‘I’m not finished with you yet.’
Kite knew that he was doomed. He would never leave this place unless he fought his way out. MI5 weren’t going to ride to the rescue. BOX 88 had not been able to isolate where he was being held. He would have to resort to desperate measures in order to get off the ship.
‘But when you are finished, you’ll release my wife?’ he pleaded. ‘At least promise me that. At least let my child survive.’
‘When you murdered my father?’
‘I didn’t murder your father! How dare you say that? How dare you accuse me of such a thing?’
Torabi nodded at Kamran, who took out a knife, flashing the blade in front of Kite’s eyes. Kite reared back, fearing that he would be cut. Torabi mumbled something in Farsi and the chauffeur moved behind him. He leaned down and sliced off the plastic ties binding his wrists. Kite’s hands fell free. He shook out the numbness in his arms, touching the line of dried blood on his wrist.
‘I have a call to make,’ said Torabi, nodding at Kamran. ‘Give him water. Give him food.’
‘I need to piss again,’ Kite replied. He knew that the call would be to the team guarding Isobel. He hoped to God that by now it was over and the Closers had freed her.
Torabi addressed Kamran in English.
‘Put a bucket in his room,’ he said. ‘He can piss in that.’
54
Jason was standing in the door of the cottage, making what Cara assumed was a call to his superiors at BOX 88. The American was talking in a jumble of code and jargon, the gist of which seemed to involve ordering in a team to remove the bodies and clean up the mess.
Rita had taken Isobel back to the farm, leaving Cara inside the cottage. The faces of the dead men had not been covered. KAISER and STONES had been through their pockets and searched every room, finding five mobile phones and two laptops which they had placed on a table in the living room. There was blood on the walls and on the ground, but not as much as Cara had been expecting. STONES had mopped up a pool of blood around one corpse using pages from a local newspaper; he was busy taking photographs of the dead man’s face. Cara was allowed to walk around freely. She had the odd, slightly hypnotic sensation of being adopted into a cult, as if Kite’s house, and what was going on inside it, was somehow sealed off from the normal world in which normal rules applied.
STONES moved towards the first Iranian that Jason had shot. He had fallen forward. It was necessary to turn him to one side so that his face could be seen by the camera.
With a surge of excitement, Cara realised that she recognised him. A full beard around the mouth and chin, no sideburns. It was the man from the passenger seat of the white van. He was wearing the same white shirt, now soaked in blood.
‘I’ve seen this guy before,’ she said.
Jason heard her and stepped closer.
‘Where?’
‘He was in the front seat of the van which they used to transport Lockie from the car park.’ It amazed her that she was already calling him ‘Lockie’. ‘This guy must have known where they were keeping him.’
‘Well he sure as shit isn’t telling us now,’ Jason replied, checking the time on his watch. ‘Which one was his phone?’
‘Red one. Samsung,’ STONES replied instantly.
‘What’s that smell?’ Cara asked. It wasn’t sweat or blood, it wasn’t aftershave or any of the other odours she might have expected to encounter after such an attack. The smell was closer to diesel or engine oil. She sniffed again, drawing it into her nostrils. ‘Like petrol,’ she muttered, and looked down at the dead man’s shoes. The edges of the soles were flecked with white paint. Cara bent down and removed one of them.
‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Jason asked.
Cara sniffed the shoe, the engine oil much sharper now and cut with an odd, low tide smell of the sea. The flat soles were spotted with white paint and flecks of rust like tiny pieces of gold leaf.
‘He’s been on a boat,’ she said. ‘Look at this.’
She turned the shoe towards Jason and showed him the little rust marks and the dots of paint. The strange seaweed smell had become even more pronounced.
‘Seawater,’ he whispered, realising that Cara had just identified where they were holding Kite. ‘Good job,’ he said, slapping her so hard on the shoulder that she almost fell over. On comms he said: ‘I need live and archive satellite imaging of every dock and basin in Canary Wharf for the past twenty-four hours. Subject is on a boat, I say again, a boat. Recently arrived from the open sea. Look for anything bigger than a dinghy. People getting on, people getting off. We are moving to the helo. We will find Kite.’
55
Kamran stuck a gun in the small of Kite’s back and pushed him down the corridor, steering him towards his cell. He told Kite to open the door then put his free hand on his back and shoved him inside.
‘I need to piss,’ Kite told him. ‘I need the bucket.’
‘Wait,’ Kamran replied.
Walking backwards towards the bathroom, his eyes always on Kite, the Iranian opened a door on the opposite side of the corridor. A long-handled mop toppled out, brushing against his shoulder as it fell to the ground. In the second
