A Colder War

34

Istanbul was just as Kell had left it: hot and crowded and traffic-stalled, the horizon a smogged screen of tower blocks and minarets. But it was now a different city, a Petri dish in which every movement and idiosyncrasy of Ryan Kleckner’s behaviour was being minutely examined and interpreted by a team of SIS analysts in London and Turkey. As he drove in from Sabiha Gökçen, Kell instructed his taxi driver to take him past Kleckner’s apartment building, where a four-man surveillance team was already on post; a man and a woman in a branch of Starbucks a block from the entrance and two young British Asians in a van parked across the street. Kell was receiving updates on Kleckner’s movements every half-hour.

ABACUS had woken early, been to the gym, returned to his apartment for lunch, and was presently upstairs reading an unidentified paperback book in the kitchen. As Amelia had promised, Kleckner’s residence, his routes to work, his favourite restaurants, his gym and his car had all been decked out with enough cameras and microphones to capture the subject in almost every moment of his waking life. He was followed on to trams, trains and ferries. A Turkish source working inside the American Consulate as a computer technician was even able to provide SIS Station with regular briefings on Kleckner’s work timetable, his moods and routines. If, at any point, a single element of the operation was discovered, SIS could be reassured that they were deniable: Kleckner would simply assume that MIT had put him under surveillance, and most probably report as much to his Station Chief at the CIA.

En route to Dubrovnik airport Kell had spoken to Amelia, who had agreed with Kell’s assessment that Zagreb/3 should handle the fallout from Sandor’s death and spend a week on Lopud crossing Croatian palms with silver. ‘I need you in Turkey,’ she had told him, and Kell had readily agreed.

But he was made to wait before seeing Rachel. Kell had invited himself round for what he euphemistically described as ‘tea at the house’, but she coolly informed him that she was ‘busy until dinner’ and suggested that they meet instead at a fish restaurant in Bebek at nine o’clock. ‘You’ll just have to be patient, Mr Kell …’ she had told him, decorating the text message with kisses. Kell had checked into the Georges Hotel on Serdar-I Ekrem and tried to kill time by reading a novel. He had been reading the same page of the same opening chapter for well over fifteen minutes when Rachel finally put him out of his misery.

Hmmm. Just found a bottle of vodka in the freezer. Two glasses as well. Drink here first before dinner …? xxx

He was at the yali within thirty minutes.

Rachel had left a key under the mat. Kell opened the front door and walked into the house to find the ground floor deserted. There was no sound, save for the lapping of the waves against the shoreline and the rumble of a dishwasher in the kitchen. Kell took off his shoes and socks and left them by the door, the air conditioning cooling his skin as he walked upstairs and stopped at the first-floor landing.

One of the bedroom doors was open. In the reflection of a mirror, Kell could see Rachel lying naked in bed, her head propped up against a scattering of pillows, her beautiful body exposed to him. He took off his shirt and moved towards her. Rachel’s dark eyes tracked him across the room.

They stayed in bed for almost three hours. Only afterwards did Kell realize that they had played out a parallel version of Paul’s letter to Cecilia. He remembered the words almost perfectly: You left keys for me. I let myself in and you were waiting. I don’t think I have ever seen you looking so beautiful. I wanted to take my time. I was craving you. Yet he could not know — and did not ask — if Rachel had been conscious of this.

At dusk they took a bath together before walking north along the western shore of the Bosporus. Rachel had kept the reservation at the restaurant. They ordered meze and grilled sea bass at a candlelit table with views across the water to the Asian side. In the bliss of reunion something palpable had shifted between them. Kell felt entirely at peace. She was all that he wanted. It astonished him how readily, even recklessly, he was prepared to be submerged by his desire for her.

‘There have been so many things I’ve wanted to ask you,’ she said, dipping a hunk of bread into a chalk white bowl of tzatziki. ‘I feel like I know nothing about you. That I did all the talking when we first met. What do you love?’

‘What do I love?’

Kell wondered if anyone had ever cared to ask him such a thing. He obliged her, in a way that he would never ordinarily have revealed himself, and his answers took them off in myriad directions — discussions about malt whisky, about Richard Yates, about cricket and Breaking Bad. Kell knew that she was making a study of him, because it was in his passions that he would be revealed to her. For years it had been in Kell’s interest as a spy to conceal himself; he had remained opaque not only to agents and colleagues, but also to Claire, the woman with whom he had lived most of his adult life. Perhaps he had even been a mystery to himself. With Rachel, however absurd it seemed after so short an acquaintance, Kell felt known. At the same time, he had not felt so unstable, so exposed, so much in the grip of another person, in years. Had Paul felt the same way about Cecilia? Had she snatched his friend’s heart as comprehensively as Rachel was seizing his own? Perhaps they were similar beasts — men who had taken on the IRA and the Taliban, and yet were incapable of controlling something as simple and as straightforward as their own feelings.

‘Tell me about Berlin,’ Rachel said as she poured the last of the wine.

‘I didn’t go to Berlin,’ he said.

Her face remained impassive.

‘Where did you go?’

‘To Lopud.’

Rachel swayed back in her chair, resting her glass so close to the corner of the table that Kell feared it would topple off and smash.

‘No wonder you didn’t tell me.’

‘I’m telling you now. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to say anything before.’ He leaned forward, unable to read her mood. ‘Cecilia Sandor is dead.’

‘Jesus.’

‘We don’t yet know what happened. It’s possible that she was murdered. It’s possible that she took her own life. We know that she had a boyfriend during the same period that she was seeing your father.’ Rachel’s face soured and she shook her head, looking down at the table. He was giving her operational theories, classified material, secrets, but he did not stop. ‘There was a man on Chios, seen talking with Sandor and your father. They were eating lunch at a restaurant in the harbour the day before the crash. We’ve been trying to identify him. He may have been an intelligence officer, he may just have been a friend.’

‘Why would somebody want to kill Cecilia?’

It was the obvious question. Kell had only his instincts, his paranoia, with which to answer it.

‘In a previous life she was a Hungarian intelligence officer. We need to establish whether or not she was recruited to seduce your father. We have doubts about the legitimacy of the relationship.’

He realized that he was saying too much, piling theory on theory, hunch on hunch. What if Rachel reported this back to her mother? There was no evidence to suggest that Cecilia was a honeytrap, other than her relationship with Luka. It was equally possible that Sandor, like Iannis Christidis, had taken her own life out of sheer despair.

‘What are you trying to tell me?’ she asked. ‘That you think Pappa was a traitor?’

It was the question to which Kell had always given himself a definitive answer: no. He simply could not believe in the annihilating possibility that Paul Wallinger had been another Kim Philby, another George Blake; that H/Ankara had been working in tandem with Cecilia Sandor and the SVR. As Rachel asked the question, he saw the depth of a daughter’s love for her father, and the profound fear that his betrayal had extended beyond adultery into treason. Kell wanted to console her. He could not bear to see Rachel suffer with such a question. Amelia was convinced that the leak was coming from the American side, from Kleckner. For the time being, they had to believe that ABACUS was the mole.

‘I’m certain he wasn’t. I just don’t know about the woman. I don’t know if she was legitimate.’

‘And now she’s been silenced, so you can never find out?’

‘Perhaps.’ Kell picked up his glass and looked past Rachel, out across the water at the zig-zag lights of the Bosporus Bridge. He felt that he had nothing left to say. Two tables away, a little girl in a pretty white dress was watching a film on a mini-DVD player while her family ate dinner.

‘Pappa talked about you,’ Rachel said suddenly. ‘I remembered it while you were away. Two years ago. There was something in the papers. Something about torture.’ Kell looked up. It was obvious that Rachel was talking about Gharani and Chater. ‘Rendition?’ she said. ‘Were you involved in that? Were you Witness X?’

Kell remembered a similar conversation with Elsa in a house in Wiltshire. He hoped to his bones that Rachel would be similarly forgiving.

‘My father said you were one of the most decent men he knew. He was stunned by what happened, by the way you were treated. Amazed that you didn’t quit.’

Kell did not entirely trust the conviction in her voice.

‘He said that?’

Rachel nodded.

‘I didn’t quit because I felt that I hadn’t done anything wrong,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t quit because I still enjoyed the job. I felt that I could do some good.’ Rachel looked at him as though he was being sentimental, even naïve. ‘Besides, what else can I do? I’m forty-four. This is all I know.’

‘No it’s not.’ Her reply was quick, almost damning. ‘That’s just something you tell yourself because the alternatives are too daunting.’

‘God I hate the way the younger generation are so wise. When did that happen?’

‘I’m not that young, Tom,’ she said.

A waiter came and offered them coffee. Simultaneously, they declined. Rachel shot Kell a look. They had both had the same thought.

‘Maybe we should get the bill?’ he said, holding her gaze.

‘That sounds like a good idea.’