‘Easy, Jase,’ muttered one of the laptoppers. He was in his late twenties and had a northern English accent. ‘All friends here.’ Cara looked up and saw what looked like a sequence of messages scrolling on the screen of his laptop.
‘What was MI5 doing at the funeral?’ Jason asked. Cara had opened her mouth to respond when he added: ‘Don’t lie. We have a clock ticking.’
‘Tell me who you are and I’ll tell you what you want to know.’
‘We’re on your side. The same side. I work with Mr Kite. I look after him.’
Cara was about to say: ‘You’re not doing a very good job,’ but thought better of it. Instead she said: ‘You’re BOX 88?’
Jason flinched. One of the laptop boys stopped typing for a split second, then resumed.
‘We’re British intelligence.’
‘And American intelligence all at the same time?’
‘There’s a clock ticking,’ Jason replied.
The answer was in their silence and evasions. Cara felt her stomach flip over.
‘Fair enough,’ she said.
‘So – again, Cara – what was the Security Service doing at Xavier Bonnard’s funeral?’
‘I’m not permitted to tell you that,’ she said. It amused her that he had pronounced ‘Xavier’ in the American way, as if Bonnard was a character on X-Men. ‘You need to ask Robert Vosse.’
‘I don’t have time to ask Robert Vosse. I’m asking you. The people who have Lachlan took his wife as well. Isobel is inside that house, pregnant, with a gun to her head. She’s a friend of mine, they both are, so I kind of want to get her out in one piece. Understood? Help me join the dots. Forget due process. Forget what you think is the correct thing to do.’
Cara was shocked that the Iranians had grabbed Isobel, but not surprised. It was the right move in terms of getting Kite under control.
‘I’m part of a very small team looking at Kite’s links to BOX 88,’ she said. Giving up her cover was like confessing to a lie as a child. ‘It’s an internal MI5 investigation prompted by a whistle-blower in SIS. If you guys are as good as everyone says you are, then you probably already know this.’
Nothing from Jason. Nothing from the two men staring into their laptops. Cara filled the silence.
‘I spoke to Kite,’ she said. ‘Like you said, I was running an alias. Emma. Said I’d met him at the Frieze art fair. We know Kite collects paintings, it seemed like a good route in.’
Again, no response from Jason. Just an expressionless stare that demanded: Keep going.
‘He obviously saw through the legend. Didn’t trust me. Gave me the card, hoping I’d use it. I did just that. The rest is history.’
Jason appeared to be making an assessment of whether or not Cara was telling him the truth.
‘That was your only interaction?’
‘Face to face, yes. But a lot has happened since then.’
She asked for some water. He gave her a litre-bottle labelled Highland Spring which tasted as though it had come out of a tap on the farm. Cara told Jason about the Middle Eastern man at the funeral, the rented Jaguar, the switch at the car park, the kidnapping of Kite and the murder of Zoltan Pavkov. After fifteen minutes the older woman came back in the Skoda and introduced herself as Rita. Rita started listening to the story as well. Cara had the sense that one of the two men using the laptops was taking down everything she said. By the time she had finished, she was hungry. She asked for some food and was given a stale sausage roll. There was still no signal on her mobile phone. She asked if BOX 88 had put an electronic bubble around the house so that the people holding Isobel would have no way of contacting their team.
‘Exactly,’ said Rita. She seemed impressed that Cara had correctly deduced this. Either that or she just had one of those faces which was friendly in all weathers.
‘Fred is across their comms,’ Jason explained, scratching the back of his neck. Fred was the man with the northern accent who had come to Cara’s aid. He briefly looked up and smiled. ‘London is translating what they send in, translating what they send out. Whoever’s inside wants to speak to his boss, wants to know what to do with Isobel. We’re going to clone the incoming messages, assume the identity of whoever is giving them their orders, tell them to move the prisoner to a new location. When they do that, we go in.’
Go in, thought Cara, knowing what that meant but not wanting to look troubled by the prospect. She had realised that neither Rita nor Jason had any idea who had kidnapped Kite. Nor did they know where he was being held.
‘Stick to Canary Wharf,’ she told them. Rita shot Jason a glance. One of the laptoppers leaned over and scratched an itch on his ankle. On the furthest of the two screens Cara could now see infra-red images from the cottage. ‘That’s where the van was last seen,’ she said. ‘That’s where they killed Zoltan.’
‘Canary Wharf?’ Jason asked, as if Cara might have made a mistake.
‘Yeah,’ she told him. ‘Why?’
‘Nothing.’
Cara had been around spies long enough to know when someone was keeping something from her.
‘What’s in Canary Wharf that’s so important?’ she asked.
‘Mind your own business.’
28
Before the meeting in the Windsor restaurant, Lachlan Kite had thought of himself as a reasonably settled, confident person. He was not beset by many of the commonplace, day-to-day insecurities of the young and felt that he had adjusted well to the death of his father. He knew that he was slightly vain and self-aware, but these were hardly sins of great magnitude for a young man of his age. For example: Kite consciously tried to model his appearance on River Phoenix, growing out his hair as much as the Alford rules had allowed (nothing below the collar, no dyes, no buzz cuts) and letting
