A Colder War Read online

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  For Christian Spurrier

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Turkey

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  London, Three Weeks Later

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Charles Cumming

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Certain persons have a natural predilection to live in that curious world of espionage and deceit, and attach themselves with equal facility to one side or the other, so long as their craving for adventure of a rather macabre type is satisfied.

  —JOHN MASTERMAN, THE DOUBLE-CROSS SYSTEM

  … You are neither here nor there,

  A hurry through which known and strange things pass

  As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

  And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

  —SEAMUS HEANEY, “POSTSCRIPT”

  TURKEY

  1

  The American stepped away from the open window, passed Wallinger the binoculars, and said: “I’m going for cigarettes.”

  “Take your time,” Wallinger replied.

  It was just before six o’clock on a quiet, dusty evening in March, no more than an hour until nightfall. Wallinger trained the binoculars on the mountains and brought the abandoned palace at Ishak Pasa into focus. Squeezing the glasses together with a tiny adjustment of his hands, he found the mountain road and traced it west to the outskirts of Dogubayazit. The road was deserted. The last of the tourist taxis had returned to town. There were no tanks patrolling the plain, no dolmus bearing passengers back from the mountains.

  Wallinger heard the door clunk shut behind him and looked back into the room. Landau had left his sunglasses on the farthest of the three beds. Wallinger crossed to the chest of drawers and checked the screen on his BlackBerry. Still no word from Istanbul; still no word from London. Where the hell was HITCHCOCK? The Mercedes was supposed to have crossed into Turkey no later than two o’clock; the three of them should have been in Van by now. Wallinger went back to the window and squinted over the telegraph poles, the pylons, and the crumbling apartment blocks of Dogubayazit. High above the mountains, an airplane was moving west to east in a cloudless sky, a silent white star skimming toward Iran.

  Wallinger checked his watch. Five minutes past six. Landau had pushed the wooden table and the chair in front of the window; the last of his cigarettes was snuffed out in a scarred Efes Pilsen ashtray now bulging with yellowed filters. Wallinger tipped the contents out of the window and hoped that Landau would bring back some food. He was hungry and tired of waiting.

  The BlackBerry rumbled on top of the chest of drawers; Wallinger’s only means of contact with the outside world. He read the message.

  VERTIGO IS ON AT 1750. GET THREE TICKETS.

  It was the news he had been waiting for. HITCHCOCK and the courier had made it through the border at Gurbulak, on the Turkish side, at ten to six. If everything went according to plan, within half an hour Wallinger would have sight of the vehicle on the mountain road. From the chest of drawers he pulled out the British passport, sent by diplomatic bag to Ankara a week earlier. It would get HITCHCOCK through the military checkpoints on the road to Van; it would get him onto a plane to Ankara.

  Wallinger sat on the middle of the three beds. The mattress was so soft it felt as though the frame was giving way beneath him. He had to steady himself by sitting farther back on the bed and was taken suddenly by a memory of Cecilia, his mind carried forward to the prospect of a few precious days in her company. He planned to fly the Cessna to Greece on Wednesday, to attend the Directorate meeting in Athens, then over to Chios in time to meet Cecilia for supper on Thursday evening.

  The tickle of a key in the door. Landau came back into the room with two packets of Prestige filters and a plate of pide.

  “Got us something to eat,” he said. “Anything new?”

  The pide was giving off a tart smell of warm curdled cheese. Wallinger took the chipped white plate and rested it on the bed.

  “They made it through Gurbulak just before six.”

  “No trouble?” It didn’t sound as though Landau cared much about the answer. Wallinger took a bite of the soft, warm dough. “Love this stuff,” the American said, doing the same. “Kinda like a boat of pizza, you know?”

  “Yes,” said Wallinger.

  He didn’t like Landau. He didn’t trust the operation. He no longer trusted the Cousins. He wondered if Amelia had been at the other end of the text, worrying about Shakhouri. The perils of a joint operation. Wallinger was a purist and, when it came to interagency cooperation, wished that they could all just keep themselves to themselves.

  “How long do you think we’ll have to wait?” Landau said. He was chewing noisily.

  “As long as it takes.”

  The American sniffed, broke the seal on one of the packets of cigarettes. There was a beat of silence between them.

  “You think they’ll stick to the plan or come down on the one hundred?”

  “Who knows?”

  Wallinger stood at the window again, sighted the mountain through the binoculars. Nothing. Just a tank crawling across the plain: making a statement to the PKK, making a statement to Iran. Wallinger had the Mercedes license plate committed to memory. Shakhouri had a wife, a daughter, a mother sitting in an SIS-funded flat in Cricklewood. They had been waiting for days. They would want to know that their man was safe. As soon as Wallinger saw the vehicle, he would message London with the news.r />
  “It’s like clicking refresh over and over.”

  Wallinger turned and frowned. He hadn’t understood Landau’s meaning. The American saw his confusion and grinned through his thick brown beard. “You know, all this waiting around. Like on a computer. When you’re waiting for news, for updates. You click refresh on the browser?”

  “Ah, right.” Of all people, at that moment Paul Wallinger thought of Tom Kell’s cherished maxim: “Spying is waiting.”

  He turned back to the window.

  Perhaps HITCHCOCK was already in Dogubayazit. The D100 was thick with trucks and cars at all times of the day and night. Maybe they’d ignored the plan to use the mountain road and come on that. There was still a dusting of snow on the peaks; there had been a landslide only two weeks earlier. American satellites had shown that the pass through Besler was clear, but Wallinger had come to doubt everything they told him. He had even come to doubt the messages from London. How could Amelia know, with any certainty, who was in the car? How could she trust that HITCHCOCK had even made it out of Tehran? The exfil was being run by the Cousins.

  “Smoke?” Landau said.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Your people say anything else?”

  “Nothing.”

  The American reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. He appeared to read a message, but kept the contents to himself. Dishonor among spies. HITCHCOCK was an SIS Joe, but the courier, the exfil, the plan to pick Shakhouri up in Dogubayazit and fly him out of Van, that was all Langley. Wallinger would happily have run the risk of putting him on a plane from Imam Khomeini to Paris and lived with the consequences. He heard the snap of the American’s lighter and caught a backdraft of tobacco smoke, then turned to the mountains once again.

  The tank had now parked at the side of the mountain road, shuffling from side to side, doing the Tiananmen twist. The gun turret swiveled northeast so that the barrel was pointing in the direction of Mount Ararat. Right on cue, Landau said: “Maybe they found Noah’s Ark up there,” but Wallinger wasn’t in the mood for jokes.

  Clicking refresh on a browser.

  Then, at last, he saw it. A tiny bottle-green dot, barely visible against the parched brown landscape, moving toward the tank. The vehicle was so small it was hard to follow through the lens of the binoculars. Wallinger blinked, cleared his vision, looked again.

  “They’re here.”

  Landau came to the window. “Where?”

  Wallinger passed him the binoculars. “You see the tank?”

  “Yup.”

  “Follow the road up.…”

  “… Okay. Yeah. I see them.”

  Landau put down the binoculars and reached for the video camera. He flipped off the lens cap and began filming the Mercedes through the window. Within a minute, the vehicle was close enough to be picked out with the naked eye. Wallinger could see the car speeding along the plain, heading toward the tank. There was half a kilometer between them. Three hundred meters. Two.

  Wallinger saw that the tank barrel was still pointing away from the road, up toward Ararat. What happened next could not be explained. As the Mercedes drove past the tank, there appeared to be an explosion in the rear of the vehicle that lifted up the back axle and propelled the car forward in a skid with no sound. The Mercedes quickly became wreathed in black smoke and then rolled violently from the road as flames burst from the engine. There was a second explosion, then a larger ball of flame. Landau swore very quietly. Wallinger stared in disbelief.

  “What the hell happened?” the American said, lowering the camera.

  Wallinger turned from the window.

  “You tell me,” he replied.

  2

  Ebru Eldem could not remember the last time she had taken the day off. “A journalist,” her father had once told her, “is always working.” And he was right. Life was a permanent story. Ebru was always sniffing out an angle, always felt that she was on the brink of missing out on a byline. When she spoke to the cobbler who repaired the heels of her shoes in Arnavutkoy, he was a story about dying small businesses in Istanbul. When she chatted to the good-looking stallholder from Konya who sold fruit in her local market, he was an article about agriculture and economic migration within Greater Anatolia. Every number in her phone book—and Ebru reckoned she had better contacts than any other journalist of her age and experience in Istanbul—was a story waiting to open up. All she needed was the energy and the tenacity to unearth it.

  For once, however, Ebru had set aside her restlessness and ambition and, in a pained effort to relax, if only for a single day, turned off her cell phone and set her work to one side. That was quite a sacrifice! From eight o’clock in the morning—the lie-in, too, was a luxury—to nine o’clock at night, Ebru avoided all e-mails and Facebook messages and lived the life of a single woman of twenty-nine with no ties to work and no responsibilities other than to her own relaxation and happiness. Granted, she had spent most of the morning doing laundry and cleaning up the chaos of her apartment, but thereafter she had enjoyed a delicious lunch with her friend Banu at a restaurant in Besiktas, shopped for a new dress on Istiklal, bought and read ninety pages of the new Elif Shafak novel in her favorite coffeehouse in Cihangir, then met Ryan for martinis at Bar Bleu.

  In the five months that they had known one another, their relationship had grown from a casual, no-strings-attached affair to something more serious. When they had first met, their get-togethers had taken place almost exclusively in the bedroom of Ryan’s apartment in Tarabya, a place where—Ebru was sure—he took other girls, but none with whom he had such a connection, none with whom he would be so open and raw. She could sense it not so much by the words that he whispered into her ear as they made love as by the way that he touched her and looked into her eyes. Then, as they had grown to know one another, they had spoken a great deal about their respective families, about Turkish politics, the war in Syria, the deadlock in Congress—all manner of subjects. Ebru had been surprised by Ryan’s sensitivity to political issues, his knowledge of current affairs. He had introduced her to his friends. They had talked about traveling together and even meeting one another’s parents.

  Ebru knew that she was not beautiful—well, certainly not as beautiful as some of the girls looking for husbands and sugar daddies in Bar Bleu—but she had brains and passion, and men had always responded to those qualities in her. When she thought about Ryan, she thought about his difference from all the others. She wanted the heat of physical contact, of course—a man who knew how to be with her and how to please her—but she also craved his mind and his energy, the way he treated her with such affection and respect.

  Today was a typical day in their relationship. They drank too many cocktails at Bar Bleu, went for dinner at Meyra, talked about books, the recklessness of Hamas and Netanyahu. Then they stumbled back to Ryan’s apartment at midnight, fucking as soon as they had closed the door. The first time was in the lounge, the second time in his bedroom with the kilims bunched up on the floor and the shade still not fixed on the standing lamp beside the armchair. Ebru had lain there afterward in his arms, thinking that she would never want for another man. Finally she had found someone who understood her and made her feel entirely herself.

  The smell of Ryan’s breath and the sweat of his body were still all over Ebru as she slipped out of the building just after two o’clock, Ryan snoring obliviously. She took a taxi to Arnavutkoy, showered as soon as she was home, and climbed into bed, intending to return to work just under four hours later.

  * * *

  Burak Turan of the Turkish National Police reckoned you could divide people into two categories: those who didn’t mind getting up early in the morning and those who did. As a rule for life it had served him well. The people who were worth spending time with didn’t go to sleep straight after Muhtesem Yuzyil and jump out of bed with a smile on their face at half past six in the morning. You had to watch people like that. They were control freaks, workaholics, religious nut
s. Turan considered himself to be a member of the opposite category of person: the type who liked to extract the best out of life; who was creative and generous and good in a crowd. After finishing work, for example, he liked to wind down with a tea and a chat at a club on Mantiklal. His mother, typically, would cook him dinner, then he’d head out to a bar and get to bed by midnight or one, sometimes later. Otherwise, when did people find the time to enjoy themselves? When did they meet girls? If you were always concentrating on work, if you were always paranoid about getting enough sleep, what was left to you? Burak knew that he wasn’t the most hardworking officer in the barracks, happy to kill time while other, better-connected guys got promoted ahead of him. But what did he care about that? As long as he could keep the salary and the job, visit Cansu on weekends, and watch Galatasaray games at the Turk Telekom every second Saturday, he reckoned he had life pretty well licked.

  But there were drawbacks. Of course there were. As he got older, he didn’t like taking so many orders, especially from guys who were younger than he was. That happened more and more. A generation coming up behind him, pushing him out of the way. There were too many people in Istanbul; the city was so fucking crowded. And then there were the dawn raids, more and more of them in the last two years—a Kurdish problem, usually, but sometimes something different. Like this morning. A journalist, a woman who had written about Ergenekon or the PKK—Burak wasn’t clear which—and word had come down to arrest her. The guys were talking about it in the van as they waited outside her apartment building. Cumhuriyet writer. Eldem. Lieutenant Metin, who looked like he hadn’t been to bed in three days, mumbled something about “links to terrorism” as he strapped on his vest. Burak couldn’t believe what some people were prepared to swallow. Didn’t he know how the system worked? Ten to one Eldem had riled somebody in the AKP, and an Erdogan flunkie had spotted a chance to send out a message. That was how government people always operated. You had to keep an eye on them. They were all early risers.

  Burak and Metin were part of a three-man team ordered to take Eldem into custody at five o’clock in the morning. They knew what was wanted. Make a racket, wake the neighbors, scare the blood out of her, drag the detainee down to the van. A few weeks ago, on the last raid they did, Metin had picked up a framed photograph in some poor bastard’s living room and dropped it on the floor, probably because he wanted to be like the cops on American TV. But why did they have to do it in the middle of the night? Burak could never work that out. Why not just pick her up on the way to work, pay a visit to Cumhuriyet? Instead, he’d had to set his fucking alarm for half past three in the morning, show himself at the precinct at four, then sit around in the van for an hour with that weight in his head, the numb fatigue of no sleep, his muscles and his brain feeling soft and slow. Burak got tetchy when he was like that. Anybody did anything to rile him, said something he didn’t like, if there was a delay in the raid or any kind of problem—he’d snap them off at the knees. Food didn’t help, tea neither. It wasn’t a blood sugar thing. He just resented having to haul his arse out of bed when the rest of Istanbul was still fast asleep.