A Colder War (2 page)

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 nuts. 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.

“Time?” said Adnan. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, too lazy even to look at a clock.

“Five,” said Burak, because he wanted to get on with it.

“Ten to,” said Metin. Burak shot him a look.

“Fuck it,” said Adnan. “Let’s go.”

*   *   *

The first Ebru knew of the raid was a noise very close to her face, which she later realized was the sound of the bedroom door being kicked in. She sat up in bed—she was naked—and screamed, because she thought a gang of men were going to rape her. She had been dreaming of her father, of her two young nephews, but now three men were in her cramped bedroom, throwing clothes at her, shouting at her to get dressed, calling her a “fucking terrorist.”

She knew what it was. She had dreaded this moment. They all did. They all censored their words, chose their stories carefully, because a line out of place, an inference here, a suggestion there, was enough to land you in prison. Modern Turkey. Democratic Turkey. Still a police state. Always had been. Always would be.

One of them was dragging her now, saying she was being too slow. To Ebru’s shame, she began to cry. What had she done wrong? What had she written? It occurred to her, as she covered herself, pulled on some knickers, buttoned up her jeans, that Ryan would help. Ryan had money and influence and would do what he could to save her.

“Leave it,” one of them barked. She had tried to grab her phone. She saw the surname on the cop’s lapel badge:
TURAN
.

“I want a lawyer,” she screamed.

Burak shook his head. “No lawyer is going to help you,” he said. “Now put on a fucking shirt.”

LONDON, THREE WEEKS LATER

3

Thomas Kell had only been standing at the bar for a few seconds when the landlady turned to him, winked, and said: “The usual, Tom?”

The usual. It was a bad sign. He was spending four nights out of seven at the Ladbroke Arms, four nights out of seven drinking pints of Adnams Ghost Ship with only the
Times
quick crossword and a packet of Winston Lights for company. Perhaps there was no alternative for disgraced spooks. Cold shouldered by the Secret Intelligence Service eighteen months earlier, Kell had been in a state of suspended animation ever since. He wasn’t out, but he wasn’t in. His part in saving the life of Amelia Levene’s son, François Malot, was known only to a select band of high priests at Vauxhall Cross. To the rest of the staff at MI6, Thomas Kell was still “Witness X,” the officer who had been present at the aggressive CIA interrogation of a British national in Kabul and who had failed to prevent the suspect’s subsequent rendition to a black prison in Cairo, and on to the gulag of Guantanamo.

“Thanks, Kathy,” he said, and planted a five-pound note on the bar. A well-financed German was standing beside him, flicking through the pages of the
FT Weekend
and picking at a bowl of wasabi peas. Kell collected his change, walked outside, and sat at a picnic table under the fierce heat of a standing gas fire. It was dusk on a damp Easter Sunday, the pub—like the rest of Notting Hill—almost empty. Kell had the terrace to himself. Most of the local residents appeared to be out of town, doubtless at Gloucestershire second homes or skiing lodges in the Swiss Alps. Even the well-tended police station across the street looked half asleep. Kell took out the packet of Winstons and rummaged around for his lighter; a gold Dunhill, engraved with the initials P.M.—a private memento from Levene, who had risen to MI6 chief the previous September.

“Every time you light a cigarette, you can think of me,” she had said with a low laugh, pressing the lighter into the palm of his hand. A classic Amelia tactic: seemingly intimate and heartfelt, but ultimately deniable as anything other than a platonic gift between friends.

In truth, Kell had never been much of a smoker, but recently cigarettes had afforded a useful punctuation to his unchanging days. In his twenty-year career as a spy, he had often carried a packet as a prop: a light could start a conversation; a cigarette would put an agent at ease. Now they were part of the furniture of his solitary life. He felt less fit as a consequence and spent a lot more money. Most mornings he would wake and cough like a dying man, immediately reaching for another nicotine kick start to the day. But he found that he could not function without them.

Kell was living in what a former colleague had described as the “no-man’s-land” of early middle-age, in the wake of a job which had imploded and a marriage which had failed. At Christmas, his wife, Claire, had finally filed for divorce and begun a new relationship with her lover, Richard Quinn, a twice-married hedge fund Peter Pan with a £14 million townhouse in Primrose Hill and three teenage sons at St. Paul’s. Not that Kell regretted the split, nor resented Claire the upgrade in lifestyle; for the most part he was relieved to be free of a relationship that had brought neither of them much in the way of happiness. He hoped that Dick the Wonder Schlong—as Quinn was affectionately known—would bring Claire the fulfillment she craved. Being married to a spy, she had once told him, was like being married to half a person. In her view, Kell had been physically and emotionally separate from her for years.

A sip of the Ghost. It was Kell’s second pint of the evening and tasted soapier than the first. He flicked the half-smoked cigarette out into the street and took out his iPhone. The green messages icon was empty; the mail envelope identically blank. He had finished the
Times
crossword half an hour earlier and had left the novel he was reading—Julian Barnes’s
The Sense of an Ending
—on the kitchen table in his flat. There seemed little to do but drink the pint and look out at the listless street. Occasionally a car would roll down the road or a local resident drag past with a dog, but London was otherwise uncharacteristically silent; it was like listening to the city through the muffle of headphones. The eerie quiet only added to Kell’s sense of restlessness. He was not a man prone to self-pity, but nor did he want to spend too many more nights drinking alone on the terrace of an upmarket gastropub in west London, waiting to see if Amelia Levene would give him his job back. The public enquiry into Witness X was dragging its heels; Kell had been waiting almost two years to see if he would be cleared of all charges or laid out as a sacrificial lamb. With the exception of the three-week operation to rescue Amelia’s son, François, the previous summer, and a one-month contract working due diligence for a corporate espionage firm in Mayfair, that was too long out of the game. He wanted to get back to work. He wanted to
spy
again.

Then—a miracle. The iPhone lit up. “Amelia L3” appeared on the screen. It was like a sign from the God in whom Kell still occasionally believed. He picked up before the first ring was through.

“Speak of the devil.”

“Tom?”

He could tell immediately that something was wrong. Amelia’s customarily authoritative voice was shaky and uncertain. She had called him from her private number, not a landline or an encrypted Service phone. It had to be personal. Kell thought at first that something must have happened to François, or that Amelia’s husband, Giles, had been killed in an accident.

“It’s Paul.”

That winded him. Kell knew that she could only be talking about Paul Wallinger.

“What’s happened? Is he all right?”

“He’s been killed.”

4

Kell hailed a cab on Holland Park Avenue and was outside Amelia’s house in Chelsea within twenty minutes. He was about to ring the bell when he felt the loss of Wallinger like something pulling apart inside him and had to take a moment to compose himself. They had joined SIS in the same intake. They had risen through the ranks together, fast-track brothers winning the pick of overseas postings across the post–Cold War constellation. Wallinger, an Arabist, nine years older, had served in Cairo, Riyadh, Tehran, and Damascus before Amelia had handed him the top job in Turkey. In what he had often thought of as a parallel, shadow career, Kell, the younger brother, had worked in Nairobi, Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Kabul, tracking Wallinger’s rise as the years rolled by. Staring down the length of Markham Street, he remembered the thirty-four-year-old wunderkind he had first encountered on the IONEC training course in the autumn of 1990, Wallinger’s scores, his intellect, his ambition just that much sharper than his own.