‘What about in an emergency?’ he asked.
‘What kind of emergency?’ Peele looked as if he was finding it difficult to imagine what could possibly go wrong.
‘I dunno. I get rumbled. Eskandarian suddenly leaves.’
As with most things, Strawson had a solution at his fingertips.
‘If the shit has well and truly hit the fan, fly the signal. Use the phone in the house and telephone your mother. If you ask her if there have been any letters sent to you by Edinburgh University, we’ll know that’s a code, that you’re in trouble and we’ll find a way of getting you out. How’s that?’
‘What if she’s not there? What if she doesn’t answer?’
‘Makes no odds. Leave what sounds like a message with the same question. Have there been any letters sent to you by Edinburgh University? That’s a last resort though, Lockie. We don’t envisage circumstances in which you would find it necessary to do such a thing. Fallback only.’
Kite took that as a tacit warning not to compromise the mission unless it was absolutely critical. The American had a way of oscillating between moments of avuncular tenderness and strict, almost dictatorial control; this was certainly an instance of the latter. Kite felt locked in a master-servant relationship with Strawson and saw that Peele was also somewhat in his shadow.
‘And if you need to get hold of me?’
‘Same principle,’ Peele replied. An attractive waitress drifted past the table and smiled at him in a way that made Kite slightly envious. ‘If you see a man or woman lurking with an FT, follow them to a secure place and hear them out. They may want to speak to you directly, they may want to pass you a message. Again, that message will most probably be inside a packet of cigarettes. Read it, absorb it, flush it down the toilet. Try not to go mad and think that every passing stockbroker at Heathrow airport carrying a rolled-up copy of the Financial Times is BOX. You’ll recognise them when you see them. They’ll have a way of making themselves known.’
‘And what if I’m not able to go out? What if it’s raining or we’ve all decided to spend the day at the villa?’
Strawson sounded a sudden, booming ‘Ha!’ and said: ‘You’ve thought it all through, haven’t you, Lockie?’
‘I just want to be thorough.’
‘Quite right too.’
Peele honoured Kite with a proud smile and explained the correct procedure.
‘If you’re stuck at the villa, wander down the drive. Look at the wall on either side of the gates. If it’s marked in chalk, that’s a signal that we need to talk to you. Find an excuse to go for a run or, better still, walk into Mougins to buy a coffee or some aspirin. We’ll find a way of letting you know what we need to let you know.’
As the days passed, such responses became commonplace, both from Peele, whom Kite saw all the time, and from Strawson, whose appearances were more infrequent. After the meal at Wolfe’s, for example, Peele role-played a number of different scenarios so that Kite became comfortable with the writing of secret messages, brush contacts and clandestine meetings. He found the work intensely interesting and rarely felt out of his depth. It was only when Strawson turned up at the Hampstead flat to talk about bugs that Kite began to feel he was at risk of getting in over his head.
‘They’re not like the movies,’ the American explained, ‘however much we’d like them to be.’ He was wearing chinos and a pressed shirt and was gregariously combative in a way Kite hadn’t seen since Killantringan. ‘I can’t just leave a wristwatch on a bookshelf and hope it’ll pick up three weeks’ worth of conversations. At BOX we like to call these things “tentacles”. For a tentacle to work, it needs to be connected to a power source. That’s why so many of them are found in light fixtures and televisions.’
This had all been news to Kite, who quickly realised that Strawson was preparing him for what would undoubtedly be the most risky part of his assignment.
‘You have a Nintendo Gameboy you use all the time, right?’
‘I do,’ Kite replied.
‘Something like that the Falcons can refit as a voice-activated microphone. It’ll maybe last two days on modified battery power. Same applies to your Walkman. Anything that can be left lying around in plain sight, hidden in a cupboard or drawer, which won’t seem out of place to passers-by if they happen upon it. These are the kinds of things we’ll be looking at when we put you in place. Another idea we had for the Bonnard villa was a ghetto blaster.’
‘You can’t call it that!’ Peele exclaimed. Kite started laughing. ‘Nobody calls it a “ghetto blaster”, Mike. You mean a tape deck. A stereo.’
‘I’m the boss here and I prefer ghetto blaster.’ Strawson tacitly acknowledged that the term sounded ridiculous. ‘We can leave one at the villa, make it look like something the great-uncle used to own. It’ll be converted to relay conversations when connected to a power source.’
‘Won’t the MOIS find it if they sweep the house?’ Kite asked.
He had remembered what Peele had said about Iranian officials coming to the villa prior to the Bonnards’ arrival.
‘They will if we leave it there for them to find it. Trick is to take advantage of the window of time between the MOIS giving the place the all-clear and the Falcons arriving at the house with whatever tentacles they’ve cooked up. That might be a two-day window, might be two hours, we don’t exactly know yet. We have a number of devices we like to use in these situations – lamps, hi-fis, anything with a power cable – that we’ll hope to have in place by the time you get there.’
‘And if they’re not in place?’ Kite asked.
‘Then we work out what to do
