‘Don’t fucking patronise me.’ Torabi’s patience had suddenly snapped. ‘You think I’m stupid? You think I can’t see through you?’
Kite tried to respond, pulling at the bonds on his hands, but Torabi shouted him down, crossing the room.
‘You’re a trained liar. You pretend to be the innocent man, but you were the snake in that house, the rat betraying your friends. Does Martha Raine know who you are? When I get to her, when I find her in New York, will she tell me who Lachlan Kite really was?’
‘You leave Martha alone.’
Torabi came to within a foot of Kite’s chair and screamed into his face: ‘Who was my father?! Was he the man you say he was?!’
His spittle was all over Kite’s face. Kite tried to wipe it off on his shoulder but could barely touch it with his jaw. He spat on the ground to clear the saliva from his mouth.
‘What’s the point?’ he said. Torabi backed away. ‘You think I’m lying. You think I’m making things up—’
The Iranian turned again, shouting.
‘Was he a terrorist? Tell me!’ Kamran burst into the room, but Torabi screamed at him to leave. ‘Did he betray my country?’ His face was flushed with angry despair. ‘Was my father a murderer? Was he?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Kite was worried by how much Torabi potentially knew. Surely it wasn’t possible that somebody had sold him the files on Eskandarian? ‘Your father was the man I have described,’ he said. ‘How could he have been a terrorist? How could he have betrayed Iran?’ He saw that Torabi’s need for answers was not in any dimension political. It was personal, a question of family honour. ‘Your father loved you,’ he said. ‘I saw it with my own eyes.’
‘Did you know what was going to happen to him? To Luc?’
Again Kite thought of the files, of the deeper truth about Eskandarian, but he concealed this from Torabi, saying only: ‘Of course I didn’t. You’re very confused, Ramin. Let me tell you what happened, at least from my point of view. Let me tell you what I came to understand after everything was over. Perhaps I can put your mind at rest.’
The Iranian was breathing heavily. He abruptly sat down on the sofa, looking around for more water.
‘The note,’ he said, indicating the balled-up piece of paper on the floor.
‘What about it?’ said Kite.
‘Hossein contacted me when he reached your village. He will call again in one hour. You have this time to answer the last of my questions and to tell me the truth about my father. Sixty minutes. No more.’ Torabi tapped his head and nodded ominously. ‘I have remembered everything you have told me so far. I am comparing it with what I already know. If anything else in your account is out of place, if I suspect again that you have misled me, you will not leave this room alive.’
47
The raid was on.
Jason turned towards CARPENTER, cocked his weapon to chamber a round and started jogging towards the road. Cara heard the order on comms.
‘STONES, KAISER, we’re mobile. See you in the house.’
She walked into the barn and stood behind Wal and Fred. Rita was beside her, staring at the laptop screens. Cara kept thinking about the photograph of Hillary and Obama watching the bin Laden raid in the White House. Their own surroundings seemed absurd by comparison: a filthy farmyard, a disused barn, drizzle falling in the English night.
People were going to die in front of her. The camera on Jason’s helmet would be a second-by-second snuff movie playing out in real time. What she was about to see was what had been happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Syria and Somalia, since she was a young girl. It was just another operation to Jason and CARPENTER, just another gig for KAISER and STONES. To Cara, it was both shocking and extraordinarily exciting.
She could already make out the front door of the cottage, the paint blue-black in the infra-red lens of Jason’s camera. There was a sequence of clicks like Morse code. STONES and KAISER blew the back door with plastic explosives a split second after Jason and CARPENTER came through the front. Wal was feeding live positional information on comms as Cara heard a quiet burst of gunfire and saw a glowing body drop to the ground in the living room. Jason shouted, ‘Isobel! Get behind me!’ and a second figure, surely Kite’s wife, moved forward and disappeared to the right of the screen. Simultaneously the helmet camera moved fractionally to the left and a second Iranian dropped to the floor in a slow, dayglo blur of gunfire.
‘Two left,’ said Rita, her voice preternaturally calm.
There was a gentle tap-tap, soft as a child blowing through a straw, and a third man slumped against a wall inside the house. He had been shot in the head and chest. The helmet cam on STONES showed a fourth Iranian coming down from the first floor, shouting threateningly, as all the others had shouted. STONES took him out and he fell to the bottom of the stairs.
It was already over. Jason continued to snap commands, the helmet camera showing doors opened, cupboards searched, rooms cleared of threats. STONES and KAISER went back up the stairs and did the same, kicking open the bathroom door and bursting into a second bedroom. Cara heard Jason say, ‘Location secured,’ but they all knew that it had ended once the fourth man had been killed on the stairs. CARPENTER had taken Isobel outside and was walking her towards the barn. Cara could see shaky footage of the lane from his helmet cam. Rita patted Wal and Fred on the back, said, ‘Good job, lads,’ and turned away from the screens. She indicated to Cara that she should
