The team were still not clear what was meant by Svetlana’s ‘medical condition’. On her walks around London she had shown no signs of physical discomfort or pain. Kell assumed that Minasian had simply spun Riedle a lie.
‘You’ll meet at your hotel?’
Riedle shook his head quickly, implying that Kell was pushing at the edge of what he was comfortable disclosing.
‘Well that’s great,’ he said, without probing further. He was concerned that Minasian would be spooked by the idea of meeting in Riedle’s hotel and instead insist on a last-minute switch to a different location. ‘And you feel fine about things?’ he asked. ‘You’re sure it’s a good idea?’
‘I am sure.’ Riedle plainly wanted to draw the subject to a close. They were eating lamb cutlets again, served with over-steamed vegetables and roast potatoes. School food, thought Kell, as he spooned mint jelly on to his plate.
‘I would just like to say something.’
Riedle had put down his knife and fork and lowered his voice to an almost reverent hush.
‘Of course.’
Kell wondered what was coming. For an awful, paranoid moment, he wondered if Riedle had grasped the extent to which he was being manipulated. Perhaps he knew the true nature of ‘Dmitri’s’ profession and had understood that Peter was a false friend. There was a resigned look on his face, candid and melancholic.
‘I want to thank you, Peter.’ Kell leaned back in his seat, relieved. ‘You have been a very good friend to me. You have helped enormously.’ Riedle suddenly reached out his hand. ‘You may not realize this,’ he continued, twirling the stem of his wine glass as it rested on the table, ‘but it is true. One of the strange things about my suffering is that it is in many ways the opposite of what a person might expect to experience at a time like this. Usually when we have suffered loss, we yearn to return to the person who has destroyed us. We want to mend the wound. It has not been like that with me. Not at all.’
‘You mean you don’t want to reconcile with Dmitri? Then why are you meeting him?’
Kell was sure that something was going to go wrong: an email exchange between the two men on the eve of the reunion that would push Minasian away; a quick, face-to-face argument giving the cameras and microphones nothing in terms of leverage. Riedle seemed stronger and more determined than had been the case in Brussels. His eyes had a fixed, stubborn quality. It was as though he was steeling himself for revenge.
‘I will meet him because I hate him and because I love him. Does this make sense?’
‘Perfect sense.’
Kell put down his own knife and fork and smiled, trying to convey that he was keen to understand in greater detail precisely what Riedle wanted to tell him.
‘I hate Dmitri. I am intensely angry with him for the way he has treated me and for the way that he has made me feel. But I also love him. How can I not? He is everything that I need and admire. I wanted someone to hear me and to understand the extent to which I had been made to suffer by this man, but also by the extent to which I had been liberated to feel such love. You were the person who listened, who understood. You were the man. I sensed that you knew what it was still to love somebody whom you also hate.’
Save for the tinkling of glass and cutlery, and the low, ordered murmur of male conversation, there was silence in the dining room. Kell felt a vivid combination of worry and regret. He knew that he had manipulated Riedle past a point at which such a manipulation was ethically defensible and yet he felt a strange sense of pride in having helped a man through his suffering.
‘Thank you for saying that,’ he replied. ‘It’s kind of you to say so. I’ve really enjoyed our conversations, Bernie. I’m glad that I’ve been able to help.’
Both men began to eat again. Kell felt that he should say something more.
‘We have a saying in English,’ he began. ‘There’s a thin line between love and hate. I’m sure you have a similar phrase in German.’
Riedle chewed and nodded, without offering an example.
‘It’s one of the fascinating things in human nature,’ Kell continued. ‘We are drawn to people who might destroy us, yet we often tire of those who show us unconditional love. It must be something to do with a fear of death and stasis. A great love affair makes us feel alive, vivid and free. But that feeling comes at a price. We are never truly happy while we are at the mercy of another person.’
‘Yes,’ Riedle replied, looking out across the ancient club. He was smiling in a benign and slightly distracted fashion. ‘It must be to do with that. Something to do with stasis. And with death.’
22
Kell returned home to find that Riedle had already written a message to Minasian. Though he had always known that their friendship might become an operational risk, he was nevertheless deeply concerned by what he read:
I have just come back from dinner at Archibald’s Club with my new friend, Peter. An extraordinary building, an old-fashioned English gentleman’s club in Bloomsbury. Photographs of Queen Elizabeth on the wall and shoe polish in the bathrooms! I have not told you about Peter, have I?
Riedle was trying to provoke a reaction, but Kell suspected that this was not how Minasian would interpret the message. A man of such bulletproof self-confidence would not be unsettled by petty jealousy; he would, however, want to know about ‘Peter’ for professional reasons. How had they met? Why was Bernhard dining with him in London? If Riedle told him about the mugging in Brussels, Minasian would almost certainly conclude that ‘Peter’ was the pseudonym of a British intelligence officer.
Kell lit a cigarette, opened the window in his living room and poured a glass of wine. He could do nothing but wait. Spotting a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four on his shelves, he took it down and began to read, drawn into the world of Doublethink and the Ministry of Love for the first time since his teens. Kell checked his laptop every four or five minutes for a reply from Minasian, but nothing had appeared in the account. At around midnight, surveillance at the Piccadilly hotel reported that Riedle had gone to bed. Kell took a shower to kill more time, but there was still no activity from Minasian fifteen minutes later.
Just after one o’clock, he took a sleeping pill, set his alarm for seven, and called it a night.
He woke at six. Minasian had replied to Riedle’s message. The wording was almost exactly as Kell had anticipated. A couple of lines in response to the Archibald’s email, then:
No. You have not told me about Peter. Who is he? How did you meet?
Kell called Amelia immediately.
‘There may be a slight problem.’
‘There’s always a slight problem.’
‘Bernie is trying to make our boy jealous by telling him about Peter.’
‘About you?’ Amelia asked.
‘Yes.’
Kell was still in bed, propped up in front of the laptop, eyes sticky with sleep, his brain clearing out the remnants of the sleeping pill.
‘He’s told him about Brussels? About the fight?’
‘Not yet.’ Kell set the laptop to one side and stood up. ‘If he does, I’m going to delete the message before Minasian gets a chance to read it. It’s worth the risk.’
Amelia did not hesitate. ‘Agreed,’ she said.
‘Any sign of him?’
‘Who? Minasian?’ There was a momentary pause, perhaps while Amelia checked her surveillance reports. ‘None.’
‘And Svetlana?’
‘Housed to Claridge’s last night.’
Kell could hear the mumble of Radio 4 in the background and assumed that Amelia was in her kitchen at the grace-and-favour SIS flat in London. They agreed to stay in touch throughout the day, though Amelia explained that she would be in a meeting ‘with the PM’ from two o’clock onwards.
‘I’m leaving it with you, Tom,’ she said. ‘Do what you have to do.’
Kell immediately called surveillance at the Piccadilly hotel and requested minute-by-minute updates on Riedle’s behaviour and movements. Just be
fore eight he was told that the target had woken up. Having gone to the bathroom, Riedle’s first act had been to open his computer. Watching a live feed at Vauxhall Cross, the surveillance officer reported that Riedle was ‘typing something into the keyboard’. When he had finished, Kell logged into the secure emails.
Sure enough, his reply was sitting in the inbox:
I will tell you about him tomorrow. Too complicated to explain now. I have booked a room in the usual way. 98 Sterndale Road, Flat 4. The postcode is W14 0HX. I have it for one night only. What time do you think you will arrive?
Kell was intensely relieved. The meeting off-site in Sterndale Road – rather than in Riedle’s hotel room – was doubtless yet another layer of Minasian paranoia, but the time delay was sufficient to give Tech-Ops the chance to rig the apartment. Kell typed the address into his iPhone. The property was no more than five minutes on foot from his own flat in Sinclair Road. He guessed that Riedle had booked it on Airbnb, or a similar online agent, and contacted Thames House to arrange entry to the property.
‘Soak the place,’ he told them, when the senior member of the surveillance team called him back twenty minutes later. ‘Get every nook and cranny. Bedrooms, bathrooms, balconies, cupboards. I’m going to need clear dialogue, clear images. This is a high-value target, a once-only opportunity. Everything has to go like clockwork.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,’ the man replied, and Kell experienced the strange and invigorating sensation of the blacklisted man who has finally been invited back into his favourite club.
23
It was then just a question of waiting for Alexander Minasian.
He had told Riedle that he would arrive in London on Tuesday the thirtieth, but by sunset there was no sign of him at Claridge’s. Three different surveillance officers working on rotation in the lobby reported sightings of Svetlana, but at no point during the day did she leave the hotel. Kell knew that Minasian might have slipped up to her room via a staff entrance, or even by donning a simple disguise, but it concerned him when Svetlana was seen eating dinner alone in the hotel restaurant with only a paperback for company.
He checked the email contact between Riedle and Dmitri but there had been no further messages between the two men. Minasian had agreed to meet Riedle at Sterndale Road ‘at about 3 p.m., if I can get away from Vera’. That was their final exchange. Had Minasian been spooked by ‘Peter’ and Archibald’s? Or was it simply in his nature to dissemble and confuse? Kell could not know. He could only sit and wait, reading the surveillance updates, watching the occasional rally at Wimbledon and ringing out for food.
At ten thirty, he called Amelia at home.
‘He’s not here.’
‘I am aware of that,’ she said.
‘If he doesn’t come, we’ve got nothing.’
‘I am also aware of that.’
‘How was the Prime Minister?’ Kell was irritated by her supercilious tone.
‘Sunburned,’ she replied.
The conversation did not last long. Amelia confirmed what Kell already knew – that Riedle and Svetlana were both in their hotel rooms – and tried to console him with the thought that Minasian was probably already in the UK, ‘shaking off an imaginary tail in Cambridge or Gatwick or Penrith’.
‘You know how that lot operate,’ she said. ‘Always think they’ve got company, even when they’re supposed to be on shopping holidays in sunny England with their beautiful young wives. You want to know my guess?’
‘I do,’ Kell replied.
‘Our man Alexander is fast asleep in his little bed in Kiev. Tomorrow morning, first thing, he’ll take a cab to the airport, fly into Heathrow under alias, skip through Passport Control and meet Svetlana for lunch.’
‘What about Sterndale Road?’ Kell asked. ‘What about Riedle? They’ve only got their love nest until Thursday morning.’
There was a noise down the line, as though Amelia thought that Kell was being unnecessarily pessimistic.
‘How long is he going to need with Riedle? At some point in the afternoon, he’ll make his excuses to Svetlana, hop in a cab to Brook Green, have his little chat with Bernie, they’ll go to bed for a bit. Then Alexander will head back to Claridge’s.’ Kell lit a cigarette, listening. ‘That’s all we’ll need,’ she said. ‘Confirmation on the mikes that the two of them have been to bed together. Once we have that, we have everything. Visual proof, audio proof, the lot. Then you’ll have what you need, Tom. The head of John the Baptist.’
24
Shahid Khan found the new life easier than he had thought it would be. It had been simple to forget his old ways and to blend in. He looked good and he knew that people liked him. He was fit and he was strong and not shy to talk to anyone who crossed his path. The guys in the gym asked him for tips on fitness and he helped them with circuits and weights. It gave Shahid pleasure to know that he was fooling them. They thought that he was their friend, their ‘buddy’. Shahid drew satisfaction from this because their friendship and camaraderie meant nothing to him. He was playing a role. He was doing it so that nobody would suspect him, so that when the day of his martyrdom arrived, these same people would tell their friends and families that Shahid Khan had seemed like such a ‘normal’ young man, so easy-going and friendly, not a care in the world. They were all fools. They had not been able to see the anger inside him. Shahid was not a ‘normal’ person. He was exceptional.
He played the same role when he was working at the supermarket. The girls on the checkouts looked at Shahid and smiled at him; some of them even teased him about his Yorkshire accent. Young mothers in heavy make-up with small children shopping in the mornings and afternoons cut him sly glances as he stacked the shelves. They asked him questions that he knew they did not need to ask. Where could they find ice cream? Where could they find sliced bread? They wanted him. He could tell by the way they smiled. Shahid knew they were lonely and empty, women with nothing inside them except base desires. They had no learning or education, no understanding of how to raise a family properly in the eyes of God. Their children were always covered in food and screaming. Shahid felt pity for them growing up in a world like this, with fathers who had abandoned them and mothers who thought only of themselves and their own desires. On Friday and Saturday nights he had seen the drinking and the fights on the streets of Brighton. Girls exposed themselves and drank alcohol and behaved like there was no difference between a man and a woman. Shahid saw how important money was to these people and yet how lazy they were. At the supermarket, for instance, the staff who worked alongside him were always trying to cheat the system. They took time off or stole food from the shelves. They worked and then they boasted about taking money from the council for housing benefit, for dole. They were open about this, as if they wished to be honoured for their lies. They had no pride, just as the women who exposed themselves in the streets and on the beaches had no honour. Shahid thought of the nobility and the courage of the women he had seen in the Caliphate. They knew that it was their duty to serve their men and to serve God.
Shahid had found a room in a house in Rottingdean. His landlady was a Christian woman who went to church every Sunday. Kitty. He rarely saw her. The house was divided into two parts. He lived at the back in a bedsit that he had decorated according to Jalal’s instructions. There were posters on the walls of Arsenal footballers, of American actresses, of Bruce Lee. Shahid kept no poetry or religious materials in view of the landlady. He did not wish to raise her suspicions. He kept his Koran hidden behind a stack of DVDs. He prayed at night, in the darkness of his room, and again first thing in the morning. Shahid had never attended mosque in Brighton. He could not risk being seen by the cameras or by the agents of MI5 who had infested sacred Muslim places of worship. He yearned for mosque but understood that he would be forgiven by God after he had completed his act of martyrdom. He would be rewarded. This was the radiance of Islam.
25
At nine forty-three on Wednesday morning, Alexander Minasian w
as sighted emerging from the revolving doors at Claridge’s in the company of his wife, Svetlana, and an ‘unidentified male’ estimated to be ‘in his late fifties or early sixties’. He was wearing black shoes, dark blue chino trousers, a white shirt and grey sports jacket. Nobody knew how Minasian had entered the hotel or when he had arrived. No morning flight from Kiev had landed in time to allow him to get to the hotel so quickly and there was no flag on his passport. He had most likely travelled under alias and slipped into the lobby in the early hours of the morning having worked counter-surveillance on Riedle, possibly for several days. That he was still in London and happy to be seen in Svetlana’s company was a credit to the team working on the operation. Minasian thought he was clean and plainly had no idea that both his wife and his erstwhile boyfriend were being watched by the Security Service.
Surveillance reported that Minasian, Svetlana and the older man were ushered into the same bulletproof limousine that had fetched Svetlana from Heathrow two days earlier. They were driven along Brook Street towards Hanover Square and followed north by an MI5 black cab to an address on Upper Wimpole Street. It was at this point that surveillance contacted Kell with the update.
Kell was sitting at home in his kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee in front of two laptops, three mobile phones and a Ben Macintyre op-ed in The Times.
‘A man matching GAGARIN’s description has just driven with VALENTINA to Upper Wimpole Street, sir. One nine one.’ ‘GAGARIN’ had been given to Minasian as a codename, on the basis that he bore a passing resemblance to the Russian cosmonaut. A quick search on Wikipedia had revealed that Yuri Gagarin had been married to a woman named ‘Valentina’. ‘A second male in the vehicle with them. Older, about sixty. Black suit, white shirt. Didn’t seem like muscle.’
A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3) Page 11