Kite was baffled. If what Peele was telling him was true, he was one of only a handful of people on the planet who knew about this organisation. Why the hell were they letting him in on a secret of that magnitude? What had he done to land himself in this predicament? It occurred to him that Peele must have been preparing him for this moment for months.
‘I have a lot of questions,’ he said.
Everyone laughed. ‘I’m sure you do, young man!’ Strawson replied.
‘Do you all have normal jobs? Like Mr Peele is a teacher?’ He looked at Rita. ‘What do you do?’
Kite realised that he had not touched his food and wolfed the salmon in four quick mouthfuls as Rita explained that she worked at ‘The Cathedral’, the London headquarters of BOX 88, telling her friends that she was a secretary when in fact she worked in intelligence.
‘And you, sir?’
‘Call me Mike,’ Strawson replied, encouraging Kite with a brisk nod. ‘To my friends in the United States, I work for an American policy unit based here in the UK. To my friends in the UK, I’m advising an investment bank in the City on growth in the North American sector.’
Kite didn’t know what a ‘policy unit’ was but understood that this probably wasn’t the time to ask. Instead he fired more questions at his hosts, receiving what he considered to be logical, comprehensive answers. He learned that, contrary to popular belief, mainstream MI6 and CIA officers were not ‘licensed to kill’, but that the ranks of BOX 88 were filled with former Navy SEALS and ex-SAS who carried out targeted kidnappings and assassinations to order. He was told that approximately 230 staff worked at BOX 88 headquarters in the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and a further 135 at The Cathedral. The bulk of the work carried out by BOX 88 was conducted overseas by a network of undercover agents operating under what Peele described as ‘non-official cover’.
‘In other words,’ he said, by now tucking into a hearty-looking fish pie, ‘these individuals present themselves as bankers, businessmen, journalists and so forth, but their deeper purpose is to conduct operations on our behalf.’
Those operations, Rita explained, had included plots to destabilise Communist dictatorships behind the Iron Curtain; to foment opposition to the Politburo among the Chinese student population in Beijing, leading directly to the protests in Tiananmen Square; helping to overthrow Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier and preventing numerous terrorist attacks around the globe.
‘But we can’t stop everything,’ said Strawson. ‘We don’t have the range. We didn’t stop Lockerbie.’
By this point they had finished eating their main courses. Peele had asked the restaurant staff to leave them undisturbed. Kite remembered the night of the Lockerbie bombing. He had been working at the hotel. His mother had switched on the news, seen a graphic of the flight path and commented that it would have blown up over Killantringan just a few minutes later. To his surprise, Strawson revealed that he had discussed the tragedy with Cheryl while staying at the hotel.
‘We lost someone on the flight,’ he said. ‘A colleague from the New York office. Buddy of mine in London, banker named Tom Martin, also knew three of the victims personally. A mother and a father in their thirties and their little girl, Gaby. She was only eight. Used to come by their house and play with his daughter.’
The American leaned over. He picked up an envelope from the ground. Kite sensed that he had arrived at a critical juncture in the long meeting. From inside the envelope Strawson produced several colour photographs which he passed across the table.
‘I gotta warn you, son. You’ll need a strong stomach.’
Kite looked at the top photograph. It was the now-famous image of the nose cone of Pan Am 103 resting on the ground near Lockerbie. What followed was a sequence of images as horrifying and distressing as any Kite had ever seen: a body hanging from the rafters of a house; another ensnared in a tree. He saw men and women still strapped into their aeroplane seats sitting in a row on the ground. Kite knew that this was another test – they wanted to see if he was tough enough to absorb such horror and to emerge from it unscarred – so he moved painstakingly through to the last of the photographs – a ghastly image of a man standing almost upright in a field, having plunged from the sky and become embedded in the Scottish soil – and put the pictures down on the table. He could not help himself letting out a heavy sigh and felt their eyes on him, judging him, as he leaned back in his seat.
‘Those are awful,’ he said. ‘Those poor people.’ His skin was fizzing with revulsion but he managed to compose himself enough to ask: ‘Why did you show them to me?’
‘We think there’s a chance it might happen again,’ said Rita. ‘Investigators have been looking at a link with Iran. Specifically, an individual who may have helped to finance the Lockerbie bombing by funnelling money from Tehran to Gaddafi.’
Kite touched the pile of photographs. Tehran. A sixth sense made a link in his mind between Xavier and the Iranian man who was coming to stay at the villa in France. He remembered Xavier mentioning him back in February. My godfather is coming to stay … I call him the “ayatollah”. Why else had Peele brought up Xavier’s name at the start of lunch?
‘Another Lockerbie?’ he said. ‘They’re going to blow up a plane?’
‘Worse than that.’ Strawson looked up at Windsor Castle. ‘A chemical weapon released onto the New York subway. Sarin. That’s the chatter from Tripoli. That’s what we’ve been trying to understand.’
Kite knew nothing about chemical weapons, only what he had
