A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3) (11 page)

Svetlana Eremenko landed at Heathrow Airport three days later. According to MI5 surveillance she was met by a uniformed chauffeur who carried her modest luggage to an armour-plated Mercedes in the short-term car park. It was a Monday morning but there was little traffic on the M4. Within an hour she was checking in for a five-night stay at Claridge’s, paying £480 per night for the privilege and charging it to a credit card that was traced to a company owned by Andrei Eremenko.

Amelia had insisted on a light-touch approach at the hotel, on the sensible basis that the continuing secure email exchanges between Riedle and Minasian would provide Kell with all the information he needed regarding the two men’s whereabouts. There was no sense in informing Claridge’s that a Russian citizen of interest to Her Majesty’s Government would soon be joining his wife in Suite 184; that would only heighten the risk of Minasian smelling a rat and taking the first plane back to Kiev. For the same reason, MI5 would not be flooding the lobby with surveillance. Amelia wanted Minasian to feel as relaxed and as anonymous as possible for a pedigree Russian intelligence officer who would already suspect that his wife was flagged by the Brits. There would be no chambermaid or concierge paid to offer information on Minasian’s movements, just as there would be no cameras or microphones installed in the Eremenko suite. The chances of Minasian saying or doing anything compromising at the hotel were negligible.

‘Besides,’ said Amelia, ‘as soon as he gets to the hotel he’s going to insist on switching rooms. They always do. Moscow rules. We could go to the very great trouble of bugging every phone and plant pot in the building, but I’d rather leave poor Svetlana in relative peace and just keep an eye on Riedle. Bernie will lead us to the mountain, won’t he, Tom? Bernie holds the keys to the castle.’

She was right. In order to pitch Minasian, to have something to hold against him, Kell needed proof of his homosexuality. At the moment he had nothing; only Riedle’s verbal account of the relationship, some photographs from Hurghada and a few anodyne emails. The goal was to get the two men together in a room, to record and film their interactions, then to extract Minasian and present him with the full extent of his folly. Faced with cooperation or ruin, Kell was certain that Minasian would choose to save his own skin.

Since Brussels, the number of messages between Riedle and Minasian had begun to intensify. Minasian had confirmed that he would be arriving in the UK on 30 June, a Tuesday. Riedle had immediately reserved a seat on a Monday-morning Eurostar from Brussels. Finding the Charlotte Street Hotel fully booked, Riedle had taken a room at a hotel on Piccadilly, less than a mile from Claridge’s. Kell had made an appointment to see the manager. Mowbray, whose fees were now being paid by SIS, equipped Riedle’s room with surveillance equipment and Kell was given a pass key allowing him access to every secure area in the hotel. No other members of staff were informed about the intrusion. The manager had been required to sign a copy of the Official Secrets Act and instructed not to report the operation to his superiors. He refused payment and told Kell that he would report ‘any unusual activity from Mr Riedle’ should anything arise.

Vauxhall Cross still had little idea why Svetlana Eremenko had come to London. Amelia had allowed Kell to put foot surveillance on her whenever she stepped outside Claridge’s, and GCHQ were listening to her phone. For the most part, however, she seemed content to sleep late at the hotel and to enjoy the shops and cafés of Mayfair. Late on the Monday afternoon she walked as far as Marylebone High Street and bought some paperbacks in Daunt Books. The following morning she was tailed to the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. At all times she was alone. One report described her as ‘modestly dressed, courteous and friendly’, as if to distinguish her from the stereotype of the super-rich Russian. It was assumed that Svetlana was communicating with her husband via WhatsApp – which was notoriously difficult to hack – or with a secondary mobile phone of which GCHQ had no knowledge. Her bags had not been searched at Heathrow nor had her room been investigated during her absences from the hotel.

Kell himself was obliged to stay clear of Svetlana at all times. There was every possibility that Minasian was already in London, travelling under alias, working counter-surveillance on his wife, checking for signs of trouble. If he spotted Kell at Claridge’s, or saw him wandering around the lobby of Riedle’s hotel in Piccadilly, he would cut and run.

Riedle, however, was a different matter. The two men had agreed to meet in London and Kell was keen to speak to him, not least because he might have information about meeting ‘Dmitri’ that had not been disclosed via email. A separate surveillance team was on hand to ‘house’ Riedle from St Pancras station to his hotel in Piccadilly. Checking in at a similar time to Svetlana, Riedle had spent most of the day working in his room, breaking off to visit the hotel gym at around six o’clock.

To limit the possibility of being seen in his company, Kell had invited Riedle to dinner at Archibald’s, an obscure private member’s club in Bloomsbury to which Minasian would have no access. Kell himself was not a member, but SIS had an arrangement with the club that had proved fruitful in the past. Unlike the Traveller’s Club or White’s, Archibald’s was not a Foreign Office watering hole and there was little chance of Kell being recognized. Nevertheless, he arrived an hour early, through the basement entrance, and arranged for a secluded table in the dining room with no line of sight to the street. Riedle, having been in town for less than six hours, was delighted to have been admitted to one of the inner sanctums of the British Establishment, and wore an uncharacte‌ristically sober grey suit for the occasion.

‘So it’s happening?’ Kell asked as their main courses were served. ‘You’re seeing him in London?’

Riedle took a sip of claret and nodded.

‘Yes. He comes here tomorrow.’ That confirmed the message Minasian had sent to Riedle, setting the date of his arrival in London as Tuesday, 30 June. ‘He has to spend some time with Vera seeing a doctor about her medical condition, then he says he will be free in the afternoons, perhaps on Wednesday or Thursday.’

The team were still not clear what was meant by Svetlana’s ‘medical condition’. On her walks around London she had shown no signs of physical discomfort or pain. Kell assumed that Minasian had simply spun Riedle a lie.

‘You’ll meet at your hotel?’

Riedle shook his head quickly, implying that Kell was pushing at the edge of what he was comfortable disclosing.

‘Well that’s great,’ he said, without probing further. He was concerned that Minasian would be spooked by the idea of meeting in Riedle’s hotel and instead insist on a last-minute switch to a different location. ‘And you feel fine about things?’ he asked. ‘You’re sure it’s a good idea?’

‘I am sure.’ Riedle plainly wanted to draw the subject to a close. They were eating lamb cutlets again, served with over-steamed vegetables and roast potatoes. School food, thought Kell, as he spooned mint jelly on to his plate.

‘I would just like to say something.’

Riedle had put down his knife and fork and lowered his voice to an almost reverent hush.

‘Of course.’

Kell wondered what was coming. For an awful, paranoid moment, he wondered if Riedle had grasped the extent to which he was being manipulated. Perhaps he knew the true nature of ‘Dmitri’s’ profession and had understood that Peter was a false friend. There was a resigned look on his face, candid and melancholic.

‘I want to thank you, Peter.’ Kell leaned back in his seat, relieved. ‘You have been a very good friend to me. You have helped enormously.’ Riedle suddenly reached out his hand. ‘You may not realize this,’ he continued, twirling the stem of his wine glass as it rested on the table, ‘but it is true. One of the strange things about my suffering is that it is in many ways the opposite of what a person might expect to experience at a time like this. Usually when we have suffered loss, we yearn to return to the person who has destroyed us. We want to mend the wound. It has not been like that with me. Not at all.’

‘You mean you don’t want to reconcile with Dmitri? Then why are you meeting him?’

Kell was sure that something was going to go wrong: an email exchange between the two men on the eve of the reunion that would push Minasian away; a quick, face-to-face argument giving the cameras and microphones nothing in terms of leverage. Riedle seemed stronger and more determined than had been the case in Brussels. His eyes had a fixed, stubborn quality. It was as though he was steeling himself for revenge.

‘I will meet him because I hate him and because I love him. Does this make sense?’

‘Perfect sense.’

Kell put down his own knife and fork and smiled, trying to convey that he was keen to understand in greater detail precisely what Riedle wanted to tell him.

‘I hate Dmitri. I am intensely angry with him for the way he has treated me and for the way that he has made me feel. But I also love him. How can I not? He is everything that I need and admire. I wanted someone to hear me and to understand the extent to which I had been made to suffer by this man, but also by the extent to which I had been liberated to
feel
such love. You were the person who listened, who understood.
You
were the man. I sensed that you knew what it was still to love somebody whom you also hate.’

Save for the tinkling of glass and cutlery, and the low, ordered murmur of male conversation, there was silence in the dining room. Kell felt a vivid combination of worry and regret. He knew that he had manipulated Riedle past a point at which such a manipulation was ethically defensible and yet he felt a strange sense of pride in having helped a man through his suffering.

‘Thank you for saying that,’ he replied. ‘It’s kind of you to say so. I’ve really enjoyed our conversations, Bernie. I’m glad that I’ve been able to help.’

Both men began to eat again. Kell felt that he should say something more.

‘We have a saying in English,’ he began. ‘There’s a thin line between love and hate. I’m sure you have a similar phrase in German.’

Riedle chewed and nodded, without offering an example.

‘It’s one of the fascinating things in human nature,’ Kell continued. ‘We are drawn to people who might destroy us, yet we often tire of those who show us unconditional love. It must be something to do with a fear of death and stasis. A great love affair makes us feel alive, vivid and free. But that feeling comes at a price. We are never truly happy while we are at the mercy of another person.’

‘Yes,’ Riedle replied, looking out across the ancient club. He was smiling in a benign and slightly distracted fashion. ‘It must be to do with that. Something to do with stasis. And with death.’

Kell returned home to find that Riedle had already written a message to Minasian. Though he had always known that their friendship might become an operational risk, he was nevertheless deeply concerned by what he read:

Riedle was trying to provoke a reaction, but Kell suspected that this was not how Minasian would interpret the message. A man of such bulletproof self-confidence would not be unsettled by petty jealousy; he would, however, want to know about ‘Peter’ for professional reasons. How had they met? Why was Bernhard dining with him in London? If Riedle told him about the mugging in Brussels, Minasian would almost certainly conclude that ‘Peter’ was the pseudonym of a British intelligence officer.

Kell lit a cigarette, opened the window in his living room and poured a glass of wine. He could do nothing but wait. Spotting a copy of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
on his shelves, he took it down and began to read, drawn into the world of Doublethink and the Ministry of Love for the first time since his teens. Kell checked his laptop every four or five minutes for a reply from Minasian, but nothing had appeared in the account. At around midnight, surveillance at the Piccadilly hotel reported that Riedle had gone to bed. Kell took a shower to kill more time, but there was still no activity from Minasian fifteen minutes later.

Just after one o’clock, he took a sleeping pill, set his alarm for seven, and called it a night.

He woke at six. Minasian had replied to Riedle’s message. The wording was almost exactly as Kell had anticipated. A couple of lines in response to the Archibald’s email, then:

Kell called Amelia immediately.

‘There may be a slight problem.’

‘There’s always a slight problem.’

‘Bernie is trying to make our boy jealous by telling him about Peter.’

‘About you?’ Amelia asked.

‘Yes.’

Kell was still in bed, propped up in front of the laptop, eyes sticky with sleep, his brain clearing out the remnants of the sleeping pill.

‘He’s told him about Brussels? About the fight?’

‘Not yet.’ Kell set the laptop to one side and stood up. ‘If he does, I’m going to delete the message before Minasian gets a chance to read it. It’s worth the risk.’

Amelia did not hesitate. ‘Agreed,’ she said.

‘Any sign of him?’

‘Who? Minasian?’ There was a momentary pause, perhaps while Amelia checked her surveillance reports. ‘None.’

‘And Svetlana?’

‘Housed to Claridge’s last night.’

Kell could hear the mumble of Radio 4 in the background and assumed that Amelia was in her kitchen at the grace-and-favour SIS flat in London. They agreed to stay in touch throughout the day, though Amelia explained that she would be in a meeting ‘with the PM’ from two o’clock onwards.

‘I’m leaving it with you, Tom,’ she said. ‘Do what you have to do.’

Kell immediately called surveillance at the Piccadilly hotel and requested minute-by-minute updates on Riedle’s behaviour and movements. Just before eight he was told that the target had woken up. Having gone to the bathroom, Riedle’s first act had been to open his computer. Watching a live feed at Vauxhall Cross, the surveillance officer reported that Riedle was ‘typing something into the keyboard’. When he had finished, Kell logged into the secure emails.

Sure enough, his reply was sitting in the inbox:

Kell was intensely relieved. The meeting off-site in Sterndale Road – rather than in Riedle’s hotel room – was doubtless yet another layer of Minasian paranoia, but the time delay was sufficient to give Tech-Ops the chance to rig the apartment. Kell typed the address into his iPhone. The property was no more than five minutes on foot from his own flat in Sinclair Road. He guessed that Riedle had booked it on Airbnb, or a similar online agent, and contacted Thames House to arrange entry to the property.

‘Soak the place,’ he told them, when the senior member of the surveillance team called him back twenty minutes later. ‘Get every nook and cranny. Bedrooms, bathrooms, balconies, cupboards. I’m going to need clear dialogue, clear images. This is a high-value target, a once-only opportunity. Everything has to go like clockwork.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,’ the man replied, and Kell experienced the strange and invigorating sensation of the blacklisted man who has finally been invited back into his favourite club.