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

15

Egypt Air flight MS777 from Cairo International Airport had touched down at London Heathrow a few minutes behind schedule at 15.44 on a cloudless English afternoon in May.

Shahid Khan had spent most of the journey trying, unsuccessfully, to sleep. He had been in a state of profound anxiety and could feel the judgment and suspicion of his fellow passengers weighing down on him like a rope coiled around his neck and shoulders. He had been travelling for five days. He had hated Dubai and wondered why Jalal had insisted that he go there from Istanbul. There were other countries, other cities, which did not require a visa for UK citizens. Shahid had looked them up online. Why subject him to Dubai? To strengthen him? To remove any doubts about his future actions? Shahid did not need such help. He did not understand Jalal’s reasons. He was at peace with the path that had been chosen for him. It was the will of Allah. Shahid looked forward to the day of his martyrdom as he looked forward to the defeat of Assad’s dogs, to the destruction and the humiliation of the American empire. This was his dream and the dream of the brothers and sisters he had left behind in the Caliphate. Many of them would not live to see this dream fulfilled. Shahid himself would not live to see it. But he would help to bring it about. This was a glorious and a pure thing.

The passengers disembarked into the terminal building. Shahid went with them, following the signs to Passport Control. In fourteen months of fighting in Syria he had not suffered with any illness, but in Cairo he had eaten food from a vendor in the street and suffered terrible sickness and cramps in his hotel room. Perhaps this was why he was in such an agitated state. He had lost weight and was still feeling sick. He had only been able to drink water on the aeroplane and to eat a few dried biscuits. And now he had to make it through the passport queue, past the Customs officers and the plain-clothes detectives – the most difficult moment of his journey. Shahid knew the obstacles in front of him. Jalal had spoken about them in detail and had told him how to behave.

Join any queue, he had said. Not the shortest one. Check the messages on your mobile phone, read a book or a newspaper. Take your jacket off if you are sweating. Do not evade eye contact and do not try to trick them. You are just another passenger. You are just another face. In the eyes of the British authorities, you are of no importance.

Shahid felt inside his jacket for the passport. He touched it. Also the mobile phone, provided to him by Jalal, and the wallet. Shahid had been given over one thousand pounds in cash. Jalal had promised that his contact at Heathrow – a man named Farouq who had fought jihad – would give him a thousand more. Shahid took out the wallet. It had a London Oyster card inside it, also till receipts, a book of stamps, even the membership card from a gym. How had Jalal organized all of this? He was so thorough and clever in his thinking. His planning and his foresight were gifts from God.

Shahid looked at the men and the women walking all around him. There were many men like him in casual clothes wearing denim jeans and grey or black jackets. Jalal had been right. It was important to look like the others, to blend in.

They came to the passport queue. Shahid waited at the end of a long, snaking line. People were complaining about the delay. Shahid wished that the queue had been shorter. It was agony to wait. He stared at his phone and shuffled forward as the queue moved, but he could not think about anything else except facing the guards. He was able to look at the Facebook page that Jalal had created and to see that a number of the friend requests he had made to strangers on the site had been accepted. This was surely good. It would make the page more believable if he was questioned in the airport. Jalal had filled the phone with numbers and contacts, but they were not people Shahid knew. He had been told never to try to communicate with any of his brothers and sisters in the Caliphate. Likewise, he was forbidden to contact any member of his family in England. Shahid had to understand this. He had to understand that his family had been told by the British government that Azhar Ahmed Iqbal had been killed while fighting for ISIS near Mosul. His father believed that his son was dead.

The queue took thirty minutes. At last, Shahid was facing the row of officials. A space came up at one of the desks in front of him and he walked up to it. He looked up and saw that the guard was Muslim. Her head was covered by a black hijab. He smiled at her. The woman did not smile back. Shahid felt that she could see right through his heart to the secret that lay inside him.

He placed the passport on the counter. The woman took it and opened it while studying his face. There were two men on the far side of the desk, watching the room. Shahid knew that they were plain-clothes officials and was sure that they were suspicious of him.

‘Good afternoon, sir,’ she said. ‘Where have you come from today?’

‘From Cairo,’ Shahid replied. He had not spoken for more than four hours and his voice was dry and cracked.

The woman placed the passport inside a machine that emitted a cold blue light. There was a red rash on her wrists and the back of her hands. She looked at a computer screen that was partly obscured behind the counter. Shahid felt sure that she was going to question him. He felt sure that the computer would tell her that the passport was a fake. ISIS had been duped by their contact in Tirana. He would be arrested by the two men in plain clothes and sent for trial. They would imprison him.

The guard looked up. She placed the passport on the counter and smiled. Shahid took it back.

‘Thank you, Mr Khan,’ she said. ‘Welcome home.’

16

Kell could not sleep.

Mowbray had left just before one, heading back to the Metropole with a quip about sharing an adjoining room with Rafal and Stephanie.

‘That headboard starts to bump, I’m calling the concierge,’ he said, shaking Kell’s hand and heading off into the night.

Kell had lain awake for an hour in the semi-darkness of his rented, featureless bedroom, wondering what Minasian would be doing in Paris. Business or pleasure? A relationship-mending break with Svetlana? A stolen weekend with a new lover? Without Amelia’s help, there would be no way of finding him in Paris. Even with the assistance of SIS, the chances of Minasian leaving a trail for Kell and his ilk to follow were minimal. The emails were his only solid lead. Riedle remained the key.

Just after two thirty he went into the kitchen and swallowed two aspirin with an inch of Talisker. He longed for a cigarette. It was perhaps a sign of the softening of Kell’s operational temperament that he was concerned about Riedle’s wellbeing. He imagined the moment when he would have to tell the German the truth about ‘Dmitri’. To break his heart still further by revealing that the man with whom he had fallen in love and shared three of the most exciting and turbulent years of his life was, in fact, a Russian intelligence officer. Riedle would have to come to terms not only with the loss of Dmitri, but also with the realization that he had been lied to and manipulated, again and again – not least by Kell himself. And to what end? To satisfy Kell’s desire for vengeance? To recruit Minasian so that he could take him in triumph to Amelia, dropping an SVR officer at her feet like a dog with a captured bird? There was no guarantee that Riedle would even agree to assist SIS in any operation against Minasian. Certainly he harboured great anger and resentment towards his former lover, but Kell was in no doubt that if ‘Dmitri’ returned, asking to be understood and forgiven, Riedle would take him back in an instant. Far from Kell’s options opening up in the wake of the discovery of the email exchange, they were shutting down.

He went into the sitting room and retrieved the laptop.

Mowbray had not signed out of Riedle’s email account. Kell felt the aspirin and the whisky working through him as he looked more closely at the screen. There were no longer three messages in the inbox. There were four. At some point in the previous two hours, Alexander Minasian had responded.

Kell clicked on the message.

I have been thinking about your letters to me. There is a great deal that I violently disagree with, but I cannot ignore the fact that you feel very angry and upset with me. For this, I want to say sorry.

This is not a justification, but an explanation: I honestly believed it would be better for you if I was not in contact with you, reappearing in your mind. I limited myself to brief emails. I thought it was better to remove all emotion.

I will be in England from 29 or 30 June until 2 July, staying at our place. You obviously have very strong feelings about the way I behaved. I would be happy to meet and talk. I believe that many of the things you have written are dishonest and unfair. If I had not written this message to you, you would have even stronger feelings in that respect. If you leave a note for me in the usual way, I will try to come and see you. I hope that my schedule will permit this.

Kell read the email three times. Minasian was coming to London. He was reaching out to Riedle, seemingly trying to make amends. Perhaps much of what Riedle had said was true. The two men really had been in love. They had shared something that was proving impossible to break. Certainly Minasian’s message did not fit with the personality type Kell had constructed in his mind. Sociopaths did not say sorry. Narcissists did not take into consideration the feelings or the circumstances of their victims. Or, rather, they did so only if they required something from them in terms of their own continued wellbeing. Was it possible that Minasian was having second thoughts about his reconciliation with Svetlana?

Kell read the email a fourth time, immediately drawing an opposite conclusion. There was no suggestion of reconciliation in the message, only a desire on Minasian’s part not to be regarded as unfeeling or cruel. A determination, in other words, to influence Riedle’s emotions. Minasian’s principal driver was power. He needed to exercise control even over the denouement of their relationship.

Thirsty for another whisky, Kell poured himself a second Talisker and resolved to think practically; to stop trying to understand every nuance of Minasian’s personality and to put a particular spin or interpretation on his behaviour based on insufficient evidence. Yet he was feeling the long night of drinking. A dangerous combination of adrenaline and stubbornness was threatening to cloud Kell’s judgment. He convinced himself that his best course of action was to reply to the email immediately, masquerading as Riedle. He felt that he could easily recreate the German’s style and syntax. He would extract the name of Minasian’s favourite hotel from Riedle in the morning, instruct Elsa or Mowbray to block his access to the account, then arrange to meet ‘Dmitri’ in London. It would be a classic false flag operation.

To that end, Kell created a blank document and began to compose his reply. Before he did so, he took the sealed packet of Winston Lights from the drawer beside his bed, opened the sitting-room window and lit his first cigarette in over six months. The nicotine worked on him with the snap of an amphetamine; he gasped at the pleasure of the first drag, inhaling deeply as the smoke filled his chest. He tapped the ash into his now empty whisky glass, balanced the cigarette on the end of the table, and began to type.

I am so happy to hear from you, Dmitri.

Kell saw that he had already made a mistake. At no point, in any of the drafts, had either man used the other’s name. Anonymity was paramount. He deleted ‘Dmitri’, took another drag from the cigarette, and continued.

I am so happy to hear from you. Thank you for your kind message. Of course I will come to London!

Kell looked at what he had written. He wondered if it sounded like Riedle. The German had used exclamation marks in his own messages, but perhaps this one was misplaced. Kell removed it. A curl of smoke drifted up into his eyes, stinging them.

I am so happy to hear from you. Thank you for your kind message. Of course I will come to London. I will travel over on the 28th and stay until the end of the month. Let’s sit down and talk about everything. It will make me so joyful to see you.

Kell double-clicked on the paragraph and copied it from the document. He would paste his reply into an encrypted email for Minasian to read in the morning.

He took a last drag of the Winston and dropped the butt into the glass. He had not enjoyed the second half of the cigarette. His mouth was dry and there was now a taste on his tongue like the surface of a road. Kell knew, without quite being able to admit it to himself, that he was drunk. He looked at his watch. It was twenty to four in the morning.

Take a break, he told himself. Think.

He went into the kitchen and ran the cold tap. Kell had intended to pour himself a glass of water, but instead cupped the water in his hands and threw it against his face so that his neck and the front of his shirt became soaked and cold.

He needed to stop. He had no control. He was not leaving himself open to chance or to basic human error. What if Riedle woke up at five and checked the account, desperate for a sign of life from Minasian? What if he saw what Kell was intending to send?

Kell went back into the sitting room and deleted the document. He marked Minasian’s email as ‘Unread’, turned off the MacBook, returned to his bedroom and swallowed two more aspirin. He was exhausted. He was so determined to find Minasian that he had been prepared to jeopardize everything just to gain a minuscule advantage of time. There was only one sensible way to proceed; to allow Riedle to respond to Minasian’s invitation and then to track him to London.

Kell returned to the bedroom, relieved that he had not been foolish enough to send the email. He fell asleep almost immediately to the sound of a child sobbing in a neighbouring apartment.

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