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

by Charles Cumming

  ‘I need to make several stops around Brighton this afternoon,’ he explained. ‘You free for the next couple of hours?’

  ‘You got the money, I got the time,’ the driver replied.

  ‘I’ll be fifteen minutes.’

  Kell put on his jacket, shouldered the rucksack and stepped out of the car.

  There were no other pedestrians in the area. Traffic was passing along the main road, but the street leading into the Close was deserted. Kell walked downhill into a neat suburban estate of detached brick houses and bungalows with small, well-tended gardens. There were few cars on the street and no sign of any residents. Google Earth had put Khan’s house on the far side of the Close. Kell walked anticlockwise around the loop, searching for number 45.

  It was a small, two-storey building with a strip of shattered tiles on the roof. Not as well maintained as the other properties in the area, not as neat and tidy. The grass at the front of the house had not been mown for several weeks and the frames around the windows were warped and chipped. There was a large green Brighton & Hove City Council recycling bin to one side of a drive that was pockmarked with clumps of weeds. A narrow, gated passage ran from the drive alongside the house to the rear of the building.

  Kell pressed the bell.

  Movement inside. The panels of frosted glass on either side of the front door shimmered. Somebody was shuffling around in the hall. Kell heard the rattle of a chain being removed, then the voice of an elderly lady saying: ‘Just a minute, please.’

  The door was opened by a frail woman in her eighties with a lively and welcoming face. As she said: ‘Hello, yes, can I help you?’ Kell caught the smell of stale smoke on her clothes.

  ‘Hello. I’m here to see Shahid.’

  ‘Shahid?’

  Did he even exist? Kell could not tell from the woman’s reaction if she knew what he was talking about.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve probably missed him.’

  ‘Probably?’

  ‘Yes, love. I think he’s just gone to work.’

  ‘Down at Asda?’

  ‘Down at Asda, yes.’

  Kell feigned frustration, as if his day had been cursed with bad luck. ‘But he told me to meet him here.’

  ‘He did?’ The elderly lady opened the door more fully. Kell assumed that she was the landlady, Katherine Arden. ‘He lives around the back.’ She nodded in the direction of the gated passage running alongside the house. ‘Did you telephone him, love?’

  ‘That’s the problem. He’s left his mobile in his room.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  It was a slick improvisation, the logic of which remained unquestioned by the landlady.

  ‘He’s teaching me Arabic,’ Kell continued. ‘We were supposed to have a lesson.’

  ‘Arabic?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t know Shahid taught that.’

  ‘Part-time,’ Kell explained. ‘He’s doing me a favour. He teaches me Arabic, I teach him the guitar.’

  ‘Oh! How nice.’ The elderly lady appeared to be distracted by a memory, then returned her gaze to Kell. ‘Guitar,’ she said. ‘He’s either always at the gym or always at his work, far as I can tell. Either that or sleeping!’

  ‘I’m Tom,’ said Kell, smiling warmly and offering the woman his hand.

  ‘Kitty,’ she replied. ‘Would you like to come in?’

  The hall smelled of food that had been deep fat fried, the living room of lily of the valley. There was a green sofa in one corner with a crisp white throw over the back. Kitty had been listening to Radio 2 when Kell had rung the bell. He could hear the low murmur of Steve Wright in the Afternoon on an old, pre-digital radio beside the window. There was a half-finished cup of tea on an upright piano beside the sofa, a folded copy of the Daily Express on a small circular dining table.

  ‘Shahid’s been here for the last couple of months, yes?’ Kell asked. ‘Since he came to Brighton?’

  ‘That’s right. I don’t mind having coloured tenants, unlike some. My parents were in India.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘All I want is clean and tidy. Reliable. Rent on time every month, no nonsense with girls or drugs.’

  ‘Shahid’s your ideal man, then.’

  ‘Yes, he is, bless him. Nice strong lad. Good manners.’

  Kell was offered a cup of tea, but did not want to be delayed in kitchen chit-chat when he could be searching Khan’s room.

  ‘Maybe it’s best if I just drive down to the Marina and see if he’s there. If he doesn’t have his phone, I can’t reach him.’

  Kitty gave a resigned shrug. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Maybe I could look for it? Take the phone down if I find it? He said it was charging in his room.’

  Kitty reacted to the suggestion not with suspicion, but with unbridled enthusiasm. It was as though Kell had offered to mow the grass and repaint the windows at the front of her house.

  ‘That’s very thoughtful of you,’ she said. ‘Yes, take it down to him. Let me find the key.’

  Two minutes later, Kell was following Kitty to the rear of the property. She walked in pale blue bedroom slippers. It was a point of stubborn principle to Kell that he had not taken the gun from the rucksack. He wanted to rely on his ability to outwit Khan, to foil his plan without recourse to violence.

  They came to a separate entrance in the back garden, overlooking a field to the south. Kitty explained that her husband had converted the first floor into a bedsit ‘about a year before he died, poor thing’.

  She knocked on the door. She called out for Khan. When there was no reply, Kitty slipped a key into the lock and ushered Kell inside. There was a staircase immediately in front of them.

  ‘You go up, love,’ she said. ‘I get too tired. I’ll wait for you here.’

  It was a piece of luck. Kell climbed the stairs. The carpet was brown and worn through and there was a smell of tiger balm on the landing. Kitty switched on a light. Kell saw that there was a bathroom to his left, a bedroom on the right. He walked into the bathroom. Water was dripping from the shower and there were black hairs in the bath and around the plughole.

  ‘That’s the bathroom,’ Kitty called out, the first indication that she was apprehensive about Kell’s behaviour. Kell reappeared on the landing and smiled.

  ‘So I see,’ he said, and went into the bedroom.

  ‘Can you find it?’ she said. ‘Can you see the phone?’

  Kell knew that he would have less than a minute to look around before Kitty’s suspicions deepened. There was a makeshift kitchen at the back of the room, an unmade bed in the far corner. The smell of tiger balm grew stronger the closer Kell came to the kitchen. The pictures on the walls were watercolours of seaside scenes, as well as posters of Mesut Ozil and Bruce Lee. No newspaper clippings on a corkboard, no jihadi literature on the bookshelves, no magazines with stories about Syria or ISIS. Kell could not even see a Koran. He went through the drawers in the kitchen and found only cutlery, a box of matches and some cooking implements. No alcohol visible, no drugs or cigarettes. Just tins of food in the cupboards, packets of rice and pasta, a box of salt.

  ‘Can’t seem to find it,’ he shouted out, opening the door of the fridge. It was empty save for two boxes of leftover Chinese takeaway, a carton of orange juice and some kind of bodybuilding protein shake in a large plastic container.

  Kell did not know what he was expecting to find. A gun? Some ammunition? Surely Khan would not risk keeping such things in the house. There was a laptop computer beside his bed. Without thinking through the legal consequences for any subsequent investigation, Kell scooped it up and put it in the rucksack, trusting that Kitty would not notice the shape change to the bag.

  As Kell turned to leave he saw a low wooden stool near the door. There was an envelope on it. He shouted out: ‘Here it is, got it!’ and picked up the envelope.

  ‘Wonderful!’ Kitty replied as Kell looked down at the address. Kh
an had written the name ‘Rosie’ in neat black ink on the front. The envelope was sealed. Kell dropped it into the rucksack and took his iPhone out of his pocket.

  ‘Found it,’ he declared to Kitty, trotting down the stairs and holding up the phone. ‘He left it charging under his bed.’

  54

  The meter in the taxi was still running. Kell knocked on the window. The driver released the lock and Kell climbed into the back seat.

  ‘Thanks for waiting,’ he said. ‘Can you take me to Asda at the Brighton Marina?’

  They turned back into Rottingdean, heading downhill towards the coast road. The driver lowered his visor against the glare of the sun. Kell took the envelope out of the rucksack and opened it up.

  It was a poem of war and love, written by Shahid in the self-aggrandizing style common to holy warriors of Islam. Kell understood immediately that Rosie was a non-Muslim girl with whom he had become romantically involved.

  From the innocence and naivety of my youth

  I sprang into the path of God like a lion.

  A lion of war and courage.

  Willing to assist.

  Willing to fight.

  Willing to hate in order to love.

  I will create a flow of blood

  To stem a flow of blood.

  All that is unclean will be cleaned by my faith.

  All insults to the Prophet will be answered with death.

  My insults will come in the form of

  The blade, the bullet, the bomb.

  You cannot know the courage inside me

  You will come to see it just as you saw the pure love inside me.

  I will avenge all those who oppose me

  I will raise my voice as I raise my weapon for God.

  Islam is my religion. God showers me with grace.

  I live by the Koran. I will die for Allah.

  I will fight the rulers, fight the traitors.

  Those who await me are as beautiful as you

  They have not lost their virtue.

  Only God can restore this purity to you.

  The distant sea glittered in the afternoon sunshine. Kell read the poem a second time and felt the burden of trying to locate Khan as a weight pressing down on him, a pressure that was close to intolerable. The poem. The soaked black hairs in the bath and around the plughole. Khan had shaved his body in preparation for an attack. He had deliberately left the poem in his bedsit for the police to discover in the aftermath of whatever atrocity had been planned by ISIS.

  Kell’s phone began to ring. A withheld number.

  ‘Tom?’

  It was Marquand. There was an unmistakable note of hesitancy in his voice.

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘The name you gave me,’ he said. The dismissive swagger that had characterized Marquand’s mood at their earlier meeting had entirely vanished. He sounded rushed and contrite. ‘On the document. Can you confirm it?’

  Kell knew, before he had even removed Minasian’s note from his jacket, that Marquand had returned to Vauxhall Cross and run a search on STRIPE.

  ‘Shahid Khan.’

  ‘Good God.’ In Marquand’s quiet astonishment, Kell heard both a note of apology and the fear that SIS, through sheer bureaucratic intransigence, had failed to prevent a massacre. ‘And the passport number?’

  Kell read it out: ‘Six. Five. Three. Seven. Eight …’

  It was enough. Marquand stopped him.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’

  Kell knew that he had won. He had finally persuaded them that Minasian had been telling the truth. But his moment of triumph had come too late.

  ‘Brighton,’ he replied.

  ‘You went there? You’re already there?’

  ‘Brighton,’ Kell said again.

  ‘Can you get to a secure phone?’

  Kell looked out of the window, shaking his head in disbelief. The taxi was pulling off the coast road on to a ramp leading down to the superstore.

  ‘Who do you think is listening, Jimmy? Just say what it is that you want to say. The clock is ticking. We’re probably already too late. What have you found out?’

  The taxi lurched to a halt behind an articulated lorry, like Marquand being bumped out of his complacency.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, conceding immediately to Kell’s request. ‘The passport official. Martinelli. His name checks out. He’s under investigation for passing fraudulently obtained documents to a loan shark in London. Kyle Chapman. One of the passports matches the information on your report. Same name. Same number. If Chapman sold it on to Jalal—’

  Kell was ahead of him. He didn’t need Marquand to join the dots.

  ‘I get it,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s nice to be believed. Hang on a minute.’

  Kell lowered the phone and told the driver to pull up and wait in the car park. He handed him another twenty-pound note and stepped out into blazing sunshine.

  ‘I just need to go into Asda,’ he explained, speaking to the driver through the window. ‘I won’t be more than five minutes.’

  ‘Asda?’ said Marquand, overhearing what Kell had said. ‘You’re in the marina?’

  ‘I’m looking for Khan.’

  ‘You’re going to confront him? Is that a good idea?’

  ‘Got a better one?’

  Kell waited for Marquand’s reply, walking quickly through crowds of shoppers pushing trolleys back and forth in the car park. Two community buses had pulled up beside the entrance to the supermarket, dispensing slow-motion pensioners into the dizzying heat of the afternoon.

  ‘Tell you what you could do,’ said Kell, spotting a young man with a shaved head stacking baskets near the automatic doors. It wasn’t Khan. He was pale-skinned, undernourished. ‘Get me a copy of Khan’s passport photo. I don’t even know what he looks like.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘And get a team to Brighton as soon as possible. I think he’s active. I think he’s going to do this thing within the next few hours. Get them to crowded public places. Plain clothes. The aquarium. The pier. The Pavilion. The beach. Whatever you do, don’t call the Brighton police. Khan sees uniformed officers swarming all around him, he’ll get spooked, live to fight another day. That’s when we lose him. That’s when he’ll know he’s been compromised by his own people and the link to GAGARIN will snap.’

  55

  Asda was a vast prefabricated barn, as big as an aircraft hangar, strip-lit and packed with customers even in mid-afternoon on a perfect summer day. Huge signs in fluorescent green offering discounted prices hung from metal beams. Old ladies with swollen ankles shuffled around the flower stalls while children, high on sugar and sunshine, screamed with boredom in fruit and veg. Kell spotted a security guard near the automatic doors and approached him. He was checking the messages on his phone.

  ‘I’m looking for Shahid Khan,’ he said.

  ‘Haven’t seen him,’ the guard replied.

  Kell walked deeper into the store. There was an information desk ahead of him. A poster bearing the slogan ‘Save Money. Live Better’ swayed overhead. He walked up to the desk. A teenage girl with dyed blonde hair wearing a black waistcoat was stifling a sneeze.

  ‘Bless you,’ Kell told her.

  ‘Thank you. What can I do for you today?’

  She had long-suffering eyes and an intelligent smile. There was a tattoo on her forearm, blue polish on her fingernails.

  ‘I’m looking for Shahid Khan.’

  ‘Shahid?’ The girl frowned, shook her head. ‘Not sure I’ve seen him today. Danny!’

  She had called out to a passing member of staff, a man in his early twenties with a summer tan wearing outsized trousers and a high-viz jacket.

  ‘Seen Shahid?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said, hardly breaking stride. ‘Ask Rosie.’

  ‘Rosie,’ said Kell, his heart skipping a beat. ‘She’s here?’

  ‘Yeah. Think she’s on the deli. Do you know where that is, sir?’

  Kell said tha
t he could find it and walked as quickly as possible across the store, past aisles of detergents and cereals, stalls with special offers on disposable barbeques. He reached the delicatessen and saw a young woman standing to one side of the serving counter arranging a display of cheeses on a disused wine barrel.

  ‘Rosie?’ he said, walking towards her.

  The girl looked up. Kell saw that the object of Khan’s affection, the focus of his poem of false courage and self-pitying love, was an attractive young woman – perhaps no older than twenty or twenty-one – with pale skin and eyes marked by tiredness and anxiety. Rosie had jewelled piercings in her ears and blonde hair gathered up in a bun beneath a cheap white hat. She frowned when Kell reached out to shake her hand. Her grip was soft and lifeless.

  ‘Hello.’

  She was on duty and too polite to say that she did not recognize this tall, well-spoken stranger, a man she had never seen before. Perhaps he was management.

  ‘My name is Tom,’ he said. ‘Tom Kell. You’re Rosie?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. There was a badge on her shirt with the name printed on it.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about Shahid.’

  In an instant there was a hardening in her gaze, a collapse in both spirit and civility.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t.’ She was moving to one side, bending to adjust the cheeses. ‘I just don’t.’

  ‘Has he hurt you?’

  She looked up, wounded. ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘Are you in love with him?’

  Rosie reared back, as if the question was both an affront to her pride and an insight of astonishing power.

  ‘Is he in trouble?’ she said, afraid to look Kell in the eye. ‘Are you police?’

  ‘I’m not the police,’ he replied. He was aware that their conversation could be overheard by a member of staff serving a customer at the nearby counter. He drew Rosie away from the area, trying to walk her towards a more private space. ‘Why would you think he’s in trouble?’ he asked, taking incrementally slow steps to one side of her so that she was obliged to move with him.