A Colder War

38

Kell was out of the Consulate and into a cab within five minutes. The driver allowed him to smoke a cigarette — ‘leave window down’ — and he texted Mohsin en route, who confirmed that Kleckner was in Bursa attending a Red Cross-hosted conference on the Syrian refugee crisis, polishing his cover and possibly working a recruitment. There would be no danger of bumping into him catching a ride on a horse and cart on Büyükada.

‘How do you pronounce it, anyway?’ Mohsin asked half an hour later, as they sat at the makeshift terminal café on the western shore of the Bosporus. Kell had arrived first and ordered two glasses of tea to kill time while waiting for the boat.

‘“Bew”, to rhyme with “chew”. “Coulda”, as in “I coulda been a contender, instead of a bum.”’

Mohsin shot Kell a quizzical look. The phrase meant nothing to him.

‘On the Waterfront?’

‘Yeah, it’s really nice here, isn’t it?’ Mohsin replied, looking out across the sapphire waters.

Kell stared down at his glass of tea. At the side of the busy thoroughfare bringing traffic to the terminal, an old man was selling roasted chestnuts from a two-wheeled cart. The wind blew a smell of burning charcoal towards the café. Kell had missed lunch and was hungry. The café had a coloured banner running above the counter, in the style of a McDonalds, advertising burgers and toasted cheese sandwiches of varying degrees of plasticity. He would have ordered something had the ferry not been announced on a crackling tannoy. They stood up, Kell snapping back the dregs of his tea like a shot of liquor, the heat of the liquid scorching the back of his throat and leaving a dust of melted sugar cubes on his tongue. Then they walked side by side towards the ticket gates, a screech of brakes and the blare of a horn behind them as traffic came to blows on the highway.

The ferry was not busy. Kell counted nineteen passengers making their way along the quay. Two of them were British — he could hear West Country accents — the rest seemingly a mix of Turks and tourists. He stepped on to the ship, following Mohsin to a seat on the first deck. A passenger had recently been sick — there was an odour of vomit shrouded in disinfectant. As the ferry slipped her moorings, it began to rain, clouds draining the Bosporus of colour and turning the churning waters cold and grey.

‘This is roughly where he sat,’ Mohsin muttered, settling into a seat beside Kell. ‘Might even be the same ferry.’ There was a small family nearby eating cheese and bread from a picnic. Mohsin, wearing shorts and a blend-in Galatasaray shirt, recalled the set-up of the team. ‘Steve was on him. Agatha. Tourist cover, playing a couple. Priya up above, hijab. I was over there —’ he indicated a television in the corner of the deck ‘— pretending to watch a local news programme.’

‘What was ABACUS carrying?’

‘Shoulder bag. Same one he usually takes to work. Carries it with him most places. Leather. Keeps books in there, newspapers and magazines, deodorant if he’s going out in the evening and doesn’t have time to shower at the Consulate.’

And product, Kell thought. Intelligence reports for a handler. Memory sticks. Hard drives. If ABACUS had made a drop, Kell needed to intercept the material, to get to it before Kleckner’s handler.

‘Did the bag seem any different on the way back? Lighter? Larger?’

‘Lighter, definitely. He had a bottle of wine because he was going to dinner with Richards.’

‘At his house?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And where is that on the island?’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll show you everything.’

The ferry stopped four times en route. On the Asian side, they moored for ten minutes while a large group of Chinese tourists boarded the ship and flocked to the interior deck, silent in hats and sunglasses, subdued by the rain. The cranes unloading container ships at the docks were shrouded in mist; Kell could make out an entire fleet of brand-new purple buses lined up on the quayside. The old railway station at Kadiköy was still standing, reminding Kell of the Bund in Shanghai, a long-ago operation to burn an African arms dealer visiting the city from Nairobi. With the rain now falling in flurries that whipped and swirled across the decks, the ferry eventually made her way to the mouth of the Bosporus and out into the open waters of the Sea of Marmara, a choppy twenty-minute crossing to Kinaliada, the first of the Princes Islands. There the rain ceased and Kell went outside into the humid afternoon, standing alone on the starboard walkway, smoking a cigarette as a rainbow arced across his shoulder towards the distant minarets of Hagia Sophia.

Half an hour later they were pulling into Büyükada, Mohsin having joined Kell on the upper deck and continuing his running commentary on ABACUS’s visit.

‘Richards was waiting for him on the dock. His kids go to school every day in the city. He was waiting for the ferry from Kartal which brings them home.’

‘And while that was coming in?’

Mohsin had obviously genned up on the surveillance report en route to Kabataş. It seemed that he could remember every detail.

‘A coffee in the second of the cafés over there.’ He pointed south, along the Büyükada jetty, past the ticket office, towards a street in the main town. ‘They had a beer, a game of backgammon, then went to get the kids.’

‘Backgammon?’

‘Yeah.’

Everything was now a clue, a tell, a signal — or a blind alley. All of Kell’s experience told him that the island was wrong. Why would a CIA mole isolate himself on Büyükada, making dead drops in a natural choke point? Was it another SVR double-bluff, like Arada’s proximity to the Russian Consulate? Or was Kell seeing tells and patterns where none existed?

Suddenly, with no sense of its origin or catalyst, he recalled a conversation with Rachel at the yali, weeks earlier. Their shared cigarette, looking out over the Bosporus while Amelia had gone for the walk with Josephine. How could he have forgotten such a thing?

Pappa had a friend who lived on Büyükada. An American journalist.

Had she meant Richards? If so, why say that he was American? Kell immediately took out his iPhone and tapped a text message to London.

Hello you — Am I imagining it, or did you mention that your father had a journalist friend on Büyükada? If I’m not going mad, can you remember his name? Richards? If I am going mad, can you ignore this text? Separation from you has made me delirious — T x

Under a fierce sun that had burned away the last of the rain clouds, Kell followed Mohsin along the broad jetty. They came into a narrow covered arcade of shops selling suntan lotion and postcards, guided tours around the island, sunglasses and imitation sailor’s hats with CAPTAIN embroidered in gold across the peak. Mohsin showed Kell into the café on the main street, pointed out where ABACUS and Richards had sat for their game of backgammon, then remembered that ‘the target’ had gone to the toilet for ‘at least five minutes’. That alone was enough to send Kell into the gents, where he looked around for a potential dead-letter box, a place to store cached documents. Perhaps there was a store room or passageway in which a cut-out or handler might wait for a brush contact. But the environment was all wrong — too busy, too small, too obvious. He lifted the lid on a cistern in the men’s cubicle, but only because it seemed lazy not to. More likely Kleckner was using Richards as the cut-out, or their friendship as a cover for his activity as a mole.

‘Where next?’ he said. ‘Show me the route.’

Mohsin promptly hailed a horse-drawn carriage and took Kell on a tour of the island, following a route that ABACUS had taken on an earlier visit to Büyükada. Kell felt slightly ridiculous, sitting side by side on a narrow love seat with a humourless surveillance officer while their grinning driver encouraged his ageing horses to move faster by whipping their flanks with a long wooden stick. The island was crowded at the seafront, but largely empty in its interior, a scattering of well-maintained houses on a loose grid separated by broad streets that were splattered with the dried, straw-coloured dung of passing horses. After half an hour Kell grew tired of the rocking of the cart, the squeaking hinge in the love seat and the perpetual clip-clop, clip-clop of the horses’ hooves. He was very hot and learning nothing useful about Kleckner. He instructed the driver to return to the main town, jumping off opposite the Splendid Palace, an Ottoman-era hotel that boasted views across the strait to Istanbul. With Mohsin beginning to flag, they went into the bar and cooled off with two glasses of lemonade under an inevitable portrait of Atatürk.

Rachel had not replied. Had she taken offence at the message about her father, or was something going on in London? Kell had not heard from her in two days and had begun to despise himself for the speed with which she had seized control of his heart; there was a dignity in his solitary life that she had completely stripped away. When he had concluded his search of the island, he would call her from the Kabataş ferry and try to encourage her to come back to Istanbul for a long weekend.

‘Show me the house,’ he said to Mohsin when he had walked back into the bar.

‘Which one?’

‘The one that’s for sale. The one you thought ABACUS might be looking at.’

It was a ten-minute walk from the hotel. Kell settled the bill and they went outside into the late afternoon sun, returning to the quiet suburban streets to the west of the main town, disturbed only by the occasional passing bicycle or pedestrian.

‘This is roughly where I had to let him go,’ Mohsin confessed, explaining that he had been following ABACUS in a one-on-one for twenty minutes but had become concerned that the American would ‘smell’ him. He led Kell downhill along a narrow lane leading towards the last row of houses before the beach. There were large private gardens on either side of the road, the bark of a dog punctuating the silence. ‘Richards lives in a house about a hundred metres that way.’ Mohsin gestured towards a screen of pine trees on a corner where the road split left and right in a T-junction. ‘We weren’t able to get close because it’s so isolated. Normally, one of us could play the cover. Grab a horse and cart, pretend to be a gardener or something. But once ABACUS gets ahead of us on foot …’

Kell interrupted him. He knew the reasons for what had happened and wasn’t interested in hearing Mohsin’s excuses. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to explain.’

They walked on in silence. Kell could hear the murmur of the sea, now only a hundred metres away to the north. The Richards family lived in a part-renovated yali on a road parallel to the shore. Kell could not tell if anyone was home, nor was he much interested in knocking on the front door and disturbing their peace. According to the surveillance reports, cross-referenced with emails and phone logs, Kleckner had visited the house three times in the previous six weeks, on one occasion staying the night and thanking Richards the next morning for giving him ‘a world-class dinner and a world-class hangover’. Kell was more interested in the house next door, now for sale, which Kleckner had been seen to visit. Properties on the island were prohibitively expensive, particularly those close to the beach. Büyükada was a summer refuge for the city’s elite; thousands of wealthy Istanbullus retreated to the island in July and August, taking up residence in second homes to escape the stifling city heat of high summer. Why would a twenty-nine-year-old spy with less than thirty thousand dollars in savings, fourteen months from his next CIA posting, be looking to buy a yali in the most expensive corner of the most expensive island in the Princes archipelago?

Kell had a possible answer a few minutes later. Walking along the road towards the house, he spotted a ‘For Sale’ sign (in English and Turkish) tacked to a tree. There was a broken wooden gate leading to the property, a tiny splinter piercing Kell’s index finger as he pushed it open. The men found themselves amid very thick undergrowth, the garden grown wild. Kell could see the shadow of what had once been a large house through gaps in the foliage, but it was clear that the entire property had been allowed to fall into ruin.

‘Tell me exactly what you saw,’ Kell said, returning to the road. Both men were soaked in sweat, Kell’s shirt sticking to his back like cellophane. It had been impossible to proceed any further through the garden. ‘You told me ABACUS went for a swim.’

Mohsin leaned on a tree beside the ‘For Sale’ sign, flattened by the heat.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘He went round in the horse and cart like I showed you. He left the driver in the centre of town, then doubled back towards the Richards’ house. I started following him along the road, exactly like we’ve done today.’ Mohsin was beginning to sound defensive and impatient: either he was bored of repeating himself or was taking Kell’s questions too personally. ‘I had to hold off when I thought I was getting too close,’ he said. ‘The rest of the team — there were only three of us that day — were back in town.’ He nodded east along the coast. Kell, too, was beginning to feel enervated by the heat and wished they had brought a bottle of water. ‘But he’d taken out his towel and I saw him later on the beach. Swimming. That’s when he got dressed, climbed up the rocks and disappeared into the house.’

‘This house?’

Mohsin nodded.

‘Taking his shoulder bag with him?’

The surveillance man hesitated, remembered. ‘Yeah. It’s not as overgrown on that side.’

‘What made you think he was interested in buying it?’

‘Just this.’ Mohsin tapped the sign. ‘Why else would somebody wander round a ruined yali on a hot afternoon after taking a nice relaxing swim? I figured Richards must have told him about the house being for sale. Or maybe he just stumbled on it. Maybe he just likes looking around old buildings.’

Maybe, Kell thought to himself, but there had been nothing in any of the files or transcripts to suggest that Kleckner had taken an interest in the property. He wondered why the hell Mohsin hadn’t volunteered this information sooner.

‘Let’s go down to the beach,’ he said.