After the meeting in Windsor, Kite felt completely unmoored. It was as if everything he had imagined might happen to him in the future, his sense of himself, even his attitudes towards his friends and family, had been turned on its head. Saying yes in the restaurant had been easy: after all, who could turn down such an opportunity? Within a few days, however, the prospect of going to France and carrying out what he had agreed to do struck Kite as being morally reprehensible. He was being asked to spy, to deceive his oldest and closest friend. He was being invited to lie and to betray, to appear to be one sort of person when in fact he was quite another. Worse, he would be spying in a house belonging to a family who had nurtured and cared for him for five years. It was duplicity of the worst kind. Kite could not tell his mother what he was intending to do nor confide in any of his friends. Had his father still been alive, he too would have been ignorant of the choice his son had made. Would Paddy Kite have approved of what he was about to do – or been appalled that his son had so easily agreed to slip into a double life?
In the days that followed the meal in Colenso’s, there had been another stone in Kite’s shoe. Whenever he cast his mind back to the Easter weekend, he understood the purpose of Strawson’s visit to Killantringan and accepted that it had been necessary to test him: to organise the power cut, for example, and to ensure that his mother was delayed in Stranraer so that BOX 88 could analyse how he reacted under pressure. Yet at a distance of several weeks from these events he felt oddly humiliated, not to mention angry that Strawson had so carelessly jeopardised his mother’s business. A group of adults of vastly wider life experience had set him up. The feeling was not dissimilar to Kite’s memories of his first weeks at Alford when, as a guileless thirteen-year-old, Cheryl had thrust him into an ecosystem of mindboggling social and historical complexity, expecting him to come to terms with traditions and rules about which Kite had known next to nothing. Lionel Jones-Lewis had presented himself to Kite as a warm, friendly father figure, only to be revealed within a matter of weeks as the sort of man who had become a schoolmaster solely so that he could live his life surrounded by attractive teenage boys. Why should Kite do the bidding of people who had consciously manipulated him in such a way? He had believed in Rita’s predicament on the train and felt foolish for saving her from thugs whom Strawson confessed had been working for BOX 88. Kite was stubborn and determined and proud. He was intrigued by the nature of the French operation, flattered to have been singled out for such a prestigious job and drawn to these unusual characters from the secret world. Certainly he did not think that Strawson was in any way as seedy nor as deceitful as his former housemaster. Nevertheless, on several occasions he thought about knocking on Billy Peele’s door and calling the whole thing off.
What stopped him was the potential threat from Eskandarian. The idea that he might be able to play a role – however small – in preventing a terrorist atrocity in the United States convinced Kite that he should set his ethical concerns to one side and commit himself to BOX 88. At his second meeting with Strawson and Rita Ayinde in London’s Ravenscourt Park a few weeks later, Kite confirmed that he was happy to go ahead.
‘I’m relieved,’ said Rita. ‘We wondered if you might have been having second thoughts.’
‘It wasn’t an easy decision,’ Kite told her. ‘I don’t feel great about Xav.’
‘Of course you don’t.’ They were walking along a broad promenade in bright sunshine, Rita on one side of Kite, Strawson on the other. ‘Think of it as doing him a favour. If his family are giving shelter to a terrorist financier, the sooner they find out, the better.’
Kite was still unclear what was so important about Xavier’s ‘godfather’. As they made half a dozen circuits of the park, Strawson told him everything he needed to know.
‘Short of recruiting someone at the highest levels of the Iranian government, we couldn’t be looking at a more influential figure in Iran than Ali Eskandarian. Son of a wealthy bazaari who allowed him to run around Paris in the 1970s, he was a rich kid on the side of the Revolution. Worked in the oil ministry from ’79 onwards, moved to Health in ’83, starts spending more and more time in Russia, which is when he first appears on CIA radar. Langley didn’t think he was important enough to keep tabs on. The less said about that, the better. Maybe they were too busy on Iran-Contra. We have Eskandarian attending conferences all over the world. Gets himself a reputation as a westernised liberal even when MI6 see him making contact with the PFLP – that’s the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Even then the Brits don’t think he’s worth watching.’
‘More fool them,’ said Rita.
‘Eskandarian moved into the private sector in
