A Colder War (20 page)

27

It was always the same afterward. Walking back down the same quiet street, catching the eyes of strangers. How quickly his exhilaration changed to shame. The men in the teahouses, the women scrubbing flagstones on a front porch—all of them watching him. All of them seeming to know exactly what he had done.

Douglas Tremayne boarded the tram. It was crowded. He felt himself hemmed in against other bodies, other men. He had washed afterward and his skin felt soft and feminine. He was aware that he smelled of soap, his hair still damp where it met the collar of his shirt. People staring at him. Strangers. Turks. The Englishman in his brown brogues and burgundy corduroy trousers. A tweed jacket in Istanbul. Tremayne liked to dress smartly but he always felt that the passengers on the tram were judging him.

He replayed the night’s events in his mind. The same old patterns. The exchanges were beginning to blend into one another. Sometimes he would forget where he had been, what had occurred, even in which city it had happened. He knew places all over Turkey.

There was always that sense beforehand of losing control, of his better self rendered powerless. It was just a thing that he was obliged to do, and until he did it, there could be no calm and equanimity in his system. He would know no peace of mind. Tremayne thought of it as an addiction and treated it as such, though he had never told a soul, never sought help, never succumbed to a confession.

Where did these impules come from? Why had he turned out this way? Why did he always make the same rotten decisions?

The tram stopped. In the distance, a minaret. More passengers crowding him up. More strangers. The stink of morning sweat and the smell of his own perfumed skin. A mingling. Tremayne touched the back of his neck, felt the dampness of his hair, wondered if this time he had finally been caught. Watched. Photographed. Filmed.

Perhaps it was what he wanted. A release from this secret life. A release from all the guilt. The guilt and the shame.

28

Kell slept for no more than an hour. At dawn, he became aware of Rachel creeping out of bed and gathering up her clothes from the ottoman. His eyes closed, his head turned toward the window, he heard her going into the bathroom, emerging a few minutes later wearing the hourglass black dress and the wedge heels of the previous evening. She approached the bed and leaned over to kiss him.

“Walk of shame,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

“You should stay.”

“No. Got to go home.”

They kissed again, and he held her close to him, but the heat between them had gone. She stood up, smoothed down the dress, waved at him with rippling fingers, and walked out of the room.

Kell immediately sat up. Istanbul was muffled by the shuttered windows, by curtains that closed out the dawn light, but he could still hear the city awakening, traffic and the lone cry of the muezzin. Rachel would easily find a taxi outside the Londres and, within half an hour, be back at home, creeping upstairs in the
yali,
past the sleeping Josephine, to snooze for the rest of the morning. He only hoped that she would not encounter Amelia downstairs, back from a dawn run or en route to an early breakfast. Walk of shame indeed.

He opened the curtains and the shutters, went to the bathroom and took a shower, then ordered breakfast to his room. Just after six thirty, too soon for the coffee and eggs to have been prepared, there was a knock at the door. Rachel? Had she forgotten something?

Wearing just a towel around his waist, Kell opened the door.

“Thomas! I am a married woman now. Cover yourself!”

It was Elsa, grinning.

“Thanks for the warning,” he said. “What are you doing up so early?”

“This,” she said, thrusting a file in his direction. “I have been working on it since I saw you. It is a long night. Amelia ask me to make some background on Cecilia Sandor. This is what I find out. It is all so very sad, Tom. How I hate wasted love.”

29

The file was a bible of grief. E-mails from Cecilia to her closest friend in Budapest, mourning the loss of Paul. Telephone calls to a doctor in Dubrovnik, whom Elsa had identified as a psychiatrist specializing in “addiction and bereavement.” Cecilia had visited Internet sites about death and heartbreak and signed into an English-language chat forum in which she had discussed her feelings of loss with total strangers around the world. She had joined a yoga class on Lopud, was having massages every forty-eight hours, therapy three times a week. She had bought self-help books from Amazon, spent £2,700 on a two-week trip to the Maldives. She had read widely on plane crashes—specifically the many newspaper reports and web articles relating to Wallinger’s accident—and closed her restaurant for ten days as soon as she had heard about his death. To Kell’s astonishment, he saw that Sandor had also made an anonymous donation of a thousand pounds to the SIS Widows’ Fund.

Further checks of her e-mail had shown that Wallinger’s mistress had flown by easyJet from Dubrovnik to Gatwick the day before the funeral and had reserved a seat on the same train that Kell and Amelia had taken from Euston. Kell realized that they had been seated no more than a carriage apart. Cecilia had been booked onto a return London train in midafternoon, a flight back to Dubrovnik the following day. She had most probably bought the flowers in Preston, driven direct to the farmhouse, left the bouquet and card in the barn, then returned to the station. One of the e-mails sent to her friend in Budapest—badly translated by Internet software—showed that Cecilia had not attended the funeral service itself.

Kell read the file over breakfast. At nine o’clock he rang Elsa in her room, congratulated her on a job well done, and asked if there had been any specific references, in any of the research, to Jim Chater or Ryan Kleckner.

“No,” she said, her voice falling away. Perhaps she felt as though she had let Kell down. “I do not think so, Tom. I can check this.”

“Don’t worry,” Kell told her. She had been up all night and sounded weary. “Get some rest. You deserve it.”

*   *   *

The British consulate was a glorious, humbling remnant of Empire, a three-story nineteenth-century neoclassical palace in the heart of Beyoglu, no more than a hundred meters from Kell’s hotel. An attack by suicide bombers a decade earlier had resulted in the death of the British consul-general and more than twenty others. Kell could remember exactly where he was—eating lunch with Claire on a glorious November afternoon in London—when he had heard about the attack on the BBC.

“All because of bloody Bush,” Claire had said, pointing at images of the president, who had been in town for talks at 10 Downing Street. Kell had ducked the argument, as he always did with Claire when it came to cause and effect on terror. “If Blair had just kept us out of Iraq,” she said, “none of this stuff would be
happening
.”

Amelia beat him to the meeting by an hour. Kell walked into the Station just before ten to be informed by “C” that she had been “up since six” and was “keen to get down to business.”

“You look knackered,” she said as she spun the locks, clockwise, counterclockwise, on the secure speech room. An alarm sounded as Kell lifted the lever and pulled on the deadweight of the door. The combination of the physical effort involved in this and the screech of the alarm served only to intensify his hangover. He felt as though he had left the better part of his brain comatose on a pillow in the Hotel Londres.

“Nice and warm in here,” Amelia quipped, reacting to the intense cold of the air-conditioning. It was a feature of secure speech rooms around the world: it was not unknown for officers to attend meetings wearing scarves and overcoats.

Amelia sat at one end of a conference table set with chairs for eight; Kell took a seat halfway down, having sealed the doors behind him. He was carrying a double espresso from an automated coffee machine on the ground floor, his third of the morning.

“How was the party?” Amelia asked as she lifted several files and printouts from a black leather briefcase, piling them on the table in front of her.

“Fun,” Kell replied. “Eurotrash bar below Galata. Expats and rich Turks. Fun.”

“And Rachel?”

“What about her?”

“Was she fun too?”

Up since six
. Kell felt the forensic, all-seeing penetration of the Levene gaze. Had Amelia spotted Rachel leaving the hotel? It was pointless lying to her; she knew that he was attracted to Rachel. Kell felt like a passenger at an airport passing through a state-of-the-art X-ray machine; every bone and muscle of his guilt glowing like a bomb.

“She’s great,” he said. “An old soul. Clever. Funny. The chaperone had a good time.”

Amelia nodded, seeming to accept this. “Is she interested in ABACUS?”

Kell frowned.
“ABACUS?”

“I didn’t tell you?” Amelia shuffled around in the files, a sudden visual reminder of the plate-spinning chaos into which the new job had thrust her. “Cryptonym for Kleckner.”

“Right,” Kell said, watching her as his head throbbed.

“So?”

Kell would enjoy answering the question. Rachel certainly hadn’t been interested enough in Ryan Kleckner to stay at his party for more than an hour. She had then come back to Kell’s hotel room and released herself to him with a passion and a finesse that had astonished him. All of this suggested that, at least for the time being, Rachel Wallinger was more interested in Thomas Kell.

“Hard to say,” he replied, distracted by a specific visual memory of Rachel’s spine as she moved beneath him, the way the pale bedroom light had cast shadows in the dips and hollows of her back. He downed the last dregs of the espresso. “She flirted with him a little bit. Kleckner certainly looked fond of her.”

“Fond?”
Amelia was frowning. “Do the Cousins
do
fond? ABACUS doesn’t strike me as the type.”

“What do we know about him?” Kell hoped to draw Amelia away from Rachel with the question. Retrieving a narrow file from the pile of papers, she duly obliged, giving him full spectrum background on Kleckner’s career (seven years in the CIA, three of them in Madrid, two of them in Turkey); his education (high school in Missouri—valedictorian—followed by SFS at Georgetown); his family history (parents divorced when Kleckner was seven, the father never to be seen again). There was—as Kell had suspected—a decent helping of religious fervor in the Kleckner lineage (the adored mother was an energetic Catholic schoolteacher who ran her own prayer group), allied to good, old-fashioned American patriotism (Kleckner had an older brother who had served two tours in Iraq, a younger sister who had returned to her day job as an ER doctor in Belleville having volunteered for a six-month secondment to Bagram in 2008). At twenty-two, Kleckner had been a star on the Georgetown rowing squad, paying his way through college by working nights as a hospital porter. After a short stint as an unpaid intern for a Republican congressman in St. Louis, he had applied for a position with the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Self-starter. Overachiever,” said Kell. “Possible loner?”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Amelia replied, rapping her fingers on Kleckner’s résumé. “I would have thought Langley was pleased to have him.”

“Would you give him a job?” Kell was suddenly nauseous with hunger, the eggs and white bread of the Londres breakfast now just acid in his gut. Amelia produced an official State Department photograph of Kleckner and flashed Kell one of the smiles she reserved for boys.

“He is
awfully
handsome,” she said, spinning the picture along the table toward Kell. He stared at the photograph. Kleckner looked as effortlessly seductive as a matinee idol. “IQ in the high hundreds,” she said. “Eyes like Gregory Peck.
Pecs
like Gregory Peck, most probably. Of
course
I’d give him a job.”

“Sexist,” Kell replied. Through the small window in the door of the secure speech room he spotted a bowl of bananas and felt like a dying man who has glimpsed a source of fresh water in the Nefud desert. “So we soak him?” he asked, knowing that it would be a long time before he could get outside to eat something. Too many alarms. Too many locks. Too much conversation.

“Oh, we soak him,” Amelia replied. “By this time next week we’ll know more about young Mr. Kleckner than he knows about himself.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. For the next half hour Amelia Levene was at her very best: thorough, imaginative, ruthless. She wasn’t just “C,” the Whitehall Dame-in-waiting. Her passion seemed to have returned, her love of the game. If she was worried that her legacy would be another Philby or Blake, a traitor to destroy the transatlantic relationship, she did not show it. Kell glimpsed some of the restless energy and enthusiasm that had marked Amelia out in her late thirties and forties. She was as focused and as forensic as he had seen her in many years. This was the woman Paul Wallinger had fallen in love with. The best SIS officer—male or female—of her generation.

It transpired that many of her ideas for the blanket coverage of Ryan Kleckner were already in place. A ten-man team, seconded from the Security Service, had put foot surveillance on ABACUS on half a dozen occasions. They were currently on standby in Istanbul, ready to go full-time as soon as Kell gave the word. Amelia had instructed Elsa to cut out the Wi-Fi at Kleckner’s residence, thereby allowing a local asset Turk Telekom engineer to fit microphones in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and living room of his apartment. The roof of Kleckner’s car—a Honda Accord—had been “painted” in the small hours of Friday morning by a team from the Station while it was parked on the street. The vehicle was now visible to satellites should Kleckner decide to go AWOL, although, as Kell pointed out, those satellites were mostly American-controlled, and therefore functionally useless (Amelia conceded the point with a grunt of disdain). Cameras were also being planted in any café, hotel, or restaurant where ABACUS had shown a “pattern.” It was known that he frequented a gym four blocks from his home and liked to visit a small teahouse off Istiklal whenever he found himself in Beyoglu. (“There’s a waitress there,” Amelia said. “He likes her.”) Both locations would have near-total visual coverage. At least once a month, Kleckner could be found attending Mass at the Church of St. Antony of Padua, the largest Catholic cathedral in Turkey. Catherine West, wife of a declared SIS officer whom Amelia had known for many years, had been given instructions to attend the same Mass and to report on Kleckner’s behavior and appearance, providing a description of anyone who came into contact with him. Information could very easily be passed between members of the congregation, most obviously by anyone sitting next to Kleckner in a pew. When Kell asked about them, Amelia confirmed that similar operations were already under way against Douglas Tremayne and Mary Begg. Tony Landau was also being watched in the United States.