A Colder War (34 page)

“You too. Bye. See you in a coupla days. Take it easy.”

Kell watched as Kleckner hung up the phone, walked into the bathroom, dug around in his washbag, and retrieved a strip of pills. The American ran a tap and threw back what appeared to be two painkillers, then switched on the shower. He walked back into the bedroom and began to rummage in the wastepaper basket. Returning to the bathroom, he did the same thing.

“What’s this about?” Aldrich asked. “What’s he doing?”

“No idea,” Kell replied, and it was only as he removed the headphones and walked outside into the corridor that an answer presented itself: Kleckner had been looking for a used condom. Had he been so drunk, so disoriented, that he had forgotten whether or not he had fucked Rachel?

“Everything all right, guv?”

Harold was still sitting on the sofa reading the
Daily Mail
. Kell had been on his way to the terrace for a cigarette but sat down, realizing that Rachel had inadvertently dragged a schedule out of Kleckner.
I gotta bunch of stuff to do today. I’m busy tomorrow, then I could catch a late flight.
She was
helping
him. The team could use that information. Rachel had isolated the times when ABACUS was planning to meet his handler, and cut short his trip by twenty-four hours.

“Interesting piece?” he asked Harold, spotting a headline about a link between cancer and dieting.

Harold turned down a corner of the paper and grinned.

“Very,” he said. “We’re all dying unless we start eating pizza. Your man Kleckner should give up on his planks and his push-ups and just start enjoying himself.”

Kell tried to smile. He had to get past what he had heard and seen. He had to move on with the job. There was still a mole to catch. It was of paramount importance to track ABACUS to his handler. Yet he could not stop himself from asking the question:

“What happened last night? After I left?”

Kell felt a check in his breathing as he waited for Harold’s response. Wasn’t it obvious what had happened? Two young people had found each other attractive. They had gone to bed together. Even if Rachel had left before dawn, she would soon be back in Kleckner’s arms, fucking him at the
yali
on Saturday. The fact that she wanted to wait, to take things slowly, only confirmed that she was taking him seriously.

“It was weird actually,” Harold replied, laying the newspaper on the sofa beside him. “For once our boy couldn’t close the deal. Maybe he was knackered out by whatsername.”

“Maybe,” Kell replied blandly, unsure what to feel. He was about to stand up and leave when Harold frowned.

“Who was she, guv? You recognize the girl?”

“No.” The lie was out of Kell’s mouth before he had a chance even to acknowledge the possibility of telling Harold the truth. He wanted his private life to remain private.

“It’s just weird.”

“Why?”

“I got asked to wipe the tapes.”

“You got asked
what
?”

“To destroy them. This morning. Throw them away.”

“Why?”

“Search me.”

And as Kell asked the obvious question, he realized the obvious answer.

“Who asked you to do that? Who asked you to destroy them?”

“The boss, guv. Amelia.”

49

Kell went to the lifts, walked quickly out onto Redan Place and called Amelia’s private number.

“Where are you?”

“Tom?”

“I need to speak to you. As soon as possible.”

“You sound agitated. Is everything all right?”

Her brusque, formal manner—at the edge of condescension, even contempt—was a further irritant to him.

“I’m fine. But we need to meet.”

“Why?”

“Why?”
Kell came to a standstill and briefly separated the phone from his ear, swearing under his breath. “Why do you think?” he said. “Because of work. Because of ABACUS.”

“And it’s urgent?” Amelia managed to make it sound as though she had a hundred better things to do.

“Yes. It’s urgent. Where are you?”

“Shouldn’t you be at the office?” she asked, as if Kell was being insubordinate. “Where’s ABACUS now?”

“Danny has him. Danny’s in charge. This is more important.”

A long silence. Finally, Amelia deigned to reply.

“It’ll have to wait,” she said. “I have a lunch that I can’t cancel. Can you meet me at my house at half past three?”

“Done,” Kell replied. “Half past three.”

*   *   *

He was early. This time there was a security goon on the door who made Kell wait in the atrium on another afternoon of incessant rain. When Amelia texted to say that she was stuck in traffic and running late, Kell went for a brisk, umbrella-sheltered walk along Kings Road, up and down Bywater Street, then into Markham Square, past the house in the northeast corner that had once belonged to Kim Philby. He bought a packet of cigarettes in a branch of Sainsbury’s and was smoking one outside Amelia’s house when she finally pulled up in her official car and nodded him toward the front door.

Moments later Kell was pacing in the sitting room of the Chelsea house waiting for Amelia to reappear. She had excused herself for five minutes, wanting to change out of a business suit into “something more comfortable.” Kell had always felt less fully-formed, a generation younger whenever he was in Amelia’s company. He put it down to a mixture of professional awe and natural deference.

“Look at you hopping up and down,” Amelia said, coming into the room while still tying the buckle on the belt of her jeans. Kell saw the flash of a tanned, gym-toned stomach beneath a sheer white blouse. “I feel like you’ve come to ask for my hand in marriage.”

She had sprayed herself with perfume. Hermès Calèche.

“I haven’t come for that,” he replied.

She shot him an appraising glance, quick with the realization that her visitor was not going to be finessed with feminine charm. Kell was angry, and Amelia knew exactly why.

“Drink?” she said.

“The usual.”

He regretted that response, because it sounded chummy and forgiving. The last thing Kell wanted was to generate an atmosphere of complicity.

Amelia moved toward the drinks cabinet and plucked out a bottle of single malt. “There’s no ice,” she said, and was turning toward the kitchen when Kell stopped her and said: “I don’t need ice. Forget it. Just some water.”

“You sound awfully tense, Tom.”

He did not respond. Amelia continued to pour the whiskey, the glug of three fingers, then passed him the glass over a sofa. Kell remained where he was as Amelia sat down in her favorite armchair, the sofa a barrier between them, a net dividing opponents.

“So.”

Two children moved past the street window ringing the bells on their bicycles. Amelia’s tone of voice, allied to impatient body language, conveyed the impression of a woman who had five, perhaps a maximum of ten, minutes to spare before she would be called off to a more important assignation.

“Why did you destroy the tapes?” Kell asked.

To his surprise, she began to smile. “Isn’t that how David Frost began his interview with Richard Nixon? Only I think it was the other way around. Why
didn’t
you destroy the tapes?”

“Rachel,” Kell said.

Amelia did not look up. “What about her?”

“Why was she in the hotel? Do you know about that? Do you know why she was with Kleckner? Did you encourage that relationship?”

“You’re angry with me when perhaps you should be angry with Rachel.”

Kell almost flew at her, but managed a swift return of serve. “Don’t worry. I’ll get to Rachel in my own good time. Right now I’m extremely angry with
you
.”

Amelia looked to one side of the room, as if weighing up a number of options. She could pull rank and tell Kell to go back to Redan Place and do the job he was being paid to do. She could admonish him for the sin of becoming involved with Rachel Wallinger. She could credit Kell with enough intelligence and strength of character to be able to hear the truth of what had occurred at the Rembrandt. Or she could simply keep her counsel, shielded by silence and secrecy.

“I would be lying if I told you that I was not aware of your feelings for each other.”

Those two words—“each other”—gave Kell a jolt of hope. They implied that Rachel had confided in Amelia. They implied that she cared for him. He took a sip of the whiskey.

“How did you know we were involved?” he asked.

“I guessed.”

“How?”

“Is that important?”

“I’d like to know.” Kell did not particularly need to hear Amelia’s answer, but he was annoyed that he had been caught out, irritated that he had left clues for her to follow. Perhaps Rachel had confessed everything.

“I’ll tell you another time,” she replied. “Come and sit, Tom. You’re making me nervous.” She gestured Kell toward an armchair. He moved around the sofa, stood in front of the chair, but did not sit down. Amelia clasped her hands together and appeared to be wary of what she was about to say. “It’s serious between the two of you, isn’t it?”

“You tell me,” Kell replied.

“I want to hear your end of it. All I know is what Rachel has told me.”

“Forgive me, but I’m wondering if any of this is your business?”

“By coming here today, you have made it my business. You seem extremely upset.”

“I
am
extremely upset. I want answers. I want to know what the hell is going on and I want to know what else you’ve concealed from me.”

Amelia’s normally impassive face was gradually flushed with something close to regret.

“It’s important for you to know that Rachel had only one condition.”

“One condition on what?”

“One condition that would guarantee her cooperation.”

Kell remembered what Elsa had said to him the previous evening.
When I met Rachel, she seemed to be friendly with Amelia.
Everything was becoming clear to him. Everything was falling into place.

“She agreed to help me, she agreed to cooperate, as long as you weren’t informed. She was aware that something could happen with Ryan that would undermine her relationship with you. She cares about you very deeply. She likes you. But ABACUS was more important.”

Kell found himself repeating the phrase “ABACUS was more important” as he stared out of the window at the gray, rain-soaked street. His pride, his professional and personal self-esteem, were teetering on a precipice.

Amelia twisted in her seat and reached for a glass that wasn’t there. Kell was drinking alone. “It would be disingenuous of me to say that the arrangement I struck with Rachel didn’t suit the Office,” she said, adding: “Down to the ground” after a slight pause.

“What kind of arrangement?” But Kell already knew the answer, in the same way that he had known, when Harold had informed him about the tapes, that Amelia had been the one to give the order to destroy them.

“An arrangement to track Kleckner. An arrangement to know where he was, what he was doing, who he was meeting, what he was saying.”

Kell felt a skin crawl of disgust, Rachel co-opted into sleaze. He said: “You wanted Rachel as Kleckner’s girlfriend.”

“Something like that.” To her credit, Amelia managed to look ashamed.

“You’re saying you deliberately and consciously sidelined me on an operation over which I was supposed to have tactical control? And you used my girlfriend to do that? Is that what you’re telling me?”

Amelia did not need to respond. They both knew the answer. Instead, she said: “I was worried that it would take months, years to get the proof on Kleckner, to have him arrested. I wasn’t even sure that ABACUS was the mole. I wanted to have a backup plan just in case. For very obvious reasons, I could hardly ask your permission. And your instincts about the teahouse, the discovery of the DLB, your
triumph,
Tom, meant that I could put the plan into action.”

Draining his whiskey, Kell reflected on Amelia’s tireless, Blairite ability to turn disaster into triumph; to make her opponents feel that they had misjudged her; to give a watertight impersonation of blamelessness and virtue, even in the aftermath of gross, cynical negligence.

“So my triumph became my undoing?” he said. “That’s what you’re telling me. That’s how you’re spinning this?”

Amelia nodded. Kell stood up, went to the cabinet, poured himself another three fingers of whiskey, did not offer Amelia a drink of her own, sat back down and produced a resigned sigh.

“You’d better tell me the whole story then,” he said, and even lit a cigarette in the living room, in flagrant breach of Amelia’s house rules on smoking. She did not tell Kell to stub it out. “Start at the beginning,” he said, settling back in the armchair and crossing his legs as the whiskey began to work through him. “Try not to leave anything out.”

*   *   *

So she told him. Everything.

Over the course of the next three-quarters of an hour, Amelia Levene confirmed to Thomas Kell that she had made a private arrangement with Rachel that would help bring Kleckner to justice.

Having met Rachel in Istanbul and established that Kleckner found her attractive, Amelia told her that there was a mole inside western intelligence, a mole threatening every SIS operation in the Middle East and beyond. That evidence had shown that the mole was most likely to be Ryan Kleckner. She had told her that Kleckner may have been involved in the death of her father.

“You couldn’t possibly have known that at the time,” Kell interjected. “We still have no proof of that.”

Amelia appeared to concede the point. It had simply been a useful weapon in the armory of her recruitment. Tell Rachel that Kleckner was instrumental in the murder of her father. That would ensure her cooperation. Kell knew the tricks, the cynicism of his own trade. He allowed Amelia to keep talking.

In the event that Kleckner’s guilt was proven, she said, Rachel had agreed to get alongside him, by staging a meeting in Istanbul. As luck would have it, on the day that Kell had discovered the dead letter box, Kleckner was on his way to London. Lo and behold, who should he look up in his little black book but Rachel Wallinger—the one who got away. The beautiful daughter of the dead British spy who had made eyes at him at her father’s funeral. It was a slice of great good fortune, of which Amelia was initially suspicious, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. Rachel was ready to avenge Paul; she would even risk losing Kell to do so.