A Colder War (24 page)

At dusk they took a bath together before walking north along the western shore of the Bosporus. Rachel had kept the reservation at the restaurant. They ordered
meze
and grilled sea bass at a candlelit table with views across the water to the Asian side. In the bliss of reunion something palpable had shifted between them. Kell felt entirely at peace. She was all that he wanted. It astonished him how readily, even recklessly, he was prepared to be submerged by his desire for her.

“There have been so many things I’ve wanted to ask you,” she said, dipping a hunk of bread into a chalk white bowl of
tzatziki
. “I feel like I know nothing about you. That I did all the talking when we first met. What do you love?”

“What do I
love
?”

Kell wondered if anyone had ever cared to ask him such a thing. He obliged her, in a way that he would never ordinarily have revealed himself, and his answers took them off in myriad directions—discussions about malt whiskey, about Richard Yates, about cricket and
Breaking Bad
. Kell knew that she was making a study of him, because it was in his passions that he would be revealed to her. For years it had been in Kell’s interest as a spy to conceal himself; he had remained opaque not only to agents and colleagues, but also to Claire, the woman with whom he had lived most of his adult life. Perhaps he had even been a mystery to himself. With Rachel, however, absurd as it seemed after so short an acquaintance, Kell felt
known
. At the same time, he had not felt so unstable, so exposed, so much in the grip of another person, in years. Had Paul felt the same way about Cecilia? Had she snatched his friend’s heart as comprehensively as Rachel was seizing his own? Perhaps they were similar beasts—men who had taken on the IRA and the Taliban, and yet were incapable of controlling something as simple and as straightforward as their own feelings.

“Tell me about Berlin,” Rachel said as she poured the last of the wine.

“I didn’t go to Berlin,” he said.

Her face remained impassive.

“Where did you go?”

“To Lopud.”

Rachel swayed back in her chair, resting her glass so close to the corner of the table that Kell feared it would topple off and smash.

“No wonder you didn’t tell me.”

“I’m telling you now. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to say anything before.” He leaned forward, unable to read her mood. “Cecilia Sandor is dead.”

“Jesus.”

“We don’t yet know what happened. It’s possible that she was murdered. It’s possible that she took her own life. We know that she had a boyfriend during the same period that she was seeing your father.” Rachel’s face soured and she shook her head, looking down at the table. He was giving her operational theories, classified material, secrets, but he did not stop. “There was a man on Chios, seen talking with Sandor and your father. They were eating lunch at a restaurant in the harbor the day before the crash. We’ve been trying to identify him. He may have been an intelligence officer, he may just have been a friend.”

“Why would somebody want to kill Cecilia?”

It was the obvious question. Kell had only his instincts, his paranoia, with which to answer it.

“In a previous life she was a Hungarian intelligence officer. We need to establish whether or not she was recruited to seduce your father. We have doubts about the legitimacy of the relationship.”

He realized that he was saying too much, piling theory on theory, hunch on hunch. What if Rachel reported this back to her mother? There was no evidence to suggest that Cecilia was a honey trap, other than her relationship with Luka. It was equally possible that Sandor, like Iannis Christidis, had taken her own life out of sheer despair.

“What are you trying to tell me?” she asked. “That you think Pappa was a
traitor
?”

It was the question to which Kell had always given himself a definitive answer: no. He simply could not believe in the annihilating possibility that Paul Wallinger had been another Kim Philby, another George Blake; that H/Ankara had been working in tandem with Cecilia Sandor and the SVR. As Rachel asked the question, he saw the depth of a daughter’s love for her father, and the profound fear that his betrayal had extended beyond adultery into treason. Kell wanted to console her. He could not bear to see Rachel suffer with such a question. Amelia was convinced that the leak was coming from the American side, from Kleckner. For the time being, they had to believe that ABACUS was the mole.

“I’m certain he wasn’t. I just don’t know about the woman. I don’t know if she was legitimate.”

“And now she’s been silenced, so you can never find out?”

“Perhaps.” Kell picked up his glass and looked past Rachel, out across the water at the zigzag lights of the Bosporus Bridge. He felt that he had nothing left to say. Two tables away, a little girl in a pretty white dress was watching a film on a mini DVD player while her family ate dinner.

“Pappa talked about you,” Rachel said suddenly. “I remembered it while you were away. Two years ago. There was something in the papers. Something about torture.” Kell looked up. It was obvious that Rachel was talking about Gharani and Chater. “Rendition?” she said. “Were you involved in that? Were you Witness X?”

Kell remembered a similar conversation with Elsa in a house in Wiltshire. He hoped to his bones that Rachel would be similarly forgiving.

“My father said you were one of the most decent men he knew. He was stunned by what happened, by the way you were treated. Amazed that you didn’t quit.” Kell did not entirely trust the conviction in her voice.

“He said that?”

Rachel nodded.

“I didn’t quit because I felt that I hadn’t done anything wrong,” he told her. “I didn’t quit because I still enjoyed the job. I felt that I could do some good.” Rachel looked at him as though he was being sentimental, even naïve. “Besides, what else can I do? I’m forty-four. This is all I know.”

“No it’s not.” Her reply was quick, almost damning. “That’s just something you tell yourself because the alternatives are too daunting.”

“God, I hate the way the younger generation are so wise. When did that happen?”

“I’m not that young, Tom,” she said.

A waiter came and offered them coffee. Simultaneously, they declined. Rachel shot Kell a look. They had both had the same thought.

“Maybe we should get the bill?” he said, holding her gaze.

“That sounds like a good idea.”

35

The memory of that night, the stillness and the intensity of it, stayed with Kell for days afterward. Shuttling between Ankara and Istanbul, combing through file after file, report after report on Wallinger and ABACUS, he was fueled by visions and memories of Rachel, their separation as frustrating to him as the endless search for clues in the great mass of data about Kleckner.

She had left for London the next day. Kell, buried in meetings and paperwork, felt like a man who had become stuck on a bus in heavy traffic, the driver refusing to let him off between stops. He could just as easily have analyzed the reports, the surveillance logs, the transcripts, in an office at Vauxhall Cross. Instead, Amelia had him living out of a suitcase in Turkey, surviving on a diet of e-mails and text messages to Rachel that became less frequent the longer they were apart.

Against this background, he worked effectively. Reading the transcripts of Ryan Kleckner’s private e-mails, listening to his telephone conversations, watching him on video surveillance feeds, Kell was able to build up an almost complete picture of ABACUS’s day-to-day life. Kell was quickly able to deduce that there were at least five women in Istanbul with whom the handsome young American was sexually involved. He read every word of Kleckner’s correspondence with Rachel, written in the run-up to his birthday at Bar Bleu, checking the language for clues, and judging the tone for any evidence of mutual attraction. To snoop on Rachel’s private correspondence, albeit as part of a legitimate and pressing operation, left Kell with a feeling that he was sliding into seedy and unethical behavior that would eventually exact a heavy toll. The competitor in him was relieved that whatever attraction Kleckner had felt for her at the funeral appeared to have dissipated, but Kell was glad to set the information about Rachel to one side, and to restore her privacy.

It was while searching through Kleckner’s list of friends on Facebook that Kell stumbled on a coincidence. Ebru Eldem, the twenty-nine-year-old journalist with
Cumhuriyet
who had been jailed the previous month, ostensibly for “terrorist” activities, had known Kleckner intimately. She had also been a source for Jim Chater—albeit as an unconscious asset—providing him with low-level cocktail party and conference gossip. Chater had been angry when the Turkish government had banged her up and had complained about it to Wallinger. Contacting Elsa, who was now in Milan, Kell instructed her to hack Eldem’s dormant Facebook account and to search for any evidence of a relationship with Kleckner. Two hours later Elsa had sent over several pages of screen-grabbed messages between the pair, which showed quite plainly that they had been lovers.

Kell immediately called Amelia in London from the secure speech room in Istanbul. She was in her office.

“Did you know that ABACUS was involved with one of Jim Chater’s assets?”

“Yes, I did.”

Any elation he had felt at making the link between Eldem and Kleckner evaporated when he heard the terse disinterest of “C’s” reply.

“It doesn’t send up a flag for you?” he said. It was freezing cold in the sealed room and Kell had forgotten to bring a sweater.

“Should it?”

He had obviously caught her in a cool, distracted mood. At their last meeting, a lunch in Istanbul, Amelia had been relaxed and open, Kell’s friend rather than his boss. She had told a story about bumping into a senior Whitehall civil servant while shopping in Waitrose. (“He looked at me in my spinster loneliness, stared at the gin and ice cream in my basket.”) Today, however, she had reverted to type, her manner brusque and businesslike, wanting results from Kell, not tenuous links between ABACUS and a jailed Turkish journalist. This, he realized, was his future. If he was handed H/Ankara, their friendship would suffer as a result. Amelia would pull rank repeatedly, reminding him time and again of his place in the firmament.

“If he knew that Eldem was reporting to Chater, that she was briefing against Erdogan … If her agenda didn’t fit with his values…”

Kell heard a noise on the line that he interpreted as Amelia’s continued frustration with the direction that the conversation was taking. Theories. Conjectures. What-ifs. She had no interest in them. He felt that she had somehow discovered that he was involved with Rachel; that she knew the extent to which the relationship was affecting his work. Instead, Amelia said something quite extraordinary.

“We’ve had a break on Chios.”

“Adam?”

“Yes. He’s been clever. Found a camera, got the footage. Eyes on the table. We’ve identified the man who was sitting with Paul and Cecilia. The man with the beard.”

“And?”

“Looks like an SVR officer. Minasian. Alexander Minasian.”

36

It was suddenly as hot in the room as the sweltering streets outside. Kell had been listening to Amelia through a speaker system but lifted the secure telephone free of its cradle and spoke to her direct.

“Paul was at a restaurant with CCTV coverage, in plain sight, with an SVR officer?”

“Yes.”

“With Cecilia Sandor? His mistress?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus.”

Kell reached for a cigarette, remembering in the same moment that smoking was forbidden inside the consulate. Instead, he picked up Amelia’s lighter and began twisting it through his fingers, then tapping it on the table. It was impossible to know what to make of the revelation. It proved everything, yet it proved nothing.

“Are you still there?” she asked. There was a note of sarcasm in her voice, because she knew that Kell would have been poleaxed by the news.

“I’m still here.” Kell scribbled “MINASIAN?” on a piece of paper, tapping the question mark with the edge of the lighter. “Was there anything from Paul or another source about running Minasian? Was he in your sights? An asset?”

“No. Of course we wish that was the case.” It was the dream of every SIS officer, from Khartoum to Santiago, to recruit and run a Russian intelligence source. “All of our preliminary intel suggests that Minasian is bona fide. Directorate C, almost certainly SVR station chief in Kiev.”

Ukraine was a second-rate posting. Usually that would indicate that Minasian was either a highflier in his early thirties who had been handed Kiev as a test, or had stalled midcareer with no chance of Paris, London, Washington, or Beijing.

“How old is he?”

“Thirty-nine.”

What did that suggest? That Minasian was based in Kiev in order to service the mole in Turkey? Quick access in, quick access out.

“And his name didn’t come up when Paul talked to you about the mole? Landau, Begg, Tremayne?”

“No.” Amelia’s voice cut out—a glitch on the line—and came back a second later. “He only had suspicions about Landau and Kleckner. Besides, we think Tremayne is clean.”

“We do?”

“Yes. We also think he’s gay.”

Kell was not surprised. “I must say I had my suspicions about that.”

“I think we all did,” Amelia replied. “Surveillance followed him to one or two places in Ankara and Istanbul that Doug would rather not have been seen. I’m going to pull him in. Have a chat.”

“There’s no sense that he’s being burned?” Kell asked. If the SVR knew about Tremayne’s sexuality, there was an outside chance that his private shame could be exploited as a point of weakness.

“None,” Amelia replied.

“So when you talked to Paul about the leaks, who raised the subject of the mole first?” Kell stretched out a tension in his lower back. “You, or him?” At last Kell could feel his brain spinning into a higher gear. “Did Paul say that he suspected a leak, or did you go to him with your suspicions?”