‘I will carry out my duty,’ he replied, and looked out of the window at a car that had broken down at the side of the motorway. It was strange to be back in England. It was cold here. He felt that he was a long way from home. He had grown up in this place, but he had grown away from it. Out there, in the suburbs of London, in the squats of Liverpool and Manchester, in the mosques of Birmingham and Southampton, lay an army of men and women who would support him in his quest. He was their symbol of hope; he would be their hero. Shahid felt that he was at the centre of a vast crowd, larger than any group or demonstration ever seen in the cities of the West, a crowd visible only to true Muslims and true believers; millions of men and women cheering him on, willing Shahid Khan to fulfil his destiny. He could not see them, but he could feel them. They gave him an insuperable strength.
‘I know what I’m doing,’ he told Farouq. ‘I know what I was sent here to do.’
19
Claridge’s made up Kell’s mind. A hotel of that size meant telling SIS. Without the assistance of his former Service, he would be outgunned on surveillance. Done properly, an operation to recruit Minasian would require undercover officers working as staff in the hotel; rooms rigged for sight and sound; eyes in the lobby and dining rooms. You could do a lot of things off the books at SIS, but you couldn’t get control of Claridge’s with only Elsa and Harold Mowbray for company.
There were several days until the Russian was due in London. Kell doubted that Minasian would risk travelling to the UK with Svetlana, but suspected that oligarch money would be paying for their room. He wondered why Minasian was taking the chance of being collared on British soil. This, after all, was the man who had given the order for the murder of Rachel Wallinger. What was so important to the SVR that it required Minasian’s presence in London? Kell confronted the very real possibility that his nemesis had quit the secret world – or been fired in the wake of the Kleckner operation – and was now working in the private sector. If that was the case, he was effectively useless as an agent. Brussels would have been a waste of time and Kell’s imminent meeting with Amelia a further humiliation.
He texted her from the Customs hall at St Pancras in the late afternoon. To his surprise, Amelia rang back within five minutes.
‘Tom?’
‘Hello,’ he said, as flatly as he could manage.
‘How are you?’ she asked. Her voice was animated and warm. ‘How have you been?’
‘I’ve been fine, thank you.’ Kell experienced the extraordinary sensation of being grateful for all the years that he had known Amelia. In the absence of Claire, she was the closest thing he possessed to family. He knew in that moment that it would be hopeless to try to fight his affection for her. ‘Something’s come up,’ he said. ‘I need to talk to you.’
Amelia was too much of an old hand to ask for more detail on an insecure line. Instead, she said: ‘Of course. Tonight? Are you free?’
He had not expected such an immediate opportunity. Kell explained that he was at St Pancras, needed to go home to drop his bags, but would be free by seven.
‘Perfect. I have to go to an event in Knightsbridge. That ghastly hotel where Clive had his fiftieth. Do you remember it?’
‘I remember,’ Kell replied.
‘Good. Then why don’t we meet there at half past six? I’ll put your name down.’
Kell was now on the station concourse, walking through a mall lined on either side by restaurants and shops. He passed an old man playing Chopin on a public piano.
‘What sort of event?’ he asked.
‘Long story,’ Amelia replied. ‘You’ll need to put on a suit.’
Kell was on time. There was no sign of Amelia in the lobby of the hotel, just a handful of businessmen in leather armchairs, hunched over tablets and smartphones. Two clipboard-wielding models wearing plastic smiles were standing beside a bank of lifts.
‘Are you here for the show, sir?’ one of them asked.
‘I am,’ Kell replied, though he had no idea what the ‘show’ would entail.
He was ushered towards the closest of three lifts and instructed to ‘hit B3’. Alone in the cabin, Kell dropped to a subterranean crypt where two more models – prettier and more glamorous than their predecessors – were checking names off a guest list. There was a background thump of state-of-the-art techno and a trio of Slavic bouncers in identical grey jackets trying their best to look intimidating. One of them stared at Kell with muscled contempt as he emerged from the lift, then appeared to experience feedback on his security earpiece and winced in pain.
Within a few moments, Kell had reached the front of a short queue.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
The taller of the two models was gazing at him through a cake of foundation. Glancing at the guest list – reading upside-down – Kell saw his own name beside that of ‘Amelia Levene’. At the top of the page he recognized the logo of a boutique fashion house and wondered why on earth the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service was attending functions hosted by European clothes designers.
‘I’m on the list,’ he said, pointing at his name. ‘Tom Kell.’
A tick and a smile and Kell was welcomed into the party, taking a flute of champagne from a tray as he passed into a dark, low-lit room stocked with thirtysomething financiers and women on their third facelift. A camp, undersized Italian wearing an embroidered purple smoking jacket walked up and greeted him.
‘Ciao.’
‘Hello,’ said Kell.
The Italian flashed a smile of radioactive whiteness while making a big deal of maintaining eye contact. It was immediately obvious that he had mistaken Kell for someone else.
‘You are Michael? With Deutsche Bank?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ Kell felt oddly flattered by the misconception. ‘I’m Tom.’
‘Luigi,’ the man replied.
They shook hands. A vastly overweight man wearing a pair of technicolor pyjamas walked past them, flanked by flunkies. With a conspiratorial whisper, Luigi explained that he was ‘a top Korean DJ’. There was a powerful smell of aftershave in the slipstream of his entourage.
‘North or South?’ Kell asked. Luigi failed to get the joke.
They continued to speak for several minutes, during which Luigi revealed that he had organized the fashion show, had moved to London from Milan at the age of twenty-one and had never heard of Amelia Levene. To their right, a group of seemingly significant figures from the fashion world were having their photographs taken against a sponsorship board. Luigi recognized one of the women – her face obliterated by collagen – and promptly excused himself from the conversation.
‘Nice talking to you,’ Kell told him, and seized a canapé from a passing waitress.
He was now alone at the edge of the room, Amelia more than twenty minutes late. In a deep armchair nearby, a young woman in a tight cream dress was draped over a man with dyed hair at least forty years her senior. The man reminded Kell of Burt Lancaster. They looked irretrievably bored both by the party and by each other.
‘There you are. I’m so sorry.’
Amelia had materialized beside him. She was wearing black silk trousers and a collarless white shirt and reached out to touch the shoulder of Kell’s suit jacket. It had been more than a year since they had last seen one another and Kell reacted to Amelia’s particular blend of poise and unattainable beauty as he had always done: by feeling strangely unformed and youthful in her presence. He caught a trace of Hermès Calèche, the perfume she always wore, the scent of it kicking up memories of all the years that he had known her.
‘Amelia.’
‘Were you struggling?’ She was looking around the room at the hordes of unsmiling guests. ‘It’s like a training exercise in here. How long can candidates survive in a room full of fashion journalists with champagne breath?’
Kell would ordinarily have laughed, but something inside him stalled on Amelia’s easy familiarity. He wanted to feel that she was uncomfortable in his presence;
that she would acknowledge the recklessness with which Rachel had been treated in Istanbul. Intuiting this, Amelia became more circumspect and laid a hand on Kell’s arm.
‘It’s very good to see you, Tom. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.’
‘No apology necessary.’
‘You look well.’
Kell knew that it was an empty compliment and did not return it.
‘Why are we here?’ he asked.
‘My goddaughter is one of the models. I promised I’d put in an appearance.’ Amelia was holding a glass of champagne and scanned the room a second time. Kell assumed that she was checking for contacts and colleagues, perhaps a cocktail circuit spook from the French or Italian embassies. ‘Tell me how you’ve been. You look fit. You look so well. I can’t believe how lovely it is to see you.’
‘I’m fine,’ Kell replied, his voice still deliberately flat and uninflected. He felt a sense of wary distrust, like walking alone down an empty street at night. ‘And you?’
Amelia let out an uncharacteristically theatrical sigh.
‘Busy,’ she said, with the clear suggestion that work was more than usually exhausting. Kell could only guess at the overwhelming complexity of her position: from Donetsk to Riyadh, from Tripoli to Beijing, he could not remember a time when the Service had been under so much pressure.
‘I need to ask you about Alexander Minasian,’ he said, adding his consuming obsession to the burden of her responsibilities.
The mention of Minasian’s name had a startling effect. In Amelia’s suddenly hardened attitude, Kell sensed a deep-lying guilt that she had failed to bring the Russian to justice. Rachel had died as a consequence of Amelia placing her in harm’s way; she was also the daughter of Paul Wallinger, a man with whom Amelia had conducted a long affair. She owed it to both of them to exact some measure of revenge against Minasian, yet she had failed to do so.
‘Of course,’ she said, again touching Kell on the arm. ‘What would you like to know?’
‘Is he still SVR?’
‘As far as I’m aware. We think he’s still operational in Kiev.’
‘He’s being watched?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ Amelia rarely apologized or admitted to fault, but on this occasion managed to convey a sense that she was ashamed by the Service’s inability to track Minasian. ‘Too many Requirements. I’m stretched in every direction. We simply can’t spare the people.’
‘I understand.’
‘I saw a report in which it was confirmed that Minasian had lost a brother in Chechnya about ten years ago.’
‘He was a soldier?’ Kell asked.
Amelia nodded. ‘Fighting the good fight for Vladimir. I can’t remember his name offhand. Information came through a separate channel, somebody looking at Andrei Eremenko, the father-in-law. Moscow keeps tabs on him, on Svetlana. She’s been struggling to have a baby.’
Kell nodded and said: ‘I know.’ The tiniest flicker of suspicion flashed across Amelia’s eyes.
‘How did you know?’
‘You first.’ Kell knew only what Riedle had told him; that ‘Dmitri’ had no children. ‘Tell me about Svetlana.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Any illnesses? Any kind of muscular problem?’
He was remembering what Riedle had said about ‘Vera’ suffering from an ailment that left her ‘in great pain’. Amelia shook her head, suggesting that Kell was barking up the wrong tree.
‘Does she visit him in Kiev?’ he asked.
Amelia answered quickly and decisively: ‘No.’
‘How often does he go home?’
‘I’d have to check the records, but from memory he’s been sighted in Moscow only once in the last year. Coming out of their apartment. Why the interest in Svetlana?’
Kell again avoided the question.
‘Do we know any more about Istanbul? About the order to kill Rachel?’
Amelia turned away. Kell felt that he could glimpse the guilt and the rage churning inside her.
‘Very little,’ she replied. ‘The Cousins were worried that we’d want an inquiry into the Kleckner business. The extent of his treachery, the deal with Jim Chater, his somewhat mysterious death.’ Jim Chater was the CIA officer whom Kleckner had manipulated and betrayed; ‘the Cousins’ was in-house jargon for the CIA. Amelia implied with a look that Langley had arranged Kleckner’s murder. ‘That sucked up a lot of time. I’m sorry to say that we eventually acquiesced. Again, events elsewhere meant that Istanbul receded into the background.’ It was no surprise to Kell that the Service had not fulfilled its responsibilities towards Rachel. A few years earlier, he himself had been chewed up by that particular blend of bureaucratic cynicism and legal intransigence at which most monolithic institutions excel. ‘To be entirely honest,’ Amelia said, ‘none of us felt that we would ever get anywhere in terms of arresting the man who killed Rachel, in terms of putting together a criminal case that—’
Kell interrupted her. He didn’t want to hear excuses. He knew, as well as she did, that the high priests of Vauxhall Cross specialized in back-covering cynicism. Amelia was now their empress and would happily have sealed the Wallinger file rather than risk trial by media. Hers, after all, was an intelligence service like all the rest. Should an officer find himself exposed to public scrutiny, he would be hung out to dry. Everybody understood this. Nobody rode to anyone’s rescue. To all questions from outsiders there was a mantra: ‘We can neither confirm nor deny’. This nurtured and protected the culture of secrecy, the one true faith to which they all subscribed. Furthermore, Kell had never put any trust in the Turkish courts. Moscow would have tied London in legal knots for a generation rather than put Minasian on the stand. No, the only way to avenge Rachel was to go after Minasian direct.
‘What if I told you that I had a line into the SVR? What if I told you that I had an opportunity to burn Minasian?’
Amelia had picked up a canapé from a passing waitress. As she raised it to her lips, she hesitated for a fraction of a second, looking up at Kell before slowly inserting the food into her mouth. Several seconds passed while she absorbed what he had told her.
‘I’d say that I was extremely interested in watching that happen,’ she said, swallowing her food. ‘Let’s find a quiet corner to continue this conversation. We’ve got about half an hour before Sophie is due on the catwalk. I’m all yours.’
Kell related the events of the previous few weeks: Mowbray’s initial sighting of Minasian and Riedle at the hotel in Hurghada; the staged mugging at the apartment in Brussels; Riedle’s account of Minasian’s repugnant behaviour during their relationship; the Russian’s imminent visit to London. Throughout Kell’s account, Amelia maintained a look of fixed concentration, only breaking her silence occasionally to check a point of fact.
‘Claridge’s?’ she asked, as Kell was drawing to the end.
‘Claridge’s,’ he replied. ‘Paid for by Svetlana. Vera. Whatever you want to call her. With Daddy’s money, anyway. The Eremenko billions.’
They were sitting alone on a sofa in a corner of the low-lit basement, huddled together like an illicit couple while guests moved around them in a hum of small talk and gossip. Their body language was so private, and the tone of their conversation so conspiratorial, that Amelia and Kell had been interrupted only once by a passing waiter offering to refill their glasses. Amelia had shooed him off.
She now edged away from Kell, reached into her handbag and checked the screen of her phone. It was not clear whether she was consulting the time or checking for messages from the Office. It may have been that Amelia simply needed a few moments in which to process what she had been told and to decide upon her reaction. When she had deliberated long enough, she put the phone back in her bag, turned towards Kell and took a deep, somewhat melodramatic breath.
‘Tom.’ It was like sitting with a doctor who was about to deliver a diagnosis of inoperable cancer. Amelia put a hand on Kell’s knee, adding once again to the im
pression of a slightly forced and patronizing intimacy. ‘I know that losing Rachel in the circumstances in which we lost her was extraordinarily difficult for you. You feel angry, you feel guilty.’
‘With respect, you don’t know how I feel.’
It was Amelia’s turn to ignore Kell’s remark.
‘You want some measure of revenge for what happened. For Rachel’s murder to mean something. A day of reckoning.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘All of us have felt powerless in this respect, Tom. Rachel’s death was, among many other things, a humiliating time. We suffered because we had been unable to save her.’
What Amelia had said was true, yet her remarks did not take account of her own complicity in Rachel’s death. She had placed her in harm’s way and had failed adequately to protect her. Kell was still waiting for some indication that Amelia bore a sense of responsibility for what had happened.
‘You know that I have the greatest respect for you,’ she said. ‘Both as an intelligence officer and as a friend, I owe you a great deal, Tom.’ Kell knew that he was being softened up. The medical diagnosis was imminent. ‘Nevertheless, I have to say that what you’ve told me sounds very much like a trap. I don’t buy it. I don’t believe it. I think you’re being manipulated. I think Harold Mowbray is in the pay of Alexander Minasian.’
20
Kell felt a thump of humiliation and turned away. He found himself staring at Luigi, who waved at him across the room with a ripple of slim fingers. Kell looked back at Amelia, numbed by what she had told him.
‘Why would you think that?’
It had always been his secret doubt; the wretched possibility that Harold had been offered a hundred grand to betray him. Amelia obviously had inside information. Minasian’s supposed homosexuality, his relationship with Riedle, the imminent trip to London: it was all too good to be true. Kell had been played for a fool by a man he had trusted as a friend.
A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3) Page 9