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

by Charles Cumming

  ‘What arrangements did you make for contacting one another?’ she asked.

  Kell was amazed by the timing of the question.

  ‘I gave him a BlackBerry,’ he replied, saying nothing about the Westfield meeting. ‘PGP encrypted. All that clever stuff.’

  ‘What’s the number?’

  ‘I’ll have to look it up.’ Kell could feel Amelia searching his face for the lie. She knew him too well. She did not trust him to give up on GAGARIN altogether.

  ‘That would be kind.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked quickly. ‘You’re going to give it to Cheltenham?’

  ‘No harm, is there?’

  ‘None,’ Kell replied. ‘Don’t you trust me to tell you if GAGARIN gets in touch?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said, caught out by Kell’s question.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave it.’ He took a sip of wine, trying to give the impression that he was at peace with Amelia’s decision. ‘I can see why it’s dangerous to trust him. I can see that he could do the Service more harm than good. I left everything in Minasian’s hands. He said he was flying back to Moscow tomorrow, that he’d be in touch on the number. If I hear from him, I’ll tell you.’

  ‘Of course you will.’ Amelia dabbed her mouth with the kitchen roll, candlelit eyes studying Kell’s face closely. He knew that she knew he was lying to her. Her next question proved it. ‘So you made no arrangement to meet again?’

  ‘You didn’t give us time!’ He smiled as he laid out the lie. ‘I was about to talk about a second meeting when your driver showed up—’

  She interrupted him. ‘What about the filming? Had you continued to record the conversation?’

  Kell remained poker-faced. He was not about to admit to Amelia that a video existed in which he and Minasian had arranged the Westfield meeting. He didn’t want her watching the film or crawling all over his ideas. He wanted to be free to work without bureaucratic interference. Amelia had let him down so many times in the past that she was effectively forcing him to deceive her.

  ‘Afraid not,’ he said, skewering a potato and cutting it in half. ‘I didn’t think it was necessary, once he’d confessed.’

  Amelia nodded, seeming to accept this answer, but she was watching him with a forensic intensity. He wanted to change the subject – to talk about her garden, about François, about anything other than Minasian – but knew that to do so would be to reveal his guilt.

  ‘Do you want me to walk you through what was said?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not necessary. I assume you’ll write it up?’

  ‘If you like.’

  They ate in silence. The insects continued to buzz around the light, the sheep continued to moan in the distant field. Kell complimented Amelia on the food and told her that Minasian had been ‘considerably more talkative with the iPhone switched off’, an observation to which she offered only a brief response.

  ‘Yes. People are often more relaxed and candid if they feel they’re not being recorded.’

  Kell poured more wine, his mouth as dry as Amelia’s sun-baked lawn. He could lie to most people with ease, but lying to Amelia Levene felt like betraying a member of his own family.

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Amelia put down her cutlery. ‘At one point this afternoon, Minasian seemed to suggest that he wasn’t responsible for killing Rachel. I wondered how you were feeling about that?’

  Kell experienced that old unsettling sense of Amelia peering into the hidden corners of his mind.

  ‘I’ll never know,’ he replied, hoping to make the subject go away. ‘Too late now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Did you believe him?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  She moved a strand of hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear.

  ‘It occurred to me that this might be why you’re so interested in him. Because he might lead you to the people who were responsible.’

  ‘So you believe him?’

  Amelia indicated with a shrug that she was not at all sure. Wary of disappearing into speculations, Kell did his best to put an end to the conversation.

  ‘I don’t have any desire for vengeance,’ he said. ‘You think I do, but you’re wrong.’ Even as he spoke the words, he knew that he was deceiving himself just as much as he was deceiving Amelia. ‘Rachel is gone. Minasian isn’t going to bring her back, nor is he going to lead me to the men who ordered her murder. As far as I’m concerned he can go about his business. He can stay in the SVR, he can quit, he can work for Andrei Eremenko. He can try to get his wife pregnant at a fertility clinic, he can move to Barcelona and start a new life with a new man. None of it makes any difference to me. The only thing I care about is STRIPE. I want him investigated. Because if some brainwashed maniac comes back from Syria and kills two hundred people in the rush hour, I want to know that I’m not responsible. I want to know that I wasn’t just sitting on the sidelines, waiting for it to happen.’

  38

  Shahid walked Brighton Pier all the time. He knew where the crowds gathered, where the cameras were, where he would have the best chance of shooting the targets and then moving forward. He had a vivid fantasy of clearing the pier of structures and people, of all the shit that was contaminating Brighton, so that he could walk along it with Rosie at his side and breathe in the clean sea air, all alone. He liked to imagine that, after it was over, the police would comb through days of CCTV and spot him as he scouted the target environment, grainy footage of a holy warrior played time and again on the Net and the news, the great Shahid Khan preparing for his day of martyrdom, planting the seeds for England’s future.

  When Shahid had seen the pier for the first time, he knew that Jalal had made the wisest and most intelligent choice of target. It was a godless place, evidence of an entire society and culture on its knees. The enclosed areas were the worst. The noise and the smell and the greed of the arcades. Mothers with their stomachs displayed who likely did not know the fathers of their own children, frenziedly pumping coins into machines that lured and tricked them with promises of riches that never came. Men who were not at work during the day, day-trip tourists and teenagers hypnotized by fruit machines and arcade computers that made a game of war, a cartoon of despair and bombings, of the conflicts created by Western politicians. Infidel soldiers, Muslim victims – all inside a game designed to entertain children. It made Shahid toxic with violence. There were times, walking in that deafening place, when the screams of the customers and the stench of their food and the noise of their music became so much for him that he wanted to act in that very moment. Had he been armed, had Kris already supplied him with his weapons, Shahid would have taken them all in a moment of transcendental purity, cleansing the room, the pier, driving an entire way of life into the sea.

  He had come here with Rosie. That was the only time that he had felt distracted in the target environment. At the far end of the pier, near the rollercoaster, where he planned to finish after working his way south from the beach, they had kissed for the first time. He had no longer been able to stop himself. He had taken her around the waist so that she could feel his strength as he pulled her towards him. She had tasted of ice cream and perfume. She had opened her mouth and he had felt her lips and her tongue, lost in the sweetness of being able to tell her with his mouth and with his body how he felt about her, how attractive she was, how much she tormented him.

  ‘God I’m so glad,’ she said, breaking the kiss and looking into his eyes. ‘I’ve wanted you to do that for so long.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Shahid said, feeling embarrassed. He knew that he had been weak to wait and wondered if he had kissed her in the right way.

  ‘Nothing to be sorry about,’ she said, and put her hand on the back of his neck. The touch of her fingers was gentle at first, then she pulled him towards her. It was a new side of her and it sent a pulse right through him. He knew that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. They were both losing their control.


  As they walked back to the bus stop, holding hands, Shahid became worried. He was more than ever convinced that Rosie had been sent by God to prove his commitment to Islam. He knew that God was making him choose between a life with a woman who was not Muslim and the afterlife of martyrdom, which was sublime. It was no choice at all. He liked Rosie, he would continue to see her, but it was pointless to get caught up in her. It was not the destiny of Shahid Khan, of Azhar Ahmed Iqbal, of Omar Assya, to be a husband or a man of the family. He was greater than that. He was a soldier in a war. A martyr. He had to fight his doubts and his lust. This was the will of God.

  39

  Amelia dropped Kell at Salisbury station the following morning and he took the train back to London. It felt like a farewell of sorts. Towards the end of dinner, the temperature had fallen in the garden. Amelia had gone inside to fetch a pashmina, leaving Kell alone at the table. He had immediately sent a WhatsApp message to Mowbray suggesting – in en clair language – that ‘the second movie’ was a ‘mirage’ that the ‘suits’ didn’t need to see. Mowbray had understood what was being asked of him, replying with the simple message: ‘I get it. Never saw the film.’ From that moment Kell had felt that his professional relationship with Amelia Levene had changed irrevocably. He had embarked on a deliberate strategy of deception. Whatever trust he had felt for her had vanished long ago. Should she discover that he was lying to her, Amelia’s faith in Kell would be similarly degraded.

  Eight days remained until the scheduled meeting with Minasian. Kell heard nothing from Amelia nor from Vauxhall Cross. He suspected that Amelia would put him under light surveillance – a quick look at his phones, a daily printout of his wi-fi activity – and therefore was conscious to go about his life as normally as possible. He made no attempt to contact Claridge’s to confirm Minasian’s reservation, nor did he check that Svetlana had made an appointment at the fertility clinic. He watched the cricket on Sky, read short stories by Isaac Babel, went to the movies, exercised at the gym. For the benefit of the snoops at GCHQ, Kell looked online at several articles about ISIS and ran Google searches on home-grown jihadis; it would have looked suspicious abruptly to abandon all interest in the potential threat from STRIPE. To test the intensity of any possible mobile surveillance, Kell took himself off to Paris for three nights, eating at his favourite restaurants – Brasserie Lipp and Chez Paul – and visiting the recently re-opened Musée Picasso. At no point did he sense that he was being watched or followed. He dined with an old colleague from the Service whom he knew to be in regular contact with Amelia. Kell said nothing about Minasian or the threat from STRIPE, but hinted that there was a ‘small possibility’ he would return to active duty in the near future, ‘depending on something in the pipeline which may or may not happen’, an appropriately gnomic remark which he hoped would be conveyed back to ‘C’. Kell checked the dedicated phone for a message from GAGARIN, but the Russian did not make contact. Kell was certain that he would appear at Westfield as promised, bringing with him detailed information about STRIPE that would allow SIS to make an arrest. He assumed that Svetlana Eremenko’s passport would be flagged at Heathrow, but did not know if Amelia would bother to put eyes on Minasian at Claridge’s. Assuming she did so, Kell had enough faith in the Russian’s anti-surveillance skills to shake off even the most sophisticated team that MI5 could throw at him.

  Friday dawned. Kell paid his habitual visit to the gym and swam forty lengths of the pool. He had paid for a private locker in the changing room and deliberately left his watch inside it when he had finished dressing. He did not want to run even the small risk that Tech-Ops had planted a tracking device in his personal effects. For the same reason, Kell put on a brand-new pair of shoes, purchased in High Street Kensington the day before. There were ways in which footwear could be ‘painted’, making it possible for the Service to follow a subject over significant distances.

  Outside the gym, Kell made a quick visual note of the five vehicles parked in the immediate area, then walked south towards Hammersmith Road to hail a cab. He had been certain that the surveillance threat against him was non-existent, yet as he turned around in the back seat of the taxi, he saw one of the cars which had been parked outside the gym – a navy blue Seat Altea – making a left turn on to Hammersmith Road. Kell had not committed any of the numperplates to memory and could not be sure that it was the same vehicle. He was also aware that he was at the start of a long process of cleaning his tail and that it was not uncommon in such circumstances to imagine threats where none existed. Paranoia kept you sharp; suspicion was a useful accomplice. Kell continued to watch the car as the taxi headed south-east. It followed him to Cromwell Road, eventually disappearing at a set of lights close to the Natural History Museum. Kell did not get a look at the driver.

  He had a simple objective: to throw off any surveillance, but not to be seen to be doing so. For that reason, Kell could not abandon his iPhone without good cause. To leave it at home – or to secure it in the locker at his gym – would look suspicious to Amelia. In Paris, Kell had dropped the phone on the street, causing a tiny hairline crack to appear in the lower part of the screen. This had given him an idea. He instructed the taxi driver to take him to a small shop on Gloucester Road, where he asked for the screen to be replaced. The owner of the shop told him that the job would take two hours. Kell promised to return before the end of the day. He had no intention of doing so – the meeting with Minasian would almost certainly run on too long – but planned instead to pick up the phone in the morning.

  As soon as he had left the shop, Kell walked the short distance to Gloucester Road Underground station and waited for a District Line train travelling east. He made a cursory assessment of the passengers standing within a carriage distance of him on the platform, then boarded the train at the last moment. As far as he could tell, there was no suspicious activity in reaction to this. Standing close to the doors, Kell feinted to leave at Victoria station, watching the behaviour of a young man who, moments earlier, had caught his eye while reading a copy of the Guardian. The man did not react. Kell had been suspicious of him not only because of the lightning quick eye contact between them, but also because he assumed that someone of his appearance – hipster haircut, Converse trainers, turned-up skinny jeans – would more probably read the digital edition of the Guardian, rather than purchase a physical newspaper. The man eventually stepped off the train at Westminster.

  Kell found a seat. He could see all the way to the rear of the carriage, but his view ahead was obscured by a large group of Spanish teenagers who had boarded the train at Victoria. On a straightforward clean, Kell would have stepped off the train at one of the stations, jumping back on at the last moment in order to expose or throw off a tail. He would have switched platforms and lines, allowing – for example – the first few trains at Gloucester Road to leave the station without him. But he could not afford to be seen to be acting abnormally. Instead, Kell got off at Embankment and walked through a narrow park running parallel to the river. A path connected the entrance at Embankment station to Waterloo Bridge. Kell walked underneath the bridge and found the rear entrance to Somerset House.

  He had come to see an exhibition in the Eastern Gallery. This was how Kell had typically filled his days during his extended absence from the Service; should Amelia glance at his surveillance report, his behaviour would not appear to be abnormal or out of character. He had walked the ground at Somerset House shortly before leaving for Paris and knew that the southern side of the complex was a warren of offices and corridors, splitting to all four points of the compass. In such an environment it was almost impossible to track a target without coming into contact with them. Kell stood in the lobby area for a count of sixty seconds and was followed inside by a woman of his own age wearing a grey business suit, carrying a cup of takeaway coffee. She was slim, wore black-rimmed glasses and nodded politely at Kell as she passed him. Kell turned and went into the ground-floor bathroom, checked his clothing for any tags
that may have been attached during his journey, then bought a ticket to the exhibition. He stayed there for the next twenty minutes.

  As soon as he had left the Eastern Gallery, he took a lift to the first floor and emerged into the outdoor courtyard. Kell had not seen the woman in the business suit since she had walked past him in the lobby. He looked for her now, but did not spot her. There were members of the public seated at outdoor tables on two sides of the courtyard and Kell strolled past them, searching for repeating faces. If the young man on the train had been following him, it was likely that he had affected a change in his appearance. Kell could not see him. He bought himself a cup of coffee and a pain au chocolat in the café in the north-east corner of the courtyard, eating them at a secluded table indoors while pretending to read a book. Across the room, there was a bearded man wearing a dark suit who was not dissimilar in appearance to a businessman Kell had clocked at Embankment station. On closer inspection, however, Kell saw that he was a different person.

  After finishing his coffee, Kell left Somerset House by the main entrance on the Strand. As he looked around for a cab, a young man wearing Converse trainers crossed the street ahead of him. He was of similar build and colouring to the Guardian-reading hipster on the Tube, but was wearing a black leather jacket and a blue baseball cap. Kell knew that experienced surveillance officers could change their outward appearance with relative ease, but that they were often obliged to continue wearing the same shoes. He waited until the young man had crossed the street, watched him walk in the direction of Covent Garden then, when he turned to greet a friend outside the Lyceum Theatre, saw that he was an entirely different person to the one who had been sitting on the train. Kell smiled. He remembered the man in denim jeans and a brown tweed jacket who had spooked him at Bayswater station several weeks before and knew that he would always be plagued by such moments of paranoia. Still, on days such as these it was better to anticipate problems rather than to walk into a trap set for him by Amelia Levene.