A Colder War (26 page)

At a dinner party hosted by the Dutch ambassador at his wife’s private residence in Ortakoy, Kleckner had been heard to say that as a graduate he had “hoped to live the kind of life that meant he didn’t have to wear a suit to the office.” Kell had remembered the remark, only because it had made him smile, but as he studied the footage of ABACUS’s visits to Arada, something became extraordinarily clear to him, extraordinarily quickly.

Twice Kleckner had visited the teahouse first thing in the morning while wearing a tie—on a weekend. Three times he had visited the teahouse in the evenings in a suit, twice during the week, but once on a Sunday evening. At no point had he gone there, at any other time of day or night, wearing anything other than casual clothes, even when in the company of a woman. The more Kleckner spooled back and forth through the images, the more Kleckner’s clothes looked out of place. Why wear a jacket and tie on a hot spring morning en route to work, or on his day off? Why not put them on as he entered the consulate or immediately prior to a meeting? Why meet a smartly dressed girl for dinner dressed in chinos and a button-down shirt, but play an aggressive, sweat-inducing game of backgammon with a Turkish man without even removing his jacket?

Kell looked at the times and dates on the footage. He was interested in Kleckner’s movements in a twenty-four-hour period either side of appearing at the café in a suit and tie. If clothing was a signal—either to a fixed camera or to somebody who had been instructed to go to Arada at a particular time of day or night to watch for the mole—then Kell had to follow it up. Were there other idiosyncrasies in his appearance? Did a tie signify one thing, a pair of shorts another? If Kleckner sat in a certain seat, did it mean that he was in a position to hand over classified information? Had the game of backgammon been interpreted as a request for a crash meeting? Kell could not know. All he was certain of was the fact that something was out of place. There was ninety-degree heat in Istanbul and Ryan Kleckner hated wearing suits. The clothes were wrong.

He rang the safe house in Sultanahmet in the hope of finding a member of the team off shift. Javed Mohsin himself picked up.

“It’s Tom.”

“Oh. Hello there.”

A typically cool greeting. Mohsin had a habit of sounding irritated by any intrusion Kell happened to make into his day-to-day affairs. It was the insolence of the underling; a man too old to be ordered around.

“Have you got ten minutes to run something for me?”

“Suppose so.”

“Don’t sound too excited, Javed.”

A grunt on the end of the line. Kell asked him to load up the surveillance reports for the seventy-two-hour period on either side of Kleckner’s first Saturday visit to Arada, when he had worn a tie. It took Mohsin almost five minutes to get himself ready, a period in which Kell could hear a toilet being flushed and the cough of another member of the team in the background.

“Okay. Got them,” he said eventually.

“Can you tell me what ABACUS was doing on Friday, fifteenth March, and Sunday, seventeenth March?”

“Don’t you have these reports?” The tone of Mohsin’s reply implied that Kell was either being stupid or lazy in requesting his assistance. “I sent digital files over ages ago.”

“Those were edited highlights and they’re right in front of me. I want a second pair of eyes on the hard copies. I want to know what you remember, what’s on the originals.”

The terseness of the response appeared to have no effect on Mohsin’s complacency. For reasons that were unclear to Kell, he began with the report from Sunday, March 17. Kleckner had been clubbing, had gone home alone, had slept late, then spent the rest of the day reading in his apartment, talking to his mother on the telephone and “masturbating.”

“Not at the same time, I hope.” Kell wondered why he had bothered making the joke. “What about the Friday?”

A rustle and flick of pages as Mohsin searched through the report.

“Looks like a normal day. Goes to the gym. Train to the consulate. Long lunch with a colleague we haven’t yet been able to identify. Then gets on a catamaran at Kabatas.”

“Where to?”

“Princes’ Islands.”

Another irritating Mohsin power play. Providing only the minimum amount of information on a request. Making Kell push for more detail.

“Did somebody follow him?”

“Sure.”

“Can you elaborate on that, Javed? This gnomic thing you do is starting to irritate.”

There was a murmured apology, nothing more. “He got off at Heybeliada.”

“What’s that? One of the islands?”

“Yup.”

“Sea of Marmara?”

“Yup.”

Ordinarily, Kell would have lost his temper, but he needed to keep Mohsin onside, at least until the end of the conversation.

“Then what?”

Another pause. A subtle change in Mohsin’s tone of voice. “Well. Then he went to Buyukada. Then we don’t know. That was one of the times we lost him.”

There was a map of Istanbul on the wall of Wallinger’s office. Kell could see the necklace of tiny islands in the Sea of Marmara that were reached by the ferry from Kabatas: Kinaliada, Burgazada, Heybeliada, Buyukada. Motorized vehicles were banned on all four.

“You lost him on an island the size of Hyde Park with no cars, no motorbikes, no bridge to the mainland?”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Kell at last had leverage in the conversation. “Not a problem,” he said. “These things happen. Let’s look at some other days.” He had written down the other dates when Kleckner had visited Arada while wearing a tie. There was a Sunday a week later. “What do you have for ABACUS on Monday the twenty-fifth?”

“March?”

“Yes.”

It was apparently another routine day. Kleckner had gone to the gym, gone to work, gone home.

“And the Saturday before that?”

Again the rustle and flick of pages. Mohsin moving more quickly now, trying to do a better job. “Okay. Here we are. Saturday, March twenty-third. Subject wakes earlier than normal. Six o’clock. Has slept alone at the apartment. Breakfast at the apartment, listening to music. Isis. Oh.” A sudden cutout, a silence. Kell felt his heart jolt. “This is interesting. Subject took a taxi to Kartal.”

“Where’s that?”

“On the Asian side. I remember this gig actually. I was on it.” It was like talking to a different person. Mohsin sounded engaged and anecdotal, like a man reminiscing in a pub over a pint. “Took me two hours to get there. He boarded a ferry and went to Buyukada.”

“Back to the Princes’ Islands?”

“Yes, sir.”

Kell could feel a rush of gathering excitement. “And once he was there? What happens next?”

Mohsin overlapped him. “Let’s see. Has a coffee and an ice cream with a friend near the ferry terminal.”

“Who’s the friend?”

Mohsin’s response took several seconds. “Er, Sarah got a clear image of him. We identified him as a journalist who lives over there. Matthew Richards. Knows a lot of expats, diplomats in Istanbul. He and Ryan see a lot of each other.”

Richards. A reporter for Reuters. Kell had seen transcripts of his telephone conversations with Kleckner, conducted on open lines, as well as copies of their e-mail and text exchanges. He had never paid much attention to them, because Richards was reckoned bona fide by London. Mohsin picked up the story.

“It turned out he wanted to look at one of the houses that’s for sale on the beach. Right next door to where Richards lives. Maybe he recommended it. Afraid to say we couldn’t get near him at times, sir. I had to make a judgment call. He would have smelled us.”

“Sure.”

“But I remember he took a towel down to the beach, had a swim. That’s in the log. When we picked him up again at the ferry terminal he still had wet hair.”

“And Richards? He didn’t go swimming with him?”

“No. Don’t think so. He’s got two kids. Married to a French girl. Was probably putting them to bed because it was getting late. Ryan maybe went into the house before the swim. Gets on well with the whole family. Likes the son, teaches him baseball.”

Kell knew that from the files and said: “Okay.”

There was one more date. The midweek evening when Kleckner had played the frenzied game of backgammon in 80 percent humidity while wearing a jacket and tie. Mohsin took a couple of minutes to find the original surveillance report. This time he started with ABACUS’s movements in the twenty-four-hour period prior to his appearance at Arada.

“Okay, got it,” he said. Kell was staring at his packet of cigarettes on Wallinger’s desk. As soon as the call was over he would walk out through the chancery and go for a smoke at the teahouse between the consulate and the Londres hotel.

“Go on,” he said.

“Girl slept with him that night. The Turkish one. Elif.” Kell knew her, remembered the name. Pneumatic, husband-seeking starlet from Bar Bleu. “She leaves at dawn, he goes to the gym.” There was a fractional pause, then: “Jesus…”

Kell pitched forward in his chair, knowing in his bones exactly what Mohsin was going to tell him. The opiate rush again, pouring through him now.

“Guess where he went, sir?”

“I think I know what you’re going to tell me.”

“Ferry. Kabatas.”

“To Buyukada?”

“You got it.”

38

Kell was out of the consulate and into a cab within five minutes. The driver allowed him to smoke a cigarette—“leave window down”—and he texted Mohsin en route, who confirmed that Kleckner was in Bursa attending a Red Cross–hosted conference on the Syrian refugee crisis, polishing his cover and possibly working a recruitment. There would be no danger of bumping into him catching a ride on a horse and cart on Buyukada.

“How do you pronounce it, anyway?” Mohsin asked half an hour later, as they sat at the makeshift terminal café on the western shore of the Bosporus. Kell had arrived first and ordered two glasses of tea to kill time while waiting for the boat.

“‘Bew’ to rhyme with ‘chew.’ ‘Coulda’ as in ‘I coulda been a contender, instead of a bum.’”

Mohsin shot Kell a quizzical look. The phrase meant nothing to him.

“
On the Waterfront
?”

“Yeah, it’s really nice here, isn’t it?” he replied, looking out across the sapphire waters. Kell stared down at his glass of tea. At the side of the busy thoroughfare bringing traffic to the terminal, an old man was selling roasted chestnuts from a two-wheeled cart. The wind blew a smell of burning charcoal toward the café. Kell had missed lunch and was hungry. The café had a colored banner running above the counter, in the style of a McDonald’s, advertising burgers and toasted cheese sandwiches of varying degrees of plasticity. He would have ordered something had the ferry not been announced on a crackling loudspeaker. They stood up, Kell snapping back the dregs of his tea like a shot of liquor, the heat of the liquid scorching the back of his throat and leaving a dust of melted sugar cubes on his tongue. Then they walked side by side toward the ticket gates, a screech of brakes and the blare of a horn behind them as traffic came to blows on the highway.

The ferry was not busy. Kell counted nineteen passengers making their way along the quay. Two of them were British—he could hear West Country accents—the rest seemingly a mix of Turks and tourists. He stepped onto the ship, following Mohsin to a seat on the first deck. A passenger had recently been sick—there was an odor of vomit shrouded in disinfectant. As the ferry slipped her moorings, it began to rain, clouds draining the Bosporus of color and turning the churning waters cold and gray.

“This is roughly where he sat,” Mohsin muttered, settling into a seat beside Kell. “Might even be the same ferry.” There was a small family nearby eating cheese and bread from a picnic. Mohsin, wearing shorts and a blend-in Galatasaray shirt, recalled the setup of the team. “Steve was on him. Agatha. Tourist cover, playing a couple. Priya up above, hijab. I was over there”—he indicated a television in the corner of the deck—“pretending to watch a local news program.”

“What was ABACUS carrying?”

“Shoulder bag. Same one he usually takes to work. Carries it with him most places. Leather. Keeps books in there, newspapers and magazines, deodorant if he’s going out in the evening and doesn’t have time to shower at the consulate.”

And product,
Kell thought. Intelligence reports for a handler. Memory sticks. Hard drives. If ABACUS had made a drop, Kell needed to intercept the material, to get to it before Kleckner’s handler.

“Did the bag seem any different on the way back? Lighter? Larger?”

“Lighter, definitely. He had a bottle of wine because he was going to dinner with Richards.”

“At his house?”

“Yeah.”

“And where is that on the island?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll show you everything.”

*   *   *

The ferry stopped four times en route. On the Asian side, they moored for ten minutes while a large group of Chinese tourists boarded the ship and flocked to the interior deck, silent in hats and sunglasses, subdued by the rain. The cranes unloading container ships at the docks were shrouded in mist; Kell could make out an entire fleet of brand-new purple buses lined up on the quayside. The old railway station at Kadikoy was still standing, reminding Kell of the Bund in Shanghai, a long-ago operation to burn an African arms dealer visiting the city from Nairobi. With the rain now falling in flurries that whipped and swirled across the decks, the ferry eventually made her way to the mouth of the Bosporus and out into the open waters of the Sea of Marmara, a choppy twenty-minute crossing to Kinaliada, the first of the Princes’ Islands. There the rain ceased and Kell went outside into the humid afternoon, standing alone on the starboard walkway, smoking a cigarette as a rainbow arced across his shoulder toward the distant minarets of Hagia Sophia.

Half an hour later they were pulling into Buyukada, Mohsin having joined Kell on the upper deck and continuing his running commentary on ABACUS’s visit.

“Richards was waiting for him on the dock. His kids go to school every day in the city. He was waiting for the ferry from Kartal, which brings them home.”