A Colder War (36 page)

[DELAY—56 SECONDS]

M:
[UNCLEAR] … this is the girl you mentioned?

K:
Yup (sic)

M:
Ryan, okay. Is this a good idea?

K:
What do you mean?

M:
You go to her or she comes to you, she approaches you?

K:
What, you think I’m that stupid? I met her at Paul’s funeral, we connected, I invited her to a party in Istanbul. (Pause, 3 seconds) Look, none of this shit is connected or your business in any way. I have to maintain some privacy.

M:
I understand that. We understand that. So you have trust in her? Complete trust?

K:
Sure I do. One hundred percent. Jesus, you think the Brits would get Paul Wallinger’s grieving daughter to fuck Tom Kell just to pull me in?

M:
Tom Kell?

K:
SIS retread. Guy they sent out to Ankara when Paul died. They had a thing for a while. Look him up.

M:
[UNCLEAR]

K:
[UNCLEAR] … paranoid. I like this girl, man. (Laughter) She’s smart, she’s pretty. There’s no risk.

M:
Okay. So be disciplined. See her in Istanbul. Try not to get attached. This is my advice, although all advice in these situations, there is always no point? Am I correct?

K:
You are absolutely fucking correct.

51

“The first thing Minasian will do is run a check on you. Try to find out everything he can about your relationship with Rachel. Then he’ll turn it around. Go to every e-mail she ever wrote, every text message she ever sent, and find out if she knows that you’re investigating Ryan.”

“I’m aware of that, Amelia.”

They were walking through Notting Hill, the rain a memory, London trying its best to be warm and European. Rachel was already in Istanbul, Kleckner on the plane. Minasian had not shown his face at the Russian embassy and was assumed to have returned to Kiev.

“What do we know about him?” Kell asked.

“Very little.” Amelia’s frank admission took Kell by surprise. “Youngish. Younger than you, anyway. Post-Soviet, in the sense that he has no bloodstream ideological link to the old days. Still in nappies during the Gorbachev coup. Ukraine is obviously of strategic importance to the Kremlin, but I suspect Minasian was posted to Kiev solely to service Kleckner, not to work the EU angle. Married. Children. Family man. Peters thinks very highly of him.” Peters was the ranking SIS officer in the Kiev Station. “Minasian is thorough, slick, ambitious. A rising star. We think the order to kill Sandor originated in Moscow, not with him, and that Minasian may have argued against it. He might be your common or garden SVR psychopath, he might not. Either way, he’s still low enough on the food chain to do what he’s told when Moscow thinks it knows best.”

Amelia was talking without looking at Kell, clipping along the pavement with impatient speed. Passing a policeman on the corner of Lansdowne Walk, she pressed Kell on his relationship with Rachel.

“Is there anything, in any of your correspondence, in which you discussed the molehunt?” Kell drew Amelia’s eyes to his and produced a withering stare that nevertheless failed to deflect her. “Even if you didn’t mention the leaks, did you discuss why you were in Turkey?”

“Of course we discussed that. Rachel knew that I was investigating her father’s crash. She knew that I’d been tapped up to replace him.” Amelia made a noise through her teeth; that revelation in itself constituted a breach of the Secrets Act. Kell settled on a mood of absolute candor. “She hated the fact that I couldn’t tell her what was going on. We tried to avoid the subject of my job as much as possible. I now realize, of course, why she was so reluctant to talk about the Office. Because all the time she was working for you.”

“Not all the time, Tom…”

“… she was afraid that I’d find out your dirty little secret.”

“A dirty little secret that just happened to produce the intel which will put Kleckner behind bars. But thank you for your support and understanding.”

It had been plain to Kell for some time that his friendship with Amelia might easily now deteriorate to a point from which it would never be salvaged. There would be too much bad blood between them. Too many lies.

“Did you talk to Rachel about Cecilia Sandor?” he asked.

“Did
you
?” Amelia’s quick, impatient glance further illustrated the extent of her frustration. Kell told her what she needed to know. “Of
course
we talked about her,” he said. “She was her father’s mistress. She knew all about her. So did Josephine. Rachel read their bloody love letters.”

“And did you tell her that Sandor was Hungarian NSA?”

It would have been easier to lie, to react with outrage at the accusation, but Kell knew that he was cornered. He had no choice but to tell the truth.

“Yes. She knows that.”

“Fantastic.” Amelia was shaking her head. “Was that a conversation or did you have it on e-mail?”

“I would never commit something like that to paper.” Kell’s response sounded brusque, but he privately acknowledged that he could not remember precisely where or when or how he had spoken to Rachel about Sandor’s intelligence background. Nor did he confess to a further sin—that Rachel knew Sandor had been assassinated. Amelia already had too much to work with.

“Have you heard from her?” she asked.

“Amelia, I haven’t heard from her since we had a row in the restaurant. It’s what you wanted, right? It’s the
cover
. I’m the jilted lover, she’s not responding to my calls.”

“Good. At least that’s one positive. As soon as she gets in touch, I’ll let you know.”

52

Alexander Minasian had left the Snaresbrook bed-and-breakfast, boarded a Central Line train into London, arranged a meeting with the SVR head of Station at a restaurant in Shepherds Market, and told him about KODAK’s relationship with Rachel Wallinger.

“Kell,” he said. “Tom Kell. What do you know about him?”

“The name is familiar. I can look into it. We will have files.”

“He was sent out to investigate the Wallinger accident. He had a meeting with Jim Chater at the American embassy in Ankara. According to KODAK, he came with this woman to a party he was hosting at a bar in Istanbul.”

“Kell knows Chater? They are friends?”

Minasian indicated that he did not know the answer to the question. He knew only that KODAK was possessed of a visceral hatred of Jim Chater. That he posed as Chater’s underling and creature, an admiring junior colleague learning at his master’s knee, but that KODAK despised the American’s ethics and working methods. Indeed there had been times when Minasian had felt that Ryan Kleckner’s work for the SVR was, in part, motivated by his animus against Chater.

“You have the date of this party?”

The head of Station was picking at a plate of chicken liver pâté. Minasian was not in the mood to eat.

“KODAK’s birthday,” Minasian replied. “According to the girl, that was the first night that she and Kell had met. We need to confirm that. They began a relationship that continued until Rachel returned to London. They had dinner here on Tuesday night, when she broke everything off. By then KODAK had already contacted her. She says she was more interested in seeing him.”

“According to who?”

“According to KODAK. This is what she told him on the night she came back to the Rembrandt. She says Kell is too old. Maybe forty-three, forty-four. She is only just thirty, she doesn’t want to be trapped in a relationship with a man she has no intention of marrying. Now she’s in Istanbul, she wants to have dinner with KODAK, he thinks she likes him.”

“Who do you believe?”

“It is not a question of who I believe,” Minasian replied, signaling for the bill. “It is a question of what the intelligence tells us.”

53

As soon as the BA flight had touched down in Istanbul, Ryan Kleckner switched on his BlackBerry. Within thirty seconds he had received a text from his mother, downloaded various work-related e-mails on three separate accounts, and sent a message to Rachel telling her how much he was looking forward to seeing her for dinner the following evening. It was after midnight, so he was not surprised when Rachel did not reply.

Kleckner was seated by a window on the starboard side of the aircraft, directly over the wing. There was the usual crammed rush for carry-on baggage as the engines powered down. Kleckner was obliged to remain in his seat for several minutes while the passengers beside him stood up, retrieved their bags, and waited in the aisle. A flight attendant made an announcement, in both English and Turkish, informing the passengers that there would be a short delay before the cabin doors were opened.

A few moments later, Kleckner was finally able to shuffle into the aisle, to find enough space in which to stand up, and to fetch his black wheeled suitcase from a locker on the opposite side of the aircraft. As he placed the suitcase on a vacant seat, he looked down the cabin at the mass of tired, impatient passengers waiting to exit the plane.

He had always hated crowds. Blank-eyed, lazy faces. Women who had allowed themselves to grow fat and sullen. Children screaming for food and toys. Kleckner wanted to push through all of them. From a young age he had been certain of his own superiority, that his intellectual and physical advantages placed him above reproach. Whatever flaws he was thought to possess—vanity, arrogance, an absence of compassion—were, to his mind, strengths. They were also easily disguised. Kleckner found it simple to win the trust of strangers; he had been able to do it long before he was trained to that purpose. To dissemble, but also to see through to the cold center of people, to intuit and understand the motivations of colleagues and friends, were gifts that he seemed to have possessed from birth. There were days when Kleckner wished that he would be found out; that somebody would have the wit and the ingenuity to see through him. But such a moment had never come.

He turned and looked back down the cabin. The stench of a three-hour flight. Too many people. Everybody crowding him up.

Kleckner looked again. A face was familiar to him. A woman in her late twenties with dark hair, standing no more than three meters away. She was traveling alone, studiously avoiding his gaze, minding her own business.

He had seen her before. He had seen those eyes. Not quite straight, not quite focused. And the teeth. They had been capped, perhaps following a childhood accident. Where had he seen her? At Bar Bleu? At a meeting in Istanbul? At a party?

It was only as he was walking down the aisle toward the exit, nodding thanks to the pilot, smiling at the flight attendants, that Kleckner remembered exactly where he had seen the woman. The realization hit him with the force of a sickness.

The perfume department. Then, an hour later, a repeating face at the exit in the southeast corner of the building. Kleckner had clocked her profile, written off the second sighting as coincidence, proceeded to a meeting with his agent.

Harrods.

54

No fewer than eighteen SVR operational assistants, in London, Kiev, and Moscow, were assigned to the case. Ten of them looked at Rachel Wallinger’s digital vapor trail, eight of them at Kell’s. Working all through Friday night, the SVR was able to retrieve and translate 362 e-mails and 764 text messages between the two parties.

Everything that KODAK had told Minasian was borne out by the evidence. The words “Amelia,” “Levene,” “crash,” “Chios,” “Cecilia,” “Sandor,” “death,” “murder,” “accident,” “mole,” “MI6,” “SVR,” “SIS,” “Ryan,” and “Kleckner” were flagged and run as cross-checks with the correspondence. Whenever these words appeared, the message was immediately forwarded to Minasian, who had caught a flight back to Kiev, via Frankfurt, on Friday evening. At no point did any of the analysts gain the impression that MI6 was investigating Kleckner. Kell’s relationship with Rachel appeared to be authentic, as did her job at a publishing house in London, the e-mails she had exchanged with friends about her conflicted feelings for Kell, her growing attraction to Kleckner.

But Minasian was not satisfied. He was convinced that the analysts had missed something. At five o’clock on Saturday morning he asked that the entire file be couriered to his apartment in Kiev, where he began to read through every text, every e-mail, every message for himself, including items that were not specifically related to the sexual relationship between Kell and Wallinger. Minasian was adept at reading and absorbing large amounts of written material at speed. Though he had not slept in almost twenty-four hours, he was nevertheless alert enough to alight on the single word—“Buyukada”—which confirmed his worst suspicions about Kell’s true purpose in Turkey.

According to the SVR report, the text message had been sent from Kell’s O2 account to Rachel Wallinger (without reply) on April 29 at 1734 hours. The same afternoon that Minasian himself had visited Buyukada to clear the DLB.

HELLO YOU—AM I IMAGINING IT, OR DID YOU MENTION THAT YOUR FATHER HAD A JOURNALIST FRIEND ON BUYUKADA? IF I’M NOT GOING MAD, CAN YOU REMEMBER HIS NAME? RICHARDS? IF I AM GOING MAD, CAN YOU IGNORE THIS TEXT? SEPARATION FROM YOU HAS MADE ME DELIRIOUS—T X

55

At around eight o’clock on Saturday morning, a surveillance analyst watching the live feed from Ryan Kleckner’s apartment in Tarabya began to report that the American was acting strangely. ABACUS had returned home from the airport at two
A.M
. but had not been to bed. Instead, he had spent a significant amount of time at his laptop, drunk an entire bottle of red wine, and Skyped his mother in the United States for more than an hour. The tone of their conversation was later characterized as “melancholy and affectionate,” a description that made sense in light of what followed.

Just after eight, Kleckner was observed reading what was assumed to be a text message on his BlackBerry. The American “appeared to freeze, as if shocked” (according to the analyst) and “remained still for a considerable period of time.” Kleckner did not reply to the message, but instead proceeded to the kitchen, where he retrieved “a passport (origin unknown), a significant amount of money (currency unknown), and a brand-new iPhone and charger” from a Tupperware box “hidden behind the pipes and materials beneath the sink.” Alert to the change in Kleckner’s behavior, the analyst had followed protocol and telephoned Tom Kell at his home in London. Kell had immediately doubled the four-man surveillance team on standby outside Kleckner’s apartment building.