‘Can I speak?’ said Kite.
‘Not yet. I’m not finished.’ Torabi swept a hand through his carefully combed hair, inhaling on the cigarette. ‘You must have seen so many changes throughout your career.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Starting out as a young intelligence officer in the last years of the Cold War, seeing the Berlin Wall come down, the collapse of the Soviet experiment. The West triumphant. You had won! Then suddenly nothing to do. No role to play any more.’ Torabi waved the cigarette in the air and made a face of mock disappointment. ‘What was the purpose of MI6 when you had nobody to spy on? You and men like your associate, Cosmo de Paul, you must have been so lost. I would love to speak to you about all this when we’re done. Really I would.’
De Paul’s name fell like an axe on Kite. What had Xavier said? Why did Torabi assume that de Paul was his ‘associate’? Perhaps it was a deliberate tactic, the name casually planted to see how the prisoner would react. Kite maintained a poker face. It was clear that Torabi had prepared his speech in advance, intending to unsettle or confuse Kite while simultaneously calming any nerves of his own that he might be feeling.
‘Ramin,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve mistaken me for somebody else.’ Kite knew that his denials would fall on deaf ears, but it was nevertheless essential to buy time by playing the innocent. ‘My name is Lachlan Kite, I’m an oil—’
‘Please!’ Torabi raised a hand and stubbed out the cigarette. ‘I already told you. This is what I don’t want us getting into. So much bullshit, it insults the hard work and sacrifices we’ve both made during our careers. Let’s not waste time denying who we are, huh? Tell me what it’s been like, seeing everything change. One quiet day in the 1980s, no cell phones; the next, just a few years later, everybody is carrying one. Same thing with the Internet. No Facebook, no email, no apps; then suddenly everything is available online for the world to see. Spying has changed! I’m younger than you by – what? – ten years. I came into our profession long after the true Cold Warriors had left.’ Torabi accompanied this remark with the same self-satisfied smirk with which he had reacted to his Fight Club joke. ‘Your generation must have found it so difficult doing your job in the way that you’d been trained to do it. No more IRA to fight. No more ETA. No polite telephoned warnings to a newspaper from the latest Sunni group before they blow themselves up on the Central line. No more travelling under alias. No more false passports, no more dead drops and one-time pads. You’ve witnessed a generational change. It’s like talking to someone who lived through the age of steam and found himself travelling on a fucking space ship! How have you survived all this time? You’re a dinosaur, man. What a privilege to be sitting with you. Truly. What a privilege.’
Coke, thought Kite. He’s high on something. These guys are all using. They need it for their nerves, to get through whatever it is they’ve been ordered to do. The guard who came to the room was on it. The chauffeur was probably jacked up on a couple of lines when he drove the Jaguar to Cheshire Street. That was the anxiety Kite could feel coming off them just before the fight. He thought of Xavier’s troubles with drugs, of all the summer nights in his early twenties with Martha at raves outside London, Strawson berating Kite for ‘wrecking his brain with Ecstasy’.
Torabi was still banging on:
‘What fascinates me is, for all that time – thirty years of international diplomacy, Thatcher, Blair, Reagan, Clinton, Trump – you guys continued to hate my country. The British, the Americans, they knew the Saudis had bankrolled ISIS and 9/11. They watched as Sunni – not Shia – suicide bombers brought carnage to London and Paris and Madrid. You let the fucking Jews build a wall around Palestine and drive Arabs into the sea. But it was all still the fault of Iran.’ Torabi gave a contemptuous laugh. ‘We were the bad guys! We were the ones you punished, the nation you tried to destroy. Not the Saudis. Not the Russians. Not the Chinese. Why little old Iran?’
Kite was as fascinated by Torabi’s impassioned, sophomoric argument as he was perplexed by its purpose. Was his captor hoping to use Kite to broker a peace deal, unaware that BOX 88 was already doing just that with his own government’s ministers in Dubai? Or was Torabi’s heartfelt outpouring nothing more than an attempt to justify whatever violations lay in store for Kite in this chamber of horrors? Either way, he had no choice other than to continue to play the mystified innocent.
‘As a matter of fact, I agree with almost everything you’ve just said,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never understood why the Americans have targeted Iran for so long, unless it’s revenge for the humiliation of the embassy siege, which happened outside the living memory of more than three-quarters of the population. Maybe it’s because you stoked the insurgency in Iraq or bankrolled Hizbollah for thirty years. How do I know? The Iranian government hates Israel. A lot of Americans don’t hate Israel. I’m not clairvoyant, but could that have something to do with it? There’s no point in asking me these questions. I’m not a politician, Ramin. I’m just a guy who reads the Economist and the New York Times. There’s no point in keeping me here if you think I’m some kind of spokesman for the British government. These are questions you should be asking in Downing Street or, better still, Washington.’
Torabi met Kite’s denial with a slow, disappointed shake of the head. He looked down and scratched at a non-existent mark on his jeans. Kite stuck to
