A Colder War

11

The force of her grief had astonished Rachel Wallinger. She had spent the greater part of her adult life thinking that her father was a liar, a cheat, a man of no substance, an absence from the heart of his own family. Yet now that he was gone, she missed him as she had never missed anyone or anything before.

How was it possible to grieve for a man who had betrayed her mother, time and again? Why was she suffering for a father who had shown her so little in the way of attention and love? Rachel had not respected Paul Wallinger, she had not even particularly liked him. When asked by friends to describe their relationship, she had always given a version of the same response – ‘He’s a diplomat. We grew up all around the world. I hardly ever saw him.’ Yet the truth was more complex and one she kept to herself. That her father was a spy. That he had used his family as cover for his clandestine activities. That his secret life on behalf of the state had afforded him an opportunity to enjoy a secret life of the heart as well.

At fifteen, while the Wallinger family were living in Egypt, Rachel had come home early from school to find her father kissing another woman in the kitchen of their house in Cairo. She had walked into the garden, looked up at the house, and seen them together. She had recognized the woman as a member of staff from the Embassy. In that moment, her entire understanding of family life had been obliterated. Her father was transformed from a man of strength and dignity, a man she trusted and whom she adored with all her heart, into a stranger who would betray her mother and whose affection for his daughter was apparently meaningless and inchoate.

What had made the discovery even worse was her father’s realization that he had been spotted. The woman had left the house immediately. Paul had then come out into the garden and had tried to convince the teenage Rachel that he had merely been comforting a distraught colleague. Please do not mention this to your mother. You do not know what you have seen. In her state of shock, Rachel had agreed to the cover-up, but her complicity in the lie changed the nature of their relationship for good. She was not rewarded for keeping the secret; in fact, she was punished. Her father became distant. He withdrew his love. It was as though, as the years went by, he perceived Rachel as a threat. There were times when she felt that she was the one who had betrayed him.

What Rachel witnessed that day also affected the way she formed and conducted her own relationships in later life. As she grew older, she became aware of trusting no one; of playing games with prospective lovers; of testing men for evidence of duplicity and cunning. Intensely private and concealed, Rachel was habitually drawn to men whom she could not have or could not control. At the same time, particularly in her early twenties, she was often dismissive of those who showed her genuine kindness and affection.

In the months after the incident in Cairo, Rachel had made it her business to pry into her father’s personal affairs, developing an obsessive fascination with his behaviour. She had cross-checked dates in his diaries; investigated ‘friends’ to whom he had introduced her at seemingly benign family gatherings; eavesdropped on telephone calls whenever she found herself passing her father’s office at home or standing outside her parents’ bedroom.

Then, years later, a reminder of the day that had changed everything.

Only weeks before her father’s death, Rachel had discovered a letter that he had written to yet another mistress. Sent to the family flat in Gloucester Road. Rachel had recognized the stationery, the handwriting, but not the name of the person to whom the letter had been originally addressed in Croatia: Cecilia Sandor. The envelope was marked ‘Address Unknown’ and there was a demand for excess postage. Rachel had intercepted it before her mother had looked through the morning post.

She could still recite parts of the letter from memory:

I cannot stop thinking about you, Cecilia. I want your body, your mouth, the taste of you, the smell of your perfume, your conversation, your laughter – I want all of it, constantly.

I cannot wait to see you, my darling.

I love you

P x

More than fifteen years after Cairo, Rachel had felt the same wrenching shock that she had experienced as a teenager looking up at the kitchen window. At thirty-one, she was no moralist. Rachel was under no illusions about marital infidelity. But the letter only served to remind her that nothing had changed. That her father would always put his own life, his own passions, his other women, in front of his love for his wife and daughter.

So why, then, was she grieving him so intensely? Driving back to London the day after the funeral, Rachel had been suddenly so overwhelmed by loss that she had pulled her car over on to the hard shoulder of the motorway and sobbed uncontrollably. It was like being under a spell, a thing she could neither break nor control. As soon as the wave of grief had passed, however, she had felt restored and able to carry on driving, thinking of ways to cheer up her mother, even if it was just by spending time with her so that she was not left on her own.

This ability to organize her behaviour, to compartmentalize her feelings, was a characteristic that Rachel had observed in her father. He had been a tough and opinionated man, perceived by many as arrogant. From time to time, Rachel herself had been accused of being distant and cold, usually by boyfriends who had been drawn to her self-confidence and energy, but eventually repelled by her refusal to conform to their expectations of her.

When she considered the many traits that she had inherited from her father, particularly now that he was gone, it felt to Rachel as though he was living inside her and that she would never shed his influence. Nor, now, did she want to. Her feelings about him in the aftermath of his death had become altogether more complex. She was angry with Paul for keeping her at such an emotional distance, but remembered the rare moments when he had held her, or taken her to dinner in London, or watched her graduation at Oxford, with great yearning. Rachel wished that he had not betrayed his family, but she also regretted never having confronted him about his behaviour. Her father had probably gone to his grave knowing that his daughter resented him. The guilt Rachel felt about that was at times overwhelming.

They were so similar. That was the conclusion she had drawn. At odds all her adult life, because they were alike in so many ways. Was that why they had come for her? Was that why she had been approached?

Spying in the DNA. Spying as a talent passed down through the generations.

12

With the tide in his favour, Kell could have swum to Turkey in a couple of hours. It was less than ten kilometres from Karfas to Çeşme; a ferry from Chios Town would have got him there in forty-five minutes. Instead, sticking to the itinerary arranged by London, he flew back to Athens and took a bumpy afternoon plane to Ankara, landing a little after five o’clock and losing his bag for an hour in the late afternoon chaos of an over-staffed Turkish airport.

Douglas Tremayne, Wallinger’s number two in Ankara and the acting Head of Station, was waiting for him in the Arrivals area. Kell couldn’t work out whether his presence at the airport was an indication of the seriousness with which he was taking the Wallinger investigation, or evidence of the fact that Tremayne was bored and starved of company. He was wearing a pressed linen suit, an expensive-looking shirt and enough aftershave to water the eyes of anyone within a twenty-foot radius. His hair had been carefully combed and his brown brogues polished to a brilliant shine.

‘I thought we were meeting for dinner?’ Kell asked, shouldering his bag as they headed towards the car park. Tremayne was an unmarried former Army officer with a fill-in-the-blanks personality whom Kell had briefly worked alongside in the late 1990s when both men had been stationed in London. Along with several other colleagues, Kell had formed the opinion that Tremayne had not yet found the courage to admit to himself, far less to others, that he was gay. Personable to an almost suffocating degree, he was best enjoyed in small doses. The prospect of spending the next several hours in his company, not to mention two full days and nights at the British Embassy combing through the Wallinger files, filled Kell with a sense of despondency bordering on dread.

‘Well, I had some time on my hands, I know what the taxi drivers are like round here, thought I’d surprise you so we could make a start on things in the car.’

Given that Tremayne was declared to the Turkish authorities, there was a chance that anything they discussed in the vehicle would be recorded and relayed back to MIT, the Turkish intelligence service.

‘When did you last have this thing swept?’ Kell asked, swinging his luggage into the boot. There was a dent in the left back panel of the car, an unhealed scar from a collision in Ankaran traffic.

‘Don’t worry, Tom. Don’t worry.’ Tremayne opened the passenger door for him, like a chauffeur anticipating a tip. ‘Picked it up yesterday afternoon.’ He patted the roof for good measure. ‘Clean as a whistle.’

‘But you’re followed?’

Tremayne waited until he had sat in the driver’s seat and switched on the engine before replying.

‘By the Iranians. By the Russians. By the Turks. Isn’t that part of my job description? To suck up surveillance so that the likes of you can go about your business?’

If such a status bothered him, Tremayne did not betray his distress. He was the quieter breed of spook, grown somewhat lazy, certainly happy to serve time in the shadow of more dynamic colleagues. Wallinger had been the star in Turkey, Amelia’s point-man for the restructuring of SIS operations in the Middle East, heading up a team of hungry young officers eager to recruit and run operations against the myriad targets presented to them in Ankara and beyond. Tremayne would not have considered himself in the running for Head of Station.

Within minutes Tremayne’s Volvo was crawling along a standard-issue Turkish highway, Kell reviving a sense he dimly recalled of Ankara as a soulless city, deposited on the Steppe, buildings of no recognizable age or tradition strewn across an erratic landscape. He had visited the city on two previous occasions, solely for meetings with MIT, and could recall nothing of the trips save for a January blizzard that had given the British Embassy the look of an Alpine ski lodge.

‘So we’ve been battening down the hatches, trying to come to terms with the whole thing.’ Kell’s mind had wandered; he wasn’t sure how long Tremayne had been monologuing about Wallinger. ‘I wasn’t able to go to the funeral, as you know. Had to mind the fort. How was it?’

Kell cracked a window and lit a cigarette, his fourth since landing.

‘Difficult. Very moving. A lot of old faces there. A lot of unanswered questions.’

‘Do you think he might have crashed the plane deliberately?’

Tremayne had the decency to make a momentary, glancing eye contact as he pitched the question, but the timing of it still irked Kell.

‘You tell me. Did Paul strike you as the suicidal type?’

‘Not at all.’ Tremayne’s response was quick and forthright, though he added a caveat, like a quick adjustment to the steering wheel. ‘Truth be told, we didn’t see a great deal of one another. We didn’t fraternize. Paul spent the majority of his time in Istanbul.’

‘Any particular reason for that?’

Tremayne hesitated before responding. ‘It’s an attack Station.’

‘I’m well aware of that, Doug. That’s why I said “particular reason”?’

Kell was trawling again, for anything: Wallinger’s assets – conscious or unconscious – his contacts, his women. The files and telegrams he would pore over in the next forty-eight hours would give an official version of Wallinger’s interests and behaviour, but there was no downside to the raw intel of gossip and rumour.

‘Well, for one thing, he loved the city. Knew it like the back of his hand, enjoyed it as Istanbul deserves to be enjoyed. Things are always more formal here. Ankara is a government town, a policy town. As you will be aware, most of the important discussions on Iran, on Syria and the Brotherhood, are taking place in Istanbul. Paul kept a lovely house in Yeniköy. He was surrounded by his books, his paintings. That’s where Josephine would visit him. She loathed Ankara. The children did, too.’

‘Rachel came here?’

Tremayne nodded. ‘Only once, I think.’

Kell took out his iPhone and checked the screen for activity. There was a single text, which turned out to be a welcome message from his mobile phone provider, and three emails, two of which were spam. It was a bad, addictive habit he had developed after spending too many solitary days and nights in London without sufficient intellectual stimulation: a craving for news, for the tiny narcotic fix of contact from the outside world. Most days he hoped for a friendly message from Claire, if only to reassure himself that she had not entirely vanished from his life.