A Colder War

53

As soon as the BA flight had touched down in Istanbul, Ryan Kleckner switched on his BlackBerry. Within thirty seconds he had received a text from his mother, downloaded various work-related emails, on three separate accounts, and sent a message to Rachel telling her how much he was looking forward to seeing her for dinner the following evening. It was after midnight, so he was not surprised when Rachel did not reply.

Kleckner was seated by a window on the starboard side of the aircraft, directly over the wing. There was the usual crammed rush for locker baggage as the engines powered down. Kleckner was obliged to remain in his seat for several minutes while the passengers beside him stood up, retrieved their bags and waited in the aisle. A flight attendant made an announcement, in both English and Turkish, informing the passengers that there would be a short delay before the cabin doors were opened.

A few moments later, Kleckner was finally able to shuffle into the aisle, to find enough space in which to stand up, and to fetch his black, wheeled suitcase from a locker on the opposite side of the aircraft. As he placed the suitcase on a vacant seat, he looked down the cabin at the mass of tired, impatient passengers waiting to exit the plane.

He had always hated crowds. Blank-eyed, lazy faces. Women who had allowed themselves to grow fat and sullen. Children screaming for food and toys. Kleckner wanted to push through all of them. From a young age he had been certain of his own superiority, that his intellectual and physical advantages placed him above reproach. Whatever flaws he was thought to possess — vanity, arrogance, an absence of compassion — were, to his mind, strengths. They were also easily disguised. Kleckner found it simple to win the trust of strangers; he had been able to do it long before he was trained to that purpose. To dissemble, but also to see through to the cold centre of people, to intuit and understand the motivations of colleagues and friends, were gifts that he seemed to have possessed from birth. There were days when Kleckner wished that he would be found out; that somebody would have the wit and the ingenuity to see through him. But such a moment had never come.

He turned and looked back down the cabin. The stench of a three-hour flight. Too many people. Everybody crowding him up.

Kleckner looked again. A face was familiar to him. A woman in her late twenties with dark hair, standing no more than three metres away. She was travelling alone, studiously avoiding his gaze, minding her own business.

He had seen her before. He had seen those eyes. Not quite straight, not quite focused. And the teeth. They had been capped, perhaps following a childhood accident. Where had he seen her? At Bar Bleu? At a meeting in Istanbul? At a party?

It was only as he was walking down the aisle towards the exit, nodding thanks to the pilot, smiling at the flight attendants, that Kleckner remembered exactly where he had seen the woman. The realization hit him with the force of a sickness.

The perfume department. Then, an hour later, a repeating face at the exit in the south-east corner of the building. Kleckner had clocked her profile, written off the second sighting as coincidence, proceeded to a meeting with his agent.

Harrods.