A Colder War (14 page)

Amelia shrugged with her eyes. Either she knew, and couldn’t say, or, more likely, had no idea who had carried out the attack and wasn’t prepared to trade in theories.

“The point is that we lost HITCHCOCK three weeks ago, Paul in a plane crash, EINSTEIN on Monday. That’s more assets than we’ve dropped in AF/PAK in seven years.” Kell, still eating, bit down on a brittle chip of lamb shank and had to pick a tiny piece of bone out of his mouth. Amelia, with the tact of a croupier, looked away. “When you went through Paul’s telegrams, through the files,” she said, “did anything jump out?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning did anything strike you as odd? Anything at all about the things he was saying and doing?”

“Everything I looked at seemed above board,” he replied. “Commonplace, even. Doug Tremayne was looking at the agent handling, farming out Paul’s assets to new officers. There was no point in giving that to me because I’m not going to be around long enough to play an operational role.”

The old man at the next-door table was eating fruit salad and made a slurping sound, as though disappointed by Kell’s answer. Amelia appeared to be about to speak when she stopped herself.

“Jesus, spit it out,” he said.

“What if I was to offer you H/Ankara?”

The job was everything he had hoped for—his reputation cleared; a sense of purpose and direction restored to his life. Yet Kell did not experience the elation he might have expected. He was arrogant enough to believe that he deserved such a position, but Amelia’s offer seemed to contain a warning. Why would “C” take the considerable risk of appointing Kell H/Ankara if she did not expect to extract a quid pro quo?

“That’s enormously flattering,” he said, and put a cautious hand on Amelia’s arm. He was thanking her, but not yet saying yes, not yet saying no.

“Do you think you’d be interested?” Amelia’s head was tipped forward, as though she were looking at him over half-moon spectacles. “Could you see yourself based out here? Three years? Four?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Good,” she replied. Then, as if there was no more to be said on the subject, she returned to what appeared to be troubling her.

“Did you come across a reference to Ebru Eldem?”

The old Turkish man rose from his seat, leaving behind the half-eaten bowl of fruit salad. Kell followed him with his eyes, but his mind was back in Wallinger’s office, sifting through files and telegrams, trying to summon the name from among a hundred others.

“Journalist?” he asked, more in hope than expectation, but Amelia nodded, encouraging him to expand. “Arrested a few months ago,” he said, dredging up the Eldem story. “Usual Turkish setup. Hack writes something critical of Erdogan, gets banged up as a terrorist for her troubles.”

“That’s the one.”

“What about her?”

“She was an American asset.”

“Okay.” It was a lunch of surprises. “Recruited by your old friend, Jim Chater. Chater complained to Paul when she was arrested.”

“Paul told you this?”

“Last time he was in London, yes. Said she was the third journalist on the Cousin’s books to have been jailed in the region.”

“Were they all Turks?”

“Yes.”

“Eldem is a political reporter?”

If Amelia was impressed that Kell had remembered such a seemingly insignificant biographical detail, she did not show it. “Yes. For
Cumhuriyet
.”

“But that’s par for the course round here,” he said. “There are eight hundred journalists in prison in Turkey. That’s more than there are in
China
.”

“Is that right?” Amelia absorbed the statistic. After a moment’s pause, she added: “Well, we’ve also lost academics. We’ve also lost students. We have a NOC in Ankara who reported direct to Paul; he’s lost a senior source in the EU. Fired about six months after we took him on.”

Like the vague physical discomfort that presages an illness, Kell had a sense that Amelia was about to tell him something profoundly troubling. Would it be the quid pro quo, or would it be something about Paul? Uncomfortable at the prospect of continuing their conversation in their current position—a mother and child were about to settle into the vacated seat beside them—Amelia suddenly stood up, put on her jacket, and led Kell out of the restaurant. They were some distance away, walking down a deserted cobbled street east of the Galata Tower, when she finally returned to the subject.

“What I’m about to tell you, I want to tell you as a friend.” She looked at Kell and, with no more than a glance, asked for his absolute discretion.

“Of course.” He put his hand on her back. This time Amelia did not flinch. “I think Simon Haynes dropped the ball in the last weeks of his tenure.”

“Go on.”

“I think certain things escaped his attention. During the transition, I was still so affected by what had happened in France”—she was referring to the kidnap and rescue of her son—“that I didn’t pay close enough attention to something that now seems very obvious.” Amelia turned down a narrow, deserted street that had been soaked by a burst pipe; water was gurgling out of a ruined building, pouring down one side of the road. “Over a four-year period, a number of joint operations with the Cousins have been undermined. HITCHCOCK and EINSTEIN the worst, no question, but others going back three years. In London, in the U.S., in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel.”

“What do you mean ‘undermined’?”

“I mean that the numbers are out. I mean that too many things have gone wrong. I’ve looked at the history, at the statistics, and we’re losing too many assets, too much strategic advantage, too much product.”

“You think there’s a leak?”

It was the question every spy hoped he would never have to ask. A mole was the secret state’s profoundest fear, the paranoid nightmare of its guarded and cautious inhabitants. Philby. Blake. Ames. Hanssen. The names kept coming, generation after generation, traitor breeding traitor, an entire bureaucratic class feeding on itself, on paranoia and doublethink. Amelia, acknowledging Kell’s question with a glance, asked for—of all things—a cigarette, which he lit for her as they walked.

“I don’t know its nature,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s technical.”

Was that better or worse? Human betrayal was morally more repugnant but, typically, less damaging than a compromised communications link. If, say, the Iranians or the Israelis, the Russians or the Chinese, had a line into SIS’s telegram system, the Service was finished, because it was the end of secrets. If, on the other hand, there was a mole, he or she was identifiable; by definition, their days were numbered.

“I’ve had to be bloody careful.” Amelia held the cigarette in the tips of her fingers and inhaled on it like a sixth-form prefect. “I’ve had everything checked and double-checked. Every mainframe, telegram, e-mail, you name it. Passwords changed, keypads, Augean stables job.”

“I didn’t know,” Kell said, and shrugged out a momentary cramp in his right shoulder. “And still the leaks keep coming?”

“And still the leaks keep coming.” Amelia tossed the cigarette into an oil-streaked puddle of water. She had taken no more than two puffs. “There are names,” she said. “The same people copied on the same intelligence, attending the same meetings, seeing the same CX.”

“Us or them?”

“Both,” she said.

“How many?”

“Too many. Dozens on our side of the Atlantic, dozens on theirs. I could be investigating this thing until my ninetieth birthday. I could make Angleton look level-headed.” They rounded another corner. Two men were playing backgammon at a small table in front of a shoe shop. One of them looked up and smiled at Amelia, apparently appreciating the presence of an elegant, well-dressed woman in his gray neighborhood. Ever the politician, she smiled back. “Too many suspects,” she said, in a flat voice. “I have little idea who sees what we see once it crosses the pond. The mole could be State Department, could be Langley. Christ, it could be the White House.” Kell listened to the fading rattle of the backgammon dice. “But,” Amelia said.

“But,” Kell repeated. A boat moaned on the Bosporus.

“There are specific people I want to look at. Four, to be precise. One is Douglas Tremayne.”

Kell felt an instinctive sense that Amelia had the wrong man: Tremayne didn’t fit the profile of a traitor, but he knew that such thoughts were the spycatcher’s Achilles’ heel. Everyone was a suspect. Everyone has his reasons.
“Doug?”
he said.

“I’m afraid so.” Amelia again removed her jacket and looped it over her arm. “The other, on our side, is Mary Begg.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Works on the Middle East Directorate at the Cross. Came to us from Five just after you left. She’s seen most things. Been involved. It could be her.”

“And the others are Yanks?” Kell asked, wondering with an accumulating envy if Begg had been his like-for-like replacement.

Amelia nodded. “I’ve got a team in Texas. In Houston. Taking a very close look at Tony Landau. His fingerprints were all over HITCHCOCK, all over EINSTEIN. He had access to most of the files relating to the corrupted assets.”

“
Most
of the files,” said Kell pointedly.

Amelia appeared to appreciate the fact that Kell had noticed the caveat. “He didn’t know about Eldem. The circulation on her was very low.”

Kell knew what Amelia was going to tell him. Chater had known about Eldem, had possibly betrayed her to the Turks. Kell was going to be asked to soak Chater’s laptops and phones, to follow him into bathrooms, to sleep under his bed. He was going to be presented with an opportunity to avenge Kabul.

“That’s why you’re here,” she said, right on cue. “The Cousins have a young officer here. Ryan Kleckner.”

“Kleckner,” Kell replied, caught off guard. He had never heard the name.

“He’s had the same access. Attended the same meetings. We’ll be looking at Begg; I have someone on Tremayne. I want you to take on Kleckner. I’ll give you everything you need to make an assessment of his behavior, to include or exclude him as a suspect.”

Kell nodded.

“A month before he flew to Chios, a week before Dogubayazit, Paul came to London. I confided in him as I am confiding in you.”

“Paul knew about the mole?” Kell asked.

“Yes.”

“And the Americans? Did you raise your concerns with them?”

“Christ, no.” Amelia shook off the idea like a sudden chill. “Go to the Cousins with an accusation like that? It would shut everything down. Every joint op. Every shared bite of intelligence. Every ounce of carefully nurtured trust since Blake and Philby.”

“So Paul was the only one who knew?”

“Wait.” Amelia held up a hand to interrupt him. They had come to the bottom of the hill, the crowded Galata Bridge now visible to the southwest, heavy traffic funneling in both directions along Kemeralti Caddesi. “I’ve got to be completely honest with you. I cannot say, hand on heart, that Paul is above suspicion.” Kell saw the conflict in her, knew the consequences if Wallinger proved to be the mole. “But we have to stop this thing. We have to find out where the leaks are coming from. I’ve had to shut almost everything down. All the joint ops, limit the circulation on too many reports. The Cousins don’t understand it and they’re getting restless. Everything we’re doing in Turkey, in Syria, with the Iranians, the Israelis, it’s all being affected. I can’t
move
until this thing is resolved.” Amelia was chopping the air with her hand. “You’ve got to try to get answers quickly, Tom,” she said, curling the hand into a fist. “If we can’t get anything on Kleckner, I’ll have to go to the Americans. Soon. And if the mole turns out to be one of ours…”

“Curtains,” said Kell.

They stood in silence for a moment.

“What did Paul say about the leaks?” Kell asked.

Amelia seemed surprised by the question. “He agreed to look into it,” she said. “He said he didn’t trust Kleckner, didn’t like Begg. Something not right about her. We agreed never to discuss my theory using any of the usual channels. No telegrams, no telephones, nothing.”

“Sure.” Kell waited for Amelia to continue. When she remained silent, gazing at the cluttered horizon beyond the minarets encircling the Golden Horn, he prompted her by saying: “And?”

She turned toward him. To Kell’s surprise, her eyes were stung with tears.

“And I never saw him again.”

20

There was nobody on the beach.

Iannis Christidis sat alone on the damp, low-tide sand, listening to the near-silent rhythm of the folding waves, his brain numb with alcohol. It was perhaps two or three o’clock in the morning; he had long since lost track of time. Reaching into the breast pocket of his shirt, he pulled out a crumpled packet of Assos and clumsily tapped three cigarettes onto the hard sand. He let two of them roll away on the wind and pressed the third to his lips. Then he reached into the pocket of his trousers for a lighter.

A last smoke for a condemned man. He could not even taste the tobacco. The first inhalation of smoke tilted his head back so that he was looking up at the black sky, tracing stars in the blinking double vision of his drunkenness, then a gasp as he rocked forward and groaned and fell to one side.

Christidis picked himself up. He pressed his fist into the sand and sat up straight. He looked out at the water again, at the black night, the silhouette of a fishing boat moored fifty meters from the beach. This was his island. This had been his life. This was the decision he had made and the mistake was too great now, the shame and the guilt. Everything to live with, nothing to live for.

He was sure now that he was going to do it. He put the cigarette in his mouth and began to scrape at the ground in front of him with both hands, like a dog burying a bone. He was pulling back the wet clods and piling them up at his feet so that his shins and the tops of his knees were soon covered in thick sand.

As a child he had played on this beach.

He choked on the cigarette, the smoke doubling back on the wind and stinging his eyes. He spat it out on the ground, spittle running down his chin so that he had to wipe it away with his sleeve. He reached around and felt his wet trousers, taking out the wallet and tossing it into the hole he had made. Taking off his watch and his wedding ring and throwing those in, too. He started to put the sand back, to cover up the hole, the waves suddenly louder, as if the tide was rushing in to carry him away. A ship must have passed in the strait a few minutes before. Iannis was able to realize that. Maybe he wasn’t as drunk as he thought he was.