A Colder War

32

As soon as Lacoste was out of sight, Kell left the shop and limped along the promenade to a small café where he ordered a Coke and a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich. Even ten minutes later he was still physically exhausted and made the latest in a series of private promises to join a gym and do some regular exercise. Having paid his bill he then walked back along the promenade, exaggerating his phantom limp as he passed the Centonove, just in case Cecilia happened to be watching. There was no sign of her, only the bald-headed waiter attending to a rowdy table of six on the terrace.

Kell continued along the path. A group of young boys were splashing in the sea, watched over by an overweight man wearing orange Speedos and a Croatian football shirt, his topless wife asleep beside him. There was a smell of pine and engine oil, a summer sense of nothing much mattering, of people having all the time in the world.

Back in his room, Kell opened the safe. He would text Lacoste’s number to Elsa. Working at her usual pace, it would probably be less than twenty-four hours before she had identified the man, traced his IP address, obtained an itemized copy of his mobile phone bill and accessed his email accounts. If Lacoste was in a relationship with Cecilia — a relationship which she had run in parallel with Wallinger — it would show up on their correspondence like UV dye on a banknote.

Kell tapped in the four-digit code, swung open the door of the safe, and reached for his mobile. Sure enough, a ‘Missed Call’ was registered on the ‘Phone’ icon. He tapped the screen and texted the number to Elsa. His shins and knees still throbbing from the run, Kell went to the beach for a swim before falling asleep in his room to the sound of clacking seagulls and a chambermaid hoovering in the corridor outside.

He woke to an email from Adam Haydock, filed as a CX to Amelia. To his irritation, Kell was copied on the message as ‘Temporary Istanbul’.

It was customary for officers filing CX to offer little interpretation of their own product. That was left to the wonks and analysts in London who would direct the intelligence further upstream until a more senior colleague or minister of sufficient rank and distinction chose to act upon it. Nevertheless, the thrust of Haydock’s report could not have been clearer. As far as he was concerned, there was no evidence of American interference on the island, nor any sense that Christidis had been compromised or manipulated. Haydock knew that ‘C’ was suspicious of the circumstances surrounding Wallinger’s crash and was aware that Kell had his own private suspicions about CIA involvement in the case. Nevertheless, against this background, he had maintained that there was no foul play or coercion involved in the death of Iannis Christidis. It was suicide, pure and simple.

All of which left Kell with a sense that he would never know the truth about the accident. If nobody had tampered with Wallinger’s plane, why had it crashed? He thought of Rachel, of the anger she felt towards her father, of the letter Paul had written to Cecilia, the intensity of his love for a woman who might not have loved him in return. A woman who, while apparently grieving Wallinger’s death, had allowed another man to caress her back, stopping him only when those caresses became too intimate, too public. Had Paul taken his own life because he had discovered that Cecilia was two-timing him? Surely not.

Perhaps there was no mystery at all, no foul play, no conspiracy. Just the random accident of engine failure, bird strike, pilot error. It was one of the lessons Kell had learned many years earlier: there were always operational questions that could not be answered. Questions of motive, of circumstance, of fact. Despite all of the resources at the disposal of SIS, the tenacity and skill of her employees, human behaviour was too unpredictable, the capacity to disguise and dissemble limitless. ‘I just don’t buy the trail of breadcrumbs,’ Amelia had said. But perhaps she wanted to see conspiracy where none existed. God knows, it was a fault of which they had all been guilty, at some point in their careers. Amelia’s desire to explain and rationalize the sudden death of a man she loved had obscured an inconvenient truth: that Paul Wallinger had most probably got into the wrong plane on the wrong afternoon, and fate had taken care of the rest.

Kell stood up, his calves aching. He took a half-litre of water from the mini-bar and drank it down. Dinner was now an hour away and he was aware that he needed to formulate a strategy for meeting Sandor. First, though, he checked his emails. Rachel had been out of touch all afternoon.

He opened his private account and saw that she had replied to an earlier message, saying that she was booked on to a flight back to London in two days’ time.

Am I going to get to see you before I go? Mum’s gone back to London and I’ve got the house to myself … x

The prospect of seeing Rachel again, of spending the night with her at the yali, was intoxicating. He had half a mind to catch the last boat to the mainland, charter a plane out of Dubrovnik and leave Lacoste and Sandor to their fates. Instead, he told her that he would be back within twenty-four hours, then changed into a pair of jeans and a shirt and wrapped his ankle in a pristine white bandage obtained from the concierge. He would need to show some evidence of his injury to Lacoste should they run into one another. Heading downstairs, Kell drank a glass of wine in the bar before walking along the path towards Centonove with the stubborn, possibly foolhardy idea turning in his mind that he would introduce himself to Sandor as a friend of Paul Wallinger’s, then sit back and watch the fireworks.