Box 88 : A Novel (2020), стр. 78
Cara had a mental image of Kite somewhere in the bowels of a high-rise, his hands tied, his mouth gagged.
‘Can they find him?’ she asked, gesturing towards the laptoppers.
Rita shrugged and said: ‘Eventually.’ She looked up at the sky. It looked as though it was going to rain. ‘Ideally, Jase goes into the cottage and talks to one of them, gets an address, narrows things down.’ Cara glanced up at Jason, who was putting on full Special Forces battle rig at the edge of the barn. She wondered how he would go about ‘talking to one of them’. She didn’t imagine it would involve a handshake and a cup of tea. Another soldier had arrived on foot in the previous twenty minutes, also American. He was standing behind Jason carrying a set of night-vision goggles. Cara had the absurd thought that they both looked overdressed.
‘Who are these guys?’ she asked, not expecting an honest answer. ‘SO15? 22?’
‘Our guys,’ Rita replied and looked away. ‘22’ was the colloquial term for the SAS. SO15 was Counter Terrorism Command. As far as Cara knew, Americans were not permitted to serve in either unit.
‘Do they have jurisdiction to do this on UK soil?’
‘Can do it on any soil they like.’
‘There’s no police to make arrests,’ Cara observed. ‘Or are they coming later?’
Rita looked at her as though she was being naive.
‘No police,’ she said. ‘Not that kind of job.’
Robert Vosse had called Cara an hour earlier, asking for an update. Rita had ordered her to tell him that there was nobody at the cottage, nothing to report, that she was coming back to London on the next train. It was the first time Cara had ever lied to him. Since then, she had felt like a child observing the grown-ups going about their mysterious business, watching and waiting, powerless to help.
‘Status?’ Jason asked.
‘Isobel’s in the lounge, two alongside,’ said Fred, the laptopper from the north of England. On one of his screens Cara could see a live, infra-red, worm’s-eye view of the eastern side of the cottage. Jason had told her the images were coming from the cam net of a Special Forces soldier, codenamed STONES, concealed in a tree line a hundred metres from the back door of the property.
‘Third enemy?’ Jason asked. Behind him, the American soldier put on a battle helmet. The identification tag CARPENTER was sewn into his uniform.
‘Upstairs,’ Fred replied. ‘Movement on the first floor. Could be resting.’
‘Sweet dreams,’ Jason replied. ‘Send the seventh.’
Everybody looked towards Wal, the younger of the two technicians. He was wearing a beanie and looked no more than twenty or twenty-one. Cara hadn’t known what Jason meant by ‘the seventh’ but assumed it was another dummy text message. She was suddenly sick with worry. She had never been involved in an operation of this kind nor been so close to the possibility of success or failure, life and death.
‘Confirm?’ said Wal.
Cara looked at the infra-red images moving back and forth on the screens. A radio in the barn crackled.
‘Vehicle.’
‘Wait!’ Jason snapped, raising his hand. Wal took his hands off the keyboard, like a pianist pausing mid-phrase. Cara had recognised the voice on the radio as a fourth SF soldier, codenamed KAISER, positioned behind a hedgerow further along the road. No cars or vans had driven past the farm since she had been intercepted more than two hours earlier.
‘Description, KAISER,’ Jason whispered on comms.
‘Skoda saloon, blue. Driver alone. Unknown if enemy or local.’
‘Hold the seventh,’ Jason replied. ‘I say again, do not send the seventh message.’
He knew what Cara knew. That whoever was in the car could be an Iranian who would immediately tell the men inside the cottage that the communications coming in and out of the property had been compromised.
‘We stop him?’ CARPENTER asked, just as the car swept past the farmhouse.
‘Too late,’ Jason replied. They all waited in silence, staring at the laptop screens, at the worm’s eye view of the cottage. The headlights burned the infra-red as the vehicle turned into the drive in front of the house. ‘That’s not a delivery guy from Amazon,’ he said. ‘That’s enemy.’
34
‘You’re wasting my time,’ said Torabi. ‘I don’t need to know about your journey to Paris, where you ate, where you smoked cigarettes with Xavier. I need to know about Eskandarian.’
Hossein had left the room, taking Kamran’s gun. It was obvious that he wasn’t coming back. Kite was sure that he was the man Torabi had dispatched to the cottage to kill Isobel.
‘You said you wanted to hear everything about France,’ he said. He had no choice but to keep drawing out the story for as long as possible, giving MI5 time to find him. ‘I’m telling you everything that’s important.’
‘You are taking too long.’
‘Let me speak to my wife. I want to know that she’s safe.’
To Kite’s surprise, Torabi looked at his cell phone and said: ‘That is no longer possible.’
‘Why?’
He did not need an answer to the question: it was written in Torabi’s face. They had lost contact with the house.
‘Luc was with you all the time?’ Torabi asked. The change of subject was further confirmation that something had gone wrong. Kite assumed that BOX had put an electronic bubble around the cottage. ‘What was he doing in Paris before you arrived?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘You drove with him to the house?’
‘Yes,’ Kite replied. ‘We had two cars. If I remember correctly, Luc was driving a Mercedes, Rosamund had a Citroën or a Peugeot. Both rented. She and Jacqui collected Martha from the airport in Cannes.’
Torabi’s phone vibrated. He checked