A Colder War

54

No fewer than eighteen SVR operational assistants, in London, Kiev and Moscow, were assigned to the case. Ten of them looked at Rachel Wallinger’s digital vapour trail, eight of them at Kell’s. Working all through Friday night, the SVR was able to retrieve and translate 362 emails and 764 text messages between the two parties.

Everything that KODAK had told Minasian was borne out by the evidence. The words ‘Amelia’, ‘Levene’, ‘crash’, ‘Chios’, ‘Cecilia’, ‘Sandor’, ‘death’, ‘murder’, ‘accident’, ‘mole’, ‘MI6’, ‘SVR’, ‘SIS’, ‘Ryan’, ‘Kleckner’ were flagged and run as cross-checks with the correspondence. Whenever these words appeared, the message was immediately forwarded to Minasian, who had caught a flight back to Kiev, via Frankfurt, on Friday evening. At no point did any of the analysts gain the impression that MI6 was investigating Kleckner. Kell’s relationship with Rachel appeared to be authentic, as did her job at a publishing house in London, the emails she had exchanged with friends about her conflicted feelings for Kell, her growing attraction to Kleckner.

But Minasian was not satisfied. He was convinced that the analysts had missed something. At five o’clock on Saturday morning he asked that the entire file be couriered to his apartment in Kiev, where he began to read through every text, every email, every message for himself, including items that were not specifically related to the sexual relationship between Kell and Wallinger. Minasian was adept at reading and absorbing large amounts of written material at speed. Though he had not slept in almost twenty-four hours, he was nevertheless alert enough to alight on the single word — ‘Büyükada’ — which confirmed his worst suspicions about Kell’s true purpose in Turkey.

According to the SVR report, the text message had been sent from Kell’s O2 account to Rachel Wallinger (without reply) on 29 April at 1734hrs. The same afternoon that Minasian himself had visited Büyükada to clear the DLB.