A Colder War (31 page)

*   *   *

Every detail of Kleckner’s arrival was relayed live to Redan Place. As soon as ABACUS was on the road, Kell had called Danny Aldrich in his room at the Rembrandt. Harold had piped the hotel’s surveillance cameras to Aldrich’s laptop so that he could keep an eye on the corridor outside Kleckner’s room, as well as the lobby and front and side entrances. If the American checked in and went walkabout, Aldrich would form part of the mobile surveillance team attempting to follow him. If he ordered room service and went to sleep, most of them would get an early night.

As it turned out, Amelia was right about Kleckner’s desire to switch rooms. Having checked in to 316, which had taken four painstaking hours to rig with cameras and microphones, the American made a cursory assessment of the room before returning to reception and requesting an upgrade. A female officer on secondment from Australian SIS was role-playing the Rembrandt receptionist—with the connivance of the hotel manager—and reacted quickly and calmly to Kleckner’s request, even throwing in the bone of a “lovely view over Knightsbridge.” ABACUS was duly reassigned a room on the top floor of the hotel that had also been wired for sight and sound.

Kell wondered at Kleckner’s motive. Did he simply want a more pleasant room, or did he have concerns about liaison surveillance? If the latter was the case, was the American simply being cautious, or did his decision speak of a gathering paranoia?

“We just have to hold our nerve,” he told Amelia on the phone just after ten o’clock.

“We do, Tom. We do,” she replied, and with that announced that she was going to bed.

It became a long night. Kleckner took a shower in his room, ordered a club sandwich, then changed into a pair of jeans and a fresh shirt before heading out into the late London evening. Jez, who had briefly fallen asleep in the mews, awoke to a telephone call from Kell instructing him to drive in loops around ABACUS while Aldrich, Carol, and two other foot surveillance officers tailed the American into Kensington.

It transpired that he had made a date to meet a Lebanese girl at Eclipse, a bar on Walton Street. The youngest female member of the team—Lucy—entered the bar ten minutes later, where the attentions of two Dubai-based businessmen briefly interfered with her efforts to photograph Kleckner’s companion.

“She’s about twenty-five,” she told Kell, speaking to him from the bar. It was almost impossible to hear what she was saying. “The name I heard was ‘Zena.’ They are intimate. They’ve either met before or he’s on a promise.”

“Why didn’t we know about her?” Kell asked Elsa, texting Danny and instructing him to hold on Walton Street. It had been a long time since he had heard the phrase “on a promise.” “Who’s Zena?”

Elsa shrugged. “Maybe the new SIM?” she said.

Kell had asked for one of the separating walls in the office to be dismantled so that there would be a larger communal area in which the various members of the team could sit. An extra sofa had also been brought in from a shop on Westbourne Grove. Elsa was lying on it, staring up at the ceiling, tired and faintly irritable.

“It is always the case that people have e-mails, sites, new IPs that they can use to make contacts.”

“True,” Kell replied. “But we still need to get hold of that SIM.”

Kleckner was another hour at Eclipse, leaving with Zena as the bar closed. Lucy had allowed the Dubai businessmen to pay her bill and had left in their company half an hour earlier, thereby giving Kleckner—had he noticed her—the impression that she had intended to meet the men and was not a surveillance threat. As soon as she had left the bar, however, she brushed off the men and returned home, “red” for the duration of Kleckner’s visit on the basis that he would recognize her as a repeating face should she continue to follow him.

Meanwhile, Aldrich had purloined a dummy black cab from the Security Service and was able to tail Kleckner and Zena to a nightclub at the eastern end of Kensington High Street. With Lucy out of the game, Kell was aware that they were down to a team of only five. He could not risk sending another watcher into the venue. He had a hunch that Kleckner would get the girl drunk, take her out onto the dance floor, then suggest a nightcap at the Rembrandt. That was his normal Istanbul modus operandi and it seemed highly unlikely to Kell that Kleckner would break off, on the cusp of a one-night stand, to meet Minasian.

So it proved. Just after three in the morning, Kell had a text from the receptionist confirming that ABACUS was “back in his room with a woman (Arabic appearance, mid-20s). Both drunk/flirtatious.” Switching on the surveillance screens, Kell and Harold were able to see Zena frantically brushing her teeth in the bathroom while a shirtless Kleckner searched the minibar for champagne. The bedspread had been disturbed, suggesting that the pair had already kissed.

“Lucky bastard,” Harold muttered. “What I would give to be twenty-nine again.”

“I’m sure a lot of women feel the same way,” Kell replied. “Take Zena. If she had a choice tonight between you and Ryan, and you were staying in the hotel, well…”

“Well it’s no competition, is it? She’s only human.”

Harold switched off the audio feed from the bathroom. The television had been turned on in the room and tuned to a music channel. There was a song playing that Kell didn’t recognize.

“Shall we leave them to it?” he suggested, remembering the first night with Rachel at the Londres.

“Good idea,” Harold replied, and they moved next door.

44

Zena slipped away before seven o’clock. Kleckner, who had been pretending to sleep, got out of bed as soon as she had left the room and checked the time on his watch. Having visited the bathroom, he dropped to the floor and completed fifty rapid push-ups, a series of stomach crunches, and a leg-strengthening exercise in which he assumed a sitting position against the wall. Kell had seen it all before in Istanbul, but it was Harold’s first glimpse of the ABACUS beauty routine.

“I knew there was something I forgot to do when I woke up this morning,” he said.

Kell, who had grabbed three hours’ sleep on a mattress in his office, said: “Me too” and patted his stomach as he walked down to the kitchen.

By eight o’clock, Kleckner was eating a virtuous breakfast in the hotel restaurant—muesli, fruit, yogurt—watched by Aldrich on the first floor. Eight surveillance officers were scattered around the neighborhood—one with Aldrich, two more in the Addison Lee Renault with Jez, three on foot in Knightsbridge. Elsa had coverage of the Wi-Fi in Kleckner’s room, as well as his Turkish cell phone, but still nothing on the Heathrow SIM. There had been no hint, in any of the ABACUS traffic, of Kleckner’s plans for the day, nor had he contacted Chater in Istanbul. Kell knew in his bones that the American was going to try to make a break from surveillance.

Just after nine fifteen, Kleckner was reported to have left the Rembrandt and to be heading east on foot—directly toward Harrods. He was wearing a baseball cap and three layers of clothing, including a black jacket that could be removed at any stage, effecting a change in appearance. Kell, leading the operation from the hub in Redan Place, ordered Jez to Harrods and put his two officers inside, one in the western corner, one in the Food Hall. Two others were sent ahead to Harvey Nichols.

The first sign of Kleckner’s intention to shake off possible liaison came as he turned south on Beauchamp Place, less than a hundred meters from the entrance to Harrods. On Walton Street he turned right once again, effectively doubling back in the direction of the Rembrandt. Kell pulled the officers out of Harrods and put them back in the Renault with Jez. Aldrich, who had been idling in the black cab on Thurloe Place, picked ABACUS up on Draycott Avenue and managed to follow him into Pelham Street. Carol, dressed in running shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt, was hooked up to headphones that allowed her to hear Kell’s feed from the hub. She jogged west along South Terrace, staying parallel to Kleckner’s position, then picked him up as he reached the Underground station at South Kensington.

“He’ll go for the Tube,” Kell announced, and wasn’t surprised when Aldrich reported that Kleckner was making a phone call in the pedestrianized area immediately west of the station.

“Can we hear that?” he called across to Elsa.

Elsa had a constant line into Kleckner’s BlackBerry, but shook her head. Either the American was talking on the new SIM, or—more likely—was garbling nonsense into a dead mouthpiece while taking the time to make a complete observation of his surroundings. Any repeating faces? Anything out of place? Ryan knew all the tricks. Javed Mohsin had lived with them for six weeks.

“Looks like a slow three sixty,” Aldrich reported, confirming Kell’s suspicion that Kleckner was slowly turning a complete circle in order to make an assessment of the area. “Now he’s going for the trains.”

Carol could not follow. Not in running gear. Instead, Aldrich and two other officers followed ABACUS into the Tube. This was the worst time on a surveillance job. Dead time. No communication from underground, save for the odd lucky text with a bar of signal, or a miracle burst on free Virgin Wi-Fi. Otherwise Kell was forced to pace and to wait, trying to communicate a sense of calm and well-being to Elsa and Harold, but inside churning with tension. He used to love this feeling in his younger days, the adrenaline surge of high stakes and risk, but Kleckner was too important—his sins too grave—for Kell to have any sense other than an intense desire to bring him to justice. He thought of Rachel, and of her dead father, and the pleasure he would gain from presenting her with Kleckner’s head on a platter. If the London mission failed—and Kell was aware that there was every chance they would lose ABACUS in the next five days and fail to identify his handler—Kell would be forced back to Istanbul and to weeks, possibly months, of waiting for a second chance. His fallback plan, which he had discussed at length with Amelia, was to switch the intelligence dropped by ABACUS in the Buyukada football for chicken feed. But such a plan would mean allowing Kleckner to continue to operate, and would almost certainly require the assistance of the CIA. That would mean Chater big-footing the SIS operation, thereby spelling the end of Kell’s involvement.

A signal from Elsa. A hand in the air, tapping her ear with the other.

“Text from Nina. Piccadilly Line. Hyde Park Corner.”

Nina was one of the two officers who had followed Kleckner into the tube. She was short and slightly cross-eyed, with capped front teeth that produced an unsettling range of colors in her mouth; Kell had met her only once and taken an instant dislike to her.

“Is he coming out?”

Elsa shrugged.

It was another twenty minutes before Kell heard anything more.

“Boss?”

Aldrich this time.

“Danny. What’s the situation?”

“He’s doing circuits. I got him to Green Park. He gets off, he gets on. One more stop to Piccadilly. Then he goes north to Oxford Circus.”

“Have you got him now?”

“Yeah, I’ve got him. I’m looking at him. But I’m down to myself.”

“What happened to Nina?”

“Fuck knows.”

Kell swore under his breath but was glad to have Aldrich as a last pair of eyes. “Where are you?”

“Hyde Park Hotel.”

A possible site for meeting a handler? Almost certainly not. It was too obvious, too quick out of the gates. An officer of Kleckner’s experience would run at least two hours of countersurveillance before contemplating such a risk. The Hyde Park Hotel had to be just another stepping post on a preplanned route.

“Visual?”

“Impossible. He’d make me.”

At that moment, a text came through from Jez, who, by a miracle Kell would never entirely understand, had somehow contrived to get into the hotel ahead of Kleckner and to track him as far as the men’s bathroom. Acting on this information, Kell instructed the other members of the team to move back into the Knightsbridge area and to await further instructions.

“You think Harrods is coming, don’t you?”

Elsa was standing beside Kell at one of the windows looking out over Whiteleys. To his surprise, she put her arm across his back, as if to try to reassure him.

“I do,” he replied, turning and smiling at her. “He’s less than five hundred meters away. It’s always been a favorite Russian watering hole. They would have told him to go there, if he didn’t know already. NKVD. KGB. FSB. Been using the place for decades.”

“Watering hole?” she said, screwing up her face. “What does this mean, please?”

“Never mind.” Kell looked out across the skyline roofs and cranes of London.

ABACUS was about to go shopping.

45

Jez saw ABACUS out of the Hyde Park Hotel and passed him on to Carol, who had changed out of her running gear, tied her hair up in a bun, and put on a business suit with heels. She was close enough to touch Kleckner as the American walked west along Knightsbridge, crossing the street at a set of traffic lights and heading toward Harrods.

The entire team, barring Nina, was back in the area, but Kell had put only one officer—a sixty-two-year-old named “Amos”—inside the store. To gamble more, only to have Kleckner leave the building within three minutes and drop down into Knightsbridge Underground, was too risky. Instead, he would spread the rest of the team around all four sides of the building, covering each of the ground-floor exits. There was no point trying to follow Kleckner every step of the way around Harrods. Let him do his thing, let him adopt his tricks. ABACUS could spend five hours trying to duck and weave through eight different departments but, when all was said and done, he still had to leave the building.

“He’s in,” said Carol.

Kleckner had used the Hans Crescent door in the north corner, still wearing the baseball cap, still wearing the black Carhartt jacket. Jez went in behind him, continuing the live conversation with Kell while Carol stayed on the entrance.

“Moving through men’s clothing. Fifteen meters.” Jez’s voice was a low, gravelly Cockney. “How are my exits?”

Kell and Elsa had more than half a dozen cell phones laid out in front of them, each feeding positional information from members of the team. Absorbing their messages, using them to create and maintain a mental map of the area, required Kell to focus and to concentrate in ways he had not known for years; it was exhilarating.