A Colder War (27 page)

“And while that was coming in?”

Mohsin had obviously read the surveillance report en route to Kabatas. It seemed that he could remember every detail.

“A coffee in the second of the cafés over there.” He pointed south, along the Buyukada jetty, past the ticket office, toward a street in the main town. “They had a beer, a game of backgammon, then went to get the kids.”

“Backgammon?”

“Yeah.”

Everything was now a clue, a tell, a signal—or a blind alley. All of Kell’s experience told him that the island was wrong. Why would a CIA mole isolate himself on Buyukada, making dead drops in a natural choke point? Was it another SVR double bluff, like Arada’s proximity to the Russian consulate? Or was Kell seeing tells and patterns where none existed?

Suddenly, with no sense of its origin or catalyst, he recalled a conversation with Rachel at the
yali,
weeks earlier. Their shared cigarette, looking out over the Bosporus while Amelia had gone for the walk with Josephine. How could he have forgotten such a thing?

Pappa had a friend who lived on Buyukada. An American journalist.

Had she meant Richards? If so, why say that he was American? Kell immediately took out his iPhone and tapped a text message to London.

HELLO YOU—AM I IMAGINING IT, OR DID YOU MENTION THAT YOUR FATHER HAD A JOURNALIST FRIEND ON BUYUKADA? IF I’M NOT GOING MAD, CAN YOU REMEMBER HIS NAME? RICHARDS? IF I AM GOING MAD, CAN YOU IGNORE THIS TEXT? SEPARATION FROM YOU HAS MADE ME DELIRIOUS—T X

Under a fierce sun that had burned away the last of the rain clouds, Kell followed Mohsin along the broad jetty. They came into a narrow covered arcade of shops selling suntan lotion and postcards, guided tours around the island, sunglasses, and imitation sailor’s hats with
CAPTAIN
embroidered in gold across the peaks. Mohsin showed Kell into the café on the main street, pointed out where ABACUS and Richards had sat for their game of backgammon, then remembered that “the target” had gone to the toilet for “at least five minutes.” That alone was enough to send Kell into the gents’, where he looked around for a potential dead letter box, a place to store cached documents. Perhaps there was a storeroom or passageway in which a cutout or handler might wait for a brush contact. But the environment was all wrong—too busy, too small, too obvious. He lifted the lid on a cistern in the men’s cubicle, but only because it seemed lazy not to. More likely Kleckner was using Richards as the cutout, or their friendship as a cover for his activity as a mole.

“Where next?” he said. “Show me the route.”

Mohsin promptly hailed a horse-drawn carriage and took Kell on a tour of the island, following a route that ABACUS had taken on an earlier visit to Buyukada. Kell felt slightly ridiculous, sitting side by side on a narrow love seat with a humorless surveillance officer while their grinning driver encouraged his aging horses to move faster by whipping their flanks with a long wooden stick. The island was crowded at the seafront, but largely empty in its interior, a scattering of well-maintained houses on a loose grid separated by broad streets that were splattered with the dried, straw-colored dung of passing horses. After half an hour Kell grew tired of the rocking of the cart, the squeaking hinge in the love seat and the perpetual clip-clop, clip-clop of the horse’s hooves. He was very hot and learning nothing useful about Kleckner. He instructed the driver to return to the main town, jumping off opposite the Splendid Palace, an Ottoman-era hotel that boasted views across the strait to Istanbul. With Mohsin beginning to flag, they went into the bar and cooled off with two glasses of lemonade under an inevitable portrait of Ataturk.

Rachel had not replied. Had she taken offense at the message about her father, or was something going on in London? Kell had not heard from her in two days and had begun to despise himself for the speed with which she had seized control of his heart; there was a dignity in his solitary life that she had completely stripped away. When he had concluded his search of the island, he would call her from the Kabatas ferry and try to encourage her to come back to Istanbul for a long weekend.

“Show me the house,” he said to Mohsin when he had walked back into the bar.

“Which one?”

“The one that’s for sale. The one you thought ABACUS might be looking at.”

It was a ten-minute walk from the hotel. Kell settled the bill and they went outside into the late afternoon sun, returning to the quiet suburban streets to the west of the main town, disturbed only by the occasional passing bicycle or pedestrian.

“This is roughly where I had to let him go,” Mohsin confessed, explaining that he had been following ABACUS in a one-on-one for twenty minutes but had become concerned that the American would “smell” him. He led Kell downhill along a narrow lane leading toward the last row of houses before the beach. There were large private gardens on either side of the road, the occasional bark of a dog punctuating the silence. “Richards lives in a house about a hundred meters that way.” Mohsin gestured toward a screen of pine trees on a corner where the road split left and right in a T-junction. “We weren’t able to get close because it’s so isolated. Normally, one of us could play the cover. Grab a horse and cart, pretend to be a gardener or something. But once ABACUS gets ahead of us on foot—”

Kell interrupted him. He knew the reasons for what had happened and wasn’t interested in hearing Mohsin’s excuses. “It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to explain.”

They walked on in silence. Kell could hear the murmur of the sea, now only a hundred meters away to the north. The Richards family lived in a part-renovated
yali
on a road parallel to the shore. Kell could not tell if anyone was home, nor was he much interested in knocking on the front door and disturbing their peace. According to the surveillance reports, cross-referenced with e-mails and phone logs, Kleckner had visited the house three times in the previous six weeks, on one occasion staying the night and thanking Richards the next morning for giving him “a world-class dinner and a world-class hangover.” Kell was more interested in the house next door, now for sale, which Kleckner had been seen to visit. Properties on the island were prohibitively expensive, particularly those close to the beach. Buyukada was a summer refuge for the city’s elite; thousands of wealthy Istanbullus retreated to the island in July and August, taking up residence in second homes to escape the stifling city heat of high summer. Why would a twenty-nine-year-old spy with less than thirty thousand dollars in savings, fourteen months from his next CIA posting, be looking to buy a
yali
in the most expensive corner of the most expensive island in the Princes’ archipelago?

Kell had a possible answer a few minutes later. Walking along the road toward the house, he spotted a “For Sale” sign (in English and Turkish) tacked to a tree. There was a broken wooden gate leading to the property, a tiny splinter piercing Kell’s index finger as he pushed it open. The men found themselves amid very thick undergrowth, the garden grown wild. Kell could see the shadow of what had once been a large house through gaps in the foliage, but it was clear that the entire property had been allowed to fall into ruin.

“Tell me exactly what you saw,” Kell said, returning to the road. Both men were soaked in sweat, Kell’s shirt sticking to his back like cellophane. It had been impossible to proceed any farther through the garden. “You told me ABACUS went for a swim.”

Mohsin leaned on a tree beside the “For Sale” sign, flattened by the heat.

“That’s right,” he said. “He went round in the horse and cart like I showed you. He left the driver in the center of town, then doubled back toward the Richards house. I started following him along the road, exactly like we’ve done today.” Mohsin was beginning to sound defensive and impatient: either he was bored of repeating himself or was taking Kell’s questions too personally. “I had to hold off when I thought I was getting too close,” he said. “The rest of the team—there were only three of us that day—were back in town.” He nodded east along the coast. Kell, too, was beginning to feel enervated by the heat and wished they had brought a bottle of water. “But he’d taken out his towel and I saw him later on the beach. Swimming. That’s when he got dressed, climbed up the rocks, and disappeared into the house.”

“This house?”

Mohsin nodded.

“Taking his shoulder bag with him?”

The surveillance man hesitated, remembered. “Yeah. It’s not as overgrown on that side.”

“What made you think he was interested in buying it?”

“Just this.” Mohsin tapped the sign. “Why else would somebody wander round a ruined
yali
on a hot afternoon after taking a nice relaxing swim? I figured Richards must have told him about the house being for sale. Or maybe he just stumbled on it. Maybe he just likes looking around old buildings.”

Maybe,
Kell thought to himself, but there had been nothing in any of the files or transcripts to suggest that Kleckner had taken an interest in the property. He wondered why the hell Mohsin hadn’t volunteered this information sooner.

“Let’s go down to the beach,” he said.

39

Through the trees and across the water, west past Kadikoy and north along the Bosporus to Kabatas, a taxi was pulling into the ferry terminal where, only a few hours earlier, Thomas Kell and Javed Mohsin had waited for the ferry, drinking their glasses of tea.

Alexander Minasian, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and a white Adidas baseball cap, paid the driver, sprinted across the concourse, passed the terminal café, pressed a ticket into the entry barrier as a foghorn sounded on the water, then leapt onto the ferry only seconds before departure.

Delayed in traffic at the end of four hours of countersurveillance, Minasian knew that if he had missed this boat, it would have been another three hours before he could dock in Buyukada, another two before it was safe to go to the Trotsky house, therefore making it necessary either to stay the night on the island or to hire a water taxi back to Istanbul in the dead of night, a journey he had endured once before, in mercilessly rough seas.

The ferry pulled away from the jetty. Minasian made grateful nodding eye contact with a member of the ship’s crew and headed for a row of molded plastic seats on the port side. He kept an eye on the jetty, looking out for any last-minute passengers racing to catch the boat. Would a surveillance team risk exposure by one of their number chasing him onto a ferry? Perhaps not. If they were well-organized, if they had people in Kadikoy or Kartal, an operative could be sent ahead to Buyukada, cutting him off at the town. It was even possible that an American or MIT team could be active on the ferry. But they were not organized. He knew that because KODAK had told him as much. In Istanbul, Alexander Minasian was always a ghost.

A second horn cried out over the water, the blast of the ship as she steered confidently toward the cut and thrust of shipping moving north and south along the Bosporus. Removing a paperback book from his jacket pocket, Minasian began to read, confident in the knowledge that his journey to clear the KODAK letter box would, as ever, remain undetected.

40

They were on the beach.

To Kell’s surprise, Mohsin had removed his shirt in the heat, revealing a tattooed and belly-fattened torso of which he seemed inordinately proud. Turning back to face the island, Kell could see the façade of the Richards house, partly obscured by a high stone wall. A small concrete harbor had been constructed on the beach, offering protection to a wooden sailing boat that was tied up with no fenders beside a paint-chipped steel ladder. For fifty meters on either side of the harbor there were sharp, mussel-covered rocks and weedy inlets; in the distance, farther toward the main town, the shoreline flattened out into shingle, offering swimmers easier access to the water.

“You said ABACUS swam here?”

“Yes,” Mohsin replied. “Went in off those steps, swam out into the open water, came back. I watched him from up there.”

He indicated the path down which they had walked from the road. It would have been easy for Mohsin to conceal himself in the shadow of the trees and the undergrowth.

“And then he went to the ruins?”

Kell began to retrace Kleckner’s steps, trying to think his way into the American’s mind. Why hadn’t Richards, or one of the children, of whom Ryan was apparently so fond, joined him for the swim? Why cool off, only to return to his friend’s house via the property next door?

Maybe he just likes looking around old buildings.

There were steps leading up to the ruined house. Large chunks of rock had broken away so that it was difficult for Kell to find his footing. Mohsin followed him to the northern perimeter of the overgrown garden. It was now possible to see the full extent of the ruins. The roof of the house had fallen in. Trees were growing in the spaces between collapsed walls, weeds and wild flowers carpeting every abandoned room. Kell was able to navigate his way under the frame of what had once been an entrance porch and emerged into an area about the size of the secure speech room at the Ankaran embassy. On one side, a wild and impenetrable bush obscured his view of the sea; on the other, a gap in a low wall allowed him to move into a second room, where various rusted cans and glass bottles were strewn on the ground. If people came to this place, they did so irregularly: most of the litter looked archeologically old.

Kell thought of Robert Hanssen, arrested by the FBI in a secluded park in Washington, D.C., after secreting classified material beneath a small wooden footbridge. As he ducked under a splintered beam, he instructed Mohsin to begin looking for anything that might function as an effective DLB.

“It’ll be something in keeping with the environment. An old rusted box. A hole in the ground. Look for stickers, marks on walls. It’s possible he’s using different locations and identifies them to his handler in that way.”

Mohsin, still shirtless, was seemingly energized by his task.