A Colder War (35 page)

Kleckner’s invitation was all that they needed. He was coming to London, was Rachel free?
Love to take you to dinner. Love to see you in your hometown.
That was all it took. Everything had fallen into place after that; everything was given the green light. All that mattered was that Rachel be smart, keep calm, hold her nerve—not exactly a challenge for a woman of her caliber. After all, she was the daughter of a master spy. The DNA, the intellect, the toughness, had been passed down to the next generation.

“You do know that we tried to recruit her at Oxford, don’t you?”

Kell was floored.
“What?”

“After graduation, she applied for Fast Stream. Got all the way to the IONEC, then walked away. Her head wasn’t right.”

Kell stared blankly ahead.
I loathe spies,
Rachel had told him. There had been nothing about SIS Fast Stream, nothing about the IONEC. Just her contempt for her father’s trade—for
Kell’s
trade. He remembered Rachel’s words.
A part of Pappa dried up inside. He had a piece missing from his heart. Decency. Tenderness. Honesty.

“Honesty.”

“What?” Amelia asked.

Kell gestured at her to continue.

“I gave her two objectives,” she said, as if Rachel was just another officer on just another operation. “We needed to get to Kleckner’s BlackBerry. If possible, to his satchel as well. Tech-Ops have replacement batteries, devices which, when switched with an existing BlackBerry battery, will continue to act as a power source, but can also provide us with audio coverage as well as precise location data.”

“So that’s what Rachel was doing in the hotel last night? That was her chance? That’s why she went back to Kleckner’s room?”

Amelia nodded.

“And did she succeed?”

The chief of the Secret Intelligence Service smiled, a lioness pleased with a cub’s first kill. “Oh, yes. She did brilliantly.”

“And did she have to fuck him first?” Kell spat the question.

“Tom, for God’s sake.”

“Did you make her do that? Is that who we are now? No better than the Russians? No better than the Mossad?”

Amelia had been seated for the best part of an hour. She stood up and walked across to the window, closing the curtains. It was some time before she deigned to respond to Kell’s question, as though he had not merely offended her at a professional level, but also as a woman.

“Right from the start,” she said, “Rachel was very clear about what she was and was not prepared to do. I think she finds Mr. Kleckner physically attractive. Plenty do.” Kell interpreted the remark as an attempt to annoy him. “In other words, to flirt with Mr. Kleckner, to seduce him if you like, would not cause a woman of Rachel’s temperament much in the way of distress. Does that make sense to you, Tom?”

“It makes sense to me, Amelia,” Kell replied pointedly, and could feel his affection for her, his loyalty to his friend and to their rotten profession, disintegrating like a worn-out rag. “What doesn’t make sense—”

“Let me finish.” Amelia was pouring herself a glass of wine and almost barked the interruption, as if Kell was about to offend her yet again with more preposterous morality. “Rachel was prepared to kiss Ryan. She was prepared even to go to bed with him. These were all choices that she made of her own volition…”

“Oh, come off it.”

“Of her own volition,” Amelia repeated, very clearly and steadily. “I never believed that she would sleep with him, have
sex
with him, that she would allow herself to become physically intimate with him in the way that you are implying. I didn’t think I had created a prostitute or a whore or that what she had shared with you meant so little to her that she would trade you in for a man she despises.”

Kell was rendered silent. He felt the shame of his jealousy as something feeble and humiliating. But Amelia was not yet done.

“Find out if they fucked!” She was almost laughing, as if something as meaningless as the brief, drunk copulation of two people was of any lasting consequence to anyone. “They didn’t, if that’s all you care about, Tom. Fucking men and your fucking egos. Why do you think she got him so drunk at the dinner, at the nightclub? Why did she lay on the promise of a steamy night at the Rembrandt Hotel, only to see him fall asleep in his own bed just as things were heating up?”

“She drugged him.”

“Bingo! Glad you could join us. Welcome to the operation.”

“How did she do that?” Kell’s experience told him that the use of a sedative, however mild, was catastrophically risky. He remembered Kleckner on the phone at the hotel.
I pass out? That never happens to me.
What if he suspected that Rachel had spiked his drink, spiked his food? What if he took a good look at his BlackBerry and realized that Rachel had tampered with the battery?

“A sedative,” Amelia confirmed. “I believe it’s called lorazepam.”

“How strong?”

“Strong enough. Ours was delayed release.” Kell shook his head. He could feel his anger at Amelia returning. “Enough to make a drunk, stressed, exhausted man feel even more drunk and stressed and exhausted—shortly before it knocks him out. And that’s exactly what happened.”

“Hence the reason Kleckner woke up at midday.”

“Hence,” Amelia replied, seemingly restored to a more acquiescent mood.

“And how did Rachel administer this lorazepam, this delayed release Mickey Finn? Don’t tell me. A vial of white powder tipped into Ryan’s mojito?”

Amelia took a sip of her wine. “Almost,” she replied, weaving around any implied condescension in Kell’s tone by producing an amused grin. “Rachel had it in chewing gum, as a matter of fact. Liquid as a backup if Kleckner didn’t take the bait. But he was keen to freshen his breath after Boujis, accepted her offer of some spearmint, chewed it for ten minutes, kissed her, and was asleep about an hour later. The booze did the rest.”

“And Rachel?”

“What about her?”

“What if Kleckner realizes that he’s been duped? What if he has doubts about the new battery? What if he already knows that we are onto him and that Rachel’s trip to Istanbul tomorrow is just a ruse to draw him in? He could have her killed.”

“That’s a little excitable, isn’t it? The SVR is hardly likely to start a third world war by murdering MI6 officers.”

“They killed Cecilia Sandor and she was working for
them
.”

“Precisely.” Amelia seemed pleased to have won the argument so easily. “In moments of disappointment, the Russians tend to kill their own. They don’t kill ours.” She surprised Kell by touching his shoulder as she passed him. “Besides, Rachel may not even have to see Kleckner in Istanbul.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s done her job. She switched the battery.” Amelia allowed herself the trace of a smile. “The phone is working. We can see Kleckner. We can hear Kleckner. If ABACUS takes the phone to the meeting, takes the battery out and leaves it even within fifty feet of their conversation, we will be able to isolate every single word.”

50

It was exactly as Amelia had promised, exactly as she had planned it. ABACUS went to his Georgetown dinner, ABACUS went home to bed. ABACUS woke up on Friday morning and then ABACUS went to see Alexander Minasian.

Kell and the surveillance team stayed on him, for the simple reason that the battery might fail, that technology would render Rachel’s remarkable coup entirely useless. They saw him visit the embassy on Thursday afternoon, they tracked him to a cinema in Westfield. In the evening ABACUS was housed to the eight-man dinner at Galvin, then taken home to the Rembrandt in an MI5 taxi that just happened to be passing as the Georgetown mob spilled out onto Baker Street at one o’clock in the morning. The next day, with Kleckner booked onto a British Airways flight to Istanbul at 1840, the American had set his alarm for seven in the morning and embarked on a countersurveillance routine so prolonged, so complex, and so exhaustive that Kell, by the time Kleckner had vanished into the suburbs of Clerkenwell at six minutes past twelve, never to be seen again, could only sit back and admire his immaculate tradecraft.

But it didn’t matter that the team had lost ABACUS a second time. Kell was obliged to go through the motions of disappointment and regret, reassuring Jez and Theo and Carol and the useless Nina that they had been up against a pedigree CIA officer and that there was no shame in failing to cover him. It didn’t matter because the BlackBerry kept beeping, the microphone kept working, all the way to a modest bed-and-breakfast in a semidetached house in Snaresbrook where Minasian was waiting in the lounge.

“Where’s the owner?” Kleckner asked, exhausted by more than four hours of countersurveillance but pleased to see that Minasian had also cleaned his tail sufficiently for the meeting to go ahead.

“We
are
the owner,” the Russian reassured him, and they had embraced like long-lost brothers.

Kleckner had removed his sports jacket at the door of the bed-and-breakfast. He had left the battery in the inside pocket, hung the jacket up on a hook in the hall, then carried the phone unit into the meeting.

The conversation between the two men was immediately transcribed. It was estimated that Rachel’s device had picked up as much as 80 percent of the dialogue.

KLECKNER (K):
Where’s the owner?

MINASIAN (M):
We are (emphasis) the owner.

(Muffled)

M:
You look well, Ryan.

K:
Ditto.

M:
Having some fun in London? Seeing the girls?

K:
One girl. Maybe two girls.

M:
(laughter) So few!

There was always small talk at the start. Kleckner was used to that. Pretending to be friends, pretending that everything was just fine, but everybody’s hearts pumping at ninety beats a minute and aware that the sooner they stopped dicking around, the sooner they could shake off the paranoia of capture and go back to their so-called lives.

M:
The product is spectacular. Am I saying that word correctly?

K:
I guess. Sure. You’re saying it in a way that I can understand it so, yeah, “spectacular.” I understand what you mean.

There was always flattery, too, the theater of reassurance. Kleckner knew the drill; Christ, he used it on his own agents.
You’re the best. We couldn’t be doing this without you. Have no doubt that you’re helping us. One day all this will be over.

Then it was down to business. Are you happy with the drop sites? Do you want to move from Buyukada? Is there any heat in Istanbul or a sense that Langley suspects a mole? It was always the same with Minasian.

To all his questions, Kleckner gave reassuring answers. Yes, the drop sites were fine, the signals in and out were working well. No heat in Istanbul, no worries about a mole. Minasian wanted to talk about the new stream of reporting from the mayor’s office. Fair enough. Kleckner told him what little he knew. And the cache of CIA weapons heading for the border at Jarabulus?
Sure, if you think you can stop them and do Assad a favor, that’s why I told you about them in the first place
.

But all Kleckner really wanted to talk about was Paul Wallinger. That was the reason he had risked Harrods and the Rembrandt. All he needed to know was why Sandor had been killed. He required answers on that. No, he
demanded
answers on that. And if he got the
wrong
replies, the
wrong
explanation, well then fuck you and fuck the SVR. Our little arrangement is terminated.

M:
As you know, one of the purposes of putting Cecilia with a senior figure in the SIS was to deflect attention away from your work.

K:
I’m aware of that. Of course I’m aware of that.

M:
If there was any sign of difficulties, if anybody became concerned about HITCHCOCK, about EINSTEIN, the rest, SIS and CIA (sic) would look at the relationship between Mr. Wallinger and Cecilia and spend many months, many years suspecting that he was the source of the leaks.

K:
Sure. So why kill her?

M:
[UNCLEAR]

K:
[UNCLEAR] … to believe that?

M:
Ryan, we are investigating, using sources.

K:
Bullshit.

M:
[UNCLEAR]

K:
Okay, so if [UNCLEAR]

M:
The plane crash was also an unfortunate incident.

K:
Incident or accident?

M:
Excuse me? Incident? Again, we had nothing to do with this. Our investigations, your investigations, the British investigation, all concluded mechanical failure. There is a small chance that Paul Wallinger took his own life. I have to admit interest in this.

K:
Okay.

M:
I push it too far. I try for a burn on Wallinger.

K:
You did what (emphasis)?

M:
[UNCLEAR] which was what Cecilia wanted.

K:
And you went along with that?

M:
She wanted to bring the relationship to an end. She wanted to go back to her boyfriend, the restaurant. I felt that I had to make a choice. Either we lose all of the access to H/Ankara, or we confront him with the reality that he has been involved in a relationship with an agent of the SVR, penetrated, compromised, and then we see what follows … [UNCLEAR]

[DELAY—56 SECONDS]

The meeting between Minasian and Kleckner thus confirmed that Paul Wallinger had never been working for Moscow. The transcript also revealed that the SVR was lying to Kleckner. Intelligence obtained by SIS had confirmed that Cecilia Sandor had been murdered by a French assassin named Sebastien Gachon. As Kell had predicted, Sandor’s boyfriend, Luka, had also disappeared a few days after Sandor’s death. Moscow had been busily tidying up the loose ends around ABACUS. It was doubted that Luka’s body would ever be found.

What came next on the transcript, however, pitched Kell and Amelia into an entirely new area of concern.