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

by Charles Cumming

  At last Kell came to the first arcade and pushed his way through it, back through the noise and the stench of vinegar and the gambling crowds, until finally he could see the archway and the entrance to the pier. Rosie was standing to one side, waiting for Khan.

  ‘You OK?’ Kell asked her. He was starved of air, cursing the cigarettes he had smoked, the years he had lived, the distance he had run in fierce summer heat. He took off the rucksack and had to lean against the side of a fish-and-chip stall, trying to catch his breath. Rosie looked as if she had never seen a man in such a state of exhaustion.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she replied. ‘How about you?’

  There were still large numbers of people milling around the entrance to the pier. Some had come up from the beach, others were holding buckets and windbreaks, heading down to the sand for an evening swim. Kell continued to search the crowds for Khan. The sound system was still playing Michael Jackson as seagulls squawked overhead. Drawing in a series of deep breaths, Kell looked at Rosie and handed back her phone.

  ‘Didn’t trust me not to call him, did you?’

  ‘Never crossed my mind,’ Kell replied.

  She was scanning the faces in front of her, eyes scrutinizing everything in her path.

  ‘No sign of him,’ she said, but as Kell looked down at his watch, he heard a note-change in Rosie’s voice, as if all strength had suddenly left her.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘He’s here. I can see him. He’s coming from the road.’

  57

  Kell looked up. At first, he saw nothing. Just sunburned faces and plastic buckets, pensioners in summer hats. England the way it used to be. Then, following Rosie’s eyeline, he looked beyond the crowds towards the road, where a white van was pulling away from the kerb. Directly in front of it, walking purposefully towards the entrance of the pier, came a young, dark-skinned man with a shaved head.

  ‘That’s him?’ Kell asked, though he knew the answer to his own question. Khan was wearing black combat trousers and a dark waistcoat. There was a large red holdall slung across his back.

  ‘Jesus,’ Rosie muttered. ‘Yeah, it’s him.’

  Whatever relief Kell felt at having identified Khan evaporated as he came to terms with his appearance. He was decked out in the uniform of the mass killer: the holdall evidently contained weapons; the waistcoat was almost certainly packed with ammunition. Kell reached into his pocket for the butt of the gun. The Sig Sauer felt tiny and inadequate in his hand. As he slipped the safety catch and took a step forward, he knew that he was going to have to shoot Khan. No plain-clothes SO15 officer had intercepted him. Kell and Rosie were all that stood between STRIPE and a massacre on the pier.

  ‘Shahid!’

  Rosie had done something extraordinarily brave. Before Kell was aware of what was happening, she had passed him, walking directly towards Khan, waving her arms above her head. Kell saw the gunman register her voice, a look of horrified surprise on his face as he saw her coming towards him. In the same moment, Khan reached for the holdall, swinging it down in front of him so that he could unzip it and take out a weapon. Kell knew that he was so jacked up on hate and adrenaline that he intended to take Rosie as his first victim.

  ‘Rosie, no!’

  Kell could not let another young woman die. As he shouted, several people in the area seemed to sense for the first time that something was wrong. Kell took out the gun and felt the crowds around him come to a standstill. Instinctively, he shouted: ‘Everybody get back!’ and waved his free arm left and right as Rosie continued to walk forward. Khan was still cradling the holdall in his arms, reaching inside it as he looked at Rosie with a mixture of rage and consternation.

  ‘Shahid!’ Kell shouted. ‘Put the fucking bag down!’

  He raised the Sig Sauer in the air, aiming high above the heads of the crowd. Kell did not have a clear shot to Khan and could not risk hitting a bystander. Rosie heard him and turned. She shouted: ‘No! Don’t!’ and Kell fired into the air in order to assert authority, to try to project control. The crowd around him scattered like birds disturbed from carrion, women screaming, men grabbing young children by the hand and pulling them away. In less than two or three seconds, there were fewer than six people left in the area. Kell shouted at them to move away, fearing that Khan’s waistcoat was a suicide vest rigged to blow. Khan himself appeared to have been startled by Kell’s gunshot and was struggling to pull the AK-47 from the holdall. Rosie, frightened by the sound of the gun, had ducked and was crouched down in the space between them, switching her frightened gaze between the two men. All traffic in the area had come to a standstill. Even in this heightened atmosphere of anxiety and confrontation, Kell was aware of a Michael Jackson song blasting out from one of the stalls beside the pier.

  ‘Drop the fucking bag!’ he shouted at Khan, and heard a siren kicking up in the distance. Beads of sweat were streaming down Kell’s face but his breathing was steady and regular. To his intense relief, he saw the bag drop to the ground. Kell continued to move towards Khan, inching forward, but Rosie now stood up – counter to everything that Kell wanted or had expected of her in that moment – and came between the two men. Kell momentarily lost the line of sight to Khan.

  In that instant, two things happened. Rosie began to speak, arms extended in front of her, palms together, as though in a gesture of prayer. She said: ‘Please don’t do this, Shahid. It’s not right. It’s not you …’ But as she spoke he took a grenade from the lower pocket of the waistcoat and held it up in the air, his face a rictus of defiance.

  ‘Get back!’ Kell shouted when he saw the grenade. There was screaming. Kell knew that any throw towards the pier or down towards the beach would create a bloodbath.

  ‘Why did you come?’ Shahid was shouting. ‘I told you to stay away!’

  ‘I wanted to stop you,’ Rosie replied. Kell had drawn alongside her and was still pointing the gun at Khan’s chest. He heard a man shout out: ‘Fucking shoot him!’ but was so determined not to take a man’s life that he waited, perhaps fatally, for Khan to make his move.

  ‘Put the grenade down, Shahid,’ Kell told him. ‘This is not the way. God is showing you his purpose. God has sent us to stop you.’

  ‘What do you fucking know about my God, you fucking pig?’ Khan shouted and held the grenade even higher. Behind him, a Union Jack cracked in the wind. Kell knew that he must fire, even as Rosie continued to implore Shahid to surrender.

  ‘Look at these people,’ she screamed. ‘Look at them!’ and pointed Khan to a group, thirty or forty feet away on the road behind him. ‘Muslims!’ she said. ‘Devout Muslims! A veiled woman! Children. With their father. A Muslim family! You want to kill them? Is that who you came to kill?’

  Kell saw what Rosie had seen. A young family, exactly as she had described: the mother dressed in black purdah, two young children in each of her hands, their father beside them.

  Khan turned and saw it too. The area around him was now completely clear, people still moving backwards along the coast road and towards the pier, those who had not run away watching the scene in fascinated disbelief.

  Suddenly there was a violent noise from the pier, like the sound of a car backfiring. Kell thought that he heard a distant scream. Others reacted to the blast, faces turning to see what had set it off. For a sickening moment Kell believed that a second gunman was loose, that they had planned to herd the terrified public towards the centre of the pier and to slaughter them. But there was no further noise, no more screaming. Kell assumed that somebody had set off a firecracker, perhaps on the beach, and turned back to Khan.

  Rosie was still standing between them. Khan was facing her. Kell had a shot to Khan’s head but saw him lower the grenade and bring it down towards his stomach, in what appeared to be a gesture of surrender. Khan seemed to have come to terms with the futility of his position. He spoke to Rosie, shaking his head, eyes glistening with rage.

  ‘You ruined everything,’ he said. These first words were barely audibl
e but then, at last, the music from the pier was shut off and there was an absolute stillness. Kell saw that Khan was holding the grenade in his left hand, tight against his stomach, and that he was slowly raising his right hand as he addressed Rosie. Had Khan not taken a further step forward, towards the girl, Kell would not have looked as closely at his raised hand. But he saw the pin of the grenade clutched in Khan’s fingers as he screamed out to his false God: ‘Allahu Akbar!’

  Rosie was less than five feet away from the advancing Khan. Kell jumped forward, grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back, the gun falling from his hand as he ran with her as far as they could manage before her weight threw him off balance and they toppled to the ground. Kell was on his side. He rolled over and smothered Rosie’s body with his own so that she was entirely protected as Khan was obliterated by the grenade, a noise of such force and power that Kell was momentarily numbed by a ringing silence in his ears. As Rosie struggled and writhed beneath him, Kell heard only the sound of sirens and of screaming.

  He prayed that Shahid Khan had died alone.

  58

  Brighton Pier reopened forty-eight hours later.

  Only one person in the crowd had taken a video of what had happened, capturing Kell’s face and recording the confrontation with Khan, right up to the moment of his suicide. When the woman attempted to sell the film to a national newspaper, the D-Notice Committee acted swiftly over the forty-five-second footage, persuading the editor to pixelate Kell’s face in order to protect his identity. Seven photographs, taken on smartphones by members of the public who had been standing behind Kell at the northern end of the pier, showed Khan’s face in full and Rosie’s in profile. Kell could not be identified from any of the pictures, all of which had appeared online within an hour of Khan’s suicide.

  SIS, Special Branch and the Security Service could neither confirm nor deny that the middle-aged man who had saved the life of Rosie Maguire was an undercover intelligence officer tasked with stopping Shahid Khan. An official inquiry would later commend both Rosie and ‘Officer B’ for their bravery in ‘extraordinarily testing circumstances’, noting that ‘Officer B’ ‘undoubtedly saved countless lives by his quick-thinking and courage’. Both Jim Martinelli and Kyle Chapman faced lengthy prison sentences for facilitating the creation and distribution of falsely obtained passports.

  Only one person in the crowd suffered minor injuries as a result of Khan’s suicide, a fragment of the grenade piercing his forearm as he instinctively raised his hand to protect his face. Rosie was taken to hospital and later obliged to sign the Official Secrets Act, forbidding her from discussing, either in public or in private, any element of her interaction with Thomas Kell. In lengthy conversations with MI5 and SIS, Rosie made it clear that she had no intention of trying to sell her story to the press or to appear on television. She was ashamed of her relationship with Khan and wanted to hide from the glare of publicity, not least because she had faced the inevitable backlash from online trolls who had attacked her for ‘sleeping with a terrorist’. Rosie nevertheless became the public face of the incident, her bravery lauded by the press next to photographs of the ‘Heroine of the Pier’ that had been culled all too easily from Facebook and Instagram.

  Kell, by contrast, vanished into anonymity, his identity protected by law, his actions adjudged by one broadsheet commentator to be typical of the ‘brave men and women who work in the shadows of our intelligence community, tracking our enemies, securing our safety, tackling the threat from Islamist terror head-on, all too often without commensurate reward or recognition’. The intelligence that had led ‘Officer B’ to the pier was widely, and erroneously, credited to a ‘long-running MI5 surveillance operation against Shahid Khan’. Amelia Levene basked in the glory of a successful SIS counter-terrorism coup and was personally congratulated by the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. Kell and Rosie were both invited to attend the same event. Rosie declined on the grounds that she ‘wanted to forget all about it’; Kell knew that his presence would oblige Amelia to lie to the Prime Minister about his suspension from the Service, his recruitment of Minasian and the assassination of Bernhard Riedle. Consequently he sent his regrets.

  Inside Vauxhall Cross, however, Kell was the man of the hour. SIS laid on a four-course lunch, opened up the cellar, slapped him on the back and told him that ‘things just hadn’t been the same’ since his inauspicious departure from the Service some four years earlier. Wags made jokes about the ‘miraculous transformation’ of ‘Witness X’ into ‘Officer B’. Jimmy Marquand apologized for the ‘hesitancy’ he had shown towards Kell in Oxford Circus and made it clear that he was pushing for ‘the highest civilian honour possible, a George Cross if HMG can be persuaded’. In a meeting in her office attended by Marquand and two senior members of the Service whom Kell had never seen before, Amelia thanked him for his contribution to ‘the fight against terror’ and expressed her admiration for the ‘tenacity’ he had shown in pursuing Minasian, ‘often against my express wishes’. Kell knew that this was Amelia’s way of admitting that she had been wrong, without going to the trouble of making an outright apology.

  Privately, Amelia was more effusive, inviting Kell for a drink at her flat in London at which she explained that a stream of intelligence coming out of Moscow from a senior source in the FSB had made her ‘blasé’ about the need to recruit Minasian. Furthermore, she had been convinced that Kell’s attitude towards the Russian had been skewed by his feelings for Rachel, and concerned that any deeper investigation into Riedle’s murder would embroil the Service in a scandal that it could ill afford. Kell accepted her apology and did not add his own theory that the pressure of the top job – the plate-spinning chaos of SIS global ‘Requirements’ – had affected Amelia’s judgment. She had found it easier to say no to a friend than to go to the trouble of backing Kell’s hunch that GAGARIN was telling the truth. It was no more or less complicated than that.

  ‘What do you want to do about Minasian?’ Amelia asked as she poured Kell a second Talisker in the living room. Kell had come from the pool at his gym and was aware that his skin was giving off a vague odour of chlorine.

  ‘I want to see him,’ he replied. ‘We agreed to meet.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘To thank him. And to see if he’ll keep working for us. That is, if you want him. Perhaps your source in Moscow is so compelling that you feel you have no need for another one.’

  Amelia slid him a look. ‘Tom, don’t,’ she said with a soft smile. She took a sip of her wine. ‘Of course we would love to continue to run him. I think that Minasian is very unlikely to agree to that, not least because he knows that after Brighton you won’t shop him to Moscow.’

  ‘Won’t I?’ Kell asked.

  Amelia knew him too well. ‘You’re not that cruel.’

  There was a moment of silence. A couple were walking past the house, turning the corner into Markham Street.

  ‘We have unfinished business,’ he said.

  ‘What sort of unfinished business? You mean the leak you were worried about?’ Amelia searched Kell’s face for a reaction. ‘Minasian knew about Witness X because Kleckner told him. It was all over Moscow at the time.’

  Kell shook his head. He had meant Rachel. He wanted the names of the men who had killed her. That was the deal he had struck with Minasian. But he could not say this to Amelia.

  ‘Just agent stuff,’ he told her. ‘Friendship. Loyalty. Trust. Mistrust.’

  ‘Why do I feel that you’re hiding something?’ she asked.

  ‘Because you’re always hiding something. You apply the same characteristics to other people.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  Amelia allowed Kell’s criticism to pass. He wanted to tell her the truth. Kell needed Amelia to know that he was not yet clear of his grief, that he had not absolved her of responsibility in Rachel’s death, that the desire for vengeance ran through his blood like an infection. Instead he told her that he had promised to let Minasian go
in return for the information about Shahid Khan. That was his intention in travelling to Warsaw. To set him free.

  ‘You want to go as a private citizen, or as part of a team?’

  In all of the commotion that had followed Brighton, Amelia had never raised the subject of Kell’s future status as an employee of SIS. This was the closest she had come to acknowledging the elephant in the room. Perhaps it was a case of personal pride: she did not want to give Kell the opportunity to turn her down. For his part, Kell was still not yet sure that he wanted to come back. He needed to see Minasian and to get the names. Then he would have a clearer idea in his mind of what he wanted to do.

  ‘I don’t feel strongly either way,’ he said.

  Amelia placed her wine glass on a table and stood up.

  ‘Go and see him,’ she said. ‘I’ll protect you.’

  59

  Amelia’s words were in Kell’s mind as he landed in Warsaw four days later. It was late on a Thursday evening. Minasian had confirmed the meeting for the next afternoon. In the only exchange between the two men since Brighton, Kell had texted the encrypted phrase: ‘White shirt OK for tomorrow?’ to which Minasian had replied: ‘See you there.’ It was enough to demonstrate that the Russian considered himself clear of surveillance and would keep to the arrangement they had made to meet in the lobby of the Regina hotel between two and three o’clock. It was a sketchy plan, not least because there was a danger that Minasian might try to double-cross Kell and put third parties into the hotel, perhaps even with the intention of trying to eliminate him in his room or on the streets of Warsaw. Aware of the threat, Amelia had arranged for the local SIS station to watch Kell at all times. They had booked a suite at the Regina under the name ‘Stephen Uniacke’, but Kell was to stay at a different hotel some distance away. A first-posting SIS officer took over the Uniacke alias and spent a fitful night in the room, a gun under his pillow as he waited for phantom Russians to strike.