A Colder War

‘A bad habit we’ve acquired from the Security Service,’ Amelia continued. She was wearing a gold necklace and briefly touched the chain. ‘It’ll be memoirs next. Whatever happened to discretion? Why couldn’t Simon just have joined BP like the rest of them?’

Kell grinned but wondered if Amelia was giving him a tacit warning: Don’t go public with Witness X. Surely she knew him well enough to realize that he would never betray the Service, far less breach her trust?

‘You ready for this?’ he asked, as they turned towards the door. Kell had been drinking a glass of Rioja and drained the last of it as he threw a few pound coins on to the table as a tip. Amelia found his eyes and, for an instant, looked vulnerable to what lay ahead. As they walked outside into the crystal afternoon sunshine, she briefly squeezed his hand and said: ‘Wish me luck.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ he told her. ‘The last thing you’ve ever needed is luck.’

He was right, of course. Shortly after three o’clock, as the congregation rose as one to acknowledge the arrival of Josephine Wallinger, Amelia assumed the dignified bearing of a leader and Chief, her body language betraying no hint that the man three hundred people had come to mourn had ever been anything more to her than a highly regarded colleague. Kell, for his part, felt oddly detached from the service. He sang the hymns, he listened to the lessons, he nodded through the vicar’s eulogy, which paid appropriately oblique tribute to a ‘self-effacing man’ who had been ‘a loyal servant to his country’. Yet Kell was distracted. Afterwards, making his way to the graveside, he heard an unseen mourner utter the single word ‘Hammarskjöld’ and knew that the conspiracy theories were gathering pace. Dag Hammarskjöld was the Swedish Secretary of the United Nations who had been killed in a plane crash in 1961, en route to securing a peace deal that might have prevented civil war in the Congo. Hammarskjöld’s DC6 had crashed in a forest in former Rhodesia. Some claimed that the plane had been shot down by mercenaries; others that SIS itself, in collusion with the CIA and South African intelligence, had sabotaged the flight. Since hearing the news on Sunday, Kell had been nagged by an unsettling sense that there had been foul play involved in Wallinger’s death. He could not say precisely why he felt this way – other than that he had always known Paul to be a meticulous pilot, thorough to the point of paranoia with pre-flight checks – yet the whispered talk of Hammarskjöld seemed to cement the suspicion in his mind. Looking around at the faceless spooks, ghosts of bygone ops from a dozen different Services, Kell felt that somebody, somewhere in the cramped churchyard, knew why Paul Wallinger’s plane had plunged from the sky.

The mourners shuffled forward, perhaps as many as two hundred men and women, forming a loose rectangle, ten-deep, on all four sides of the grave. Kell saw CIA officers, representatives from Canadian intelligence, three members of the Mossad, as well as colleagues from Egypt, Jordan and Turkey. As the vicar intoned the consecration, Kell wondered, in the layers of secrecy that formed around a spy like scabs, what sin Wallinger had committed, what treachery he had uncovered, to bring about his own death? Had he pushed too hard on Syria or Iran? Trip-wired an SVR operation in Istanbul? And why Greece, why Chios? Perhaps the official assumption was correct: mechanical failure was to blame. Yet Kell could not shake the feeling that his friend had been assassinated; it was not beyond the realms of possibility that the plane had been shot down. As Wallinger’s coffin was lowered into the ground, he glanced to the right and saw Amelia wiping away tears. Even Simon Haynes looked cleaned out by grief.

Kell closed his eyes. He found himself, for the first time in months, mouthing a silent prayer. Then he turned from the grave and walked back towards the church, wondering if mourners at an SIS funeral, twenty years hence, would whisper the name ‘Wallinger’ in country churchyards as a short-hand for murder and cover-up.

Less than an hour later, the crowds of mourners had found their way to the Wallinger farm, where a barn near the main house had been prepared for a wake. Trestle tables were laid out with cakes and cheese sandwiches cut into white, crustless triangles. Wine and whisky on standby while two old ladies from the village served tea and Nescafé to the great and the good of the transatlantic intelligence community. Kell was greeted with a mixture of rapture and pity by former colleagues, most of whom were too canny and self-serving to offer their whole-hearted support on the fiasco of Witness X. Others had heard word of his divorce on the Service grapevine and placed consoling hands on Kell’s shoulder, as if he had suffered a bereavement or been diagnosed with an inoperable illness. He didn’t blame them. What else were people supposed to say in such circumstances?

The flowers that had lain on Wallinger’s coffin had been set out at one end of the barn. Kell was standing outside, smoking a cigarette, when he saw Wallinger’s children – his son, Andrew, and his daughter, Rachel – bending over the floral tributes, reading the cards, and sharing a selection of the written messages with one another. Andrew was the younger of the two, now twenty-eight, reportedly earning a living in Moscow as a banker. Kell had not seen Rachel for more than fifteen years, and had been struck by her dignity and grace as she supported her mother at the graveside. Andrew had wept desperately for the father he had lost as Josephine stared into the black grave, frozen in what Kell assumed was a medicated grief. Yet Rachel had maintained an eerie stillness, as if in possession of a secret that guaranteed her peace of mind.

He was grinding out the cigarette, half-listening to a local farmer telling a long-winded anecdote about wind farms, when he saw Rachel bend down and pick up a card attached to a small bunch of flowers on the far side of the barn. She was alone, several metres from Andrew, but Kell had a clear view of her face. He saw Rachel’s dark eyes harden as she read the card, then a flush of anger scald her cheeks.

What she did next astonished him. Leaning down, with a brisk flick of her wrist she skidded the flowers low and hard towards the edge of the barn, where they hit the whitewashed wall with a soundless thud. Rachel then placed the card in her coat pocket and returned to Andrew’s side. No words were exchanged. It was as though she did not want to involve her brother in what she had just seen. Moments later Rachel turned and walked back towards the trestle tables, where she was intercepted by a middle-aged woman wearing a black hat. As far as Kell could tell, nobody else had witnessed what had happened.

The barn had become hot and, after a few minutes, Rachel removed her coat, folding it over the back of a chair. She was continually in conversation with guests who wished to convey their condolences. At one point she burst into laughter and the men in the room, as one, seemed to turn and look at her. Rachel had an in-house reputation for beauty and brains; Kell recalled a couple of male colleagues constructing Christmas party innuendoes about her. Yet she was not as he had imagined she would be; there was something about the dignity of her behaviour, the decisiveness with which she had dispatched the flowers, a sense in which she was fully in control of her emotions and of the environment in which she had found herself, that intrigued Kell.

In time, she had made her way to the far side of the barn. She was at least fifty feet from the coat. Kell, carrying a plate of sandwiches and cake towards the chair, took off his own coat and folded it alongside Rachel’s. At the same time, he reached into her outside pocket and removed the card.

He glanced across the barn. Rachel had not seen him. She was still deep in conversation, her back to the chair. Kell walked quickly outside, crossed the drive and went into the Wallingers’ house. Several people were milling about in the hall, guests looking for bathrooms, staff ferrying food and drink from the kitchen to the barn. Kell avoided them and walked upstairs.

The bathroom door was locked. He needed to find a room where he would not be disturbed. Glimpsing posters of Pearl Jam and Kevin Pietersen in a room further along the corridor, Kell found himself in Andrew’s bedroom. There were framed photographs from his time at Eton above a wooden desk, as well as various caps and sporting mementoes. Kell closed the door behind him. He took the card from his jacket pocket and opened it up.

The inscription was in an Eastern European language that Kell assumed to be Hungarian. The note had been handwritten on a small white card with a blue flower printed in the top right-hand corner.

Szerelmem. Szívem darabokban, mert nem tudok Veled lenni soha már. Olyan fájó a csend amióta elmentél, hogy még hallom a lélegzeted, amikor álmodban néztelek.

Had Rachel been able to understand it? Kell put the card on the bed and took out his iPhone. He photographed the message, left the bedroom and returned to the barn.

With Rachel nowhere to be seen, Kell removed his overcoat from the chair and, by simple sleight of hand, replaced the card in her coat pocket. It had been in his possession for no more than five minutes. When he turned around, he saw that she was coming back into the barn and walking towards her mother. Kell went outside for a cigarette.

Amelia was standing on her own in front of the house, like someone at the end of a party waiting for a cab.

‘What have you been up to?’ she asked.

At first, Kell thought that she had spotted him lifting the card. Then he realized, from Amelia’s expression, that the question was merely a general enquiry about his life.

‘You mean recently? In London?’

‘Yes, recently.’

‘You want an honest answer to that?’

‘Of course.’

‘Fuck all.’

Amelia did not react to the bluntness of the response. Ordinarily she would have smiled or conjured a look of mock disapproval. But her mood was serious, as though she had finally arrived at a solution to a problem that had been troubling her for some time.

‘So you’re not busy for the next few weeks?’

Kell felt a jolt of optimism, his luck about to change. Just ask the question, he thought. Just get me back in the game. He looked out across a valley sketched with dry-stone walls and distant sheep, thinking of the long afternoons he had spent brushing up his Arabic at SOAS, the solo holidays in Lisbon and Beirut, the course he had taken at City Lit in twentieth-century Irish poetry. Filling up the time.

‘I’ve got a job for you,’ she said. ‘Should have mentioned it earlier, but it didn’t seem right before the funeral.’ Kell heard the gravel-crunch of someone approaching them across the drive. He hoped the offer would come before they were cut off, mid-conversation. He didn’t want Amelia changing her mind.

‘What kind of job?’

‘Would you go out to Chios for me? To Turkey? Find out what Paul was up to before he died?’

‘You don’t know what he was up to?’

Amelia shrugged. ‘Not all of it. On a personal level. One never does.’ Kell looked down at the damp ground and conceded the point with a shrug. He had dedicated most of his working life to the task of puncturing privacy, yet what did a person ultimately know about the thoughts and motives of the people who were closest to them? ‘Paul had no operational reason to be in Chios,’ Amelia continued. ‘Josephine thinks he was there on business, Station didn’t know he was going.’

Kell assumed that Amelia suspected what was obvious, given Wallinger’s reputation and track record: that he had been on the island with a woman and that he had been careful to cover his tracks.

‘I’ll tell Ankara you’re coming. Red carpet, access all areas. Istanbul ditto. They’ll open up all the relevant files.’

It was like getting a clean bill of health after a medical scare. Kell had been waiting for such a moment for months.

‘I could do that,’ he said.

‘You’re on full pay, yes? We put you on that after France?’ The question was plainly rhetorical. ‘You’ll have a driver, whatever else you need. I’ll make arrangements for you to have a cover identity while you’re there, should you need it.’

‘Will I need it?’

It was as if Amelia was holding back a vital piece of information. Kell wondered what he was signing up for.

‘Not necessarily,’ she said, though her next remark only confirmed his suspicion that there was something else in play. ‘Just tread carefully around the Yanks.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You’ll see. Tricky out there at the moment.’

He was struck by the intensity with which Amelia was speaking.

‘What are you not telling me?’ he asked.

‘Just find out what happened,’ she replied quickly, and took his wrist in a gloved hand, squeezing hard at the bone as though to stem the flow of blood from a wound. Amelia’s steady eyes held Kell’s, then flicked back in the direction of the wake, at the mourners in black filing out of the barn. ‘Why was Paul on Chios?’ she said, and there was agony in the question, a powerful woman’s despair that she had been unable to protect a man whom perhaps she still loved. ‘Why did he die?’

For a moment Kell thought that her composure was going to crack. He took Amelia’s arm and squeezed back, the reassurance of a friend. But her strength returned, as quickly as the sudden gust of wind that blew across the farm, and whatever Kell was about to say was cut short.

‘It’s simple,’ she said, with the trace of a resigned smile. ‘Just find out why the hell we’re all here.’

7

Kell had packed his bags, cleared out of his room and cancelled his reservation at L’Enclume within the hour. By seven o’clock he was back in Preston station, changing platforms for an evening train to Euston. Amelia had driven to London with Simon Haynes, having called Athens and Ankara with instructions for Kell’s trip. He bought a tuna sandwich and a packet of crisps on the station concourse, washed them down with two cans of Stella Artois purchased from a catering trolley on the train, and finished The Sense of an Ending. No colleague, no friend from SIS had elected to join him on the journey home. There were spies from five continents scattered throughout the train, buried in books or wives or laptops, but none of them would run the risk of publicly consorting with Witness X.

Kell was home by eleven. He knew why Amelia had chosen him for such an important assignment. After all, there were dozens of capable officers pacing the corridors of Vauxhall Cross, all of whom would have jumped at the chance to get to the bottom of the Wallinger mystery. Yet Kell was one of only two or three trusted lieutenants who knew of Amelia’s long affair with Paul. It was rumoured throughout the Service that ‘C’ had never been faithful to Giles; that she had perhaps been involved in a relationship with an American businessman. But, for most, her links to Wallinger would have been solely professional. Any thorough investigation into his private life would inevitably turn up hard evidence of their relationship. Amelia could not afford to have talk of an affair on the record; she was relying on Kell to be discreet with whatever he found.

Before going to bed he repacked his bags, dug out his Kell passport and emailed the photograph of the Hungarian inscription to an old contact in the National Security Authority, Tamas Metka, who had retired to run a bar in Szolnok. By seven the next morning Kell was in a cab to Gatwick and back in the dreary routine of twenty-first-century flying: the long, agitated queues; the liquids farcically bagged; the shoes and belts pointlessly removed.

Five hours later he was touching down in Athens, cradle of civilization, epicentre of global debt. Kell’s contact was waiting for him in a café inside the departures hall, a first-posting SIS officer instructed by Amelia to provide a cover identity for Chios. The young man – who introduced himself as ‘Adam’ – had evidently been working on the legend throughout the night: his eyes were stiff with sleeplessness and he had a rash, red as an allergy, beneath the stubble on his lower jaw. There was a mug of black coffee on the table in front of him, an open sandwich of indeterminate contents, and a padded envelope with the single letter ‘H’ scribbled on the front. He was wearing a Greenpeace sweatshirt and a black Nike baseball cap so that Kell could more easily identify him.

‘Good flight?’

‘Fine, thanks,’ Kell replied, shaking his hand and sitting down. They exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes before Kell took possession of the envelope. He had already passed through Greek Customs, so there was now less danger of being caught with dual identities.

‘It’s a commercial cover. You’re an insurance investigator with Scottish Widows writing up a preliminary report on the Wallinger crash. Chris Hardwick.’ Adam’s voice was quiet, methodical, well-rehearsed. ‘I’ve got you a room at the Golden Sands hotel in Karfas, about ten minutes south of Chios Town. The Chandris was full.’

‘The Chandris?’

‘It’s where everybody stays if they come to the island on business. Best hotel in town.’

‘You think Wallinger may have stayed there under a pseudonym?’

‘It’s possible, sir.’

Kell hadn’t been called ‘sir’ by a colleague in over a year. He had lost sight of his own status, allowed himself to forget the considerable achievements of his long career. Adam was probably no older than twenty-six or twenty-seven. Meeting an officer of Kell’s pedigree was most likely a significant moment to him. He would have wanted to make a good impression, particularly given Kell’s links to ‘C’.

‘I’ve arranged for you to pick up a car at the airport. It’s booked for three days. The Europcar desk is just outside the terminal. There’s a couple of credit cards in Hardwick’s name, the usual pin number, a passport of course, driving licence, some business cards. I’m afraid the only photograph we had of you on file looks a bit out of date, sir.’

Kell didn’t take offence. He knew the picture. Taken in a windowless room at Vauxhall Cross on 9 September 2001. His hair cut shorter, his temples less greyed, his life about to change. Every spy on the planet had aged at least twenty years since then.

‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ he said.

Adam looked up at the ceiling and blinked hard, as though trying to remember the last in a sequence of points from a mental checklist.

‘The air traffic control officer who was on duty the afternoon of Mr Wallinger’s flight can meet you tonight at your hotel.’

‘Time?’

‘I said seven.’

‘That’s good. I want to move quickly on this. Thank you.’

Kell watched as Adam absorbed his gratitude with a wordless nod. I remember being you, Kell thought. I remember what it was like at the beginning. With a pang of nostalgia, he pictured Adam’s life in Athens: the vast Foreign Office apartment; the nightclub memberships; the beautiful local girls in thrall to the glamour and expense accounts of the diplomatic life. A young man with a whole career ahead of him, in one of the great cities of the world. Kell put the envelope in his carry-on bag and stood up from the table. Adam accompanied him as far as a nearby duty-free shop, where they parted company. Kell bought a bottle of Macallan and a carton of Winston Lights for Chios and was soon airborne again above the shimmering Mediterranean, checking through the emails and texts that had collected on his iPhone before take-off.

Metka had already sent through a translation of the message seen by Rachel.

My dear Tom

It is always good to hear from you and I am of course happy to help.

So what happened to you? You took up poetry? Writing Magyar love sonnets? Maybe Claire finally had the sense to leave you and you fell in love with a girl from Budapest?

Here is what the poem says – please excuse me if my translation is not as ‘pretty’ as your original:

My darling. I cannot be with you today, of all days, and so my heart is broken. Silence has never been this desperate. You are asleep, but I can still hear you breathing.

It is really very moving. Very sad. I wonder who wrote it? I would like to meet them.

Of course if you are ever here, Tom, we must meet. I hope you are satisfied in your life. You are always welcome in Szolnok. These days I very rarely come to London.

With kind regards

Tamas

Kell powered down the phone and looked out of the window at the wisps of motionless cloud. What Rachel had reacted to so strongly was obvious enough: a message from one of Wallinger’s grieving lovers. But had Rachel understood the Hungarian or recognized the woman’s handwriting? He could not know.

The plane landed at a small, functional, single-runway airport on the eastern shore of Chios. Kell identified the air traffic control tower, saw a bearded engineer on the tarmac tending to a punctured Land Cruiser, and took photographs of a helicopter and a corporate jet parked either side of an Olympic Air Q400. Wallinger would have taken off only a few hundred metres away, then banked east towards Izmir. The Cessna had entered Turkish airspace in less than five minutes, crashing into the mountains south-west of Kütahya perhaps an hour later.

The island’s taxi drivers were on strike so Kell was glad of the hire car, which he drove a few miles south to Karfas along a quiet road lined with citrus groves and crumbling, walled estates. The Golden Sands was a tourist hotel located in the centre of a kilometre-long beach with views across the Chios Strait to Turkey. Kell unpacked, took a shower, then dressed in a fresh set of clothes. As he waited in the bar for his meeting, nursing a bottle of Efes lager and an overwhelming desire to smoke indoors, he reflected on how quickly his personal circumstances had changed. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, he had been eating a tuna sandwich on a crowded train from Preston. Now he was alone on a Greek island, masquerading as an insurance investigator, in the bar of an off-peak tourist hotel. You’re back in the game, he told himself. This is what you wanted. But the buzz had gone. He remembered the feeling of landing in Nice almost two years earlier, instructed by the high priests at Vauxhall Cross to find Amelia at any cost. On that occasion, the rhythms and tricks of his trade had come back to him like muscle memory. This time, however, all that Kell felt was a sense of dread that he would uncover the truth about his friend’s death. No pilot error. No engine failure. Just conspiracy and cover-up. Just murder.

Mr Andonis Makris of the Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority was a thick-set islander of about fifty who spoke impeccable, if over-elaborate English and smelled strongly of eau de cologne. Kell presented him with Chris Hardwick’s business card, agreed that Chios was indeed very beautiful, particularly at this time of year, and thanked Makris for agreeing to meet him at such short notice.

‘Your assistant in the Edinburgh office told me that time was a factor,’ Makris reassured him. He was wearing a dark blue, pin-striped suit and a white shirt without a tie. Self-assured to the point of arrogance, he gave the impression of a man who had, some years earlier, achieved personal satisfaction in almost every area of his life. ‘I am keen to assist you after such a tragedy. Many people on the island were shocked by the news of Mr Wallinger’s death. I am sure his family and colleagues are as keen as we are to find out what happened as soon as is possible in human terms.’

It was obvious from his demeanour that Makris bore no sense of personal responsibility for the crash. Kell assumed that he would want to take the opportunity to shift the blame for the British diplomat’s demise on to the shoulders of Turkish air traffic control as quickly as possible.