‘Why do you think that?’ Kite asked, not wanting to sound naive.
‘Eskandarian advises the new guy in charge, Rafsanjani, behind the backs of the senior clerics,’ Strawson replied. ‘Back in January he arranges a trip to France, wants to see his old friend from Paris days, Luc Bonnard. Khomeini apparently says no problem, go to Luc, go to France. Then Khomeini dies. They have an election coming up in Iran at the end of July. Rafsanjani is expected to win and be confirmed as the new president. Does Eskandarian cancel his trip? No, he does not.’
‘I don’t really get it,’ said Kite. So much information had been thrown at him that he was beginning to feel swamped.
‘The question is straightforward,’ the American replied. ‘What’s so important that Rafsanjani is prepared to let one of his closest friends and advisers, potentially the financier for Lockerbie, roam around France for two weeks in August, right after he might become president? What did Khomeini set in train that we don’t know about? The world has been looking at Tiananmen since the spring. Nobody is paying any attention to a highly influential Iranian go-between who arranged a so-called vacation in France six months ago and is sticking to it, regardless of the fact that the ayatollah is now dead and his country in turmoil. What is Eskandarian planning? Who is he meeting? And how does Luc Bonnard fit into all this?’
Kite had an almost photographic memory and could file away names and dates and events with relative ease. Nevertheless, he wished that he had been permitted to write notes on what he was being told.
‘Luc?’ he replied. ‘He’s involved in this?’
Ayinde caught Strawson’s eye, but neither responded directly to Kite’s question. Instead, Rita said:
‘Think of yourself as someone who is helping to fill in a corner of a very large canvas. There may be something you discover in France – something you’re completely unaware of but which nevertheless makes sense to us – which could later become crucial to our understanding of who exactly we’re dealing with and what their precise intentions are.’
‘So how do I go about doing that?’ Kite asked. ‘How do I fill in this canvas?’
They were standing in a tunnel beneath a railway line at the south-eastern entrance to the park. Strawson came to a halt as a train thundered overhead.
‘It’s easy,’ he said, obliged to step to one side as a child ran past them. He raised his voice so that he could be heard above the noise of the train, his words echoing in the dark tunnel. ‘We spend the next three weeks teaching you.’
29
How well can you ever know a person?
In the six years that Isobel Paulsen had been involved with Lachlan Kite – falling in love, getting married in Stockholm, becoming pregnant with their child – she had always known that a day like this would finally come. Eighteen months into their relationship he had told her that he wasn’t in fact an oil trader, that when he went to work in Canary Wharf he wasn’t going to the headquarters of Grechis Petroleum, he was instead going to a suite of offices occupied by individuals working in secret on behalf of British intelligence. The revelation in itself hadn’t particularly surprised her; Isobel had always suspected that Kite was hiding something from her. He was clever, physically fit, charming and unsentimental: it made sense that he was a spy. What troubled her was the realisation that his past would now remain hidden from her forever. There were vast tracts of his life about which she would know nothing: operations, successes, failures, lovers. He had spoken several times of a former girlfriend, Martha Raine, the woman who had telephoned him from New York with the news of Xavier’s death. Isobel came to understand that Martha had been inextricably linked with Kite’s early years as an intelligence officer; a woman she had never met had access to a greater intimacy with her husband than she did. Isobel was envious of this, no question. She tried to tell herself that Kite’s past was no different to anyone else’s. We all have secrets, she thought. We all have shame. We have all had relationships which have shaped us. Yet somehow what had passed between Martha and Kite was richer in Isobel’s imagination, more complex and meaningful, than any of her own entanglements.
When she saw her husband’s face on the screen of the cell phone, Isobel did not panic. She did not worry that Kite looked tired and shaken, that his life was at risk or that she might never hold him again. She had seen Kite at his most vulnerable – in illness, in grief, in personal tragedy – and knew that he was strong enough to withstand whatever was happening to him. She did not doubt him.
‘I’m fine,’ she had told him, trying not to worry him or make him fear for the baby. ‘Why are they holding you? You haven’t done anything. They think you’re a spy—’
He would have understood that she was trying to protect him. They were talking to one another without talking to one another, speaking intimately without the scum who were holding them understanding. Isobel was confused and worried, yes. She did not know why these men had taken her hostage, nor why Kite was being held captive by their associates. She did not know where he was or what they wanted from him. Yet she had never felt so extraordinarily close to him. This was their shared fate, their crisis, their test. It had nothing to do with the past, with Kite’s secrets, with Martha Raine. They would survive it together and emerge stronger and happier than they already were. They
