A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3) (2 page)

Thomas Kell stood on the westbound platform at Bayswater station, one eye on a copy of the
Evening Standard
, the other on the man standing three metres to his left wearing faded denim jeans and a brown tweed jacket. Kell had seen him first on Praed Street, reflected in the window of a Chinese restaurant, then again twenty minutes later coming out of a branch of Starbucks on Queensway. Average height, average build, average features. Tapping his Oyster card on the reader at Bayswater, Kell had turned to find the man walking into the station a few paces behind him. He had ducked the eye contact, staring at his well-worn shoes. That was when Kell sensed he had a problem.

It was just after three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in June. Kell counted eleven other people waiting on the platform, two of them standing directly behind him. Drawing on a long-forgotten piece of self-defence, he placed his right leg further forward than his left, shifted his weight back on to his rear heel as the train clattered into the station – and waited for the shove in the back.

It never came. No crowding up, no crazed Chechen errand boy trying to push him on to the tracks as a favour to the SVR. Instead the District Line train deposited half a dozen passengers on to the platform and eased away. When Kell looked left, he saw that the man in the faded jeans had gone. The two men who had been standing behind him had also boarded the train. Kell allowed himself a half smile. His occasional outbreaks of paranoia were a kind of madness, a yearning for the old days; the corrupted sixth sense of a forty-six-year-old spy who knew that the game was over.

A second train, moments later. Kell stepped on board, took a fold-down seat and re-opened the
Standard
. Royal pregnancies. Property prices. Electoral conspiracies. He was just another traveller on the Tube, traceless and nondescript. Nobody knew who he was nor who he had ever been. On the fifth page, a photograph of an aid worker murdered by the maniacs of ISIS; on the seventh, more wretched news from Ukraine. It was of no consolation to Kell that in the twelve months he had spent as a private citizen following the murder of his girlfriend, Rachel Wallinger, the regions on which he had worked for the greater part of his adult life had further disintegrated into violence and criminality. Though Kell had deliberately avoided making contact with anyone in the Service, he had occasionally run into former colleagues in the supermarket or on the street, only to be treated to lengthy discourses on the ‘impossible task’ facing SIS in Russia, Syria, Yemen and beyond.

‘The best we can hope for is a kind of stasis, somehow to keep a
lid
on things,’ a former colleague had told him when they bumped into one another at a Christmas party. ‘God knows it was easier in the age of the despots. There are some mornings, Tom, when I’m as nostalgic for Mubarak and Gaddafi as a Dunkirk Tommy for the white cliffs of Dover. At least Saddam gave us something to
aim
for.’

The train pulled into Notting Hill Gate. In the same conversation, the colleague had offered his ‘sincere condolences’ over Rachel’s death and intimated to Kell how ‘devastated’ the ‘entire Service’ had been over the circumstances of her assassination in Istanbul. Kell had changed the subject. Rachel’s memory was his alone to curate; he wanted no part in others’ recollections of the woman to whom he had lost his heart. Perhaps he had been naive to fall so quickly for a woman he had barely known, yet he guarded the memory of his love as jealously as a starving animal with a scrap of food. Every morning, for months, Kell had thought of Rachel at the moment of waking, then steadily throughout the day, a debilitating punctuation to his solitary, unchanging existence. He had raged at her, he had talked with her, he had drenched himself in memories of the short period in which they had been involved with one another. The loss of the
potential
that Rachel had possessed to knit together the broken strands of Kell’s life constituted the most acute suffering he had ever known. Yet he had survived it.

‘You must be having a mid-life crisis,’ his ex-wife, Claire, had told him at one of their occasional reunion lunches, commenting on the fact that Kell had given up alcohol, was taking himself off to the gym three times a week and had broken a twenty-year, twenty-a-day smoking habit. ‘No alcohol, no fags. No
spying
? Next thing you’ll be buying an open-topped Porsche and taking twenty-two-year-olds to the polo at Windsor Great Park.’

Kell had laughed at the joke even as he inwardly acknowledged how little Claire understood him. She knew nothing, of course, about his relationship with Rachel, nothing about the operation that had led to her death. This was just the latest in a lifetime of secrets between them. As far as Claire was concerned, Kell would always be the same man: an intelligence officer through and through, a spy who had spent more than two decades in thrall to the lustre and intrigue of the secret world. She believed that their marriage had failed because he had loved the game more than he had loved her.

‘You’re wedded to your agents, Tom,’ Claire had said during one of many similarly unequivocal conversations that had heralded the end of the marriage. ‘Amelia Levene is your family, not me. If you had to choose between us, I have no doubt that you would pick MI6.’

Amelia. The woman whose career Kell had saved and whose reputation he had salvaged. The Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, appointed three years earlier, now approaching the end of her tenure, with the Middle East on fire, Russia in political and economic turmoil and Africa ravaged by Islamist terror. Kell had neither seen nor heard from her since the afternoon of Rachel’s funeral, an occasion at which they had deliberately ignored one another. By recruiting Rachel to work for SIS behind his back, Amelia had effectively signed her death warrant.

Earl’s Court. Kell stepped off the train and registered the familiar acid taste of his implacable resentment. It was the one thing he had been unable to control. He had come to terms with the end of his marriage, he had mastered his grief, reasoned that his professional future lay beyond the walls of Vauxhall Cross. Yet he could not still a yearning for vengeance. Kell wanted to seek out those in Moscow who had given the order for Rachel’s assassination. He wanted justice.

The Richmond service was due in a few minutes. A pigeon swooped in low from the Warwick Road, flapped towards the opposite platform and settled beside a bench. There was a District Line train standing empty behind it. The pigeon hopped on board. As if on cue, the doors slid shut and the train moved out of the station.

Kell turned and joined the huddle of passengers on platform 4, heads ducked down in text messages, Twitter feeds, games of Angry Birds. A huge bearded man with a ‘Baby on Board’ badge attached to the lapel of his jacket stood beside him. Kell half-expected to spot his old friend from Bayswater: faded denim jeans and a brown tweed jacket. A woman behind him was talking in Polish on a mobile phone; another, shrouded in a black niqab, was scolding a small child in Arabic. These were the citizens of the new London, the international masses whom Amelia Levene was charged to protect. More than twenty years earlier, Kell had joined SIS in a spirit of undiluted patriotism. To save lives, to defend and protect the kingdom, had seemed to him both a noble and an exhilarating pursuit for a young man with adventure in his blood. Now that London was a city of Africans and Americans, of Hollande-fleeing French, of Eastern Europeans too young to have known the impediments of Communism, he felt no different. The landscape had changed, yet Kell still felt wedded to an
idea
of England, even as that idea shifted and slipped beneath his feet. There were days when he longed to return to active duty, to stand once again at Amelia’s side, but Rachel’s death had pushed him into exile. He had allowed the personal to overcome the political.

The train pulled into the platform. Carriages as empty as his days flickered in the afternoon light. Kell stepped aside to allow an elderly woman to board the train, then took his seat, and waited.

Kell was at his flat in Sinclair Road within twenty minutes. He had been inside for less than five when his phone rang, a rare landline call that Kell assumed would be from Claire. The number was otherwise known only to SIS Personnel.

‘Guv?’

It didn’t take long for Kell to pick the voice. Born and raised in Elephant and Castle, then two decades in Tech-Ops at MI5.

‘Harold?’

‘The one and only.’

‘How did you get this number?’

‘Nice to hear from you, too.’

‘How?’ Kell asked again.

‘Do we have to do this?’

It was a fair question. With half a dozen clicks of a mouse, Harold Mowbray could have found out Kell’s blood type and credit rating. Now private sector, he had worked closely with Amelia on two occasions in the previous three years: Kell’s home number might even have come directly from ‘C’.

‘OK. So how have you been?’

‘Good, guv. Good.’

‘Arsenal doing all right?’

‘Nah. Gave them up for Lent. Too many pretty boys in midfield.’

Kell found himself reaching for a cigarette that wasn’t there. He thought back to the previous summer, sitting with Mowbray in a Bayswater safe house killing time waiting for a mole. Harold had known that Kell was in love with Rachel. He had come to the funeral, paid his respects. Kell trusted him insomuch as he had always been efficient and reliable, but knew that theirs was a professional relationship that would never transcend Mowbray’s loyalty to whoever was paying his bills.

‘So what’s up?’ he asked. ‘You selling something? Want me to buy your season ticket to Highbury?’

‘Keep up. Arsenal moved out of Highbury years ago. Been playing at the Emirates since 2006.’ It occurred to Kell that, save for a perfunctory exchange in Pret A Manger, this was the first conversation he had held with another human being in over twenty-four hours. The night before he had cooked spaghetti bolognese at home and watched back-to-back episodes of
House of Cards
. In the morning he had gone to the gym, then wandered alone around an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Sometimes he would go for days without any meaningful interaction whatsoever.

‘Still,’ said Mowbray, ‘we need to have a chat.’

‘Isn’t that what we’re doing?’

‘Face to face.
Mano a mano.
Too long and complicated for the phone.’

That could mean only one thing. Work. Blowback from a previous operation, or a dangled carrot on something new. Either way, Mowbray didn’t trust Kell’s landline to keep it a secret. Anybody could be listening in. London. Paris. Moscow.

‘You remember that Middle Eastern place we used to go to on the American gig?’

‘Which one?’ ‘The American gig’ had been the molehunt. Ryan Kleckner. A CIA officer in the pay of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service.

‘The one with the waitress.’

‘Oh,
that
one.’ Kell made a joke of it, but understood that Mowbray was being deliberately obscure. There was only one Middle Eastern restaurant that both of them had been to on the Kleckner operation. Westbourne Grove. Persian. Kell had no recollection of the waitress, pretty or otherwise. Mowbray was simply making sure that their table wouldn’t be covered in advance.

‘Can you make dinner tonight?’ he asked.

Kell thought about stalling but was too intrigued by the invitation. Besides, he was looking at another night of leftovers and
House of Cards
. Dinner with Harold would be a fillip.

‘Meet you there at eight?’ he suggested.

‘You will know me by the smell of my cologne.’

Kell arrived at the restaurant at quarter to eight, early enough to ask for a quiet spot at the back with line of sight to the entrance. To his surprise, Mowbray was already seated at a table in the centre of the small, brick-lined room, his back to a group of jabbering Spaniards.

It was fiercely hot, the open mouth of a
tanoor
blowing a furnace heat into Kell’s face as he walked inside. A waitress, whom he vaguely recognized, smiled at him as Mowbray stood up behind her. Iranian music was playing at a volume seemingly designed to guarantee a degree of conversational privacy.

‘Harold. How are you?’

‘
Salam
, guv.’

‘
Salam, khoobi
,’ Kell replied. The heat of the
tanoor
as he sat down was like a summer sun against his back.

‘You speak Farsi?’ They were shaking hands.

‘I was showing off,’ Kell said. ‘Enough to get by in restaurants.’

‘Menu Farsi,’ Mowbray replied, smiling at his own remark. ‘Iranians don’t like being confused for Arabs, do they?’

‘They do not.’

Mowbray looked to be recovering from a bad case of sunburn. His forehead was scalded red and there were flaking patches of dry skin around his mouth and nose.

‘Been away?’ Kell asked.

‘Funny you should mention that.’ Mowbray flapped a napkin into his lap and grinned. ‘Went to Egypt with the wife.’

‘Why funny?’

‘You’ll see. Shall we order?’

Kell wondered why he was playing hard to get. He opened his menu as the waitress passed their table. Mowbray looked up, caught Kell’s eye and winked.

‘So,’ he said, spring-loading another joke. ‘You can have a skewer of minced lamb with taftoon bread,
two
skewers of minced lamb with taftoon bread, a skewer of marinated lamb cubes with taftoon bread,
two
skewers of marinated lamb cubes with taftoon bread, a skewer of minced lamb
and
a skewer of marinated lamb cubes with taftoon …’

‘I get it,’ said Kell, smiling as he closed the menu. ‘You order. I’m going to the bathroom.’

There was a strong smell of hashish leading up to the gents. Kell stopped to look at a wall of turquoise tiles inlaid on the staircase, breathing in the smoke. He wanted to trace the source of the smell, to find whoever had rolled the joint in a backroom office and to share it with them. In the bathroom he washed his hands and glanced in the mirror, wondering why Mowbray was coming to him with tall tales from Egypt. What was the scoop? ISIS? Muslim Brotherhood? Maybe he was the bagman for a job offer in the private sector, an ex-SIS suit using Kell’s friendship with Mowbray as a lure. There had been five or six such offers in the previous twelve months, all of which Kell had turned down. He wasn’t interested in private security, nor did he want to be a nodding donkey on the board of Barclays or BP. On the other hand, if the pitch was something Russian, something that would get Kell close to the men who had ordered Rachel’s assassination, he would give it serious consideration.

‘I forgot,’ Mowbray announced, as Kell settled back into his seat. ‘They don’t serve booze.’

‘Don’t worry about it. I gave up.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Seven months dry.’

‘Now why would you want to go and do a thing like that?’

‘Tell me about Egypt.’

Mowbray leaned forward and put a hand in his pocket. Kell thought he was going to produce a photograph or a flash drive, but he kept it there as he spoke. If Kell hadn’t known that Mowbray was capable of far greater subtleties, he might have assumed that he was triggering a recording device.

‘Hurghada.’

‘What about it?’

‘One-horse town on the east coast. Mainland Egypt. Red Sea, facing Sinai.’

‘I know where it is, Harold.’

‘Last three years, Karen and me have been flying there for a bit of winter sun; easyJet goes three times a week. Car picks us up and drives us an hour south to a place called Soma Bay. Four hotels and a golf course, back-to-back, arse end of nowhere. Fresh water piped in from the Nile, turns the fairways green, fills the swimming pools. Coral reefs and scuba diving for the grown-ups, camel rides on the beach for the kids. In the tourist industry they call it a “hot flop”.’

The food arrived. Mashed aubergines with garlic and herbs. Feta cheese mixed with tarragon and fresh mint. A bowl of hummus was placed in front of Kell, nestled beside a basket of flatbread.

‘There’s your
taftoon
,’ he said, encouraging Mowbray to continue.

‘Anyway, we always stay at the same place. German-owned, German efficient, German-occupied sunbeds. Never seen a Yank there, never met a Frog. The occasional Brit, from time to time, but mostly German pensioners and Russian oligarch types with dyed hair and third wives who probably weren’t alive under Gorbachev. Am I painting the picture?’

‘Vividly,’ said Kell, and took a bite of
taftoon
.

‘So, guv, here’s the thing. Here’s the reason I wanted to see you. Something very strange happened, something I can still hardly believe.’

Mowbray looked like he meant it. There was an expression of amused consternation on his face.

‘They do breakfasts,’ he said, nodding slowly and looking across the table, as though half-expecting Kell to finish his sentence. ‘They do breakfasts every morning …’

‘What a breakthrough in hospitality,’ Kell replied. ‘I must go and stay there.’

Mowbray didn’t laugh. His eyes were fixed somewhere around Kell’s left ear.

‘On the second last day we were there, this couple walks in. Two men. You get that kind of thing at the hotel. They’re comfortable with gays, lots of it about, even for a Muslim country.’ Mowbray sipped his tap water, trying to slow himself down. ‘Karen looks up and makes a noise of disapproval.’ He checked himself. ‘No, not disapproval, she’s not homophobic or anything. More conspiratorial than that. Like a joke between us. “Look at the fruits”, you know?’

‘Sure,’ said Kell.

‘They were both dressed in white shirts and white trousers. That’s very German, too. Ninety per cent of the guests look like they’re playing at Wimbledon or members of some cult. Pristine white, like an advert for one of those soap powders that really deliver at low temperatures.’ Kell resisted telling Mowbray to ‘get on with it’ because he knew how Mowbray liked to operate. ‘And there’s an age gap between them,’ he said, ‘maybe fifteen or twenty years. The older bloke is the one facing me. German money, you can tell. He sits down with what looks like a fruit salad, black-rimmed glasses, suntan. I can’t see the boyfriend, but he’s younger, fitter. Late thirties, at a guess. The old boy is camp, a bit effeminate, but this one looks straight, macho. There’s something about him that triggers me, but I can’t yet tell what it is.’

Kell had stopped eating. He knew what Mowbray was going to tell him, a giddy premonition of something so improbable that he dismissed it out of hand.

‘Anyway, Karen had finished her orange juice. Wanted to get another one. She’d hurt her foot on the coral so I offered to go instead. There’s an egg station at the buffet and I waited there while the chef made me an omelette. Got the wife’s orange juice, got some yogurt, then started to walk back towards our table. That was when I saw his face. That was when I recognized him.’

‘Who?’ said Kell. ‘Who was it?’

‘The boyfriend was Alexander Minasian.’