A Colder War Read online

  If you feel that your position has been compromised, do not show yourself at the teahouse or at the Ankara location. Instead, obtain or borrow a cell phone and text the word BESIKTAS to my number. If this is not possible, for whatever reason—you cannot obtain a signal, you cannot obtain a phone—go to a phone box or other landline and speak this word when there is an answer. If we contact you using this word, it is our belief that your work for us has been discovered and that you should leave Turkey.

  It seemed highly improbable to KODAK that he would ever be suspected of treachery, far less caught in the act of handing secrets to the SVR. He was too clever, too cautious, his tracks too well covered. Nevertheless, he remembered the meeting points, and the crash instructions, and committed the numbers associated with them to memory.

  There are three potential meeting points in the event of exposure. Remember them. If you say BESIKTAS ONE, a contact will meet you in the courtyard of the Blue Mosque at the time agreed. He will make himself known to you and you will follow him. If you consider Turkey to be unsafe, make your way across the border to Bulgaria with the message BESIKTAS TWO. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to board an airplane. A contact will make himself known to you at the time agreed, in the bar of the Grand Hotel in Sofia. In exceptional circumstances, if you feel that it is necessary to cross into former Soviet territory, where you will be safer and more easily escorted to Moscow, there are boats from Istanbul. You will always be welcome in Odessa. The code for this crash meeting is BESIKTAS THREE.

  6

  It had dawned on Thomas Kell that the number of funerals he was attending in a calendar year had begun to outstrip the number of weddings. As he traveled north with Amelia in a packed first-class carriage from Euston, he felt as though the change had occurred almost overnight: one moment he had been a young man in a morning suit throwing confetti over rapturous couples every third weekend in summer; the next he had somehow morphed into a veteran fortysomething spook, flying in from Kabul to bury a friend or relative dead from alcohol or cancer. Looking around the train gave Kell the same feeling: he was older than almost everyone in the carriage. What had happened to the intervening years? Even the ticket inspector appeared to have been born after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  “You look tired,” Amelia said, looking up from an op-ed in The Independent. She had taken to wearing half-moon reading glasses and almost looked her age.

  “Gee, thanks,” Kell replied.

  She was seated opposite him at a table sticky with half-eaten croissants and discarded coffee cups. Beside her, oblivious to Amelia’s rank and distinction, a clear-skinned student with an upgraded ticket to Lancaster was playing solitaire on a Samsung tablet. Both had their backs to the direction of travel as the fields and rivers of England whistled by. Kell was jammed in at a window seat, trying to avoid touching thighs with an overweight businesswoman who kept falling asleep in a Trollope novel. He had packed a bag because he was planning to stay in the north for several days. Why hammer back to London when he could go walking in Cumbria and eat two-star Michelin food at L’Enclume? There was nothing and nobody waiting for him back home in Holland Park. Just the Ladbroke Arms and another pint of Ghost Ship.

  Kell was wearing a charcoal business suit, a white shirt, and a black tie; Amelia was dressed in a dark blue suit and black overcoat. Their funereal garb drew occasional sympathetic stares as they walked across Preston station. Amelia had booked a cab on SIS and, by half past twelve, they were wandering around Cartmel like a married couple, Kell checking into his hotel, Amelia calling the office more than once to ensure that everything back in London was running smoothly.

  They were eating chicken pie in a pub in the center of the village when Kell spotted George Truscott at the bar, ordering a half pint of lager. As assistant to the chief, Truscott had been lined up to succeed Simon Haynes as “C” before Amelia had stolen his prize. It had been Truscott, a corporatized desk jockey of suffocating ambition, who had authorized Kell’s presence at the interrogation of Yassin Gharani; and it had been Truscott, more than any other colleague, who had gladly thrown Kell to the wolves when the Service needed a fall guy for the sins of extraordinary rendition. Roughly three minutes after taking over as chief, Amelia had dispatched Truscott to Bonn, dangling the top job in Germany as a carrot. Neither of them had seen him since.

  “Amelia!”

  Truscott had turned from the bar and was carrying his half pint across the pub, like a student learning how to drink during Fresher’s Week. Kell wondered if he should bother disguising his contempt for the man who had ruined his career, but stage-managed a smile, largely out of respect for the somber occasion. Amelia, to whom false expressions of loyalty and affection came as naturally as blinking, stood up and warmly shook Truscott’s hand. A passerby, glancing at their table, would have concluded that both were delighted to see him.

  “I didn’t know you were coming, George. Did you fly in from Bonn?”

  “Berlin, actually,” Truscott replied, hinting archly at work of incalculable importance to the secret state. “And how are you, Tom?”

  Kell could see the wheels of Truscott’s ruthless, back-covering mind turning behind the question; that cunning and inexhaustibly competitive personality with which he had wrestled so long in the final months of his career. Truscott’s thoughts might as well have appeared as bubbles above his narrow, bone-white scalp. Why is Kell with Levene? Has she brought him in from the cold? Has Witness X been forgiven? Kell glimpsed the tremor of panic in Truscott’s wretched and empty soul, his profound fear that Amelia was about to make Kell “H/Ankara,” leaving Truscott with the backwater of Bonn, a Cold War EU hang-up barely relevant in the age of Asia Reset and the Arab Spring.

  “Oh, look, there’s Simon.”

  Amelia had spotted Haynes coming out of the gents’. Her predecessor produced a beaming smile that instantly evaporated when he saw Kell and Truscott in such close proximity. Amelia allowed him to kiss both her cheeks, then watched as the male spooks became stiffly reacquainted. Kell barely took in the various platitudes and clichés with which Haynes greeted him. Yes, it was a great tragedy about Paul. No, Kell hadn’t yet found a permanent job in the private sector. Indeed it was frustrating that the public enquiry had stalled yet again. Before long, Haynes had shuffled off in the direction of Cartmel Priory, Truscott trotting along beside him as though he still believed that Haynes could influence his career.

  “Simon wanted to give the eulogy for Paul,” Amelia said, checking her reflection in a nearby mirror as she put on her coat. They had polished off their chicken pies, split the bill. “He didn’t seem to think it would be a problem. I had to put a stop to it.”

  Having collected his knighthood from Prince Charles the previous autumn, Haynes had appeared at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, spoken at an Intelligence Squared debate at the Royal Geographical Society, and enthusiastically listed his favorite records on Desert Island Discs. As such, he was the first outgoing chief of the Service to be seen to be actively benefiting, both commercially and in terms of his own public profile, from his former career. For Haynes to have given the eulogy at Wallinger’s funeral would have exposed the deceased as a spy to the many friends and neighbors who had gathered in Cartmel under the impression that he had been simply a career diplomat, or even a gentleman farmer.

  “A bad habit we’ve acquired from the Security Service,” Amelia continued. She was wearing a gold necklace and briefly touched the chain. “It’ll be memoirs next. Whatever happened to discretion? Why couldn’t Simon just have joined BP like the rest of them?”

  Kell grinned but wondered if Amelia was giving him a tacit warning. Don’t go public with Witness X. Surely she knew him well enough to realize that he would never betray the Service, far less breach her trust?

  “You ready for this?” he asked, as they turned toward the door. Kell had been drinking a glass of Rioja and drained the last of it as he threw a few pound coins onto the table as a tip. Amelia
found his eyes and, for an instant, looked vulnerable to what lay ahead. As they walked outside into the crystal afternoon sunshine, she briefly squeezed his hand and said: “Wish me luck.”

  “You’ll be fine,” he told her. “The last thing you’ve ever needed is luck.”

  * * *

  He was right, of course. Shortly after three o’clock, as the congregation rose as one to acknowledge the arrival of Josephine Wallinger, Amelia assumed the dignified bearing of a leader and chief, her body language betraying no hint that the man three hundred people had come to mourn had ever been anything more to her than a highly regarded colleague. Kell, for his part, felt oddly detached from the service. He sang the hymns, he listened to the lessons, he nodded through the vicar’s eulogy, which paid appropriately oblique tribute to a “self-effacing man” who had been “a loyal servant to his country.” Yet Kell was distracted. Afterward, making his way to the graveside, he heard an unseen mourner utter the single word “Hammarskjöld” and knew that the conspiracy theories were gathering pace. Dag Hammarskjöld was the Swedish secretary of the United Nations who had been killed in a plane crash in 1961, en route to securing a peace deal that might have prevented civil war in the Congo. Hammarskjöld’s DC6 had crashed in a forest in former Rhodesia. Some claimed that the plane had been shot down by mercenaries; others that SIS itself, in collusion with the CIA and South African intelligence, had sabotaged the flight. Since hearing the news on Sunday, Kell had been nagged by an unsettling sense that there had been foul play involved in Wallinger’s death. He could not say precisely why he felt this way—other than that he had always known Paul to be a meticulous pilot, thorough to the point of paranoia with preflight checks—yet the whispered talk of Hammarskjöld seemed to cement the suspicion in his mind. Looking around at the faceless spooks, ghosts of bygone ops from a dozen different Services, Kell felt that somebody, somewhere in the cramped churchyard, knew why Paul Wallinger’s plane had plunged from the sky.

  The mourners shuffled forward, perhaps as many as two hundred men and women, forming a loose rectangle, ten deep, on all four sides of the grave. Kell saw CIA officers, representatives from Canadian intelligence, three members of the Mossad, as well as colleagues from Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey. As the vicar intoned the consecration, Kell wondered, in the layers of secrecy that formed around a spy like scabs, what sin Wallinger had committed, what treachery he had uncovered, to bring about his own death? Had he pushed too hard on Syria or Iran? Trip-wired an SVR operation in Istanbul? And why Greece, why Chios? Perhaps the official assumption was correct: mechanical failure was to blame. Yet Kell could not shake the feeling that his friend had been assassinated; it was not even beyond the realm of possibility that the plane had been shot down. As Wallinger’s coffin was lowered into the ground, he glanced to the right and saw Amelia wiping away tears. Even Simon Haynes looked cleaned out by grief.

  Kell closed his eyes. He found himself, for the first time in months, mouthing a silent prayer. Then he turned from the grave and walked back toward the church, wondering if mourners at an SIS funeral, twenty years hence, would whisper the name “Wallinger” in country churchyards as a shorthand for murder and cover-up.

  * * *

  Less than an hour later, the crowds of mourners had found their way to the Wallinger farm, where a barn near the main house had been prepared for a wake. Trestle tables were laid out with cakes and cheese sandwiches cut into white, crustless triangles. Wine and whiskey were on standby while two old ladies from the village served tea and Nescafé to the great and the good of the transatlantic intelligence community. Kell was greeted with a mixture of rapture and pity by former colleagues, most of whom were too canny and self-serving to offer their wholehearted support on the fiasco of Witness X. Others had heard word of his divorce on the Service grapevine and placed consoling hands on Kell’s shoulder, as if he had suffered a bereavement or been diagnosed with an inoperable illness. He didn’t blame them. What else were people supposed to say in such circumstances?

  The flowers that had lain on Wallinger’s coffin had been set out at one end of the barn. Kell was standing outside, smoking a cigarette, when he saw Wallinger’s children—his son, Andrew, and his daughter, Rachel—bending over the floral tributes, reading the cards, and sharing a selection of the written messages with each other. Andrew was the younger of the two, now twenty-eight, reportedly earning a living in Moscow as a banker. Kell had not seen Rachel for more than fifteen years, and had been struck by her dignity and grace as she supported her mother at the graveside. Andrew had wept desperately for the father he had lost as Josephine stared into the black grave, frozen in what Kell assumed was a medicated grief. Yet Rachel had maintained an eerie stillness, as if in possession of a secret that guaranteed her peace of mind.

  He was grinding out the cigarette, half listening to a local farmer telling a long-winded anecdote about wind farms, when he saw Rachel bend down and pick up a card attached to a small bunch of flowers on the far side of the barn. She was alone, several meters from Andrew, but Kell had a clear view of her face. He saw Rachel’s dark eyes harden as she read the card, then a flush of anger scald her cheeks.

  What she did next astonished him. Leaning down, and with a brisk flick of her wrist, she skidded the flowers low and hard toward the edge of the barn, where they hit the whitewashed wall with a soundless thud. Rachel then placed the card in her coat pocket and returned to Andrew’s side. No words were exchanged. It was as though she did not want to involve her brother in what she had just seen. Moments later Rachel turned and walked back toward the trestle tables, where she was intercepted by a middle-aged woman wearing a black hat. As far as Kell could tell, nobody else had witnessed what had happened.

  The barn had become hot and, after a few minutes, Rachel removed her coat, folding it over the back of a chair. She was continually in conversation with guests who wished to convey their condolences. At one point she burst into laughter and the men in the room, as one, seemed to turn and look at her. Rachel had an in-house reputation for beauty and brains; Kell recalled a couple of male colleagues constructing Christmas-party innuendos about her. Yet she was not as he had imagined she would be; there was something about the dignity of her behavior, the decisiveness with which she had dispatched the flowers, a sense in which she was fully in control of her emotions and of the environment in which she had found herself, that intrigued Kell.

  In time, she had made her way to the far side of the barn. She was at least fifty feet from the coat. Kell, carrying a plate of sandwiches and cake toward the chair, took off his own coat and folded it alongside Rachel’s. At the same time, he reached into her outside pocket and removed the card.

  He glanced across the barn. Rachel had not seen him. She was still deep in conversation, her back to the chair. Kell walked quickly outside, crossed the drive, and went into the Wallingers’ house. Several people were milling about in the hall, guests looking for bathrooms, staff ferrying food and drink from the kitchen to the barn. Kell avoided them and walked upstairs.

  The bathroom door was locked. He needed to find a room where he would not be disturbed. Glimpsing posters of Pearl Jam and Kevin Pietersen in a room farther along the corridor, Kell found himself in Andrew’s bedroom. There were framed photographs from his time at Eton above a wooden desk, as well as various caps and sporting mementos. Kell closed the door behind him and navigated past various items of clothing that were strewn on the floor. He took the card from his jacket pocket and opened it up.

  The inscription was in an eastern European language that Kell assumed to be Hungarian. The note had been handwritten on a small white card with a blue flower printed in the top right-hand corner.

  Szerelmem. Szívem darabokban, mert nem tudok Veled lenni soha már. Olyan fájó a csend amióta elmentél, hogy még hallom a lélegzeted, amikor álmodban néztelek.

  Had Rachel been able to understand it? Kell put the card on the bed and took out his iPhone. He photographed the message, left the bedroo
m, and returned to the barn.

  With Rachel nowhere to be seen, Kell removed his overcoat from the chair and, by simple sleight of hand, replaced the card in her coat pocket. It had been in his possession for no more than five minutes. When he turned around, he saw that she was coming back into the barn and walking toward her mother. Kell went outside for a cigarette.

  * * *

  Amelia was standing on her own in front of the house, like someone at the end of a party waiting for a cab.

  “What have you been up to?” she asked.

  At first, Kell thought that she had spotted him lifting the card. Then he realized, from Amelia’s expression, that the question was merely a general enquiry about his life.

  “You mean recently? In London?”

  “Yes, recently.”

  “You want an honest answer to that?”

  “Of course.”

  “Fuck all.”

  Amelia did not react to the bluntness of the response. Ordinarily she would have smiled or conjured a look of mock disapproval. But her mood was serious, as though she had finally arrived at a solution to a problem that had been troubling her for some time.

  “So you’re not busy for the next few weeks?”

  Kell felt a jolt of optimism, his luck about to change. Just ask the question, he thought. Just get me back in the game. He looked out across a valley sketched with dry-stone walls and distant sheep, thinking of the long afternoons he had spent brushing up his Arabic at SOAS, the solo holidays in Lisbon and Beirut, the course he had taken at City Lit in twentieth-century Irish poetry. Filling up the time.

  “I’ve got a job for you,” she said. “Should have mentioned it earlier but it didn’t seem right before the funeral.” Kell heard the gravel-crunch of someone approaching them across the drive. He hoped the offer would come before they were cut off midconversation. He didn’t want Amelia changing her mind.