A Colder War

45

Jez saw ABACUS out of the Hyde Park Hotel and passed him on to Carol, who had changed out of her running gear, tied her hair up in a bun and put on a business suit with heels. She was close enough to touch Kleckner as the American walked west along Knightsbridge, crossing the street at a set of traffic lights and heading towards Harrods.

The entire team, barring Nina, was back in the area, but Kell had put only one officer — a sixty-two-year-old named ‘Amos’ — inside the store. To gamble more, only to have Kleckner leave the building within three minutes and drop down into Knightsbridge Underground, was too risky. Instead, he would spread the rest of the team around all four sides of the building, covering each of the ground-floor exits. There was no point trying to follow Kleckner every step of the way around Harrods. Let him do his thing, let him adopt his tricks. ABACUS could spend five hours trying to duck and weave through eight different departments but, when all was said and done, he still had to leave the building.

‘He’s in,’ said Carol.

Kleckner had used the Hans Crescent door in the north corner, still wearing the baseball cap, still wearing the black Carhartt jacket. Jez went in behind him, continuing the live conversation with Kell while Carol stayed on the entrance.

‘Moving through men’s clothing. Fifteen metres …’ Jez’s voice was a low, gravelly Cockney. ‘How are my exits?’

Kell and Elsa had more than half a dozen mobile phones laid out in front of them, each feeding positional information from members of the team. Absorbing their messages, using them to create and maintain a mental map of the area, required Kell to focus and to concentrate in ways he had not known for years; it was exhilarating.

‘All covered,’ he replied, as Jez moved upstairs to the first floor, allowing Amos to pick up Kleckner in the food hall.

‘Visual,’ Amos said, the trace of a Somerset accent. While most of the members of the team were using earpieces and concealed microphones, Amos had been given an antediluvian Nokia of the sort favoured by grandparents and lonely widowers. Kell had banked on the phone giving plausible cover. ‘Looking at some caviar, I think. In the delicatessen. Baseball cap still on.’

Working in partnership, Jez and Amos were able to move with Kleckner as he ran counter-surveillance for the next fifty minutes. Through the mists and the pretty girls in Perfumes and Cosmetics, he next went up two floors to linens, then down via the Egyptian-themed escalators past the candle-lit memorial to Diana and Dodi Fayed. Whenever the American dropped out of sight, making a sudden left- or right-hand turn, Harold used a link to the Harrods closed-circuit security cameras to try to track him. This worked only twice — a sudden flickering image of a figure in a dark jacket and a baseball cap — but on both occasions Kell was able to establish Kleckner’s approximate position and to feed it back to the team. At the same time, Nina had reappeared, having travelled east on the Piccadilly line for almost half an hour under the misguided impression that Kleckner was seated in the adjacent carriage.

‘I had the wrong guy,’ she explained sheepishly. ‘Fucking baseball cap. Same jacket.’

‘Never mind,’ Kell told her, and put her in Beauty and Fashion, covering Doors 6 and 7 on the right-angle in the south-east corner. Meanwhile, Aldrich, Carol and three others were standing outside under natural cover, using umbrellas to shield them from a sudden shower of rain.

Just before midday, Kell was informed by Amos that ABACUS had made his way to the toy department on the third floor, via the large bookstore in the centre of the second. He had bought a copy of Wired magazine and was presently playing a computer game on a large-screen television in the north apex. Kell took the opportunity to switch out Jez and Amos, putting them on exterior ground-floor exits while Carol and Lucy continued visual surveillance on separate floors. Throughout the slow minutes of watching, the texts, the closed-circuit images, the bursts of talk and the long, agonizing silences, Kell nevertheless felt that he was on top of the operation, spinning the right plates, making the right decisions. Kleckner would eventually leave the building, fail to notice that Danny or Carol or Nina had picked him up, and lead SIS to his SVR handler.

In the blink of an eye, however, it was all lost.

One moment Lucy had a confirmed sighting of ABACUS in Toys, the next Carol saw him moving through Children’s Clothing on the fourth floor. Then he was gone. No closed circuit. No sightings at any of the ground-floor exits. The mobiles in Redan Place stopped buzzing, the laptop screens went quiet. Eight highly experienced surveillance officers stopped talking to Thomas Kell, who felt a gathering storm of frustration as the realization hit him that he had lost Ryan Kleckner. For two hours Kell had the team watching all ten doors at street level while Aldrich and Nina swept through Harrods trying to find the American. But there was no sign of him. Shortly before three, Kell called them off and rang Amelia.

‘I lost him.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

She sounded sanguine, rather than irritated, but Kell said: ‘Gee thanks,’ as though Amelia had doubted him all along.

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘Harrods,’ he said. ‘Fucking Harrods.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Kell had called her at the Cross. He could hear another telephone ringing in Amelia’s office. ‘We know that ABACUS has agents outside Turkey. There’s every possibility that he’s meeting one of them, not his handler. He’ll come back to the hotel at some point, and we can start all over again.’

Kell thanked her and hung up. He took the lift down to the ground floor and went for lunch at a fish-and-chip shop on Porchester Road. He tried texting Rachel, but heard nothing back. By the time he had returned to the hub, Elsa was on her way out to a movie at Whiteleys, Harold coming back from a Thai massage on Queensway.

‘Smell that, guv?’ he said. ‘Tiger balm.’ Kell squeezed out a smile. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Harold said, planting a hand on Kell’s elbow. ‘These things happen. We have other plans up other sleeves.’

‘We do?’ Kell replied, sounding and feeling uncertain.

Harold winked. Kell couldn’t tell if he was being serious or merely trying to cheer him up.

‘Anybody find the baseball cap?’ Harold asked. ‘The jacket?’

Kell shook his head. Perhaps Kleckner had effected a complete change in his appearance — stealing a Harrods uniform, buying a new outfit in menswear — or had simply managed to slip through one of the exits just at the point when Jez or Carol or Nina or Danny had been looking the other way. Eyes became tired. Concentration sagged. It was inevitable. Either way, ABACUS was now a ghost.

For the next several hours Kell moved his chess pieces around the board — Aldrich back to the first floor of the Rembrandt, Carol jogging through Grosvenor Square on the off chance that Kleckner would show up on a visit to the Embassy — but it was a game against an opponent who would not show his face. Elsa returned from the cinema (‘I see a film about Earth with Will Smith and the son of Will Smith. It was not a good film’) and began to work Kleckner’s Facebook account, looking for an exchange of messages with one of his many London girlfriends. Amelia had overruled Kell’s decision to wire two of the flats belonging to Kleckner’s earlier one-night stands, on the basis that it would be a waste of time to do so, thereby leaving Kell with no further moves. Kleckner was somewhere in London — somewhere in England; it might be days before he resurfaced. All Kell could do was sit and kill time by overseeing a change of shift in the surveillance team, Carol and Jez and the rest heading home, to be replaced by eight MI5 watchers, none of whom had ever seen Ryan Kleckner in the flesh. Kell felt the frustration of a man prevented from seeing direct action in the field. He was used to playing an active part in operations, not sitting passively in an office trying to second-guess an opponent. Spying was waiting, yes, but Kell wanted to be in the Rembrandt, in the taxi on Egerton Gardens, on the streets of Knightsbridge, not stewing in Redan Place in front of banks of surveillance screens with Harold stinking of Tiger Balm and Elsa lost in her world of codes and bits and algorithms.

At ten he went out for dinner, wandering down Westbourne Grove to a Persian restaurant where he ate a lamb kebab and drank mint tea, thinking of the horses and carts on Büyükada and the moan of the ships on the Bosporus. Harold had gone home for a few hours but was due back at midnight. Elsa had fallen asleep on the mattress in Kell’s office. Danny Aldrich was minding the fort, and had promised to call Kell as soon as there was any news on ABACUS.

Just after eleven, Kell’s phone rang.

‘Boss?’

It was Danny. Kell was smoking a cigarette outside a newsagent. Across the street, two drunk girls were climbing into a taxi. It looked as though one of them was about to be sick.

‘Yes?’

‘He’s back.’

‘At the Rembrandt?’

‘No. Pat picked him up walking north from South Ken Tube. But looks like they’re heading there.’

Kell was already walking back towards Redan Place. He dropped the half-finished cigarette in a puddle, heard it fizz.

‘They?’ he said.

‘He’s got a girl with him.’

‘The same one as last night? Zena?’

‘Negative. Someone else. Could be one of the Facebookers. We’ll have visual in a couple of minutes.’

Kell began to sprint down Redan Place, drawing the fob key from his pocket, jogging into the lobby and turning towards the bank of lifts. He had to wait more than a minute for the doors to open. There was a smell of curry in the cabin. Somebody had come back with a takeaway.

‘We’re in here,’ Danny called out, summoning Kell into the surveillance room.

Harold and Elsa were seated in front of the Rembrandt screens. Neither of them looked up, but Elsa mumbled: ‘Ciao.’

‘They in the hotel?’ Kell asked.

‘Yup. Just got out of the lift.’ Harold was leaning forward. ‘You should see the bird. Fucking unbelievable. This bloke’s a machine.’

The audio feed from Kleckner’s room was switched on. Kell could see a long shot down the corridor of Kleckner and the woman. As the door opened, Kell heard the woman’s voice first, an American accent, mimicking a line from Pink Floyd.

‘Oh my God, what a fabulous room. Are all these your guitars?’

Kleckner laughed, Harold smiled, and they all watched as the woman walked inside. It was only then that Kell realized who she was.

Rachel.