A Colder War

41

‘What do you think it means?’

‘Isn’t that obvious?’ Kell replied.

He was back in the Secure Speech room, still in the same sweat-soaked clothes he had worn all day, talking to Amelia in London. It was half-past ten in Turkey, half-past eight in Vauxhall. Amelia was looking at the final line of Kleckner’s document, sent by secure telegram an hour earlier.

Why CS termination? Explanation? PW compromised? Suggest LHR Tues 30-Fri 3 (confirm SMS)

‘There’s an obvious link with Cecilia Sandor,’ Kell said. ‘“PW” has got to be Paul.’

‘I realize that, Tom.’

‘Then which bit of it is confusing you?’

They had been on the line for almost an hour and Kell was at the edge of his patience. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, Rachel had failed to respond when he had called her from the ferry, and it was so cold in the Secure Speech room that he was wearing an undersized winter coat purloined from a Lost Property cupboard in the Chancery. He had wanted to go straight from the island to Sabiha Gökçen and catch the late flight back to London, but the discovery of the DLB, the proof of Kleckner’s treachery — with Paul’s possible involvement thrown in — was too pressing. Instead, Kell had pulled Amelia out of a meeting in Whitehall and she had raced back to Vauxhall Cross to speak to him.

‘No bit of it is confusing me,’ she replied, reacting to Kell’s insolence as he would have expected. Her voice had taken on an edge of irritated condescension, like the start of a row with Claire. ‘I simply wanted to know what you think. What is meant by the word “compromised”? Was Paul an asset or was Paul a patsy? And why does Kleckner care?’

‘Why does he care?’ Kell had a sudden glimpse of his future as H/Ankara and knew that he would grow to hate these interminable conversations with London, Rachel long gone and fucking some hotshot thirty-something QC at a warehouse apartment in Shoreditch, while Kell deadened his soul with work, throwing himself into recruitments and agent-running as a means of forgetting her. In recent weeks he had come to think of the Speech Room as a padded cell, a freezing womb in which he felt trapped and controlled. Surely it would be better if he was back in London, dealing with ‘C’ face-to-face, day-to-day, then heading home to a flat lined with his books and his paintings, to a midnight bed warmed by Rachel? ‘He cares because killing Sandor was a mistake,’ he said. ‘It draws attention to what he’s up to. Somebody finds out Cecilia was seeing Paul, that makes them sit up and start asking questions.’

‘Of course it does.’

Kell heard the tinkle of a spoon against a cup, like the prelude to an after-dinner speech. Amelia was probably drinking an espresso from the new machine in her private office.

‘We are still where we were on Wallinger,’ Kell added. ‘Either he was conscious that Sandor was an SVR asset, and therefore deliberately assisting her, or he was not. What’s strange, what doesn’t ring true, is Kleckner’s consciousness of that SVR operation. If Minasian was running both of them — an asset in the CIA, an asset in SIS — it’s feasible that he would have made them aware of each other, but it’s risky. Doubles the chances of one of them getting caught, of one of them betraying the other.’

‘Precisely.’ Amelia sounded pleased to have Kell thinking along similar lines. ‘Though we are both agreed that the tradecraft on much of this operation has been eccentric, to say the least.’

‘We are both agreed on that.’

Kell buttoned the coat to the neck and bit down on a stick of shortbread, the only food that had passed his lips in eight hours, save for a handful of boiled sweets discovered in a bowl near the Consulate entrance.

‘Tom?’

‘Yes?’

‘I have to go to the Cousins with this.’

It was what Kell had expected Amelia to say. An SVR mole inside the CIA was catastrophic; that it had taken the Brits to identify him would both embarrass Langley and leave them in London’s debt for years. Nevertheless, Kell recoiled at the idea.

‘That is the one thing we should not do. Yet.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’ll try to pin most of it on Paul. Say that the most damaging leaks — on HITCHCOCK, on EINSTEIN — came from our side. We need to clear him of suspicion, find out the precise nature of his relationship with Sandor and Minasian.’

‘There’s no time for that,’ Amelia replied. ‘The Americans need to know. Jim Chater has to be told.’

‘All in good time. Kleckner is heading to the UK, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘So get me to London. Tuesday to Friday, he’ll be on our turf, we know that we can control him. Let me move the surveillance operation from Istanbul to London, get my team home, get fresh eyes and legs on him. Kleckner wants to talk about Sandor’s murder. He will lead us to his handler.’

‘And if we lose him? If he shakes us off?’

‘Then we lose him.’

Kell was aware that Amelia needed him in Istanbul. The Station was going to have to try to put cameras on the DLB; to identify Kleckner’s ‘signal in’ to Minasian; to work out how to put a long-term advance surveillance team on Büyükada that would saturate ABACUS on his next visit. Kell would suggest that SIS try to gain control of the DLB and switch Kleckner’s product for chicken feed, handing bogus intelligence to the SVR that would tie Moscow in knots. But London meant Rachel. Kell wanted time with her, even if it was just the few days when Ryan Kleckner would be in town. Time to track the American into the arms of his handler, yes; but also time to rekindle their relationship.

‘There’s no need for you to come over, Tom.’

Kell heard a note of apology in Amelia’s voice, as though she wanted to save him the trouble of flying back.

‘Of course there is. We should talk face-to-face, line everything up for Ryan’s visit. I’ll get the early BA flight tomorrow, see you around lunchtime.’

‘What about the Red Cross convoy?’

‘What about it?’

‘We let the Russians inform Assad? That’s your view?’ Amelia sounded as though she wanted to test the direction of Kell’s moral compass. ‘The convoy gets hit, gets discovered, Jim finds out that we knew about it, he’s not going to be best pleased.’

‘Since when did you care so much about Jim Chater?’

It was a better reply than Kell had intended, touching as it did on Amelia’s loyalty to her own.

‘Fair point,’ she replied, with an appropriate edge of contempt for the man who had almost obliterated Kell’s career. ‘Nevertheless, I don’t like the idea of a Red Cross team getting arrested or shot by the Syrians when we could have saved them.’

Kell wondered what Amelia was expecting him to say. Surely she could see the importance of delaying any conversation with Langley?

‘I don’t like it either,’ he said, ‘but we don’t have any choice. Tell Jim and he’ll ask how we found out about a top secret consignment of American weapons making their way into the arms of the Free Syrian Army. Warn the driver and the Russians will know there’s blowback on Kleckner’s material.’

‘Collateral damage?’ Amelia said, as though she wanted Kell to take responsibility for it.

‘Collateral damage,’ he replied.