A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3) (20 page)

Amelia was spooning slices of chicken and roast potatoes onto two warmed plates.

‘You’re not listening to me,’ she said. ‘Even in those circumstances, I doubt that GAGARIN would play ball. Nothing he tells us can be trusted. What’s his motivation? He doesn’t need money. He’s married to the daughter of one of the richest men in Russia. A man like that probably already has several million dollars siphoned off in offshore accounts in readiness for his divorce and/or retirement. Minasian has no
ideological
motive for treachery. The only thing he really cares about is Alexander Minasian – his own survival, his own self-image, his own progress through life. He’s not a Kleckner. He’s not looking for kicks or to occupy centre stage. He’s a manipulator, a sadist. Coercion? Perhaps. But how does a man like that respond to being blackmailed by an enemy Service that has already got the better of him over Kleckner? By
thanking
us? No. He’s going to want to
harm
us. So why bring the fox into the chicken coop, Tom? Why take that risk?’

‘Because of the threat to hundreds, maybe thousands of lives.’

‘That’s not why you’re doing this. That’s not why this is so important to you.’

‘Does it matter why it’s important to me? I thought our job – I thought
your
job – was to save lives?’

Amelia stopped serving the food and turned to face him. There was suddenly great affection in her eyes, a look of respect and understanding borne of years of embattled friendship. He understood what she had meant by wanting to protect him, yet her protection was the last thing he needed.

‘Of course I have a responsibility to keep people safe,’ she replied. For a moment it looked as though she was going to come towards him, to try to take hold of his arms in a gesture of reassurance. ‘I just want to be sure that you understand what might be going on here.’

‘I understand, Amelia,’ Kell replied. He was beginning to feel patronized.

‘Do you?’ A wasp flew in front of her face and she flicked it away with her hand. ‘Minasian knows that it’s only a matter of time before word leaks out about Riedle. Somebody is going to talk. So inevitably he’ll be kicked out of the SVR.’ The wasp flew out into the garden. Amelia went back to serving the food. ‘In fact the only reason they might have for keeping him on would be his burgeoning relationship with SIS. Minasian confesses that he’s been turned, Moscow sees that as an opportunity to use him as a double agent, he then sends us months and months of chicken feed.’

‘Aren’t we getting a bit ahead of ourselves?’

‘Perhaps,’ Amelia replied, though it was clear from her tone of voice that she considered the scenario to be completely plausible.

‘What about the fertility clinic?’ Kell asked. ‘What about Svetlana’s baby?’

‘What about it?’

To Kell’s embarrassment, he found that he could not answer his own question. His desire to manipulate Minasian by controlling his wife’s access to the baby they both craved felt sordid and reprehensible. ‘So we just give up?’ he said, trying to salvage the argument. ‘We have a serving SVR officer by the balls who’s just told me there is a home-grown, clean-skin
jihadi
planning a terrorist atrocity on British soil, but we let him go because we think he’s a Trojan horse?’

Amelia did not answer immediately. She picked up two bottles of wine – one white, one red – walked past Kell and carried them outside. She lit a candle at the table, then came back into the kitchen, took knives and forks from the cutlery drawer, tore off some strips of kitchen roll for napkins and invited Kell to pick up their plates. He did so. A loose roast potato rolled on to the floor. Amelia swore, picked it up, put it back on the plate without a word, then led him outside.

‘Have a seat,’ she said.

Kell set down the plates and refilled their glasses of wine. Amelia thanked him. She looked up at the steep hill that bordered the northern side of the property, gathering her thoughts. A swarm of insects were buzzing around an outdoor light. Kell could hear a sheep moaning in the darkness.

‘Look,’ she said, drawing what felt like a line under their earlier exchange. ‘I’m sorry. I owe you an apology.’

‘How so?’

‘It was a mistake for me to tell you to pursue this. I wanted you to be working for us again. I wanted Minasian as badly as you did. You came to me with the revelation about his sexuality, it seemed too good an opportunity to resist. I should have known better. Minasian is a type. The high-functioning homosexual, forced to exist in secret, living a double life. We’ve seen it historically time and time again. That behaviour breeds a love of intrigue and subterfuge, of acting and performance. Risk-taking. The guilty secret inside the gay man makes him feel ashamed and vulnerable, which leads to an absolute ruthlessness, not to mention a five-star talent for manipulation.’

‘That’s all a bit old hat, isn’t it?’ Kell was surprised that Amelia was voicing such a reactionary theory. ‘Maybe fifty years ago you might have been able to make a case for that kind of behaviour, but not today. What you’re saying is basically homophobic.’

‘It
is
fifty years ago in Russia in terms of gay rights. It
is
fifty years ago in terms of what Alexander Minasian can do with his private life and – more importantly – can be
seen
to be doing with his private life in Moscow and Kiev. How is he any different from a Blunt or a Burgess, a J. Edgar Hoover or a Jeremy Thorpe? I’m not saying that
all
secretly gay men in the twenty-first century are sociopathic. Goodness me.’ With an exasperated intake of breath, Amelia looked out on her garden and took a moment to compose herself. ‘Look.’ She turned back to Kell, trying to lay the conversation to rest. ‘All I’m saying is that it’s textbook. I should have avoided him at all costs. It was my fault. This was the wrong operation for you.’

Kell felt that this answer was unequivocal and did not respond. Amelia interpreted his silence as a demand for a more persuasive argument, and tried to provide it.

‘There is also the added problem of the shooting this afternoon.’ She had picked up her knife and fork. ‘I must be frank. That’s what’s changed my mind definitively. I can’t risk linking the Service to Riedle. I can’t spare the resources. Furthermore, going after Andrei Eremenko is not an HMG Requirement. Let him skirt around the sanctions. Let him sell forty per cent of his petrochemical company to Svetlana. You may not have noticed, but we have other fish to fry these days.’

Kell looked down at his food. ‘It’s not about Eremenko,’ he said. ‘Since when is counter-terrorism not a Requirement of Her Majesty’s bloody government?’

Here Amelia was prepared to concede ground.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘If there’s something on the clean skin that I can use, then sure. If Minasian gives you something credible, come back to me. But my advice to you would be to leave it. Your assessment of Minasian’s character in the first instance was absolutely correct. He’s a sociopath. Sadistic, manipulative, cruel. He has to win. He can’t win by making you the hero.’

Kell nodded, knowing that he would still get nothing in terms of cooperation from SIS. No surveillance, no technical support, no analysts. Once Amelia had made up her mind about something, there was no persuading her. Perhaps that explained why she had wanted him to come all the way down to Wiltshire; to give him the bad news in person, then perhaps to try to rebuild the broken pieces of their friendship.

‘If that’s your decision, then I guess that’s the end of it,’ he said, and began to eat.

‘You’re sure?’ she said.

‘What choice do I have?’

For all his frustration, Kell recognized that he still had options. He had told Mowbray to delay sending the second film. Amelia knew nothing about Westfield, nothing about the arrangements he had made to meet Minasian. He could act alone in the next few weeks, running GAGARIN, gathering intelligence, only involving the Service at a later date if the product on STRIPE proved to be authentic. He had enough money to pay Harold, with Elsa Cassani in the wings should he need further back-up. Better to function in this way, behind Amelia’s back, than to risk being shut down altogether.

‘What arrangements did you make for contacting one another?’ she asked.

Kell was amazed by the timing of the question.

‘I gave him a BlackBerry,’ he replied, saying nothing about the Westfield meeting. ‘PGP encrypted. All that clever stuff.’

‘What’s the number?’

‘I’ll have to look it up.’ Kell could feel Amelia searching his face for the lie. She knew him too well. She did not trust him to give up on GAGARIN altogether.

‘That would be kind.’

‘Why?’ he asked quickly. ‘You’re going to give it to Cheltenham?’

‘No harm, is there?’

‘None,’ Kell replied. ‘Don’t you trust me to tell you if GAGARIN gets in touch?’

‘Of course I do,’ she said, caught out by Kell’s question.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave it.’ He took a sip of wine, trying to give the impression that he was at peace with Amelia’s decision. ‘I can see why it’s dangerous to trust him. I can see that he could do the Service more harm than good. I left everything in Minasian’s hands. He said he was flying back to Moscow tomorrow, that he’d be in touch on the number. If I hear from him, I’ll tell you.’

‘Of course you will.’ Amelia dabbed her mouth with the kitchen roll, candlelit eyes studying Kell’s face closely. He knew that she knew he was lying to her. Her next question proved it. ‘So you made no arrangement to meet again?’

‘You didn’t give us time!’ He smiled as he laid out the lie. ‘I was about to talk about a second meeting when your driver showed up—’

She interrupted him. ‘What about the filming? Had you continued to record the conversation?’

Kell remained poker-faced. He was not about to admit to Amelia that a video existed in which he and Minasian had arranged the Westfield meeting. He didn’t want her watching the film or crawling all over his ideas. He wanted to be free to work without bureaucratic interference. Amelia had let him down so many times in the past that she was effectively forcing him to deceive her.

‘Afraid not,’ he said, skewering a potato and cutting it in half. ‘I didn’t think it was necessary, once he’d confessed.’

Amelia nodded, seeming to accept this answer, but she was watching him with a forensic intensity. He wanted to change the subject – to talk about her garden, about François, about anything other than Minasian – but knew that to do so would be to reveal his guilt.

‘Do you want me to walk you through what was said?’

She shook her head. ‘Not necessary. I assume you’ll write it up?’

‘If you like.’

They ate in silence. The insects continued to buzz around the light, the sheep continued to moan in the distant field. Kell complimented Amelia on the food and told her that Minasian had been ‘considerably more talkative with the iPhone switched off’, an observation to which she offered only a brief response.

‘Yes. People are often more relaxed and candid if they feel they’re not being recorded.’

Kell poured more wine, his mouth as dry as Amelia’s sun-baked lawn. He could lie to most people with ease, but lying to Amelia Levene felt like betraying a member of his own family.

‘Tom?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

Amelia put down her cutlery. ‘At one point this afternoon, Minasian seemed to suggest that he wasn’t responsible for killing Rachel. I wondered how you were feeling about that?’

Kell experienced that old unsettling sense of Amelia peering into the hidden corners of his mind.

‘I’ll never know,’ he replied, hoping to make the subject go away. ‘Too late now, isn’t it?’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘Not necessarily.’

She moved a strand of hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear.

‘It occurred to me that this might be why you’re so interested in him. Because he might lead you to the people who were responsible.’

‘So
you
believe him?’

Amelia indicated with a shrug that she was not at all sure. Wary of disappearing into speculations, Kell did his best to put an end to the conversation.

‘I don’t have any desire for vengeance,’ he said. ‘You think I do, but you’re wrong.’ Even as he spoke the words, he knew that he was deceiving himself just as much as he was deceiving Amelia. ‘Rachel is gone. Minasian isn’t going to bring her back, nor is he going to lead me to the men who ordered her murder. As far as I’m concerned he can go about his business. He can stay in the SVR, he can quit, he can work for Andrei Eremenko. He can try to get his wife pregnant at a fertility clinic, he can move to Barcelona and start a new life with a new man. None of it makes any difference to me. The only thing I care about is STRIPE. I want him investigated. Because if some brainwashed maniac comes back from Syria and kills two hundred people in the rush hour, I want to know that I’m not responsible. I want to know that I wasn’t just sitting on the sidelines, waiting for it to happen.’

Shahid walked Brighton Pier all the time. He knew where the crowds gathered, where the cameras were, where he would have the best chance of shooting the targets and then moving forward. He had a vivid fantasy of clearing the pier of structures and people, of all the shit that was contaminating Brighton, so that he could walk along it with Rosie at his side and breathe in the clean sea air, all alone. He liked to imagine that, after it was over, the police would comb through days of CCTV and spot him as he scouted the target environment, grainy footage of a holy warrior played time and again on the Net and the news, the great Shahid Khan preparing for his day of martyrdom, planting the seeds for England’s future.

When Shahid had seen the pier for the first time, he knew that Jalal had made the wisest and most intelligent choice of target. It was a godless place, evidence of an entire society and culture on its knees. The enclosed areas were the worst. The noise and the smell and the greed of the arcades. Mothers with their stomachs displayed who likely did not know the fathers of their own children, frenziedly pumping coins into machines that lured and tricked them with promises of riches that never came. Men who were not at work during the day, day-trip tourists and teenagers hypnotized by fruit machines and arcade computers that made a game of war, a cartoon of despair and bombings, of the conflicts created by Western politicians. Infidel soldiers, Muslim victims – all inside a game designed to entertain children. It made Shahid toxic with violence. There were times, walking in that deafening place, when the screams of the customers and the stench of their food and the noise of their music became so much for him that he wanted to act in that very moment. Had he been armed, had Kris already supplied him with his weapons, Shahid would have taken them all in a moment of transcendental purity, cleansing the room, the pier, driving an entire way of life into the sea.

He had come here with Rosie. That was the only time that he had felt distracted in the target environment. At the far end of the pier, near the rollercoaster, where he planned to finish after working his way south from the beach, they had kissed for the first time. He had no longer been able to stop himself. He had taken her around the waist so that she could feel his strength as he pulled her towards him. She had tasted of ice cream and perfume. She had opened her mouth and he had felt her lips and her tongue, lost in the sweetness of being able to tell her with his mouth and with his body how he felt about her, how attractive she was, how much she tormented him.

‘God I’m so glad,’ she said, breaking the kiss and looking into his eyes. ‘I’ve wanted you to do that for so long.’

‘Sorry,’ Shahid said, feeling embarrassed. He knew that he had been weak to wait and wondered if he had kissed her in the right way.

‘Nothing to be sorry about,’ she said, and put her hand on the back of his neck. The touch of her fingers was gentle at first, then she pulled him towards her. It was a new side of her and it sent a pulse right through him. He knew that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. They were both losing their control.

As they walked back to the bus stop, holding hands, Shahid became worried. He was more than ever convinced that Rosie had been sent by God to prove his commitment to Islam. He knew that God was making him choose between a life with a woman who was not Muslim and the afterlife of martyrdom, which was sublime. It was no choice at all. He liked Rosie, he would continue to see her, but it was pointless to get caught up in her. It was not the destiny of Shahid Khan, of Azhar Ahmed Iqbal, of Omar Assya, to be a husband or a man of the family. He was greater than that. He was a soldier in a war. A martyr. He had to fight his doubts and his lust. This was the will of God.