Copyright

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Copyright © Charles Cumming 2016

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Cover photographs © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (man, right); Tim Robinson/Arcangel Images (man, left and steps); Roy Bishop/Arcangel Images (London scene); Shutterstock.com (shoes)

Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007467549

Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780007467532

Version: 2017-03-22

Dedication

For Julia Wisdom

Epigraph

‘We are, I know not how, somewhat double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.’

Michel de Montaigne

‘Truth doesn’t always come from truthful men.’

James Salter

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

London

Chapter 1

Five Weeks Later

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Acknowledgements

Read on for an extract from the first book in the Thomas Kell series …

About the Author

By Charles Cumming

About the Publisher

London

1

Put it all on red. Put it all on black.

Jim Martinelli stacked five thousand pounds of chips into two six-inch piles. He held each of the piles in the tips of his fingers. One of them was fractionally higher than the other, the other slightly crooked at the base. He stared at them. His whole future, the mountain of his debt, just twenty discs of plastic in a casino. Double the money and he could keep Chapman at bay. Lose it and he was finished.

Arms across the baize, a blur of hands as the players around him reached out to place their bets. The suit from Dubai putting single chips on eighteen through thirty-six, the other Arab putting a grand on red. The Chinese tourist to Martinelli’s left put a carpet of blue chips in the upper third, smothering the table with piles of five and six. Big wins for him tonight, big losses. Then he put twenty grand on ten and walked away from the table. Twenty thousand pounds on a one in thirty-five chance. Even in the worst times, in the craziest urges of the last two years, Martinelli had never been stupid enough to do something like that. Perhaps he wasn’t as messed up as he thought. Maybe he still had things under control.

The wheel was spinning. Martinelli stayed out of the play. It didn’t feel right; he wasn’t getting a clear reading on the numbers. The Chinese tourist was hovering near the bar, now almost twenty feet away from the table. Martinelli tried to imagine what it must be like to have so much money that you could afford to blow twenty grand on a single moment of chance. Twenty grand was four months’ salary at the Passport Office, more than half of his debt to Chapman. Two wins in the next two rounds and he would be holding that kind of dough. Then he could cash out, go home, call Chapman. He could start to pay back what he owed.

The croupier was tidying up. Centring chips, straightening piles. In a low, firm voice he said: ‘No further bets, please, gentlemen,’ and turned towards the wheel.

The house always wins, Martinelli told himself. The house always wins …

The ball was beginning to slow. The Chinese tourist was still hovering near the bar, back turned to the play, his little chimney of twenty grand on ten. The ball dropped and began to jump in the channels, the quiet innocent clatter as it popped from box to box. Martinelli laid a private bet with himself. Red. It’s going to be red. He looked down at his pile of chips and wished that he had staked it all.

‘Twenty-seven, red,’ said the croupier, placing the wooden dolly on a low pile of chips in the centre of the baize. Martinelli felt a sting of irritation. He had missed his chance. Across the room, the tourist was returning from the bar, watching the croupier clear away the losing bets, the cheap plastic rustle of thousands of pounds being dragged across the baize and scooped into the tube. There was no expression on his face as the stack on ten was pulled; nothing to indicate loss or sorrow. Washed-out and inscrutable. The face of a gambler.

Martinelli stood up, nodded at the inspector. He left his chips on the table and walked downstairs to the bathroom. They were playing Abba on the sound system, a song that reminded Martinelli of driving long distances with his father as a child. The door of the gents was ajar, paper towels littering the floor. Martinelli scraped them to one side with his foot and checked his reflection in the mirror.

His skin was pallid and gleaming with sweat. In the bright fluorescent light of the bathroom the tiredness under his eyes looked like bruises from a fight. He had worn the same shirt two nights in a row and could see that a thin brown line of dirt had formed inside the collar. He bared his teeth, wondering if a chunk of olive or peanut had been lodged in his gums all night. But there was nothing. Just the pale yellow stains on his front teeth and a sense that his breath was stale. He took out a piece of gum and popped it into his mouth. He was exhausted.

‘All right, Jim? How’s it going for you tonight?’

Martinelli swung around.

‘Kyle.’

It was Chapman. He was standing in the door, looking at a stack of leaflets in a plastic box beside the sink. Advice for gamblers, advice for addicts. Chapman picked one up.

‘What does it say here?’ he began, reading from the leaflet in his abrasive London accent. ‘How to play responsibly.’

Chapman smiled at Martinelli, but the eyes were dead, menacing. He turned the page.

‘Remember. Gambling is a way for responsible adults to have some fun.’

Martinelli had never had the balls to read the leaflet. They said that the addict had to want to quit. He felt his stomach dissolve and had to steady himself against the wall.

‘Most of our customers do not see gambling as a problem. But for a very small minority, Jim, we know that this is not the case.’

Chapman looked up. He moved the side of his mouth in a way that made Martinelli feel like he was going to spit at him.

‘If you think you are having trouble controlling your gambling, this leaflet contains important information on where to seek help.’ Chapman lowered the leaflet and looked into Martinelli’s eyes. ‘Do you need help, Jim?’ He tilted his head to one side and grinned. ‘Do you want to talk to someone?’

‘I’ve got five grand on the table. Upstairs.’

‘Five? Have you?’ Chapman sniffed loudly, as if he was struggling to clear his sinuses. ‘You and I both know that’s not what we’re talking about, don’t we? You’re not being straight, Jim.’

Chapman took a step forward. He raised the leaflet and held it in front of him, like a man singing a hymn in church.

‘Only gamble what you can afford to lose,’ he said. ‘Set yourself personal limits. Only spend a certain amount of time at the tables.’ He stared at Martinelli. ‘Time, Jim. That’s what you’ve run out of, isn’t it?’

‘I’ve told you,’ he said. ‘Five grand. Upstairs. Let me play.’

Chapman walked towards the basins. He looked at himself in the mirror, admiring what he saw. Then he kicked out his leg behind him and slammed the bathroom door.

‘I can tell you that you’ve got a problem,’ he said. ‘I can tell you that if you don’t give me what’s owed by tomorrow morning, I won’t be – how do they say – responsible for my actions.’

‘I understand that.’ Martinelli could feel himself freezing up, his mind going numb.

‘Oh you understand that, do you?’

‘Can you just let me past?’ Martinelli pressed away from the wall and moved towards the basins. ‘Can you open the door, please? I want to go upstairs.’

Chapman appeared to admire his display of courage. He nodded and opened the door. An ominous smile was playing on his face as he indicated that Martinelli could leave.

‘Don’t let me stop you,’ he said, stepping to one side with the flourish of a matador. ‘You go and see what you can do, Jim. Be lucky.’

Martinelli climbed the stairs two at a time. He needed to be back at the tables in the way that a man who has been held underwater craves to reach the surface and to suck in a deep breath of air. He headed back to his seat and saw that a play was coming to an end. The pop and clatter of the ball, the rapt attention of the gamblers waiting for it to settle.

‘Six. Black,’ said the croupier.

Martinelli saw that the Chinese tourist had a split of five grand on five and six. A small fortune. The croupier placed the dolly on the winning square and began to sweep the losing chips from across the table. Then he paid out what he owed – more than eighty grand to the Chinese in a stack of twenty, with no discernible reaction from either man.

Martinelli took it as a sign. He waited until the table was clear, then moved his stack of chips on to black. All or nothing. Take it or leave it. The house always wins. Fuck Kyle Chapman.

Then it was just a question of waiting. The bloke from Dubai put his usual spread on eighteen through thirty-six, the other Arab going big on six-way splits along the baize. It worried Martinelli that the Chinese stayed out of the play, wandering over to the bar. It was like a bad omen. Maybe he should take back his chips.

‘No more bets, please, gentlemen,’ said the croupier.

Too late. Martinelli could do nothing but stare at the wheel, praying for the chance on black, mesmerized – as he had always been – by the counterpoint of spokes and ball, the one hypnotically slow, the other a blur as it raced beneath the rim.

Slowing now, the ball about to drop. Nauseous with anxiety, Martinelli took his eyes away from the wheel and saw Kyle Chapman standing in his eyeline. He had come back upstairs. He wasn’t looking at the wheel. He wasn’t looking at the baize. He was looking directly at the man who owed him thirty thousand pounds.

Martinelli’s eyes went back to the table. All or nothing. Feast or famine. He heard the rattle and click of the ball, watched it drop and vanish beneath the rim like a magic trick.

The inspector looked down. He would see it first. The croupier leaned over the wheel, preparing to call the number.

Martinelli closed his eyes. It was like an axe falling. He always felt sick at this moment.

I should have put it all on red, he thought. The house always wins.

Five Weeks Later

2

Thomas Kell stood on the westbound platform at Bayswater station, one eye on a copy of the Evening Standard, the other on the man standing three metres to his left wearing faded denim jeans and a brown tweed jacket. Kell had seen him first on Praed Street, reflected in the window of a Chinese restaurant, then again twenty minutes later coming out of a branch of Starbucks on Queensway. Average height, average build, average features. Tapping his Oyster card on the reader at Bayswater, Kell had turned to find the man walking into the station a few paces behind him. He had ducked the eye contact, staring at his well-worn shoes. That was when Kell sensed he had a problem.

It was just after three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in June. Kell counted eleven other people waiting on the platform, two of them standing directly behind him. Drawing on a long-forgotten piece of self-defence, he placed his right leg further forward than his left, shifted his weight back on to his rear heel as the train clattered into the station – and waited for the shove in the back.

It never came. No crowding up, no crazed Chechen errand boy trying to push him on to the tracks as a favour to the SVR. Instead the District Line train deposited half a dozen passengers on to the platform and eased away. When Kell looked left, he saw that the man in the faded jeans had gone. The two men who had been standing behind him had also boarded the train. Kell allowed himself a half smile. His occasional outbreaks of paranoia were a kind of madness, a yearning for the old days; the corrupted sixth sense of a forty-six-year-old spy who knew that the game was over.

A second train, moments later. Kell stepped on board, took a fold-down seat and re-opened the Standard. Royal pregnancies. Property prices. Electoral conspiracies. He was just another traveller on the Tube, traceless and nondescript. Nobody knew who he was nor who he had ever been. On the fifth page, a photograph of an aid worker murdered by the maniacs of ISIS; on the seventh, more wretched news from Ukraine. It was of no consolation to Kell that in the twelve months he had spent as a private citizen following the murder of his girlfriend, Rachel Wallinger, the regions on which he had worked for the greater part of his adult life had further disintegrated into violence and criminality. Though Kell had deliberately avoided making contact with anyone in the Service, he had occasionally run into former colleagues in the supermarket or on the street, only to be treated to lengthy discourses on the ‘impossible task’ facing SIS in Russia, Syria, Yemen and beyond.

‘The best we can hope for is a kind of stasis, somehow to keep a lid on things,’ a former colleague had told him when they bumped into one another at a Christmas party. ‘God knows it was easier in the age of the despots. There are some mornings, Tom, when I’m as nostalgic for Mubarak and Gaddafi as a Dunkirk Tommy for the white cliffs of Dover. At least Saddam gave us something to aim for.’

The train pulled into Notting Hill Gate. In the same conversation, the colleague had offered his ‘sincere condolences’ over Rachel’s death and intimated to Kell how ‘devastated’ the ‘entire Service’ had been over the circumstances of her assassination in Istanbul. Kell had changed the subject. Rachel’s memory was his alone to curate; he wanted no part in others’ recollections of the woman to whom he had lost his heart. Perhaps he had been naive to fall so quickly for a woman he had barely known, yet he guarded the memory of his love as jealously as a starving animal with a scrap of food. Every morning, for months, Kell had thought of Rachel at the moment of waking, then steadily throughout the day, a debilitating punctuation to his solitary, unchanging existence. He had raged at her, he had talked with her, he had drenched himself in memories of the short period in which they had been involved with one another. The loss of the potential that Rachel had possessed to knit together the broken strands of Kell’s life constituted the most acute suffering he had ever known. Yet he had survived it.

‘You must be having a mid-life crisis,’ his ex-wife, Claire, had told him at one of their occasional reunion lunches, commenting on the fact that Kell had given up alcohol, was taking himself off to the gym three times a week and had broken a twenty-year, twenty-a-day smoking habit. ‘No alcohol, no fags. No spying? Next thing you’ll be buying an open-topped Porsche and taking twenty-two-year-olds to the polo at Windsor Great Park.’

Kell had laughed at the joke even as he inwardly acknowledged how little Claire understood him. She knew nothing, of course, about his relationship with Rachel, nothing about the operation that had led to her death. This was just the latest in a lifetime of secrets between them. As far as Claire was concerned, Kell would always be the same man: an intelligence officer through and through, a spy who had spent more than two decades in thrall to the lustre and intrigue of the secret world. She believed that their marriage had failed because he had loved the game more than he had loved her.

‘You’re wedded to your agents, Tom,’ Claire had said during one of many similarly unequivocal conversations that had heralded the end of the marriage. ‘Amelia Levene is your family, not me. If you had to choose between us, I have no doubt that you would pick MI6.’

Amelia. The woman whose career Kell had saved and whose reputation he had salvaged. The Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, appointed three years earlier, now approaching the end of her tenure, with the Middle East on fire, Russia in political and economic turmoil and Africa ravaged by Islamist terror. Kell had neither seen nor heard from her since the afternoon of Rachel’s funeral, an occasion at which they had deliberately ignored one another. By recruiting Rachel to work for SIS behind his back, Amelia had effectively signed her death warrant.

Earl’s Court. Kell stepped off the train and registered the familiar acid taste of his implacable resentment. It was the one thing he had been unable to control. He had come to terms with the end of his marriage, he had mastered his grief, reasoned that his professional future lay beyond the walls of Vauxhall Cross. Yet he could not still a yearning for vengeance. Kell wanted to seek out those in Moscow who had given the order for Rachel’s assassination. He wanted justice.

The Richmond service was due in a few minutes. A pigeon swooped in low from the Warwick Road, flapped towards the opposite platform and settled beside a bench. There was a District Line train standing empty behind it. The pigeon hopped on board. As if on cue, the doors slid shut and the train moved out of the station.

Kell turned and joined the huddle of passengers on platform 4, heads ducked down in text messages, Twitter feeds, games of Angry Birds. A huge bearded man with a ‘Baby on Board’ badge attached to the lapel of his jacket stood beside him. Kell half-expected to spot his old friend from Bayswater: faded denim jeans and a brown tweed jacket. A woman behind him was talking in Polish on a mobile phone; another, shrouded in a black niqab, was scolding a small child in Arabic. These were the citizens of the new London, the international masses whom Amelia Levene was charged to protect. More than twenty years earlier, Kell had joined SIS in a spirit of undiluted patriotism. To save lives, to defend and protect the kingdom, had seemed to him both a noble and an exhilarating pursuit for a young man with adventure in his blood. Now that London was a city of Africans and Americans, of Hollande-fleeing French, of Eastern Europeans too young to have known the impediments of Communism, he felt no different. The landscape had changed, yet Kell still felt wedded to an idea of England, even as that idea shifted and slipped beneath his feet. There were days when he longed to return to active duty, to stand once again at Amelia’s side, but Rachel’s death had pushed him into exile. He had allowed the personal to overcome the political.

The train pulled into the platform. Carriages as empty as his days flickered in the afternoon light. Kell stepped aside to allow an elderly woman to board the train, then took his seat, and waited.

3

Kell was at his flat in Sinclair Road within twenty minutes. He had been inside for less than five when his phone rang, a rare landline call that Kell assumed would be from Claire. The number was otherwise known only to SIS Personnel.

‘Guv?’

It didn’t take long for Kell to pick the voice. Born and raised in Elephant and Castle, then two decades in Tech-Ops at MI5.

‘Harold?’

‘The one and only.’

‘How did you get this number?’

‘Nice to hear from you, too.’

‘How?’ Kell asked again.

‘Do we have to do this?’

It was a fair question. With half a dozen clicks of a mouse, Harold Mowbray could have found out Kell’s blood type and credit rating. Now private sector, he had worked closely with Amelia on two occasions in the previous three years: Kell’s home number might even have come directly from ‘C’.

‘OK. So how have you been?’

‘Good, guv. Good.’

‘Arsenal doing all right?’

‘Nah. Gave them up for Lent. Too many pretty boys in midfield.’

Kell found himself reaching for a cigarette that wasn’t there. He thought back to the previous summer, sitting with Mowbray in a Bayswater safe house killing time waiting for a mole. Harold had known that Kell was in love with Rachel. He had come to the funeral, paid his respects. Kell trusted him insomuch as he had always been efficient and reliable, but knew that theirs was a professional relationship that would never transcend Mowbray’s loyalty to whoever was paying his bills.

‘So what’s up?’ he asked. ‘You selling something? Want me to buy your season ticket to Highbury?’

‘Keep up. Arsenal moved out of Highbury years ago. Been playing at the Emirates since 2006.’ It occurred to Kell that, save for a perfunctory exchange in Pret A Manger, this was the first conversation he had held with another human being in over twenty-four hours. The night before he had cooked spaghetti bolognese at home and watched back-to-back episodes of House of Cards. In the morning he had gone to the gym, then wandered alone around an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Sometimes he would go for days without any meaningful interaction whatsoever.

‘Still,’ said Mowbray, ‘we need to have a chat.’

‘Isn’t that what we’re doing?’

‘Face to face. Mano a mano. Too long and complicated for the phone.’

That could mean only one thing. Work. Blowback from a previous operation, or a dangled carrot on something new. Either way, Mowbray didn’t trust Kell’s landline to keep it a secret. Anybody could be listening in. London. Paris. Moscow.

‘You remember that Middle Eastern place we used to go to on the American gig?’

‘Which one?’ ‘The American gig’ had been the molehunt. Ryan Kleckner. A CIA officer in the pay of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service.

‘The one with the waitress.’

‘Oh, that one.’ Kell made a joke of it, but understood that Mowbray was being deliberately obscure. There was only one Middle Eastern restaurant that both of them had been to on the Kleckner operation. Westbourne Grove. Persian. Kell had no recollection of the waitress, pretty or otherwise. Mowbray was simply making sure that their table wouldn’t be covered in advance.

‘Can you make dinner tonight?’ he asked.

Kell thought about stalling but was too intrigued by the invitation. Besides, he was looking at another night of leftovers and House of Cards. Dinner with Harold would be a fillip.

‘Meet you there at eight?’ he suggested.

‘You will know me by the smell of my cologne.’

4

Kell arrived at the restaurant at quarter to eight, early enough to ask for a quiet spot at the back with line of sight to the entrance. To his surprise, Mowbray was already seated at a table in the centre of the small, brick-lined room, his back to a group of jabbering Spaniards.

It was fiercely hot, the open mouth of a tanoor blowing a furnace heat into Kell’s face as he walked inside. A waitress, whom he vaguely recognized, smiled at him as Mowbray stood up behind her. Iranian music was playing at a volume seemingly designed to guarantee a degree of conversational privacy.

‘Harold. How are you?’

‘Salam, guv.’

‘Salam, khoobi,’ Kell replied. The heat of the tanoor as he sat down was like a summer sun against his back.

‘You speak Farsi?’ They were shaking hands.

‘I was showing off,’ Kell said. ‘Enough to get by in restaurants.’

‘Menu Farsi,’ Mowbray replied, smiling at his own remark. ‘Iranians don’t like being confused for Arabs, do they?’

‘They do not.’

Mowbray looked to be recovering from a bad case of sunburn. His forehead was scalded red and there were flaking patches of dry skin around his mouth and nose.

‘Been away?’ Kell asked.

‘Funny you should mention that.’ Mowbray flapped a napkin into his lap and grinned. ‘Went to Egypt with the wife.’

‘Why funny?’

‘You’ll see. Shall we order?’

Kell wondered why he was playing hard to get. He opened his menu as the waitress passed their table. Mowbray looked up, caught Kell’s eye and winked.

‘So,’ he said, spring-loading another joke. ‘You can have a skewer of minced lamb with taftoon bread, two skewers of minced lamb with taftoon bread, a skewer of marinated lamb cubes with taftoon bread, two skewers of marinated lamb cubes with taftoon bread, a skewer of minced lamb and a skewer of marinated lamb cubes with taftoon …’

‘I get it,’ said Kell, smiling as he closed the menu. ‘You order. I’m going to the bathroom.’

There was a strong smell of hashish leading up to the gents. Kell stopped to look at a wall of turquoise tiles inlaid on the staircase, breathing in the smoke. He wanted to trace the source of the smell, to find whoever had rolled the joint in a backroom office and to share it with them. In the bathroom he washed his hands and glanced in the mirror, wondering why Mowbray was coming to him with tall tales from Egypt. What was the scoop? ISIS? Muslim Brotherhood? Maybe he was the bagman for a job offer in the private sector, an ex-SIS suit using Kell’s friendship with Mowbray as a lure. There had been five or six such offers in the previous twelve months, all of which Kell had turned down. He wasn’t interested in private security, nor did he want to be a nodding donkey on the board of Barclays or BP. On the other hand, if the pitch was something Russian, something that would get Kell close to the men who had ordered Rachel’s assassination, he would give it serious consideration.

‘I forgot,’ Mowbray announced, as Kell settled back into his seat. ‘They don’t serve booze.’

‘Don’t worry about it. I gave up.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Seven months dry.’

‘Now why would you want to go and do a thing like that?’

‘Tell me about Egypt.’

Mowbray leaned forward and put a hand in his pocket. Kell thought he was going to produce a photograph or a flash drive, but he kept it there as he spoke. If Kell hadn’t known that Mowbray was capable of far greater subtleties, he might have assumed that he was triggering a recording device.

‘Hurghada.’

‘What about it?’

‘One-horse town on the east coast. Mainland Egypt. Red Sea, facing Sinai.’

‘I know where it is, Harold.’

‘Last three years, Karen and me have been flying there for a bit of winter sun; easyJet goes three times a week. Car picks us up and drives us an hour south to a place called Soma Bay. Four hotels and a golf course, back-to-back, arse end of nowhere. Fresh water piped in from the Nile, turns the fairways green, fills the swimming pools. Coral reefs and scuba diving for the grown-ups, camel rides on the beach for the kids. In the tourist industry they call it a “hot flop”.’

The food arrived. Mashed aubergines with garlic and herbs. Feta cheese mixed with tarragon and fresh mint. A bowl of hummus was placed in front of Kell, nestled beside a basket of flatbread.

‘There’s your taftoon,’ he said, encouraging Mowbray to continue.

‘Anyway, we always stay at the same place. German-owned, German efficient, German-occupied sunbeds. Never seen a Yank there, never met a Frog. The occasional Brit, from time to time, but mostly German pensioners and Russian oligarch types with dyed hair and third wives who probably weren’t alive under Gorbachev. Am I painting the picture?’

‘Vividly,’ said Kell, and took a bite of taftoon.

‘So, guv, here’s the thing. Here’s the reason I wanted to see you. Something very strange happened, something I can still hardly believe.’

Mowbray looked like he meant it. There was an expression of amused consternation on his face.

‘They do breakfasts,’ he said, nodding slowly and looking across the table, as though half-expecting Kell to finish his sentence. ‘They do breakfasts every morning …’

‘What a breakthrough in hospitality,’ Kell replied. ‘I must go and stay there.’

Mowbray didn’t laugh. His eyes were fixed somewhere around Kell’s left ear.

‘On the second last day we were there, this couple walks in. Two men. You get that kind of thing at the hotel. They’re comfortable with gays, lots of it about, even for a Muslim country.’ Mowbray sipped his tap water, trying to slow himself down. ‘Karen looks up and makes a noise of disapproval.’ He checked himself. ‘No, not disapproval, she’s not homophobic or anything. More conspiratorial than that. Like a joke between us. “Look at the fruits”, you know?’

‘Sure,’ said Kell.

‘They were both dressed in white shirts and white trousers. That’s very German, too. Ninety per cent of the guests look like they’re playing at Wimbledon or members of some cult. Pristine white, like an advert for one of those soap powders that really deliver at low temperatures.’ Kell resisted telling Mowbray to ‘get on with it’ because he knew how he liked to operate. ‘And there’s an age gap between them,’ he said, ‘maybe fifteen or twenty years. The older bloke is the one facing me. German money, you can tell. He sits down with what looks like a fruit salad, black-rimmed glasses, suntan. I can’t see the boyfriend, but he’s younger, fitter. Late thirties, at a guess. The old boy is camp, a bit effeminate, but this one looks straight, macho. There’s something about him that triggers me, but I can’t yet tell what it is.’

Kell had stopped eating. He knew what Mowbray was going to tell him, a giddy premonition of something so improbable that he dismissed it out of hand.

‘Anyway, Karen had finished her orange juice. Wanted to get another one. She’d hurt her foot on the coral so I offered to go instead. There’s an egg station at the buffet and I waited there while the chef made me an omelette. Got the wife’s orange juice, got some yogurt, then started to walk back towards our table. That was when I saw his face. That was when I recognized him.’

‘Who?’ said Kell. ‘Who was it?’

‘The boyfriend was Alexander Minasian.’

5

Kell stared at Mowbray in disbelief.

‘Don’t fuck around,’ he said, because the chance sighting was so sensational that Kell had to reckon that Mowbray was making a joke.

‘As clear as I’m sitting here facing you,’ he said. ‘No way it was anybody else.’

Alexander Minasian was the SVR officer responsible for the recruitment of Ryan Kleckner, a high-level CIA mole in the Middle East who had funnelled Western secrets to Moscow for more than two years. In an operation instigated by Amelia Levene, Kell had identified Kleckner, run him to ground in Odessa and handed him over to Langley. In response to the loss of Kleckner, Moscow had given the order to kill Rachel. Kell held Minasian personally responsible. He wanted his head on a plate.

‘Minasian has a wife,’ Kell said quietly. The heat of the kiln was burning into his back. ‘At least that’s what we thought. It never entered the equation that he was gay. It’s not SVR house style. They wouldn’t countenance it. They’re not big on homosexuality in Putin’s Russia. You probably noticed.’

Mowbray’s reaction – a slow shake of the head, mouth pursed so that minute traces of food were visible on the inside of his lips – told Kell that he was convinced by what he had seen. He picked up his glass and turned it in his hand, a man waiting to be believed. Kell began to work from memory, his knowledge of Minasian still as insubstantial as the official SIS file. Nobody knew where Minasian had come from, where he was currently stationed, how he had recruited Kleckner.

‘Minasian’s wife is the daughter of a St Petersburg oligarch. Andrei Eremenko. Draws a lot of water in Moscow. Close to the Kremlin.’ Kell had spent long hours looking into Eremenko’s business affairs, searching for any overlap with Minasian, any clue as to his whereabouts or personality. ‘If he finds out his son-in-law is gay …’

‘He’s not going to be very happy about it.’ Mowbray finished Kell’s sentence and set his glass back on the table. ‘Nor is Mrs Minasian, for that matter. Wives can be sensitive about that sort of thing.’

‘Perhaps she already knows,’ Kell suggested. In his experience, wives often knew far more of their husband’s misdemeanours than they ever publicly acknowledged. Many of them preferred to exist in a state of denial. Let the man philander, let him play his vain and tawdry games. Just keep it in-house. At all costs, protect the nest.

‘That’s what I wondered.’

Kell was silent as he continued to analyse what he had been told. It was unthinkable that the SVR would have a gay officer on its books, married or otherwise. SIS had only begun recruiting openly homosexual employees in the previous ten or fifteen years; modern Russia was antediluvian by comparison. If Minasian’s secret were exposed, his career would end overnight.

‘Who else have you spoken to about this?’

Kell dreaded the simple reply: ‘C’ because it would instantly shrink his options. The wheels of his imagination had begun to turn, a dormant ruthlessness circling Minasian’s vulnerability like a bird of prey. If his nemesis was hiding a secret of this magnitude, he was vulnerable to an extent that was almost beyond belief. But if Amelia knew about it, she would sideline Kell on any subsequent operation, doubtless citing ‘personal issues’ and ‘clouded judgment’.

‘I haven’t told a soul,’ Mowbray replied, though his eyes slid to one side and he tapped his mouth with a napkin as he spoke. Kell studied the face and could not be certain that Mowbray was telling the truth. A tiny section of sunburned skin around his nose looked as if it was about to flake off.

‘Not even Karen?’ he asked. Spousal pillow talk was an occupational hazard among veteran spies; the habit of secrecy became harder and harder to sustain as the years went by.

‘Never discuss work with the wife,’ Mowbray replied quickly. ‘Never. Something we agreed on from day one. Last time she asked me was ninety-one or ninety-two, when they arrested a bunch of IRA in London. She was watching John Simpson on the Nine O’Clock News, said: “Did you have something to do with this?” I told her to mind her own business.’

‘But she saw Minasian?’

‘Oh yeah. All the time.’

‘What does that mean? She met him?’

‘No. Neither of us did. But we were staying at the same hotel. Caught the whole show.’

Kell saw the glint in Mowbray’s eye, the suggestion of an even greater prize.

‘Call it trouble in paradise,’ he explained with a predictable grin. ‘Our man from Moscow wasn’t getting on very well with his boyfriend. They kept fighting. Arguing.’

‘All of this played out in public?’ Kell was beginning to wonder if Harold had stumbled on a set-up, Minasian role-playing the moody boyfriend for the purpose of an undisclosed SVR operation at the hotel. Perhaps the relationship had even been staged for Mowbray’s benefit, or Harold himself had been turned by the Russians.

‘Not exactly.’ Mowbray was leaning forward again, still grinning. ‘You see, I made a point of watching them whenever I could. Surreptitious photos, eavesdropping in the bar.’

‘Jesus.’ Kell had an image of Mowbray prowling around a sun-blasted Egyptian tourist resort with a long-lens camera and a boom microphone. ‘Any chance I could see those photos?’

Mowbray had been biding his time, waiting for the invitation. Setting his knife and fork to one side, he shot Kell a look of mischievous self-satisfaction and reached back into his jacket pocket. Inside were half a dozen colour photographs, the size of postcards, four of which spilled on to the ground as he retrieved them.

‘Fuck,’ he muttered. It was like watching a conjuror trying to learn a new trick. ‘Here you go.’

Kell took the photographs and experienced an extraordinary feeling of exhilaration. He turned to check his background. A chef in stained check trousers was standing three feet behind him, stretching a ball of dough on a small cushion. Kell’s body was cloaked in heat. He craved alcohol.

The first photograph showed Minasian standing alone at the edge of a swimming pool, in bright sunlight. He was wearing Rayban sunglasses and navy blue swimming shorts. Fit for his age, defined musculature, an expressionless mouth. The man who had given the order to kill Rachel. He felt a visceral hatred towards him. There was a woman’s blurred shoulder in the left foreground of the shot, presumably Karen. Mowbray had used her as a decoy.

The next three photographs were all taken by long lens from an elevated position, angled down towards a garden in which Minasian was standing with his lover. When Kell asked, Mowbray confirmed that he had been sitting on the balcony of his room at the back of the hotel and had overheard the two men arguing. In the first shot of the sequence, they were embracing, Minasian topless, the older man wearing a pale pink short-sleeved shirt, white shorts and plimsolls. He was tanned with chalk-white hair that was bald at the crown. In the second shot, the older man appeared to be extremely upset, his eyes stained with tears, Minasian leaning back as if to disengage from what was happening in front of him. In the third shot – Kell assumed that he had looked at the sequence out of chronological order – Minasian was gesticulating with his right arm in a manner deemed threatening enough for the older man to be shielding himself by raising his hand and turning to one side. Was he afraid of being hit? The next photograph, apparently taken with a different lens, from a new angle, showed the older man crouching down in a separate section of the garden, hands covering his face.

‘What was going on?’ Kell asked.

‘They were shouting at each other like a couple of teenagers.’ The waitress removed the bowls of hummus and mashed aubergine. There was a clatter as something fell over in the kitchen. ‘Big fight between two queens about “lying” and “broken promises” and Minasian being a “prick”. I couldn’t make much of it out.’

‘They were always speaking English?’

‘Mostly. Far as I could tell, the old boy didn’t speak Russian. He’s German. From Hamburg.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I’m not an idiot, guv.’

‘Nobody said you were, Harold.’

Kell took a bite of lamb and invited Mowbray to continue. He was about to order a beer when he remembered that the restaurant was dry. A single glimpse of the secret world had been enough to strip him of a seven-month commitment to remain booze free.

‘His name is Bernhard Riedle.’

‘How are you spelling that?’

Mowbray wrote down the name on a piece of paper and passed it to Kell.

‘I got into the hotel email. Piece of piss. Jumped on their wi-fi, hacked into the account used by the reservations manager, read Riedle’s messages.’

‘Undetected?’

Kell felt uneasy. Mowbray wasn’t trained in surveillance. If Minasian had caught even a scent of his interest – the eavesdropped conversations, the clandestine photographs – he might have turned the tables and engineered an investigation of his own into the nosey couple from England.

‘Of course undetected. Did the whole thing from my room. Took fifteen minutes. Anyway, here’s the interesting bit. Minasian stayed under a pseudonym. Riedle called him “my partner Dmitri” in the emails.’

‘Makes sense,’ said Kell. ‘He’s married. Riedle could be covering for him. Did you get a passport? A surname?’

‘No, sir.’

‘But Minasian would have had to show one when he checked in. So either Riedle really does think his boyfriend is called “Dmitri” or he’s conscious that Alexander Minasian works for the SVR and is travelling under alias.’

‘How do you figure that?’

Mowbray looked momentarily confused, as if Kell had identified a flaw in his thesis. For his own part, Kell was surprised that Mowbray had failed to join the dots.

‘If I go on holiday with my girlfriend “Anne Smith” and she travels on a passport calling herself “Betty Jones”, I’m going to ask her how come she has two identities. Unless she’s from the Office.’

‘True,’ said Mowbray. ‘You are.’ There was a sheepish pause while he made a silent calculation. Kell sensed his embarrassment and urged him to continue.

‘Well,’ he said, rubbing the back of his head. ‘We can discount the idea that Riedle is a spook. Once I got home I did some digging around. He’s an architect.’

‘From Hamburg?’

‘Originally, yes. That’s where he has his practice, anyway. Right now, though, he’s spending a lot of time in Brussels.’

‘Reason?’

‘Some kind of office building. Swish headquarters for a Belgian television company. He’s designing it, living in an apartment there while it goes up.’

‘With Minasian paying him the occasional visit?’

‘Negative, Houston.’

‘They broke up?’

‘They broke up,’ Mowbray replied.

Kell immediately saw this not as a setback, but as an opportunity. A man in love is less likely to betray his partner. A man with a broken heart can be manipulated into acts of vengeance.

‘You said Riedle was feeling sorry for himself? That’s what you meant? Minasian dumped him?’

Mowbray squeezed his chafed nose and looked to one side, timing the delivery of a chunk of bad news. The waitress, who had passed their table several times in the preceding minutes, trying to ascertain if the two middle-aged gentlemen intended to finish their meals, finally made her decision and began collecting their plates of half-eaten food.

‘He dumped him,’ said Mowbray. ‘Gigantic lover’s tiff.’

‘After the argument you witnessed? That was it? They separated?’

Mowbray nodded, staring at the table.

‘The photos you saw, then Riedle crying on his own in the garden. That was the last time we saw Minasian. I assume he left that night. There was a twenty-two hundred Air Egypt flight from Hurghada to Cairo. He could have gone anywhere after that.’

‘And Riedle?’

‘Stayed another two days. Had breakfast in his room, ate dinner alone with a look on his face like his life was over.’

‘How do you figure that?’ Kell asked. ‘Just from a look on his face? Maybe he’s that kind of person.’

Mowbray pitched backwards in his seat, as if Kell had been unnecessarily confrontational. Kell apologized with a raised hand and took the opportunity to order two glasses of mint tea. He was aware that his adrenaline was running high, an eagerness to ensnare Minasian clashing against long-practised instincts for caution and context.

‘What I meant was …’

‘Don’t worry, guv.’ Mowbray offered a conciliatory hand of his own. ‘I know what you meant. How did we know he was suffering? Why was he wandering around like a lovestruck adolescent?’

‘Precisely. How did you know?’

Mowbray pulled out a packet of cigarettes and set them on the table. Kell looked at them and resented his own self-discipline.

‘Riedle spent a lot of time at the pool, reading off an iPad. Struck up a friendship with one of the boys down there. Egyptian kid, good-looking.’

‘Gay?’

Mowbray realized what he had said and shook his head vigorously, chasing off the inference.

‘No. Nothing like that. Married, wife and kid in Luxor. Early thirties. Laid out our sunbeds in the morning. Brought us drinks. Put up the umbrellas when the sun got too hot. You know the kind of thing.’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, I got talking to him and he said how Riedle was unhappy. He’d broken up with his boyfriend. They’d been seeing each other for over three years, had the latest in a long line of nasty rows. “Dmitri” had left the hotel, gone off with a new man.’

‘He told all that to a pool boy?’

Mowbray seemed to be aware that the interaction sounded far-fetched.

‘Bernhard struck me as the confessional sort. Needy, artistic, you know? Any sympathetic ear will do for a type like that. “I’m in pain, come and listen to me. I’ve built a new house, come and look at it. I’m miserable, make me feel better.” And we tell strangers our secrets, don’t we? He’s never going to see the pool boy again, never going to build him a house in Luxor. He was a convenient shoulder to cry on for a couple of miserable days in paradise.’

Kell felt a strange and disorienting sense of kinship with Riedle, the empathy of the broken-hearted man. He remembered his own dismay at Rachel’s treachery, then the long months of grieving that followed her death. He accepted the mint tea from the waitress, who smiled at Mowbray as she placed a glass on the table in front of him. Kell was surprised when Mowbray asked for the bill. What was the hurry?

‘You’ve told nobody about this?’ he asked.

‘Nobody, guv. Just you. I knew what it would mean to you, after everything that happened. Wanted to give you the opportunity.’

Kell found himself saying ‘Thank you’ in a way that caused Mowbray to produce a conspiratorial nod. A small burden of complicity had been established between them. Yet it was disconcerting to consider that choice of word: ‘opportunity’. An opportunity for what? Kell knew that nothing would ever erase the pain he had suffered over the loss of Rachel. Vengeance would not bring her back to life, nor alter the dynamics of his relationship with Amelia. Recruiting Minasian would bring Kell a modicum of respect from colleagues at SIS for whom he felt little but contempt. So why do it? Why not stand up, shake Mowbray’s hand, put fifty quid on the table to cover the bill and walk out of the restaurant? His better future lay outside SIS – he knew this, he had come to terms with it – and yet Kell felt powerless to suppress his hunger for revenge.

‘You know that I’m going to go after him, don’t you?’ he said.

‘I assumed that, yes,’ Mowbray replied.

The waitress brought the bill.

6

They had made it easy for Jim Martinelli.

Kyle Chapman had asked for his address in Peterborough. He had said that four separate UK passport application forms would arrive at his home within the next seven days. He told Martinelli that if he took the forms to work, processed them in the usual way in his capacity as an application examiner, and guaranteed that the passports would then be sent out to the individuals concerned, his debt of £30,000 would be cleared.

Chapman gave Martinelli a warning. He said that if he attempted to contact any law enforcement official in relation to the passports, or kept a record of any of the information contained in the application forms, he would be killed. Chapman told Martinelli that he was working on behalf of a ‘businessman in Tirana’ with connections to organized criminal groups in the UK who would ‘happily’ hunt him down and ‘enjoy listening to you begging for your life in some warehouse in Peterborough where the only thing that moves is a rat taking a shit and a fucked-off Albanian touching an electric cable to your testicles’. Chapman added that if, at any point, he or his client became aware that Martinelli was suffering from ‘stress’ or had taken sick leave, or was in any way considering a change of job within the next six months, he would suffer the same fate. It was a simple exchange. The passports for the debt. No behavioural problems at work. No midnight confessions to the Samaritans after ‘half a bottle of Smirnoff and a good cry’. If he delivered the passports, he would be free of his debt. Nobody would ever come near him again, nobody would ever finger him for abusing his position. Chapman and his associate in Albania were ‘men of their word who believed in loyalty and good professional conduct’.

Martinelli had agreed. He had felt that he had no choice. Five days later, the passport applications had arrived at his home. Two of them had the photographs of Caucasian males attached, the third a picture of a woman in her mid-twenties, possibly with roots in north-east Africa or the Arabian peninsular. The fourth showed a fit-looking male in his early twenties who was almost certainly of Indian or Pakistani heritage. His was the only name that Martinelli committed to memory, because he had felt – looking into the young man’s blank, pitiless eyes – that he was betraying not only himself by allowing such a man to possess a falsely obtained British passport, but also, potentially, the lives of many others.

The young man’s name was Shahid Khan.

7

As soon as he had shaken Mowbray’s hand outside the restaurant, Kell set to work.

He needed to discover more about Minasian, to find a way of running him to ground. He knew that the Russian would have left no trace of himself in Hurghada, save for a false passport and a few brisk, pixelated appearances on hotel CCTV. With that in mind, Kell instructed his old friend and ally, Elsa Cassani, a freelance computer specialist based in Rome, to try to find out the surname on which ‘Dmitri’ had been travelling in Egypt. To his surprise, her efforts failed. There was no record on the hotel computer of Bernhard Riedle’s companion; the room had been registered and billed solely in Riedle’s name. Kell assumed that if ‘Dmitri’ had presented a passport, the details had either been lost or transcribed by hand.

That meant going after Riedle. If Kell could befriend him and earn his trust, he could stripmine Riedle for information about Minasian’s habits, his character traits, his strengths and weaknesses. Such a psychological portrait would prove invaluable when the time came to try to recruit him. Above all, Riedle could provide Kell with a means of communicating with Minasian. Used correctly, the heartbroken lover could be the lure that would draw Kell’s quarry out into the open.

With Elsa having drawn a blank, Kell put his doubts about Mowbray to one side and hired him on £750 a day for ‘as long as it takes to get me face-to-face with Dmitri’. Such was Kell’s determination to pursue Minasian without involving Amelia Levene that he was prepared to spend much of the £200,000 fee SIS had deposited in his bank account following the Kleckner operation. It had always felt like blood money to Kell; to use it in pursuit of Rachel’s killer felt not only just, but liberating.

Mowbray was immediately successful. By Saturday he had located Riedle’s address in Brussels and ascertained that he was living in a block of luxury, serviced apartments in the Quartier Dansaert. Kell found the agents online and took out a three-week rental of his own on an apartment in the same building. He then travelled with Mowbray to Brussels on the Eurostar, taking two rooms at the Hotel Metropole. The next afternoon, less than five days after meeting Mowbray in Westbourne Grove, Kell had moved into the apartment.

8

Weekends were always the hardest. When he was busy with work, Bernhard Riedle could find distraction in a site visit, in a conversation with a structural engineer, even in lunch with his client. But when the meetings stopped, when the builders went home on a Friday evening and the office in Hamburg closed for business, Riedle was alone with his agony. He drank constantly, he sat on his own in the apartment, unable to read, to concentrate on watching the television, to do anything other than obsess about Dmitri.

He thought about him incessantly. Though there was no evidence for this, he was convinced that Dmitri had left his wife and that all of the promises he had made to Bernhard were now being made to a younger, more vital lover, a partner with whom he would build a meaningful future. He pictured them deep in conversation, laughing and sharing intimacies; devouring one another’s bodies. Everything physical between them was more satisfying for Dmitri, their intellectual life more stimulating and more meaningful than it had ever been with Bernhard. He could hear Dmitri betraying him in conversation, speaking contemptuously of his character. What they had shared over their three years together – the trips to Istanbul, to London and New York – had already become a subject of ridicule. The peculiar hardness in Dmitri’s personality, the chill ruthlessness Bernhard had fought so hard to ignore, was now all that remained of him. He felt discarded and forgotten. He felt weak and he felt old. He wanted, more than anything he had ever wanted in his life, to have the opportunity to confront Dmitri, to rail at him for his cruelty and selfishness, and then to restore their relationship to what it had once been. He felt that he could not live without Dmitri’s love. If he could not have it, he would kill himself. He was going mad.

Brussels was a prison. They had spent so much time in the city in recent months that every street corner held a memory of their relationship. Restaurants in which they had eaten, parks in which they had walked, cinemas where they had watched films, holding hands and touching in the darkness. The bed in which Bernhard slept was the bed in which he had made love to Dmitri, stroked his hair, read to him from the books they adored. It was only in bed that Dmitri had allowed himself to be vulnerable, to articulate his deepest fears and insecurities. On occasions he had encouraged Bernhard to beat him, to punish him – these had been the only times when Bernhard had felt that he had any semblance of control over their relationship. He had been intoxicated by the intimate depravity of their private selves. There had been nothing false between them in this bed. There had been no secrets. Now Bernhard could only sleep by taking a pill that would knock out the night, leaving him exhausted for work the following morning. In his first waking moments, he would be assaulted by images of Dmitri with his new lover. As a consequence, he walked the streets with a feeling of bottled hate – he had never known such humiliation, such a distilled sense of betrayal and loss. This was the wretched character of Bernhard Riedle’s life. He was at the mercy of a man who seemed utterly contemptuous of him. He was fifty-nine years old and knew – because he had no illusions about such things – that he would never again experience a love as intense and as fulfilling as that which he had experienced with Dmitri.

It was a Saturday night in June. Tourists in the Grande Place. Teenagers drinking cheap beer, couples with selfie sticks taking flash photographs in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Bernhard despised them, not least because he envied them their youth and apparent happiness. The square stank of horse manure and cheap melted chocolate and it was almost impossible to take more than a few steps without tripping over a small child. Bernhard felt less alone among the crowds, but wished that he had taken one of the smaller side streets through the old town instead of subjecting himself to the chaos of the square. He had eaten an early dinner in a poor and expensive Italian restaurant, leaving half of his food untouched, a bottle of Verdicchio emptied. Before dinner he had consumed two beers on an empty stomach and now felt the familiar symptoms of a depressive drunkenness. He was wary of encountering an associate from the building project, or even the client himself. It would take very little for Bernhard to break down; a small gesture of kindness, an expression of empathy, and he might even collapse in tears. He did not want to undermine his reputation nor be exposed for the lonely and broken fool that he had become.

He decided to return home, to take a sleeping pill, then to go to church in the morning. He had begun to pray last thing at night, pleading with God to ease his suffering, to show Dmitri the error of his ways. It was time to take his prayers to a place in which he might find some modicum of spiritual solace. He knew that Dmitri believed only in himself and in his own strength. He would doubtless hold Bernhard in even greater contempt for the naivety of his new-found devotion. So be it. He had to try to find some semblance of calm, a way to end the turbulence into which he had been thrown since Egypt.

Riedle walked towards his apartment block in the Quartier Dansaert, the crowds ebbing away as he reached Rue des Chartreux. The entrance to the building was set back from the street by a short, dimly lit passageway in which couples sometimes lurked for a furtive kiss, and where Bernhard’s neighbours tied up their bicycles and pushchairs. By the time he reached it, the bustle of the night had receded to an absolute stillness, the only noise in the neighbourhood the echo of Bernhard’s footsteps as he turned towards the door.

What happened next happened quickly.

There was a man of Somalian appearance standing in the passageway, most likely a drug addict. His jacket was torn, his shoes stained. Bernhard could smell the sharp acidic filth of his clothes and sweat.

‘Entschuldigen Sie mich,’ he said, instinctively speaking in German. The Somali was blocking his route to the door and took a step towards him.

‘Argent,’ he said, the French aggressive and guttural. ‘Portefeuille. Maintenant.’

As Bernhard processed the realization that he was being mugged, a second man walked into the passageway behind him, shutting off any hope of escape. This man was taller than the Somali and almost certainly of Eastern European descent. He loomed over Bernhard. There was a livid birthmark to the left of his nose.

‘Un moment, s’il vous plaît,’ he said, turning back to the Somali, desperately searching for his wallet. Bernhard reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a handful of loose change. Some of the money spilled on to the ground as he tried to pass it to the Somali.

‘Fucking money now,’ said the Eastern European.

‘Oui, oui. Yes, OK,’ Bernhard told him, spinning around. That was when he saw the knife, hidden within the folds of the man’s leather jacket. Bernhard let out a gasp, still desperately searching for his wallet. Had he been pickpocketed in the Grande Place? He was terrified of being cut. Of all things, at that moment he thought not of Dmitri – who would surely have been able to protect him from his assailants – but of ISIS, of kidnap, of heads sliced apart by machetes. He wondered if the men were terrorists.

‘Watch.’

The Eastern European had flicked at the antique Omega Constellation on Bernhard’s wrist, sending pain shooting along his forearm. He winced and cried out as the man hissed at him in French to remain silent.

‘Argent.’

Before Bernhard had a chance to remove the watch, the Somali had grabbed him by the right arm, almost knocking him to the ground. A car drove past but did not stop. Bernhard wanted to shout out but knew that they would run him through with the knife. He was pitiably afraid. He had never known such fear, even when attacked as a young man, for his habits, for his dress, for the sin of being gay. Those attacks had conferred upon him a certain nobility and he had at least experienced them with other men, in groups of two or three. On this occasion, however, he was quite alone. He could be killed for the watch, for the contents of his wallet, and the men would never be caught.

Then, a miracle. One of the tenants from the apartment block came into the passage from the street, jangling a set of keys, whistling a tuneless song. He was about forty-five, lean and reasonably fit. The man looked up, realized what was happening and acted with astonishing speed. In clear, confident French, he approached the men, stepping in front of Bernhard as he did so.

‘Mais qu’est-ce qu’il se passe? Dégage de là.’

Bernhard felt himself pushed against the wall as the Somali moved past him to confront the neighbour. The next thing Bernhard knew, the neighbour had disarmed the Eastern European, knocking his knife to the ground. It spun away to the far side of the passage as the Somali doubled over from a savage kick in his groin. Meanwhile, the Eastern European was nursing a cut on his arm. He cried out in pain and ran on to the street, leaving his friend behind. The neighbour – who was dressed in jeans and a dark sweater – dispatched a second, heavy blow to the Somali, this time to the side of his neck. He fell on to the cobbled tiles of the passageway, where blood had dripped on to the ground. The neighbour then grabbed Bernhard, put a key in the lock, and guided him inside the entrance of the apartment building before slamming the door behind them. All of this had taken less than twenty seconds.

‘Are you all right? Ça va?’ he asked, holding Bernhard’s forearms and fixing his eyes with a manic, adrenalized stare. As Bernhard registered that his saviour was British, he became dimly aware of the rapid kick and scrape of a man trying to kickstart a motorbike on the street.

‘Oui. Ça va. Yes,’ he replied, shaking his head in bewildered gratitude, thanking the Englishman as effusively as he could manage. So great was his relief that he felt he might be on the verge of laughter.

‘Did they attack you?’ the man asked. ‘Did they take anything?’

‘No,’ Bernhard replied. ‘You were extraordinary. I do not know what happened. Thank you.’

‘Stay here,’ said the neighbour and re-opened the door. He walked back along the passageway until he was standing outside on the street. The Somali had disappeared. The neighbour then took a tissue from his pocket, bent down and mopped up the blood that had spilled on the ground. At that moment, Bernhard heard the motorbike catch and roar, buzzing past the Englishman, who swore loudly – ‘Fuck you!’ – as the Eastern European made his escape.

‘Did you get the licence plate?’ Bernhard asked, when the man had come back into the foyer.

‘I’m afraid not,’ he replied.

‘Never mind. Probably it was a stolen bike.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Probably it was.’

9

The two men stood face to face in the lobby. One of them was in a state of advanced shock. The other was pleased that the plan he had so meticulously prepared had come off without a hitch.

Thomas Kell, the brave, resourceful English neighbour who had come to the aid of Bernhard Riedle, placed a comforting hand on the German’s back and felt the quick surge and drop of his chest as he struggled to control his breathing. Riedle put out a hand to steady himself against the wall of the lobby and looked across at Kell.

‘I cannot thank you enough,’ he said. ‘Without your help …’

‘Don’t mention it,’ Kell replied. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

Riedle had a kind, friendly face, solid and bespectacled. It was a face Kell warmed to immediately. Riedle took a moment to gather himself, then quite literally dusted himself down, running his hands along his sleeves and down his thighs as though trying to drive away all evidence of contact with his attackers.

‘You said you didn’t lose anything?’ Kell asked. ‘They didn’t take any of your money?’

‘You didn’t give them a chance,’ Riedle’s face broke into a relieved smile. ‘They took nothing.’

Kell introduced himself as ‘Peter’ and explained that he had been coming back from eating dinner at a local restaurant. Riedle – to Kell’s surprise – introduced himself as ‘Bernie’, a nickname that had not come up in any of the surveillance of his email traffic. Taking advantage of the German’s mood of heartfelt gratitude, Kell suggested that he accompany him to his apartment and sit with him until he had completely recovered from the shock of the attack. To Kell’s relief, Bernhard happily agreed to the idea, adding that he was mesmerized by the skill and professionalism with which his neighbour had disarmed and chased off his assailants.

‘Were you once a soldier?’ he asked as they walked side by side up the stairs.

‘Not as such,’ Kell replied. ‘In a former life I worked as a diplomat, often in some fairly hairy places. Kenya. Iraq. Afghanistan. I was taught a bit of self-defence, you know? Luckily I very rarely get a chance to use it.’

‘Well, I am extremely grateful to you.’ They had reached the door. Riedle took out a set of keys. He was several inches shorter than Kell, who could see a small summer insect trapped in the light white hairs on the crown of his head. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if you had not appeared,’ he said, turning the key and ushering his guest inside. Kell walked into the hall and heard the thunk and click of a sliding bolt as Riedle closed the door behind them. ‘He had a knife. You cut him.’

‘He cut himself.’ Kell noted the same off-the-peg watercolours, candlesticks and soft furnishings that adorned his own apartment, two floors above. Clearly the developers had bought dozens of the same items in a job lot, distributing them evenly throughout the building. The layout of the rooms was also identical. A kitchen off the hall, a bedroom and bathroom to the rear of the apartment. ‘But not seriously,’ he said. ‘The blade must have touched his wrist as I went to disarm him.’

Riedle listened intently, though Kell was spinning a further deceit. The man who had been holding the knife was a former Polish intelligence officer named Rafal Suda whom Kell had met many years earlier while working on an SIS operation in Gdansk. Rafal had snapped open a small vial of theatrical blood that had dripped, effectively enough, on to the cobbles. His accomplice, Xavier Baeyens, a retired Belgian Customs official, had acquired the motorbike on which Suda had made his escape. He had stripped the plates, fudged the insurance, and put enough petrol in the tank to get to Bruges.

‘Should I call the police?’ Riedle asked.

It was a question Kell had been expecting and one for which he had prepared a suitably tortured answer.

‘It’s difficult,’ he said. ‘The same thing happened to a friend of mine in London recently. Broad daylight, cameras everywhere, two witnesses to a mugging at knifepoint. She lost her bag, her wedding ring, a cellphone, about three hundred pounds in cash. The police did nothing. They tried, of course, but it was impossible to track down the men who had attacked her. She got lost in weeks of bureaucracy and eventually nothing came of it.’

Riedle was momentarily frustrated. He wanted justice. Kell could see it in his face.

‘But they looked like drug dealers and local criminals,’ he said. ‘There might be photographs on file at the … the …’ He struggled for the correct English term. ‘Commissariat? Precinct?’

‘Police station,’ said Kell.

‘Yes. We could identify them.’

The brave English neighbour managed to look suitably dismayed by this idea.

‘If you need to do that, Bernie, of course I’d be happy to help. But I’m very busy with work and, being one hundred per cent honest, slightly reluctant to get dragged into a court case. I live in London, I’d have to keep coming back and forth to Brussels. You seem unharmed. Nothing was stolen, so you have no need to file an insurance claim. But of course if you want to …’

Riedle nodded. He could hardly ask Peter to waste time speaking to the police, to assist in pressing charges or to travel regularly from London to Brussels to stand as a witness in any ensuing trial. It was just a street mugging, after all. He had lost nothing but his dignity. It would be best for Riedle to comply with the wishes of the man who had so uncomplainingly come to his rescue.

‘Of course, of course,’ he said, turning towards the kitchen. He gestured at Kell to sit down. ‘Better to have a drink and forget all about it. These scum will never be found.’

As Kell muttered ‘Yes’, the mobile phone in his jacket buzzed with an incoming text. He assumed it was Harold, sitting upstairs in the rented apartment on the fourth floor, doubtless helping himself to a large tumbler of Kell’s single malt. Mowbray had been waiting in the lobby as Kell approached the passageway on Rue des Chartreux, ready to intercept any neighbour who threatened to leave the building while the mugging was taking place.

Kell checked the phone. It was a text from Rafal. He had met up with Xavier. They had abandoned the motorbike. Kell gave them the all-clear and thanked them for a job well done. Suda was due to return to Poland the next day, Xavier to take a ten-day holiday in Accra. Kell was putting the phone back in his pocket when Riedle appeared from the kitchen.

‘Can I make you a drink?’

Kell asked for whisky. His commitment to remaining on the wagon had lasted only until his first night in Brussels, when he had succumbed to the temptation of a glass of Talisker. He was not yet back on the cigarettes, but reckoned the Minasian operation would have him on twenty a day before the end of the month. As a precaution, he had bought a packet of Winston Lights and stowed them, still sealed, in the drawer beside his bed.

‘Ice?’ Riedle asked.

‘No, thank you. Just a splash of water to open it up.’

Riedle disappeared and returned with the drink. Kell sat down in a suede-covered armchair identical to the one upstairs in which he had read Rafal and Xavier’s surveillance reports on Riedle’s movements around Brussels. The staged mugging had been planned for the night before, only to be called off at the last moment when a taxi had pulled up on the opposite side of the street, just as Xavier was taking up position.

‘I like this expression,’ said Riedle, passing Kell the whisky. Kell thanked him with a brisk nod. ‘To “open it up”. The water does this with the flavour, yes? I do not drink whisky.’

Riedle himself was holding a long-stemmed glass of red wine and appeared to be slightly unsteady on his feet. Xavier had been tailing him all evening and had reported the consumption of two beers in the old town before eight o’clock, then an entire bottle of white wine at an Italian restaurant in the Rue de la Montagne. Shock usually took the edge off drunkenness, but Riedle had been saved from the lions and might easily be slipping into a state of euphoria.

‘Cheers.’

Kell lifted the whisky – blended, to judge by the smell – and the two men touched glasses.

It had begun.

10

They were smiling as they handed the envelope to Azhar Ahmed Iqbal. There were three of them. The oldest of the men, whom Azhar had never seen before, said that it was a genuine British passport that had come by diplomatic bag from Amman. An official in the UK Passport Office had been compromised by brave and resourceful agents of ISIS and had produced the passport in return for a sum of money.

Azhar opened the envelope. The passport was hard and cold to the touch. It was clean and new and would not easily bend in his hands. They were still smiling at him as they watched him look at it and flick through the pages.

Three months earlier, Azhar had been taken into a room in Raqqa and had sat on a stool beside a blank white wall. Someone had taken his photograph. One of the men, a fighter from Tunisia who had worked as a barber, had shaved off Azhar’s beard and cut his hair so that he would look good in front of the camera. Azhar saw that this photograph had now been laminated inside the passport. He looked successful and educated. He looked like a businessman. It was exactly what they wanted.

‘You like the way you look?’ Jalal asked with a sly grin.

‘Yeah. I like it,’ Azhar replied.

‘But now you are not Azhar Ahmed Iqbal from Leeds, no? You are no longer Omar Assya. Who are you, my friend?’

Azhar looked down at the name printed beneath the photograph. He had been using the kunya ‘Omar Assya’ for at least three years as a way of obscuring his identity from the West Yorkshire Police. He had grown used to it.

‘Shahid Khan.’ Azhar did not mind the name. They had made him a year older. But then he saw his place of birth. ‘From Bradford?’ he said. ‘Why did you say I was from fookin’ Bradford?’

All the men laughed. When they had calmed down, when Azhar had finished talking about the rivalry between Leeds and Bradford, and when he had started to get used to being called ‘Shahid’, Jalal told him that he had to protect the passport at all costs. He should also carry it around with him so that it became slightly worn and looked less new. Before returning to the United Kingdom, Shahid was to fly to Dubai and then to Cairo so that the passport would show arrival and departure stamps from the UAE and Egypt. This would help to dispel any suspicion if a member of the UK Border Police at Heathrow looked more closely at the passport and decided to question Shahid about his movements. Should this happen, Shahid was to say that he had been attending his cousin’s wedding in Dubai and had returned home via Cairo so that he could visit the Pyramids. If he was subjected to more intense scrutiny – if, for example, he was taken into an interview room by an officer of the British MI5 – Shahid was to rely on the biographical details of his real life. So: Shahid Khan went to the same school as Azhar Ahmed Iqbal; he had the same cousins, the same brothers and sisters, as Azhar Ahmed Iqbal. That way he could tell his favourite family stories and make his background sound more realistic. The trick was to stay as close to the truth as possible. It was when you started to lie that you ran into trouble.

‘What about my job?’ Azhar asked. ‘What do I do for work?’

Jalal said that this was a good question which proved that they had chosen the right soldier for the operation in England. He told ‘Shahid’ that he was to say he was unemployed and about to move to London to look for work. He was to say that he had spent the last of his savings on the trips to Dubai and Cairo. Jalal would see to it that a Facebook page and mobile phone account were set up in Shahid Khan’s name. He would have other profiles on the Internet that would fool the British MI5. Jalal told Shahid that he had time in which to adapt to his new identity and to ask more questions like the one he had just been clever enough to ask. Jalal insisted that it was ‘extremely unlikely’ that Shahid would be questioned by the British. Thousands of young Muslim men passed through Heathrow Airport every day. They would make sure that his flight arrived at the busiest time of day. Shahid would be well dressed – they would provide good clothes for him – and he would look educated and respectable. It was the will of Allah that Shahid Khan be allowed to pass into his former country.

Shahid had absolute faith in Jalal’s judgment. It was Jalal who had taught him about the beauty of the Caliphate. Shahid embraced him. He embraced the other men. They told him that he was brave and would soon be spoken of as a hero who had avenged the Prophet. Shahid believed them. It was all that he wanted. To be a hero in their eyes, in the eyes of the true believers, and to do God’s will.

11

Kell and Riedle talked until two o’clock in the morning.

Kell had sensed immediately that it would take at least two or three such encounters before Riedle would begin to open up about ‘Dmitri’. It was obvious from a certain detachment in his conversation that the German wanted to present himself in a good light, particularly in the aftermath of the mugging, which had plainly unsettled him. He was a proud man. A successful man. Kell knew from Elsa’s research that Riedle was responsible for a large team of architects in Hamburg and had been a partner at his firm for more than ten years. He listened closely as Riedle explained the work he was doing in Brussels, occasionally adding stories of his own about his phantom career as a diplomat in the Foreign Office. Riedle, who spoke faultless English as a result of spending seven years working in London, was evidently highly regarded within architectural circles, but tended to keep himself to himself. He valued his privacy and had few close friends. With the exception of his three-year relationship with the married Minasian, Riedle’s lifestyle appeared to be morally unimpeachable: Elsa and Mowbray had not flagged up any predilection for rent boys or problems with drugs and gambling. His interests stretched from English and American literature to Chinese contemporary art to the street food of Mexico and the music of Brazil. He was educated, thoughtful and unfailingly polite. Kell liked him.

At no point in the evening did Riedle mention his sexuality. Kell hinted that his own marriage had broken down several years earlier, but quickly moved the subject on when he sensed that Riedle was uneasy. Don’t rush him, he told himself, moving through the rusty gears of a hundred yesteryear recruitments. Let the relationship flourish in its own good time. If Riedle thinks that you are discreet, that you are astute and wise, that you are, above all, sympathetic to his cause, he will become your agent. Allow him to warm to you, to trust you, finally to confide in you; Kell’s influence would be the drop of water that causes the whisky to open up.

And so it came to pass. The two neighbours made a plan to meet for dinner two nights later at Forgeron, a fashionable brasserie in a district of Brussels frequented by Belgian hipsters and optimistic couples on second dates. Riedle appeared at half past seven wearing a lively grey tweed suit, brown brogues and a pale pink shirt, offset by a cream tie spotted with large blue polka dots. He was sporting a new, thicker pair of glasses that were almost identical to those worn by every architect Kell had ever encountered. He was tempted to make a joke about typecasting but instead complimented Riedle on the choice of venue.

‘Yes. It’s wonderful here,’ he said, reminding Kell of a music-hall impresario as he gazed around the room. ‘I have reserved a table on the balcony.’

Kell looked up. The ‘balcony’ was a narrow raised metal walkway on the first floor, no more than five feet wide, set with tables for two. Riedle confirmed their reservation with the maître d’ and the two men were led upstairs by a waitress who shot Kell an exaggeratedly friendly look, judging him to be Riedle’s boyfriend and wanting to appear supportive. There was a low roof above the balcony and an overweight man occupying the first of three tables. The man’s chair was jutting out so that Kell was obliged to perform an elaborate ducking manoeuvre in order to pass him. The waitress had selected the furthest table on the walkway and took their orders for drinks. Kell was pleased when he heard Riedle asking for a kir. The sooner there was alcohol inside him, the better.

There were pleasantries and exchanges of small talk while they studied their menus and drank their aperitifs. Riedle, who had his back to the other diners, raised a toast to Kell and insisted that he was going to pay for the meal ‘as a thank you for saving me’. During their conversation at the apartment, Kell had explained that he was working on an investment project in Brussels, a suitably vapid job description which he hoped would discourage any further interest. Nevertheless, Riedle asked if his meetings were going well and Kell was able to say that it was ‘early days’ and that ‘a number of parties still needed to be sounded out’ before the ‘proper financing’ could be guaranteed. Riedle’s own account of a difficult meeting with a services consultant that afternoon took them halfway through their first course, by which time they were drinking a bottle of Chablis. Kell had ordered smoked salmon blinis, Riedle a vichyssoise.

‘How is your food?’ Riedle asked.

‘Not identifiably Russian,’ Kell replied, and was glad to see a momentary discomfort flicker in his companion’s eyes. He had chosen the dish as a private joke, but now realized that it might lead him towards Minasian. ‘How’s your soup?’

‘Fine.’

Taking advantage of a slight pause, Kell inched towards Dmitri.

‘The blinis are fine, but I’ve broken a personal promise. Just as one should never eat bouillabaisse outside Marseilles, I believe you should never order these’ – he indicated his plate – ‘outside Moscow.’

‘You have been to Russia?’ Riedle asked. Kell could feel him lifting from the bottom of the river, circling upwards through the dark waters, rising slowly to the bait.

‘Many times,’ he replied. ‘The caviar is not as good as it once was – and it’s certainly more expensive nowadays – but I still go there for business.’

‘You were a diplomat there?’

‘No. Briefly in Armenia in the mid-nineties when I filled in for somebody on sick leave, but never Moscow.’ Kell had to be careful not to push too hard. ‘Minasian’ was an Armenian surname. Though it was almost certainly the case that Dmitri had presented himself to Riedle as a Russian citizen, he might occasionally have spoken nostalgically of his forebears in the Caucasus. The best cover is the simplest cover, one which draws on truthful elements in the spy’s background. ‘Have you been yourself?’ he asked, sipping his Chablis without an apparent care in the world. ‘Moscow? St Petersburg?’

‘I do not trust Russians,’ Riedle replied, with an almost petulant finality. ‘I have personal reasons. I despise their politics, their leadership.’

‘It’s certainly a worry …’

‘I sometimes think that the Russian character is the end of kindness, you know? The end of everything that is nice and good in this world.’

Kell was not a fisherman, but knew the angler’s rapturous delight in feeling that first bite on the lure. The sudden tug, the ripple on the surface of the water, the line running out as the fish ran free.

‘I’m not sure I understand you,’ he said, though he understood all too well.

‘As I say, personal reasons.’ Riedle finished his soup and set the spoon down gently. ‘I have to be careful what I say. I don’t want to come across as racist or as a bigot …’

‘You are among friends, Bernie. You can say what you like. I’m not here to judge you.’

That was all it took. Riedle pulled the sleeve of his jacket, squeezed a ruby cufflink and was away.

‘When I think of the Russian temperament, I think of sin,’ he said, looking at Kell as though he was both morally ashamed and politically disappointed by what he was about to say. ‘I think of money and the greed for riches. A state apparatus that robs its own people, politicians filling their pockets at the expense of the men and women they are elected to represent. I think of violence. Journalists silenced, opposition politicians murdered for the exercise of free speech. Corruption and death always going hand in hand.’ He took a sip of water, like a pianist composing himself before embarking on the final movement of a concerto. ‘When I think of Russia I think of deceit. Husbands deceiving wives. Young women seducing older men because they crave nothing but money and status. Deceit in business, of course. Do you follow me? The Slavic temperament is human nature at its most base. There is no kindness in Russia. Everything is so raw and brutal. They are like animals.’

It was an astonishing diatribe, and one to which Kell responded with the obvious question.

‘You said you had personal reasons for feeling this way?’

A waiter had inched along the balcony and begun to clear away their plates of food. Kell hoped that the interruption would not cause Riedle to soften his prejudice or, worse, change the subject.

‘I don’t wish to bore you with those,’ he said, ordering a bottle of Chianti. ‘I can’t only talk about myself this evening, Peter.’

‘No. Do.’ Kell sensed that talking about himself was exactly what Bernard Riedle wanted to do. ‘I’d be interested to hear your reasons. I sometimes find myself thinking the same way about Russia, particularly when it comes to murdered dissidents.’

Riedle took his eyes away from Kell and past him towards the large street window. He appeared to be lost in thought. It was like watching a man in a dealership trying to decide whether or not to buy an expensive car.

‘I had a relationship with a Russian,’ he said finally, the bustle and noise of the restaurant rendering his voice almost inaudible. ‘A man,’ he added. Riedle examined Kell’s reaction with sudden intensity. ‘Does this make you uncomfortable?’

Kell wondered if there had been something in his facial response to indicate disapproval, because he knew that Riedle was searching for any evidence of homophobia.

‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘Does the man live in Hamburg?’

Riedle shook his head.

‘You were together a long time?’

‘Three years.’

‘When did you break up?’

Riedle swallowed a long, glass-emptying mouthful of Chablis.

‘Last month,’ he replied, and looked over the railing that ran along the length of the walkway, down towards the entrance of the restaurant. Kell could see a chef standing over a bed of crushed ice, shucking oysters. ‘I was in Egypt,’ he said, again bringing his eyes back to the table. ‘A holiday. Things had not been good for a long time. He decided finally to end things.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ Kell had a memory of Claire blithely informing him that she was in a new relationship, less than a month after their separation. ‘Nothing worse than a break-up,’ he said. ‘How are you coping?’

Riedle seemed both surprised and comforted by the question. ‘Not well,’ he said. ‘To be honest, Peter, I am suffering.’

Kell leaned towards him, doing his job. ‘I’ve been there,’ he said. ‘You don’t sleep. You can’t eat. You’re angry, you feel lost. It doesn’t get any easier with age. If anything, these things become worse.’

‘Yes,’ Riedle replied. ‘You felt this with your wife when your marriage ended?’

Kell hesitated for a moment, because he hated drawing Claire into operational conversation. It was tawdry and disloyal to use her for the purposes of deception; there had to be something in his life that remained sacred. Everything else, for years and years, had been infected by spying.

‘My marriage was different,’ he said. ‘My wife and I met when we were very young. We grew apart. We became different people as the years went by.’ Kell might have added that there had been times when he had blamed Claire for the entire squeezed and cut-down shape of his life; that he had been liberated by their separation. Or he might have said that there were still moments, when they met for lunch or saw one another at a social occasion, when he felt an almost gravitational pull towards her, a longing to be reintegrated into their former life. Instead, he said something comparatively bland, but undeniably true: ‘I think she found the demands of my job very difficult. There was also an added, very painful complication in that we were never able to have children.’

The waiter brought their main courses and the bottle of Chianti. It was then that Riedle mentioned Minasian for the first time.

‘I’m embarrassed to admit that Dmitri – my lover, my boyfriend – was married.’

Kell allowed himself to process the revelation, seemingly for the first time, before responding.

‘These things happen,’ he said. ‘Adultery is commonplace. Men find themselves conflicted. Particularly in Russia, I imagine, where the attitude to a person’s sexuality is so toxic. Embarrassment is pointless, Bernie. Shame is what we feel when we are worried about what other people are thinking about us.’

‘This is a very liberal view.’ Riedle smiled with avuncular disapproval, touching one of the polka dots on his expensive cream tie. The light caught in his designer spectacles and flashed off a lens. ‘Dmitri was tormented by his deceit. Or, at least, he pretended to be.’

It was a first meaningful glimpse into the Minasian personality. Kell said: ‘What do you mean, “pretended”?’ as he scribbled notes in his mind.

Riedle lifted his knife and fork and carved into the fatty edge of a lamb cutlet. ‘Perhaps I am being unfair,’ he said. ‘His wife has been ill for many years. Some kind of muscular difficulty which leaves her in great pain.’

Kell suspected that this was a lie. There was nothing in the files about Svetlana Minasian suffering from a debilitating illness, muscular or otherwise.

‘That’s awful,’ Kell said, a judgment that caused Riedle to wince. He wanted no expressions of sympathy for the woman; she had simply been an obstacle blocking his access to Dmitri.

‘It is and it is not,’ he replied. ‘She prevents him from living the life he wants to live. From being the man he wants to be. She is also highly critical of him, closed off in her thinking. Spoiled and judgmental.’

Kell wondered how much of this was true. He suspected that Minasian had constructed flaws in Svetlana’s character that would both console Riedle and justify his emotional distance from the marriage.

‘And children? Do they have any?’

Riedle shook his head. ‘No.’ There was a strange kind of satisfaction in his reply; it suggested the complete absence of a sexual relationship between Minasian and his wife. ‘I think Dmitri was very sophisticated, very clever when it came to presenting himself to me in a certain way,’ Riedle said, with a perceptiveness that took Kell by surprise. ‘He knew what I wanted and he knew how to give it. He also knew how to take it away.’

‘Take what away? You mean his love for you?’

Like a breeze coming through an open window, Kell remembered the enveloping intimacy he had known with Rachel, the deepest and most fulfilling love he had ever felt for a woman; a love ripped away in a few short days by the realization that she had been lying to him. He thought of Amelia’s cunning and of his own role in deceiving Riedle. Minasian was the common denominator. ‘Dmitri’ controlled them all.

‘I mean that there is something sadistic about him. Something deeply manipulative and cruel. That is the conclusion I have come to, not just because of the way he has disregarded me since our relationship ended, but also because I can now look back on his behaviour when we were together in a different way.’

‘In what way?’

‘He was often selfish and bullying. He knew that I was not as strong as he was. He knew that I was profoundly in love with him. But rather than take responsibility for this, to be careful with my feelings, he used it as a tool, a weapon against me.’ For some time, Riedle chewed his food, saying nothing. Kell also remained silent, waiting. ‘A person should have a duty of care for someone they profess to love, no?’ Riedle’s expression suggested that his question could brook no argument. ‘I think Dmitri was obsessed by ideas of power. This is the only way I can understand things, looking back. Have you read Nineteen Eighty-Four?’

‘Not for a long time.’

‘It is one of Dmitri’s favourite novels.’ Kell silently absorbed the irony of this revelation, but said nothing. ‘There is an exchange, towards the end of the book, when Winston Smith is being tortured. A discussion about power. Winston is asked how a man exerts power over another man. Do you remember his answer?’

‘By making him suffer?’ Kell suggested.

‘Precisely!’

Riedle beamed at Kell with astonished admiration, as if he had at last met a person who could not only understand his plight, but explain Dmitri’s behaviour into the bargain. Kell smiled. He was trying to link together what Riedle was saying. Much of it was startling, yet a jilted lover, an angry and heartbroken boyfriend, will think and say anything that might make sense of tangled emotions. Kell needed to be able to separate Riedle’s prejudices from the hard, observable facts about Minasian’s behaviour. Kell reminded himself that he had only two objectives: to build a detailed psychological profile of Minasian, and to use Riedle to lure him out of the shadows. Everything else was tangential.

‘It sounds to me as though it’s a good thing that you’re no longer with this man. If what you’re saying is true, he didn’t make you very happy. It sounds like a form of torture.’

‘It is true. Believe me. But isn’t it also the case that the things in life which give us the most pleasure also cause us the most pain?’

‘I’ll drink to that.’

Kell lifted his glass but had misjudged the moment. Riedle was uncomfortable and quickly returned to his recollections.

‘Dmitri was everything to me. I thought of us as a perfect match, despite the gap in age between us.’

‘How old was he?’ Kell asked.

‘Thirty-four when we met. He is almost thirty-eight now. I have just become fifty-nine.’ Riedle appeared briefly to slip into a private memory. Kell knew that Minasian had lied to Riedle about his age; according to his file at SIS, he was almost forty-one. ‘We laughed together,’ Riedle said. ‘I could tell him everything and he could solve my problems. He was capable of immense kindness, of great insights. We shared a love of the same literature, the same interests. The truth is that he fascinated me in every element of his personality.’

‘But he knew this and he took advantage of it.’

‘Yes!’ Riedle’s response was quick, almost convulsive. Kell noticed the table behind him coming to a sudden halt in conversation. ‘Yes, he took advantage of that.’ Riedle cut off another chunk of lamb. He spoke as he chewed. It was the first time the German’s impeccable table manners had faltered. ‘What is most painful is the loss of this side of his personality. The side that could make me happy. It is not easy at my age to meet a man, particularly one who possessed this ability to bring such contentment to me.’ Kell thought of Rachel, her ghost eavesdropping on their conversation, and concluded – not for the first time – that human beings were fools to expect other people to shore them up. He was about to repeat his earlier assertion that Riedle was well shot of the relationship when something happened that stripped him of his composure. Looking down towards the entrance, he saw a beautiful woman in her early twenties walking into the restaurant in the company of a man who was at least twice her age. The man was wearing a black suit and his hair was slicked back with gel. A large birthmark was visible to the left of his nose.

It was Rafal Suda.

Kell fixed his eyes back on Riedle and smiled a crocodile smile. If the German looked down, he would see Suda. It was that simple. The man who had mugged him only two nights earlier was standing less than eight feet away, making audible small talk with the maître d’. If Riedle recognized him, there would be a confrontation. There would be police involvement and Kell would be obliged to act as a witness. The operation would be over before it had begun. Any hope of locating Minasian by using Riedle as a lure would evaporate.

In an effort to keep the conversation flowing, Kell repeated his assertion that Riedle was lucky to be free of Dmitri, a man who had exerted such a baleful influence over his private life. He spoke for as long as it took for Suda and his date to be led towards the interior of the restaurant. When they were beyond Riedle’s line of sight, Kell encouraged the German to respond. As he listened to his reply, Kell could see Suda, out of the corner of his eye, being led to the first table on the parallel balcony. He was no further away than the length of a London bus. It was a slice of wretched luck. Forgeron had seating for up to a hundred customers in the main section towards the back of the restaurant, but Suda had been seated in one of the few places from which he could still be seen by Riedle.

The German was talking. Kell was trying to absorb what he was saying about Minasian while simultaneously formulating a plan for getting Suda out of the restaurant. A warning text message would do it, but Suda would almost certainly have abandoned the mobile he had used on the Riedle operation. Kell had no other number, only an email address. What were the chances of a middle-aged Polish spook checking his inbox while a statuesque blonde was gazing adoringly into his eyes over a platter of oysters? Slim, at best. No, he had to think of an alternative approach – and all the while keep Riedle talking.

‘What were Dmitri’s politics?’ he asked. Kell looked down at Riedle’s plate. The German had almost finished his lamb cutlets. That was the next problem. With a kir and several glasses of wine inside him, a man of Riedle’s age might need to go to the bathroom in the break between courses. Should he do so, he would need to turn around and to inch along the balcony, all the while looking out over the restaurant, directly towards Suda’s table.

‘He rarely spoke about politics,’ he said. ‘I asked him, of course, and we had arguments about what was going on in Ukraine.’

‘What kind of arguments?’

‘Oh, the usual ones.’ Riedle speared a stem of purple-sprouting broccoli, no more than two or three mouthfuls left before he would finish. ‘That Crimea should be restored to Russia, that it was given to Kiev without permission by Khrushchev …’

‘I would agree with that,’ Kell replied.

‘But I saw the separatist aggression in the east as a senseless waste of lives, innocent people dying for the cause of meaningless nationalism.’

‘I would also agree with that,’ Kell concurred, desperately scrabbling for ideas. He felt like a public speaker with ten more minutes to fill and not an idea in his head. ‘And what we’ve been seeing in Russia is the extraordinary success of the Kremlin propaganda machine. There are educated, liberal intellectuals in Moscow who believe that Ukrainian soldiers have crucified Russian children, that any opposition to Russian influence in the region has been orchestrated by the CIA …’

The use of ‘we’ was a hangover from Office days, the party line at SIS. Kell had made a mistake. Riedle, thankfully, appeared not to have noticed. Instead he nodded approvingly at what Kell had said and then – Kell felt the dread again – turned in his seat and looked down towards the entrance, distracted by a movement or sound that Kell had not detected.

‘But otherwise he wasn’t a political animal?’ Kell asked, trying to bring Riedle’s eyes back to the table. It had been a mistake to ask about politics. Riedle was a sensualist, an emotional man in the grip of heartbreak. He didn’t want to be talking about civil wars. He wanted to be talking about his feelings.

‘No, he was not. He had studied political philosophy at Moscow University.’

A waiter brought a bottle of champagne to Suda’s table. When the cork popped, Riedle might turn around. All of Kell’s energy was directed at preventing that from taking place. He needed to hold Riedle in a sort of trance of conversation, to make it impossible for him to look away.

‘What was his job?’ Kell asked. He removed his jacket in the gathering heat.

‘Like you,’ Riedle replied. ‘Private investment. Raising financing for different projects around Europe.’

A classic SVR cover.

‘Which allowed him to travel extensively? To spend time with you?’

The woman was giggling, Suda raising a loud toast.

‘Precisely.’ Something had caused Riedle to smile. ‘It’s funny. I always felt like the sophisticated one. The older Western European intellectual teaching the boy from Russia. This was false, of course. Dmitri was much cleverer, much better educated than I am. But he was often very quiet. I used to think of it as shyness. Now I think of it as a lack of something.’

‘He sounds like somebody with very little generosity of spirit.’

‘Yes!’ Riedle almost thumped the table in enthusiastic endorsement of Kell’s insight. ‘That is exactly what he was like.’

‘Generosity of spirit is so rare,’ Kell said, continuing to improvise conversation. Could he send a note via a member of staff? Not a chance. Nor could he leave Riedle alone at the table; the German might use the time to start gazing around the restaurant. ‘If a person is essentially self-interested,’ Kell said, moving a floret of cauliflower in slow circles around his plate, ‘if their only goal is the satisfaction of their own vanity, their own appetites, even at the expense of friends or loved ones, that can be enormously distressing for the person left behind.’

‘You understand a great deal, Peter,’ Riedle replied, lifting a final mouthful of lamb towards his gaping mouth. Kell watched the rising fork as he might have watched a clock ticking down to zero hour. He was convinced that Riedle was going to leave the table as soon as he had finished eating. ‘Tell me about your own experience,’ Riedle asked. ‘Tell me how you coped with the end of your marriage.’

If it would guarantee the German’s undivided attention for the next hour, Kell would happily now have told him the most intimate and scandalous details of his relationship with Claire. Besides, wasn’t it one of the golden rules of recruitment? Share your vulnerabilities. Confide in a prospective agent. Tell him whatever he needs to hear in order to establish complicity. But before he had a chance to answer, Riedle added a coda.

‘First, however, will you excuse me?’ He was dabbing his mouth with his napkin and preparing to stand up. ‘I must go to the bathroom.’

At that same moment, Kell looked across the room and saw Rafal Suda in the midst of precisely the same ritual. The dabbed napkin. The soundless request to his companion. It was as though the two men had made a secret plan to meet. Rising to his feet, Suda laughed as his date cracked a toothy joke. If Riedle left now, he would bump into Suda within thirty seconds.

‘Would you mind if I went first?’ Kell asked and did something that he had never done in all his life as an intelligence officer. He clutched at his waist and pretended to be hit by a searing pain in his stomach.

‘But of course,’ Riedle replied, settling back into his seat. ‘Are you all right, Peter?’

Kell struggled to his feet, wincing in apparent agony. ‘Fine,’ he gasped, ‘Fine’, and ducked to avoid a low-hanging lamp. ‘Happens from time to time. Just give me five minutes will you, Bernie? I’ll be right back.’

12

Kell was only a few feet behind Suda as he walked into the bathroom. A man in a dark grey suit came out at the same time and held the door for him as they passed.

‘Merci,’ Kell said, going inside.

Suda was standing at a urinal, staring down into the bowl. He was alone in the room. There were two cubicles beyond him, both of which Kell checked for occupants before lighting the blue touchpaper.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

Suda looked back, urinating, and swore in Polish.

‘Tom.’

‘I’m eating dinner ten feet away from your fucking table with Bernhard fucking Riedle. Why are you still in Brussels?’

The shock oozed into Suda’s face as he began to reply, his blue-black birthmark creased with fatigue. Still urinating, he was unable fully to turn around. Kell was riding the adrenaline of the previous fifteen minutes and did not hold back.

‘You realize if he sees you, I’m fucked? You realize if he so much as turns around and looks at your underage, I-still-haven’t-graduated-from-high-school girlfriend and recognizes the man sitting opposite her, that my operation – for which you were extraordinarily well paid and which has cost me outside of ten thousand pounds and almost two weeks of planning – will not only be over, but will involve you being arrested in front of a room full of people carrying iPhones – iPhones with cameras and zoom lenses and microphones – and me standing right beside Riedle as he asks me to positively identify the street criminal who tried to mug him two nights ago?’

Suda was zipping up his trousers and trying to interrupt, but Kell wasn’t done.

‘I’m not interested what excuse you have, why you felt that you had to stay in Brussels with your newly adolescent, fake eyelash, breast-enhanced babysitter, rather than go home to your wife and children in Warsaw as you promised me you would do when I hired you, but here’s what’s going to happen, Rafal. There’s a kitchen outside. You go into it. You walk very quickly and very confidently to the back of that kitchen and you leave by any exit possible. You leave the way the staff leave. If anybody tries to stop you, pay them. Do you have money?’

Suda nodded. It was like scolding a schoolboy who had been caught cheating in an exam.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I will tell a waiter that I saw you leaving, that you had to go out the back because your wife had walked into the restaurant and that you gave me money. I will pay your bill. The waiter will then explain to Kim Kardashian that you’re waiting for her outside. Maybe she’ll finish her oysters. Maybe she won’t. You can call her. Do what you want. But if you don’t get out of here and get permanently out of Riedle’s sight, I will personally see to it that no intelligence agency, no corporate espionage outfit, no police department, no bank or multinational will ever give you any business again. You won’t teach. You won’t drive cabs. You won’t change a fucking lightbulb in this shitty Belgian bathroom. All you will do is get out of this restaurant. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred pounds. Leave.’

13

Suda did as he was told.

Kell watched him walk briskly through the swing doors of the kitchen and waited outside to make sure that he did not double back. He then took the maître d’ to one side, explained that he had met a man in the bathroom who was at risk of being compromised by his wife while dining with his mistress, paid Suda’s bill in cash, tipped the maître d’ a further twenty euros to break the news gently and discreetly to the girlfriend, then made his way back to Riedle.

Several minutes had passed since Kell had left the table, but the German was relaxed and companionable, fussing and fretting over Kell’s condition. Have you had these incidents before? Do you require a doctor? Perhaps it was something in your food? Kell brushed aside his concerns, realizing – as their conversation continued – that Minasian would almost certainly have taken advantage of Riedle’s innate decency; there was a neediness about him, a desire to win affection through acts of kindness and generosity, which to a sadist like Minasian would have been like the scent of blood to a shark.

‘I was thinking, while you were away, that I feel rather ashamed.’

‘Ashamed, Bernie? Why?’

Kell wondered why Riedle hadn’t yet taken the opportunity to go to the bathroom. His napkin was still balled on the table.

‘It is embarrassing for a man of my age, a man almost sixty, to be at the mercy of an infatuation, don’t you think? To be so broken-hearted. So weak. I feel like a fool.’

‘Don’t,’ Kell replied firmly, and tried to comfort Riedle with a gentle smile. ‘I think it shows that you are alive. That you haven’t given up on people, become stale or jaded.’ Riedle asked him to translate the word ‘jaded’ and Kell offered ‘tired’ as a lazy synonym. ‘We all have a need for company. Most of us, anyway. What you are going through speaks to our deep need to feel connected, to share our lives with somebody who understands us, who makes us feel cherished. We want to feel free to be who we are. We want somebody who will help to open up the best side of ourselves.’

Rachel flooded Kell’s memory, her poise and her laughter, the way in which she had so quickly intuited so much about him. He felt the loss of her as a pain every bit as searing as that which he had faked only ten minutes earlier, clutching his stomach for Riedle’s benefit.

‘To care for somebody and to be cared for,’ Kell continued, now thinking of Claire and of everything that had gone missing between them. ‘To be excited about seeing them, hearing what they have to say, talking to them. Isn’t that what it’s all about? You obviously had that with Dmitri, when things were good between you. A person can be fifty-nine or nineteen and experience those things. There’s no shame in mourning them when they have been taken away from you.’

‘Then I thank you for your understanding,’ Riedle sighed with a gesture of collapsing gratitude, and finally stood up to go to the bathroom.

As he inched along the walkway, Kell looked across to the opposite balcony, where the maître d’ was only now informing Suda’s companion that her date had left for the evening via the back door. She took the news with laudable restraint, checking her face in a compact mirror before standing up, adjusting her hair and walking downstairs. As she tottered to the ground floor on four-inch heels, she took a smartphone from her purse and checked the screen for messages. At the same moment, Kell felt his own phone pulse in his trouser pocket.

It was a text from Suda.

I will tell Stephanie that it was a Polish police matter, not anything to do with my wife.

Tell her what you like, Kell muttered as a second text came in.

I will take her to Hotel Metropole. I apologize, Tom. My plane leaves for Warsaw at 8 tomorrow. In the morning.

Kell deleted the messages without replying and watched Stephanie collect her coat at the entrance. She must have felt his gaze because she looked up and stared at Kell, an almost imperceptible tremor of longing in her eyes. A beautiful young woman aware of her power over men, and testing it all the time. Kell thought of her in Rafal’s arms in a bed at the Hotel Metropole. Then he thought of Rachel and Claire, of Riedle and Minasian, of the whole sorry dance of sex and yearning, of love and betrayal.

There was one more glass of wine left in the bottle of Chianti. He finished it.

14

The two men walked home together, Riedle bidding farewell to Kell in the lobby of the apartment building where, just two days earlier, they had met for the first time. Kell rode the lift to the fourth floor, already taking the pen from his jacket pocket with which he would write down detailed notes about the dinner. It was an old habit from Office days. Get home, write up the telegram, no matter how late at night, then send it to London.

Kell entered the apartment. He was hanging up his jacket when he heard a cough from the living room. Walking inside, he saw Mowbray sitting on the sofa, a glass of single malt in front of him and a grin on his face like Arsenal had won the European Cup in extra time.

‘You’re looking very pleased with yourself, Harold.’

‘Am I, guv? Well, that makes sense.’ He leaned further back on the sofa. ‘How was your dinner? Bernie try and hold your hand?’

‘Very funny.’

‘Seriously, you wanna be careful, boss. Bloke like that, lonely and unhappy. Nice, good-looking British diplomat comes along, listens to his sad stories, protects him from antisocial elements on the mean streets of Brussels. He might be falling in love with you.’

Kell was pouring a whisky of his own and felt a sting at the edge of his vanity. He didn’t normally mind Mowbray’s joshing, but liked to maintain a level of hierarchical respect in his dealings with colleagues.

‘So why are you looking so smug?’ he asked, sitting in an armchair at right angles to the sofa. Kell kicked off his shoes, trusting his memory sufficiently to be able to write the report in an hour’s time.

‘Did Bernie say anything about how he used to contact lover boy?’

Kell shook his head. ‘We haven’t got that far yet. First night I met him he mentioned something about a friend “always losing his phones and changing numbers”. I assumed that was Minasian, that he had four or five different mobiles he used for contacting Riedle. Why do you ask?’

Kell took a sip of his whisky, sensing that Mowbray had made a breakthrough. The communications link between Riedle and Minasian was the holy grail of the operation. Find that and they could start to track the Russian, to lure him across the Channel to London.

‘I think I’ve cracked it,’ he said.

Kell moved forward. ‘Tell me.’

‘You know I put key-log software in his laptop? Every password entered, every sentence typed.’

‘Sure.’

There was a laptop on the table in front of them. Mowbray opened it up. ‘So it turns out they kept it simple. Least as far as email is concerned. I’ve been able to hack into his account. They encrypted their messages.’

It was the smart play, the easiest and most secure way for Minasian to communicate with Riedle without raising his suspicions or drawing the attention of the SVR.

‘PGP?’ Kell asked, an acronym for a popular piece of encryption software that he understood in only simple terms.

‘Very good!’ Mowbray replied, amazed that Kell – who was famously antediluvian when it came to technology – was even aware that PGP existed. ‘So Elsa got hold of the private key which Bernie stored on his laptop and Bob became my uncle. After that it’s just like reading a normal email correspondence.’

Mowbray swivelled the laptop towards Kell and said: ‘Take a look.’ There were three emails sitting in the account: two from Riedle, one from Minasian. Kell assumed that the others had been deleted or filed elsewhere. As Mowbray stood up and went outside on to the balcony to smoke a cigarette, Kell clicked on the most recent message.

It was dated ten days earlier and had been given the headline ‘Betrayal’. It was both a plea from Riedle, begging Minasian to come to Brussels so that they could patch things up, and a sustained attack on his character and behaviour. Reading it, Kell felt as if he was intruding on a private grief so intense as to be almost embarrassing in its candour.

You are not the man I recognize, the man I love. You are so cruel to me, so hard and objective. What happened to us? Your attitude when we talked on the phone yesterday degraded everything that we once shared.

That phrase – ‘when we talked on the phone’ – was as welcome to Kell as water in a drought, because it held out the possibility that Minasian would risk contacting Riedle again, perhaps making a call on Skype that Mowbray’s microphones would pick up.

You coldly announce that you are still in love with Vera, that you are now disgusted by your true sexuality, by what passed between us. How do you think that makes me feel? You tell me that you still love her, that you now find Vera attractive, when we both know this is a lie. You have never wanted to be with her in that way. Why now? Why the change? Then you told me on the telephone that you feel more relaxed in her company than you ever did with me. What kind of a person says those things?

A sociopath says those things, thought Kell. Someone incapable of compassion, of feeling anything but contempt for those who might ask something of them.

I always admired your commitment to the ‘truth’. There had been so many lies in my own life when we met that I found your determination to act honestly in all things captivating. But I realize now that you are a hypocrite. Your ‘truth’ is just what suits you at the time. It disguises your ruthlessness, because you are indeed ruthless and unkind. You lie to Vera, you lie to me, you lie to your unborn children. You lie to yourself.

Kell no longer knew if he was reading the email for operational reasons or purely out of human fascination. He worried that Riedle’s anger and spite, if it continued, would drive Minasian further and further away. At times he sounded like a man who had lost all reason and context.

You have left me, but you have not tried to soften the blow or to use the simple white lies people use in these situations when they care about not hurting a lover. What I hope for, what I need, is a small amount of compassion, of kindness, some sense that what we have been through together over the past three yearsmeanssomething to you. All I am asking for is a sense that you understand and are sensitive to the depth of my love for you. You know, better than anyone has ever known, how I think and how I feel and how difficult my life is now that you are not in it – and yet you treat me as if I was no more important to you than a boy picked up in a sauna.

There was more. Much more. The suggestion that Minasian, a year earlier, had been introduced to one of Riedle’s friends and had slept with him. The accusation that he had taunted Riedle continuously with stories about the men (and women) he met in different European cities while working for the bank. There had clearly been a sado-masochistic element to the relationship which Minasian had encouraged and enjoyed. Added to what Riedle had told Kell at dinner about Minasian’s aggressive, sullen behaviour, the relationship amounted to a catalogue of emotional abuse. Kell wanted to go downstairs, to knock on Riedle’s door, ask him why the hell he had put up with it for so long, and then pour him a large Scotch.

He clicked to the second email. It was, as Kell expected, a brief reply from Minasian, written four days after Riedle’s message, with no Subject line. The language was distant, cold and supremely controlled.

I hoped that you would behave with more dignity, more courage. If you write to me like this again I will have nothing more to do with you. I refuse to engage with your insults and accusations.

Kell noted the absence of any consoling words. Nothing to acknowledge Riedle’s pain or the accusation of infidelity. Nevertheless, Minasian was holding out the possibility of further interaction in the future.

Riedle had replied within twelve hours. Kell clicked to this final email.

I am very sorry. I was angry. Please don’t vanish. I am happy to be friends. I just want to keep you in my life and to try to understand what is happening to us.

You are so strong. I don’t think you have ever known heartbreak. I know that you have felt isolated and alone. I know that you have felt a panic about the structure of your life. But you have never known what it is to feel passed over, exchanged – the madness of loss. You have never lost somebody that you were not ready to lose, a person who felt, as I do, that you were holding his entire happiness in the palm of your hand. It’s like you have closed your hand. Made a fist. I need to be treated with delicacy, with kindness and compassion. Please provide this. I am begging you.

I am very sorry for the things I said. I did not mean them. Please consider what I said about Brussels. I can come and meet you anywhere, even if it’s just for lunch (or a cup of coffee!) In Egypt you said you had a period coming up in Paris. That would be perfect – I can be at the Gare du Nord in less than two hours from Brussels.

Kell drained the whisky, thinking of Paris, of Brasserie Lipp, remembering Amelia’s kidnapped son and the operation three years earlier, in which Kell had played the pivotal role in securing his release. On a pad beside the computer he began to write notes. The first word he wrote, in capitals, was CONTROL, beneath which he began to sketch out his ideas in more detail.

1. Power and control central to M’s personality. Must retain a position of dominance. What is he afraid of if he loses control? What is the vulnerability/insecurity we can exploit? The secret about his sexuality – or something else?

2. For R to be this upset/deranged, there must be huge charisma. Charm, apparent empathy, patience, sensuality. M extremely attractive – to young and old, male and female. He demands adoration. He nurtures it. So this must be partly cultivated, artificial behaviour.

Chameleon. Adapts himself to give people what they need for as long as he needs them.

3. According to R, M is highly judgmental/opinionated. Does he also react badly to criticism? Gloating self-image? Ask R in more detail.

4. What does M want? What can we give him? Do we flatter, or squeeze?

‘What are you writing?’

Mowbray had appeared beside him. Kell covered up part of the notes with his elbow, like a card player wary of revealing his hand.

‘Just some initial thoughts on Minasian.’

‘Yeah? Sounds like a nice fella, doesn’t he?’ Mowbray’s shirt smelled of cigarette smoke. ‘Real piece of work. Chewed up our Bernie and spat him out.’

‘Yes,’ Kell agreed. ‘He was out of his depth. Can’t have had any idea what he was getting into.’

Mowbray leaned over, his breath stale with whisky.

‘Flatter or squeeze. What does that mean?’

‘Exactly what it says.’ Kell was annoyed that Mowbray was being intrusive. ‘Either I make Minasian feel like top dog, tell him how great he is, feed his ego and his self-image, or I find out what it is that he’s hiding – and squeeze him.’

‘Hiding? You mean above and beyond the fact that he’s married to the daughter of a Russian oligarch but secretly likes taking it up the jacksie?’

Kell couldn’t contain a burst of laughter. ‘That may be all there is to it,’ he said. ‘Just that secret. Just Riedle. But I was interested by something Bernie said at dinner, very early on. That he thinks of Russians as corrupt, greedy. Wouldn’t surprise me if Minasian is involved in something illegal. Something financial, possibly linked to Svetlana’s father.’

‘You think he would have told Bernie about that?’

‘Who knows?’ Kell closed the laptop. ‘The system out there would certainly present a man in Minasian’s position with myriad opportunities to squirrel away some cash for a rainy day. He’s a vain man. A controlling man. A narcissist, for want of a better word. If he’s threatened by his father-in-law’s wealth, if Svetlana’s lifestyle is an affront to his masculinity and his sense of his own grandeur, if Minasian feels that he has to bring home more than an SVR salary, then – yes – he could be involved in corrupt activity.’

Mowbray returned to the sofa and appeared to be mulling over Kell’s theory. Kell scribbled ‘MONEY?’ on the notepad, underlining it twice, and wondered what Elsa might be able to find out about Minasian’s financial affairs if pointed in the right direction.

‘How much store do you set by those?’ Mowbray asked, flicking his head towards the laptop.

‘What do you mean?’ Kell asked.

‘I mean how much can we ever know somebody, just by reading what they’ve written, or what someone else has said about them? It’s all prejudice, isn’t it? I know there are people out there who think the world of Harold Mowbray. And I know there are people out there who think I’m more or less a complete arsehole.’ Kell smiled. ‘Seriously, boss.’ Mowbray was looking around for his glass. ‘This Alexander Minasian. Maybe he’s not as bad as we all think. Maybe we’re reading him wrong. Maybe one day you’ll get face to face with him and discover you have more in common with him than you ever imagined.’

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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