A Colder War (29 page)

“Look. Matt is a friend of mine. I go to his place all the time, he has parties, he has dinners. I can get away into the Trotsky place, leave whatever I have to leave, collect whatever you need me to collect. Then I can be back before anybody notices I’m gone. Somebody finds me there, I say I’m a historian with an interest in Lev Bronstein. Either that or I have plans to buy the place and turn it into a house like Matt’s. See? You send me to some park in Istanbul and I start acting suspicious around buildings, I have to drive around for five hours shaking off a tail and then leaving classified information in some toilet somewhere, I’m gonna get antsy. I’m gonna get
caught
. And I don’t want to get caught, because I want to help you guys. I can’t do that if I’m sitting on my ass in some prison in Virginia.”

So the SVR had let Ryan Kleckner have his way. Above all, the agent must feel comfortable in his work; he must feel safe. It was a relief to Minasian that he was handling a trained CIA officer—albeit one with limited experience—whose skills in countersurveillance had significantly reduced the chances of disclosure. KODAK was a calm and thorough agent, sometimes eerily so. Nevertheless, Minasian was aware of Moscow’s concerns about him and conscious that the American’s attitudes did not always sit well with senior colleagues. Minasian was convinced that the order to kill Cecilia Sandor, for example, would not have been given in normal circumstances. It was a symptom of Moscow’s paranoia about KODAK, a determination to protect their source at all costs. Had Minasian himself been consulted on the operation, he would have argued strongly for Sandor and Luka Zigic to be left intact.

Minasian spun around and looked back at the beach. He was far from the shore and concerned that an opportunistic islander might steal his towel or bag. Two men—a Caucasian male in the company of a dark-skinned Turk—were leaving the beach via a slip road. Three small children were also accompanying their mother back into town. It was the end of the day. Minasian looked west, toward the gradually setting sun, and knew that it was time to finish his swim and to complete his task. Turning onto his back, he began to head for shore, arms windmilling slowly in the dusk while, high above, an airplane slipped across the sky.

41

“What do you think it means?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” Kell replied.

He was back in the secure speech room, still in the same sweat-soaked clothes he had worn all day, talking to Amelia in London. It was half past ten in Turkey, half past eight in Vauxhall. Amelia was looking at the final line of Kleckner’s document, sent by secure telegram an hour earlier.

Why CS termination? Explanation? PW compromised? Suggest LHR Tues 30-Fri 3 (confirm SMS)

“There’s an obvious link with Cecilia Sandor,” Kell said. “‘PW’ has got to be Paul.”

“I realize that, Tom.”

“Then which bit of it is confusing you?”

They had been on the line for almost an hour and Kell was at the edge of his patience. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, Rachel had failed to respond when he had called her from the ferry, and it was so cold in the secure speech room that he was wearing an undersized winter coat purloined from a lost property cupboard in the Chancery. He had wanted to go straight from the island to Sabiha Gokcen and catch the late flight back to London, but the discovery of the DLB, the proof of Kleckner’s treachery—with Paul’s possible involvement thrown in—was too pressing. Instead, Kell had pulled Amelia out of a meeting in Whitehall and she had raced back to Vauxhall Cross to speak to him.

“No bit of it is confusing me,” she replied, reacting to Kell’s insolence as he would have expected. Her voice had taken on an edge of irritated condescension, like the start of a row with Claire. “I simply wanted to know what you think. What is meant by the word ‘compromised’? Was Paul an asset or was Paul a patsy? And why does Kleckner care?”

“Why does he
care
?” Kell had a sudden glimpse of his future as H/Ankara and knew that he would grow to hate these interminable conversations with London, Rachel long gone and fucking some hotshot thirtysomething barrister at a warehouse apartment in Shoreditch, while Kell deadened his soul with work, throwing himself into recruitments and agent-running as a means of forgetting her. In recent weeks he had come to think of the secure speech room as a padded cell, a freezing womb in which he felt trapped and controlled. Surely it would be better if he was back in London, dealing with “C” face-to-face, day-to-day, then heading home to a flat lined with his books and his paintings, to a midnight bed warmed by Rachel? “He cares because killing Sandor was a mistake,” he said. “It draws attention to what he’s up to. Somebody finds out Cecilia was seeing Paul, that makes them sit up and start asking questions.”

“Of course it does.”

Kell heard the tinkle of a spoon against a cup, like the prelude to an after-dinner speech. Amelia was probably drinking an espresso from the new machine in her private office.

“We are still where we were on Wallinger,” Kell added. “Either he was conscious that Sandor was an SVR asset, and therefore deliberately assisting her, or he was not. What’s strange, what doesn’t ring true, is Kleckner’s consciousness of that SVR operation. If Minasian was running both of them—an asset in the CIA, an asset in SIS—it’s feasible that he would have made them aware of each other, but it’s risky. Doubles the chances of one of them getting caught, of one of them betraying the other.”

“Precisely.” Amelia sounded pleased to have Kell thinking along similar lines. “Though we are both agreed that the tradecraft on much of this operation has been eccentric, to say the least.”

“We are both agreed on that.”

Kell buttoned the coat to the neck and bit down on a stick of shortbread, the only food that had passed his lips in eight hours, save for a handful of peppermints discovered in a bowl near the consulate entrance.

“Tom?”

“Yes?”

“I have to go to the Cousins with this.”

It was what Kell had expected Amelia to say. An SVR mole inside the CIA was catastrophic; that it had taken the Brits to identify him would both embarrass Langley and leave them in London’s debt for years. Nevertheless, Kell recoiled at the idea.

“That is the one thing we should not do. Yet.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ll try to pin most of it on Paul. Say that the most damaging leaks—on HITCHCOCK, on EINSTEIN—came from our side. We need to clear him of suspicion, find out the precise nature of his relationship with Sandor and Minasian.”

“There’s no time for that,” Amelia replied. “The Americans need to know. Jim Chater has to be told.”

“All in good time. Kleckner is coming to the U.K., yes?”

“Yes.”

“So get me to London. Tuesday to Friday, he’ll be on our turf, we know that we can control him. Let me move the surveillance operation from Istanbul to London, get my team home, get fresh eyes and legs on him. Kleckner wants to talk about Sandor’s murder. He will lead us to his handler.”

“And if we lose him? If he shakes us off?”

“Then we lose him.”

Kell was aware that Amelia needed him in Istanbul. The Station was going to have to try to put cameras on the DLB; to identify Kleckner’s “signal in” to Minasian; to work out how to put a long-term advance surveillance team on Buyukada that would saturate ABACUS on his next visit. Kell would suggest that SIS try to gain control of the DLB and switch Kleckner’s product for chicken feed, handing bogus intelligence to the SVR that would tie Moscow in knots. But London meant Rachel. Kell wanted time with her, even if it was just the few days when Ryan Kleckner would be in town. Time to track the American into the arms of his handler, yes; but also time to rekindle their relationship.

“There’s no need for you to come over, Tom.”

Kell heard a note of apology in Amelia’s voice, as though she wanted to save him the trouble of flying back.

“Of course there is. We should talk face-to-face, line everything up for Ryan’s visit. I’ll get the early BA flight tomorrow, see you around lunchtime.”

“What about the Red Cross convoy?”

“What about it?”

“We let the Russians inform Assad? That’s your view?” Amelia sounded as though she wanted to test the direction of Kell’s moral compass. “The convoy gets hit, gets discovered, Jim finds out that we knew about it, he’s not going to be best pleased.”

“Since when did you care so much about Jim Chater?”

It was a better reply than Kell had intended, touching as it did on Amelia’s loyalty to her own.

“Fair point,” she replied, with an appropriate edge of contempt for the man who had almost obliterated Kell’s career. “Nevertheless, I don’t like the idea of a Red Cross team getting arrested or shot by the Syrians when we could have saved them.”

Kell wondered what Amelia was expecting him to say. Surely she could see the importance of delaying any conversation with Langley?

“I don’t like it either,” he said, “but we don’t have any choice. Tell Jim and he’ll ask how we found out about a top secret consignment of American weapons making their way into the arms of the Free Syrian Army. Warn the driver and the Russians will know there’s blowback on Kleckner’s material.”

“Collateral damage?” Amelia said, as though she wanted Kell to take responsibility for it.

“Collateral damage,” he replied.

42

Twelve hours later Kell was touching down in London.

He came from the ceaseless clamor and sweat of Istanbul into a city of permanent rain. It was always the same coming home. Landing at Heathrow under gray skies; the same fat-turned-to-muscle Crystal Palace supporter driving the same gargling black cab; the gradual but somehow reassuring adjustment to the smallness and the litter and the dimmed light of England. Rachel, having vanished from Kell’s life for the better part of three days, suddenly surfaced again, texting him incessantly on the M4 with a customary barrage of jokes about his age and a demand that Kell meet her for dinner.

MY PLACE. I’M COOKING. DON’T FORGET YOUR PACEMAKER, OLD MAN XXX

Kell had forgotten to put out the garbage before he left for Chios. Opening the door of his flat he was hit by a nauseating smell, close to the stench of death, and had to open every window in the place before walking the bag downstairs and throwing it in a Dumpster eight doors down. Having sifted through his post, he showered and changed, then took a cab to Bayswater shortly after one o’clock.

Amelia was waiting for him in a branch of Costa Coffee at the northern end of the Whiteleys shopping mall. They walked to the empty office of a defunct mail order catalogue business on Redan Place. It was here, a year earlier, that Kell had told Amelia about the plot to kidnap her son. He remembered the conversation as one of the most difficult they had ever endured, yet as they rode the lift to the fourth floor, Amelia seemed relaxed and uninhibited, whatever memories she retained of that afternoon now happily erased. She was wearing an almost exact replica of the outfit she had worn that day: a skirt with a navy blue jacket, a white blouse, and a gold necklace. Kell noticed that it was the one she had worn to the funeral; the same necklace she had been wearing in the photograph that Wallinger had kept beside his bed in Ankara. The realization gave him an odd sense of reassurance, because such a symbolic choice surely suggested that Amelia had no doubts about Paul’s innocence.

“The Office owns this place now?” he asked as Amelia tapped in the security code, switching off a silent alarm.

“Rents,” she replied, dropping her handbag on the ground. She walked toward the kitchen at the far end of the room. “You want tea?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

The office had changed. Two years earlier it had been open plan, rows of plastic-wrapped dresses hanging on racks along the south wall, desks covered in coffee cups and computers. Now the room had been sectioned off into six separate areas with a corridor running down the center. Kell could see Amelia filling up the kettle at the far end of the office. There had been a red sofa outside the kitchen. That too was gone.

“This place is operational?” he called out, walking toward her.

“About to be.” She turned to face him. “I thought we could watch our friend from here. Team coming in at three to arrange the layout. Agree?”

“Sounds like a done deal.” Kell was impressed that Amelia had moved so quickly on Kleckner’s visit to London.

“Let me get you his itinerary,” she said.

As the kettle crackled and came to a boil, Amelia passed Kell a three-page document outlining ABACUS’s travel arrangements. Everything was there. Flight times, hotels, meetings, lunches, dinners. All put together within the previous twenty-four hours.

“That was quick,” he said. “Who did this? Elsa?”

It transpired that Kleckner had telephoned Jim Chater from Bursa, requesting some leave. The call had been picked up by Cheltenham. Chater had signed off on the trip and Kleckner had spent the rest of the evening back at his apartment in Istanbul, arranging the journey. Elsa had been watching his e-mail and credit cards, GCHQ listening to his phones.

“He’s staying at the Rembrandt?” Kell was trying to recall where Kleckner had based himself on previous visits to the capital. In the beds of two or three different girls—he wasn’t certain how many—but never before at a hotel. “Why isn’t he using one of the embassy apartments? Did he try for that?”

“He did.” Amelia was looking in a cupboard for a mug. She found one and pulled it down, muttering something about “fresh milk.” Kell had a sudden flash memory of Rachel in the kitchen at the
yali
. He remembered the way she had leaned across the counter, reaching for a box of tea. “There’s a delegation in town,” Amelia was saying. “All the flats were full. Which makes our job that much easier.”

Kell wondered if he could light a cigarette or if the temporary office would be subject to Civil Service regulations. “Could be a smoke screen. Could be he’s staying somewhere else and has no intention of checking in.”

Amelia turned and appeared to hesitate before answering. “Perhaps,” she said. “But I’ve got a team going into the Rembrandt tomorrow morning, just in case. Harold heading it up. They’ll rig two rooms. If little Ryan complains about the first one, he’ll be moved to the second. Either way we’ll have coverage.”