A Colder War

3

Thomas Kell had only been standing at the bar for a few seconds when the landlady turned to him, winked, and said: ‘The usual, Tom?’

The usual. It was a bad sign. He was spending four nights out of seven at the Ladbroke Arms, four nights out of seven drinking pints of Adnams Ghost Ship with only The Times quick crossword and a packet of Winston Lights for company. Perhaps there was no alternative for disgraced spooks. Cold-shouldered by the Secret Intelligence Service eighteen months earlier, Kell had been in a state of suspended animation ever since. He wasn’t out, but he wasn’t in. His part in saving the life of Amelia Levene’s son, François Malot, was known only to a select band of high priests at Vauxhall Cross. To the rest of the staff at MI6, Thomas Kell was still ‘Witness X’, the officer who had been present at the aggressive CIA interrogation of a British national in Kabul and who had failed to prevent the suspect’s subsequent rendition to a black prison in Cairo, and on to the gulag of Guantanamo.

‘Thanks, Kathy,’ he said, and planted a five-pound note on the bar. A well-financed German was standing beside him, flicking through the pages of the FT Weekend and picking at a bowl of wasabi peas. Kell collected his change, walked outside and sat at a picnic table under the fierce heat of a standing gas fire. It was dusk on a damp Easter Sunday, the pub – like the rest of Notting Hill – almost empty. Kell had the terrace to himself. Most of the local residents appeared to be out of town, doubtless at Gloucestershire second homes or skiing lodges in the Swiss Alps. Even the well-tended police station across the street looked half-asleep. Kell took out the packet of Winston and rummaged around for his lighter; a gold Dunhill, engraved with the initials P.M. – a private memento from Levene, who had risen to MI6 Chief the previous September.

‘Every time you light a cigarette, you can think of me,’ she had said with a low laugh, pressing the lighter into the palm of his hand. A classic Amelia tactic: seemingly intimate and heartfelt, but ultimately deniable as anything other than a platonic gift between friends.

In truth, Kell had never been much of a smoker, but recently cigarettes had afforded a useful punctuation to his unchanging days. In his twenty-year career as a spy, he had often carried a packet as a prop: a light could start a conversation; a cigarette would put an agent at ease. Now they were part of the furniture of his solitary life. He felt less fit as a consequence and spent a lot more money. Most mornings he would wake and cough like a dying man, immediately reaching for another nicotine kick-start to the day. But he found that he could not function without them.

Kell was living in what a former colleague had described as the ‘no-man’s land’ of early middle-age, in the wake of a job which had imploded and a marriage which had failed. At Christmas, his wife, Claire, had finally filed for divorce and begun a new relationship with her lover, Richard Quinn, a twice-married hedge fund Peter Pan with a £14 million townhouse in Primrose Hill and three teenage sons at St Paul’s. Not that Kell regretted the split, nor resented Claire the upgrade in lifestyle; for the most part he was relieved to be free of a relationship that had brought neither of them much in the way of happiness. He hoped that Dick the Wonder Schlong – as Quinn was affectionately known – would bring Claire the fulfilment she craved. Being married to a spy, she had once told him, was like being married to half a person. In her view, Kell had been physically and emotionally separate from her for years.

A sip of the Ghost. It was Kell’s second pint of the evening and tasted soapier than the first. He flicked the half-smoked cigarette into the street and took out his iPhone. The green ‘Messages’ icon was empty; the ‘Mail’ envelope identically blank. He had finished The Times crossword half an hour earlier and had left the novel he was reading – Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending – on the kitchen table in his flat. There seemed little to do but drink the pint and look out at the listless street. Occasionally a car would roll down the road or a local resident drag past with a dog, but London was otherwise uncharacteristically silent; it was like listening to the city through the muffle of headphones. The eerie quiet only added to Kell’s sense of restlessness. He was not a man prone to self-pity, but nor did he want to spend too many more nights drinking alone on the terrace of an upmarket gastro pub in West London, waiting to see if Amelia Levene would give him his job back. The public inquiry into Witness X was dragging its heels; Kell had been hanging on almost two years to find out whether he would be cleared of all charges or laid out as a sacrificial lamb. With the exception of the three-week operation to rescue Amelia’s son, François, the previous summer, and a one-month contract working due diligence for a corporate espionage firm in Mayfair, that was too long out of the game. He wanted to get back to work. He wanted to spy again.

Then – a miracle. The iPhone lit up. ‘Amelia L3’ appeared on the screen. It was like a sign from the God in whom Kell still occasionally believed. He picked up before the first ring was through.

‘Speak of the devil.’

‘Tom?’

He could tell immediately that something was wrong. Amelia’s customarily authoritative voice was shaky and uncertain. She had called him from her private number, not a landline or encrypted Service phone. It had to be personal. Kell thought at first that something must have happened to François, or that Amelia’s husband, Giles, had been killed in an accident.

‘It’s Paul.’

That winded him. Kell knew that she could only be talking about Paul Wallinger.

‘What’s happened? Is he all right?’

‘He’s been killed.’

4

Kell hailed a cab on Holland Park Avenue and was outside Amelia’s house in Chelsea within twenty minutes. He was about to ring the bell when he felt the loss of Wallinger like something pulling apart inside him and had to take a moment to compose himself. They had joined SIS in the same intake. They had risen through the ranks together, fast-track brothers winning the pick of overseas postings across the post-Cold War constellation. Wallinger, an Arabist, nine years older, had served in Cairo, Riyadh, Tehran and Damascus, before Amelia had handed him the top job in Turkey. In what he had often thought of as a parallel, shadow career, Kell, the younger brother, had worked in Nairobi, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Kabul, tracking Wallinger’s rise as the years rolled by. Staring down the length of Markham Street, he remembered the thirty-four-year-old wunderkind he had first encountered on the IONEC training course in the autumn of 1990, Wallinger’s scores, his intellect, his ambition just that much sharper than his own.

But Kell wasn’t here because of work. He hadn’t rushed to Amelia’s side in order to offer dry advice on the political and strategic fallout from Wallinger’s untimely death. He was here as her friend. Thomas Kell was one of very few people within SIS who knew the truth about the relationship between Amelia Levene and Paul Wallinger. The pair had been lovers for many years, a stop-start, on-off affair which had begun in London in the late 1990s and continued, with both parties married, right up until Amelia’s selection as Chief.

He rang the bell, swiped a wave at the security camera, heard the lock buzzing open. There was no guard in the atrium, no protection officer on duty. Amelia had probably persuaded him to take the night off. As ‘C’, she was entitled to a grace-and-favour Service apartment, but the house belonged to her husband. Kell did not expect to find Giles Levene at home. For some time the couple had been estranged, Giles spending most of his time at Amelia’s house in the Chalke Valley, or tracing the ever-lengthening branches of his family tree as far afield as Cape Town, New England, the Ukraine.

‘You stink of cigarettes,’ she said as she opened the door into the hall, offering up a taut, pale cheek for Kell to kiss. She was wearing jeans and a loose cashmere sweater, socks but no shoes. Her eyes looked clear and bright, though he suspected that she had been crying; her skin had the sheen of recent tears.

‘Giles home?’

Amelia caught Kell’s eyes quickly, skipping on the question, as though wondering whether or not to answer it truthfully.

‘We’ve decided to try for separation.’

‘Oh Christ, I’m so sorry.’

The news acted on him in conflicting ways. He was sorry that Amelia was about to experience the singular agony of divorce, but glad that she would finally be free of Giles, a man so boring he was dubbed ‘The Coma’ in the corridors of Vauxhall Cross. They had married one another largely for convenience – Amelia had wanted a steadfast, back-seat man with plenty of money who would not block her path to the top; Giles had wanted Amelia as his prize, for her access to the great and the good of London society. Like Claire and Kell, they had never been able to have children. Kell suspected that the sudden appearance of Amelia’s son, François, eighteen months earlier, had been the relationship’s last straw.

‘It’s a great shame, yes,’ she said. ‘But the best thing for both of us. Drink?’

This was how she moved things on. We’re not going to dwell on this, Tom. My marriage is my private business. Kell stole a glance at her left hand as she led him into the sitting room. Her wedding ring was still in place, doubtless to silence the rumour mill in Whitehall.

‘Whisky, please,’ he said.

Amelia had reached the cabinet and turned around, an empty glass in hand. She gave a nod and a half-smile, like somebody recognizing the melody of a favourite song. Kell heard the clunk and rattle of a single ice cube spinning into the glass, then the throaty glug of malt. She knew how he liked it: three fingers, then just a splash of water to open it up.

‘And how are you?’ she asked, handing him the drink. She meant Claire, she meant his own divorce. They were both in the same club now.

‘Oh, same old, same old,’ he said. He felt like a man at the end of a date who had been invited in for coffee and was struggling for conversation. ‘Claire’s with Dick the Wonder Schlong. I’m house-sitting a place in Holland Park.’

‘Holland Park?’ she said, with an escalating tone of surprise. It was as though Kell had moved up a couple of rungs on the social ladder. A part of him was dismayed that she did not already know where he was living. ‘And you think—’

He interrupted her. The news about Wallinger was hanging in the space between them. He did not want to ignore it much longer.

‘Look, I’m sorry about Paul.’

‘Don’t be. You were kind to rush over.’

He knew that she would have spent the previous hours picking over every moment she had shared with Wallinger. What do lovers eventually remember about one another? Their eyes? Their touch? A favourite poem or song? Amelia had almost word-perfect recall for conversations, a photographic memory for faces, images, contexts. Their affair would now be a palace of memories through which she could stroll and recollect. The relationship had been about much more than the thrill of adultery; Kell knew that. At one point, in a moment of rare candour, Amelia had told Kell that she was in love with Paul and was thinking of leaving Giles. He had warned her off; not out of jealousy, but because he knew of Wallinger’s reputation as a womanizer and feared that the relationship, if it became public knowledge, would skewer Amelia’s career, as well as her happiness. He wondered now if she regretted taking his advice.

‘He was in Greece,’ she began. ‘Chios. An island there. I don’t really know why. Josephine wasn’t with him.’

Josephine was Wallinger’s wife. When she wasn’t visiting her husband in Ankara, or staying on the family farm in Cumbria, she lived less than a mile away, in a small flat off Gloucester Road.

‘Holiday?’ Kell asked.

‘I suppose.’ Amelia had a whisky of her own and drank from it. ‘He hired a plane. You know how he loved to fly. Attended a Directorate meeting at the Station in Athens, stopped off on Chios on the way home. He was taking the Cessna back to Ankara. There must have been something wrong with the aircraft. Mechanical fault. They found debris about a hundred miles north-east of Izmir.’

‘No body?’

Kell saw Amelia flinch and winced at his own insensitivity. That body was her body. Not just the body of a colleague; the body of a lover.

‘Something was found,’ she replied, and he felt sick at the image.

‘I’m so sorry.’

She came towards him and they embraced, glasses held awkwardly to one side, like the start of a dance with no rhythm. Kell wondered if she was going to cry, but as she pulled away he saw that she was entirely composed.

‘The funeral is on Wednesday,’ she said. ‘Cumbria. I wondered if you would come with me?’

5

The agent known to SVR officer Alexander Minasian by the cryptonym ‘KODAK’ had near-perfect conversational recall and a photographic memory once described by an admiring colleague as ‘pixel sharp’. As winter turned to spring in Istanbul, his signals to Minasian were becoming more frequent. KODAK recalled their conversation at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London almost three years earlier:

Every day, between nine o’clock and nine thirty in the morning, and between seven o’clock and seven thirty in the evening, we will have a person in the tea house. Somebody who knows your face, somebody who knows the signal. This is easy for us to arrange. I will arrange it. When you find yourself working in Ankara, the routine will be the same.

KODAK would typically leave his apartment between seven and eight o’clock in the morning, undertake no discernible counter-surveillance, drive his car or – more usually – take a taxi to Istiklal Caddesi, walk down the narrow passage opposite the Russian Consulate, enter the tea house and sit down. Alternatively, he would leave work at the usual time, take a train into the city, browse in some of the bookshops and clothing stores on Istiklal, then stop for a glass of tea at the appointed time.

Whenever you have documents for me, you only need to go to the tea house at these times and to present yourself to us. You will not need to know who is watching for you. You will not need to look around for faces. Just wear the signal that we have agreed, take a cup of tea or take a coffee, and we will see you. You can sit inside the café or you can sit outside the café. It does not matter. There will always be somebody there.

Of course KODAK did not wish to establish a pattern. Whenever he was in the area around Taksim, day or night, he would try to go to the tea house, ostensibly to practise his Turkish with the pretty young waitress, to play backgammon, or simply to read a book. He frequented other tea houses in the area, other restaurants and bars, often purposefully wearing near-identical clothing.

If it suits you, bring a friend. Bring somebody who does not know the significance of the occasion! If you see somebody leaving while you are there, do not follow them. Of course not. This would be dangerous. You will not know who I have sent to look for you. You will not know who might be watching them, just as you will not know who might be watching you. This is why we do not leave a trace. No more chalk marks on walls. No more stickers. I have always preferred the static system, something that cannot be noticed, except by the eye which has been trained to see it. The movement of a vase of flowers in a room. The appearance of a bicycle on a balcony. Even the colour of a pair of socks! All these things can be used to communicate a signal.

KODAK liked Minasian. He admired his courage, his instincts, his professionalism. Together they had been able to do significant work; together they might bring about extraordinary change. But he felt that the Russian, from time to time, could be somewhat melodramatic.

If you feel that your position has been compromised, do not show yourself at the tea house or at the Ankara location. Instead, obtain or borrow a cell phone and text the word BEŞIKTAŞ to my number. If this is not possible, for whatever reason – you cannot obtain a signal, you cannot obtain a phone – go to a callbox or other landline and speak this word when there is an answer. If we contact you using this word, it is our belief that your work for us has been discovered and that you should leave Turkey.

It seemed highly improbable to KODAK that he would ever be suspected of treachery, far less caught in the act of handing secrets to the SVR. He was too clever, too cautious, his tracks too well covered. Nevertheless, he remembered the meeting points, and the crash instructions, and committed the numbers associated with them to memory.

There are three potential meeting points in the event of exposure. Remember them. If you say BEŞIKTAŞ ONE, a contact will meet you in the courtyard of the Blue Mosque at the time agreed. He will make himself known to you and you will follow him. If you consider Turkey to be unsafe, make your way across the border to Bulgaria with the message BEŞIKTAŞ TWO. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to board an aeroplane. A contact will make himself known to you at the time agreed, in the bar of the Grand Hotel in Sofia. In exceptional circumstances, if you feel that it is necessary to cross into former Soviet territory, where you will be safer and more easily escorted to Moscow, there are boats from Istanbul. You will always be welcome in Odessa. The code for this crash meeting is BEŞIKTAŞ THREE.

6

It had dawned on Thomas Kell that the number of funerals he was attending in a calendar year had begun to outstrip the number of weddings. As he travelled north with Amelia in a packed first-class carriage from Euston, he felt as though the change had occurred almost overnight: one moment he had been a young man in a morning suit throwing confetti over rapturous couples every third weekend in summer; the next he had somehow morphed into a veteran forty-something spook, flying in from Kabul to bury a friend or relative dead from alcohol or cancer. Looking around the train gave Kell the same feeling: he was older than almost everyone in the carriage. What had happened to the intervening years? Even the ticket inspector appeared to have been born after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

‘You look tired,’ Amelia said, looking up from an op-ed in the Independent. She had taken to wearing half-moon reading glasses and almost looked her age.

‘Gee thanks,’ Kell replied.

She was seated opposite him at a table sticky with half-eaten croissants and discarded coffee cups. Beside her, oblivious to Amelia’s rank and distinction, a clear-skinned student with an upgraded ticket to Lancaster was playing Solitaire on a Samsung tablet. Both had their backs to the direction of travel as the fields and rivers of England whistled by. Kell was jammed in at a window seat, trying to avoid touching thighs with an overweight businesswoman who kept falling asleep in a Trollope novel. He had packed a bag because he was planning to stay in the north for several days. Why hammer back to London when he could go walking in Cumbria and eat two-star Michelin food at L’Enclume? There was nothing and nobody waiting for him back home in Holland Park. Just the Ladbroke Arms and another pint of Ghost Ship.

Kell was wearing a charcoal lounge suit, a white shirt and a black tie; Amelia was dressed in a dark blue suit and black overcoat. Their funereal garb drew occasional sympathetic stares as they walked across Preston station. Amelia had booked a cab on SIS and, by half-past twelve, they were wandering around Cartmel like a married couple, Kell checking into his hotel, Amelia calling the Office more than once to ensure that everything back in London was running smoothly.

They were eating chicken pie in a pub in the centre of the village when Kell spotted George Truscott at the bar, ordering a half-pint of lager. As Assistant to the Chief, Truscott had been lined up to succeed Simon Haynes as ‘C’, before Amelia had stolen his prize. It had been Truscott, a corporatized desk jockey of suffocating ambition, who had authorized Kell’s presence at the interrogation of Yassin Gharani; and it had been Truscott, more than any other colleague, who had gladly thrown Kell to the wolves when the Service needed a fall guy for the sins of extraordinary rendition. Roughly three minutes after taking over as Chief, Amelia had dispatched Truscott to Bonn, dangling the top job in Germany as a carrot. Neither of them had seen him since.

‘Amelia!’

Truscott had turned from the bar and was carrying his half-pint across the pub, like a student learning how to drink during Fresher’s Week. Kell wondered if he should bother disguising his contempt for the man who had ruined his career, but stage-managed a smile, largely out of respect for the sombre occasion. Amelia, to whom false expressions of loyalty and affection came as naturally as blinking, stood up and warmly shook Truscott’s hand. A passer-by, glancing at their table, would have concluded that both were delighted to see him.

‘I didn’t know you were coming, George. Did you fly in from Bonn?’

‘Berlin, actually,’ Truscott replied, hinting archly at work of incalculable importance to the secret state. ‘And how are you, Tom?’

Kell could see the wheels of Truscott’s ruthless, back-covering mind turning behind the question; that cunning and inexhaustibly competitive personality with which he had wrestled so long in the final months of his career. Truscott’s thoughts might as well have appeared as bubbles above his narrow, bone-white scalp. Why is Kell with Levene? Has she brought him in from the cold? Has Witness X been forgiven? Kell glimpsed the tremor of panic in Truscott’s wretched and empty soul, his profound fear that Amelia was about to make Kell ‘H/Ankara’, leaving Truscott with the backwater of Bonn; a Cold War, EU hang-up barely relevant in the age of Asia Reset and the Arab Spring.

‘Oh look, there’s Simon.’

Amelia had spotted Haynes coming out of the Gents. Her predecessor produced a beaming smile that instantly evaporated when he saw Kell and Truscott in such close proximity. Amelia allowed him to kiss both her cheeks, then watched as the male spooks became stiffly reacquainted. Kell barely took in the various platitudes and clichés with which Haynes greeted him. Yes, it was a great tragedy about Paul. No, Kell hadn’t yet found a permanent job in the private sector. Indeed it was frustrating that the public inquiry had stalled yet again. Before long, Haynes had shuffled off in the direction of Cartmel Priory, Truscott trotting along beside him as though he still believed that Haynes could influence his career.

‘Simon wanted to give the eulogy for Paul,’ Amelia said, checking her reflection in a nearby mirror as she slipped into her coat. They had polished off their chicken pies, split the bill. ‘He didn’t seem to think it would be a problem. I had to put a stop to it.’

Having collected his knighthood from Prince Charles the previous autumn, Haynes had appeared at The Sunday Times Literary Festival, spoken at an Intelligence Squared debate at the Royal Geographical Society and enthusiastically listed his favourite records on Desert Island Discs. As such, he was the first outgoing Chief of the Service actively to be seen to be benefiting, both commercially and in terms of his own public profile, from his former career. For Haynes to have given the eulogy at Wallinger’s funeral would have exposed the deceased as a spy to the many friends and neighbours who had gathered in Cartmel under the impression that he had been simply a career diplomat, or even a gentleman farmer.