A Colder War

22

Kell reacted quickly, a rapid improvisation.

‘That’s odd. I had a meeting with someone who was going to the same party. Kleckner. He works at the Consulate here, right?’

‘Right,’ Rachel replied.

‘I think somebody caught someone’s eye,’ Josephine added, shooting Rachel an arch look. In that moment Kell realized that Kleckner had asked Rachel as his date.

‘Mum, I met him for five minutes at the wake. He knew I was coming out to Istanbul. He just very sweetly invited me to his party.’

‘Is it a big thing? A dinner?’ Kell’s voice was steady but he was aware of trying to make himself feel less physically tense. If the party was an intimate dinner for a dozen of Kleckner’s closest friends, he had no chance of crashing; if most of ex-pat Istanbul was invited, he could tag along.

‘Some bar. Bleu. Have you heard of it?’

Amelia obviously hadn’t, but she said: ‘Yes’ because she knew what Kell was trying to do. He wanted to get into Kleckner’s circle, wanted to have a chance to go eye-to-eye with his target.

‘I’m not sure I want to go on my own,’ she said. ‘I won’t know anyone.’

Josephine began to speak. ‘Then just stay here with—’

Amelia did not allow her to finish. ‘Take Tom,’ she said, throwing out the idea as casually as Kell had tossed his cigarette into the Bosporus. ‘He’s always complaining that he’s too old for nightclubs but too young to stay at home.’

Rachel seemed to enjoy that line. ‘Are you always complaining about that?’ she asked, with a knowing tilt of the head.

Kell muttered, ‘I’ve never said that in my life’, while all three women grinned at him.

Rachel enjoyed the sight of his momentary discomfort and took up Amelia’s suggestion. ‘Come with me then,’ she said. ‘It’ll be fun. You can be my chaperone.’

Chaperone, Kell thought two hours later as he stared into the steamed-up mirror of his hotel bathroom, wiping away the condensation to reveal a face smothered in shaving foam, his hair wet from the shower. Chaperone. He opened the bathroom door and shaved as the steam slowly cleared. He thought of the line in Moonraker about Bond’s reluctance to shave twice in the same day and a smile curled in the mirror. Thomas Kell was not a vain man, but he was vain enough to want to look good for Rachel Wallinger. Moving closer to the glass he spotted a single black hair protruding from his left earlobe, two more in his nostrils. He pulled them out, his eyes watering. There was a hairdrier in the wardrobe, but Kell drew the line at that, towelling himself dry and then dressing in jeans, desert boots and a pale blue shirt that had been laundered by the hotel in Ankara.

He had arranged to meet Rachel at the base of the Galata Tower. She was there before he was, pivoting on wedge heels in a belted black dress, a pair of Ray-Bans with powder-blue frames shielding her eyes from the fading evening sun. He kissed her on both cheeks and recognized her perfume, though he could not place it. Perhaps a colleague had worn it at SIS.

‘Did you eat?’ she asked.

Kell had ordered a sandwich on room service and wolfed it after the shower, but said: ‘No,’ because he hoped that Rachel was hungry. He wanted to sit with her for a while, to get to know her, just the two of them.

‘Shall we get something quick?’

‘Good idea.’

They found a small, contemporary place hidden in the warren of bars and restaurants north of the Tower and sat at an angle to one another, eating meze and drinking a bottle of chilled Turkish red. Rachel did not ask any questions about the crash, nor did she seem interested in probing Kell for further information about her father’s career. Instead, they talked about their respective lives in London, Rachel explaining that she was about to start a new job in publishing after working for several years as a documentary filmmaker. Kell made no mention of his suspension from the Service, but sketched out the basic facts of his divorce and his current life in London.

‘Do you get on well with your wife?’ she asked.

‘Broadly speaking.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that we’re still friends, even though each of us feels betrayed by the other.’

‘Then you can’t be friends.’

‘I disagree. It just takes time.’ Rachel produced an inscrutable smile. ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Ever been married?’

Rachel arched her eyebrows, as though Kell was being old-fashioned. ‘Never,’ she said. ‘Don’t imagine I ever will be.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I’ll tell you another time. Right now I’m happier grilling you.’ She looked quickly to one side of the table. ‘Do you miss your wife?’

Kell drew her eyes back to his. ‘I miss her company, of course. She’s a fantastic person. We spent most of our adult lives together.’ He placed a packet of Karelia Filters on the table, like an opening bid in a game of poker. ‘You could say that there are times when I miss the structure of what we had, the ease of two people who knew each other very well and were comfortable in one another’s company. But I don’t miss the other stuff.’

‘What stuff?’

Kell avoided talk of adultery and rows and opted instead for a subject that he hoped would draw Rachel away from the forensic dissection of his marriage.

‘I wanted to have children. I still want to have children. We weren’t able to do that.’

She looked at him as though he had betrayed Claire. ‘Is that why you left her?’

‘No,’ Kell replied instantly. ‘It was more complicated than that.’

Rachel chose that moment to stand up and to go to the bathroom, leaving Kell alone at the table, half-listening to the conversations of his fellow diners. He had been on only two dates since Claire’s departure for the more fertile slopes of Primrose Hill, on both of which he had gleaned an astonishing amount of personal information from his respective companions, never to see them again. It was one of the anomalies of life on the divorce circuit: everybody had a story to tell, everybody had baggage they were eager to unload. There was precious little privacy, but a refreshing lack of obfuscation. The time for concealment, for presenting a false self, seemed to pass as people crossed the Rubicon of forty. What you saw was, at long last, what you got.

It was the same talking to Rachel, whom Kell might have expected to be more circumspect. Sitting with her was like sitting with the promise of better times ahead. It was an odd thing to articulate to himself, but he felt something of his old strength returning, as though he was being shown the best of a world of which he had grown tired. Rachel was provocative and honest, she was beautiful to look at, she made him feel alive and enthused. It was an effort, in fact, to conceal from her the extent to which he was already bewitched.

Bar Bleu was a five-minute walk downhill along a street that smelled of sewage, where cats nipped in and out of rusted scaffolding pipes and a moped screamed in high gear, struggling with the slope. At one point, walking along cobbles ruptured by years of Istanbul traffic, Rachel stumbled under the weak street lights and Kell reached quickly across to prevent her tripping over. The moment passed in an instant, but it was like an old-fashioned test of chivalry that he had passed with ease.

‘Quick reactions,’ she said, briefly touching the top of his hand as Kell released her arm. The tips of her fingers were soft and cold in the night. He felt the scratch of one of her rings against his wrist.

‘The training kicked in,’ he joked. ‘My world is a jungle of threats.’

Rachel laughed and they smoked a cigarette on the final stages of the walk, arriving at the entrance of Bar Bleu at the same time as a pimped four-by-four with tinted windows and an inevitably personalized number plate. The doors opened and two expensively maintained, stilettoed Turkish girls emerged from the back, followed by gelled boyfriends in designer shirts. A valet attendant slipped into the driver’s seat and the traffic that had bunched up behind it on the narrow street was allowed to pass.

‘Brave new world,’ Kell muttered.

A black-jacketed bouncer gave Kell the up-and-down and nodded him towards a clipboard-wielding hostess. Under the heading ‘Ryan K. Birthday’, Kell could see the words ‘Rachel Wallinger + 1’. An overweight Indian man with a shaved head and a ten-thousand-dollar wristwatch was jammed in against a wall.

‘Who were you meant to come with?’ Kell shouted as they pushed through the crush of drinkers at the front of the bar. The temperature had gone up by ten degrees.

‘You,’ she replied. ‘I texted Ryan to tell him I was bringing someone. He said he’d heard of you.’

Kell had worked with countless CIA officers over a period of twenty years. Jim Chater was the ranking American spy in the region. The name Thomas Kell was probably as well known at Langley as it was in the corridors of Vauxhall Cross. He concluded that there was no darker implication to Kleckner’s remark.

‘What does he look like?’ he asked Rachel as a waitress angled past carrying a tray of cocktails above her head. Kell leaned back in a rope-a-dope, allowing the tray to pass close to his head.

‘Can’t really remember,’ Rachel replied, shouting now because the music in the bar — Kell knew it was Beyoncé, but couldn’t name the track — was apocalyptically loud.

‘Rachel!’

And there he was. Ryan Kleckner. A worked-out, tanned, good-looking American with teeth that glowed slightly blue under the bright lights of the bar. Kleckner was wearing jeans and a crisp white shirt, unbuttoned sufficiently to reveal a loose nest of chest hair, and appeared to be the lodestone around which dozens of party girls and Eurotrash lotharios were orbiting in a frenzy of coke and tequila. Rachel was in his arms as Kleckner kissed both her cheeks. He locked on to Kleckner’s eyes and smiled broadly as Rachel introduced them.

‘Tom! Wow, hi, thanks for coming.’ He was nodding, smiling, enveloping Kell in goodwill. ‘Honoured that you’re here. Know a lot about you.’

This almost an aside, a remark to exclude Rachel, as though Kleckner was paying private tribute, spy to spy. Rachel, meanwhile, was shuffling around in her handbag, saying, ‘I bought you something, a present,’ as another waiter twisted past with a tray of cocktails.

‘What is it?’ Kleckner asked, taking what looked like a paperback book that Rachel had wrapped in red paper. There was a birthday card stuck to the top of the package.

‘Open it,’ she said, shouting over the music. Kell was hot. He wanted a drink. He craved another cigarette but it was a three-day voyage back to the entrance through the drinkers and partygoers standing four-deep at the bar.

Kleckner opened the card first. From what Kell could ascertain, it was a Larson cartoon. The American took a moment to stare at it, then burst into laughter. Kell didn’t ask to take a look. The paperback was a copy of Hitch 22, the memoirs of the late British journalist Christopher Hitchens. Kleckner appeared to swallow some measure of disappointment. A flicker of irritation passed across his face, like a software glitch, before he found the words to thank Rachel.

‘This is the God Delusion guy, right?’ Kleckner glanced again at the cover. Kell reckoned it was ten to one the American was a practising believer. ‘Journalist who backed the US on Saddam?’

‘That’s right!’ Rachel was shouting. ‘But not The God Delusion. God Is Not Great. Sort of the same thing.’

Kleckner did not respond. He looked as though he wanted to set the present to one side, as an error of judgment by the pretty British girl, and to continue enjoying his evening. Rachel appeared to sense this and, as a tall, red-headed woman tapped Kleckner on the shoulder, shared a look with Kell, relaxing her mouth into a mock frown.

‘Clearly not a fan of the Hitch,’ she said.

‘Clearly,’ Kell replied. ‘I’ll get us a drink.’

That turned out to be a promise that was hard to keep. For all of twenty minutes, Kell queued at the bar, jostled and squeezed on all sides by a dozen men trying to catch the eye of the bartenders, all of them soaked in sweat and aftershave. When, finally, he had paid for two caipirinhas and ferried them back, Kell found Rachel tucked in a corner sofa talking to Kleckner and a second, unidentified man who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a silver chain necklace. There was a large ice bucket on a table in front of them, two Laurent Perriers and a bottle of designer vodka nestled among the glittering cubes.

‘You should have had a glass of champagne,’ Kleckner shouted, placing a sturdy and welcoming hand on Kell’s shoulder as he stooped to sit with them. The second man, bald and squat as Bob Hoskins, introduced himself as ‘Taylor, colleague of Ryan’s’. Kell filed the name away for his ten o’clock. Taylor said: ‘We were just talking about Erdoğan.’

The conversation allowed Kell the chance to take Kleckner’s political temperature, though he never strayed far from established State Department lines. Erdoğan, in Kleckner’s view, ‘wants his head on coins, his face on banknotes. Guy wants streets named after him, to out-Atatürk Atatürk.’ This was not exactly news; indeed, it was a view shared by Kell and most of his former colleagues at SIS. Kell felt that Rachel made the most interesting contribution to the conversation.

‘Don’t you think the Atatürk cult is sort of fatal to Turkey?’ she said, looking to Taylor first, her eyes level with his sweat-soaked shirt. ‘I think it stops them moving forward, thinking in fresh ways. He’s held in such reverence, and on the one hand that’s a wonderful thing, because he’s a sort of Mandela figure here, the spiritual leader of the nation. But it’s maybe time to move on? They can’t seem to move out from behind the shadow of this immense father figure. They’re like children in that sense.’

Taylor was closer in age to Kell and observably flattened by champagne and vodka. His washed-out eyes stared at Rachel’s, trying, without evident success, to engage his brain sufficiently to respond to what she had said. Kleckner, who had been drinking at twice Taylor’s rate, had no such problem.

‘I know what you mean,’ he said, with a self-assurance that was almost patronizing. ‘Like a kind of North Korean brainwashing. They’re comforted by him. They worship him. They walk into a post office and his picture is on the wall. Nobody wants to betray that legacy. Nobody wants to question it or criticize him and maybe then move up to the next gear.’

‘Except fuckin’ Erdoğan,’ Taylor muttered, slugging another mouthful of Laurent Perrier. He twisted his neck in the direction of the toilets, as though weighing up the tactical and strategic consequences of making a break for the bathroom. There were heavy crowds between the sofa and the doors. He appeared to decide against it and swivelled back to make beady eye contact with Kell. ‘What about you, Tom?’

‘We’re all defined and held back by national myths,’ Kell replied. Ordinarily he would have ducked the question, but the competitor in him wanted to outgun Kleckner. ‘The Russians have the Rodina. Everything flows from that concept. The Motherland, a near-masochistic willingness to subordinate to a strong leader.’

‘Yeah, talk about not being able to fucking move on,’ Taylor muttered. ‘Talk about sabotaging your own future.’

Rachel smiled as Kell pressed ahead. ‘And the Americans have it, too. Land of the free. Home of the brave. The right to bear arms. Question those principles too strongly and you’ll be run out of town as a socialist.’

‘You got a problem with those principles, Tom?’ Rachel asked. Kell relished her archness, but noticed that Kleckner was looking at both of them very intently.

‘Not at all. Why would I have a problem with freedom? Or bravery?’ Taylor screwed his face up and shook his head, seeking solace in another mouthful of champagne. ‘I’m just trying to make the point that if a politician, in the American context, strays too far from the rights of the individual, if he or she appears to promote an idea of collective, rather than personal responsibility, then they’re going to get hammered in the newspapers and hammered at the polls.’

For a moment, it felt as though Kleckner was going to respond, but the American kept his counsel. Perhaps it was all getting a bit serious for a twenty-ninth birthday party. Jay-Z had started singing ‘Empire State of Mind’ and a tanned blonde in a micro mini had appeared at Kleckner’s side. Taylor finally made a move to the bathroom, allowing the girl to slip into his seat while keeping her hand firmly on Kleckner’s thigh. She whispered something in his ear, shooting Rachel a quick look of search and threat. Kell couldn’t tell if they were more than friends. More likely the blonde was just another Istanbul party girl who liked to drape herself around handsome American diplomats.

‘Another drink?’ he asked Rachel, who looked as though she was regretting coming to the party.

‘Sure,’ she replied, with a soft glance.

Kell stood up and moved through the crowds to the bar. What to make of Kleckner? Kell remembered the line in Macbeth: ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.’ Kleckner looked like a believer. If not a patriot, exactly, then certainly a young man possessed of a certain idealistic zeal. At that age, everybody wanted to make a difference. Would it matter to Ryan Kleckner how he made that difference, or would it simply be a question of influence for its own sake? Could such a person be selling Western secrets to Moscow, to Iran, to Beijing? Of course.

Kell looked back in the direction of the sofa. He saw Kleckner’s gaze fastened on to Rachel’s, attentive and solicitous, the micro-mini blonde edged out by their body language, looking every bit the unwelcome guest as she perched on Taylor’s chair. Kell suddenly regretted sounding off about national myths. He regretted leaving to buy another round of drinks. He felt all of the separateness and the weight of his age in this place filled with youth and music and beauty. Too old for nightclubs, too young to stay at home.

A space opened up at the bar. Kell angled into it, lodging a territorial elbow on the counter, but felt the pulse of his phone vibrating in his back pocket. He reached for it and answered a blocked call.

‘Tom? It’s Adam Haydock.’

Kell could barely hear. He shouted at Haydock to wait and abandoned his place at the bar, pushing through the crowds to the exit. ‘Can you hear me now?’

Kell wondered what was so important that it couldn’t wait until morning. ‘Sure,’ he replied.

‘I thought I should tell you …’ There was a conspiratorial edge to Adam’s voice.

‘Tell me what?’

‘Iannis Christidis is dead.’