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

by Charles Cumming

  He headed west in the direction of Trafalgar Square and walked north along St Martin’s Lane as far as Wyndham’s Theatre. Kell was known within the Service as an avid reader and collector of rare books, so it made sense for him to browse in the windows of the second-hand bookstores in nearby Cecil Court; doing so afforded him the opportunity to glance up and down the pedestrianized colonnade every few moments, checking for foot surveillance. He saw nothing to raise his suspicions. Having bought a first edition of The Whitsun Weddings at Goldsboro Books, he walked to Holborn station and boarded a Central Line train to Shepherd’s Bush. By half past one, exactly an hour before his scheduled meeting with GAGARIN, Thomas Kell was walking into Westfield.

  40

  It was a soft target. That was the first thing Kell thought about whenever he found himself in Westfield. A handful of gunmen, armed with semi-automatic weapons, could stroll inside at any moment and murder two or three hundred people in less time than it took to make a skinny latte. The security guards were unarmed. Counter-terrorism units in Paddington would take at least ten minutes to scramble. Members of the British public did not carry guns or knives. A reasonably well-organized terrorist cell – or lone wolf jihadi with combat experience in Syria – could wreak havoc in the heart of London before MI5 had got out of bed. That was the stark reality of Western capital cities in the early twenty-first century. That was the nature of the threat from STRIPE.

  Kell walked around. Westfield was crowded with families of every race and creed, the new international London of Somalians, Bengalis, Saudis, Chinese. It was one of the emerging paradoxes of extreme Islam that the modern terrorist was blind to nationality and religion; every person in the mall – the Saudi doctor, the Iraqi exile, the Nigerian lawyer – was a legitimate target. Kell felt an exaggerated sense that he was one of the few white European faces in the building, and therefore easier to spot among the polyglot sea of shoppers and staff. Taking an escalator to the first floor, he felt a sense of kinship with Alexander Minasian, who was doubtless going through a near-identical anti-surveillance routine somewhere else in London. It was even possible that Minasian was already inside Westfield and that the two men would pass one another in the mall. Kell imagined that the Russian had left Claridge’s at dawn and taken an inexhaustibly complex sequence of trains and taxis and Tubes in an attempt to shake off the phantom agents of SIS and Andrei Eremenko. It was Minasian who had taught Kleckner about the joys of Harrods; he would almost certainly have spent half an hour inside the store that morning, affecting changes in his appearance, doubling back along mirrored corridors, perhaps even lifting a security pass so that he could leave via the subterranean passage that led to the staff entrance on Hans Crescent.

  Kell stopped at the top of the escalator. It occurred to him, not for the first time in his long career, that the business of agent-running was absurd. He knew that Amelia could not afford to put a team on him; he knew that the chances of Minasian being followed by the SVR were infinitesimally small. Kell could have met GAGARIN in broad daylight in the middle of Leicester Square and, chances are, nobody would have batted an eyelid. Yet he had spent nine days in a state of sustained paranoia, shuttling around London and Paris, renting out lockers at his local gym and handing in his iPhone for repair. As for Minasian, Kell could only imagine the obsessive lengths to which the Russian had gone in order to ensure his security. And yet it had to be done. If Minasian helped to stop an attack, if Kell’s actions ensured the safety of the men and women obliviously going about their shopping in Westfield, then it would all have been worth it.

  He was hungry. Kell made a clockwise circuit of the western section of the mall, purchased a small digital wristwatch in WHSmith, then ate a tagine at a branch of Comptoir Libanais, watching all the time for repeating faces or suspicious behaviour. By the time he had finished eating, it was twenty past two. Kell sank a double espresso, picked up his bag, passed a group of schoolchildren being herded towards the cinema and walked the short distance to the entrance of Marks and Spencer.

  The women’s section on the ground floor was empty. Nobody looking at dresses, nobody looking at skirts. Kell walked straight ahead towards the underwear department, passing a woman in full burka pushing a sleeping child in a buggy. To his left, there were rows and rows of pyjamas and nightdresses; to his right, a huge poster of a model in pink lingerie. A bank of escalators led upstairs to the men’s section and down to the Food Hall. Kell rode to the first level, using the height of the escalator to scan the open-plan floor for Minasian. The anxiety was in him now; the heart-quickening fear that his agent would fail to show. Kell wasn’t worried about Amelia. He hardly even cared about surveillance. The only thing that mattered was GAGARIN’s integrity. Had he gone back to Moscow to confess his sins? Had Eremenko confronted him and demanded that he divorce Svetlana? Or had Minasian kept his word, gathered the product on STRIPE and brought it with him to Westfield? Kell could hear Amelia’s voice in his head – He has to win. He can’t win by making you the hero – and suddenly felt that he had been played. The Russian wasn’t going to come. STRIPE was a fake. GAGARIN was a ghost.

  Kell reached the top of the escalator. The men’s section was straight ahead of him. Suits, jackets, trousers, shirts. He looked at his watch. It was exactly half past two. He had timed it perfectly. He turned to his left, made a complete anticlockwise circuit of the floor, found a Panama hat and placed it in a handbasket that he carried back to the escalator. He had not yet seen Minasian. He walked towards the men’s section and saw a row of white shirts stacked on a shelf close to the entrance. He turned and went back to the far end of the shop floor and placed two pairs of socks in the basket, trying to behave as naturally and as unobtrusively as possible.

  Why wasn’t Minasian there? Kell looked down at the basket and told himself to relax. Spying is waiting. He repeated the mantra, telling himself, over and over again, that agents always showed. In twenty years Kell had known a source not to materialize only three times. They stuck to the rules. They did what they were told. After all, Minasian knew that SIS had enough compromising material on him to obliterate his career; there was no possibility that he would risk taking them on. He had to come. He had to show. GAGARIN had no choice.

  Kell looked again at his watch. Already twenty to three. He turned around and looked back at the entrance. Thirty feet away he could see a husband and wife flicking through suits and an overweight man in his fifties holding up a mustard tweed jacket, checking his reflection in the mirror. Still no sign of Minasian. Kell picked up another pair of socks, dropped them in the basket.

  Then there she was. Coming out of a changing room in the corner of the store. A slim woman in a grey business suit, wearing black-rimmed glasses. The woman who had passed him in the lobby at Somerset House. Kell immediately reached down into the basket and took hold of the rim of the Panama hat. If he put it on, it was a signal to Minasian. Get out. I am compromised. Abort.

  He looked again. He could not see the woman’s face. In breach of all sensible tradecraft, Kell walked directly towards her. He moved so quickly and with such purpose that the woman looked up, sensing him in her peripheral vision. Kell was walking towards her as though he was intending to introduce himself. And then he saw, to his intense relief, that he had made a mistake. It was not the same person. His eyes had played the old surveillance trick, turning her into someone else. She was much younger than the woman he had seen in Somerset House, but the grey suit was exactly the same. Doubtless it was a Marks and Spencer staple.

  He turned and walked back towards the entrance. Time to pick up a white shirt and let GAGARIN know that the coast was clear.

  Kell was passing the bank of escalators when he saw a man in his mid-thirties walking into the store ahead of him. Cheap denim jeans, a grey T-shirt, several days of stubble.

  Minasian.

  At first the Russian did not see Kell. He turned to his right, picked up a white shirt, then moved forward to look at a rack of suits. Kell passed w
ithin three metres of him and went to the stack of shirts. He picked up a white shirt of his own, tucked it under his arm, then walked directly towards him.

  Minasian was barely recognizable, no trace of the slick metropolitan professional whom Kell had interviewed at Sinclair Road. As he looked up and caught Kell’s eye, there was an electrifying moment of understanding between them, invisible to any passer-by, which confirmed that the meeting could safely go ahead. Then Minasian moved away. Kell put down the basket, placed the shirt back on the stack and walked out of the store.

  41

  Mowbray had hired the Peugeot in his wife’s name and left it overnight in Westfield. He had posted the keys and the parking ticket through Kell’s front door just after nine o’clock the previous evening, with a note telling him where to find the vehicle. As soon as he had left Marks and Spencer, Kell took a lift to Level Two of the underground car park, paid for twenty-four hours of parking and found the Peugeot. He sat behind the wheel and looked at his watch. Four and a half minutes had passed since he had seen Minasian. He knew that it would take less than thirty seconds to drive the short distance to Aisle 45.

  He could picture Minasian every step of the way. Down to the Food Hall, past the soups and the rows of checkout staff, the grandmothers buying chutneys and the teenagers stacking shelves. The chill of the air conditioning, the shrill robotic voice of the automated warning on the walkways – Please hold the handrail while travelling … Please hold the handrail while travelling – then the stale, uncirculated air of the subterranean car park. The lengths to which both men had gone to protect themselves from scrutiny, to seal off any possibility of suspicion or arrest, struck Kell with the full force of their absurdity. Sitting in Mowbray’s rented car in the basement of that vast, soulless shopping mall, Kell wondered what had gone so wrong between their two countries that the SVR would not simply pass over, as a matter of courtesy and respect, the file on a brainwashed jihadi bent on causing mayhem in the United Kingdom. Why had it required blackmail to obtain that information? Why had it required Kell to devise an intricate system of signals and meetings with a compromised Russian spy in order to secure the safety of his fellow citizens? Was the blood feud between their two countries, the clash of systems and personalities, so toxic that it would allow for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people? Kell was under no illusions about the extent to which people wanted – even needed – to cause each other harm, but he felt cleaned out by the political classes, exhausted by the effort of trying to make a difference in a world where no difference could be made.

  He looked again at the watch. Eight minutes since he had left GAGARIN. He started the engine and pulled out. The wheels of the Peugeot squealed on the smooth concrete. Kell flicked on the headlights and looked for Minasian. He turned into Aisle 45 and saw him immediately – the newly grown beard, the cheap denim jeans, the man on whom he had come to rely so heavily. Kell pulled up alongside him and Minasian opened the door. Within a minute they had left the car park, emerging into the clear, bright sunlight of a London afternoon.

  42

  The more time Shahid spent with Rosie, the more he opened up to her. He wanted somebody to know what he had been through in his life, the pain he had suffered, the sense of isolation he had known. It had taken sacrifices for Azhar Ahmed Iqbal to become Shahid Khan. It had been necessary for him to prove his worth on the battlefield and then to separate himself from his old life, even from his family. Shahid wanted Rosie to know at least some of this, so that when the time came she would look back and understand why he had been prepared to sacrifice his life for a cause much greater than himself.

  There were obviously things that he could not tell her. It was too much of a risk. Though he knew that Rosie hated the police because of what they had done to her family, Shahid could not trust her with the full knowledge of what he had seen and done in the Caliphate. She would never understand, for example, why homosexuality was a sin in the eyes of God and therefore why it had been right for Shahid to take the life of the man in Raqqa. He and two other fighters had led the blindfolded man to the top of an apartment block, close to where Shahid had been living, and Shahid had pushed him to his death. Rosie could never be told this. If he began to explain his actions, to describe to her both the revulsion and the intoxicating sense of power that he had felt as he reacted to the baying crowd and pushed the man; if he told her that he had looked down at the dead body – the man’s leg twisted and jack-knifed at the knee, his smashed skull spilling blood onto the ground – and had felt liberated in that moment from all ordinary moral constraints; well, she would never be able to see sense and would inevitably betray him.

  One night in July, Shahid had gone around to Rosie’s flat and they had watched a DVD. When Rosie went out to buy pizzas, he had looked for her diary and read parts of it. He knew then how much she wanted him and felt confident when he undressed her later that night and took pleasure in her body. He knew that she had dreamed about him that way and so he let her touch him and suck him and give him the pleasure that he had wanted for so long. Afterwards, though, Shahid had felt that they had gone too far and he left the flat. Rosie had been upset and had texted him. She asked if he was all right and if she had ‘done something wrong’. Shahid had not responded.

  Two days later, he invited her for a meal at an Italian restaurant in Brighton. He wanted her again. He wanted to be inside her this time. He used some of the money that Farouq had given him, because he thought he should take her somewhere nice, somewhere impressive.

  It was over dinner that he started to tell Rosie more about his past. First, he told her about Vicky. He said that he had had a girlfriend in Leeds who had cheated on him. She had gone to live with another man in London. She had betrayed him and broken his heart. Then he told her that he had a secret, that if the police or anyone else knew about it, he would get into a lot of trouble. Rosie understood that he was telling her to keep her mouth shut. Shahid said that he was a good Muslim who had been horrified by what was happening in Syria and had gone there, secretly, to fight against Assad.

  Far from being shocked, Rosie said that she admired his courage.

  ‘I think that’s amazing of you.’ She held his hand across the table. ‘Fuck, that’s so brave.’

  ‘I believed in what I was fighting for,’ he told her. ‘I believed I made the right choice in going there. I never doubted myself. I never doubted my brothers and sisters who fought alongside me, against the regime.’

  ‘Brothers and sisters?’

  ‘You know, fellow soldiers. The women out there living alongside them.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘Assad was killing innocent people, slaughtering them. Women and children. Women like yourself, Rosie, Muslim girls like Marwa and Hind at work. Butchered by Assad’s cowards. I just felt like it had been going on too long. Their sisters in Pakistan, Afghanistan, murdered by Americans, killed by drone attacks. Women and children. Old men and babies. I felt like I had a responsibility as a Muslim to go out and fight for them. To protect them, avenge them.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  In her diary Rosie had written that Shahid often seemed ‘unhappy about something, sad inside’, so he knew that what he had told her might help her to piece him together. He knew her well enough to know that she would respect him for his honesty and admire him for what he had done.

  He poured more water into her glass – he didn’t like her to drink alcohol when they were together – and told her more about his reasons for going to Syria.

  ‘Many times, back in Leeds, I’d be watching films, you know, on YouTube, wherever we could find it, wherever my friends could find the footage online, and I still remember the blood, the pregnant bodies carved open, the screaming on those films.’ He saw Rosie flinch. ‘I’m sorry to speak like this to you, but that’s what drove me out there. It wasn’t like I didn’t feel anything. I cried again and again, you know? I wept for the fear those people lived under, of the attacks by Assad a
nd the Americans. Their lives without hope, futures destroyed before they had started. Somebody had to do something to help them. It was the will of Allah, peace be upon him.’

  Rosie hesitated. It looked as though she was trying to work out how she felt about what Shahid had told her. Eventually she admitted that she did not understand the complexity of the politics in Syria and didn’t feel that she knew enough about Muslims or what Shahid believed in.

  ‘What about ISIS?’ she said.

  Shahid knew that he could tell her nothing about ISIS and the Caliphate. It was enough that she knew he had fought on behalf of oppressed Muslims. She would admire him if he told her this. Girls, Muslim or infidel, loved soldiers. They liked their men to be strong and brave.

  ‘What about them?’ he said.

  ‘Did you come across them? They’re fucking maniacs.’

  Shahid was silent. Rosie saw that he was annoyed.

  ‘I don’t mean to upset you,’ she said

  ‘You’re not upsetting me.’ He spoke quietly. ‘There’s lots of lies and propaganda about ISIS put out by the West. They’re not just about violence or whatever. Suicides. Bombings. That’s all propaganda and lies.’

  ‘But it’s on the news. Online.’

  ‘Yeah but those guys, the guys that do that stuff, they’re the radical ones. You always get men like that in war. They go too far. They’re not thinking about the future and what’s best for Islam. Some of them don’t know their religion. They have no education.’