A Colder War (22 page)

And there she was. Cecilia Sandor. Emerging from the ground-floor entrance and making her way across the path to the terrace. The binoculars were powerful enough for Kell to make out the precise features of her face. He was surprised by what he saw. She was not a naturally beautiful woman; indeed, it looked as though Cecilia had used fillers extensively beneath her eyes and on her mouth. Her upper lip had the absurd and unmistakable swell of collagen, her vast breasts out of all proportion to an otherwise reedy frame. Seeing how tall she was, Kell thought instantly of Rachel’s nickname—the Na’vi—and grinned as a bead of sweat dripped down his back. Behind him, perhaps fifty meters away, he heard a group of three or four people walking past on the path. One of them was whistling a chunk of Tchaikovsky—either
Swan Lake
or
The Nutcracker,
Kell never knew the difference—and the melody lodged in his mind as he continued to watch the terrace.

Cecilia emerged from the restaurant carrying a bottle of water. She placed the bottle in front of an elderly couple, then spoke to a man of about thirty-five who was wearing sunglasses and a red polo shirt. The man was seated alone at the table farthest from the entrance. He had finished eating; there was an espresso cup on the table in front of him, and he was smoking a cigarette. Cecilia picked up what appeared to be a small metal tray on which the man had placed some euros to pay for his meal and held the tray in her hand as they spoke to each other. Then the man placed his hand on the small of Cecilia’s back, rested it there, and caressed her. Cecilia did not react until, as much as ten seconds later, the man moved his hand down toward her buttocks, at which point she eased him away and stepped back from the table.

What had Kell just seen? It was impossible to know whether Cecilia had moved his hand away out of irritation, or simply because she did not want other customers at the restaurant to see what was happening.

Kell knew immediately what he had to do. Standing up, he left the binoculars beside the hut and moved as fast as he could back toward the path. He was wearing shorts and sneakers, and the plants and trees picked at his skin as he struggled through the undergrowth. It was essential that he try to identify the man before he left the restaurant. Kell began to jog along the path, his phone jumping in his back pocket as he descended toward the town. He was soon completely drenched in sweat and taking deep gulps of air as he ran, cursing his addiction to cigarettes. The phone began to ring but he ignored it. Within three minutes he had reached the end of the forest path and could turn toward the bay through the narrow back alleys of the town. His pace was slowing, but he urged himself on, formulating a plan as he ran and knowing that he could rest and catch his breath as soon as he was within a stone’s throw of the restaurant.

Reaching the harbor, Kell found himself among thick crowds wandering around the shops and cafés close to the pier. He assumed these were mostly passengers from the midday ferry that he had observed approaching the island half an hour earlier. The sight of a sweating, panting Englishman with a roasted face drew stares as he turned north and began to jog toward Centonove. Within a minute, the terrace of the restaurant was in sight. Within another ten seconds, Kell could see that the man in the red shirt had left. He swore under his breath and stopped running, his lungs stinging, gasping for air, his head, neck, arms, and legs broiled by the afternoon sun.

Kell looked up. To his relief, he could see the man coming toward him on the path. There was an elderly lady in front of him, dressed in black widow’s weeds, as well as a middle-aged British couple whom Kell recognized from the Lafodia.

This was his only chance. Kell was going to take a crazy risk, of the sort that he might have tried on the IONEC twenty years earlier, to prove an aptitude for courage and quick thinking. It was operationally near-suicidal, yet he had no choice.

The British couple were within ten meters of where Kell was standing. Hoping that they would pass without seeing him, he turned his back to stare at a rack of postcards outside a small shop. If they stopped and tried to talk to him, to offer help to a struggling tourist, the plan would be unworkable. Kell was still desperately short of breath and continued to gasp for air as he picked up one of the postcards. To his relief, the British couple walked past without stopping.

He immediately put the postcard back, turned around, and moved into the center of the path, effectively blocking it. With sweat pouring down his face, Kell made direct, pleading eye contact with the man in the red shirt as he walked toward him. The man frowned and slowed his pace, recognizing that Kell was trying to communicate with him. Putting his weight unsteadily on his left foot, but adding no further exaggeration to his already disheveled appearance, Kell raised his hand and took the gamble.

“Do you speak English?”

“Sure.” It sounded like a Balkan accent. The man was perhaps closer to forty than thirty-five, but good-looking and fit. He was wearing a chunky metal watch on a tanned wrist, pressed linen trousers, and a pair of expensive-looking deck shoes. The red polo shirt had a Lacoste crocodile on the chest.

“Could I ask a big favor?”

“Favor?”

“Do you have a phone I could borrow?”

The words were no sooner out of Kell’s mouth than he remembered that he had forgotten to switch off the sound on his own iPhone. If it rang in his back pocket, he was finished.

“You need make a call?” The man looked genuinely alarmed at the sight of the medically unstable British jogger standing before him.

“Just to my hotel,” Kell replied. He nodded toward the white hulk of the Lafodia, a quarter of a mile along the bay. He could not risk putting his hand into his back pocket and feeling for the mute switch on the phone. He would just have to pray that it didn’t ring. “My wife. I came out without my…”

To Kell’s amazement, Lacoste quickly extracted a Samsung from his hip pocket, swept his thumb over the screen, and handed him the unlocked phone. “You have the number?”

Kell nodded and muttered heartfelt thanks, then began tapping out the number of his private U.K. cell phone, which he had left in the safe in his room. It began to ring. He heard the automated message responding on voice mail.

“
Welcome to the O2 messaging service. The person you are calling is unable to take your call…”

Kell knew that he would have to improvise a nonexistent dialogue with his “wife” and hope that it sounded credible.

“Hi. It’s me.” An appropriate pause. “I know. Yes. Don’t worry. I’m fine.” Another delay. Lacoste was staring at him, his expression entirely blank. “I’m just borrowing a phone off a very kind passerby. I think I’ve torn a muscle in my leg.” Another pause. It occurred to Kell that he would later be able to hear his own improvised performance, recorded for posterity. “No, I’m fine. But could you ask the hotel to send down one of their buggies? I don’t want to have to limp back.”

Kell took the weight off his injured leg and winced to accentuate a burst of imaginary pain. Lacoste could not have been less interested in the nuances of Kell’s performance: he was looking out across the bay and seemed to be perfectly happy waiting for the call to end.

“Or maybe sprained it,” Kell said, hearing a sustained tone as the messaging service cut him off. “I’m not sure.” He counted out two more seconds, long enough for his imaginary wife to question the seriousness of his injury and perhaps the good sense of asking the hotel to rush to his assistance. Then Kell said: “Yeah, maybe you’re right” as Lacoste turned to face him once again. Kell tried to study the features of his face as closely as possible, to commit them to memory. “Look, I’d better get off the line,” he said. “I’m using someone’s phone and he needs to get away.”

Kell had assumed that Lacoste could speak English and had been listening to every word of the phantom conversation. To his surprise, however, Cecilia’s mystery man merely frowned and bounced his eyebrows, suggesting that he did not fully comprehend why Kell had needed the phone in the first place. Kell duly conjured three more snippets of imaginary dialogue, then rang off, telling the dead phone line that he was catching his breath outside a shop halfway along the bay. He then handed back the Samsung, thanked Lacoste effusively, and watched as he strolled off in the direction of the ferry terminal.

Ten seconds later, in an act of God for which Kell sent thanks and praise to the heavens, the iPhone began to ring in his back pocket. He went into the shop to answer it.

“Tom?”

It was Elsa. Kell smiled at the coincidence.

“Funny you should ring,” he said. “I’ve got a number I need you to check.”

32

As soon as Lacoste was out of sight, Kell left the shop and limped along the promenade to a small café where he ordered a Coke and a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich. Even ten minutes later he was still physically exhausted and made the latest in a series of private promises to join a gym and do some regular exercise. Having paid his bill he then walked back along the promenade, exaggerating his phantom limp as he passed Centonove, just in case Cecilia happened to be watching. There was no sign of her, only the bald-headed waiter attending to a rowdy table of six on the terrace.

Kell continued along the path. A group of young boys were splashing in the sea, watched over by an overweight man wearing orange Speedos and a Croatian football shirt, his topless wife asleep beside him. There was a smell of pine and engine oil, a summer sense of nothing much mattering, of people having all the time in the world.

Back in his room, Kell opened the safe. He would text Lacoste’s number to Elsa. Working at her usual pace, it would probably be less than twenty-four hours before she had identified the man, traced his IP address, obtained an itemized copy of his cell phone bill, and accessed his e-mail accounts. If Lacoste was in a relationship with Cecilia—a relationship which she had run in parallel with Wallinger—it would show up on their correspondence like UV dye on a banknote.

Kell tapped in the four-digit code, swung open the door of the safe, and reached for his mobile. Sure enough, a missed call was registered on the phone icon. He tapped the screen and texted the number to Elsa. His shins and knees still throbbing from the run, Kell went to the beach for a swim before falling asleep in his room to the sound of clacking seagulls and a chambermaid vacuuming in the corridor outside.

He woke to an e-mail from Adam Haydock, filed as a CX to Amelia. To his irritation, Kell was copied on the message as “Temporary Istanbul.”

EYES ONLY / ALERT C / TempISTAN/ ATH4

Case: I. Christidis / 12.6.13

1. Suicide note found by wife. (Handwriting/style confirmed). Describes financial concerns, fears of bankruptcy; regret and sense of personal responsibility for Wallinger crash; poor relationship with daughter. (Copy (Greek) in transit/VXC
+
TempISTAN).

2. Colleagues speak of likable, “honest” personality. Teetotal, but alcohol found in bloodstream postmortem. No history of alcoholism.

3. Greek Orthodox, lapsed.

4. Sense of surprise in community that Christidis should take his own life, but motives appear plausible to those who knew him. Coroner report seen by AH—suicide verdict obtained. Coroner’s report not challenged by family.

5. Comms (PRISM) shows e-mail used infrequently. Regular cell and land calls to wife and friends (colleagues). No pornography. No drug use. No girlfriend/boyfriend. No psychiatrist/medication.

6. Credit card debt—
€
17,698.23 House owned. Airport shifts cut, income down by 10% (on 2010). Wife unemployed. Christidis brother died (61) 2012. Bereavement?

7. No third-party/Cousin interest detected on Chios. Police cooperative (
€
500 single payment). Nothing recorded against Christidis in police files.

It was customary for officers filing CX to offer little interpretation of their own product. That was left to the wonks and analysts in London, who would direct the intelligence further upstream until a more senior colleague or minister of sufficient rank and distinction chose to act upon it. Nevertheless, the thrust of Haydock’s report could not have been clearer. As far as he was concerned, there was no evidence of American interference on the island, nor any sense that Christidis had been compromised or manipulated. Haydock knew that “C” was suspicious of the circumstances surrounding Wallinger’s crash and was aware that Kell had his own private doubts about CIA involvement in the case. Nevertheless, against this background, he had maintained that there was no foul play or coercion involved in the death of Iannis Christidis. It was suicide, pure and simple.

All of which left Kell with a sense that he would never know the truth about the accident. If nobody had tampered with Wallinger’s plane, why had it crashed? He thought of Rachel, of the anger she felt toward her father, of the letter Paul had written to Cecilia, the intensity of his love for a woman who might not have loved him in return. A woman who, while apparently grieving Wallinger’s death, had allowed another man to caress her back, stopping him only when those caresses became too intimate, too public. Had Paul taken his own life because he had discovered that Cecilia was two-timing him? Surely not.

Perhaps there was no mystery at all, no foul play, no conspiracy. Just the random accident of engine failure, bird strike, pilot error. It was one of the lessons Kell had learned many years earlier: there were always operational questions that could not be answered. Questions of motive, of circumstance, of fact. Despite all of the resources at the disposal of SIS, the tenacity and skill of her employees, human behavior was too unpredictable, the capacity to disguise and dissemble limitless. “I just don’t buy the trail of breadcrumbs,” Amelia had said. But perhaps she wanted to see conspiracy where none existed. God knows, it was a fault of which they had all been guilty, at some point in their careers. Amelia’s desire to explain and rationalize the sudden death of a man she loved had obscured an inconvenient truth: that Paul Wallinger had most probably got into the wrong plane on the wrong afternoon, and fate had taken care of the rest.