A Colder War (40 page)

“You want us to follow him?” Elsa asked.

“No. Stay there. I’ll need you if he comes back down.”

Kell had no choice. He stepped over a barrier and ran across the highway, a Lada bearing down on him from twenty feet. The driver blasted the horn as Kell spun in front of him, reaching the other side. Looking up, he made eye contact with Kleckner in the booth as the funicular began its slow journey up the hill.

“Danny!” Kell shouted into the commslink. “Harold! Get to the top of the Steps. Get to the fucking square, get to Jez on Primorskiy Boulevard.”

If a reply came, Kell did not hear it. His sweat-soaked earpiece slipped free from the lobe and tapped loose against his back as he began, in the full glare of the midday sun, to run up the ten flights of the Potemkin Steps. His legs were numb with effort, his stinging lungs giving him only shallow, seizing breaths as he desperately tried to stay level with Kleckner. The progress of the funicular was obscured by a line of trees. Kell knew that he was behind the game. Kleckner would be out in the square within a minute, and then only one chance left to catch him.

Kell urged himself on, three more flights, two steps at a time, drawing stares as he sprinted forward. At the top stood the same shirtless boy with the same vast eagle perched on his shoulder. Behind the boy, the imperial outline of the Duc de Richelieu, the pigeon long gone from his outstretched hand. Kell was soaked in sweat, a searing pain in his lungs. One more flight. ABACUS was surely out of the carriage by now and loose in the square.

Kell saw Kleckner ten seconds later. Jogging away from the Steps, away from the Duc de Richelieu, toward the rank of taxis parked at the northern end of Ekaterininskaya. As he turned, Kleckner made eye contact with Kell, the hunter and the hunted. The man who had tried to take Rachel from him, the man who had almost ruined Amelia’s career. Kell sprinted toward him, closing up the distance so that there was no more than twenty feet between them. Kleckner had no choice but to turn and run.

Three men, all smoking, were leaning on the same car in the taxi rank. None of them looked like they had washed in days. Kell hoped to God that the other two had been paid off.

“Taksi?”
Jez asked in his best lazy Russian, taking a step toward the American.

Kleckner did not hesitate.

“Da,”
he said, getting into the backseat of the car. “Let’s go.”

64

Kleckner slammed the rear door, urged Jez—in fluent Russian—to “go as quickly as possible to the airport,” then twisted around in the backseat to see a breathless Tom Kell gesticulating at one of the taxi drivers in the rank. As the Audi accelerated along Ekaterininskaya, Kleckner opened the window and tried to organize his thoughts. If Kell had come for him, he had come with a team. SIS and the Agency would have the airport, the train station, the main roads out of Odessa wrapped up. Within moments, Kell himself would be in a taxi, giving pursuit. How the hell had this been allowed to happen?

“Can you go faster, please?” he urged the driver, who had a bored, contempt-for-tourists laziness about him. “I’m being followed. I’ll pay you. Just go as fast as possible, get off the main road. Take back streets.”

“Da, da.”

Kleckner muttered “Jesus Christ” in English. Normally his spoken Russian impressed people, broke the ice on a conversation. Not today. Not with this one. The driver missed an obvious side street at a set of lights, continuing west along a main drag in clear contravention of Kleckner’s instructions.

“Hey! I thought I said get off the main roads.” He wondered if the driver was from a different country. Maybe he didn’t speak Russian. “You wanna let me drive?”

“Da, da.”

Kleckner swore again, this time with greater ferocity. Yet his words continued to have no effect. The driver was immune to any sense of urgency or threat. Kleckner turned in his seat to see one of the cabs from the rank less than three hundred meters behind him. Kell was on his tail. At last the driver made a slow turn into a quieter side street.

“About fucking time, man,” Kleckner muttered, in English, only to be thrown forward in his seat as the driver slammed on the brakes.

Jez turned around. He had pulled the Audi over to the side of the road. There were no pedestrians in sight. The taser was concealed in the hollow recess beside his left hand. He reached for it.

“You know what, mate?” he said, and saw Kleckner’s eyes widen in alarm, registering the British accent. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up for a little bit?”

And with that, Jez reached forward, touched the taser to Kleckner’s chest, and fired.

65

Kell saw the Audi pull over to the side of the road. He instructed the driver of the cab to drop him at the corner. As he was handing over a ten-
grivna
note, Kell looked ahead and saw Kleckner’s body flex and slump in the backseat of the Audi, then Jez opening the driver’s door and stepping outside. It was done.

Kell took out his phone and called Danny.

“We’re on Sadikovskaya,” he said, reading off the Cyrillic on a street sign. “You?”

“Traffic. Harold too. What’s happening? I’m sorry, we’re trying to get to you. Fast as possible.”

“It’s all fine,” Kell told him, taking over in the driver’s seat of the Audi. Jez had opened the back door, got hold of Kleckner’s leg and pushed a needle of ketamine into his thigh. “We’ve got him,” Kell said. His lungs felt as though they had been washed in acid. “Meet you at the strip.”

*   *   *

The strip was an abandoned military airfield, seventy-five kilometers northwest of Odessa, where Amelia had arranged for a chartered Gulfstream to be idling on the tarmac, waiting to spirit ABACUS out of Ukraine. Kell couldn’t risk the long drive north to Kiev, not with Minasian waking up in less than an hour and scrambling every SVR officer from Odessa to Archangel in pursuit of his lost prize. Jez had patted Kleckner down, found a SIM in the ticket pocket of his jeans, removed his wristwatch. Kell was concerned that the watch might show Kleckner’s position and had thrown it out of the window.

“That thing was worth three grand,” Jez exclaimed, looking back at the wheat field into which Kell had flung the watch.

“Maybe a farmer will find it,” Kell replied. “He can buy himself a new tractor.”

They drove on quiet country roads, avoiding the main highways, limiting the possibility of a bent Ukrainian cop pulling the Audi over as a favor to Moscow. Kleckner was out cold, slumped on the backseat after thirty seconds of hallucinogenic agitation in central Odessa when the ketamine had begun to work through him. Kell estimated that the American would be awake by the time the plane took off. Awake and ready to start answering questions.

*   *   *

A forest at the edge of a vast plain of fields, a metaled track leading to the airfield. Muggy in the late afternoon.

Nobody at the airstrip save for two British pilots smoking idly in the shadow of a derelict control tower, one called Bob, the other called Phil. Both of them long enough in the tooth not to ask about the cargo they were carrying. The flight plan had been filed, the right palms crossed with the right amount of silver. ABACUS would be taken out of Ukrainian airspace, the Gulfstream brushing the southern tip of Moldova, heading west into Romania, then refueling in Hungary before continuing north over Austria and Germany. Bob expected to touch down at RAF Northolt sometime around nine o’clock BST. Kell would take Kleckner to a safe house in Ruislip, an SIS team would try to ascertain the extent to which ABACUS had corrupted assets and operations in the region, then he would be handed over to the Americans.

Danny and Harold arrived five minutes after Kell. No smiles, no congratulatory handshakes as they approached the Audi and saw Kleckner’s drugged body slumped in the backseat. Everybody knew that there was still work to do. Danny confirmed that the rest of the team were leaving Odessa—some by road, some by rail, some by air via Kiev—then grabbed Kleckner by the feet and dragged him out of the car. Kell stood at the back door and took the American’s shoulders. He could feel the bulk of Kleckner’s muscles as he carried him toward the Gulfstream, the body that Rachel had kissed. He experienced no sense of elation, no joy at Kleckner’s capture. Indeed, as the American was hauled into the cabin, Jez helping to lay him across two seats at the front of the aircraft, Kell thought only of Istanbul and offered a silent prayer to the God in whom he still sometimes believed that Rachel Wallinger was safe.

66

She knew how to work the cover. She had texted Kleckner, called his cell phone, written him an irate e-mail. Even after Amelia had managed to get a message to her saying that ABACUS had fled to Odessa, she had kept up the facade, calling a friend in London and complaining that Ryan—“that American guy I told you about”—had stood her up, failed to keep to a promise of taking her out to dinner in Istanbul.

“You poor thing,” the friend had said, oblivious to the masquerade, oblivious to the fact that the SVR were listening in to Rachel Wallinger’s calls. “I know you really liked him. Maybe he’s just had to go and work or something. Maybe he lost his phone.”

“That old chestnut,” Rachel replied. “Fuck him. Makes me miss Tom.”

She knew that it was important to behave naturally, that Minasian’s people were most likely watching her. That there was a potential SVR threat against her, but only if it could be proven that she had been working against ABACUS on behalf of SIS.

So she had tried to enjoy herself. Or, at the very least, to live her life as she would ordinarily have lived it, given a few days of leisure in Istanbul. She had been to the Topkapi, she had breezed around the Blue Mosque, she had taken a boat along the Bosporus. And she had thought about Tom Kell, wondering if he would ever forgive her for the sin of consorting with Ryan Kleckner.

Rachel made the mistake of drinking alone on Sunday night, returning home from a restaurant in Yenikoy after dark. Too much alcohol on an empty stomach, her loneliness buttressed by grief and nerves and by Laura Marling on her iPhone. Approaching the house, she turned the music up loud, louder still when her favorite song came on, the mournful lament of “Goodbye England.”

Rachel climbed the steps to the front door of the
yali,
reaching for her keys. The music and the headphones were shrouding every sound in the city. She turned the key in the lock.

She did not look back. She could not hear what was going on around her. She closed the door behind her and walked into the house.

67

The Gulfstream took off into a setting sun. Jez and Harold drove the Audis back to Odessa. As Kell looked down at the airfield, the control tower as remote and indistinct as an abandoned church, he saw a small boy standing at the edge of the woods, mournfully waving at the departing aircraft, as if it were carrying away the bodies of the dead.

Ryan Kleckner woke up over Romania. Groggy, muscle-slow, then aware of the plastic cuffs binding his wrists, the belt buckled tight around his waist. He convulsed briefly, like the start of an epileptic fit, then relaxed back into his seat, aware of the hopelessness of his position.

The first man he saw was Thomas Kell.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“You’re being flown to London,” Kell told him. He was seated on a fold-down chair, facing the American. “You’re in the custody of SIS.”

“The custody of what the fuck? Can you untie me please? What the fuck happened here?”

It was odd to hear Kleckner’s voice. Kell had listened to it so many times, on tapes and feeds and recordings of one kind or another. Only once—at the party in Bar Bleu—had he actually been in the presence of the American. He waited for Kleckner’s rage and shame to subside; it would only be a matter of time before the personality and the training imposed itself. A man as immune to moral consequence as Ryan Kleckner would believe that he could talk his way out of capture. His self-confidence was bulletproof.

“You want to explain what’s going on? You got people from the Agency onboard?” he asked.

“Sadly they couldn’t join us,” Kell replied.

“So this is how MI6 operates now? We can just grab one of your guys, drug him, tie him up? You going to be okay with that, Tom? We can
render
one another?”

Kell knew that Kleckner was being smart, trying to probe for a weakness. Jim Chater’s willingness to transport Yassin Gharani to a black prison in Cairo—and Kell’s failure to stop him—had effectively cost him his job and his reputation.

“Let’s not get too excited, Ryan. Would you like a drink?”

“What have you got? Caipirinhas? Isn’t that your favorite?”

“You have a good memory.”

“Rachel told me.”

A smile curled at the edge of Kleckner’s lips as he registered Kell’s reaction. Kell longed to tell him that he had been played by Rachel, that her affection for him had been a mirage, that every kiss she had planted on his body, every moment of lust and intimacy they had shared, had been a sham. Rachel had no more cared for Ryan Kleckner than a call girl cares for a client.

“How’s that going?” he asked.

“What? My thing with your girlfriend?”

“Yeah. Got any trips to Paris planned? Taking her home to meet your mother?”

Kleckner jerked forward, as far as the belt would allow. There was a note of supercilious triumph in his voice as he stared at Kell.

“When we land, and when I get a chance to talk to the people who actually
know
what’s been going on, who actually
know
why I made a relationship with the SVR, and when they find out that SIS has effectively
kidnapped
a CIA officer without permission or due process, I kind of get the feeling that
your
career, the careers of your superiors, in fact the entire relationship between my Agency and your dipshit Service, will be fucked into the next century.”

Kell experienced a brief chill of foreboding before reassuring himself that Kleckner was bluffing.