Cara wondered out loud if it would work.
‘Of course it won’t work.’ The beaming grin which accompanied Vosse’s reply was the cheeriest thing Cara had seen all day. ‘He’ll panic. He’ll call his paymaster. And because we’ll be all over Zoltan’s phones, because you and Cagney will be sitting outside his flat tonight, and because Eve and Villanelle are going to be following said Mr Pavkov home this afternoon and waiting for him when he comes into work tomorrow morning, we’ll find out inside the next twenty-four hours who the fuck has kidnapped Lachlan Kite.’
6
When Kite regained consciousness he found himself lying on a hard bed in a small, windowless room fitted out with little more than a solitary bulb and a stained hessian rug. There were no pictures on the walls nor any other furnishings, save for a low plastic table close to the door on which someone had placed a bottle of water. As far as Kite could tell, there were no surveillance cameras. He was still wearing his shirt and suit trousers, but the jacket had been taken and his shoes were missing. There was no sign of his watch, wallet or mobile phone. Kite felt in his trouser pockets for his house keys, but they too had gone. All this was just as he had expected, just as he himself would have done in similar circumstances. The Iranians had been thorough. He was surprised that they had left the wedding band on his left hand; perhaps it had proved too difficult to remove.
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
