A Colder War (12 page)

“You pimping on the side, Jim?” Chater seemed stumped for a witty comeback. “Thanks, but I’ll be fine.”

It looked as though Chater had taken offense, or had at least lost interest in the subject. He looked down at the surface of the desk.

“So, engine trouble, huh?”

Another question about Chios. Kell was certain now that the Cousins had information of their own about Wallinger’s accident. He took a risk, to gauge what reaction the name would generate. “I’ve got people talking to the engineer who worked on Paul’s plane before takeoff,” he said. “Iannis Christidis.”

It was as though Chater had been fed a piece of bad news through an earpiece. He twitched, touching the side of his neck. The recovery was just as rapid—all of this within much less than a second—but the relaxed, carefree way in which he said: “Oh, yeah?” betrayed a profound disquiet.

“Yeah.” Kell employed a straightforward bluff. “There was a small problem with the Cessna on the way in from Ankara. Paul had asked Christidis to check it out.”

“Is that right?” Chater glanced at his watch. “Hey, we need to get this thing done. I got an eleven o’clock.”

“I’ve been saying that since ten.”

“Touché,” Chater replied.

“Can we at least talk about Dogubayazit?”

Chater looked at Kell as though he had tried to offer him a bribe. “In
here
?”

“Where, then?” Kell took Chater’s gaze back out of the window. “I’m not the one who decided to hold this meeting next to a playground.”

“Kathryn’s fault,” he replied, stacking the blame on a colleague as easily as he had secured the wrists of Yassin Gharani. “She didn’t know who you were. She didn’t know why you were here.” Chater’s excuse bounced around the room in search of a good home. He held Kell’s gaze. “Well, look, we don’t have an option to move now,” he said. “We’ll have to do this another time.”

“When?” Kell looked pointedly at his watch. “This afternoon? Tomorrow morning?”

He knew that within five minutes of the meeting ending, Chater would be upstairs in the CIA Station working a trace on Iannis Christidis.

“Not going to work,” the American replied. “I’m flying to D.C. at midday tomorrow, full up until then.”

“When do you get back?”

Chater seemed to find the answer at the top of the security wall surrounding the playground. He was craning his neck as he said: “About a week.”

The Cousins knew something. Chater’s obstinacy spoke volumes about the CIA’s position on Wallinger.

“I’m going to trust that these walls don’t have ears,” he said. Outside the room, a man walked past in the corridor saying: “Sure, yeah, six.” Chater was no longer looking out of the window. “We are expecting your report into HITCHCOCK. Any idea of a time frame on that?”

“Imminent.”

“What does that mean? Tomorrow? The next day? Or does it have to fly with you to D.C. and back?”

That at least earned Kell a smile. “About a week, Tom, yeah. We still have some”—Chater enjoyed reviving the phrase—“loose ends.”

They had reached the end of the road. Three minutes were left on the clock, but Jim Chater seemed to be glancing at the second hand every twenty seconds.

“Any chance I can speak to Tony Landau?” Kell asked.

Landau was the CIA officer who had accompanied Wallinger to the Iranian-Armenian border.

“Sure,” Chater replied. “If you can get to Houston.” Kell was about to respond when Chater sucked up the remaining time. “Look. You ask me, we don’t even know for sure if HITCHCOCK was in the vehicle. Whole thing could have been a bluff. Did your agent even exist?”

It was an astonishing accusation, not least because it implied that SIS had been fooled into running an Iranian agent provocateur. Why was Chater going down this route?

“Nobody can confirm the sighting, Tom. Nobody knows who was in the car.”

“Come off it,” Kell replied. “You guys shot a fucking
video
.”

“Which showed nothing. Passenger had a beard like a mulberry bush. No way of telling it was Shakhouri Mirzai.”

“What are you trying to tell me? That your sources in Iran have seen Mirzai walking the streets? That Iranian intelligence set the whole thing up, sacrificing two employees in the process?”

“Who’s to say they were employees?” Chater shot Kell a look that he could only interpret as contempt for Wallinger’s botched role in the operation. “Could have been anybody. Could have been two patsies on a life sentence, making an extra buck for their families.” Chater stood up from the desk, rubbing what looked like a bite on his left arm. “Look, it’ll all be in my report.” It was clear that the discussion was over. “I’ll see you in a week, Tom. You take it easy.”

*   *   *

Kell had been obliged to hand in his cell phone when he entered the embassy. It was given back to him by a shaven-headed Marine, but was now operationally useless: Chater’s team, though unlikely to do so, had nevertheless been given more than an hour in which to strip the phone and fit it with state-of-the-art surveillance software. So Kell walked to a café three blocks from the embassy, wrote down the numbers for Marianna and Adam, took the SIM out, then binned the phone and called Marianna from a phone box across the street, using a card purchased at a nearby
bakkal
.

“Marianna, it’s Chris Hardwick calling.”

“Chris!”

Her voice was sprightly and excitable. Kell guessed that she was alone in the office; if Delfas had been looking over her shoulder, she would have sounded more circumspect. They exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes—Kell catching up on all of Marianna’s family news—before eventually broaching the subject of the Sandor villa.

“Do you remember mentioning that you saw Paul Wallinger talking to someone at one of the restaurants near your office?”

If Marianna was surprised by the line of questioning, the speed and enthusiasm of her answer did not suggest it.

“Of course, yes. The man with a beard.”

“That’s right. What restaurant were they in? The one below your office?”

Marianna had already told him that this was not the case, but Kell needed a starting point from which to discover the true location.

“No, no,” she said, predictably enough. “I think it was Marikas. In fact, I’m sure it was Marikas.”

“How do you spell that?” In the cramped, noisy phone booth, Kell scrawled down the name. After that it was just a question of winding things down. “I’ve got a feeling I went there for a coffee one morning.”

“Yes,” said Marianna. “You probably did.”

Kell cleared his throat. He asked three more questions about Marianna’s family, correctly remembering the names of her mother and father, then intimated that he was being called into a meeting. “Hopefully my report will be ready by the end of the week,” he said.

“You must have worked so hard, Chris.” Marianna sounded slightly crestfallen that the conversation—indeed, the relationship—was drawing to an inevitable end. “I so wish we could meet again,” she said.

Kell was aware of the cruel absurdity of his lies. In the old days, he had sometimes drawn satisfaction from simple manipulations of this kind; but no longer. An easy facility for deceit, an ability to make a lonely woman feel cherished was hardly a talent of which a man of forty-four could be proud.

“Me too,” he said, and hated himself.

“So when will you come back to see me?” Marianna asked.

Kell could picture her in the solitude of the office, her face slightly flushed, seagulls clacking outside.
Recruiting an agent is an act of seduction.

“I don’t suppose for a long time,” he replied, trying not to sound cold and distant. “Unless I get out to Greece for a holiday.”

“Well, it would be wonderful to see you again,” she said. “Please let’s stay in touch.”

“Yes. Let’s.”

Kell hung up, extracted the card, and lit a much-needed cigarette. He began walking in the direction of his hotel. At the edge of a well-tended municipal park he spotted another public phone box, queued for two minutes behind a tracksuited Syrian, then dialed the number in Athens.

Adam Haydock was at his desk.

“I’ve got some jobs for you.”

“Go ahead, sir.”

Across the street, two bored cops were checking driver’s licenses at random from passing cars and mopeds. Turkey: still a light-touch police state.

“It’ll mean going to Chios with a Tech-Ops team. It’ll mean getting clearance from London.”

“From Amelia?” Adam asked.

“From ‘C,’” Kell replied.

17

Kell woke before dawn on the Istanbul sleeper with a coronary headache and a raging thirst directly linked to the bottle of Macallan he had polished off the night before with two young Turkish businessmen who were en route to Bulgaria for a three-day conference on “white goods.” Two ibuprofen and half a liter of water later, Kell was gazing out of the scratched window of his four-man sleeper compartment drinking a cup of sweetened black Nescafé and listening to the snores of the mustachioed widower occupying the bunk below his own.

The train shunted into Haydarpasa station just after six o’clock. Kell zipped up his bag, bade farewell to his traveling companions, and took a ferry across the Bosporus to Karakoy. Ordinarily he might have felt the traditional romantic excitement of the Western traveler arriving by sea in one of the great cities of the world, but he was in a frustrated mood, hungover and tired, and Istanbul felt like just another staging post on his quest to solve the riddle of Paul Wallinger’s death. He might just as well have been arriving in Brussels or Freetown or Prague. There would be endless meetings at the consulate. There would be long telephone calls to London. He would have to spend many hours searching Wallinger’s
yali
in Yenikoy. An indoor life. At no point—if past experience was anything to go by—would he have the chance to relax and to enjoy the city, to visit the Topkapi, for example, or to take a boat trip to the Black Sea. He remembered visiting Istanbul as a twenty-year-old university student, Claire at his side on their first summer together as boyfriend and girlfriend. They had stayed for five days in a cheap backpacker’s hostel in Sultanahmet, surviving on
raki
and chickpea stews. A few months later, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, Kell had received the tap on the shoulder from SIS. It was like remembering a bygone era. His twenty-year-old self was now a stranger to him; Claire had walked the streets of Istanbul with a different man.

He texted Claire then walked through sporadic crowds toward the Galata Bridge. It was a warm, blustery morning. Ferries were bumping the quay, eight lanes of traffic stalled in both directions in the rush-hour crush of Kennedy Avenue. Men were selling steamed mussels and blackened husks of corn from makeshift barbecues erected beside the newspaper kiosks and ticket booths on the promenade. Kell bought a copy of the
International Herald Tribune
and walked along the lower, pedestrianized section of Galata Bridge, aiming for a restaurant that he knew fifty meters along the walkway. Above him, clumps of men were fishing from the eastern side of the bridge; thin plastic lines dropped down in front of the restaurant, near-invisible against the bright clouds and silver waters of the Bosporus. A young, unshaven waiter showed Kell to a table adjacent to a group of German tourists who were drinking glasses of tea and staring at a fold-up map of Turkey. As he sat down, Kell immediately pointed at a photograph of some fried eggs on a five-language, laminated menu. The waiter smiled, said: “Chips?” and Kell nodded, eager to see off his hangover.

It was only then, settling into his chair and looking out across the water at the boats on the swollen sea, at the far Asian shore, that the city at last began to open up for him, the magic and the romance of Constantinople. Kell was himself again. To the southeast, he could see birds twisting on warm swells above the minarets of Hagia Sophia; to the north, the huddled wharfs and buildings of Galata, splashed by sun. He drank a double espresso, smoked a Winston Light, and read the headline stories on the
Tribune
as a sudden wind cracked the pages of his newspaper. A tourist poster of Cappadocia was tacked to the wall of the restaurant. Kell mopped up the yolks of his fried eggs with hunks of soft white bread, ordered a second cup of coffee, then paid his bill.

Half an hour later he was walking into the dimly lit lobby of the Grand Hotel de Londres, an old-world Istanbul institution a stone’s throw from the British consulate. The small, red-carpeted lobby was empty save for a cleaning lady dusting a framed oil painting on the stairs. Above her, an ancient glass chandelier rattled in the draft of the street door as it closed behind Kell. A tap on the reception desk bell summoned a voluminous man from an office hidden behind a small brown door. Kell signed the register in his own name, handed over his battered passport, and took his bags upstairs in a cramped lift to a bedroom with views over Beyoglu and, in the distance, a slim, shimmering strip of the Golden Horn.

Around eleven o’clock, having showered and shaved and swallowed two more painkillers, he wandered downstairs. He wasn’t due at the consulate until after lunch and wanted to finish
My Name Is Red
in the hotel bar. He took the stairs, passing the same cleaning lady, who had now made her way to the second floor, where she was reverently wiping the glass on a framed picture of Ataturk.

Kell heard their conversation long before he saw their faces. A singsong English, decorated by laughter, and the elegant, well-spoken tones of his old friend and colleague, suddenly not in London anymore, but staying in the very same hotel.

Amelia Levene and Elsa Cassani were seated opposite each other on an ornate sofa in the resident’s lounge looking, for all the world, like a mother and daughter who had just returned from a sightseeing trip to Sultanahmet. Kell instantly sensed the rapport between them; it had been evident in the timbre of Amelia’s voice, a particular softness that she employed only with trusted friends and confidantes. Elsa was plainly in awe of her, yet her manner was not nervous or overly respectful; she seemed relaxed, even slightly mischievous in Amelia’s company. There were two glasses of tea in front of them, on small white saucers, and a packet of Turkish chocolate biscuits, doubtless bought at a nearby shop.