‘We’re all devastated, as you can imagine,’ said Strawson.
Kite could not believe that anybody in that strange, secret building was as devastated as he was. Nobody had known Billy Peele in the way that he did. Nobody had believed in Lachlan Kite in the way that Billy Peele had believed in him. Everything that had happened in France had only happened because of this man who had trusted him, taught him, taken him under his wing. That man was now lying dead, somewhere in France, somewhere in London, with a bullet in his heart.
‘Where is he?’ he asked. He was extraordinarily cold. ‘Is he here? Did you bring him back? Can I see him?’
Kite began to sob uncontrollably. It was the first time that he had cried since his father’s funeral. He was ashamed of himself but completely powerless to stop it. Strawson, to his amazement, crouched down and held him, whispering: ‘I’m so sorry, kid. It’s OK. Let it out. I’m so sorry.’ Kite had the wild, awful thought that Sebastian Maidstone was going to walk in and laugh at them. Strawson produced a pale blue handkerchief from his pocket which Kite used to mop his tears. It smelled of the same cologne Luc had worn in France. ‘We haven’t lost a man in five years. It’s just one of those things.’
‘One of those things?’ Kite repeated, sitting up and looking at Strawson. He could feel that his tears were stopping, as if the initial shock of hearing that Peele was dead had been expelled from him. ‘What were you doing in the van? What happened to Ali? I don’t understand.’
‘When you’re ready, I can tell you. I’ll explain everything, OK?’
Kite nodded mutely. The American touched his face as he might have touched the face of his own son.
‘It will take time. Everything is going to be all right. I’m going to take care of you. We all will. We’re going to make sure that you never have to go through anything like this again. You’re one of us now, Lockie. Part of the family.’
58
‘How is it possible that my father is still alive?’ Torabi asked.
Kite could see that he believed him. The Iranian had read enough files and spoken to enough people to have doubted the official version of the kidnapping; they had fed his obsession. He continued to point the gun at Kite’s chest, but appeared to be deep in thought. Perhaps he was allowing himself a moment of quiet celebration. He started nodding his head in a kind of warped daze, like someone listening to music through headphones, losing themselves to the beat.
‘It’s possible because you were right about the Americans. It was CIA in the van, not the exiles. The CIA shot Abbas and kidnapped your father. Bijan and his comrades were assassinated on the orders of MI6. They both wanted Eskandarian for themselves.’ Kite was as close to the truth as he would ever go; it was unthinkable that he would tell Torabi about Peele or BOX 88. ‘He lived in Maryland under witness protection for the next fifteen years. Since then he’s been resident here in the UK.’
‘How do you know this?’
Never confess, never break cover, never admit to being a spy.
‘I know this because I am who you thought I was. I’m not an oil trader. I work for British intelligence. I can take you to your father if you call off Hossein.’
There was no discernible reaction to Kite’s revelation: no shock that Eskandarian had resided in the United States, nor any visible acknowledgement that Kite had at last confessed the truth. Torabi said only: ‘Explain it to me.’
‘There isn’t time.’
‘My father was a traitor?’
‘Your father was a hero. He was seized because the Americans made a calculation that he would be more useful to them in Washington than he would have been in Tehran. He did more to heal the divisions between Iran and the West than a thousand diplomats, a thousand politicians. There’s a reason we were able to do business with Rafsanjani and Khatami in the nineties. That reason was your father.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Torabi, too astonished fully to acknowledge what Kite had told him.
‘Your father believed that the Iran which had been promised to the children of the Revolution was not the Iran which has materialised. He wanted to do something about that, to bring your country in from the cold. After 9/11, there was less any of us could do. We went into Iraq, Ahmedinajad came along, Netanyahu, and the whole mess started up again. But Ali played a pivotal role in the long negotiations which led to the nuclear deal.’
Kite paused, knowing that he had left out the salient fact that Eskandarian had died in his bed in 2014. He had not lived long enough to see the deal on which he had worked so hard signed into law, nor to watch it being pulled apart two years later by the Trump administration. By an extraordinary twist of fate, Luc Bonnard had passed away on the same day at a hospital in Paris, nine years after his release from prison.
‘And Lockerbie?’ Torabi asked.
‘What about it?’ Kite calculated that there would be no harm in telling his captor a little more of the truth. ‘Abbas Karrubi was the channel to the PFLP, not Ali. We got our wires crossed. The regime in Tehran was using Abbas as the linkman to Jibril and al-Megrahi. They set your father up as a patsy. Before the end of the month, the FBI had arrested four members of an Iranian terrorist cell in
