Coming back to BOX 88 headquarters at around five o’clock, he caught sight of a bearded man standing alone outside Canary Wharf station. The man appeared to be waiting for someone. Nothing unusual about that at the start of the rush hour, but Kite did a double-take. It was John, the American with whom he had smoked at the funeral. He looked up as Kite came towards him.
‘Lachlan.’
‘I get the feeling this isn’t a chance encounter.’
‘Was told you would pass this way.’ The American extended a huge, hairy hand and clasped Kite in a vigorous handshake. ‘Ward Hansell. I’m over from the Stadium.’
The Stadium was the Service nickname for BOX 88 headquarters in the United States, so called because of its proximity to the home of the New York Giants. Kite was astonished that Hansell was a colleague: he had been convinced that the bearded, unkempt ‘John’ at the Oratory was a bona fide addict and friend of Xavier’s.
‘Sorry I didn’t introduce myself at the funeral. When you approached me asking for a smoke, I thought it was a bump. Didn’t know who you were until I put two and two together.’
‘That’s all right,’ Kite replied, conscious of the extent to which his guard had been down on the morning of the funeral. Was he getting sloppy? Were his sharpest days behind him? ‘What are you doing in London?’
‘Let’s walk.’
It transpired that Hansell had taken an interest in one of the mourners at Xavier’s service: Cosmo de Paul. That Kite’s nemesis and sparring partner should again pop up on his radar struck him as an eerie coincidence: Torabi had twice brought up de Paul’s name on the ship.
‘How long have you been watching him?’ he asked.
‘Three months.’
De Paul had been recruited by MI6 out of Oxford in 1994, eventually leaving the Service in 2008 to take up a position in the private sector. As someone who had known de Paul both operationally and personally over a period of thirty years, Kite assumed that Hansell wanted to speak to him on background.
‘We think he may be a security risk.’
‘To BOX or the wider population?’ Kite asked.
He hadn’t intended to make a joke, but Hansell chuckled. Evidently, he had already spent enough time around de Paul to know that he was a disruptive, unpredictable opportunist.
‘You guys getting any heat from Five?’ the American asked.
‘You could say that.’
Kite wondered how much or how little Hansell knew about the Vosse unit.
‘De Paul has been talking to Rebecca Simmonds, saying things he shouldn’t be saying.’
Of course. Suddenly it all made sense. Simmonds was the director general of MI5. De Paul was the DG’s whistle-blower. He had known of Kite’s involvement in BOX 88 for more than twenty years and had long resented his own exclusion from that most elite of clubs. But why choose this moment to pour poison in Simmonds’s ear?
‘What sort of things?’ he asked.
‘Well that’s what I don’t fully understand,’ Hansell replied. ‘You have an old girlfriend living in New York, right? Martha Raine?’
Kite came to a halt. Of all things, he had not expected this. He felt the tide of the past rushing up to meet him, the bitter memories of Martha’s years at Oxford, the spectre of de Paul’s bizarre, private obsession with Kite, incubated at Alford and continuing to the present day.
‘Martha?’ he asked, as if Hansell had made a mistake. ‘What does she have to do with any of this?’
There was a corporate bar across the square filled with office workers grabbing a drink before heading home. At the church, Hansell had possessed the wild, dishevelled appearance of an Old Testament prophet; now, in the pale evening light of Canary Wharf, his beard trimmed and hair neatly cut, he could have passed for one of the mid-level executives queuing for a pint at the bar. He nodded towards the entrance, laying a heavy hand on Kite’s back.
‘Let’s get a drink,’ he said. ‘You and I need to talk.’
Keep Reading …
If you enjoyed BOX 88, why not try Charles Cumming’s previous thriller …
A SIMPLE TASK
Successful novelist Kit Carradine has grown restless. So when British Intelligence invites him to enter the secret world of espionage, he willingly takes a leap into the unknown.
A GLOBAL THREAT
Kit finds himself in Morocco on the trail of Lara Bartok – a leading figure in Resurrection, a revolutionary movement whose brutal attacks on right-wing politicians have spread violence throughout the West.
A DANGEROUS TARGET
Drawn to Lara, but caught between competing intelligence services who want her dead, Kit faces an awful choice: abandon her to her fate or risk everything trying to save her.
Click here to order a copy of The Man Between
Acknowledgements
With thanks to: Julia Wisdom, Kathryn Cheshire, Finn Cotton, Ann Bissell, Roger Cazalet, Kate Elton, Liz Dawson, Anne O’Brien and everyone behind the scenes at HarperCollins. To Will Francis, Kirsty Gordon and the team at Janklow & Nesbit. To Harriette Peel, Perdita Martell, Christopher de Bellaigue, Sarah Gabriel, TC, Nick Green, Natasha Fairweather, Boris Starling, P, Benedict Bull, JF, Olivier Bonas, Laila D, KS, Dr Charlotte Cassis, Angus Maguire, Ben Barrett, JJ Keith, Nick Lockley, Christian Spurrier, Ben Higgins, Charlie Gammell, Nicholas Griffin, Peter F,
