A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3)

by Charles Cumming

  ‘If I am not back at my hotel by seven o’clock,’ he said, ‘my wife will be alarmed.’

  ‘Well we can’t have that.’

  ‘You have given me no means of communicating with her.’

  Kell took the BlackBerry and battery out of his jacket pocket, holding them up in both hands.

  ‘You mean this? You want to contact her?’

  ‘It would be a good idea for us.’

  Kell shook his head. ‘Maybe later. First, could we talk about what you were doing in Sterndale Road?’

  Minasian looked down at the plate of biscuits and ignored the question.

  ‘You live here?’ he asked, gazing around the room.

  It was no surprise that Minasian had worked it out. They had walked past a pile of letters in the hall, one of which had been a bank statement addressed to Kell. Even if the Russian had failed to see it, there were too many personal touches, too many idiosyncrasies in the apartment for the location to pass as a safe house. From his chair, Minasian could see a black-and-white photograph of a Masai warrior, a memento from a long-ago posting in Nairobi; a framed letter in Hebrew from a senior official in the Israeli government, sent to Kell just a few weeks after he had arrived as an undeclared ‘diplomat’ in Tel Aviv; and a gold cigarette lighter, engraved with the initials P.M., given to him by Amelia two years earlier. On the bookshelves, to Minasian’s left, there were numerous weighty tomes on foreign affairs and political philosophy, as well as diplomatic memoirs and half a yard of John le Carré. It would not have taken a detective of particularly sharp insight to conclude that this was Kell’s home.

  ‘I do,’ he conceded. In all conversations of this sort, it was better to tell the truth whenever possible. Confidence was forged more quickly in an atmosphere of honesty.

  ‘Then why have you brought me here?’

  ‘Time,’ Kell replied, again being as candid as the situation would allow. ‘We won’t be able to talk for very long. As you said, Alexander, you must soon be getting back to your wife.’

  Minasian appeared to concede Kell’s point and looked back at the plate of biscuits without any further comment.

  Kell repeated his question.

  ‘What were you doing in Sterndale Road?’

  Minasian looked up. His gaze assumed a soulful, penetrative quality that suggested both high intelligence and absolute candour. In this moment, it was a face seemingly innocent of wrongdoing. There was no malice in it.

  ‘You know why I was there,’ he said.

  ‘Do I?’

  Minasian continued to look at Kell. He knew what SIS wanted. A video confession of his relationship with Riedle. It was just a question of how long Minasian would delay the inevitable, and therefore salvage a little pride.

  ‘I’m sorry about Bernie,’ Kell said, trying a different approach. ‘I really am. He was a good man.’

  No discernible reaction from the Russian. Minasian used silence as both a disguise and as a tool of control.

  Kell pressed on: ‘It must have been a terrible shock to you.’

  Minasian’s mouth twisted into an expression of distaste. He looked across the room at the bookshelves.

  ‘You are Peter,’ he said quietly. It was not a question. It was a statement.

  ‘I am Peter,’ Kell replied.

  ‘You were lovers?’

  Kell laughed out loud and turned towards the kitchen, as though expecting to share the moment with Mowbray.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Peter was not a threat to you.’

  Minasian appeared to appreciate the subtlety of Kell’s answer and smiled to himself, nodding slowly. But the apparent softening in his demeanour was short-lived.

  ‘Why did the British have him killed?’

  ‘We didn’t.’

  Kell took a first sip of the coffee. It was cooler than he had anticipated. Perhaps they had been talking for longer than he imagined.

  ‘Not you. Your superiors.’

  ‘That’s who I meant.’

  A strange combination of sadness and disappointment played out across Minasian’s face. Kell was struck again by the beguiling candour of his eyes and felt for a moment, against all rational judgment, that he was dealing with a man of deep sensitivity and moral principle. Such an ability to deceive through appearances was a priceless quality for a spy and one that Kell found himself coveting. He could see how effective Minasian must have been in recruiting Ryan Kleckner, appealing simultaneously to the American’s sophomoric political ideas and to his monstrous vanity. As for Riedle, no wonder he had fallen so hard: a man as attractive and charismatic as Minasian would have strung him along as skilfully as a matador exhausting a bull.

  ‘He was assassinated.’

  ‘Yes he was,’ Kell replied. ‘But not by us.’ He felt it necessary to add: ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You do not need to say this. It is of no interest to me what you feel.’

  Kell decided to test his longheld belief that Minasian had encouraged Rachel’s murder. What if the decision had come from Moscow and Minasian had been overruled when he tried to stop it? Kell had no evidence for this other than a sense that the man sitting in front of him was too canny, too cautious and all-seeing, to have made such a rash move. Rachel’s death had been a senseless act, not only morally indefensible but strategically pointless. Minasian was surely far too subtle to sink to such depths or to sully his reputation so needlessly.

  ‘Do you know why he was killed?’ Kell asked.

  ‘You would know the answer to that question,’ Minasian replied.

  Kell noticed that the Russian was allowing a very small amount of his shock and grief to colour his mood. He had to try to keep Minasian in this state. It was no good allowing him to retreat into silence and obfuscation.

  ‘I don’t blame you for what happened to Rachel,’ he said, burying his hate in order to close the gap between them. ‘You know that I was in love with her. I know that you tried to broker our deal in good faith. I know that the order to kill her came from Moscow.’

  Minasian took the bait. His eyes locked on to Kell’s.

  ‘I am glad you know that,’ he replied. ‘I hoped that your sources would find it out. I do not operate in this way. That is the truth, Thomas.’

  Kell registered the use of his first name and felt a coldness pass across the surface of his skin. It was as though Minasian had been expecting their confrontation all along.

  ‘I know that the order to kill Rachel came from Moscow,’ he repeated, ‘just as I know that my Service had nothing to do with what happened today. To Bernie. I believe you were betrayed by your own people.’

  Minasian looked towards the lens of the iPhone, longing to switch it off so that he could speak with total openness.

  ‘Believe what you want,’ he said. ‘I know my own people. I know my own side.’

  Kell seized on this.

  ‘Really? You think the SVR would tolerate a homosexual officer? Come to think of it, would anybody in the Russian political and intelligence community tolerate the man that you are, the man that you need to be? Why else have you lived in such secrecy for so long? Why else are you forced to live your life as a lie?’

  It was the principal point of weakness in Minasian’s personality and Kell intended to press on it repeatedly until it reaped rewards.

  ‘You can do better than this, surely?’ Minasian replied, revealing an unsurprising gift for condescension. Kell was not deterred.

  ‘I don’t need to do any better,’ he said, ‘because what I’m saying is the truth. You work for an organization – in fact, you serve a country – that considers you a third-class citizen, depraved and amoral, purely because of something as simple and immutable as your sexuality.’ He thought of Blunt and Burgess, clutched into the loving embrace of the NKVD for precisely the same reason. ‘You serve the very people who would condemn you for the man that you are, for the way that you feel. You’re in a hypocritical position, Alexander. You have no integrity.’

  Th
e words came out more or less as Kell would have wished them to come out, and they had more or less the impact that he had hoped for. He was trying to deliver blows to Minasian’s vanity, to slice through the fragile narcissism of a man who knew, deep in his psyche, that he was fraudulent. Long ago, Minasian had been resourceful enough to set up his personality in such a way that he could survive – even flourish – within the hypocrisy that Kell had identified. Yet Kell was convinced that at the centre of his character lurked an isolated and fearful man, an individual so at odds with society that the secret world had been the one place in which he could safely find refuge and still function.

  ‘I am interested by your methods,’ Minasian replied. For the first time his voice sounded uncertain. ‘It’s fascinating to see the way the British work.’

  ‘Let’s not fuck around,’ Kell replied quickly. ‘I’m trying to pay you the compliment of not telling you how much we already know about you and how much shit you’re in. I’m trying to treat you as an equal and I’m happy to offer you any way out of the terrible situation into which you and your wife have fallen.’

  ‘My wife?’

  Minasian was unable to conceal his shock. He had instantly understood what Kell was telling him. We know about your fertility problems. We can make this easy or we can make this hard. Minasian was being compromised by a Service that had been gently blackmailing its targets for decades and calling it ‘common sense’ and ‘the British way’. In Moscow, they roughed you up and shot you. In London, they took you for oysters; only later did you find out you’d picked up the bill.

  ‘Svetlana,’ Kell replied, and felt a trace of shame at his own ruthlessness. He lifted up his cup of coffee, his face partly concealed behind the mug as he drank. ‘Do you want to talk about her? Do you think she knew about Bernhard? Do you think that’s what happened today?’

  Minasian leaned back in his chair, exhaled heavily and folded his arms. He had reached a decision. The Russian knew that he was cornered and that it would be pointless not to cooperate further with SIS. If he left the interview without a promise of collaboration, Kell would shop him to Moscow. Minasian was most likely resigned to the inevitability of working for Kell and had concluded that he could maintain greater control over his destiny by agreeing to do so quickly.

  ‘This is a dirty trade we have chosen, is it not?’ he said.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Kell replied coolly. It sounded like a line Minasian had remembered from a movie.

  ‘I think I know what happened to Bernhard,’ Minasian said. He stood up, took one of Kell’s cigarettes, lit it and returned to the chair. Kell handed him an ashtray, his heart thumping as the confession began to pour out. ‘I think I know where I was lazy.’

  ‘Lazy?’

  ‘You know this too.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me,’ Kell replied, ‘and we’ll see if our theories match.’

  Minasian smiled again – that secret, mischievous glint that transformed his face – and drew on the cigarette with resigned pleasure.

  ‘I loved him. Did you know that?’

  Kell felt the delicious rush of adrenaline that accompanies the moment a target snaps.

  ‘I suspected it,’ he replied, though this was far from the truth. From everything that he had discerned from Riedle, the relationship between the two men had been emotional one-way traffic. Riedle had loved Minasian deeply, hopelessly. Minasian had provoked and then tested that love primarily for the purpose of being fuelled by it. Kell remembered one of Riedle’s more hysterical outbursts: ‘He derives a sadistic satisfaction from torturing me. He drinks the blood from my wounds.’ Kell had to keep telling himself that the man sitting in front of him was a sociopath; that any demonstration of normal human decency or compassion was almost certainly an act.

  ‘Bernhard was a good man,’ Minasian continued. ‘He was very generous, very interesting. Kind and patient.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kell said, lighting a cigarette of his own. Minasian’s respectful tone, his simple and direct manner, was completely persuasive.

  ‘We had fought,’ he continued, the voice level and matter-of-fact. ‘I was not always happy in his company. I think this explains why I was sometimes aggressive towards him.’

  It looked as though Minasian needed Kell to agree with this assessment of his behaviour, so he nodded.

  ‘If I am honest,’ the Russian continued, ‘I felt trapped by his love. He adored me. And I did adore him. But Svetlana had to come first. My work had to come first. I was torn between them and I felt guilty. Guilty about my feelings, even about my desires. The marriage and my career had to survive.’

  ‘Of course,’ Kell replied. Like all world-class liars, Minasian was able, first and foremost, to convince himself of his own sophistry and deceit. If he could convince himself, it followed that he could convince others. Kell even suspected that the Russian took pleasure in seeing his lies play out in public. Everything that he was saying was a performance – for Kell, for the camera, for himself. Had Kell not had the chance to meet Riedle and to hear his side of the story, he might have believed every word of what Minasian was telling him.

  ‘I expected to see him one last time,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see him. He was the most important person in my life for the last three years. When I was with him, I was at my most alive, more so even than in my work. I was going there today to talk to him. I was looking forward to it.’

  ‘And to stay the night?’ Kell asked.

  Minasian shook his head quickly. ‘I don’t think so.’ He looked troubled as he said this. ‘It would have been difficult, with Svetlana.’

  They stared at one another. Kell had done his best to appear empathetic to Minasian’s expressions of sadness and regret, while Minasian himself had looked increasingly forlorn, almost as if he was starting to blame himself for Riedle’s death.

  ‘Let me ask you this,’ said Kell. ‘Why did you stay so long at Sterndale Road? Why did it take you so long to walk away? It was only by chance that we saw you.’

  Minasian shrugged, looking up at the ceiling. He appeared to contemplate Kell’s question deeply and waited a considerable amount of time before answering it.

  ‘Do you remember when you were a child?’ he said finally, ‘after swimming?’ The Russian brought his eyes back to Kell’s. They were vast and sad. He looked so young, so trusting. ‘You would stand under the warm shower and you would not want to get out because you knew that you would be cold afterwards.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kell replied.

  ‘It was like that.’

  Minasian’s innocence at this moment was undeniably touching. Despite all that he knew about his character, the ruthlessness beneath the seemingly harmless exterior, Kell could not help but feel a burst of sympathy. Minasian had made the decision to confess. He had crossed the Rubicon. He knew that ‘Peter’ had spoken at length to Riedle about the collapse of their relationship and therefore that Kell knew a great deal about him. Minasian was now trying to build a counter-narrative that would slowly convince Kell of his inherent decency and blamelessness. Why? Because it would give him room to manoeuvre at a later stage in their relationship. By then, if the Service had come to trust ‘GAGARIN’, Riedle’s version of his character would be ignored as the hysterical exaggerations of a jilted lover.

  ‘Do go on,’ Kell said, fascinated by the strategy.

  ‘What would you like to know?’ Minasian asked.

  Kell posed the first question that came into his head.

  ‘You said earlier that you were “lazy”. What did you mean by that?’

  Minasian rested his cigarette in the ashtray and stretched his arms above his head. His white linen shirt had come loose at the waist, revealing a taut, muscular belly, smooth and hairless.

  ‘Everybody makes mistakes,’ he replied. ‘Even God.’

  Kell smiled, not least because he recognized the quote.

  ‘Isaac Babel?’

  The Russian cracked a vulpine smile.

  ‘Very impress
ive,’ he said. ‘You know Russian literature?’

  ‘Some,’ Kell replied.

  ‘Babel was a wonderful writer.’ Minasian raised his hands and crossed his forearms so that they were resting on top of his head. Kell glimpsed the watch again, the status symbol. ‘A Ukrainian, in fact. From Odessa.’

  ‘I know,’ said Kell. ‘Shot by the NKVD, wasn’t he? For adultery. Sleeping with another officer’s wife.’

  ‘If you believe that.’ Minasian’s tone implied that NKVD liquidations were the stuff of Western propaganda. Kell brought the conversation back to Riedle.

  ‘We were talking about mistakes,’ he said. ‘About bad luck. Somebody knew that you were communicating with Bernie. Is that possible? Somebody other than us?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Minasian replied. ‘I cannot think of any other way.’

  ‘Your Service?’

  Minasian picked up the cigarette. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Something like that would be enough to get you fired, right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  There was a sound of hammering from building works across the street. Kell waited until it had subsided before testing out a theory.

  ‘Tell me about Svetlana’s father.’

  Minasian’s eyes flicked up at Kell’s.

  ‘Andrei?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The Russian took a long draw on the cigarette, buying himself time. Kell watched him stub it out and knew that he had hit a nerve.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he said, looking towards the kitchen. Minasian’s back was partly turned.

  ‘What kind of a man is he? What kind of father-in-law? How does he treat his daughter?’

  ‘It is complicated.’ Minasian suddenly looked more uncomfortable than at any time in the interview.

  ‘How is it complicated?’

  The Russian’s eyes darted to one side and his mouth contorted into a pained grimace. He did not want to say something that might compromise his position still further. Kell remained silent, allowing Minasian to reveal as much, or as little, as he chose.