CHARLES CUMMING
A Colder War

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright © Charles Cumming 2014

Cover design layout © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Cover photographs © Josephine Pugh/Arcangel Images (cityscape); Henry Steadman (foreground and figure, right); Superstock (bench, seated man); Shutterstock.com (all other images).

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

Extract from The Double-Cross System by Sir John Masterman. Published by Vintage. Reprinted by permission from The Random House Group Limited.

Extract taken from ‘Postscript’ taken from The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney © Estate of Seamus Heaney and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

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, down-loaded, 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: 9780007467501

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2014 ISBN: 9780007467495

Version: 2020-06-15

Praise for A Colder War:

‘The spy thriller has been on the ascendant in the past few years, breeding a bunch of talented writers, Cumming among the very best’ The Times

‘An espionage maestro … The levels of psychological insight are married to genuine narrative acumen – but anyone who has read his earlier books will expect no less’ Independent

‘A cleverly plotted spy tale’ Sun

‘Cumming’s prose is always lean and effective, but I was struck by the many times he injected phrases and descriptions so nice that I stopped to savour them’ Washington Post

‘A Colder War is more than an excellent thriller: it is also a novel that forces us to look behind the headlines and question some of our own comfortable assumptions’ Spectator

Dedication

For Christian Spurrier

‘Certain persons … have a natural predilection to live in that curious world of espionage and deceit, and attach themselves with equal facility to one side or the other, so long as their craving for adventure of a rather macabre type is satisfied.’

John Masterman, The Double-Cross System

‘… You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.’

Seamus Heaney, ‘Postscript’

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for A Colder War

Dedication

Epigraph

Turkey

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

London: Three Weeks Later

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

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Keep Reading …

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By Charles Cumming

About the Publisher

Turkey

1

The American stepped away from the open window, passed Wallinger the binoculars and said: ‘I’m going for cigarettes.’

‘Take your time,’ Wallinger replied.

It was just before six o’clock on a quiet, dusty evening in March, no more than an hour until nightfall. Wallinger trained the binoculars on the mountains and brought the abandoned palace at İshak Paşa into focus. Squeezing the glasses together with a tiny adjustment of his hands, he found the mountain road and traced it west to the outskirts of Doğubayazit. The road was deserted. The last of the tourist taxis had returned to town. There were no tanks patrolling the plain, no dolmus bearing passengers back from the mountains.

Wallinger heard the door clunk shut behind him and looked back into the room. Landau had left his sunglasses on the furthest of the three beds. Wallinger crossed to the chest of drawers and checked the screen on his BlackBerry. Still no word from Istanbul; still no word from London. Where the hell was HITCHCOCK? The Mercedes was supposed to have crossed into Turkey no later than two o’clock; the three of them should have been in Van by now. Wallinger went back to the window and squinted over the telegraph poles, the pylons and the crumbling apartment blocks of Doğubayazit. High above the mountains, an aeroplane was moving west to east in a cloudless sky, a silent white star skimming towards Iran.

Wallinger checked his watch. Five minutes past six. Landau had pushed the wooden table and the chair in front of the window; the last of his cigarettes was snuffed out in a scarred Efes Pilsen ashtray now bulging with yellowed filters. Wallinger tipped the contents out of the window and hoped that Landau would bring back some food. He was hungry and tired of waiting.

The BlackBerry rumbled on top of the chest of drawers; Wallinger’s only means of contact with the outside world. He read the message.

Vertigo is on at 1750. Get three tickets

It was the news he had been waiting for. HITCHCOCK and the courier had made it through the border at Gürbulak, on the Turkish side, at ten to six. If everything went according to plan, within half an hour Wallinger would have sight of the vehicle on the mountain road. From the chest of drawers he pulled out the British passport, sent by diplomatic bag to Ankara a week earlier. It would get HITCHCOCK through the military checkpoints on the road to Van; it would get him on to a plane to Ankara.

Wallinger sat on the middle of the three beds. The mattress was so soft it felt as though the frame was giving way beneath him. He had to steady himself by sitting further back on the bed and was taken suddenly by a memory of Cecilia, his mind carried forward to the prospect of a few precious days in her company. He planned to fly the Cessna to Greece on Wednesday, to attend the Directorate meeting in Athens, then to cross over to Chios in time to meet Cecilia for supper on Thursday evening.

The tickle of a key in the door. Landau came back into the room with two packets of Prestige Filters and a plate of pide.

‘Got us something to eat,’ he said. ‘Anything new?’

The pide was giving off a tart smell of warm curdled cheese. Wallinger took the chipped white plate and rested it on the bed.

‘They made it through Gürbulak just before six.’

‘No trouble?’ It didn’t sound as though Landau cared much about the answer. Wallinger took a bite of the soft, warm dough. ‘Love this stuff,’ the American said, doing the same. ‘Kinda like a boat of pizza, you know?’

‘Yes,’ said Wallinger.

He didn’t like Landau. He didn’t trust the operation. He no longer trusted the Cousins. He wondered if Amelia had been at the other end of the text, worrying about Shakhouri. The perils of a joint operation. Wallinger was a purist and, when it came to inter-agency cooperation, wished that they could all just keep themselves to themselves.

‘How long do you think we’ll have to wait?’ Landau said. He was chewing noisily.

‘As long as it takes.’

The American sniffed, broke the seal on one of the packets of cigarettes. There was a beat of silence between them.

‘You think they’ll stick to the plan or come down on the 100?’

‘Who knows?’

Wallinger stood at the window again, sighted the mountain through the binoculars. Nothing. Just a tank crawling across the plain: making a statement to the PKK, making a statement to Iran. Wallinger had the Mercedes’ numberplate committed to memory. Shakhouri had a wife, a daughter, a mother sitting in an SIS-funded flat in Cricklewood. They had been waiting for days. They would want to know that their man was safe. As soon as Wallinger saw the vehicle, he would message London with the news.

‘It’s like clicking “refresh” over and over.’

Wallinger turned and frowned. He hadn’t understood Landau’s meaning. The American saw his confusion and grinned through his thick brown beard. ‘You know, all this waiting around. Like on a computer. When you’re waiting for news, for updates. You click “refresh” on the browser?’

‘Ah, right.’ Of all people, at that moment Paul Wallinger thought of Tom Kell’s cherished maxim: ‘Spying is waiting.’

He turned back to the window.

Perhaps HITCHCOCK was already in Doğubayazit. The D100 was thick with trucks and cars at all times of the day and night. Maybe they’d ignored the plan to use the mountain road and come on that. There was still a dusting of snow on the peaks; there had been a landslide only two weeks earlier. American satellites had shown that the pass through Besler was clear, but Wallinger had come to doubt everything they told him. He had even come to doubt the messages from London. How could Amelia know, with any certainty, who was in the car? How could she trust that HITCHCOCK had made it out of Tehran? The exfil was being run by the Cousins.

‘Smoke?’ Landau said.

‘No thanks.’

‘Your people say anything else?’

‘Nothing.’

The American reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. He appeared to read a message, but kept the contents to himself. Dishonour among spies. HITCHCOCK was an SIS Joe, but the courier, the exfil, the plan to pick Shakhouri up in Doğubayazit and fly him out of Van, that was all Langley. Wallinger would happily have run the risk of putting him on a plane from Imam Khomeini to Paris and lived with the consequences. He heard the snap of the American’s lighter and caught a backdraught of tobacco smoke, then turned to the mountains once again.

The tank had now parked at the side of the mountain road, shuffling from side to side, doing the Tiananmen twist. The gun turret swivelled north-east so that the barrel was pointing in the direction of Mount Ararat. Right on cue, Landau said: ‘Maybe they found Noah’s Ark up there,’ but Wallinger wasn’t in the mood for jokes.

Clicking refresh on a browser.

Then, at last, he saw it. A tiny bottle-green dot, barely visible against the parched brown landscape, moving towards the tank. The vehicle was so small it was hard to follow through the lens of the binoculars. Wallinger blinked, cleared his vision, looked again.

‘They’re here.’

Landau came to the window. ‘Where?’

Wallinger passed him the binoculars. ‘You see the tank?’

‘Yup.’

‘Follow the road up …’

‘… OK. Yeah. I see them.’

Landau put down the binoculars and reached for the video camera. He flipped off the lens cap and began filming the Mercedes through the window. Within a minute, the vehicle was close enough to be picked out with the naked eye. Wallinger could see the car speeding along the plain, heading towards the tank. There was half a kilometre between them. Three hundred metres. Two.

Wallinger saw that the tank barrel was still pointing away from the road, up towards Ararat. What happened next could not be explained. As the Mercedes drove past the tank, there appeared to be an explosion in the rear of the vehicle that lifted up the back axle and propelled the car forward in a skid with no sound. The Mercedes quickly became wreathed in black smoke and then rolled violently from the road as flames burst from the engine. There was a second explosion, then a larger ball of flame. Landau swore very quietly. Wallinger stared in disbelief.

‘What the hell happened?’ the American said, lowering the camera.

Wallinger turned from the window.

‘You tell me,’ he replied.

2

Ebru Eldem could not remember the last time she had taken the day off. ‘A journalist,’ her father had once told her, ‘is always working’. And he was right. Life was a permanent story. Ebru was always sniffing out an angle, always felt that she was on the brink of missing out on a byline. When she spoke to the cobbler who repaired the heels of her shoes in Arnavutköy, he was a story about dying small businesses in Istanbul. When she chatted to the good-looking stallholder from Konya who sold fruit in her local market, he was an article about agriculture and economic migration within Greater Anatolia. Every number in her phone book – and Ebru reckoned she had better contacts than any other journalist of her age and experience in Istanbul – was a story waiting to open up. All she needed was the energy and the tenacity to unearth it.

For once, however, Ebru had set aside her restlessness and ambition and, in a pained effort to relax, if only for a single day, turned off her mobile phone and set her work to one side. That was quite a sacrifice! From eight o’clock in the morning – the lie-in, too, was a luxury – to nine o’clock at night, Ebru avoided all emails and Facebook messages and lived the life of a single woman of twenty-nine with no ties to work and no responsibilities other than to her own relaxation and happiness. Granted, she had spent most of the morning doing laundry and cleaning up the chaos of her apartment, but thereafter she had enjoyed a delicious lunch with her friend Banu at a restaurant in Beşiktaş, shopped for a new dress on Istiklal, bought and read ninety pages of the new Elif Şafak novel in her favourite coffee house in Cihangir, then met Ryan for martinis at Bar Bleu.

In the five months that they had known one another, their relationship had grown from a casual, no-strings-attached affair to something more serious. When they had first met, their get-togethers had taken place almost exclusively in the bedroom of Ryan’s apartment in Tarabya, a place where – Ebru was sure – he took other girls, but none with whom he had such a connection, none with whom he would be so open and raw. She could sense it not so much by the words that he whispered into her ear as they made love, but more by the way that he touched her and looked into her eyes. Then, as they had grown to know one another, they had spoken a great deal about their respective families, about Turkish politics, the war in Syria, the deadlock in Congress – all manner of subjects. Ebru had been surprised by Ryan’s sensitivity to political issues, his knowledge of current affairs. He had introduced her to his friends. They had talked about travelling together and even meeting one another’s parents.

Ebru knew that she was not beautiful – well, certainly not as beautiful as some of the girls looking for husbands and sugar daddies in Bar Bleu – but she had brains and passion and men had always responded to those qualities in her. When she thought about Ryan, she thought about his difference to all the others. She wanted the heat of physical contact, of course – a man who knew how to be with her and how to please her – but she also craved his mind and his energy, the way he treated her with such affection and respect.

Today was a typical day in their relationship. They drank too many cocktails at Bar Bleu, went for dinner at Meyra, talked about books, the recklessness of Hamas and Netanyahu. Then they stumbled back to Ryan’s apartment at midnight, fucking as soon as they had closed the door. The first time was in the lounge, the second time in his bedroom with the kilims bunched up on the floor and the shade still not fixed on the standing lamp beside the armchair. Ebru had lain there afterwards in his arms, thinking that she would never want for another man. Finally she had found someone who understood her and made her feel entirely herself.

The smell of Ryan’s breath and the sweat of his body were still all over Ebru as she slipped out of the building just after two o’clock, Ryan snoring obliviously. She took a taxi to Arnavutköy, showered as soon as she was home, and climbed into bed, intending to return to work just under four hours later.

Burak Turan of the Turkish National Police reckoned you could divide people into two categories: those who didn’t mind getting up early in the morning; and those who did. As a rule for life it had served him well. The people who were worth spending time with didn’t go to sleep straight after Muhteşem Yüzyil and jump out of bed with a smile on their face at half-past six in the morning. You had to watch people like that. They were control freaks, workaholics, religious nuts. Turan considered himself to be a member of the opposite category of person: the type who liked to extract the best out of life; who was creative and generous and good in a crowd. After finishing work, for example, he liked to wind down with a tea and a chat at a club on Mantiklal near the precinct station. His mother, typically, would cook him dinner, then he’d head out to a bar and get to bed by midnight or one, sometimes later. Otherwise, when did people find the time to enjoy themselves? When did they meet girls? If you were always concentrating on work, if you were always paranoid about getting enough sleep, what was left to you? Burak knew that he wasn’t the most hard-working officer in the barracks, happy to tick over while other, better-connected guys got promoted ahead of him. But what did he care about that? As long as he could keep the salary, the job, visit Cansu on weekends and watch Galatasaray games at the Turk Telekom every second Saturday, he reckoned he had life pretty well licked.

But there were drawbacks. Of course there were. As he got older, he didn’t like taking so many orders, especially from guys who were younger than he was. That happened more and more. A generation coming up behind him, pushing him out of the way. There were too many people in Istanbul; the city was so fucking crowded. And then there were the dawn raids, dozens of them in the last two years – a Kurdish problem, usually, but sometimes something different. Like this morning. A journalist, a woman who had written about Ergenekon or the PKK – Burak wasn’t clear which – and word had come down to arrest her. The guys were talking about it in the van as they waited outside her apartment building. Cumhuriyet writer. Eldem. Lieutenant Metin, who looked like he hadn’t been to bed in three days, mumbled something about ‘links to terrorism’ as he strapped on his vest. Burak couldn’t believe what some people were prepared to swallow. Didn’t he know how the system worked? Ten to one Eldem had riled somebody in the AKP, and an Erdoğan flunkie had spotted a chance to send out a message. That was how government people always operated. You had to keep an eye on them. They were all early risers.

Burak and Metin were part of a three-man team ordered to take Eldem into custody at five o’clock in the morning. They knew what was wanted. Make a racket, wake the neighbours, scare the blood out of her, drag the detainee down to the van. A few weeks ago, on the last raid they did, Metin had picked up a framed photograph in some poor bastard’s living room and dropped it on the floor, probably because he wanted to be like the cops on American TV. But why did they have to do it in the middle of the night? Burak could never work that out. Why not just pick her up on the way to work, pay a visit to Cumhuriyet? Instead, he’d had to set his fucking alarm for half-past three in the morning, show himself at the precinct at four, then sit around in the van for an hour with that weight in his head, the numb fatigue of no sleep, his muscles and his brain feeling soft and slow. Burak got tetchy when he was like that. Anybody did anything to rile him, said something he didn’t like, if there was a delay in the raid or any kind of problem – he’d snap them off at the knees. Food didn’t help, tea neither. It wasn’t a blood sugar thing. He just resented having to haul his arse out of bed when the rest of Istanbul was still fast asleep.

‘Time?’ said Adnan. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, too lazy even to look at a clock.

‘Five,’ said Burak, because he wanted to get on with it.

‘Ten to,’ said Metin. Burak shot him a look.

‘Fuck it,’ said Adnan. ‘Let’s go.’

The first Ebru knew of the raid was a noise very close to her face, which she later realized was the sound of the bedroom door being kicked in. She sat up in bed – she was naked – and screamed, because she thought a gang of men were going to rape her. She had been dreaming of her father, of her two young nephews, but now three men were in her cramped bedroom, throwing clothes at her, shouting at her to get dressed, calling her a ‘fucking terrorist’.

She knew what it was. She had dreaded this moment. They all did. They all censored their words, chose their stories carefully, because a line out of place, an inference here, a suggestion there, was enough to land you in prison. Modern Turkey. Democratic Turkey. Still a police state. Always had been. Always would be.

One of them was dragging her now, saying she was being too slow. To Ebru’s shame, she began to cry. What had she done wrong? What had she written? It occurred to her, as she covered herself, pulled on some knickers, buttoned up her jeans, that Ryan would help. Ryan had money and influence and would do what he could to save her.

‘Leave it,’ one of them barked. She had tried to grab her phone. She saw the surname on the cop’s lapel badge: TURAN.

‘I want a lawyer,’ she screamed.

Burak shook his head. ‘No lawyer is going to help you,’ he said. ‘Now put on a fucking shirt.’

London Three Weeks Later

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Speak of the devil.’

‘Tom?’

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

‘It’s Paul.’

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

‘What’s happened? Is he all right?’

‘He’s been killed.’

4

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

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

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

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

‘Giles home?’

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

‘We’ve decided to try for separation.’

‘Oh Christ, I’m so sorry.’

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

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

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

‘Whisky, please,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Look, I’m sorry about Paul.’

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

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

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

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

‘Holiday?’ Kell asked.

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

‘No body?’

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

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

‘I’m so sorry.’

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6

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

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

‘Gee thanks,’ Kell replied.

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

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

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

‘Amelia!’

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

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

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

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

‘Oh look, there’s Simon.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You mean recently? In London?’

‘Yes, recently.’

‘You want an honest answer to that?’

‘Of course.’

‘Fuck all.’

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

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

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

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

‘What kind of job?’

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

‘You don’t know what he was up to?’

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

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

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

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

‘I could do that,’ he said.

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

‘Will I need it?’

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

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

‘What does that mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

7

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

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

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

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

‘Good flight?’

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

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

‘The Chandris?’

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

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

‘It’s possible, sir.’

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

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

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

‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ he said.

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

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

‘Time?’

‘I said seven.’

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

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

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

My dear Tom

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

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

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

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

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

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

With kind regards

Tamas

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Did you meet Mr Wallinger personally?’

Makris was taking a sip of white wine and was halted by the question. He swallowed in his own good time and dabbed his mouth carefully with a paper napkin before responding.

‘No.’ The voice was even in tone, a trace of American in the accent. ‘The flight plan had been filed before I arrived on my shift. I spoke to the pilot – to Mr Paul Wallinger – on the radio as he checked his instruments, taxied to the runway and prepared for take-off.’

‘He sounded normal?’

‘What does “normal” mean, please?’

‘Was he agitated? Drunk? Did he sound tense?’

Makris reacted as though Kell had impugned his integrity.

‘Drunk? Of course not. If I sense that a pilot is any of these things, I will prevent him from flying. Of course.’

‘Of course.’ Kell had never had much time for thin-skinned bureaucrats and couldn’t be bothered to summon an apology for whatever offence his remark might have caused. ‘You can understand why I have to ask. In order to complete a full report on the accident, Scottish Widows needs to know everything …’

As though he had already grown tired of listening, Makris leaned down, picked up a slim briefcase and set it on the table. Kell was still speaking as two thick thumbs operated the sliding locks. The catches popped, the lid sprang open, and Makris’s face was momentarily obscured from view.

‘I have the flight plan here, Mr Hardwick. I made a copy for you.’

‘That was very thoughtful.’

Makris lowered the lid, passing Kell a one-page document covered in hieroglyphs of impenetrable Greek. There were boxes where Wallinger had scrawled his personal details, though no address on the island appeared to have been provided.

‘The flight plan was to take the Cessna over Aignoussa, then east into Turkey. It is customary for Çeşme or Izmir to take immediate responsibility for aircraft entering Turkish airspace.’

‘This is what happened?’

Makris nodded gravely. ‘This is what happened. The pilot told us he was leaving our circuit and then changed radio frequency. At this point, Mr Wallinger was no longer our responsibility.’

‘Do you know where he was staying on Chios?’

Makris directed his eyes towards the flight plan. ‘Does it not say?’

Kell turned the sheet of paper around and held it up for inspection. ‘Hard to tell,’ he said.

Makris pursed his lips, as if to imply that Chris Hardwick had caused secondary offence by his failure to read and understand modern Greek. He took back the flight plan, studied it carefully, and was obliged to admit that no address had been given.

‘There seems to be only Mr Wallinger’s residence in Ankara,’ he conceded. Clearly, this was a minor breach in aeronautical protocol. Kell suspected that, first thing in the morning, Makris would hunt down a junior colleague at the airport and take significant pleasure in reprimanding him for the oversight. ‘But there is a telephone number,’ he said, as if to compensate for the clerical error.

‘A telephone number on Chios?’

Makris did not need to look back at the code. ‘Yes.’

According to a preliminary report sent to Amelia the day before the funeral, Wallinger had used his own logbook and JAR licence to hire the Cessna in Turkey, his own passport to enter Ankara, but had then left no trace of his movements once he arrived on Chios. His mobile phone had been switched off for long periods during his stay and there was no activity on any Wallinger credit card, nor on his four registered SIS legends. He had effectively spent a week on Chios as a ghost. Kell assumed that Wallinger had been with a woman, and was trying to conceal his whereabouts from both Josephine and Amelia. Yet the lengths he had gone to suggested that it was equally plausible he had been making contact with an agent.

‘Do you recognize the number?’

‘Do I recognize it?’ Makris’s reply was effortlessly condescending. ‘No.’

‘And have you heard anything about what Mr Wallinger was doing on Chios? Why he was visiting the island? Any rumours around town, newspaper reports?’

Kell accepted that his questions were what is known in the trade as a ‘trawl’, but it was nevertheless important to ask them. It did not surprise him in the least when Makris suggested with a light cough that Mr Hardwick was exceeding his brief.

‘Paul Wallinger was just a tourist, no?’ he said, raising his eyebrows. It was clear that he had no desire to improvise an answer. ‘I certainly have not spoken to anybody, or read anything, which suggests other interests. Why do you ask?’

Kell produced a bland smile. ‘Oh, just background for the report. We need to ascertain whether there was any chance that Mr Wallinger deliberately took his own life.’

Makris tried to appear appropriately dignified as he considered the grave matter of Paul Wallinger’s possible suicide. It had doubtless occurred to him that such a verdict would absolve Chios airport entirely of any responsibility in the crash, thus ending, at a stroke, the possibility of a lawsuit against the engineer who had checked the Cessna.

‘Let me ask around,’ he replied. ‘To be perfectly honest with you, I have not yet even discussed the crash with my colleagues in Turkey.’

‘What about your engineers?’

‘What about them, please?’

‘Have you ascertained who was on duty the afternoon of the flight?’

‘Of course.’ Makris had prepared for this, the most sensitive section of the interview, and dealt with it as Kell had expected he would. ‘Air traffic control is not accountable for maintenance and engineering. That is a separate department, a separate union. I assume that you will be holding other meetings with other employees in order to obtain a more full picture of the tragedy?’

‘I will.’ Kell experienced another craving for a cigarette. ‘Do you happen to have the name of the engineer to hand?’

Makris appeared to weigh up the good sense of denying the man from Scottish Widows this simple request. At some cost to his equilibrium – his neck did an agitated roll and there was another delicate cough of irritation – he wrote down the name on the back of the flight plan.

‘Iannis Christidis?’ Kell studied Makris’s spidery handwriting. With this and the phone number he had more than enough leads to plot Wallinger’s movements in the days leading up to his death.

‘That is correct,’ Makris replied. And to Kell’s surprise he immediately stood up and drained the last of his wine. ‘Now, will there be anything else, Mr Hardwick? My wife is expecting me for dinner.’

As soon as Makris had left the hotel, Kell went back to his room and dialled the number using the hotel landline. He was connected to a recorded answering service, but the message was in Greek. Heading back downstairs he dialled the number again, asked the receptionist to listen to the message and to give a rough translation of what was being said. To his frustration he was told that the voice was a default, computer-generated message with no person or corporation named. Kell, by now hungry and thinking about dinner, returned to his room to ring Adam.

‘The engineer who worked on Wallinger’s plane was called Iannis Christidis. Can you see if there’s anything recorded against?’

‘Sure.’

It sounded as though Adam had woken up from a siesta. Kell heard the bump and scratch of a man looking around for a pen, the noise of a dog barking in the background.

‘With a name like Christidis you’ll probably get the Greek phone book, but see if he has a profile on the island.’

‘Will do.’

‘How are your reverse telephone directories for Chios?’

‘I’m sure we can work something out.’

Kell read out the number from the flight plan, checked that Adam had taken it down correctly, then mentally switched off. Having watched the headlines on CNN, he went for a grilled sea bass and a Greek salad at a restaurant halfway along the beach. From his table on a moonlit terrace he could see the distant lights of the Turkish coast, blinking like a runway.

At ten o’clock, smoking a cigarette at the edge of a high tide, he felt the pulse of a message coming through on his phone. Adam had sent a text.

Still working on IC. Number is for a letting agency. Villas Angelis. 119 Katanika, on the port. Proprietor listed as Nicolas Delfas.

8

Alexander Minasian, the SVR rezident in Kiev, the Directorate C officer whose recruitment of KODAK would surely make him a legend in the halls of Yasenevo, was a ghost on visits to Turkey. Sometimes he would come by aeroplane. Sometimes he would cross by car or truck from Bulgaria. On one occasion, he had taken a train across the frontier at Edirne. Always under alias, always using a different passport. Three times on the KODAK operation, Minasian had taken a ship from Odessa – his favoured method of reaching Turkey – later meeting the asset in a room at the Ciragan Kempinski Hotel. They had drunk chilled red Sancerre and talked of the political and moral benefits of KODAK’s work. Showing good instincts from the very beginning, the asset had always refused to meet undeclared SVR officers on Turkish soil, as well as cut-outs and NOCs. KODAK would only deal with Minasian, whom he knew simply as ‘Carl’.

Their arrangement was straightforward. Whenever there was product to be shared, KODAK would present himself at one of two cafés in Ankara or Istanbul and produce the agreed signal. This would be seen by a member of the Embassy staff and a telegram immediately sent to Kiev. For reasons that Minasian had always accepted and understood, KODAK did not believe in handing over every piece of information or intelligence that crossed his desk. The product he chose to share with the SVR was always ‘cherry-picked’ (KODAK’s phrase, one that Minasian had been obliged to look up) and usually of the highest quality.

‘I’m not interested in giving you streams of reporting about investment goals, energy budgets, crystal ball stuff. That’s what’s going to get me caught. What I choose to give you, when I choose to give you it, will be hard, actionable intelligence, usually with very high clearance.’

There were two dead-letter boxes in Istanbul. One in the men’s bathroom of a tourist restaurant in Sultanahamet owned by a former KGB officer, long since retired and now married to a Turkish woman who had borne him two sons. A dry cistern in the second of two recently modernized cubicles, detached from all plumbing, was ideal for the purposes of leaving memory sticks, hard drives and documents – whatever KODAK wished to pass on.

The second site was located among the ruins of an old house – said once to have belonged to Leon Trotsky – on the northern shore of Büyükada, an island in the Sea of Marmara. This was KODAK’s preferred location, because the asset was friendly with a journalist on Büyükada who lived adjacent to the site, so that any journeys made to the island could pass as social visits. KODAK had recently expressed his distaste for the cistern – though of course it had been thoroughly cleaned and disinfected during the bathroom renovations – complaining to Minasian that he felt ‘like Michael Corleone going to shoot somebody’ whenever he lifted the lid to make a drop. Minasian had promised to find a third site, although KODAK seemed increasingly fond of the box on Büyükada, concealed as it was among the ruins, and protected from rains and vermin.

It was towards this box that Minasian was headed, though his journey, as always, was to be a six-hour masterpiece of counter-surveillance, involving two changes of clothing, five different taxis, two ferries (one north to Istinye, the other south to Bostanci), as well as three miles on foot in Beşiktaş and Beyoğlu. Only when Minasian was certain that he had picked up no surveillance did he board the private vessel at Marinturk Marina and make the short crossing to Büyükada.

While on the island he still exercised caution. It was possible that MIT or the Americans could have advanced surveillance on Büyükada and pick Minasian up on foot (no vehicles were allowed on the island, only bicycles and horse-drawn carts). For this reason he effected his second change of appearance in a restaurant near the ferry terminal, leaving by a rear exit. Having completed a circuit of the island by cart, Minasian instructed the driver to take him within three hundred metres of the Trotsky house, completing the last section of his journey on foot.

He was carrying a leather shoulder bag, in which he had placed his changes of clothing, as well as a pair of swimming trunks and a towel. During the warmer months, Minasian would often take a swim before collecting the product. Anything to add to a sense of blameless leisure. Today, however, he was keen to return to Kadiköy on the ferry so that he could dine with a male friend in Bebek. For this reason, he went directly to the location, discerned that he was alone, and removed the contents left for him the previous day.

The paper was folded and protected from the elements by a transparent plastic folder that had been bound with a rubber band. This was usual. Minasian opened it and immediately photographed the contents. To his surprise, he saw that there was only one piece of information.

LVa/UKSIS Tehran (nuclear) Massoud Moghaddam

Cryptonym: EINSTEIN

9

The offices of Villas Angelis were located above a small, family-run restaurant on the harbour in Chios Town. Kell reached the first floor by an external staircase at the side of the building, knocking on a part-frosted glass door through which he could see a small, strip-lit office occupied by a woman in her late thirties. The woman looked up, turned an inquisitive squint into a welcoming smile, then crossed the room and invited Kell to enter with a flourish of bosom and bonhomie.

‘Hello, sir, hello, hello,’ she said, on the correct assumption that Kell was a visitor to the island and spoke no Greek. She was wearing a floral-print summer dress and blue espadrilles that were squashed by her swollen feet. ‘Come and sit down. How can we help you?’

Kell shook the woman’s hand and settled into a small wooden chair facing her desk. Her name was Marianna and she was no taller than the water cooler beside which she was standing. The screensaver on her computer showed a photograph of an elderly Greek couple, whom Kell took to be her parents. There were no photographs on the desk of a husband or boyfriend, only a framed formal portrait of a child in knickerbockers – her nephew? – flanked on either side by his parents. Marianna was not wearing a wedding ring.

‘My name is Chris Hardwick,’ Kell said, handing over his card. ‘I’m an insurance investigator with Scottish Widows.’

Marianna’s English was good, but not good enough to untangle what Mr Hardwick had told her. She asked Kell to repeat what he had said, while studying the card closely for further clues.

‘I’m investigating the death of a British diplomat. Paul Wallinger. Does that name mean anything to you?’

Marianna looked very much as though she wanted the name to mean something to her. Her eyes softened, so that she was looking at Kell with something like yearning, and her head tilted to one side in an effort to accommodate the question. In the end, however, she was obliged to admit defeat, responding in an apologetic tone that suggested frustration with her own ignorance.

‘No, I’m sorry that it does not. Who was this man? I am sorry that I cannot help you.’

‘It’s quite all right,’ Kell replied, smiling as warmly as he could. To the left, a poster of the Acropolis was peeling off the wall. Beside it, three digital clocks in pale grey cases displayed the time in Athens, Paris and New York. Kell heard the sound of footsteps on the external staircase and turned to see a man of similar age and build to Andonis Makris pushing through the door of the office. He had thick eyebrows and a heavy black moustache, with two different shades of dye battling for prominence in his hair. Seeing Kell in the chair, the man grumbled something in Greek and moved towards the furthest window in the room, throwing open a set of shutters so that the office was suddenly flooded with morning sunlight and the noise of gunning mopeds. It was clear to Kell that the man was Marianna’s boss and that his words had been some sort of reprimand to her for a sin as yet undetected.

‘Nico, this is Mr Hardwick.’ Marianna offered Kell a conciliatory smile, which he interpreted as an apology in advance for her boss’s erratic temperament. She then began tapping something into her computer as Nicolas Delfas crossed the room and invited Kell to move to a seat beside his own desk. The body language was page one machismo: I’m in charge now. Men should deal with men.

‘You’re looking to rent a place?’ he asked, offering up a dry, bulky handshake.

‘No. I’m actually an insurance investigator.’ Delfas had braced his arms across his desk and was busily searching for something among a pile of papers. ‘I was just asking your colleague if your office had had any dealings with a British diplomat named Paul Wallinger?’

The word ‘diplomat’ was barely out of Kell’s mouth before Delfas looked up and began shaking his head.

‘Who?’

‘Wallinger. Paul Wallinger.’

‘No. I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t know him. I did not know him.’

Delfas met Kell’s eye, but his gaze quickly slid back to the desk.

‘You don’t want to talk about him or you don’t know who he was?’

The Greek began moving objects on the top of a battered black filing cabinet, an exertion that caused him to breathe more heavily and to shake his head in frustration. After a few moments he looked at Kell again, as though surprised to see that he was still in the office.

‘Sorry?’ he said.

‘I was asking if you had met Mr Wallinger.’

Delfas pursed his lips, the bristles of his thick moustache momentarily obscuring the base of his nose.

‘I have told you, I do not know about this man. I don’t have any questions to answer. What else can I help you with?’

‘Wallinger’s flight plan listed your office as a contact number on Chios. I wondered if he had rented a property from Villas Angelis?’

Kell glanced at Marianna. She was still absorbed in her computer, though it was clear that she was listening to every word of the conversation: her ears and cheeks had flushed to scarlet and she looked tense and stiff. Delfas barked something at her, then uttered a word – ‘gamoto’ – which Kell assumed to be a close Greek cousin of ‘fuck’.

‘Look, Mister, uh …’

‘Hardwick.’

‘Yes. I do not know what it is you are talking about. We are very busy here. I cannot help you with your enquiries.’

‘You didn’t hear about the accident?’ Kell was amused by the idea that Delfas and Marianna were ‘busy’. The office had all the bustle and energy of a deserted waiting room in a branch-line railway station. ‘He took off from Chios airport last week,’ he said. ‘His Cessna crashed in western Turkey.’

At last Marianna turned her head and looked at the two men. It was obvious that she had remembered Wallinger’s name, or was at least familiar with the circumstances of the accident. Delfas, seeming to sense this, stood up and tried to usher Kell towards the door.

‘I do not know about this,’ he said, adding what sounded like a further brusque denial in his native tongue. Pulling at the door, he held it open with his eyes fixed on the ground. Kell had no choice but to stand and leave. Long exposure to liars – good and bad – had taught him not to strike in the first instance. If the perpetrator was being wilfully stubborn and obstructive it was better to let them stew.

‘Fine,’ he said, ‘fine,’ and turned to Marianna, nodding a warm farewell. As he left, Kell quickly scanned the room for evidence of CCTV and burglar alarms, making a rapid assessment of the locks on the door. Given that Delfas was plainly hiding something, it might be necessary to arrange a break-in and to take a closer look at the company’s computer system. Kell informed him that Edinburgh would be in ‘written contact regarding Mr Wallinger’s relationship with Villas Angelis’, and said that he was grateful for the opportunity to have spoken to him. Delfas muttered: ‘Yes, thank you’ in English, then slammed the door behind him.

The office opening hours and telephone number were engraved in a sheet of hard white plastic at the base of the external stairs. Kell was studying the notice and thinking about arranging for a Tech-Ops team to fly out to Chios when a far simpler idea occurred to him. The muscle memory of a cynical old spook. He knew exactly what he had to do. There was no need to organize a break-in. There was Marianna.

10

‘Recruiting an agent is an act of seduction,’ an instructor at Fort Monckton had told a class of eager SIS pups in the autumn of 1994. ‘The trick with agents of the opposite gender is to seduce them without, well, seducing them.’

Kell remembered the ripple of knowing laughter that had followed that remark, a room full of high-functioning trainee spooks all wondering what would happen if they one day found themselves in a situation where they were sexually attracted to an agent. It happened, of course. To gain the trust of a stranger, to convince a person to believe in you, to compel them to act, sometimes against their own better instincts – was that not the first step to the bedroom? Good agents were often bright, ambitious, emotionally needy: to run them required a mixture of flattery, kindness and empathy. It was the spy’s job to listen, to be in control, to remain strong, often in the face of impossibly difficult circumstances. The men employed by SIS were often physically attractive, the women also. Several times in his career, Kell had been in situations where, had he wanted to, it would have been easy to take a female agent to bed. They came to rely on you, to trust and admire their handler completely. Right or wrong, the mystique of spying was an aphrodisiac. For much the same reason, the atmosphere within the four walls of Thames House and Vauxhall Cross had often been likened to a bordello, particularly where younger employees were concerned. Secrecy bred intimacy. Officers could only discuss their work with other officers. Often they would do so at night, over a drink or two in the MI5 bar, or a local pub in Vauxhall. Inevitably, one thing led to another, both at home and abroad. It was the way of the business. It was also one of the reasons the divorce rate in SIS was as high as in Beverly Hills.

The trick with agents of the opposite gender is to seduce them without, well, seducing them. Kell sat on the harbour wall at quarter to three, the instructor’s words running through his mind as he kept an eye on the first-floor windows of Villas Angelis. At exactly one minute past three, Marianna and Delfas emerged to begin their hour-long lunch break. Delfas went into the restaurant downstairs, to be greeted by several nodding patrons who were seated at tables beneath a burgundy awning. Marianna began to walk south along the harbour road. Kell followed her at a discreet distance and watched as she went into a restaurant adjacent to the ferry terminal. From his position on the street he had clear sight of her table. There was a second door at the side of the restaurant through which he could enter without being seen. He would sit down, order some food, then contrive a reason to walk past.

He took five hundred euros out of an ATM, entered the restaurant, nodded at a waitress, and sat down. Within a minute, Kell had a menu open in front of him; within two, he had ordered sausages, fried potatoes and salad, as well as a half-litre bottle of sparkling water. Marianna was on the opposite side of the room, beyond the bar, one of perhaps fifteen or twenty other customers spread out around the restaurant. Kell could not see her table, but had glimpsed the top of her head when he walked in.

As soon as the waitress had brought the water, Kell stood up and headed towards the bar. He turned right, ostensibly looking for the toilets, but made a point of staring at Marianna’s table. Sensing movement in her peripheral vision, she looked up and instantly recognized Kell. She smiled warmly and set aside the book she was reading.

‘Oh, hello.’ Kell managed to convey a look of complete surprise as he came to a halt beside her. He was pleased to note that Marianna was blushing.

‘Mr Harding!’

‘Hardwick. Call me Chris. Marianna, yes?’

She looked embarrassed not to have remembered his name. ‘What are you doing here?’

Kell turned and nodded back in the general direction of his table. ‘Same as you, I suppose. Just having some lunch.’

‘Have you eaten?’

Marianna glanced at the chair opposite her own, as though mustering the courage to invite Kell to join her.

‘I’ve just ordered,’ he replied, adding a warm smile. ‘What have you got there? Some soup? Looks delicious.’

Marianna looked down at what appeared to be a bowl of clear chicken soup. She lifted up the spoon. For a worrying moment, Kell wondered if she was going to offer him a taste.

‘Yes, soup. I am very sorry about Nico.’

Kell played dumb with the name. ‘Nico?’

‘My boss …’

‘Oh. Him. Yes, that was frustrating.’

She appeared to have run out of things to say. Kell looked ahead towards the door of the bathroom.

‘Sorry,’ she said, taking the cue. ‘I didn’t mean to stop you.’

‘No, no,’ Kell replied. ‘It’s really nice to see you. I enjoyed meeting you this morning.’ Marianna appeared not to know how to react to the compliment. Her hand moved towards her face and the tips of her fingers brushed her eyebrows. Kell hooked the ensuing silence with an appropriate amount of bait. ‘I was just frustrated. It would have been useful to find out why Mr Wallinger had your number.’

Marianna looked as though she was in possession of the answer to Mr Hardwick’s simple question.

‘Yes,’ she replied, her hand reaching for the spine of the book, as though to reassure herself about something. The flush had gone from her cheeks, and she looked eager to continue the conversation. ‘Nico can be difficult in the mornings.’

Kell nodded, allowing another brief silence to envelop them. Marianna shot a nervous glance towards the bar.

‘Where are my manners?’ she said. ‘You are a guest in Chios. Would you like to eat at my table? I can’t leave you on your own.’

‘Are you sure?’ Kell felt the small but unmistakable buzz of a successfully executed plan.

‘Of course!’ Marianna’s natural bustle and bonhomie was suddenly in full flood. She looked buoyant. ‘I can tell the waitress to bring your food to my table. That is, if you’d like me to?’

‘I would like that very much.’

After that, it was easy. Kell hadn’t recruited an unconscious asset for over a year, but the tricks of the trade, the grammar of a successful pitch, were second nature to him. ‘If you’re doing it properly,’ the same instructor at the Fort had told the same 1994 class, ‘a recruitment shouldn’t feel cynical or manipulative. It should feel as though both parties want the same outcome. It should feel as though the prospective agent requires something from you, and that you can meet that requirement.’

And so it was that Kell discovered the limits of Marianna Dimitriadis’s loyalty to Nicolas Delfas.

From the outset, he avoided talking about Wallinger. Instead, Kell concentrated on finding out as much about Marianna as possible. By the time they were eating dessert – a rice pudding flavoured with lemon – he knew where she had been born, how many brothers and sisters she had, where those siblings lived, the names of her best friends, how she had come to work at Villas Angelis, why she had remained on Chios (rather than pursue a career in Thessaloniki in public relations), as well as the identity of her last boyfriend, a German tourist who had lived with her for six months before returning to his wife in Munich. In her natural warmth and good cheer, Kell detected the loneliness of the maiden aunt, the romantic and social frustration of the lifelong spinster. He rarely shifted his gaze from Marianna’s lively and melancholy eyes. He smiled when she did; he listened as carefully and as intelligently as she required. He was certain that, by the time it came to settle the bill, she would agree to the simple task that he was about to set her.

‘I’ve got a problem,’ he said.

‘You do?’

‘If I can’t find out why Paul Wallinger used the number of your office on his flight plan, my boss is going to go crazy. He’ll have to send somebody else out to Chios, I’ll get the blame, the whole thing will take weeks and cost a fortune.’

‘I see.’

‘Forgive me for saying this, Marianna, but I felt like Nico was hiding something from me. Was that the case?’ His companion’s eyes dropped to the table. Marianna began to shake her head but Kell could see that she was smiling to herself. ‘I don’t mean to pry,’ he added.

‘You’re not prying,’ she replied instantly. She looked up and gazed into his eyes, a look of yearning with which he had become familiar throughout the meal.

‘What was it then?’

‘Nico is not very …’ She searched for the correct adjective ‘… kind.’ It was not the word that Kell had been expecting, but he was glad of it. ‘He does not like to help people unless they can help him. He does not like to involve himself in anything … complex.’

Kell nodded in appreciation of Marianna’s stark analysis of character. The waitress passed their table and Kell took the opportunity to order an espresso.

‘How would it be complex?’ he asked. ‘Was he involved in business with Mr Wallinger?’

A burst of laughter and a beaming smile told Kell that this was not the case. Marianna shook her head.

‘Oh no. There was nothing wrong in their relationship.’ She glanced out of the window. A ferry was easing into the harbour, passengers on the bow waving at the mainland. ‘He just decided not to help you.’ Marianna could see that Mr Hardwick was affronted by Delfas’s belligerence. ‘Do not take it personally,’ she said, and for a moment Kell thought that she was going to reach for his hand. ‘He is like this with everyone. I am not like that. Most Greek people are not like that.’

‘Of course.’

The moment had arrived. Kell felt the bulge of €500 in his wallet, money that he had been ready to offer Marianna in exchange for her cooperation. He had laid a private bet with himself that he would not need it.

‘Would you be willing to help me?’ he asked.

‘In what way?’ Marianna was blushing again.

‘Can you tell me what Nico wasn’t prepared to say? It would save me a lot of trouble.’

If Marianna experienced a moment of ethical conflict over the matter, it passed in no more than a second. With a matter-of-fact sigh, her loyalty to her boss was shaken off like a passing fad.

‘From my memory,’ she said, taking Kell into her immediate confidence, ‘Mr Wallinger was staying in one of our villas. For a week.’

‘Then why didn’t Nico tell me that?’

She shrugged. It seemed that they were both at the mercy of a stubborn and irascible man. ‘He came into the office to collect the keys.’

Kell buried his surprise. The news of the sighting was like a vision of Wallinger coming back from the dead.

‘You met him?’

‘Yes. He was very nice, a quiet man, quite serious.’ Marianna hesitated, taking a risk with Mr Hardwick’s ego. ‘I thought he was very tall – and extremely handsome!’

Kell smiled. That sounded like Paul.

‘So he was on his own?’

‘Yes. Although I saw him later that day. With somebody else.’

‘Oh. Who was that?’ Kell was about to say: ‘A woman?’ when he checked himself. ‘Another tourist?’

‘A man,’ Marianna replied, matter-of-factly. Kell wondered if her memory was playing tricks on her. It was not the answer he had been expecting. ‘I walked past their table,’ she said. ‘One of the cafés near my office.’

Kell found that he was turning Amelia’s words over in his mind. Tread carefully around the Yanks. Tricky out there at the moment.

‘This man. Was he American by any chance?’

Kell was concerned that he was asking too many questions. He was relying on the atmosphere of broad agreement which had grown up between the two of them, a relaxed complicity.

‘I don’t know,’ Marianna replied. ‘I never saw him again.’

‘Was he as handsome as Mr Wallinger?’

Kell put a grin on the question, trawling for a description in a way that he hoped would not raise Marianna’s suspicions.

‘Oh no!’ she said, obliging him. ‘He was younger, but he had a beard, and I don’t like beards. I think the villa was rented by a woman. In fact, I am sure of that, because I spoke with her on the telephone.’

This was the name Kell needed. Find the woman and he could find the man. He was sure of it.

‘I don’t want to get you into trouble,’ he said, suggesting quite the opposite with his eyes.

‘What do you mean?’

‘All I would need is a copy of the rental agreement. If there’s nothing sinister or illegal going on, it would really save me a lot of …’

Marianna did not even bother to hear him out. They were friends now – perhaps more than that. Mr Hardwick had successfully earned her trust. She leaned forward and at last touched the top of his wrist. Kell heard the buzz of a moped as it tore along the port, the crack of seagulls circling above the restaurant.

‘No problem,’ she said. ‘Where are you staying? How would be the best way of sending it? I could fax?’

Three hours later, lying on his bed, almost halfway through My Name Is Red, Kell heard a knock at the door of his hotel room. He opened it to find the same receptionist who had assisted him with the recorded message the previous evening. She was holding up a piece of paper.

‘Fax.’

Kell tipped her five euros and went back into the room. Marianna had sent through the rental agreement, as well as a short handwritten note scribbled at the top of the page: Great to meet you! Hope to see you again! The document was dual-language, so Kell was able to see that the villa in question had been rented, at a cost of €2500, for the seven days prior to the crash. There was no sign of Wallinger’s name on the document, only the signature and date of birth of a woman who had given a Hungarian passport and cell phone number for ID. Seeing her handwriting, Kell felt the mystery of Rachel’s note opening in front of him like a blooming flower. Checking the camera roll on his iPhone, he saw that there was a clear match with the signature on the rental agreement.

He was on the phone to Tamas Metka within minutes.

‘Tom!’ he exclaimed. ‘Tell me. Why am I so popular all of a sudden?’

‘I need a profile on somebody. Hungarian passport holder.’

‘Is he the poet?’

Kell laughed. ‘Not he. She. Our usual arrangement?’

‘Sure. The name?’

‘Sandor,’ Kell replied, reaching for a packet of cigarettes. ‘Cecilia Sandor.’

11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She could still recite parts of the letter from memory:

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

I cannot wait to see you, my darling.

I love you

P x

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

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

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

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

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

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

12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But you’re followed?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Any particular reason for that?’

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

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

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

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

‘Rachel came here?’

Tremayne nodded. ‘Only once, I think.’

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

‘Is that the new one?’ Tremayne asked.

‘I’ve no idea.’ Kell put the iPhone back in his pocket. ‘Tell me what Paul was working on when he died. Amelia said you’d be able to bring me up to speed.’

A change of gear and Tremayne crawled towards a red light.

‘I suppose you’ve heard about the Armenian fiasco?’

It was a reminder to Kell that he had been out of the loop for too long. Whatever operation Tremayne was referring to had not even been mentioned by Amelia in Cartmel.

‘Assume that I’m starting at zero, Doug. The decision to send me here was only taken two days ago.’

The traffic light began to flash. Tremayne moved off in bunched suburban traffic, passing beneath a giant billboard of José Mourinho advertising what appeared to be contents insurance.

‘I see,’ he said, plainly surprised by Kell’s ignorance. ‘Well, best described as a bloody farce. Eight-month joint operation with the Cousins to bring a high-ranking Iranian military official across the border. Everything going like clockwork from Tehran, he gets as far as the frontier with his courier, Paul and his opposite number in the CIA about to pop the champagne and then – bang!’

‘Bang?’

‘Car bomb. Asset and courier both killed instantly. Paul apparently had the whites of his eyes, the Cousin bloody waved at him. It’s all in a report you’ll read tomorrow.’ Tremayne overtook a truck belching fumes into the Ankaran evening and changed into a lower gear. ‘Amelia didn’t tell you?’

Kell shook his head. No, Amelia didn’t tell me. And why was that? To save face, or because there was more to the story than a simple botched joint op?

‘The bomb was planted by the Iranians?’

‘We assume so. Remote controlled, almost certainly. For obvious reasons we weren’t able to get a look at the wreckage. It’s as though we were allowed to glimpse our prize, and then that prize was snatched from his grasp. A very deliberate snub, a power play. Tehran must have known about HITCHCOCK all along.’

‘HITCHCOCK was the cryptonym?’

‘Real name Sadeq Mirzai.’

Again, Kell wondered why Amelia had not told him about the bomb. Had the operation been spoken of at the funeral? Were there half a dozen conversations in the barn about HITCHCOCK to which he had not been privy? He felt the familiar, numb anger of his long exclusion from privileged information.

‘What’s the American line on what happened?’

Tremayne shrugged. He was of the view that the post-9/11 Cousins were a law unto themselves, best treated with deference, but kept at arm’s length as much as possible. ‘You’re meeting them on Monday,’ he said. There was a note-change in Tremayne’s voice, as if he was about to apologize for letting Kell down. ‘Tom, there’s something I need to discuss with you.’

‘Go on.’

‘The CIA Head of Station here. I assume you’ve been told?’

‘Been told what?’

Tremayne stretched the muscles in his neck, releasing another puff of aftershave into the car. ‘Tom, I’ve been made aware of your situation. I’ve known about it for some time.’ Tremayne was referring to Witness X. It sounded as though he wanted Kell’s gratitude for remaining circumspect. ‘For what it’s worth, I think you were strung up.’

‘For what it’s worth, I think I was too.’

‘Hung out to dry to protect HMG. Made a scapegoat for the numberless failings of our superiors.’

‘And inferiors,’ Kell added, squeezing the cigarette out of the gap in the window. In that moment, passing a group of men standing idly beside the road, he knew exactly what Tremayne was about to tell him. He was back in the room with Yassin Gharani, back in Kabul in 2004, with a pumped-up CIA officer throwing punches in the face of a brain-washed jihadi.

‘Jim Chater is in town.’

Chater was the man whose reputation and good name Kell had protected at the expense of his own career. That naïvety, in itself, had been a principal component of his anger in the past two years, not least because he had never received adequate thanks for suppressing what he knew about the worst aspects of Chater’s conduct. Gharani had been beaten senseless. Gharani had been waterboarded. For his uncommitted sins he had then been dispatched to a black site in Cairo and – when the Egyptians were done with him – to Cuba and the prolonged humiliations of Guantanamo. And Chater was now the man with whom Kell would have to discuss the death of Paul Wallinger.

Kell turned to Tremayne, wondering why ‘C’ hadn’t warned him. Amelia had placed her own needs – her desire for her affair with Paul never to become public knowledge – above the good sense of putting Kell into an environment in which he would clash with one of the men he held responsible for terminating his career. Perhaps she had seen a benefit in that. As Tremayne, in an effort to locate Kell’s hotel, began taking directions from a Turkish sat-nav, Kell reflected that Chater was a rogue element, a running sore in the otherwise cordial relationship between the two services. However, Amelia had presented him with an opportunity, a chance for explanations, for closure. Something cold stirred inside Kell, a dormant ruthlessness. The chance to do business with Jim Chater in Turkey was also the chance to exact a measure of revenge.

13

Massoud Moghaddam, a lecturer in chemistry at Sharif University, a commercial director with responsibility for procurement at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant near Isfahan, and a CIA asset recruited by Jim Chater in 2009, known to Langley by the cryptonym EINSTEIN, woke as usual shortly before dawn.

His routine did not vary from morning to morning. He left his wife sleeping, showered and brushed his teeth, then prayed in the living room of his two-bedroom apartment in northern Tehran. By seven, his six-year-old son, Hooman, and eight-year-old daughter, Shirin, were both awake. Narges, his wife, had washed and was preparing breakfast in the kitchen. The children were now old enough to dress themselves, but young enough still to make an apocalyptic mess at the table whenever the family sat together for a meal. At breakfast time, Massoud and Narges usually ate lavash bread with feta cheese and honey; the children preferred their bread with chocolate spread or fig jam, most of which ended up in crumbs and splatters on the floor. While Mummy and Daddy drank tea, Hooman and Shirin gorged on orange juice and made jokes about their friends. By eight, it was time for the children to leave for school. Their mother almost always walked them to the gates, leaving Massoud alone in the apartment.

Dr Moghaddam wore the same outfit to work every day. Black leather shoes, black flannel trousers, a plain white shirt and a dark grey jacket. In the winter he added a V-neck pullover. He wore a cotton vest under his shirt and rarely, if ever, removed the silver necklace given to him by his sister, Pegah, when she had moved to Frankfurt with her German husband in 1998. Most mornings, to avoid the rush-hour traffic that blighted Tehran, Massoud would ride the subway to Sharif or Ostad Moin. On this particular day, however, he had an evening appointment in Pardis, and would need the car to drive back into the city after supper.

Massoud drove a white Peugeot 205 that he kept in the car park beneath his apartment building. He would joke to Narges that the only time he was ever able to accelerate beyond twenty miles an hour in Tehran was on the ramp leading out of the car park. Thereafter, like every other commuter heading south on Chamran and Fazlolah Nouri, he was stuck in a permanent, hour-long crawl of traffic. The Peugeot was not air-conditioned, so he was obliged to drive with all four windows down, allowing every molecule of air pollution and every decibel of noise to accompany him on his journey.

On certain mornings, Massoud would listen to the news on the radio, and to intermittent traffic reports, but he had recently concluded that each of these was as pointless as the next; there were now so many subway construction sites in Tehran, and the city so overwhelmed by traffic, that the only solution was to drive as assertively as possible along the shortest geographical route. Come off any of the main arteries, however, and he ran the risk of being redirected by traffic police, or stopping altogether behind a broken-down truck. Today, with smog shrouding the Alborz mountains, Massoud eased his irritation by plugging an MP3 player into the stereo and clicking to The Well-Tempered Clavier. Though certain notes and phrases were hard to detect against the noise of the highway, he knew the music intimately and always found that Bach helped to ease the stress of a hot summer morning in near-permanent four-lane gridlock.

After almost an hour, he was at last able to loop down from Fazlolah Nouri on to Yadegar-e-Emam. Massoud was now within a few hundred metres of the University car park, although there were still two sets of traffic lights to negotiate. It was fiercely hot, and his shirt was soaked with sweat. As he came to a halt, a pedestrian walked past the driver’s window, the smoke from his mint cigarette drifting into the car, a smell that reminded Massoud of his father. Up ahead, he could see yet another traffic cop directing yet another group of jousting cars. All around him, the ceaseless, Bach-drowning cacophony of horns and bikes and engines.

Massoud glanced in his opposite wing-mirror, preparing to push into the outer lane so that he could later make the turn on to Homayunshahr. A motorbike was snaking through a gap in traffic, about two metres from the Peugeot. If Massoud pushed out, there was a chance he would knock the bike over. Looking again in the mirror, he saw that there was a helmeted passenger riding pillion behind the driver. Best to let them past.

The motorbike did so, but drew up alongside the Peugeot. To Massoud’s surprise, the driver applied the brakes and stopped. There was space in front of him in which to move, yet he had come to a halt. The driver bent forward and seemed to look at Massoud through a black visor that threw sunlight into the car. Massoud heard a muffled word spoken under the helmet – not Persian – but lost his concentration when the lights turned green and he was obliged to engage first gear and shunt towards the turning.

It was only when he sensed a weight magnetizing to the rear door, pulling down on the Peugeot’s suspension like a flat tyre, that Massoud realized what had happened and was seized by black panic. The bike was gone, swerving directly in front of the car, then angling back in a fast U-turn into the river of traffic moving on the opposite side. In desperation, Massoud reached for his seat belt, the engine still running, and pulled the belt across his chest as he tried to open the door.

Witnesses to the explosion later reported that Dr Massoud Moghaddam had one foot on the road when the blast shaped towards him, obliterating the front section of the Peugeot 205 but leaving the engine almost intact. Four passers-by were injured, including a customer emerging from a nearby café. A nineteen-year-old man on a bicycle was also killed in the attack.

14

Kell spent the next two days, from half-past eight in the morning to ten o’clock at night, in Wallinger’s office on the top floor of the British Embassy. SIS Station was reached through a series of security doors activated by a swipe card and a five-digit pin. The last of the doors, leading from the Chancery section into the Station itself, was almost a metre thick, heavy as a motorcycle and watched over by a CCTV camera linked to Vauxhall Cross. Kell was required to open a combination lock and turn two handles simultaneously before pulling the door towards him on a slow hinge. He joked to one of the secretaries that it was the first exercise he had taken in almost a year. She did not laugh.

In accordance with Station protocols the world over, Wallinger’s computer hard drive had been placed inside the Strong Box prior to his departure for Greece. On the first morning, Kell asked one of the assistants to remove it and to reboot the computer while he made a brief mental inventory of the personal items in Wallinger’s office. There were three photographs of Josephine on the walls. In one, she was standing in a damp English field with her arms around Andrew and Rachel. All three were wearing outdoor coats and smiling broadly beneath hoods and caps – a happy family portrait. On Wallinger’s desk there was a further framed picture of Andrew wearing his Eton morning suit, but no photograph of Rachel from her own schooldays. The Daily Telegraph obituary of Wallinger’s father, who had served in the SOE, was framed and hung on the far wall of the office beside another large picture of Andrew rowing in an eight at Cambridge. Again, there was no comparable photograph of Rachel, not even of her graduation day at Oxford. Kell did not know a great deal about Wallinger’s children, but suspected that Paul would have enjoyed a closer and perhaps less complicated relationship with his son, largely because of the broad streak of unemotional machismo in his character. There was very little else of a personal nature in the room, only an Omega watch in one of the desk drawers and a scuffed signet ring, which Kell could not recall ever having seen on Wallinger’s hand. Finding the largest desk drawer locked, he had asked for it to be opened, but found only painkillers and vitamin pills in half-finished packets, as well as a handwritten love letter from Josephine, dated shortly after their wedding, which Kell stopped reading after the first line out of respect for her privacy.

The hard drive gave him access to the SIS telegrams that Wallinger had sent and received in the previous thirteen months, copies of which were also being read by one of Amelia’s assistants in London. Wallinger’s internal communications within the Station, and to the wider Embassy staff, had not been automatically copied to Vauxhall Cross, but Kell found nothing in the intranet messages to the Ambassador or First Secretary which appeared out of the ordinary. Amelia had gone over the heads of SIS vetting to ensure that Kell was given immediate DV clearance to read anything in Turkey that might help him to piece together Wallinger’s state of mind, as well as his movements, in the weeks leading up to his death. He was permitted to read four ‘Eyes-Only’ telegrams on Iranian centrifuges that had been seen only by H/Istanbul, Amelia, the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister. The classified internal report into the failed defection of Sadeq Mirzai had been copied to Jim Chater, who had added his own remarks in anticipation of a similar CIA report into the incident. Kell could find nothing in the manner in which the recruitment of Mirzai had been handled, nor in the planning and execution of the operation, that seemed problematic or misjudged. As Tremayne had suggested, the Iranians must have been alerted to the defection, likely because of an error in Mirzai’s tradecraft. Only by talking to Chater face-to-face would Kell be able to get a fuller picture.

On his third afternoon in Ankara, Kell took a taxi to Wallinger’s suburban villa in Incek, a property owned by the Foreign Office and occupied by successive Heads of Station for most of the previous two decades. Turning the key in the front door, Kell reflected that he had searched many homes, many hotel rooms, many offices in his career, but had only had cause to snoop on a friend once before – when searching for Amelia two years earlier. It was one of the healthier house rules at SIS and MI5: staff were required to sign a document pledging not to investigate the behaviour of friends or relatives on Service computers. Those caught doing so – running background checks on a new girlfriend, for example, or looking for personal information about a colleague – would quickly be shown the door.

The villa was starkly furnished in the modern Turkish style with very little of Wallinger’s taste apparent in the décor. Kell suspected that his yali in Istanbul would be quite different in atmosphere: more cluttered, more scholarly. It appeared as though a cleaner had recently been to the property, because the kitchen surfaces were as polished as a showroom, the toilets blue with detergent, the beds made, the rugs straightened, not a speck of dust on any shelf or table. In the cupboards, Kell found only what he would have expected to find: clothes and shoes and boxes; in the bathroom, toiletries, towels and a dressing-gown. Beside Wallinger’s bed there was a biography of Lyndon Johnson; beneath the television downstairs, box sets of all five series of The Wire. The villa, as soulless as a serviced apartment, revealed very little about the personality of the occupant. Even Wallinger’s study had a feeling of impermanence: a single photograph of Josephine on the desk, another of Andrew and Rachel as children hanging on the wall. There were various magazines, Turkish and English, paperback thrillers on a shelf, a reproduction poster of the 1974 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. Kell read through a few scribbled notes in a foolscap pad, found an out-of-date diary in the desk, but no hidden documents, no letters concealed behind pictures, no false passports or suicide note. Wallinger had kept a tennis racket and a set of golf clubs in a cupboard under the stairs. Feeling somewhat foolish, Kell checked for a hidden compartment in the handle of the racket and for a false bottom in the golf bag. He discovered nothing but some old tees and two hardened sticks of prehistoric chewing gum. It was the same story upstairs. Checking behind drawers, unscrewing lampshades, looking under cupboards – Wallinger had hidden nothing in the house. Kell moved from room to room, listening to the intermittent sounds of birdsong and passing cars in the suburban street outside, and concluded that there was nothing to find. Tremayne had been right – Wallinger’s heart had been in Istanbul.

Kell was in a bathroom adjacent to the smaller of two spare bedrooms when he heard the front door opening and then slamming shut. The sound of a set of keys falling on to the surface of a glass table. Not an intruder; it had to be someone who had legitimate access to the villa. A cleaner? The landlord?

Kell left the bathroom and walked out on to the landing. He called out: ‘Merhaba?’

No reply. Kell began to walk downstairs, calling out a second time: ‘Merhaba? Hello?’

He could see down into the hall. A faint shadow moved across the polished floor. Whoever had come in was now in Wallinger’s office. As he reached the mid-point of the stairs, Kell heard a reply in a sing-song accent he recognized instantly.

‘Hello? Somebody is there, please?’

A woman came out of the office. She was wearing blue leggings and a black leather jacket and her hair was grown out and tied at the back. Kell hadn’t seen her since the operation to save François Malot, in which she had played such a crucial role. When she saw him, her face broke into a wide smile and she swore excitedly in Italian.

‘Minchia!’

‘Elsa,’ Kell said. ‘I wondered when I’d run into you.’

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