A Colder War
‘He is German,’ she said. ‘A musician.’
‘Rock band?’
‘No, classical.’ She was about to show Kell a photograph from her wallet when his phone began to ring.
It was Tamas Metka.
‘Can you speak?’ The Hungarian explained that he was calling from a phone box across the street from the bar in Szolnok. Kell gave him the number of the secure telephone in Wallinger’s bedroom and walked upstairs. Two minutes later, Metka rang back.
‘So,’ he said, a strain of irony in his voice. ‘Turns out you may have met this Miss Sandor.’
‘Really?’
‘She used to be one of us.’
Why wasn’t Kell surprised? Wallinger was most likely having yet another affair with yet another female colleague.
‘A spook?’
‘A spook,’ Metka confirmed. ‘I took a look at the files. She worked several times alongside SIS, Five. She was with us until three years ago.’
‘Us meaning she’s Hungarian?’
‘Yes.’
‘Private sector now?’
‘No.’ There was a smothering roar on the line, the sound of a truck or bus driving past the phone booth. Metka waited until it had passed. ‘Nowadays she owns a restaurant on Lopud.’
‘Lopud?’
‘Croatia. One of the islands off Dubrovnik.’
Kell was sitting on Wallinger’s bed. He picked up the biography of LBJ, turned it over in his hand, skimmed the quotes on the back.
‘Is she married?’ he asked.
‘Divorced.’
‘Kids?’
‘None.’
Metka emitted a gusty laugh. ‘Why do you want to know about her, anyway? You fallen in love with a beautiful Magyar poet, Tom?’
So Cecilia was beautiful, too. Of course she was.
‘Not me. Somebody else.’ Kell had replied as though Wallinger was still alive, still involved with Sandor. ‘Why did she leave the NSA?’
A phone rang on the ground floor of the villa. Kell heard Elsa’s voice as she answered – ‘Pronto!’ Maybe it was her husband calling. Putting the book back on the bedside table, it fell open to a page that had been marked by what looked like a photograph. Kell picked it up.
‘I’m not certain why,’ Metka replied. Kell, now only half-listening, turned the photograph around. He was astonished to see that it was a picture of Amelia.
‘Say that again,’ he said, buying time as he came to terms with what he was looking at.
‘I said I don’t know why she left us. What I saw of her file showed that it was in ’09. Voluntary.’
In the photograph, which had been taken perhaps ten or fifteen years earlier, in the full flush of Amelia’s affair with Wallinger, she was sitting in a crowded restaurant. There was a glass of white wine in front of her, a blurred waiter in a white jacket passing to the left of her chair. She was tanned and wearing a strapless cream dress with a gold necklace that Kell had seen only once before: it was identical to the one Amelia had worn at Wallinger’s funeral. She was perhaps forty in the picture and looked extraordinarily beautiful, but also profoundly content, as though she had at last attained a kind of inner peace. Kell could not remember ever having seen Amelia so at ease.
‘She still had security clearance,’ Metka was saying. ‘There was nothing negative recorded against her.’
Kell put the photograph back in the book and tried to think of something to say. ‘The restaurant?’ he asked.
‘What about it?’
‘You got a name? An address on Lopud?’
He knew that he was going to have to find Cecilia Sandor, to talk to her. She was the key to everything now.
‘Oh sure,’ said Metka. ‘I’ve got the address.’
16
The Embassy of the United States of America was a low-roofed complex of buildings in the heart of the city, flat as the Pentagon and defended by black metal fencing three metres high. The contrast with the British Embassy, a lavish imperial throwback in an upmarket residential neighbourhood overlooking downtown Ankara, could not have been starker. While the Brits employed a single uniformed Turk to run routine security checks on vehicles approaching the building, the Americans deployed a small platoon of buzz-cut, flak-jacketed Marine Corps, most of them hidden behind tungsten-strengthened security gates designed to withstand the impact of a two-ton bomb. You couldn’t blame the Yanks for laying things on a bit thick; every wannabe jihadi from Grosvenor Square to Manila wanted to take a pop at Uncle Sam. Nevertheless, the atmosphere around the Embassy was so tense that, as he pulled up in a rattling Ankaran taxi, Kell felt as though he was back in the Green Zone in Baghdad.
After fifteen minutes of checks, questions and pat-downs, he was shown into an office on the first floor with a view on to a garden in which somebody had erected a wooden climbing frame. There were various certificates on the walls, two watercolours, a photograph of Barack Obama and a shelf of paperback books. This, Kell was told, was where Jim Chater would meet him. The choice of venue immediately raised Kell’s suspicions. Any discussion between a cadre CIA officer and a colleague from SIS should, as a matter of course, take place inside the CIA’s Station. Was Chater planning a blatant snub, or would they move to a Secure Speech room once he arrived?
The meeting was scheduled for ten o’clock. Twelve minutes had passed before there was a light knock on the door and a blonde woman in her late twenties entered wearing a trouser suit and a clip-on smile.
‘Mr Kell?’
Kell stood up and shook the woman’s hand. She introduced herself as Kathryn Moses and explained that she was an FP-04 State Department official, which Kell dimly recalled as an entry-level ranking. More likely she was CIA, an errand girl for Chater.
‘I’m afraid Jim’s running late,’ she said. ‘He’s asked me to step in. Can I get you a coffee, tea or something?’
Kell didn’t want to lose another five minutes of the hour-long meeting in beverage preparation. He said no.
‘Any idea what time he’ll be here?’
It was then that he realized Ms Moses had been sent deliberately to stall him. Settling into a revolving chair behind the desk, she gave Kell a brief, appraising glance, adjusted the sleeves of her jacket, then spoke to him as though he was a Liberal Democrat minister visiting Turkey on a two-day fact-finding tour.
‘Jim has asked me to give you an overview of how we see things right now developing locally and in the Syrian–Iranian theatre, particularly with reference to the regime in Damascus.’
‘OK.’ It turned out to be a mistake to imply consent, because Moses now cleared her throat and didn’t draw breath until the clock on the office wall had moved to within a few second-hand clicks of half-past ten. There was background on the State Department decisions to move the Istanbul Consulate out of town and to share an airbase with the Turks at Incirlik. Moses had views on the ‘contradictory’ relationship with Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan and was pleased that the ‘shaky period’ in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq – a veiled reference to Turkey’s refusal to cooperate with the Bush administration – was now a thing of the past. In the view of the Obama administration, she said, the Turkish leadership had come to the realization that membership of the EU was no longer a viable goal, nor was it particularly in the country’s interests. Indeed, despite accepting seven billion euros in aid from the EU over a period of ten years, Mr Erdoğan wanted ‘to turn Turkey’s face to the south and to the east’, establishing himself as ‘a benign Islamic Calvinist’ – not a phrase coined by Kathryn Moses – with Turkey as ‘a beacon for the rest of Muslim North Africa and the Middle East, a modern, functioning capitalist buffer state existing peaceably between East and West’.
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