A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3) (21 page)

Amelia dropped Kell at Salisbury station the following morning and he took the train back to London. It felt like a farewell of sorts. Towards the end of dinner, the temperature had fallen in the garden. Amelia had gone inside to fetch a pashmina, leaving Kell alone at the table. He had immediately sent a WhatsApp message to Mowbray suggesting – in
en clair
language – that ‘the second movie’ was a ‘mirage’ that the ‘suits’ didn’t need to see. Mowbray had understood what was being asked of him, replying with the simple message: ‘I get it. Never saw the film.’ From that moment Kell had felt that his professional relationship with Amelia Levene had changed irrevocably. He had embarked on a deliberate strategy of deception. Whatever trust he had felt for her had vanished long ago. Should she discover that he was lying to her, Amelia’s faith in Kell would be similarly degraded.

Eight days remained until the scheduled meeting with Minasian. Kell heard nothing from Amelia nor from Vauxhall Cross. He suspected that Amelia would put him under light surveillance – a quick look at his phones, a daily printout of his wi-fi activity – and therefore was conscious to go about his life as normally as possible. He made no attempt to contact Claridge’s to confirm Minasian’s reservation, nor did he check that Svetlana had made an appointment at the fertility clinic. He watched the cricket on Sky, read short stories by Isaac Babel, went to the movies, exercised at the gym. For the benefit of the snoops at GCHQ, Kell looked online at several articles about ISIS and ran Google searches on home-grown
jihadis
; it would have looked suspicious abruptly to abandon all interest in the potential threat from STRIPE. To test the intensity of any possible mobile surveillance, Kell took himself off to Paris for three nights, eating at his favourite restaurants – Brasserie Lipp and Chez Paul – and visiting the recently re-opened Musée Picasso. At no point did he sense that he was being watched or followed. He dined with an old colleague from the Service whom he knew to be in regular contact with Amelia. Kell said nothing about Minasian or the threat from STRIPE, but hinted that there was a ‘small possibility’ he would return to active duty in the near future, ‘depending on something in the pipeline which may or may not happen’, an appropriately gnomic remark which he hoped would be conveyed back to ‘C’. Kell checked the dedicated phone for a message from GAGARIN, but the Russian did not make contact. Kell was certain that he would appear at Westfield as promised, bringing with him detailed information about STRIPE that would allow SIS to make an arrest. He assumed that Svetlana Eremenko’s passport would be flagged at Heathrow, but did not know if Amelia would bother to put eyes on Minasian at Claridge’s. Assuming she did so, Kell had enough faith in the Russian’s anti-surveillance skills to shake off even the most sophisticated team that MI5 could throw at him.

Friday dawned. Kell paid his habitual visit to the gym and swam forty lengths of the pool. He had paid for a private locker in the changing room and deliberately left his watch inside it when he had finished dressing. He did not want to run even the small risk that Tech-Ops had planted a tracking device in his personal effects. For the same reason, Kell put on a brand-new pair of shoes, purchased in High Street Kensington the day before. There were ways in which footwear could be ‘painted’, making it possible for the Service to follow a subject over significant distances.

Outside the gym, Kell made a quick visual note of the five vehicles parked in the immediate area, then walked south towards Hammersmith Road to hail a cab. He had been certain that the surveillance threat against him was non-existent, yet as he turned around in the back seat of the taxi, he saw one of the cars which had been parked outside the gym – a navy blue Seat Altea – making a left turn on to Hammersmith Road. Kell had not committed any of the numperplates to memory and could not be sure that it was the same vehicle. He was also aware that he was at the start of a long process of cleaning his tail and that it was not uncommon in such circumstances to imagine threats where none existed. Paranoia kept you sharp; suspicion was a useful accomplice. Kell continued to watch the car as the taxi headed south-east. It followed him to Cromwell Road, eventually disappearing at a set of lights close to the Natural History Museum. Kell did not get a look at the driver.

He had a simple objective: to throw off any surveillance, but not to be seen to be doing so. For that reason, Kell could not abandon his iPhone without good cause. To leave it at home – or to secure it in the locker at his gym – would look suspicious to Amelia. In Paris, Kell had dropped the phone on the street, causing a tiny hairline crack to appear in the lower part of the screen. This had given him an idea. He instructed the taxi driver to take him to a small shop on Gloucester Road, where he asked for the screen to be replaced. The owner of the shop told him that the job would take two hours. Kell promised to return before the end of the day. He had no intention of doing so – the meeting with Minasian would almost certainly run on too long – but planned instead to pick up the phone in the morning.

As soon as he had left the shop, Kell walked the short distance to Gloucester Road Underground station and waited for a District Line train travelling east. He made a cursory assessment of the passengers standing within a carriage distance of him on the platform, then boarded the train at the last moment. As far as he could tell, there was no suspicious activity in reaction to this. Standing close to the doors, Kell feinted to leave at Victoria station, watching the behaviour of a young man who, moments earlier, had caught his eye while reading a copy of the
Guardian
. The man did not react. Kell had been suspicious of him not only because of the lightning quick eye contact between them, but also because he assumed that someone of his appearance – hipster haircut, Converse trainers, turned-up skinny jeans – would more probably read the digital edition of the
Guardian
, rather than purchase a physical newspaper. The man eventually stepped off the train at Westminster.

Kell found a seat. He could see all the way to the rear of the carriage, but his view ahead was obscured by a large group of Spanish teenagers who had boarded the train at Victoria. On a straightforward clean, Kell would have stepped off the train at one of the stations, jumping back on at the last moment in order to expose or throw off a tail. He would have switched platforms and lines, allowing – for example – the first few trains at Gloucester Road to leave the station without him. But he could not afford to be seen to be acting abnormally. Instead, Kell got off at Embankment and walked through a narrow park running parallel to the river. A path connected the entrance at Embankment station to Waterloo Bridge. Kell walked underneath the bridge and found the rear entrance to Somerset House.

He had come to see an exhibition in the Eastern Gallery. This was how Kell had typically filled his days during his extended absence from the Service; should Amelia glance at his surveillance report, his behaviour would not appear to be abnormal or out of character. He had walked the ground at Somerset House shortly before leaving for Paris and knew that the southern side of the complex was a warren of offices and corridors, splitting to all four points of the compass. In such an environment it was almost impossible to track a target without coming into contact with them. Kell stood in the lobby area for a count of sixty seconds and was followed inside by a woman of his own age wearing a grey business suit, carrying a cup of takeaway coffee. She was slim, wore black-rimmed glasses and nodded politely at Kell as she passed him. Kell turned and went into the ground-floor bathroom, checked his clothing for any tags that may have been attached during his journey, then bought a ticket to the exhibition. He stayed there for the next twenty minutes.

As soon as he had left the Eastern Gallery, he took a lift to the first floor and emerged into the outdoor courtyard. Kell had not seen the woman in the business suit since she had walked past him in the lobby. He looked for her now, but did not spot her. There were members of the public seated at outdoor tables on two sides of the courtyard and Kell strolled past them, searching for repeating faces. If the young man on the train had been following him, it was likely that he had affected a change in his appearance. Kell could not see him. He bought himself a cup of coffee and a
pain au chocolat
in the café in the north-east corner of the courtyard, eating them at a secluded table indoors while pretending to read a book. Across the room, there was a bearded man wearing a dark suit who was not dissimilar in appearance to a businessman Kell had clocked at Embankment station. On closer inspection, however, Kell saw that he was a different person.

After finishing his coffee, Kell left Somerset House by the main entrance on the Strand. As he looked around for a cab, a young man wearing Converse trainers crossed the street ahead of him. He was of similar build and colouring to the
Guardian
-reading hipster on the Tube, but was wearing a black leather jacket and a blue baseball cap. Kell knew that experienced surveillance officers could change their outward appearance with relative ease, but that they were often obliged to continue wearing the same shoes. He waited until the young man had crossed the street, watched him walk in the direction of Covent Garden then, when he turned to greet a friend outside the Lyceum Theatre, saw that he was an entirely different person to the one who had been sitting on the train. Kell smiled. He remembered the man in denim jeans and a brown tweed jacket who had spooked him at Bayswater station several weeks before and knew that he would always be plagued by such moments of paranoia. Still, on days such as these it was better to anticipate problems rather than to walk into a trap set for him by Amelia Levene.

He headed west in the direction of Trafalgar Square and walked north along St Martin’s Lane as far as Wyndham’s Theatre. Kell was known within the Service as an avid reader and collector of rare books, so it made sense for him to browse in the windows of the second-hand bookstores in nearby Cecil Court; doing so afforded him the opportunity to glance up and down the pedestrianized colonnade every few moments, checking for foot surveillance. He saw nothing to raise his suspicions. Having bought a first edition of
The Whitsun Weddings
at Goldsboro Books, he walked to Holborn station and boarded a Central Line train to Shepherd’s Bush. By half past one, exactly an hour before his scheduled meeting with GAGARIN, Thomas Kell was walking into Westfield.

It was a soft target. That was the first thing Kell thought about whenever he found himself in Westfield. A handful of gunmen, armed with semi-automatic weapons, could stroll inside at any moment and murder two or three hundred people in less time than it took to make a skinny latte. The security guards were unarmed. Counter-terrorism units in Paddington would take at least ten minutes to scramble. Members of the British public did not carry guns or knives. A reasonably well-organized terrorist cell – or lone wolf
jihadi
with combat experience in Syria – could wreak havoc in the heart of London before MI5 had got out of bed. That was the stark reality of Western capital cities in the early twenty-first century. That was the nature of the threat from STRIPE.

Kell walked around. Westfield was crowded with families of every race and creed, the new international London of Somalians, Bengalis, Saudis, Chinese. It was one of the emerging paradoxes of extreme Islam that the modern terrorist was blind to nationality and religion; every person in the mall – the Saudi doctor, the Iraqi exile, the Nigerian lawyer – was a legitimate target. Kell felt an exaggerated sense that he was one of the few white European faces in the building, and therefore easier to spot among the polyglot sea of shoppers and staff. Taking an escalator to the first floor, he felt a sense of kinship with Alexander Minasian, who was doubtless going through a near-identical anti-surveillance routine somewhere else in London. It was even possible that Minasian was already inside Westfield and that the two men would pass one another in the mall. Kell imagined that the Russian had left Claridge’s at dawn and taken an inexhaustibly complex sequence of trains and taxis and Tubes in an attempt to shake off the phantom agents of SIS and Andrei Eremenko. It was Minasian who had taught Kleckner about the joys of Harrods; he would almost certainly have spent half an hour inside the store that morning, affecting changes in his appearance, doubling back along mirrored corridors, perhaps even lifting a security pass so that he could leave via the subterranean passage that led to the staff entrance on Hans Crescent.

Kell stopped at the top of the escalator. It occurred to him, not for the first time in his long career, that the business of agent-running was absurd. He knew that Amelia could not afford to put a team on him; he knew that the chances of Minasian being followed by the SVR were infinitesimally small. Kell could have met GAGARIN in broad daylight in the middle of Leicester Square and, chances are, nobody would have batted an eyelid. Yet he had spent nine days in a state of sustained paranoia, shuttling around London and Paris, renting out lockers at his local gym and handing in his iPhone for repair. As for Minasian, Kell could only imagine the obsessive lengths to which the Russian had gone in order to ensure his security. And yet it had to be done. If Minasian helped to stop an attack, if Kell’s actions ensured the safety of the men and women obliviously going about their shopping in Westfield, then it would all have been worth it.

He was hungry. Kell made a clockwise circuit of the western section of the mall, purchased a small digital wristwatch in WHSmith, then ate a tagine at a branch of Comptoir Libanais, watching all the time for repeating faces or suspicious behaviour. By the time he had finished eating, it was twenty past two. Kell sank a double espresso, picked up his bag, passed a group of schoolchildren being herded towards the cinema and walked the short distance to the entrance of Marks and Spencer.

The women’s section on the ground floor was empty. Nobody looking at dresses, nobody looking at skirts. Kell walked straight ahead towards the underwear department, passing a woman in full burka pushing a sleeping child in a buggy. To his left, there were rows and rows of pyjamas and nightdresses; to his right, a huge poster of a model in pink lingerie. A bank of escalators led upstairs to the men’s section and down to the Food Hall. Kell rode to the first level, using the height of the escalator to scan the open-plan floor for Minasian. The anxiety was in him now; the heart-quickening fear that his agent would fail to show. Kell wasn’t worried about Amelia. He hardly even cared about surveillance. The only thing that mattered was GAGARIN’s integrity. Had he gone back to Moscow to confess his sins? Had Eremenko confronted him and demanded that he divorce Svetlana? Or had Minasian kept his word, gathered the product on STRIPE and brought it with him to Westfield? Kell could hear Amelia’s voice in his head –
He has to win. He can’t win by making you the hero
– and suddenly felt that he had been played. The Russian wasn’t going to come. STRIPE was a fake. GAGARIN was a ghost.

Kell reached the top of the escalator. The men’s section was straight ahead of him. Suits, jackets, trousers, shirts. He looked at his watch. It was exactly half past two. He had timed it perfectly. He turned to his left, made a complete anticlockwise circuit of the floor, found a Panama hat and placed it in a handbasket that he carried back to the escalator. He had not yet seen Minasian. He walked towards the men’s section and saw a row of white shirts stacked on a shelf close to the entrance. He turned and went back to the far end of the shop floor and placed two pairs of socks in the basket, trying to behave as naturally and as unobtrusively as possible.

Why wasn’t Minasian there? Kell looked down at the basket and told himself to relax. Spying is waiting. He repeated the mantra, telling himself, over and over again, that agents always showed. In twenty years Kell had known a source not to materialize only three times. They stuck to the rules. They did what they were told. After all, Minasian knew that SIS had enough compromising material on him to obliterate his career; there was no possibility that he would risk taking them on. He
had
to come. He
had
to show. GAGARIN had no choice.

Kell looked again at his watch. Already twenty to three. He turned around and looked back at the entrance. Thirty feet away he could see a husband and wife flicking through suits and an overweight man in his fifties holding up a mustard tweed jacket, checking his reflection in the mirror. Still no sign of Minasian. Kell picked up another pair of socks, dropped them in the basket.

Then there she was. Coming out of a changing room in the corner of the store. A slim woman in a grey business suit, wearing black-rimmed glasses. The woman who had passed him in the lobby at Somerset House. Kell immediately reached down into the basket and took hold of the rim of the Panama hat. If he put it on, it was a signal to Minasian. Get out. I am compromised. Abort.

He looked again. He could not see the woman’s face. In breach of all sensible tradecraft, Kell walked directly towards her. He moved so quickly and with such purpose that the woman looked up, sensing him in her peripheral vision. Kell was walking towards her as though he was intending to introduce himself. And then he saw, to his intense relief, that he had made a mistake. It was not the same person. His eyes had played the old surveillance trick, turning her into someone else. She was much younger than the woman he had seen in Somerset House, but the grey suit was exactly the same. Doubtless it was a Marks and Spencer staple.

He turned and walked back towards the entrance. Time to pick up a white shirt and let GAGARIN know that the coast was clear.

Kell was passing the bank of escalators when he saw a man in his mid-thirties walking into the store ahead of him. Cheap denim jeans, a grey T-shirt, several days of stubble.

Minasian.

At first the Russian did not see Kell. He turned to his right, picked up a white shirt, then moved forward to look at a rack of suits. Kell passed within three metres of him and went to the stack of shirts. He picked up a white shirt of his own, tucked it under his arm, then walked directly towards him.

Minasian was barely recognizable, no trace of the slick metropolitan professional whom Kell had interviewed at Sinclair Road. As he looked up and caught Kell’s eye, there was an electrifying moment of understanding between them, invisible to any passer-by, which confirmed that the meeting could safely go ahead. Then Minasian moved away. Kell put down the basket, placed the shirt back on the stack and walked out of the store.