A Colder War (16 page)

The question was directed at him with a look of nonchalance. Kell met it with a grin.

“I don’t know.” He looked across at Amelia, who was staring into her cup. “What am I these days?”

The chief of the Secret Intelligence Service was saved from conjuring a suitably witty response by the arrival of Josephine Wallinger, who had paused in the doorway of the kitchen, as though taking in the view for the first time. Kell was shocked by her appearance. She looked tired and browbeaten, as though everything Paul had ever done—his spying, his womanizing, even his death—had conspired to ruin her.

“Did you know that the Turkish word for ‘Bosporus’ is the same as the word for ‘throat’?”

“I did not know that,” Amelia replied, moving toward her with arms outstretched. The two women embraced. As Josephine said: “Thank you for coming. How lovely to see you,” Kell looked at Rachel in an effort to discern whether or not she knew about her father’s affair with Amelia. There was no observable change in her expression.

“You know Tom, of course?”

Amelia ushered Josephine toward Kell. She smelled of tears and face cream. He kissed her on both cheeks and said how good it was to see her. When she thanked him for coming to the funeral, Rachel interjected, saying: “Oh, were you there? I didn’t notice you,” and Kell tried to unpick the implication of the remark. Was it an insult, a way of flirting with him, or simply a throwaway line?

For some time they idled in chitchat: Kell, Josephine, and Amelia sitting on various armchairs and sofas dotted around the open-plan kitchen. Rachel moved from room to room, from floor to floor, but honored Kell with a glance whenever she returned to the kitchen. Having waited for the correct moment, Amelia invited Josephine to accompany her on a walk around Yenikoy. That gave Kell the chance to smoke a long-awaited cigarette on the veranda. It was no surprise when he heard the click of the door behind him and turned to see that Rachel was coming outside to join him.

Round two.

“Got a spare one of those?”

“Sure.”

He dug out the packet of Winston Lights, slid out a single cigarette, and tilted it toward her. She took it and he offered her a light, cupping his hand around the flame to protect it from gusts of sea wind. The tips of her fingers touched the back of his hand as she inhaled on the flame and withdrew from him.

“I always think it looks as though it’s coming to a boil.”

It took Kell a moment to realize that Rachel was talking about the Bosporus. The observation was entirely apt. The churning waters ahead of them seemed to be bubbling in a fury of surging tides and winds.

“You go out on it much? Did your father take you?”

“Once,” she said, and exhaled a funnel of smoke that bent in front of his face and rushed off, evaporating on the breeze. “We took a ferry out to Buyukada. Have you been there?”

“Never,” Kell replied.

“One of the islands in the Sea of Marmara. Summer tourists, mostly, but Pappa had a friend who lived out there. An American journalist.”

As soon as he heard the word “American,” Kell thought of Chater, of Kleckner, of the mole. He wondered who the journalist was to whom Rachel was referring. Just as quickly, like the smoke turning sharply from her lips, she changed the subject.

“Why did you say that he was good at his job? How is a spy a good spy? What made Pappa better than anyone else?”

Kell would happily have spent the rest of the afternoon answering that question, because it was his area of particular expertise, a subject he had studied and thought about for the better part of his adult life. He began with a simple observation.

“Believe it or not, it’s a question of honesty,” he said. “If a person is clear about what they want to achieve, if they set about achieving that goal objectively and with precision, more often than not they will succeed.”

Rachel looked confused. Not because she did not understand what Kell was trying to say, but because she did not necessarily accept it.

“Are you talking about life or are you talking about spying?”

“Both,” Kell replied.

“It all sounds a bit self-help.”

Kell laughed off the insult. “Thanks,” he said, but her next remark caught him off guard.

“Are you saying my father wasn’t a liar?”

He would have to proceed carefully. It was all very well sharing a flirtatious cigarette with an attractive woman on the shores of the Hellespont, but that woman was also the daughter of a man who had recently been killed. Kell was the gatekeeper of Paul Wallinger’s reputation. Whatever he told Rachel about her father, she would remember for the rest of her life.

“We lie,” he said. “I have lied in my career. It wasn’t something your father was immune to, either. But let’s face it, deceit isn’t exactly unique to espionage.” She frowned again, as if she thought that Kell was trying to wriggle off a hook. He looked up at the house, then out across the water. “Architects lie. Ship captains lie. I was trying to make a different point. That we achieve our best results by presenting ourselves honestly. That goes for all relationships, don’t you think? And what I do, what your father did, was ultimately about making relationships.”

Rachel drew deeply on the answer and smoked in silence. A ketch passed within a hundred meters of the
yali
. Kell followed its progress, enjoying the drum tautness of the full sails, the clean white churn of the wake.

“I loathe spies,” she said.

Kell laughed at this, but Rachel was looking out across the water and would not meet his gaze.

“Explain,” he said, trying to deny to himself that a woman he desired, whose good opinion he already coveted, had deliberately insulted him.

“I think it killed something off in Pappa,” she said. “A part of him dried up inside. I began to think that he had a piece missing from his heart. Call it decency. Call it tenderness. Honesty, perhaps.”

And Paul knew that,
Kell thought, remembering the abundance of photographs of Andrew in Ankara, the comparative absence of pictures of Rachel. Wallinger knew that his bright, beautiful, perceptive daughter had seen through him. He knew that he had lost her respect.

“I’m sorry to hear you say that,” he said. “I really am. I hope you won’t always feel that way. I don’t think it’s true of Paul. He was capable of great kindness. He was a decent man.” Kell tripped on the words as he said them, because he knew they were platitudes designed to comfort a woman who was long past any desire to be falsely reassured. He tried a different approach. “What we do—the people we are obliged to work with, the ends we are asked to justify—takes its toll. It becomes impossible to remain above the fray. Does that make sense? In other words, we are blackened by our association with politics, with the secret world.” Even as he said this, Kell could feel a contrary argument rising inside him. There had been decency in Paul Wallinger only when it was in Paul Wallinger’s interests to be decent; when it served him to be ruthless, he was ruthless. “What’s the line from Nietzsche? He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster—”

Rachel interrupted him, tossing her cigarette out to sea. “Right,” she said impatiently, as though Kell was a freshman trying to impress her with cod philosophy. He felt embarrassed and opted for greater simplicity. “What I’m trying to tell you is that we are all the sum of our contradictions. We all make mistakes. They fuck you up, your mum and dad, but your mum and dad also do a pretty good job of fucking themselves up, too.”

That made her grin. At last. It was lovely to see it again, the flattering radiance of Rachel Wallinger’s smile. Kell tossed his cigarette into the water, but they remained on the veranda.

“So what mistakes have you made, Tom?” she said, and touched his arm, as though she imagined that she did not have his full attention. Had Kell possessed an ounce more self-confidence in that moment, a watertight assurance that it would not offend her, he would have reached for Rachel, looped his hand around her waist, pulled her toward him, and kissed her. But he could no more make a pass at Wallinger’s daughter than he could imagine making a pass at Amelia Levene.

“Lots,” he replied. “And all of them bound by the Official Secrets Act. You’ll have to wait for my memoirs.”

She smiled again and looked south at the vast suspension bridge linking European Istanbul to the Asian side. At night it was lit by a thousand blue lights, a sight Kell always enjoyed. He would have liked to take Rachel to one of the restaurants in Moda or Ortakoy, to order oysters and Chablis, to talk for hours. He hadn’t felt that way about a woman in years.

“How well do you know Amelia?” she asked.

Kell heard a warning in the question, perhaps the implication that Rachel knew about the affair. He smothered his concern with a joke.

“Well enough that if she had spinach in her teeth, I would tell her.”

Rachel did not laugh. She was still looking south, toward the bridge.

“Mum doesn’t trust her.”

“No?”

“She thinks she knows more about Dad’s accident than she’s letting on.”

That was unexpected. Nothing to do with the affair. Everything to do with the crash. Kell did his best to reassure her.

“Please don’t worry about that,” he said. “All of us are trying to find out what happened. That’s why I’m here. That’s why they’ve gone off for a walk.”

“You’re talking to me like I’m too young to hear the grown-ups’ secrets.”

“You know that’s not true. Nobody thinks that, Rachel. Least of all me.”

“We’ve only just met. You don’t know me.”

He wanted to tell her that he had met her before; or, at least, that he had watched her and seen what she had done with the flowers at her father’s funeral. The flare of anger in her eyes, flinging the bouquet into the wall, a gesture at once violently dismissive of Cecilia Sandor and instinctively defensive of her mother. Kell remembered how Rachel had gone to Andrew afterward, almost as if she was protecting him from the consequences of their father’s deceit. She had removed the card before Andrew had had the chance to see it. Kell still did not know if Rachel had been able to understand the Hungarian text on the card or had simply recognized the handwriting.

A noise inside the house. Josephine and Amelia returning from their walk. Kell wished that he had been privy to their conversation; Amelia tiptoeing around Josephine’s resentment of the woman who had almost stolen her husband. Rachel opened the door and went back into the room. Kell caught a knowing look on Amelia’s face as she registered that the two of them had been outside together.

“I wish you wouldn’t smoke, darling,” Josephine said, smiling benignly at Kell as though he were a chauffeur who had been killing time waiting for his boss. “What time’s your thing tonight?”

“What thing?” Amelia asked.

“I’ve been invited to a party,” Rachel replied.

“Some colleague of Paul’s,” Josephine added blandly, still looking at Kell. “Perhaps you know him. American diplomat. Ryan Kleckner.”

22

Kell reacted quickly, a rapid improvisation.

“That’s odd. I had a meeting with someone who was going to the same party. Kleckner. He works at the consulate here, right?”

“Right,” Rachel replied.

“I think somebody caught someone’s eye,” Josephine added, shooting Rachel an arch look. In that moment Kell realized that Kleckner had asked Rachel as his date.

“Mum, I met him for five minutes at the wake. He knew I was coming out to Istanbul. He just very sweetly invited me to his party.”

“Is it a big thing? A dinner?” Kell’s voice was steady but he was aware of trying to make himself feel less physically tense. If the party was an intimate dinner for a dozen of Kleckner’s closest friends, he had no chance of crashing; if most of expat Istanbul was invited, he could tag along.

“Some bar. Bleu. Have you heard of it?”

Amelia obviously hadn’t, but she said: “Yes” because she knew what Kell was trying to do. He wanted to get into Kleckner’s circle, wanted to have a chance to go eye-to-eye with his target.

“I’m not sure I want to go on my own,” she said. “I won’t know anyone.”

Josephine began to speak. “Then just stay here with…”

Amelia did not allow her to finish. “Take Tom,” she said, throwing out the idea as casually as Kell had tossed his cigarette into the Bosporus. “He’s always complaining that he’s too old for nightclubs but too young to stay at home.”

Rachel seemed to enjoy that line. “Are you always complaining about that?” she asked, with a knowing tilt of the head. Kell muttered: “I’ve never said that in my life,” while all three women grinned at him. Rachel enjoyed the sight of his momentary discomfort and took up Amelia’s suggestion. “Come with me, then,” she said. “It’ll be fun. You can be my chaperone.”

*   *   *

Chaperone,
Kell thought two hours later as he stared into the steamed-up mirror of his hotel bathroom, wiping away the condensation to reveal a face smothered in shaving foam, his hair wet from the shower.
Chaperone
. He opened the bathroom door and shaved as the steam slowly cleared. He thought of the line in
Moonraker
about Bond’s reluctance to shave twice in the same day and a smile curled in the mirror. Thomas Kell was not a vain man, but he was vain enough to want to look good for Rachel Wallinger. Moving closer to the glass he spotted a single black hair protruding from his left earlobe, two more in his nostrils. He pulled them out, his eyes watering. There was a hair dryer in the wardrobe, but Kell drew the line at that, toweling himself dry and then dressing in jeans, desert boots, and a pale blue shirt that had been laundered by the hotel in Ankara.

He had arranged to meet Rachel at the base of the Galata Tower. She was there before he was, pivoting on wedge heels in a belted black dress, a pair of Ray-Bans with powder blue frames shielding her eyes from the fading evening sun. He kissed her on both cheeks and recognized her perfume, though he could not place it. Perhaps a colleague had worn it at SIS.

“Did you eat?” she asked.

Kell had ordered a sandwich from room service and wolfed it after the shower, but said: “No,” because he hoped that Rachel was hungry. He wanted to sit with her for a while, to get to know her, just the two of them.