‘You made it,’ she said. She was perspiring very slightly and carrying a half-finished glass of white wine. ‘Where’s your driver?’
‘Waiting for you to let him go,’ Kell replied.
Amelia peered out towards the lane and gestured at the Vauxhall. Kell saw the car move away.
‘I made dinner,’ she said, leaving a faint mist of Hermès Calèche in the corridor as she turned towards the kitchen. Kell felt like a husband coming home late after a long day at work.
‘I ate in the car,’ he replied.
He had not been back to the house since the Malot operation, but the place still looked and smelled the same. Fading wallpaper, worn rugs, furniture that had been in Amelia’s family for generations. He saw two photographs of her son, François, who lived in Paris, and remembered Minasian’s remark, earlier in the afternoon: You have shown me so much of yourself. Your taste. Your style. The things you possess and the things you lack. Amelia offered to take Kell’s jacket, but he kept it on, immediately lighting a cigarette as a means of testing her mood.
‘If you’re going to do that, we’ll have to go outside,’ she said. ‘Drink?’
Kell saw that there was a half-finished bottle of red wine in the kitchen and asked for a glass. Memories were coming back to him all the time. He recalled the elderly Barbara Knight masquerading as a cleaning lady, the team watching and listening to her every move on a bank of screens in the house next door. Kell wondered what had become of her, and of her feckless husband, whose name momentarily escaped him. In different circumstances, he would have enjoyed reminiscing about the operation with Amelia, but too much had changed between them. He opened the back door and took a seat at the head of a garden table. Amelia followed him, passing Kell his glass of wine.
‘Thank you for coming all this way,’ she said.
‘Don’t mention it. Nothing I like more than surprises.’
‘Yes. I remember.’
There was a smell of roast chicken coming from the kitchen. Kell was suddenly hungry.
‘Why all the subterfuge?’ he asked.
‘No particular reason.’ Amelia sipped her drink. It would not have surprised Kell if she had added: ‘I just enjoy winding you up.’
‘The driver. A favourite of yours?’
‘Increasingly, why?’
‘Never mind.’ The easy rapport between them was bothering him. He had expected Amelia to be in a less affable mood. ‘Bureaucrat. Company man. Looked like he hadn’t told a joke since the mid-1980s. Not my cup of tea.’
‘Oh, poor Tom,’ Amelia replied, and Kell’s patience snapped.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Amelia leaned back in mock-surprise. ‘Nothing!’ she said, and Kell knew that he had overreacted. ‘I was just teasing you.’
There was a prolonged silence. Kell continued to smoke the cigarette, but found the taste of it sour against the wine. She was behaving as if nothing she had done in the preceding twelve hours was of any consequence or concern. The order to release Minasian, her refusal to cooperate on surveillance, the reluctance to offer Kell a safe house. All of it appeared to have been forgotten.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘Not to me. I just spent the last few weeks reeling in an SVR officer for you. On my own time. Recruited him this afternoon. Only you don’t seem all that enthusiastic about it.’
‘Can you blame me?’
Kell dropped the cigarette, putting it out under his shoe. Amelia looked down and appeared to suppress an urge to ask Kell to pick it up.
‘What don’t I know?’ he said. ‘What are you keeping from me?’
He dreaded her reply. There had been so many secrets between them, so many lies. Amelia could finesse and conceal with greater skill than any person he had ever known.
‘You know everything,’ she said. Her eyes contained an apology for earlier deceptions, as though she was keen to build a new and more trusting relationship between them. In feeling this, Kell knew that he was most probably deceiving himself.
‘Then why are you acting this way?’ he asked. ‘Why tell me to stand down? Why don’t you want a piece of Minasian?’
‘To protect you.’ Amelia stood up and walked back into the kitchen. Kell picked up his glass and followed her. She had opened the door of the oven and was pulling out the chicken.
‘Protect me from what?’
She set the roasting tray to one side before answering.
‘You don’t see him straight. You’re too close to him.’
‘You’re not serious?’ The question contained what Kell hoped was an appropriate level of contempt.
‘Harold sent the tape,’ Amelia replied, finding a carving knife in a drawer beside the sink. ‘I watched it before you arrived. You’re too easy on him. He tells you whatever he thinks you want to hear.’
Kell took another sip of wine. It had been a long and difficult day. He did not want to give Amelia the pleasure of seeing him lose control.
‘You think I don’t understand him? You think I handled him wrong?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Then what are you saying? That you don’t believe we have a lone wolf? That he’s lying about this kid from Leeds?’
Amelia secured the chicken with a fork and began to carve through a leg.
‘What kid from Leeds? What are you talking about?’
Amelia had not yet seen that section of the recording. She knew nothing about the terrorist threat. Kell explained what little Minasian had told him and was stunned by her reaction.
‘Sounds like he’s just making it up.’
Kell took a step towards her. ‘What?’
It amazed him that she was so certain in her conviction, so oblivious to any sense that she was being stubborn or obstructive, even though he himself had experienced identical misgivings about STRIPE.
‘Well, we certainly have no way of checking him out, do we?’ Amelia was still carving, still not looking at him. ‘Unless Minasian gives you something actionable, a detail we could use to run this boy to ground, what he’s told you is effectively worthless.’
‘Isn’t that the point of having him as an agent?’ Kell lit a second cigarette, blowing the smoke towards the food. Amelia cut him a look. ‘I see him again. I get more information. We try to stop the attack.’
‘Possibly,’ she conceded. ‘If the possibility of such an attack even exists.’
‘How can you afford to be so sanguine about this? He’s a fucking clean skin.’
At last, Amelia set down the knife and turned towards him.
‘Tom, you know as well as I do that we get hundreds of threats like this every year. I grant you, this one may be genuine. It could be the case that Alexander Minasian is a noble humanitarian who wants to help prevent a terrorist attack on UK soil. It could be the case that the SVR just happen to have a line into the ISIS cell in Syria that obtained this false passport and funded a young jihadi back to Britain.’ She crossed to the stove and emptied a pan of gravy into a small porcelain jug. ‘It could also be the case that Minasian knew he had to give you something this afternoon in order to get out of your flat, so he made it up off the top of his head.’
‘Fine,’ Kell replied, holding up his hands in mock surrender. He was so exasperated by Amelia’s attitude, so bewildered by her intransigence, that he did not feel it was worth continu-ing. She was not going to change her mind. She was only going to find more reasons to doubt GAGARIN. Added to this sense of frustration was his own nagging suspicion that she was right; Kell wondered why it had become so important to him to believe everything Minasian had told him.
‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ she said, ‘but I just don’t buy it. You think that you can get GAGARIN to cooperate on the basis that he’s gay and working for a government that is aggressively homophobic. You think that you can offer him refuge from Andrei Eremenko, even though nobody has a clue who really carried out this afternoon’s
shooting.’
‘You don’t think Eremenko had Riedle killed?’
‘I have no idea!’
‘Who else then? Who ordered it?’
Amelia was scalded by the handle of a pan and dropped it into the sink with a clatter. Kell asked if she was all right but she brushed him off.
‘Tom, we don’t yet know who ordered it.’ He searched her face, looking for some tiny indication that she was concealing something, that SIS knew who was behind the assassination. ‘And we don’t have to know. It’s a police matter. The murder of Bernhard Riedle, tragic though it is, is not the responsibility of the Secret Intelligence Service.’ Kell tossed his cigarette through the back door. Amelia followed it with disapproving eyes, as if Kell’s act of minor vandalism might start a fire in her garden. ‘Answer me this,’ she said. ‘When have you ever known a successful recruitment based on blackmail?’
Kell did not want to concede her point, but failed to provide an answer.
‘When we work successfully,’ she continued, ‘what we do is based on trust, on empathy. It isn’t ever about revenge or coercion. You know that.’
‘Of course I do,’ Kell replied.
‘So when Minasian tells you how much he loved Bernhard Riedle, that he couldn’t walk away from Sterndale Road because he felt like a child “standing in the shower after a swim” – or whatever it was that he said – all I see is a bullshit artist of the first order.’ Kell could picture Amelia studying the first video, looking for reasons to doubt Minasian, to push him away. ‘Here is a man whose career you undermined by exposing Ryan Kleckner,’ she said. ‘He has a personal animus against us – against you, in particular – that is every bit as toxic as yours against him. Alexander Minasian is the sort of person who will say and do anything in order to survive. He will never betray the SVR, and he will certainly never allow himself to be humiliated by you.’
‘So I’m the problem?’ Kell felt another spasm in his lower back. Amelia saw him wince in pain but said nothing. ‘Because of Kleckner, because of Odessa, he won’t deal with me? If somebody else runs Minasian, you think that he or she might produce something useful from him?’
Amelia was spooning slices of chicken and roast potatoes onto two warmed plates.
‘You’re not listening to me,’ she said. ‘Even in those circumstances, I doubt that GAGARIN would play ball. Nothing he tells us can be trusted. What’s his motivation? He doesn’t need money. He’s married to the daughter of one of the richest men in Russia. A man like that probably already has several million dollars siphoned off in offshore accounts in readiness for his divorce and/or retirement. Minasian has no ideological motive for treachery. The only thing he really cares about is Alexander Minasian – his own survival, his own self-image, his own progress through life. He’s not a Kleckner. He’s not looking for kicks or to occupy centre stage. He’s a manipulator, a sadist. Coercion? Perhaps. But how does a man like that respond to being blackmailed by an enemy Service that has already got the better of him over Kleckner? By thanking us? No. He’s going to want to harm us. So why bring the fox into the chicken coop, Tom? Why take that risk?’
‘Because of the threat to hundreds, maybe thousands of lives.’
‘That’s not why you’re doing this. That’s not why this is so important to you.’
‘Does it matter why it’s important to me? I thought our job – I thought your job – was to save lives?’
Amelia stopped serving the food and turned to face him. There was suddenly great affection in her eyes, a look of respect and understanding borne of years of embattled friendship. He understood what she had meant by wanting to protect him, yet her protection was the last thing he needed.
‘Of course I have a responsibility to keep people safe,’ she replied. For a moment it looked as though she was going to come towards him, to try to take hold of his arms in a gesture of reassurance. ‘I just want to be sure that you understand what might be going on here.’
‘I understand, Amelia,’ Kell replied. He was beginning to feel patronized.
‘Do you?’ A wasp flew in front of her face and she flicked it away with her hand. ‘Minasian knows that it’s only a matter of time before word leaks out about Riedle. Somebody is going to talk. So inevitably he’ll be kicked out of the SVR.’ The wasp flew out into the garden. Amelia went back to serving the food. ‘In fact the only reason they might have for keeping him on would be his burgeoning relationship with SIS. Minasian confesses that he’s been turned, Moscow sees that as an opportunity to use him as a double agent, he then sends us months and months of chicken feed.’
‘Aren’t we getting a bit ahead of ourselves?’
‘Perhaps,’ Amelia replied, though it was clear from her tone of voice that she considered the scenario to be completely plausible.
‘What about the fertility clinic?’ Kell asked. ‘What about Svetlana’s baby?’
‘What about it?’
To Kell’s embarrassment, he found that he could not answer his own question. His desire to manipulate Minasian by controlling his wife’s access to the baby they both craved felt sordid and reprehensible. ‘So we just give up?’ he said, trying to salvage the argument. ‘We have a serving SVR officer by the balls who’s just told me there is a home-grown, clean-skin jihadi planning a terrorist atrocity on British soil, but we let him go because we think he’s a Trojan horse?’
Amelia did not answer immediately. She picked up two bottles of wine – one white, one red – walked past Kell and carried them outside. She lit a candle at the table, then came back into the kitchen, took knives and forks from the cutlery drawer, tore off some strips of kitchen roll for napkins and invited Kell to pick up their plates. He did so. A loose roast potato rolled on to the floor. Amelia swore, picked it up, put it back on the plate without a word, then led him outside.
‘Have a seat,’ she said.
Kell set down the plates and refilled their glasses of wine. Amelia thanked him. She looked up at the steep hill that bordered the northern side of the property, gathering her thoughts. A swarm of insects were buzzing around an outdoor light. Kell could hear a sheep moaning in the darkness.
‘Look,’ she said, drawing what felt like a line under their earlier exchange. ‘I’m sorry. I owe you an apology.’
‘How so?’
‘It was a mistake for me to tell you to pursue this. I wanted you to be working for us again. I wanted Minasian as badly as you did. You came to me with the revelation about his sexuality, it seemed too good an opportunity to resist. I should have known better. Minasian is a type. The high-functioning homosexual, forced to exist in secret, living a double life. We’ve seen it historically time and time again. That behaviour breeds a love of intrigue and subterfuge, of acting and performance. Risk-taking. The guilty secret inside the gay man makes him feel ashamed and vulnerable, which leads to an absolute ruthlessness, not to mention a five-star talent for manipulation.’
‘That’s all a bit old hat, isn’t it?’ Kell was surprised that Amelia was voicing such a reactionary theory. ‘Maybe fifty years ago you might have been able to make a case for that kind of behaviour, but not today. What you’re saying is basically homophobic.’
‘It is fifty years ago in Russia in terms of gay rights. It is fifty years ago in terms of what Alexander Minasian can do with his private life and – more importantly – can be seen to be doing with his private life in Moscow and Kiev. How is he any different from a Blunt or a Burgess, a J. Edgar Hoover or a Jeremy Thorpe? I’m not saying that all secretly gay men in the twenty-first century are sociopathic. Goodness me.’ With an exasperated intake of breath, Amelia looked out on her garden and took a moment to compose herself. ‘Look.’ She turned back to Kell, trying to lay the conversation to rest. ‘All I’m saying is that it’s textbook. I should have avoided him at all costs. It was my fault. This was the wrong operation for you.’
Kell felt that this answer was unequivocal and did not respond. Amelia interpreted his silence as a demand
for a more persuasive argument, and tried to provide it.
‘There is also the added problem of the shooting this afternoon.’ She had picked up her knife and fork. ‘I must be frank. That’s what’s changed my mind definitively. I can’t risk linking the Service to Riedle. I can’t spare the resources. Furthermore, going after Andrei Eremenko is not an HMG Requirement. Let him skirt around the sanctions. Let him sell forty per cent of his petrochemical company to Svetlana. You may not have noticed, but we have other fish to fry these days.’
Kell looked down at his food. ‘It’s not about Eremenko,’ he said. ‘Since when is counter-terrorism not a Requirement of Her Majesty’s bloody government?’
Here Amelia was prepared to concede ground.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘If there’s something on the clean skin that I can use, then sure. If Minasian gives you something credible, come back to me. But my advice to you would be to leave it. Your assessment of Minasian’s character in the first instance was absolutely correct. He’s a sociopath. Sadistic, manipulative, cruel. He has to win. He can’t win by making you the hero.’
Kell nodded, knowing that he would still get nothing in terms of cooperation from SIS. No surveillance, no technical support, no analysts. Once Amelia had made up her mind about something, there was no persuading her. Perhaps that explained why she had wanted him to come all the way down to Wiltshire; to give him the bad news in person, then perhaps to try to rebuild the broken pieces of their friendship.
‘If that’s your decision, then I guess that’s the end of it,’ he said, and began to eat.
‘You’re sure?’ she said.
‘What choice do I have?’
For all his frustration, Kell recognized that he still had options. He had told Mowbray to delay sending the second film. Amelia knew nothing about Westfield, nothing about the arrangements he had made to meet Minasian. He could act alone in the next few weeks, running GAGARIN, gathering intelligence, only involving the Service at a later date if the product on STRIPE proved to be authentic. He had enough money to pay Harold, with Elsa Cassani in the wings should he need further back-up. Better to function in this way, behind Amelia’s back, than to risk being shut down altogether.
A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3) Page 19