A Colder War (11 page)

A phone rang on the ground floor of the villa. Kell heard Elsa’s voice as she answered—
“Pronto!”
Maybe it was her husband calling. Putting the book back on the bedside table, it fell open to a page that had been marked by what looked like a photograph. Kell picked it up.

“I’m not certain why,” Metka replied. Kell, now only half listening, turned the photograph around. He was astonished to see that it was a picture of Amelia.

“Say that again,” he said, buying time as he came to terms with what he was looking at.

“I said I don’t know why she left us. What I saw of her file showed that it was in ’09. Voluntary.”

In the photograph, which had been taken perhaps ten or fifteen years earlier, in the full flush of Amelia’s affair with Wallinger, she was sitting in a crowded restaurant. There was a glass of white wine in front of her, a blurred waiter in a white jacket passing to the left of her chair. She was tanned and wearing a strapless cream dress with a gold necklace that Kell had seen only once before: it was identical to the one Amelia had worn at Wallinger’s funeral. She was perhaps forty in the picture and looked extraordinarily beautiful, but also profoundly content, as though she had at last attained a kind of inner peace. Kell could not remember ever having seen Amelia so at ease.

“She still had security clearance,” Metka was saying. “There was nothing negative recorded against her.”

Kell put the photograph back in the book and tried to think of something to say. “The restaurant?” he asked.

“What about it?”

“You got a name? An address on Lopud?”

He knew that he was going to have to find Cecilia Sandor, to talk to her. She was the key to everything now.

“Oh, sure,” said Metka. “I’ve got the address.”

16

The embassy of the United States of America was a low-roofed complex of buildings in the heart of the city, flat as the Pentagon and defended by black metal fencing ten feet high. The contrast with the British embassy, a lavish imperial throwback in an upmarket residential neighborhood overlooking downtown Ankara, could not have been starker. While the Brits employed a single uniformed Turk to run routine security checks on vehicles approaching the building, the Americans deployed a small platoon of buzz-cut, flak-jacketed Marine Corps, most of them hidden behind tungsten-strengthened security gates designed to withstand the impact of a two-ton bomb. You couldn’t blame the Yanks for laying things on a bit thick; every wannabe
jihadi
from Grosvenor Square to Manila wanted to take a pop at Uncle Sam. Nevertheless, the atmosphere around the embassy was so tense that, as he pulled up in a rattling Ankaran taxi, Kell felt as though he were back in the Green Zone in Baghdad.

After fifteen minutes of checks, questions, and pat-downs, he was shown into a small office on the first floor with a view onto a garden in which somebody had erected a small wooden climbing frame. There were various certificates on the walls, two watercolors, a photograph of Barack Obama, and a shelf of paperback books. This, Kell was told, was where Jim Chater would meet him. The choice of venue immediately raised Kell’s suspicions. Any discussion between a cadre CIA officer and a colleague from SIS should, as a matter of course, take place inside the CIA’s Station. Was Chater planning a blatant snub, or would they move to a secure speech room once he arrived?

The meeting was scheduled for ten o’clock. Twelve minutes had passed before there was a light knock on the door and a blond woman in her late twenties entered wearing a suit and a clip-on smile.

“Mr. Kell?”

Kell stood up and shook the woman’s hand. She introduced herself as Kathryn Moses and explained that she was an FP-04 State Department official, which Kell dimly recalled as an entry-level ranking. More likely she was CIA, an errand girl for Chater.

“I’m afraid Jim’s running late,” she said. “He’s asked me to step in. Can I get you a coffee, tea, or something?”

Kell didn’t want to lose another five minutes of the hour-long meeting in beverage preparation. He said no.

“Any idea what time he’ll be here?”

It was then that he realized Ms. Moses had been sent deliberately to stall him. Settling into a rolling chair behind the desk, she gave Kell a brief, appraising glance, adjusted the sleeves of her jacket, then spoke to him as though he were a Liberal Democrat minister visiting Turkey on a two-day fact-finding tour.

“Jim has asked me to give you an overview of how we see things right now developing locally and in the Syrian-Iranian theater, particularly with reference to the regime in Damascus.”

“Okay.” It turned out to be a mistake to imply consent, because Moses now cleared her throat and didn’t draw breath until the clock on the office wall had moved to within a few second-hand clicks of half past ten. There was background on the State Department decisions to move the Istanbul consulate out of town and to share an airbase with the Turks at Incirlik. Moses had views on the “contradictory” relationship with Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and was pleased that the “shaky period” in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq—a veiled reference to Turkey’s refusal to cooperate with the Bush administration—was now a thing of the past. In the view of the Obama administration, she said, the Turkish leadership had come to the realization that membership of the EU was no longer a viable goal, nor was it particularly in the country’s interests. Indeed, despite accepting seven billion euros in aid from the EU over a period of ten years, Mr. Erdogan wanted “to turn Turkey’s face to the south and to the east,” establishing himself as “a benign Islamic Calvinist”—not a phrase coined by Kathryn Moses—with Turkey as “a beacon for the rest of Muslim north Africa and the Middle East, a modern, functioning capitalist buffer state existing peaceably between east and west.”

“If I could just ask why you think I need to hear this?”

But Moses was deaf to Kell’s entreaties. Chater had put the screws on her and she would not risk incurring his wrath by allowing Thomas Kell to slip from her grasp. She had been told to keep him busy, and keep him busy was what she intended to do.

“Just a moment,” she said, and actually raised her hand, as though Kell had been rude to interrupt. “If I could just finish, because Jim was keen that you have some sense of where we are on all this, before you guys get together. As you probably know, the prime minister has been highly critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East, hostile toward Israel, particularly in respect of the 2010 flotilla, but happy to allow NATO radar systems on the soil of the republic and certainly supportive, in a tacit sense, of the overthrow of Assad as an Iranian/Russian client state. In other words, Mr. Kell, we see the Turkish leadership at the present time as contradictory. Mr. Erdogan has reined in the military, stabilized the
lira,
overseen a boom in exports and foreign—particularly Gulf Arab—investment, but at the same time attempted to rewrite the constitution to amass greater power. The man in the street sees him as a sultan, and has no problem with the increasingly moralistic and authoritarian tone of the leadership. Those with an instinctive fealty to Ataturk, of course, view him as a demagogue.” Kell had to admire her chutzpah: Chater had probably given her ten minutes’ notice, but she was speaking with the fluency and confidence of a university lecturer. “So what do we have here?” At last she glanced at some notes on her desk. “An Islamist in sheep’s clothing, rolling back the secular state and causing long-term damage to the region as a consequence, or the one guy in this part of the world that the West can actually do business with?”

Kell produced a smile to acknowledge that Moses had played a clever hand. “You tell me,” he said. “You seem to have all the answers. I thought I was here to discuss the death of Paul Wallinger.”

But Moses did not get a chance to answer Kell’s question. As though he had been waiting in the wings of a theater for a cue, Jim Chater walked into the office. Summoning Kell to his feet with outstretched arms, he took him into a tight bear-hug embrace with all the warmth and authenticity of a Judas kiss.

“Tom. So great.” The American broke off and stepped back to take a look at Kell, his mouth a wry grin, his gas-blue eyes fired up and doing their best impression of rapport. Chater looked just as Kell remembered him: short, physically fit, and egregiously self-satisfied. He was wearing two days of stubble, stonewashed denim jeans, and a pair of Nike sneakers. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Couldn’t be helped. How’s Kathryn been treating you? She give you her grand theory on how we’re all at the center of the universe? Turkey the most important country east of New York, west of Beijing?”

“Something like that.” Ordinarily, Kell might have conjured a chuckle here to make Chater feel top dog; in the old days, he had always worked on the assumption that it was best to flatter the Cousins. Now, though, as a free agent, he found that he wanted to retain some dignity; Kell no longer thought of himself as a company man. When he looked at Jim Chater, he didn’t see a chummy Yank, a trusted ally, a man with good points and bad. He saw a human being who had abandoned the better part of himself in a cell in Kabul. Kell remembered the stench and the violence and the vengeance of that place and felt the shame of his own complicity in it every day.

“So how long you in town for?” Chater asked.

Kell had tickets to leave for Istanbul on the night train, but the CIA didn’t need to know that.

“A few days,” he replied.

Kathryn was watching them with quiet, underling deference. Kell hoped that she would soon leave.

“Yeah? And you’re havin’ a good time?”

“I wouldn’t exactly put it that way.”

Even a man as impregnable to self-doubt as Jim Chater recognized that he had been gauche. It was time to pay his respects to Kell’s friend and colleague.

“Of course. Of course not. Look, Tom. We were all of us here shocked by the news about Paul. Such a tragedy. Such a senseless waste. I sent a note on behalf of my staff to London. I don’t know if you saw that?”

Kell said that he hadn’t, a response that opened a convenient door for Chater.

“That’s right, so where are you now? I heard you were out. I heard you were in. What’s your status? How can we help you?”

Kathryn chose this moment to ease out of the room. (“I’m going to leave you gentlemen to it.”) Kell shook her hand, said how nice it had been to meet her, and caught a beat of appreciation in the interaction between Moses and Chater. Just in the timing of his glance as she opened the door to leave; the body language of a job well done.

“Clever,” he said, nodding after her. “Interesting.”

“You bet,” Chater replied, but Kathryn’s absence had an immediate effect on Chater’s mood. He looked suddenly as Kell remembered him from Kabul: cynical, calculating, indifferent. “So,” he said, rubbing the palm of his hand across the razored grays of his scalp, “you never answered my question.”

“I’m back. Amelia wants answers. She sent me.”

“Right.” There was both a measure of doubt and a hefty dose of condescension in the tone of Chater’s response. “So what rank are we talking? You’re coming in as H/Ankara? Nothing like new blood to excite us, Tom.”

Kell knew the game that was being played. Did Thomas Kell have the clearance, the status, to deserve a full briefing on HITCHCOCK from James N. Chater III? Or was he just a glorified coroner, tying up the loose ends of Paul Wallinger’s life?

“We’re talking STRAP 3 clearance,” Kell replied pointedly. “Same as it always was. Same as it will always be. Doug Tremayne isn’t going to be running our Station, if that’s the question you’re trying to ask.”

“I know what question I’m trying to ask.” Chater’s blue eyes were fixed on Kell’s even as he twisted his rolling chair from side to side. “So you’re still her friendly face? You trust ‘C’ after everything she’s put you through?”

Kell recognized the interrogator’s trick. “We both want answers,” he replied, ducking under the provocation. “The past is a foreign country.”

A sound came out of Chater’s nose like a man having difficulty identifying the source of an unusual smell. He began to smile.

“So you’re no longer Witness X? I heard Gharani was paid off by her majesty’s government. Tom Kell isn’t going to have his day in court?”

“Who are you asking for, Jim? Yourself or for the agency?”

Chater’s arms went up suddenly, like an act of mock surrender, before clasping his hands behind his head. It looked as though he was about to tip back in the chair. He said nothing, but the smile held.

“On Paul’s accident,” Kell said. It was already ten forty-five. “On the crash. We think engine failure at this point. There was no black box, obviously. We’re just trying to piece together Paul’s final movements, tie up any loose ends.”

“You got loose ends, Tom?”

It might have been the question of a concerned ally, but it was more likely an attempt to unsettle Kell by implying that SIS was disorganized. “We’re fine,” he replied.

“Paul was on vacation at the time?”

“Yup.”

“On Chios?”

“That’s right.”

“He had a place there?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

Chater glanced out of the window. His eyes seemed to focus momentarily on the climbing frame.

“He have a girl out there?”

Kell sensed that Chater already knew the answer to his own question. “Again, not that I’m aware of.”

“So what the fuck was he doing?”

“That’s the loose end.”

Kell thought that he could hear children playing outside, but when he looked into the garden, there were none. Chater was asking too many questions.

“I heard you got divorced.”

“Where did you read that?
Foreign Affairs
?” Kell was annoyed, but certainly not surprised, by the intrusion. It was trademark Chater to go creeping around in a colleague’s private life—asking questions, hearing things on grapevines—and then to bring up his findings in a meeting.

“Don’t recall,” Chater said, clearly lying. “Maybe
The National Enquirer
?” Suddenly he sat bolt upright in his chair and leaned forward at the desk, another shit-eating grin spreading out across his face. “So, we gotta get you a girl while you’re in town.”