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

by Charles Cumming

  ‘There is no doubt that Andrei draws strength and political influence from having me as a son-in-law,’ he began.

  ‘How so?’ Kell asked, startled by Minasian’s frankness.

  ‘In Russia, to have a close family member in the intelligence services is to obtain a certain status. A guarantee of safety.’

  ‘Safety from what?’

  ‘From the vultures in the Kremlin.’

  Kell was astonished by the choice of vocabulary. ‘That’s how you would describe the men who employ you? As vultures?’

  Minasian ducked the question.

  ‘Andrei would like me to remain in the SVR. That is all I am saying. We are part of a big, happy family, Thomas. His business interests are completely protected as long as I remain in the Service.’

  ‘That’s not all you’re saying.’

  ‘What else am I saying?’

  ‘Your wife is Andrei’s only child, yes?’

  Minasian nodded.

  ‘And he loves her, of course?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So it stands to reason that he wants his daughter to have a good and faithful husband.’

  A shimmer of irritation appeared on Minasian’s face. The moment was gone in a second, but Kell felt that he had been afforded a glimpse into his deep-state personality. Kell waited for a moment and took a deep, apologetic breath, as though he wished he did not have to voice the theory that he was now obliged to articulate.

  ‘What if Andrei suspected that you were cheating on Svetlana?’ he asked. ‘Is that possible?’

  Minasian nodded resignedly. ‘Of course. Everything in our world is possible.’

  ‘So, given that, what if he hired somebody to investigate you? Somebody to follow you around and go through your stuff whenever you were overseas, away from Kiev or Moscow?’

  Minasian reacted to the idea as if it had never occurred to him, though Kell was sure that he was lying.

  ‘You really think this is what happened?’ he asked.

  ‘Stay with me.’ Kell had smoked his own cigarette to the base of the filter and now stubbed it out, scorching the tips of his fingers as he did so. ‘You needed an alphanumeric code to communicate with Bernie, yes? A public key and a private key.’

  ‘Something like this.’

  ‘You kept the private key written down in the lining of your suitcase, under a floorboard, or sewn into the curtains of the spare room? It was too long to commit to memory.’

  Minasian compressed a smile. ‘Something like this.’

  ‘So let’s imagine that the private investigators hired by your father-in-law found that code. They knew what to do with it. They isolated the email account and they opened up your correspondence with Riedle.’

  Minasian’s admiring silence spoke volumes. Kell had worked it out.

  ‘They reported back to Andrei. They told him that his son-in-law was having an affair. Not with a housewife from Vienna or a waitress in the Marais, but with an architect from Hamburg. A fifty-nine-year-old man. They told him that his son-in-law was secretly gay.’

  Minasian stood up and again took one of Kell’s cigarettes, lighting it and then standing by the closed curtains as he smoked. Kell was aware that he was now out of shot on the film, but did not want to break the moment by adjusting the angle on the lens.

  ‘You would know better than I do what your father-in-law’s views are on homosexuality,’ he said. ‘Just from looking at the guy, knowing his background and his record, I’d say he probably isn’t the most liberal-minded person I’ve ever set eyes on.’ Minasian looked as if he had swallowed something unpleasant. ‘Let’s face it, Alexander. He was probably incredibly angry with you, embarrassed and unsettled. If you weren’t who you are, if you weren’t of value to him, if you weren’t the only chance he’s got of having grandchildren, who’s to say what might have happened? It could have been you getting shot this afternoon, not Bernie.’

  Minasian turned quickly, a sour expression on his face barely discernible against the square of light in the living-room window.

  ‘I think Andrei Eremenko made a decision based on rage and based on business. He felt that Bernhard Riedle had the potential to obliterate your career in the SVR and therefore to destroy his daughter’s life and threaten his relationship with the Kremlin. Still with me?’

  Minasian was listening to Kell with the same stillness with which he might have listened to the doctor on Great Wimpole Street just a few hours earlier. He did not say ‘yes’ to Kell’s question; he did not say ‘no’. He simply stared at him.

  ‘In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if Andrei has a little word with you at some stage in the next twenty-four hours. Stop cheating on my daughter. Stay away from your boyfriends. Be a man. It wouldn’t surprise me if he lets you know that he was the one responsible for ordering Riedle’s assassination. That’s why you didn’t want to get out of the shower, isn’t it, Alex? You knew that as soon as you walked away from that place, you were going to be cold and you were going to be lonely. In fact, you knew that your life was never going to be the same again.’

  34

  As soon as he saw Rosie Maguire for the first time, Shahid Khan knew that she was going to change everything.

  He had not taken any of the girls who had been offered to him in Syria. Women came to the Caliphate to serve as brides to the warriors fighting against the forces of Assad. Shahid had felt no desire for their company, for the arrangement of marriage, for the physical benefits of a shared bed. He had felt that a woman would distract him from his commitment to the cause. In this respect he was unlike many of the other soldiers who were fighting inside Iraq and Syria. He knew that Jalal had sensed this and recognized that there was something different about him, something special. Jalal had seen the discipline and the focus in Shahid’s personality. This was one of the reasons why he had been chosen for the important operation in England.

  Shahid had been working at the supermarket for more than a month when he first noticed Rosie. He was shocked by the intensity of his attraction to her, and ashamed that he had no control over it. He walked past the deli counter where she worked two or three times in the space of a few minutes, each time looking at her, trying to catch her eye. On the last occasion she looked up and smiled. Just a tiny curl at the edge of her mouth, like she already knew what was going to happen between them. Then it was gone. But it was enough to convince Shahid that she liked him. It wasn’t the kind of smile the other white girls gave him. It wasn’t greedy or empty, a look of bored lust. There was meaning in it. It was as if Rosie was trying to say that she understood him.

  The next day she wasn’t there. Shahid was about to start working nights so, the following afternoon, he came in early. He found her in the staff canteen. She was putting on a sweater at the end of her shift.

  ‘I’m Shahid,’ he said. ‘I saw you.’

  ‘Oh, hi there.’

  That smile again. There was nobody else in the room.

  ‘You finished? Going home?’

  ‘Yeah. You?’

  ‘Nah. Nights.’

  ‘What’s that like?’

  Before he had thought about his answer, Shahid said: ‘Lonely.’

  Rosie liked it that he had been honest enough to admit this. ‘I bet,’ she said. ‘Not many other people around, yeah? Nobody to chat to.’

  ‘I don’t mind it that much,’ Shahid replied, not wanting her to think that he was complaining. ‘I put on headphones, get the place to myself.’

  ‘Your own playground.’

  She was not as striking as some of the other girls he had seen in Brighton, but she was more beautiful than all of them. The feeling Rosie gave Shahid when she looked at him was like a picture of all that was right and all that was wrong. He knew that it was not permitted for him to be with a woman if she was not Muslim, but Shahid had become lonely in Brighton. He had needs. He knew that it would be foolish to become involved with Rosie, that it was dangerous in the context of the operation, but a
n old part of him was suddenly awake again.

  He began to think about her all the time. He wanted to see her. He found out when she would be working so that they would be in the supermarket at the same time. When Rosie was talking to him she made him feel calm. Shahid liked to make her laugh. He told her stories about the people who worked out at the gym and teased her about her taste in music. He was surprised that she found him funny. He did not know that he was capable of that with a woman. She brought new things out of him.

  It was Rosie who had asked him out first. Shahid had not liked this and yet he had agreed straight away. He felt that it should have been his place to make the invitation, but that his faith and his discipline had not allowed this. He had gone with her because he was compelled by his attraction to her. Just for a walk along the beach so that he could spend more time with her. A lot of white girls were racist and didn’t want to be seen with a ‘Paki’, but Rosie was different.

  He had worn shorts and a T-shirt. She had worn a summer dress that had partly covered her shoulders. He tried to fight his feelings for her, but it was hopeless. He took photographs of her as they chatted in a café so that he could look at her face and the curves of her waist and her breasts when he was in his room later on. He had done similar things with Vicky, the girl who had betrayed him in Leeds. He had taken photographs of her to look at when he was alone. Vicky had sent him films of herself as well, disgusting films. Shahid had destroyed them. They were shameful. He did not want things to be the same with Rosie. He wanted what was between them to be pure. Vicky had turned out to be cruel and unkind. Rosie wasn’t like that. There was something vulnerable about her, something that meant he would always be able to control her.

  ‘So where did you say you were from?’ she asked him. ‘What’s your accent?’

  They were in Starbucks on London Road. Rosie had ordered an iced coffee and a chocolate cookie. Shahid had paid for them.

  ‘Leeds,’ he replied, without thinking. He should have said ‘Bradford’.

  ‘Yeah? So what you doing down here?’

  ‘Trying to make a new start,’ he replied. ‘I like the seaside. Saving up enough money so I can go to college.’

  Shahid told Rosie things that he had told no one else. Truthful things. That his oldest brother, Imran, had been killed in a car accident when Shahid was seventeen. That his mother had died of liver cancer only a year before that. That he’d been into aikido as a teenager, used to fight with his brother and compete in competitions, but had given it all up after Imran died.

  ‘What about your father?’ Rosie asked. ‘Where’s he?’

  ‘Don’t have any contact with him,’ Shahid replied. Two years earlier, Elyas Iqbal had been told by West Yorkshire Police that Shahid – or Azhar, as his father knew him – had been killed while fighting for ISIS in Mosul. ‘We don’t get on,’ Shahid told her. ‘We fell out.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Rosie had already told him that she had grown up in care in Nottingham. Her mother had been taken away from her by social services when she was ten because she had been addicted to heroin. Shahid felt bad telling her that he had no relationship with his surviving family. It felt like a waste of something Rosie would have given everything for.

  ‘My dad’s difficult,’ Shahid replied. ‘Conservative. Strict. Classic Pakistani immigrant, you know? Wouldn’t let me breathe, man. Always judging me, telling me I wasn’t doing stuff right.’

  ‘That must have been hard for you. I can imagine. And without your mum there, too.’

  Shahid felt the breath going out of him. The feeling of being listened to, of being understood, was almost overwhelming.

  ‘Yeah, she was the one I got on with,’ he said, and felt the empty anger that was always there whenever he remembered his mother. ‘She encouraged me with stuff, you know? She was proud of my belts, the aikido and that. Sounds like it was bad for you, too. What happened to your mum? You ever see her?’

  ‘Nah,’ Rosie replied, brushing the question away. ‘Don’t know where she is or what she’s doing. Never knew my dad, neither.’

  On their second date they went to the cinema. While watching the film, Shahid knew that Rosie wanted him to kiss her, yet he did not have the courage. He was constantly fighting against his faith and his discipline. It bewildered him that he could feel such a sense of longing for a woman who was infidel, at the same time as a determination not to betray himself. Other men wanted to be with her. Rosie had told him that. Shahid knew that she had already slept with other men. She was twenty and she was not a virgin. Shahid hated this about her and yet he wanted to be one of those men. He thought of her in the act of loving him. He thought of her tenderness and her soft skin and her caresses on his stomach and his back. It was torture. A woman had finally pushed Shahid Khan towards love, but she was not pure and she was not Muslim.

  ‘I keep a diary,’ she said as they were waiting at the bus stop after the film.

  ‘Yeah? What kind of things do you write about?’

  ‘Stuff.’

  ‘Am I in it?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She gave him one of her smiles, kind eyes promising limitless intimacy. ‘Maybe not.’

  Shahid had felt that people were watching them. Otherwise he would have kissed her. He didn’t like the feeling of being judged, the Paki with the white girl.

  ‘I write about feeling lonely,’ she said, looking back at the town. ‘About not knowing where I’ve come from, where I belong.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. It’s who I am.’

  Shahid was about to take Rosie’s hand when he saw that his bus was coming.

  ‘That’s mine,’ he said, losing his courage. ‘I’d better go.’

  Rosie looked disappointed.

  ‘Yeah?’ she said. ‘You don’t want to wait for the next one?’

  ‘Nah. Gotta get back.’ Shahid knew that he had to find a way of getting this woman out of his system. ‘I’ll see you at work,’ he said, stepping on board. He did not know how Rosie was planning to get home.

  ‘Yeah, at work then,’ she replied, stepping aside to let other passengers on to the bus. ‘Thanks for the film, Shahid. I had a really nice time with you.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Text me,’ she mouthed through the window, and waved as Shahid took a seat.

  35

  There was a gentle knock at the door. Kell wondered why Mowbray was interrupting them. He felt that he had Minasian where he wanted him and was frustrated by the disruption. Picking up the iPhone, he told Minasian to take a seat and walked next door.

  Mowbray was in the bedroom.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s the boss, guv. She keeps calling. Keeps threatening. Wants to know what’s going on.’

  ‘Threatening? What do you mean?’

  ‘She doesn’t like it that we’ve got GAGARIN here. Under our own steam. Off the books. It’s making people nervous.’

  Kell felt a familiar burst of irritation with Amelia’s tactics.

  ‘Where’s Simon?’ he asked.

  ‘Long gone. She ordered him home.’

  ‘What have you told her?’

  ‘The truth.’

  The television in the bedroom was paused on Sky News. Kell handed over the iPhone and told Mowbray to encrypt the video, then to send it to Vauxhall Cross.

  ‘That’ll keep her quiet. Give her something to chew on.’ The image on the television was flickering. ‘I need more time with Minasian. I need to know what he’s going to give us, how we’re going to communicate, when we can next meet up.’

  ‘Sure,’ Mowbray replied, as though such concerns were far beyond his remit or understanding. Kell looked across his bedroom at the set of bookshelves. Mowbray had flattened down a framed photograph of Rachel.

  ‘Did you …?’

  ‘Just in case Minasian came in here,’ Mowbray explained. ‘Didn’t want him seeing …’

  ‘It’s all right,
’ Kell replied, picking up the photograph. ‘Let him see her. Let him see what he did.’

  There was a pile of papers on the floor, including a copy of the notes Kell had scribbled in Brussels after the first dinner with Riedle. He reached for them, a sudden spasm in the base of his spine as he turned around.

  ‘Anything on the news about Sterndale Road?’ he asked, nodding towards the television. ‘Twitter? Internet?’

  ‘Bits and pieces.’

  Kell looked down at the notes. The pain was spreading across his lower back.

  Power and control central to M’s personality. Must retain a position of dominance.

  ‘Sounds like the cops think it’s a local issue,’ Mowbray was saying. ‘Riedle hasn’t been formally identified.’

  Kell continued to read the notes.

  Chameleon. Adapts himself to give people what they need for as long as he needs them.

  He asked for Mowbray’s phone so that he could continue to film the interview. He read the final note.

  What does M want? What can we give him? Do we flatter, or squeeze?

  Kell returned to the interrogation. Minasian was standing on the far side of the room. He had taken down two books. The first was a Penguin Classic of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry; the second, which Minasian was reading, had a pale yellow cover. It occurred to Kell that he was looking remarkably relaxed for a man who had just been told that his father-in-law had arranged for his lover’s murder.

  ‘Larkin?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Minasian replied. ‘Whitsun Weddings.’

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘Of course I know it.’ Minasian provided a brief glimpse of the intellectual hauteur that had so exasperated Riedle. ‘Why would I not?’

  Kell shrugged. He could not think how to answer such a question. The Russian turned a page and ran a finger down several lines of verse.