A Divided Spy: A gripping espionage thriller from the master of the modern spy novel

4

Kell arrived at the restaurant at quarter to eight, early enough to ask for a quiet spot at the back with line of sight to the entrance. To his surprise, Mowbray was already seated at a table in the centre of the small, brick-lined room, his back to a group of jabbering Spaniards.

It was fiercely hot, the open mouth of a tanoor blowing a furnace heat into Kell’s face as he walked inside. A waitress, whom he vaguely recognized, smiled at him as Mowbray stood up behind her. Iranian music was playing at a volume seemingly designed to guarantee a degree of conversational privacy.

‘Harold. How are you?’

‘Salam, guv.’

‘Salam, khoobi,’ Kell replied. The heat of the tanoor as he sat down was like a summer sun against his back.

‘You speak Farsi?’ They were shaking hands.

‘I was showing off,’ Kell said. ‘Enough to get by in restaurants.’

‘Menu Farsi,’ Mowbray replied, smiling at his own remark. ‘Iranians don’t like being confused for Arabs, do they?’

‘They do not.’

Mowbray looked to be recovering from a bad case of sunburn. His forehead was scalded red and there were flaking patches of dry skin around his mouth and nose.

‘Been away?’ Kell asked.

‘Funny you should mention that.’ Mowbray flapped a napkin into his lap and grinned. ‘Went to Egypt with the wife.’

‘Why funny?’

‘You’ll see. Shall we order?’

Kell wondered why he was playing hard to get. He opened his menu as the waitress passed their table. Mowbray looked up, caught Kell’s eye and winked.

‘So,’ he said, spring-loading another joke. ‘You can have a skewer of minced lamb with taftoon bread, two skewers of minced lamb with taftoon bread, a skewer of marinated lamb cubes with taftoon bread, two skewers of marinated lamb cubes with taftoon bread, a skewer of minced lamb and a skewer of marinated lamb cubes with taftoon …’

‘I get it,’ said Kell, smiling as he closed the menu. ‘You order. I’m going to the bathroom.’

There was a strong smell of hashish leading up to the gents. Kell stopped to look at a wall of turquoise tiles inlaid on the staircase, breathing in the smoke. He wanted to trace the source of the smell, to find whoever had rolled the joint in a backroom office and to share it with them. In the bathroom he washed his hands and glanced in the mirror, wondering why Mowbray was coming to him with tall tales from Egypt. What was the scoop? ISIS? Muslim Brotherhood? Maybe he was the bagman for a job offer in the private sector, an ex-SIS suit using Kell’s friendship with Mowbray as a lure. There had been five or six such offers in the previous twelve months, all of which Kell had turned down. He wasn’t interested in private security, nor did he want to be a nodding donkey on the board of Barclays or BP. On the other hand, if the pitch was something Russian, something that would get Kell close to the men who had ordered Rachel’s assassination, he would give it serious consideration.

‘I forgot,’ Mowbray announced, as Kell settled back into his seat. ‘They don’t serve booze.’

‘Don’t worry about it. I gave up.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Seven months dry.’

‘Now why would you want to go and do a thing like that?’

‘Tell me about Egypt.’

Mowbray leaned forward and put a hand in his pocket. Kell thought he was going to produce a photograph or a flash drive, but he kept it there as he spoke. If Kell hadn’t known that Mowbray was capable of far greater subtleties, he might have assumed that he was triggering a recording device.

‘Hurghada.’

‘What about it?’

‘One-horse town on the east coast. Mainland Egypt. Red Sea, facing Sinai.’

‘I know where it is, Harold.’

‘Last three years, Karen and me have been flying there for a bit of winter sun; easyJet goes three times a week. Car picks us up and drives us an hour south to a place called Soma Bay. Four hotels and a golf course, back-to-back, arse end of nowhere. Fresh water piped in from the Nile, turns the fairways green, fills the swimming pools. Coral reefs and scuba diving for the grown-ups, camel rides on the beach for the kids. In the tourist industry they call it a “hot flop”.’

The food arrived. Mashed aubergines with garlic and herbs. Feta cheese mixed with tarragon and fresh mint. A bowl of hummus was placed in front of Kell, nestled beside a basket of flatbread.

‘There’s your taftoon,’ he said, encouraging Mowbray to continue.

‘Anyway, we always stay at the same place. German-owned, German efficient, German-occupied sunbeds. Never seen a Yank there, never met a Frog. The occasional Brit, from time to time, but mostly German pensioners and Russian oligarch types with dyed hair and third wives who probably weren’t alive under Gorbachev. Am I painting the picture?’

‘Vividly,’ said Kell, and took a bite of taftoon.

‘So, guv, here’s the thing. Here’s the reason I wanted to see you. Something very strange happened, something I can still hardly believe.’

Mowbray looked like he meant it. There was an expression of amused consternation on his face.

‘They do breakfasts,’ he said, nodding slowly and looking across the table, as though half-expecting Kell to finish his sentence. ‘They do breakfasts every morning …’

‘What a breakthrough in hospitality,’ Kell replied. ‘I must go and stay there.’

Mowbray didn’t laugh. His eyes were fixed somewhere around Kell’s left ear.

‘On the second last day we were there, this couple walks in. Two men. You get that kind of thing at the hotel. They’re comfortable with gays, lots of it about, even for a Muslim country.’ Mowbray sipped his tap water, trying to slow himself down. ‘Karen looks up and makes a noise of disapproval.’ He checked himself. ‘No, not disapproval, she’s not homophobic or anything. More conspiratorial than that. Like a joke between us. “Look at the fruits”, you know?’

‘Sure,’ said Kell.

‘They were both dressed in white shirts and white trousers. That’s very German, too. Ninety per cent of the guests look like they’re playing at Wimbledon or members of some cult. Pristine white, like an advert for one of those soap powders that really deliver at low temperatures.’ Kell resisted telling Mowbray to ‘get on with it’ because he knew how he liked to operate. ‘And there’s an age gap between them,’ he said, ‘maybe fifteen or twenty years. The older bloke is the one facing me. German money, you can tell. He sits down with what looks like a fruit salad, black-rimmed glasses, suntan. I can’t see the boyfriend, but he’s younger, fitter. Late thirties, at a guess. The old boy is camp, a bit effeminate, but this one looks straight, macho. There’s something about him that triggers me, but I can’t yet tell what it is.’

Kell had stopped eating. He knew what Mowbray was going to tell him, a giddy premonition of something so improbable that he dismissed it out of hand.

‘Anyway, Karen had finished her orange juice. Wanted to get another one. She’d hurt her foot on the coral so I offered to go instead. There’s an egg station at the buffet and I waited there while the chef made me an omelette. Got the wife’s orange juice, got some yogurt, then started to walk back towards our table. That was when I saw his face. That was when I recognized him.’

‘Who?’ said Kell. ‘Who was it?’

‘The boyfriend was Alexander Minasian.’

5

Kell stared at Mowbray in disbelief.

‘Don’t fuck around,’ he said, because the chance sighting was so sensational that Kell had to reckon that Mowbray was making a joke.

‘As clear as I’m sitting here facing you,’ he said. ‘No way it was anybody else.’

Alexander Minasian was the SVR officer responsible for the recruitment of Ryan Kleckner, a high-level CIA mole in the Middle East who had funnelled Western secrets to Moscow for more than two years. In an operation instigated by Amelia Levene, Kell had identified Kleckner, run him to ground in Odessa and handed him over to Langley. In response to the loss of Kleckner, Moscow had given the order to kill Rachel. Kell held Minasian personally responsible. He wanted his head on a plate.

‘Minasian has a wife,’ Kell said quietly. The heat of the kiln was burning into his back. ‘At least that’s what we thought. It never entered the equation that he was gay. It’s not SVR house style. They wouldn’t countenance it. They’re not big on homosexuality in Putin’s Russia. You probably noticed.’

Mowbray’s reaction – a slow shake of the head, mouth pursed so that minute traces of food were visible on the inside of his lips – told Kell that he was convinced by what he had seen. He picked up his glass and turned it in his hand, a man waiting to be believed. Kell began to work from memory, his knowledge of Minasian still as insubstantial as the official SIS file. Nobody knew where Minasian had come from, where he was currently stationed, how he had recruited Kleckner.

‘Minasian’s wife is the daughter of a St Petersburg oligarch. Andrei Eremenko. Draws a lot of water in Moscow. Close to the Kremlin.’ Kell had spent long hours looking into Eremenko’s business affairs, searching for any overlap with Minasian, any clue as to his whereabouts or personality. ‘If he finds out his son-in-law is gay …’

‘He’s not going to be very happy about it.’ Mowbray finished Kell’s sentence and set his glass back on the table. ‘Nor is Mrs Minasian, for that matter. Wives can be sensitive about that sort of thing.’

‘Perhaps she already knows,’ Kell suggested. In his experience, wives often knew far more of their husband’s misdemeanours than they ever publicly acknowledged. Many of them preferred to exist in a state of denial. Let the man philander, let him play his vain and tawdry games. Just keep it in-house. At all costs, protect the nest.

‘That’s what I wondered.’

Kell was silent as he continued to analyse what he had been told. It was unthinkable that the SVR would have a gay officer on its books, married or otherwise. SIS had only begun recruiting openly homosexual employees in the previous ten or fifteen years; modern Russia was antediluvian by comparison. If Minasian’s secret were exposed, his career would end overnight.

‘Who else have you spoken to about this?’

Kell dreaded the simple reply: ‘C’ because it would instantly shrink his options. The wheels of his imagination had begun to turn, a dormant ruthlessness circling Minasian’s vulnerability like a bird of prey. If his nemesis was hiding a secret of this magnitude, he was vulnerable to an extent that was almost beyond belief. But if Amelia knew about it, she would sideline Kell on any subsequent operation, doubtless citing ‘personal issues’ and ‘clouded judgment’.

‘I haven’t told a soul,’ Mowbray replied, though his eyes slid to one side and he tapped his mouth with a napkin as he spoke. Kell studied the face and could not be certain that Mowbray was telling the truth. A tiny section of sunburned skin around his nose looked as if it was about to flake off.

‘Not even Karen?’ he asked. Spousal pillow talk was an occupational hazard among veteran spies; the habit of secrecy became harder and harder to sustain as the years went by.

‘Never discuss work with the wife,’ Mowbray replied quickly. ‘Never. Something we agreed on from day one. Last time she asked me was ninety-one or ninety-two, when they arrested a bunch of IRA in London. She was watching John Simpson on the Nine O’Clock News, said: “Did you have something to do with this?” I told her to mind her own business.’

‘But she saw Minasian?’

‘Oh yeah. All the time.’

‘What does that mean? She met him?’

‘No. Neither of us did. But we were staying at the same hotel. Caught the whole show.’

Kell saw the glint in Mowbray’s eye, the suggestion of an even greater prize.

‘Call it trouble in paradise,’ he explained with a predictable grin. ‘Our man from Moscow wasn’t getting on very well with his boyfriend. They kept fighting. Arguing.’

‘All of this played out in public?’ Kell was beginning to wonder if Harold had stumbled on a set-up, Minasian role-playing the moody boyfriend for the purpose of an undisclosed SVR operation at the hotel. Perhaps the relationship had even been staged for Mowbray’s benefit, or Harold himself had been turned by the Russians.

‘Not exactly.’ Mowbray was leaning forward again, still grinning. ‘You see, I made a point of watching them whenever I could. Surreptitious photos, eavesdropping in the bar.’

‘Jesus.’ Kell had an image of Mowbray prowling around a sun-blasted Egyptian tourist resort with a long-lens camera and a boom microphone. ‘Any chance I could see those photos?’

Mowbray had been biding his time, waiting for the invitation. Setting his knife and fork to one side, he shot Kell a look of mischievous self-satisfaction and reached back into his jacket pocket. Inside were half a dozen colour photographs, the size of postcards, four of which spilled on to the ground as he retrieved them.

‘Fuck,’ he muttered. It was like watching a conjuror trying to learn a new trick. ‘Here you go.’

Kell took the photographs and experienced an extraordinary feeling of exhilaration. He turned to check his background. A chef in stained check trousers was standing three feet behind him, stretching a ball of dough on a small cushion. Kell’s body was cloaked in heat. He craved alcohol.

The first photograph showed Minasian standing alone at the edge of a swimming pool, in bright sunlight. He was wearing Rayban sunglasses and navy blue swimming shorts. Fit for his age, defined musculature, an expressionless mouth. The man who had given the order to kill Rachel. He felt a visceral hatred towards him. There was a woman’s blurred shoulder in the left foreground of the shot, presumably Karen. Mowbray had used her as a decoy.

The next three photographs were all taken by long lens from an elevated position, angled down towards a garden in which Minasian was standing with his lover. When Kell asked, Mowbray confirmed that he had been sitting on the balcony of his room at the back of the hotel and had overheard the two men arguing. In the first shot of the sequence, they were embracing, Minasian topless, the older man wearing a pale pink short-sleeved shirt, white shorts and plimsolls. He was tanned with chalk-white hair that was bald at the crown. In the second shot, the older man appeared to be extremely upset, his eyes stained with tears, Minasian leaning back as if to disengage from what was happening in front of him. In the third shot – Kell assumed that he had looked at the sequence out of chronological order – Minasian was gesticulating with his right arm in a manner deemed threatening enough for the older man to be shielding himself by raising his hand and turning to one side. Was he afraid of being hit? The next photograph, apparently taken with a different lens, from a new angle, showed the older man crouching down in a separate section of the garden, hands covering his face.

‘What was going on?’ Kell asked.

‘They were shouting at each other like a couple of teenagers.’ The waitress removed the bowls of hummus and mashed aubergine. There was a clatter as something fell over in the kitchen. ‘Big fight between two queens about “lying” and “broken promises” and Minasian being a “prick”. I couldn’t make much of it out.’

‘They were always speaking English?’

‘Mostly. Far as I could tell, the old boy didn’t speak Russian. He’s German. From Hamburg.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I’m not an idiot, guv.’

‘Nobody said you were, Harold.’

Kell took a bite of lamb and invited Mowbray to continue. He was about to order a beer when he remembered that the restaurant was dry. A single glimpse of the secret world had been enough to strip him of a seven-month commitment to remain booze free.

‘His name is Bernhard Riedle.’

‘How are you spelling that?’

Mowbray wrote down the name on a piece of paper and passed it to Kell.

‘I got into the hotel email. Piece of piss. Jumped on their wi-fi, hacked into the account used by the reservations manager, read Riedle’s messages.’

‘Undetected?’

Kell felt uneasy. Mowbray wasn’t trained in surveillance. If Minasian had caught even a scent of his interest – the eavesdropped conversations, the clandestine photographs – he might have turned the tables and engineered an investigation of his own into the nosey couple from England.

‘Of course undetected. Did the whole thing from my room. Took fifteen minutes. Anyway, here’s the interesting bit. Minasian stayed under a pseudonym. Riedle called him “my partner Dmitri” in the emails.’

‘Makes sense,’ said Kell. ‘He’s married. Riedle could be covering for him. Did you get a passport? A surname?’

‘No, sir.’

‘But Minasian would have had to show one when he checked in. So either Riedle really does think his boyfriend is called “Dmitri” or he’s conscious that Alexander Minasian works for the SVR and is travelling under alias.’

‘How do you figure that?’

Mowbray looked momentarily confused, as if Kell had identified a flaw in his thesis. For his own part, Kell was surprised that Mowbray had failed to join the dots.

‘If I go on holiday with my girlfriend “Anne Smith” and she travels on a passport calling herself “Betty Jones”, I’m going to ask her how come she has two identities. Unless she’s from the Office.’

‘True,’ said Mowbray. ‘You are.’ There was a sheepish pause while he made a silent calculation. Kell sensed his embarrassment and urged him to continue.

‘Well,’ he said, rubbing the back of his head. ‘We can discount the idea that Riedle is a spook. Once I got home I did some digging around. He’s an architect.’

‘From Hamburg?’

‘Originally, yes. That’s where he has his practice, anyway. Right now, though, he’s spending a lot of time in Brussels.’

‘Reason?’

‘Some kind of office building. Swish headquarters for a Belgian television company. He’s designing it, living in an apartment there while it goes up.’

‘With Minasian paying him the occasional visit?’

‘Negative, Houston.’

‘They broke up?’

‘They broke up,’ Mowbray replied.

Kell immediately saw this not as a setback, but as an opportunity. A man in love is less likely to betray his partner. A man with a broken heart can be manipulated into acts of vengeance.

‘You said Riedle was feeling sorry for himself? That’s what you meant? Minasian dumped him?’

Mowbray squeezed his chafed nose and looked to one side, timing the delivery of a chunk of bad news. The waitress, who had passed their table several times in the preceding minutes, trying to ascertain if the two middle-aged gentlemen intended to finish their meals, finally made her decision and began collecting their plates of half-eaten food.

‘He dumped him,’ said Mowbray. ‘Gigantic lover’s tiff.’

‘After the argument you witnessed? That was it? They separated?’

Mowbray nodded, staring at the table.

‘The photos you saw, then Riedle crying on his own in the garden. That was the last time we saw Minasian. I assume he left that night. There was a twenty-two hundred Air Egypt flight from Hurghada to Cairo. He could have gone anywhere after that.’

‘And Riedle?’

‘Stayed another two days. Had breakfast in his room, ate dinner alone with a look on his face like his life was over.’

‘How do you figure that?’ Kell asked. ‘Just from a look on his face? Maybe he’s that kind of person.’

Mowbray pitched backwards in his seat, as if Kell had been unnecessarily confrontational. Kell apologized with a raised hand and took the opportunity to order two glasses of mint tea. He was aware that his adrenaline was running high, an eagerness to ensnare Minasian clashing against long-practised instincts for caution and context.

‘What I meant was …’

‘Don’t worry, guv.’ Mowbray offered a conciliatory hand of his own. ‘I know what you meant. How did we know he was suffering? Why was he wandering around like a lovestruck adolescent?’

‘Precisely. How did you know?’

Mowbray pulled out a packet of cigarettes and set them on the table. Kell looked at them and resented his own self-discipline.

‘Riedle spent a lot of time at the pool, reading off an iPad. Struck up a friendship with one of the boys down there. Egyptian kid, good-looking.’

‘Gay?’

Mowbray realized what he had said and shook his head vigorously, chasing off the inference.

‘No. Nothing like that. Married, wife and kid in Luxor. Early thirties. Laid out our sunbeds in the morning. Brought us drinks. Put up the umbrellas when the sun got too hot. You know the kind of thing.’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, I got talking to him and he said how Riedle was unhappy. He’d broken up with his boyfriend. They’d been seeing each other for over three years, had the latest in a long line of nasty rows. “Dmitri” had left the hotel, gone off with a new man.’

‘He told all that to a pool boy?’

Mowbray seemed to be aware that the interaction sounded far-fetched.

‘Bernhard struck me as the confessional sort. Needy, artistic, you know? Any sympathetic ear will do for a type like that. “I’m in pain, come and listen to me. I’ve built a new house, come and look at it. I’m miserable, make me feel better.” And we tell strangers our secrets, don’t we? He’s never going to see the pool boy again, never going to build him a house in Luxor. He was a convenient shoulder to cry on for a couple of miserable days in paradise.’

Kell felt a strange and disorienting sense of kinship with Riedle, the empathy of the broken-hearted man. He remembered his own dismay at Rachel’s treachery, then the long months of grieving that followed her death. He accepted the mint tea from the waitress, who smiled at Mowbray as she placed a glass on the table in front of him. Kell was surprised when Mowbray asked for the bill. What was the hurry?