A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3) (19 page)

‘It is not a problem,’ Minasian replied. ‘I know London. I know where I am. I can walk from here.’ He looked up at the surrounding buildings, across the street at an unmarked Transit van. ‘No doubt your people will be following me all the way.’

Kell did nothing to disabuse Minasian of the idea that he was under surveillance. They shook hands, Minasian’s grip surprisingly soft.

‘Look after yourself,’ he said.

‘You too, Tom.’

Without acknowledging the driver, Minasian walked north along Sinclair Road. He did not look back. Kell watched him. Just another Russian in London, just another pedestrian on the street. When he was about to vanish out of sight, Kell called out.

‘Hey!’

He was not quite sure why he was doing what he was about to do. Minasian reacted to Kell’s shout and turned around. Kell raised his hand, indicating that Minasian should stop. He began walking towards him.

‘What is it?’ Minasian asked as Kell caught up with him.

Kell knew that he had been overcome by a moment of sentimentality, but there was also good operational sense in what he was about to say. Agent care. Agent cultivation.

‘What about Riedle?’ he asked. ‘What about Bernie?’

Minasian stepped backwards and frowned. He seemed to think that Kell was taunting him.

‘The funeral,’ Kell explained. ‘Would you like somebody to go? To represent you?’

Minasian reacted in a way that Kell could not have anticipated. With profound sadness, the Russian lowered his head, then reached out and placed a hand on Kell’s shoulder. He looked at him with gratitude.

‘You are kind,’ he said. ‘You do not need to do this. I will mourn him privately. All of my feelings for Bernhard were private. I am used to this.’

Without another word, Minasian turned and walked away. There was a skip beside Kell, filled with bags of earth and smashed furniture. He leaned against it and watched Minasian until he was out of sight. He was heading in the direction of Westfield. Kell assumed that he would go directly to Marks and Spencer and walk the ground in readiness for their meeting. It was what he himself would have done.

In due course Kell turned and headed back towards the car. The driver was watching him as he approached the vehicle. There was a look on his face of small-minded bureaucratic distrust that irritated Kell intensely.

‘Everything all right?’ he said to him.

The driver did not reply.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I have a postcode, sir.’

‘What is it?’

The driver indicated with a tilt of the head that he was not prepared to divulge even this simple piece of information. ‘I have my orders,’ he explained.

Kell suppressed an urge to lean into the car and pick up the instruction sheet the driver had left out on the passenger seat. Instead he looked up at his flat and saw Mowbray’s face in the bedroom window, half hidden behind twitching curtains. It was like catching a neighbour spying. He wondered how long Mowbray would remain loyal. Was it his fault that Amelia had sent the car? Had they cooked up the plan together?

‘Do you need anything from your residence?’ the driver asked. He had a pedantic, adenoidal voice. ‘I was told it would be a long night.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that you should perhaps pack a bag.’

Kell shook his head, no longer bothering to disguise the fact that he had no idea what the hell was going on. He walked back to the front door and let himself in. Mowbray was at the table in the sitting room, working on a laptop.

‘You knew about this?’ Kell asked.

‘Knew about what?’

‘The car. The driver.’

Mowbray looked up, an expression of blank innocence on his face. ‘No, guv.’

Kell trusted him as he would once have trusted Amelia or Rachel. That is to say, he did not trust Mowbray at all.

‘What did she say to you on the phone? Did she threaten you?’

‘Threaten me? What about?’ Mowbray was not angry, but seemed bewildered by Kell’s questions. ‘She was just fucked off that you were doing stuff behind her back. Disobeying orders.’

‘Just me or you as well?’

‘You and me both.’

Kell took a moment. There was no point in making an enemy of Mowbray, in continuing to interrogate him.

‘The second film,’ he said, trying to move on. ‘Did you encrypt it?’

‘Just doing it now.’

‘Don’t,’ Kell told him.

Mowbray again seemed puzzled.

‘Something’s going on.’ Kell was looking around for his lighter. ‘I don’t want Amelia to see the second film until I know what’s happening. Can you hold her off until morning?’

‘I suppose.’

Kell did not know what to make of Mowbray’s reply. It was neither a guarantee that he would do what he had been asked, nor an indication that his loyalty to Kell had been bought out by SIS. Kell took his phone, went into the bedroom and threw a change of clothes in an overnight bag. He grabbed some toiletries, picked up his jacket and wallet and went back into the sitting room.

‘Did you overhear any of the arrangements I made with GAGARIN? Lines of communication? Crash meetings?’

‘No, guv.’

Kell was pleased. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘So if Amelia asks you about any of that stuff, you won’t have to lie to her.’

Mowbray frowned. ‘No, I suppose not.’ He closed the laptop. ‘What’s going on, boss? How come they let GAGARIN walk? None of this feels right. Why is it you going in the car and not him?’

Kell persuaded himself to be reassured by Mowbray’s questions. He found the lighter and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

‘I have no idea,’ he replied. ‘No idea at all.’

Kell was smoking as he opened the back door of the Vauxhall.

‘Please extinguish your cigarette before entering the vehicle,’ said the driver, with such banal, automated humourlessness that Kell was tempted to stub it out on the paintwork. Mowbray had gathered up his belongings and was already fifty metres away on Sinclair Road, heading south towards Kensington Olympia. Kell tossed the cigarette in the gutter, sat in the back seat and closed the door.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘I have my instructions, sir. I only have a postcode—’

‘So you keep saying.’ Kell didn’t bother buckling the seatbelt. ‘A postcode is all I’ll need. What is it?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge that, sir.’ Though Kell had spent over two decades working alongside numberless job-for-life bureaucrats and middle-managers, he was always astonished by the manner in which they spoke. ‘All I can tell you is that you should prepare for a journey of perhaps two or two and a half hours. Traffic dependent.’

Kell was at the edge of his patience. He felt as he had done on that wretched November day four years earlier when two SIS security gorillas had escorted him to the entrance of Vauxhall Cross, demanding – in tones of flat, emotionless condescension – that Kell surrender his pass at the gates ‘before leaving the premises’. Kell had served too loyally, and achieved too much for Amelia Levene, to be treated with such disdain.

He sat back. Perhaps he was overreacting. He was tired and hungry and still angry with Amelia. Kell could not think why it was necessary to sit in a car for two hours in order to have a meeting with her. Who else would be there? In his state of bedraggled irritation, he would not have been surprised to find Amelia waiting for him in a coastal safe house alongside her opposite number in the SVR. Anything was possible. Why else had she been so reluctant to ensnare Minasian?

‘Can we stop for something to eat?’ he asked.

The driver had been listening to a debate about the EU on LBC radio. He said: ‘Sorry, what was that?’ and turned down the volume.

‘I said can we stop and get something to eat? Just a sandwich will do.’

‘Yes, sir. That should be possible. I’ll stop at the next petrol station.’

The next petrol station turned out to be Fleet Services on the M3, an hour outside London. Kell was followed around the rest area by the driver and watched at a discreet distance as he bought a Whopper at Burger King and a double espresso from Starbucks.

‘Where did you think I was going to go?’ he said, no longer bothering to disguise his contempt as they walked back towards the car. ‘Hide in the gents? Run out the back and hotwire a Ford Fiesta?’

Nothing more was said. Kell sat in the back, wolfing his burger, running through old emails on his iPhone, and suppressing a truculent desire to rub gherkins into the upholstery.

Fifteen minutes later, the driver took the exit for the A303. Kell now knew where he was being taken. Sure enough, just before half past nine, the Vauxhall entered the village of Chalke Bissett, where Amelia owned a small house. It was here, two years earlier, that Kell and Amelia had run the operation to flush out her kidnapped son. At the church in the centre of the village the sat-nav became confused and began to send the Vauxhall back in the direction of Salisbury. Kell explained that he had been to the address many times before and directed the driver through the village and along the isolated lane that led to Amelia’s property.

To his surprise, the driver did not insist on accompanying Kell to the front door. Instead, he turned the Vauxhall around and waited in the lane while Kell approached the house. It was almost dark, but he could make out a satellite dish and what looked to be a mobile phone mast on the roof. Tech-Ops at Vauxhall Cross had given C’s country retreat an upgrade.

Amelia took her time coming to the door. Kell had to knock twice before she appeared in the short corridor which led from the kitchen to the front of the house. She was wearing casual weekend clothes – there was a slight tear in the knee of her jeans – and looked as though she had been doing some gardening.

‘You made it,’ she said. She was perspiring very slightly and carrying a half-finished glass of white wine. ‘Where’s your driver?’

‘Waiting for you to let him go,’ Kell replied.

Amelia peered out towards the lane and gestured at the Vauxhall. Kell saw the car move away.

‘I made dinner,’ she said, leaving a faint mist of Hermès Calèche in the corridor as she turned towards the kitchen. Kell felt like a husband coming home late after a long day at work.

‘I ate in the car,’ he replied.

He had not been back to the house since the Malot operation, but the place still looked and smelled the same. Fading wallpaper, worn rugs, furniture that had been in Amelia’s family for generations. He saw two photographs of her son, François, who lived in Paris, and remembered Minasian’s remark, earlier in the afternoon:
You have shown me so much of yourself. Your taste. Your style. The things you possess and the things you lack.
Amelia offered to take Kell’s jacket, but he kept it on, immediately lighting a cigarette as a means of testing her mood.

‘If you’re going to do that, we’ll have to go outside,’ she said. ‘Drink?’

Kell saw that there was a half-finished bottle of red wine in the kitchen and asked for a glass. Memories were coming back to him all the time. He recalled the elderly Barbara Knight masquerading as a cleaning lady, the team watching and listening to her every move on a bank of screens in the house next door. Kell wondered what had become of her, and of her feckless husband, whose name momentarily escaped him. In different circumstances, he would have enjoyed reminiscing about the operation with Amelia, but too much had changed between them. He opened the back door and took a seat at the head of a garden table. Amelia followed him, passing Kell his glass of wine.

‘Thank you for coming all this way,’ she said.

‘Don’t mention it. Nothing I like more than surprises.’

‘Yes. I remember.’

There was a smell of roast chicken coming from the kitchen. Kell was suddenly hungry.

‘Why all the subterfuge?’ he asked.

‘No particular reason.’ Amelia sipped her drink. It would not have surprised Kell if she had added: ‘I just enjoy winding you up.’

‘The driver. A favourite of yours?’

‘Increasingly, why?’

‘Never mind.’ The easy rapport between them was bothering him. He had expected Amelia to be in a less affable mood. ‘Bureaucrat. Company man. Looked like he hadn’t told a joke since the mid-1980s. Not my cup of tea.’

‘Oh, poor Tom,’ Amelia replied, and Kell’s patience snapped.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Amelia leaned back in mock-surprise. ‘Nothing!’ she said, and Kell knew that he had overreacted. ‘I was just teasing you.’

There was a prolonged silence. Kell continued to smoke the cigarette, but found the taste of it sour against the wine. She was behaving as if nothing she had done in the preceding twelve hours was of any consequence or concern. The order to release Minasian, her refusal to cooperate on surveillance, the reluctance to offer Kell a safe house. All of it appeared to have been forgotten.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

‘Not to me. I just spent the last few weeks reeling in an SVR officer for you. On my own time. Recruited him this afternoon. Only you don’t seem all that enthusiastic about it.’

‘Can you blame me?’

Kell dropped the cigarette, putting it out under his shoe. Amelia looked down and appeared to suppress an urge to ask Kell to pick it up.

‘What don’t I know?’ he said. ‘What are you keeping from me?’

He dreaded her reply. There had been so many secrets between them, so many lies. Amelia could finesse and conceal with greater skill than any person he had ever known.

‘You know everything,’ she said. Her eyes contained an apology for earlier deceptions, as though she was keen to build a new and more trusting relationship between them. In feeling this, Kell knew that he was most probably deceiving himself.

‘Then why are you acting this way?’ he asked. ‘Why tell me to stand down? Why don’t you want a piece of Minasian?’

‘To protect you.’ Amelia stood up and walked back into the kitchen. Kell picked up his glass and followed her. She had opened the door of the oven and was pulling out the chicken.

‘Protect me from what?’

She set the roasting tray to one side before answering.

‘You don’t see him straight. You’re too close to him.’

‘You’re not serious?’ The question contained what Kell hoped was an appropriate level of contempt.

‘Harold sent the tape,’ Amelia replied, finding a carving knife in a drawer beside the sink. ‘I watched it before you arrived. You’re too easy on him. He tells you whatever he thinks you want to hear.’

Kell took another sip of wine. It had been a long and difficult day. He did not want to give Amelia the pleasure of seeing him lose control.

‘You think I don’t understand him? You think I handled him wrong?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Then what are you saying? That you don’t believe we have a lone wolf? That he’s lying about this kid from Leeds?’

Amelia secured the chicken with a fork and began to carve through a leg.

‘What kid from Leeds? What are you talking about?’

Amelia had not yet seen that section of the recording. She knew nothing about the terrorist threat. Kell explained what little Minasian had told him and was stunned by her reaction.

‘Sounds like he’s just making it up.’

Kell took a step towards her. ‘What?’

It amazed him that she was so certain in her conviction, so oblivious to any sense that she was being stubborn or obstructive, even though he himself had experienced identical misgivings about STRIPE.

‘Well, we certainly have no way of checking him out, do we?’ Amelia was still carving, still not looking at him. ‘Unless Minasian gives you something actionable, a detail we could use to run this boy to ground, what he’s told you is effectively worthless.’

‘Isn’t that the point of having him as an agent?’ Kell lit a second cigarette, blowing the smoke towards the food. Amelia cut him a look. ‘I see him again. I get more information. We try to stop the attack.’

‘Possibly,’ she conceded. ‘If the possibility of such an attack even exists.’

‘How can you afford to be so sanguine about this? He’s a fucking clean skin.’

At last, Amelia set down the knife and turned towards him.

‘Tom, you know as well as I do that we get hundreds of threats like this every year. I grant you, this one may be genuine. It could be the case that Alexander Minasian is a noble humanitarian who wants to help prevent a terrorist attack on UK soil. It could be the case that the SVR just happen to have a line into the ISIS cell in Syria that obtained this false passport and funded a young
jihadi
back to Britain.’ She crossed to the stove and emptied a pan of gravy into a small porcelain jug. ‘It could also be the case that Minasian knew he had to give you something this afternoon in order to get out of your flat, so he made it up off the top of his head.’

‘Fine,’ Kell replied, holding up his hands in mock surrender. He was so exasperated by Amelia’s attitude, so bewildered by her intransigence, that he did not feel it was worth continu-ing. She was not going to change her mind. She was only going to find more reasons to doubt GAGARIN. Added to this sense of frustration was his own nagging suspicion that she was right; Kell wondered why it had become so important to him to believe everything Minasian had told him.

‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ she said, ‘but I just don’t buy it. You think that you can get GAGARIN to cooperate on the basis that he’s gay and working for a government that is aggressively homophobic. You think that you can offer him refuge from Andrei Eremenko, even though nobody has a clue who really carried out this afternoon’s shooting.’

‘You don’t think Eremenko had Riedle killed?’

‘I have no idea!’

‘Who else then? Who ordered it?’

Amelia was scalded by the handle of a pan and dropped it into the sink with a clatter. Kell asked if she was all right but she brushed him off.

‘Tom, we don’t yet know who ordered it.’ He searched her face, looking for some tiny indication that she was concealing something, that SIS knew who was behind the assassination. ‘And we don’t
have
to know. It’s a police matter. The murder of Bernhard Riedle, tragic though it is, is not the responsibility of the Secret Intelligence Service.’ Kell tossed his cigarette through the back door. Amelia followed it with disapproving eyes, as if Kell’s act of minor vandalism might start a fire in her garden. ‘Answer me this,’ she said. ‘When have you ever known a successful recruitment based on blackmail?’

Kell did not want to concede her point, but failed to provide an answer.

‘When we work successfully,’ she continued, ‘what we do is based on trust, on empathy. It isn’t ever about revenge or coercion. You know that.’

‘Of course I do,’ Kell replied.

‘So when Minasian tells you how much he loved Bernhard Riedle, that he couldn’t walk away from Sterndale Road because he felt like a child “standing in the shower after a swim” – or whatever it was that he said – all I see is a bullshit artist of the first order.’ Kell could picture Amelia studying the first video, looking for reasons to doubt Minasian, to push him away. ‘Here is a man whose career you undermined by exposing Ryan Kleckner,’ she said. ‘He has a personal animus against us – against
you
, in particular – that is every bit as toxic as yours against him. Alexander Minasian is the sort of person who will say and do
anything
in order to survive. He will never betray the SVR, and he will certainly never allow himself to be humiliated by you.’

‘So I’m the problem?’ Kell felt another spasm in his lower back. Amelia saw him wince in pain but said nothing. ‘Because of Kleckner, because of Odessa, he won’t deal with me? If somebody else runs Minasian, you think that he or she might produce something useful from him?’