A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3) (12 page)

It was then just a question of waiting for Alexander Minasian.

He had told Riedle that he would arrive in London on Tuesday the thirtieth, but by sunset there was no sign of him at Claridge’s. Three different surveillance officers working on rotation in the lobby reported sightings of Svetlana, but at no point during the day did she leave the hotel. Kell knew that Minasian might have slipped up to her room via a staff entrance, or even by donning a simple disguise, but it concerned him when Svetlana was seen eating dinner alone in the hotel restaurant with only a paperback for company.

He checked the email contact between Riedle and Dmitri but there had been no further messages between the two men. Minasian had agreed to meet Riedle at Sterndale Road ‘at about 3 p.m., if I can get away from Vera’. That was their final exchange. Had Minasian been spooked by ‘Peter’ and Archibald’s? Or was it simply in his nature to dissemble and confuse? Kell could not know. He could only sit and wait, reading the surveillance updates, watching the occasional rally at Wimbledon and ringing out for food.

At ten thirty, he called Amelia at home.

‘He’s not here.’

‘I am aware of that,’ she said.

‘If he doesn’t come, we’ve got nothing.’

‘I am also aware of that.’

‘How was the Prime Minister?’ Kell was irritated by her supercilious tone.

‘Sunburned,’ she replied.

The conversation did not last long. Amelia confirmed what Kell already knew – that Riedle and Svetlana were both in their hotel rooms – and tried to console him with the thought that Minasian was probably already in the UK, ‘shaking off an imaginary tail in Cambridge or Gatwick or Penrith’.

‘You know how that lot operate,’ she said. ‘Always think they’ve got company, even when they’re supposed to be on shopping holidays in sunny England with their beautiful young wives. You want to know my guess?’

‘I do,’ Kell replied.

‘Our man Alexander is fast asleep in his little bed in Kiev. Tomorrow morning, first thing, he’ll take a cab to the airport, fly into Heathrow under alias, skip through Passport Control and meet Svetlana for lunch.’

‘What about Sterndale Road?’ Kell asked. ‘What about Riedle? They’ve only got their love nest until Thursday morning.’

There was a noise down the line, as though Amelia thought that Kell was being unnecessarily pessimistic.

‘How long is he going to need with Riedle? At some point in the afternoon, he’ll make his excuses to Svetlana, hop in a cab to Brook Green, have his little chat with Bernie, they’ll go to bed for a bit. Then Alexander will head back to Claridge’s.’ Kell lit a cigarette, listening. ‘That’s all we’ll need,’ she said. ‘Confirmation on the mikes that the two of them have been to bed together. Once we have that, we have everything. Visual proof, audio proof, the lot. Then you’ll have what you need, Tom. The head of John the Baptist.’

Shahid Khan found the new life easier than he had thought it would be. It had been simple to forget his old ways and to blend in. He looked good and he knew that people liked him. He was fit and he was strong and not shy to talk to anyone who crossed his path. The guys in the gym asked him for tips on fitness and he helped them with circuits and weights. It gave Shahid pleasure to know that he was fooling them. They thought that he was their friend, their ‘buddy’. Shahid drew satisfaction from this because their friendship and camaraderie meant nothing to him. He was playing a role. He was doing it so that nobody would suspect him, so that when the day of his martyrdom arrived, these same people would tell their friends and families that Shahid Khan had seemed like such a ‘normal’ young man, so easy-going and friendly, not a care in the world. They were all fools. They had not been able to see the anger inside him. Shahid was not a ‘normal’ person. He was exceptional.

He played the same role when he was working at the supermarket. The girls on the checkouts looked at Shahid and smiled at him; some of them even teased him about his Yorkshire accent. Young mothers in heavy make-up with small children shopping in the mornings and afternoons cut him sly glances as he stacked the shelves. They asked him questions that he knew they did not need to ask. Where could they find ice cream? Where could they find sliced bread? They wanted him. He could tell by the way they smiled. Shahid knew they were lonely and empty, women with nothing inside them except base desires. They had no learning or education, no understanding of how to raise a family properly in the eyes of God. Their children were always covered in food and screaming. Shahid felt pity for them growing up in a world like this, with fathers who had abandoned them and mothers who thought only of themselves and their own desires. On Friday and Saturday nights he had seen the drinking and the fights on the streets of Brighton. Girls exposed themselves and drank alcohol and behaved like there was no difference between a man and a woman. Shahid saw how important money was to these people and yet how lazy they were. At the supermarket, for instance, the staff who worked alongside him were always trying to cheat the system. They took time off or stole food from the shelves. They worked and then they boasted about taking money from the council for housing benefit, for dole. They were open about this, as if they wished to be honoured for their lies. They had no pride, just as the women who exposed themselves in the streets and on the beaches had no honour. Shahid thought of the nobility and the courage of the women he had seen in the Caliphate. They knew that it was their duty to serve their men and to serve God.

Shahid had found a room in a house in Rottingdean. His landlady was a Christian woman who went to church every Sunday. Kitty. He rarely saw her. The house was divided into two parts. He lived at the back in a bedsit that he had decorated according to Jalal’s instructions. There were posters on the walls of Arsenal footballers, of American actresses, of Bruce Lee. Shahid kept no poetry or religious materials in view of the landlady. He did not wish to raise her suspicions. He kept his Koran hidden behind a stack of DVDs. He prayed at night, in the darkness of his room, and again first thing in the morning. Shahid had never attended mosque in Brighton. He could not risk being seen by the cameras or by the agents of MI5 who had infested sacred Muslim places of worship. He yearned for mosque but understood that he would be forgiven by God after he had completed his act of martyrdom. He would be rewarded. This was the radiance of Islam.

At nine forty-three on Wednesday morning, Alexander Minasian was sighted emerging from the revolving doors at Claridge’s in the company of his wife, Svetlana, and an ‘unidentified male’ estimated to be ‘in his late fifties or early sixties’. He was wearing black shoes, dark blue chino trousers, a white shirt and grey sports jacket. Nobody knew how Minasian had entered the hotel or when he had arrived. No morning flight from Kiev had landed in time to allow him to get to the hotel so quickly and there was no flag on his passport. He had most likely travelled under alias and slipped into the lobby in the early hours of the morning having worked counter-surveillance on Riedle, possibly for several days. That he was still in London and happy to be seen in Svetlana’s company was a credit to the team working on the operation. Minasian thought he was clean and plainly had no idea that both his wife and his erstwhile boyfriend were being watched by the Security Service.

Surveillance reported that Minasian, Svetlana and the older man were ushered into the same bulletproof limousine that had fetched Svetlana from Heathrow two days earlier. They were driven along Brook Street towards Hanover Square and followed north by an MI5 black cab to an address on Upper Wimpole Street. It was at this point that surveillance contacted Kell with the update.

Kell was sitting at home in his kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee in front of two laptops, three mobile phones and a Ben Macintyre op-ed in
The Times
.

‘A man matching GAGARIN’s description has just driven with VALENTINA to Upper Wimpole Street, sir. One nine one.’ ‘GAGARIN’ had been given to Minasian as a codename, on the basis that he bore a passing resemblance to the Russian cosmonaut. A quick search on Wikipedia had revealed that Yuri Gagarin had been married to a woman named ‘Valentina’. ‘A second male in the vehicle with them. Older, about sixty. Black suit, white shirt. Didn’t seem like muscle.’

Kell knew in his bones that the older man was Andrei Eremenko. He was about to say as much when the hunch was confirmed.

‘I’ve had Vauxhall call up images of TOLSTOY, sir. I’d say it’s a match. Looks like him.’

It was the third time in his career that Kell had heard Surveillance refer to a Russian target as TOLSTOY. They needed to read some new books.

‘Thank you,’ he replied. ‘Was GAGARIN carrying anything?’

Kell wanted to know if Minasian had an overnight bag, something large enough to contain a change of clothes.

‘Affirmative. Small backpack. VALENTINA just her usual handbag. Nothing on TOLSTOY.’

Kell was stubbing out a cigarette. He had been smoking almost continuously for forty-eight hours.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Switch the cars and keep an eye on them when they come out.’

Though Kell was relieved that Minasian was in London, he was also unsettled by the thought that the man whom he held responsible for Rachel’s murder was now just a few miles away in Westminster. His presence was tangible. Kell wanted to confront him, but felt trapped. It was like being a boxer who had trained for a fight in which he would never participate. How extraordinarily easy it would be to walk out of his flat and hail a cab, to drive to Upper Wimpole Street and challenge Minasian face to face. No tradecraft. No surveillance. No plots. Just a reckoning between men. And yet that option was denied to him by the demands of the operation. The political had superseded the personal. Kell and Amelia had set themselves on the path of an elaborate revenge which, if handled properly, would leave Minasian’s life and career in tatters. The gentle, blameless Svetlana would be married to a traitor of the Motherland and her father’s business career ruined by association. And for what? The prestige of running a Russian intelligence officer? To honour Rachel’s memory? Staring at the laptops and the phones, the notepads and the half-empty cups of coffee, at all the paraphernalia of scrutiny and surveillance, Kell wondered – not for the first time – if it was all going to be worth it.

To distract himself, he typed ‘191 Upper Wimpole Street’ into Google, on the assumption that the family had been invited to a meeting or brunch at a private residence. What he saw cast him back into the twilight of his own marriage, to numberless visits of the same kind at Claire’s side, each of them more desperate than the last:

The Wimpole Clinic offers an extensive range of fertility services. Our team of specialist consultants in the fields of fertility and gynaecology are expert in all aspects of assisted conception, endoscopic surgery and male fertility. We can provide comprehensive assistance to couples who are not able to conceive on their own.

The coincidence was startling. It transpired that Minasian had been telling a version of the truth when he complained to Riedle that ‘Vera’ was suffering from a medical condition that left her ‘in great pain’. That pain was not physical; it was psychological. Claire had been devastated by her inability to have children, so much so that Kell attributed the deterioration of their marriage chiefly to the agony of her infertility. He had been resigned to living out the rest of his life without children, but Claire had sought solace in the arms of other men, wrongly believing that they might give her the child she had always craved. Minasian was now living through the same torment. Was it his own fault that Svetlana was unable to conceive? Had Riedle been correct in suggesting that the sexual relationship between them was non-existent? And why was Eremenko accompanying his daughter and son-in-law on such a private and potentially distressing visit? Daddy’s money was almost certainly paying for Svetlana’s treatment, but there was something humiliating – even emasculating – about his direct involvement.

Kell picked up the phone. Amelia was at her desk. When he told her that Minasian and Svetlana were attending an appointment at the clinic, he heard the quiet, empty shock in her voice as memories of her own long battle with conception came flooding back.

‘Is that so?’ she said softly. ‘Poor girl.’

There was a long pause, as much as five or six seconds, a period in which the decency inside Kell, his momentary sympathy for Minasian, completely evaporated. An idea of such wretched cynicism had taken hold of him that he was almost ashamed of himself for conceiving it. Yet he could not shake it off. To Kell’s astonishment, Amelia had arrived at the same conclusion. They were both thinking in exactly the same way. They had made the same ruthless calculation, but it was Amelia who was bold enough to articulate it.

‘We can use this,’ she said. ‘You realize that, don’t you?’

‘I do,’ Kell replied.

‘Where is the best fertility treatment in the world?’

‘London.’

‘Exactly. If Minasian wants to have children, he needs to be sure that we’ll let Svetlana into the country. Once she starts her treatment, she’ll be flying in every six weeks. Put a block on her passport and that’s not going to happen.’

Kell was dismayed by Amelia’s logic, not least because her ultimate disregard for Svetlana matched his own. In Amelia’s position, he would have played exactly the same card. This was the business they were in. No compassion, no sympathy, no kindness. Honour among thieves, perhaps. Honour among spies, never. They were committed to taking Minasian as their prize and would stop at nothing to do so.

Shahid longed to act, to do what he had been sent to do.

In Brighton he had come to see, with blessed clarity, what he had been taught about the West, first by Javed Rahman, the preacher in Leeds who had brought him to true Islam, and later by Jalal. They had taught him that liberty was a poison inside human beings. They had used a phrase Shahid had always remembered: ‘Freedom is made of thorns’. The openness of European society, the liberal values of America and the West, led directly to moral depravity. Therefore that society needed to be cleansed. Shahid understood this fully now. The cleansing could only take place if those who lived by such values were wiped away.

So he waited, day and night, for the signal. Whenever he grew impatient and hungry to act, Shahid thought of the silent army of true Muslims in every community in Europe and around the world who believed in what he was going to do. Those people, the oppressed and the humble, gave him strength. Jalal had told him that the attack must come at the ‘most timely political moment’. Those who had established the Caliphate, who wanted it to expand and to grow in strength, predicted that Shahid’s martyrdom would fill the governments and the populations of the West with fear; his bravery would draw the United Kingdom and her allies into acts of retaliation and vengeance. The ultimate goal was war.

Whenever he was not working or training in the gym, Shahid scoured the newspapers, listened to the radio and watched television. He read every story he could find about ISIS and the Middle East. He studied the political situation in America, in Russia, and closely followed events in the United Kingdom. He wanted to be able to anticipate when the order would come. If his brothers and sisters in the Caliphate suffered a reverse – if, say, a holy warrior was killed by a drone strike or a prisoner of the infidel released from captivity – would Shahid be signalled to act? Or would they prefer him to strike when ISIS had been victorious in battle, to indicate to the world – to believers and non-believers alike – that the Caliphate was indestructible and its dominance inevitable?

Finally, on an evening late in June, as Shahid was returning home from work, he received the message from Kris. It was just as Jalal had said it would be: a simple text message, using pre-arranged language, indicating when the operation was to go ahead. Yet it dismayed Shahid to learn of the delay. He could not understand why they wanted him to wait.

Time and venue agreed: 11/7, 6 p.m.