A Colder War Read online

  The hard drive gave him access to the SIS telegrams that Wallinger had sent and received in the previous thirteen months, copies of which were also being read by one of Amelia’s assistants in London. Wallinger’s internal communications within the Station, and to the wider embassy staff, had not been automatically copied to Vauxhall Cross, but Kell found nothing in the intranet messages to the ambassador or first secretary which appeared out of the ordinary. Amelia had gone over the heads of SIS vetting to ensure that Kell was given immediate DV clearance to read anything in Turkey that might help him to piece together Wallinger’s state of mind, as well as his movements, in the weeks leading up to his death. He was permitted to read four “eyes-only” telegrams on Iranian centrifuges that had been seen only by H/Istanbul, Amelia, the foreign secretary, and the prime minister. The classified internal report into the failed defection of Shakhouri Mirzai had been copied to Jim Chater, who had added his own remarks in anticipation of a similar CIA report into the incident. Kell could find nothing in the manner in which the recruitment of Mirzai had been handled, nor in the planning and execution of the operation, that seemed problematic or misjudged. As Tremayne had suggested, the Iranians must have been alerted to the defection, likely because of an error in Mirzai’s tradecraft. Only by talking to Chater face-to-face would Kell be able to get a fuller picture.

  * * *

  On his third afternoon in Ankara, Kell took a taxi to Wallinger’s suburban villa in Incek, a property owned by the Foreign Office and occupied by successive heads of station for most of the previous two decades. Turning the key in the front door, Kell reflected that he had searched many homes, many hotel rooms, many offices in his career, but had only had cause to snoop on a friend once before—when searching for Amelia the previous year. It was one of the healthier house rules at SIS and MI5: staff were required to sign a document pledging not to investigate the behavior of friends or relatives on Service computers. Those caught doing so—running background checks on a new girlfriend, for example, or looking for personal information about a colleague—would quickly be shown the door.

  The villa was starkly furnished in the modern Turkish style with very little of Wallinger’s taste apparent in the decor. Kell suspected that his yali in Istanbul would be quite different in atmosphere: more cluttered, more scholarly. It appeared as though a cleaner had recently been to the property, because the kitchen surfaces were as polished as a showroom, the toilets blue with detergent, the beds made, the rugs straightened, not a speck of dust on any shelf or table. In the cupboards, Kell found only what he would have expected to find: clothes and shoes and boxes; in the bathroom, toiletries, towels, and a dressing gown. Beside Wallinger’s bed there was a biography of Lyndon Johnson; beneath the television downstairs, box sets of all five seasons of The Wire. The villa, as soulless as a serviced apartment, revealed very little about the personality of the occupant. Even Wallinger’s study had a feeling of impermanence: a single photograph of Josephine on the desk, another of Andrew and Rachel as children hanging on the wall. There were various magazines, Turkish and English, paperback thrillers on a shelf, a reproduction poster of the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. Kell read through a few scribbled notes in a foolscap pad and found an out-of-date diary in the desk, but no hidden documents, no letters concealed behind pictures, no false passports or suicide note. Wallinger had kept a tennis racket and a set of golf clubs in a cupboard under the stairs. Feeling somewhat foolish, Kell checked for a hidden compartment in the handle of the racket and for a false bottom in the golf bag. He discovered nothing but some old tees and two hardened sticks of prehistoric chewing gum. It was the same story upstairs. Checking behind drawers, unscrewing lampshades, looking under cupboards—Wallinger had hidden nothing in the house. Kell moved from room to room, listening to the intermittent sounds of birdsong and passing cars in the suburban street outside, and concluded that there was nothing to find. Tremayne had been right—Wallinger’s heart had been in Istanbul.

  Kell was in a bathroom adjacent to the smaller of two spare bedrooms when he heard the front door opening and then slamming shut. The sound of a set of keys falling onto the surface of a glass table. Not an intruder; it had to be someone who had legitimate access to the villa. A cleaner? The landlord?

  Kell left the bathroom and walked out onto the landing. He called out: “Merhaba?”

  No reply. Kell began to walk downstairs, calling out a second time: “Merhaba? Hello?”

  He could see down into the hall. A faint shadow moved across the polished floor. Whoever had come in was now in Wallinger’s office. As he reached the midpoint of the stairs, Kell heard a reply in a singsong accent he recognized instantly.

  “Hello? Somebody is there, please?”

  A woman came out of the office. She was wearing blue leggings and a black leather jacket and her hair was grown out and tied at the back. Kell hadn’t seen her since the operation to save François Malot, in which she had played such a crucial role. When she saw him, her face broke into a wide smile and she swore excitedly in Italian.

  “Minchia!”

  “Elsa,” Kell said. “I wondered when I’d run into you.”

  15

  They hugged each other in the hall, Elsa wrapping her arms around Kell’s neck so tightly that he almost lost his balance. She smelled of a new perfume. The shape of her, the warmth in her greeting, reminded Kell that they had almost become lovers in the summer of the Malot operation, and that only his loyalty to Claire, allied to a sense of professional responsibility, had prevented that.

  “It is so amazing to see you!” she said, raising herself up on tiptoes to kiss him. Kell felt like a favorite uncle. It was not a feeling he enjoyed, yet he remembered how easily Elsa had broken through the wall of his natural reticence, how close they had become in the short time they had spent together. “Amelia sent you?” she asked.

  Kell was surprised that Elsa did not know that he was going to be in Ankara. “Yes. She didn’t tell you?”

  “No!”

  Of course she didn’t. How many other Service freelancers were working on the Wallinger case? How many other members of staff had Amelia dispatched to the four corners of the earth to find out why Paul had died?

  “You’re picking up his computers?”

  Elsa was a Tech-Ops specialist, a freelance computer whiz who could decipher a software program, a circuit board, or a screen of code as others could translate pages of Mandarin, or sight-read a Shostakovich piano concerto. In France, a summer earlier, she had unearthed nuggets of intelligence in laptops and BlackBerries that had been critical to Kell’s investigation: without her, the operation would certainly have failed.

  “Sure,” she said. “Just picked up the keys.”

  She glanced toward the glass table. Kell saw the keys resting against the base of a vase containing fake plastic flowers.

  “I guess that’s what you call good timing,” he told her. “I was about to start downloading the hard drive.”

  Elsa’s face screwed up in confusion, not merely at the obvious overlap in their responsibilities, but also because she knew that, to Kell, computer technology was a gobbledygook language of which he had only a rudimentary understanding.

  “It’s a good thing I am here, then,” she said. It was only then that she let go of his hands, pivoting back in the direction of the office. “I can tell you which plug goes in the wall and which one goes in the back of the computer.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  Kell studied her face. He remembered the natural ebullience, a young woman entirely at ease in her own skin. Running into Elsa so suddenly had lifted his spirits out of the despondency that had plagued him for days. “When did you get here?” he asked.

  She glanced outside. She had three earrings in her right lobe, a single stud in the left. “Yesterday?” It was as though she had forgotten.

  “You’re going into the Station at some point?”

  Elsa nodded. “Sure. Tomorrow, I have an appointment. Amelia
wants me to go through Mr. Wallinger’s e-mails.” She pronounced “Wallinger” in two separate parts—“Wall” and then a Scandinavian “Inga”—and Kell smiled. “Is that not correct, Tom Kell? Wallinger?”

  “It’s perfect. It’s your way of saying it.”

  It was good to hear the music of her voice again, the mischief in it. “Okay. So I take a look at this man’s computers, take the phones and maybe the drives back to Rome for analysis.”

  “The phones?” Kell followed her into the office and watched as Elsa powered up Wallinger’s desktop.

  “Sure. He had two cell phones in Ankara. One of the SIM cards from his personal phone was recovered from the airplane.”

  Kell did not disguise his astonishment. “What?”

  “You did not know this?”

  “I’m playing catch-up.” Elsa squinted, either because she did not understand the expression, or because she was surprised that Kell appeared so far off his game. “Amelia only brought me in a few days ago.”

  During the operation in which they had first worked together, Kell had spoken to Elsa about his role in the interrogation of Yassin Gharani. She knew that he had been sidelined by SIS, but made it clear that she believed in Kell’s innocence. For this, she occupied a special place in his affections, not least because her trust had been more than Claire had ever been able to afford him.

  “You’re going to Istanbul?” she asked.

  “As soon as I’m done with the Americans. You?”

  “I think so, yes. Maybe. There is Wallinger’s house there? And, of course, a Station.”

  Kell nodded. “And where there is a Station, there are computers for Elsa Cassani.”

  The booting desktop played an accompaniment to Kell’s remark, a rising scale of digitized notes issuing from two speakers on Wallinger’s desk. Elsa tapped something into the keyboard. It was only then that Kell saw the ring on her finger.

  “You got engaged?” he said, and experienced a sense of dismay that surprised him.

  “Married!” she replied, and held up the ring as though she expected Kell to be as pleased as she was. Why was he not glad for her? Had he become so cynical about marriage that the prospect of a woman as lively, as full of promise, as Elsa Cassani walking up the aisle filled him with dread? If so, these were cynical, almost nihilistic thoughts of which he was not proud. There was every chance that she would find great happiness. Plenty did. “Who’s the lucky man?”

  “He is German,” she said. “A musician.”

  “Rock band?”

  “No, classical.” She was about to show Kell a photograph from her wallet when his phone began to ring.

  It was Tamas Metka.

  “Can you speak?” The Hungarian explained that he was calling from a phone box across the street from the bar in Szolnok. Kell gave him the number of the secure telephone in Wallinger’s bedroom and walked upstairs. Two minutes later, Metka rang back.

  “So,” he said, a strain of irony in his voice. “Turns out you may have met this Miss Sandor.”

  “Really?”

  “She used to be one of us.”

  Why wasn’t Kell surprised? Wallinger was most likely having yet another affair with yet another female colleague.

  “A spook?”

  “A spook,” Metka confirmed. “I took a look at the files. She worked several times alongside SIS, Five. She was with us until three years ago.”

  “‘Us’ meaning she’s Hungarian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Private sector now?”

  “No.” There was a smothering roar on the line, the sound of a truck or bus driving past the phone booth. Metka waited until it had passed. “Nowadays she owns a restaurant on Lopud.”

  “Lopud?”

  “Croatia. One of the islands off Dubrovnik.”

  Kell was sitting on Wallinger’s bed. He picked up the biography of LBJ, turned it over in his hand, skimmed the quotes on the back.

  “Is she married?” he asked.

  “Divorced.”

  “Kids?”

  “None.”

  Metka emitted a gusty laugh. “Why do you want to know about her, anyway? You fallen in love with a beautiful Magyar poet, Tom?”

  So Cecilia was beautiful, too. Of course she was.

  “Not me. Somebody else.” Kell had replied as though Wallinger was still alive, still involved with Sandor. “Why did she leave the NSA?”

  A phone rang on the ground floor of the villa. Kell heard Elsa’s voice as she answered—“Pronto!” Maybe it was her husband calling. Putting the book back on the bedside table, it fell open to a page that had been marked by what looked like a photograph. Kell picked it up.

  “I’m not certain why,” Metka replied. Kell, now only half listening, turned the photograph around. He was astonished to see that it was a picture of Amelia.

  “Say that again,” he said, buying time as he came to terms with what he was looking at.

  “I said I don’t know why she left us. What I saw of her file showed that it was in ’09. Voluntary.”

  In the photograph, which had been taken perhaps ten or fifteen years earlier, in the full flush of Amelia’s affair with Wallinger, she was sitting in a crowded restaurant. There was a glass of white wine in front of her, a blurred waiter in a white jacket passing to the left of her chair. She was tanned and wearing a strapless cream dress with a gold necklace that Kell had seen only once before: it was identical to the one Amelia had worn at Wallinger’s funeral. She was perhaps forty in the picture and looked extraordinarily beautiful, but also profoundly content, as though she had at last attained a kind of inner peace. Kell could not remember ever having seen Amelia so at ease.

  “She still had security clearance,” Metka was saying. “There was nothing negative recorded against her.”

  Kell put the photograph back in the book and tried to think of something to say. “The restaurant?” he asked.

  “What about it?”

  “You got a name? An address on Lopud?”

  He knew that he was going to have to find Cecilia Sandor, to talk to her. She was the key to everything now.

  “Oh, sure,” said Metka. “I’ve got the address.”

  16

  The embassy of the United States of America was a low-roofed complex of buildings in the heart of the city, flat as the Pentagon and defended by black metal fencing ten feet high. The contrast with the British embassy, a lavish imperial throwback in an upmarket residential neighborhood overlooking downtown Ankara, could not have been starker. While the Brits employed a single uniformed Turk to run routine security checks on vehicles approaching the building, the Americans deployed a small platoon of buzz-cut, flak-jacketed Marine Corps, most of them hidden behind tungsten-strengthened security gates designed to withstand the impact of a two-ton bomb. You couldn’t blame the Yanks for laying things on a bit thick; every wannabe jihadi from Grosvenor Square to Manila wanted to take a pop at Uncle Sam. Nevertheless, the atmosphere around the embassy was so tense that, as he pulled up in a rattling Ankaran taxi, Kell felt as though he were back in the Green Zone in Baghdad.

  After fifteen minutes of checks, questions, and pat-downs, he was shown into a small office on the first floor with a view onto a garden in which somebody had erected a small wooden climbing frame. There were various certificates on the walls, two watercolors, a photograph of Barack Obama, and a shelf of paperback books. This, Kell was told, was where Jim Chater would meet him. The choice of venue immediately raised Kell’s suspicions. Any discussion between a cadre CIA officer and a colleague from SIS should, as a matter of course, take place inside the CIA’s Station. Was Chater planning a blatant snub, or would they move to a secure speech room once he arrived?

  The meeting was scheduled for ten o’clock. Twelve minutes had passed before there was a light knock on the door and a blond woman in her late twenties entered wearing a suit and a clip-on smile.

  “Mr. Kell?”

  Kell stood up and shook the woman’s hand
. She introduced herself as Kathryn Moses and explained that she was an FP-04 State Department official, which Kell dimly recalled as an entry-level ranking. More likely she was CIA, an errand girl for Chater.

  “I’m afraid Jim’s running late,” she said. “He’s asked me to step in. Can I get you a coffee, tea, or something?”

  Kell didn’t want to lose another five minutes of the hour-long meeting in beverage preparation. He said no.

  “Any idea what time he’ll be here?”

  It was then that he realized Ms. Moses had been sent deliberately to stall him. Settling into a rolling chair behind the desk, she gave Kell a brief, appraising glance, adjusted the sleeves of her jacket, then spoke to him as though he were a Liberal Democrat minister visiting Turkey on a two-day fact-finding tour.

  “Jim has asked me to give you an overview of how we see things right now developing locally and in the Syrian-Iranian theater, particularly with reference to the regime in Damascus.”