Box 88

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 stood 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.

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 outpouring 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.