Torabi was briefly silenced. Kite felt the heat in his swollen jaw from Hossein’s blows. He could not tell if his performance was working or if his lies would lead to yet further misery for Isobel, but he decided to ramp up his denials.
‘What is the purpose of this? My wife is pregnant. You are holding both of us against our will. I can’t help you when what you seem to be interested in finding out is so far outside my area of expertise. I will tell you whatever I can remember from France. Perhaps there will be a detail which you can add to something Xavier said which will help you to piece together whatever it is you seem so desperate to know. But, please, release my wife. Let her see a doctor. I’m begging you. This can’t go on much longer.’
Torabi remained unmoved. He muttered something in Farsi to Hossein, who left the room. Kamran hawked a ball of phlegm into the back of his throat. Kite wondered if he was going to spit it on his neck. He looked around, trying to think of ways of freeing his wrists. There was so little he could do. He remembered the metal bar in the bathroom, the nail protruding from the wall. They were all he had.
‘Listen to me,’ said Torabi. He lit a cigarette then suddenly pulled Kite forward, dragging him by the collar so that the chair came with him, scraping across the floor. ‘An hour ago I sent one of my men to kill someone. A weak man who risked my entire operation. His mistake was to be stupid. Your mistake is to treat me as if I am stupid. Here’s what I’m going to do.’ Torabi grabbed Kite’s head and held the lit cigarette against the back of his neck. The ember seared his skin. ‘I am sending that same person to the place where we are holding your wife. If in less than two hours you have not told me everything you and the British government know about the life and career of Ali Eskandarian – his links to the PFLP, his relationship with the CIA and with Iranian exile groups in France – he has orders to cut open your wife and to kill the child inside her. For all I care she can watch it die as her own life ebbs away. Do you understand what I am telling you?’
Torabi released Kite’s head and stepped backwards, throwing the cigarette on the ground. The back of Kite’s neck felt as though it had erupted. Tears formed in his eyes, not from fear but from pain. There was a stench of burned hair.
‘I understand,’ he gasped.
He closed his eyes. He was not a man to pray, to believe in divine intervention or the possibility of miracles, but if his hands were somehow to have been untied in that moment, he would not have hesitated to kill Torabi. Kite tried to forget what had happened, to ignore the burning sensation on his skin, to believe that he could save Isobel.
‘What is your decision?’ Torabi asked.
It was the first rule that Strawson and Peele had drummed into him all those years ago. Never confess. Never break cover. Somehow he had to keep talking long enough to give MI5 time to find him without giving away the truth about Eskandarian.
‘My decision is the same as it has always been,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you everything I know. Everything I heard about what happened in France when I discussed it with MI6 later.’
Torabi studied Kite’s face very closely, weighing up whether or not his offer was sufficient to meet his needs.
‘In return, I’ll need several things,’ Kite continued. ‘I want the pressure on my wrists to be reduced because I can no longer feel my hands. I want the wires cut and no more torture.’
‘Torture?’ Torabi replied, as if he had no idea what Kite was referring to.
‘You know what I mean,’ he said, twisting his head to expose the flesh that Torabi had burned.
‘What else?’
Kite involuntarily shook his head from side to side in an attempt to ease his pain. ‘I need water. I need something to eat. And a chance, when I’m finished, to speak to my wife, to be reassured that she is safe.’
‘Bring him some water,’ Torabi replied flatly, speaking to Kamran in English. ‘Find him something to eat.’ He leaned over, picked up the lit cigarette and extinguished it in an ashtray. ‘As for your wife, you’ve already spoken to her. You don’t speak to her again.’
26
The young Lachlan Kite was rarely lost for words, but as he stood in the doorway of the private room at Colenso’s, he could think of nothing to say which might adequately express his surprise and confusion. Billy Peele was grinning at him. Michael Strawson, last seen climbing into a taxi at Killantringan, was suddenly a friend of Peele’s who had materialised at what was supposed to be a private dinner arranged to celebrate the successful completion of Kite’s A levels. Most baffling of all, the timid black woman from the Glasgow train was now a strikingly well-dressed associate of both men, striding towards Kite with a glint in her eye, a glass in her hand and a beaming smile.
‘I owe you an explanation, Lockie,’ she said. There was no longer any trace of a West African accent. ‘Blame my colleagues. They wanted me to see what kind of man you are. They wanted me to test you.’ She stuck out her hand. Kite shook it as if in a trance. ‘Rita,’ she said. ‘Thank you for looking after me. Plenty of others would have turned the other cheek.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Kite replied, looking up at Peele for answers.
‘Of course you don’t,’ he said. ‘Why would you? Hall of mirrors. Come and sit
