said. ‘It says Clipper Maid of the Seas.’
They were allowed to board first because Gaby was part of a family. There were other children behind her, but no sign of the boy who had been crying when they walked past the X-ray machine. It was cold in the tunnel. There was a colour photograph on the wall of the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River, the Twin Towers behind them glinting in the sun. A tall stewardess wearing red lipstick and a pretty blue skirt said: ‘Hi there! Love your teddy bear! He’s huge!’ as Gaby walked through the big open door, right behind where the captain was sitting in the cockpit. It was dark now and the sound of the airport was deafening, but as soon as she entered the cabin and started following her father towards her seat, the noise seemed to fade away, as if Gaby had put in her mommy’s new earplugs.
They were seated towards the front of the plane. The stewardess strapped her in and gave her a set of headphones, explaining that a film would start playing once the plane was airborne over Scotland.
‘Scotland?’ Daddy asked. He sounded surprised.
‘Weather diversion,’ the stewardess replied. ‘Little bumpy tonight over Ireland.’
That was when she told Gaby that Teddy was so big he was going to have to go in a cupboard until after take-off. The cupboards were full of cases and handbags; it looked as though he was going to be squashed in there. Gaby felt like crying but she wanted to seem grown-up in front of the other passengers. The stewardess said she would give her candy to make her feel better.
‘You know they call candy “sweets” in London,’ Gaby told her.
‘Is that right?’ the stewardess replied, looking sideways at Mommy. ‘Sweets, huh?’ She had a pretty smile and very white teeth. ‘So does Santa Claus know where you’re going to be on Christmas Eve, honey? Have you told him?’
‘I don’t believe in Santa Claus. My friend Billy says it’s just my daddy dressed up with a beard.’
‘News to me,’ said Daddy, and secured his seat belt as the stewardess walked off. She was smiling.
Gaby owned a yellow Swatch. She looked at it as the plane took off; it said twenty-five past six. Mommy hated flying so she always sat between them, Daddy holding her right hand, Gaby holding her left. Mommy closed her eyes as the aeroplane climbed through the sky. It was a better feeling even than the swings in Battersea Park, the noise and the rattle and the power of the big plane taking them up towards the moon.
‘Set your watch to New York time, honey,’ said her father, reaching across and touching her wrist. ‘We’re going home.’
Beneath them, in the chill of the hold, was the luggage Gaby’s parents had checked in at Heathrow a little more than an hour earlier: clothes, toiletries, Christmas presents. Close by, secured inside a brown Samsonite suitcase loaded onto a feeder flight at Malta airport that morning, was a timer-activated bomb constructed with the odourless plastic explosive Semtex and hidden inside a Toshiba cassette recorder by agents working on behalf of the Libyan government.
Gaby and her parents and the more than 250 souls on board Pan Am 103 would never reach New York City, never return to their families for Christmas. At three minutes past seven, as the aircraft was passing over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, the bomb exploded. Those sitting towards the front of the plane were killed instantly. Others fell for over five miles, some still strapped in their seats, thrown free of the fuselage yet conscious for up to three minutes as they plunged to the ground. The wreckage of the obliterated plane, scattered over an area of 850 square miles, destroyed twenty-one houses and killed eleven residents of Lockerbie. In an instant the Clipper Maid of the Seas had been transformed into a flight of angels, violated by terror.
1
It was Martha, of all people, who rang Kite to tell him that Xavier Bonnard had killed himself.
The call, logged to Kite’s mobile at 11.24 GMT, transcripted by GCHQ before midday and copied to Thames House, was traced to a cell phone in the New York metropolitan area registered to ‘Martha Felicity Raine’ of 127 Verona Street, Brooklyn. The take quality was considered moderate, but a recording had been automatically archived. An analyst in Cheltenham was able to provide a full account of the brief conversation.
LACHLAN KITE (LK): Hello?
MARTHA RAINE (MR): Lockie. It’s me.
LK: Martha. God. What a surprise. MR: Yes. [break, 1 second] LK: Is everything all right? Are you OK? MR: I’m afraid it’s something awful. LK: What’s happened? Are the children all right? MR: You’re sweet. They’re fine. They’re both well. No, something else. LK: What is it? MR: It’s Xavier. He’s gone. Xavier has died. [break, 2 seconds] I thought you would want to know. Perhaps you already do. LK: No. I didn’t. I didn’t know. [break, 1 second] I appreciate you ringing. Must be early there. MR: I only just found out. Thought I should ring straight away. LK: Yes. What happened? What … MR [overlapping]: They think it was suicide. They’re not 100 per cent sure. He was in Paris. In an apartment. Not his father’s place, somebody else’s. LK: Who’s ‘they’? MR: Jacqui. She rang me. She’s in Singapore these days. LK: What about Lena? Were they still together? MR: I think so, yes. Just about. Living in London. They still have the Onslow Square house. I don’t know where the children are. LK: (Inaudible) [break, 2 seconds] MR: Are you there? Are you all right, Lockie? LK: I’m fine. I’m in the country. Sussex. We have a cottage here. MR: We? LK: Yes. I met somebody. I got married. [break, 1 second] MR: Right. Yes, I did hear that. On the grapevine. I’m happy for you. Finally settling down. What’s her name? What does she do? LK: She’s a doctor. Isobel. [break, 2 seconds] MR: And what about everything else? Are you still doing those things you used to do? That life? LK: I’ll tell you when I see you. We can talk about it then. MR: Of course. Silly of me to ask. Must be beautiful there. Lovely England. I never get back … LK: Killed himself how? MR: They think an overdose. I didn’t want to pry. Jacqui didn’t go into details. Obviously she was very upset. LK: Yes, of course. Christ … MR: I’m sorry, Lock. I have to go. The kids … LK: Of course. School run? They must be big now. MR: Gigantic. Are you sure you’re OK? LK: I’m fine. I’ll be absolutely fine. You? MR: Yes. Just makes me think of the old days, you know. He was such a lovely man, such a mess. A lost soul. LK: Yes. He was all of those things. [break, 1 second] Thank you for telling me, Martha. I really appreciate it. It’s been good to hear your voice, if nothing else. MR: Yours too. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get to the funeral if it’s next week. There’s just too much on here. Jonas is going away, he has work. My au pair just quit … LK: I’m sure the Bonnards will understand. There’ll be lots of people there. MR: Everybody from that time. LK: Yes. Everybody.The four members of the MI5 team gathered around an IKEA kitchen table in a damp, under-hoovered safe flat in Acton, read the transcript and, later, listened to the recording of the conversation several times. One excerpt in particular – the question Are you still doing those things you used to do? – gave team leader Robert Vosse the shot of operational adrenaline he had been craving ever since his investigation into BOX 88 had begun. Like a detective happening upon the clue that at last placed his suspect at the scene of the crime, Vosse – a big-boned, amiable man of forty-one with outsized features who wore thick-rimmed glasses and clothes from Marks & Spencer – was convinced that Martha Raine had provided concrete evidence that Lachlan Kite was a spy.
‘We’ve been digging into every nook and cranny of Kite’s existence for the past three weeks and come up with precisely sweet Fanny Adams. Nothing recorded against, not even a parking fine or a speeding ticket. A six-person surveillance team – the best of the best – has been following him around like Rain Man waiting for Kite to pop his head into Vauxhall Cross or catch a flight to Langley. Has he done that? Has he bollocks. Here is a man we are told is the operational commander of a secret Anglo-American spy unit that’s been running off the books for almost forty years, but the most Lachlan Kite has done this month is get himself a haircut and book a weekend break to Florence. Now, finally, he takes a phone call. A woman from his past says, “Are you still doing the things you used to do?” What did she mean by that? What else could she possibly have meant other than “Are you still operational as a spy?”’
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.’
