A Colder War (25 page)

“The latter.”

“And you knew nothing about his relationship with Sandor? Paul didn’t tell you that he was going to Chios?”

“No. As I have told you before, no.”

These were not the answers Kell had been hoping for. If Wallinger had been an SVR asset, run by Minasian out of Kiev or Odessa, he could have set a crash meeting on Chios to discuss Amelia’s suspicions. But why include Cecilia in the mix? Was she the cutout? Even if that were the case, why hold such a meeting in plain sight of half of the population of Chios Town? Kell said as much to Amelia, who appeared to want him to continue talking, vacuuming up Kell’s analysis, digging around in his brain. He asked if there had been any developments in Croatia.

“Official verdict still suicide.” Kell heard a faint gulp and swallow, then the thunk of what sounded like a glass hitting a table in Vauxhall. “Locals seem to believe that. But no note was left. Your friend Mr. Luka Zigic has been telling anyone who will listen to him that his girlfriend was murdered.”

“Now why would he suspect a thing like that?”

“Zagreb 3 is still trying to find out. Luka certainly doesn’t think she was suicidal. No medication in the bathroom cabinets, all fun and games as far as he was concerned. In bed and out. You remember Cecilia shut the restaurant in the first ten days of May?”

The temperature was dropping in the secure speech room. Kell said: “Yes.”

“She spent most of that time with Zigic in Dubrovnik. We’ve also got regular telephone calls between them when Sandor was in England for the funeral. He met her at the airport when she flew home. Poor old Luka seemed to be under the impression she was attending a conference in Birmingham organized by the Croatian tourist board.”

“Somebody forgot to get all their ducks in a row.” Kell laid a private bet with himself that Zigic would be dead by the end of the month. If he was going around casting doubts on Sandor’s legend, making people suspect foul play in her death, whoever had killed her would happily kill him too, just to ensure quiet. “Here’s what I think.” Kell replaced the phone in its cradle and again spoke into the room. “Sandor was being run by Minasian as a honey trap. She seduced Paul, on SVR orders. She got pillow talk out of him, maybe more. When Minasian judged that the moment was right, he confronted Paul on Chios. Tried to blackmail him into cooperation. ‘We have films of the two of you together, we have letters, we have recorded conversations. Work for us or we tell the world that the married head of SIS Station in Ankara is screwing a Russian spy.’”

There was a pause in London. Kell could not know how many people were in the room with Amelia, but suspected that they were both alone. The molehunters. The circle of trust was two.

“And then Paul kills himself, crashes the plane rather than face the music?”

“Possibly. Or, more likely, it just
crashes
. Engine failure. Pilot error.” Kell was struck by how coldly he was discussing the accident. It was like talking about an item he had seen on the news. “Call it unfortunate timing.”

“Do you really think that, Tom? Or do you not want to face the other possibility?”

“What other possibility?” Kell began to walk around the table, pacing out his thoughts. It had always astonished him how eagerly Amelia had wanted to pursue the idea that the great love of her life had been a traitor. Why take herself down that path? It was ruinous in personal terms, it was ruinous professionally. It was as though she wanted to control Wallinger even in death. “You want me to consider that Paul was working for Moscow? That Minasian recruited him? That
Cecilia
recruited him? Amelia, if you told me that you were having dinner with Burt Lancaster at the Ivy tonight, I would believe that before I believe that Paul Wallinger was a Russian spy. These leaks, these failed ops, these system flaws all came about in the last thirty-six months, correct?”

“Correct. HITCHCOCK, EINSTEIN, etcetera.”

“You have always believed that the leak was coming from the American side. From Kleckner or Landau. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“Then let’s go with that hunch. Forget about Paul, take eyes off Mary Begg, put everything on the Cousins.”

“I’m not ready to do that.”

“There’s something about Mary?” Kell asked. He regretted the joke as soon as he had made it.

“Leave her to me,” Amelia replied. “Begg is a London problem.”

There was a brief moment of silence, humorless and tense. Kell wondered what Amelia knew about Begg: who was watching her; what they were seeing and hearing; why she was still under suspicion.

“Paul doesn’t fit the profile of a traitor,” he said, again instinctively defending Wallinger.

“Is there such a thing as a profile?”

“You know there’s a profile.” Kell retrieved the lines from Sudoplatov, lodged in his memory for years. “‘Search for men who are hurt by fate or nature. The ugly, people craving power or influence, people who have been defeated by circumstances.’ Does that sound to you like Paul?” Amelia did not respond. “Look at the historical record,” Kell said. “Philby: sociopathic narcissist. Blunt: ditto. Burgess, Maclean, Cairncross: ideologues. Ames and Hanssen: cash and vanity. Paul doesn’t tick a single box. He never cared about money. He was vain, sure, but he was never short of women or colleagues telling him how wonderful he was. He was your golden boy.”

At the end of the line, Amelia sniffed and said: “So was Philby.” Kell could picture her rolling her eyes.

“Paul was cunning, yes,” he said, “but his sins were there for all to see, for anyone who cared to look closely enough. As for ideological conviction, are we really expected to believe that a senior British intelligence officer, in the wake of 9/11 and Chechnya and Litvinenko, suddenly decides to work for the government of Vladimir Putin sometime in 2008 or 2009? Why? Why would he do a thing like that? For money? He’s no longer paying for private education, Rachel and Andrew left home years ago.” How strange to be saying her name aloud, just another building block in his defense of Wallinger. “Josephine owns a flat in Gloucester Road that’s worth minimum one point four million. You saw the farmhouse in Cartmel. Add another two million to the Wallinger real estate portfolio. Plus foreign perks, plus the
yali,
plus the villa in Ankara. Paul loved the Service. He loved the job.” Kell was on the point of adding: “He loved
you,
for Christ’s sake,” but stopped himself. In truth, he no longer knew who or what he was protecting. His dead friend? Amelia, whose reputation would lie in tatters if her former lover was exposed as a mole? The Service itself, toward which Kell felt almost wholly ambivalent in the wake of Witness X? Or was he protecting Rachel? Philby’s children, the Maclean offspring, the sons and daughters of Ames and Hanssen, had all been variously ruined by association with their traitor fathers. It was better to believe in Paul’s innocence, to run every other lead to the ground, before confronting the possibility that Wallinger had betrayed them all.

“I would agree with all of that,” Amelia replied. “And with your analysis of what may have happened with Minasian and Sandor. But it still gives us a serious problem.”

“Of course it does.”

“What did Paul tell Sandor? What was the extent of her access?”

Kell scrolled through his memory of the files and e-mails, the love letters, the photographs. “Impossible to say,” he replied eventually. “We need to find out if all the leaks—HITCHCOCK, EINSTEIN, everything—flowed from Paul’s interactions with Cecilia, or if we still have a threat from Kleckner or Landau.”

Amelia took another sip of water. Again the sound of the glass in Vauxhall. “What are your thoughts on that? You’ve been looking at ABACUS. Landau looks clean to us. Doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who has the
guts
to betray his country, know what I mean?”

That was vintage Amelia. Acerbic, straight to the point.
The guts to betray your country.
Kell absorbed the remark with a smile and sat down. He again took the secure phone from its cradle, aware that he had seen nothing—in any file, on any tape, in any surveillance report—to arouse the slightest suspicion in Kleckner.

“Everything checks out,” he said. “But then again, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? We’re not talking about a disgruntled bureaucrat in the State Department who can’t send an e-mail to his handler without half the world reading it. We’re talking about a trained CIA officer who may or may not be working in conjunction with a pedigree counterintelligence service. If Ryan Kleckner is funneling Western secrets to Moscow or Beijing, it will be in their institutional DNA to make it look as though Ryan Kleckner is
not
funneling Western secrets to Moscow or Beijing.”

“Of course.”

“So I’ll keep looking,” Kell told her.

“Yes, you will.”

37

The break came within less than twenty-four hours.

Kell had installed himself in Wallinger’s office in the SIS Station in Istanbul, a screen to one side of the desk showing flagged-up fragments of Kleckner surveillance footage shot during the previous six weeks. His days were mostly taken up reading reports on Kleckner—anything that London had been able to ascertain about his life and career—as well as myriad classified files relating to EINSTEIN, HITCHCOCK, Sandor, and Wallinger. Many of them Kell was reading for a second or third time, hoping to catch something that he had missed, a pattern, a flaw, an overlap that would unlock the mystery.

What made matters more complex still was not knowing whether the breaks and idiosyncrasies in ABACUS’s “patterns” around the city were the results of Kleckner’s own legitimate work as a CIA officer, attempting to recruit sources within Istanbul while working under diplomatic cover as a “health attaché,” or whether they constituted something more suspicious. On four occasions the SIS surveillance team tasked with following Kleckner had lost him. In the first instance, a trailing vehicle had broken down. In another, the same van had become lodged in heavy traffic and ABACUS had slipped from view. But on two other occasions, Kleckner had employed active countersurveillance against a six-man team and shaken them off after just forty-five minutes. Was he meeting his handler, or an agent of his own? The leader of the surveillance team, a thirty-four-year-old British Asian named Javed Mohsin, had complained repeatedly that it was impossible to track ABACUS with anything less than ten officers. He needed eyes behind the target and ahead, anticipating where ABACUS may or may not go, based on previous behavior. That meant numbers on the ground. Most of the team—as well as two Tech-Ops specialists with responsibility for the blizzard of cameras and microphones installed across Istanbul—had already been in Turkey for six weeks and were understandably keen to return home. Amelia was reluctant to request a replacement unit, not least because it would have to be seconded from MI5. That raised the risk of too many questions being asked in London about an operation against an American ally on foreign soil. At Kell’s suggestion, she agreed to look into hiring Harold Mowbray and Danny Aldrich, the freelancers who had helped in the hunt for her son, François, almost two years earlier. Elsa Cassani had also agreed to continue dedicating her time and resources to ABACUS.

Having looked at Kleckner from every angle, Kell had concluded that there was one area of his life that seemed particularly unusual: his regular visits to a small teahouse on Istiklal, no more than fifty meters from the entrance to the Russian consulate. Amelia had mentioned an attractive waitress at the café who seemed to have caught Kleckner’s eye, but the girl had since ceased to work there and there was no evidence that she had ever met Kleckner socially. Two weeks after her final shift, ABACUS was still going to the café two or three times a week, usually after shopping for books and magazines on Istiklal. Nothing unusual about that, but he showed no similar loyalty to any other establishment in the city, save for the café at his gym (where Kleckner would often eat breakfast after working out in the morning) and a Lebanese restaurant close to the American consulate which was popular with many of his colleagues.

Furthermore, the teahouse itself—which was called Arada—was fairly nondescript. Kell had dropped by and been struck both by the lack of clientele and by the quality of the tea, which, even by Turkish standards, was so stewed as to be undrinkable. (It was notable on the tapes that Kleckner rarely finished, and sometimes never touched, his drinks.) Walk a few hundred meters north along Istiklal and the American would surely have discovered several places that were more atmospheric, where the girls were prettier, the drinks and snacks of a higher quality. Arada was situated down a dark passage, with no natural sunlight. It was not particularly comfortable, nor did Kleckner appear to enjoy a friendship with the manager. On one occasion, he had played backgammon, appearing to lose his temper with an elderly Turk who picked up his dice too quickly after rolling. Granted, Arada had a certain old-world charm and offered a quiet respite from the noise and bustle of Istanbul’s busiest thoroughfare, but Kleckner’s fondness for the place seemed eccentric.

There was also the question of the café’s proximity to the Russian consulate. If Kleckner was signaling to a handler or cutout, it was an almost outrageous gambit, but perhaps that was in the nature of whatever double bluff had been orchestrated by the SVR. Who would ever assume that a CIA officer would contact his controller within spitting distance of Russian soil? Kell had ordered up the Arada surveillance reports. There was no discernible pattern to the visits. If ABACUS had a glass of tea or a Turkish coffee at the location during the day, he was either en route to or from a meeting, or shopping for clothes and books. His evening visits were usually followed by consular business (dinners, cocktails) or dates with the five local women who seemed only too happy to throw themselves into the arms of the charismatic American diplomat. On at least three occasions, Kleckner had gone to Arada with a girl.

The reports contained information about Kleckner culled by other SIS assets with whom he had come into contact in Istanbul. These included snippets of conversations at parties, minutes from meetings between the two allies, even a chat with a brokenhearted Irish au pair with whom Kleckner had enjoyed a one-night stand—anything and everything that might assist Kell in building up a picture of ABACUS’s personality and attitudes. It was noted that he was “a fan” of Obama, surprisingly “ebullient” on drone attacks, that while “intoxicated” he had lambasted the whistleblower Bradley Manning—at the same time launching a “sustained and scathing attack on Julian Assange”—and that as a student at Georgetown he had supported the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq. Other biographical details had appeared at first to be mundane—“likes Bob Dylan”; “misses his mother”—but it was one such seemingly innocuous observation that unlocked the entire operation.