‘In here,’ said the man, opening a door at the end of the passage.
Kite was shown into a room with blacked-out windows lit by two anglepoise lamps. Vinyl plastic sheets had been taped to the floor. For the first time he was afraid. There was a couch against the far wall covered in a white dust sheet with a wooden coffee table in front of it. Several cardboard boxes had been piled up in the corner of the room next to a television with a cracked screen. Two chairs were stacked on top of one another nearby. The guard lifted off the first of them, turned it in the air and set it down in the centre of the room, close to a metal toolbox.
‘Sit,’ he said.
Kite had no choice but to do as he was instructed. He waited for the guard to grab his hands and bind them, but he did not do so. Instead he left the room by a door in the facing wall and told Kite to wait. Kite looked around. Anything could happen in this place. Teeth. Toenails. Fingers. They had prepped the room. It would take all of his courage to withstand what was coming. He had to try to stop thinking about Isobel and to trust that she would be OK. He had to have sufficient faith in himself that he would not reveal the identities of BOX 88 agents and personnel under torture. If they were going to kill him, he hoped that his son would never find out what had happened here. And he prayed that it would be over quickly.
The door opened. Fariba walked in. He had changed out of the suit and was now wearing blue designer jeans and a white collared shirt. He smiled at Kite as if to reassure him. He still looked every inch the international playboy, fit and lean, as relaxed as if he had just walked off a yacht in Miami Beach and ordered a round of cocktails at the Delano. Kite wondered what had become of the real Jahan Fariba. It would have been simple enough for the Iranians to prevent him from attending the funeral and for the man standing in front of him to have assumed his identity.
‘Lachlan,’ he said breezily, as though Kite was an old friend whom he’d kept waiting for an unnecessary length of time. Fariba raised an apologetic hand and gestured at the vinyl sheets lining the floor. ‘I’m sorry about all this. How are you feeling?’
‘Just wonderful, thank you. Never been better.’
Fariba checked that the door behind Kite was locked and said: ‘Sure.’
‘What’s going on?’ Kite asked. ‘Who are you?’
‘Who am I?’ Fariba seemed to find the question amusing. ‘Well I’m not Jahan Fariba, that’s for sure.’
‘What’s your real name?’
‘My real name is Ramin Torabi. You may choose to believe that. You may choose not to believe that. I don’t care either way.’
The Iranian’s American-accented English was already beginning to grate. Torabi removed the dust sheet from the couch and sat down. The cushions were finished in cheap black leather. He made himself comfortable and stared at Kite with apparent fascination.
‘Wow. It’s quite something to have you here. Xavier told me so much about you.’
‘Did you kill my friend?’
‘Did I kill Xavier?’ The Iranian tried to sound affronted by the accusation, but his reply was deliberately provocative. ‘Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. It’s not particularly important.’
‘It’s particularly important to me.’
‘I’m sure that’s the case, buddy, but like I told you, I really don’t give a shit.’
If there was one thing Kite hated being called, it was ‘buddy’. He wanted to get up from the chair and finish what he had started in the car, but knew that as soon as he attacked Torabi, half a dozen armed Iranian goons would come rushing through the door to his rescue. This time there was a camera in the room, a dome lens in the ceiling. They were watching what was going on. Kite looked down at the metal toolbox. In one movement Kite could open it and use whatever was inside as a weapon. He knew that it had been placed there to tempt him.
‘Seriously,’ Torabi continued. ‘I don’t want to keep you here any longer than I have to. Truth is, we didn’t think you’d react in the way you did. You were good! You sensed the danger. You kind of forced our hand when it came to getting you under control, you know?’
Kite saw that he was expected to reply, so he said nothing.
‘I want to say something important before we start out. I understand how a situation like this works from your point of view. You’re a professional. You’ve been brought here. You’re trained for situations like this.’ Torabi produced a glib, insincere smile, lit a cigarette and blew a lungful of smoke at the ceiling. ‘You’ve been taught never to reveal anything about what you do. The first and the last rule of intelligence work – the same goes for Iranians as it does for Brits – is never confess. It’s like Fight Club! The first rule of spying is you never talk about spying!’ Torabi laughed explosively at his own joke, apparently under the impression that he was the first person to have made it. ‘Men like you and I respect those rules. But I want us to take a time out and go past all that bullshit if we can. I know who you are, I know what you’ve done. So the sooner we dispense with
