‘Where am I?’ he asked.
‘That is not important.’
‘Are we on a boat?’
Torabi looked surprised. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘The smell. The size of the rooms.’
‘Maybe you are. Maybe you’re not. Like I said, it’s not important. Hossein will take you to your room.’
Kite could see that he would make no further progress.
‘My wife is pregnant,’ he said, hoping for a last-minute favour, but expecting nothing. ‘She’ll be worried. I’ll be perfectly happy to answer your questions, but I’d appreciate it if you would somehow get a message to her explaining that I’m OK.’
Torabi opened the door, preparing to leave. Hossein, the man who had earlier escorted him to the interview, entered the room.
‘You’re OK for now, Mr Kite,’ Torabi replied. ‘Who’s to say if you’ll be OK later.’
9
Kite turned to Hossein and told him that he needed to use the bathroom. They were halfway along the corridor leading back to his cell.
‘The what?’
‘The bathroom. The toilet. The loo.’ It was like a brief insight into the absurdities of the British class system: saying ‘loo’ meant you were posh; when Kite had used the word ‘toilet’ in his first term at Alford, the thirteen-year-old Cosmo de Paul had told him he was ‘common’. ‘Where can I find it?’
There was a door at the end of the passage. Hossein was holding a two-way radio and used it to call Kamran. The chauffeur duly appeared and the two men instructed Kite not to lock the door as they stood outside the bathroom, waiting for him to finish.
Kite used the time to assess what the room could offer. A small, blacked-out porthole confirmed that he was indeed on board a ship. He kept the tap running to provide a covering noise for a brief search of a cupboard beneath the sink. Inside he found two unused bars of soap, bottles of bleach and cleaning fluid, but not what he had hoped for: hydrogen peroxide hair dye or white spirit, something flammable and highly sensitive which could later be either forcibly ingested by the guards or used as an improvised explosive. There was an out-of-date box of codeine, some diarrhoea medication and a few pills for seasickness. Kite put six of the codeine tablets in the pocket of his trousers, closed the cupboard and switched off the tap. At the last moment, he noticed a nail protruding from the wall beneath the sink. He grabbed the head and moved it back and forth, trying to disturb the plaster, but had succeeded only in shifting it a few millimetres from the wall when there was a knock on the door.
‘Let’s go,’ said Hossein.
‘Two minutes.’
Kite looked around for other loose screws or nails which he could prise from the walls and later use in a fight. There were none that he could see. The shower curtain was held up on plastic hooks. A metal towel rail might come away from the wall easily enough if Kite needed to use it as a weapon. There was a towel draped over it. He flushed the toilet and went out into the corridor.
‘Everything OK, gentlemen?’ he asked.
Neither man responded. Hossein waited until Kamran had closed the bathroom door, put a gun in the small of Kite’s back and walked him to his windowless cell. As he reached for the door handle, Kite glanced down at Hossein’s watch and saw the date and time. It was just after eleven o’clock at night on the day of the funeral. He wondered what Isobel was doing, how she was coping with his disappearance. Doubtless by now she had called the emergency number and whoever was on duty at BOX 88 had instigated a search.
‘Do either of you have a phone?’ he said, noting that neither Hossein nor Kamran had searched him as he came out of the bathroom. ‘If you could get a message to my wife—’
‘Forget it,’ said Hossein. Kamran had already turned and was walking back down the corridor.
‘I can pay you when I get out.’
Kite held out no hope that Hossein would oblige; he simply wanted to find out what kind of man he was dealing with. A loyal colleague of Torabi – or a foot soldier? There was a momentary flicker of interest in his eyes, but his response was by the book.
‘You couldn’t afford me.’
‘Hossein!’
Kamran had summoned him from the end of the corridor. Hossein pushed Kite through the open door, so that he almost tripped over on the low plastic table, then slammed it shut behind him.
‘Hey!’ Kite cried out.
He heard the key turning in the lock, then the murmur of the two men as they spoke in Farsi outside. Kite walked over to the bed, put the codeine pills under the mattress and lay down. He was suddenly exhausted, yet knew that he would find it almost impossible to sleep. Torabi had organised everything so carefully: the car park, the ship, the switch of identity with Fariba. Kite knew what it was about Ali Eskandarian that the Iranians were so desperate to find out. What he could not understand was why it had taken MOIS thirty years to track him down.
10
The hours following the disappearance of Lachlan Kite gave Cara Jannaway her first opportunity to see the Security Service doing what it did best. For a woman who was not easily impressed, who had found her first year at MI5 to be peculiarly repetitive, even boring, it was quite an afternoon.
Within forty-five minutes of Vosse meeting Zoltan Pavkov, he had obtained a Home Office warrant to saturate the Serbian in round-the-clock surveillance. A technical team was dispatched to Zoltan’s flat in Bethnal Green, rigging the kitchen, bathroom and living room with listening devices and adding a live feed from the camera in his laptop computer for good measure. Zoltan’s shabby Fiat Punto was parked outside and received the same treatment: microphones were placed behind the dashboard and a tracking device in
