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

by Charles Cumming

  Kell’s driver was a Pole on the SIS payroll who carried a firearm and was old enough to remember the heat of the Cold War. He took Kell to a nondescript hotel a mile from the Regina, where he held a brief meeting with Max Stenbeck, the formidable – and formidably young – Head of Station in Warsaw. Stenbeck, who had fought with the Royal Marines in Afghanistan before transferring to SIS in 2007, congratulated Kell on Brighton and assured him that he would be safe ‘at all times’. To Kell’s frustration, Stenbeck also guaranteed that ‘every word’ of his conversation with Minasian in the Uniacke suite would be picked up and recorded by a Tech-Ops team in the next room. ‘We will have eyes on you,’ he said. Kell knew that he would have to obtain the names of the men who had killed Rachel in such a way as to avoid Stenbeck’s microphones. Amelia would want to know every move that he made in the room and would likely do everything in her power to prevent Kell from pursuing Rachel’s killers.

  ‘The risk from Minasian is very low,’ Kell assured Stenbeck. He hoped that his newly minted reputation for courage and perspicacity would persuade Stenbeck to accept this analysis without demur. ‘If Minasian wanted me dead, he’d have done it in London. He wants to be reassured that we won’t shop him to Moscow. He wants me to let him go.’

  ‘And do you intend to do that?’

  Kell shrugged. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

  Later Kell went for dinner alone, sipping a beer at one of the tourist restaurants in the old town, thinking of Brussels and the dead Riedle, of the long days and nights he had spent luring him in. Could it be said that Riedle had died so that dozens of people in Brighton might survive? Kell could not make the link in his mind; Riedle was dead because Eremenko had willed it. He had not been a necessary sacrifice. Riedle had been murdered because of his sexuality and because Minasian had lied to him. Kell could absolve himself of personal responsibility, but felt no sense of justice, just as he had felt little euphoria in the hours and days that followed Brighton. He had acted bravely – yes – but it was the girl who had stopped Khan. Without Rosie’s love, and the effect of that love on a brainwashed young man, dozens of people would have died. Kell had simply been cynical enough to recognize that he could use her; just as he had been cynical enough to use Bernhard Riedle. This was the grammar of his trade and the structure of his personality: a facility for deceit and manipulation was as much a part of Kell’s character as his decency and capacity for love.

  He was sitting at a table towards the centre of a cobbled square in the medieval centre of Warsaw. A few metres away, a man dressed as a druid, his clothes and face entirely covered in silver paint, was sitting as still as a waxwork, hovering in mid air as if held up only by a wooden staff. Children stared at him, straining on their parents’ hands. Close by, men were selling the summer’s fad gadget, a luminous rocket that fired high into the night sky before returning to earth with the accuracy of a boomerang. At the next table, four young people of varying nationalities were struggling to find anything to say to one another, sitting through long pauses and communicating in fractured English. Kell had been watching them for almost an hour. One of them, a Frenchwoman in her late twenties, kept looking at Kell, as though imploring him to join them and to inject some life into their conversation. A part of him wanted to accept the tacit invitation. He could have smiled and pulled up a chair, found out the group’s stories and made them laugh. But he knew that he could have no part in it. This was more than a sense of being restricted by his responsibilities towards Minasian; Kell felt completely separated from the everyday to and fro of life, to the extent that he could not even imagine communicating with strangers.

  He realized, finishing his beer and asking for the bill, that he had felt like this for too long. It was time to change things. He needed to organize his life so that he was no longer so isolated, so compromised. He was tired of being alone.

  60

  When Kell walked into the Regina hotel the following afternoon, he found the small lobby deserted. It was just before two o’clock. As he took a seat on a sofa in the centre of the room, he caught a movement in his peripheral vision and turned to see two guests checking in at a reception desk tucked away in the south-east corner of the lobby. Almost a dozen bags were strewn on the ground behind them. The guests sounded tired and agitated. Classical music was playing. Kell could hear a fountain in the courtyard behind him. He was wearing a white shirt and carrying a baseball cap that he placed on a plumped cushion beside him. A waiter appeared, crossed the lobby and asked Kell if he wanted a drink. He ordered an espresso. Then he took out his BlackBerry and iPhone and checked for messages. There was a text from Stenbeck, who was in a room directly underneath the Uniacke suite, informing him that an SIS security detail was waiting outside the hotel. There was no word on the BlackBerry from GAGARIN.

  At ten minutes past two, Kell looked up to see Minasian coming through the revolving door at the entrance to the hotel. He was carrying a plastic bag and wearing a white polo shirt. He was clean-shaven and appeared to have lost weight. He made momentary eye contact before turning towards the reception desk. Kell finished his espresso, left a fifty-zloty note under the cup and saucer and walked towards the bank of lifts on the far side of the lobby. He could hear Minasian talking to the receptionist in English. He stepped into a lift and rode up to the top floor. Kell knew that it would not be necessary to text the Uniacke room number to Minasian. A man of his resourcefulness and experience would be able to discover such information as easily as he could order a cup of coffee.

  And so it proved. Exactly ten minutes after Minasian had walked into the hotel, there was a soft tap on the door of the suite. Kell had closed the curtains and conducted a sound check with Tech-Ops in the room below. He took a moment to compose himself, then opened the door.

  ‘The hero of Brighton.’

  Minasian had prepared a wolfish smile. He stepped into the room and set the plastic bag on the ground. Kell closed the door behind him. To his astonishment, Minasian immediately grabbed him in a bearhug and slapped his hands against Kell’s back, muttering: ‘Congratulations, Tom, congratulations,’ as he squeezed ever tighter. Kell did not know if Minasian was frisking him for a microphone or weapon, planting some kind of tracking device on his sweater, or behaving in an authentic way. He had come to trust the Russian and to doubt him in equal measure. There were days when he thought that Riedle had misread his character to a disastrous extent; and days when he believed that Riedle had seen through to the cold centre of his pitiless and corrupted personality.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Alexander. I’m glad you could make it.’

  Minasian shrugged, suggesting that he had experienced no difficulty in keeping to their scheduled meeting. He crossed to the far side of the suite and briefly popped open a curtain, as though expecting to see a surveillance officer crouched on the window ledge with a boom microphone.

  ‘You did it,’ he said.

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Brighton.’ Minasian turned and beamed another telegenic smile. ‘You stopped Shahid Khan. You stopped this monster. You saved the lives of hundreds of people.’

  Kell knew what Minasian wanted him to say.

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ he replied. ‘You made it all possible. You were the hero, Alexander. The British government – the British people – owe you a debt of thanks that we can never repay.’

  Minasian was silent as he absorbed the compliment, trying to appear modest. It was cold in the room, the air-conditioning working hard against the fierce Warsaw summer.

  ‘Hot outside,’ Minasian said. ‘Cold in here.’

  ‘So it’s not just the British who like to talk about the weather.’

  Minasian did not appear to understand the joke and gave no reaction. He walked back to the door, picked up the plastic bag, reached inside it and pulled out a gift-wrapped present.

  ‘I bought you something,’ he said.

  He passed the present to Kell.

  ‘That was very kind of y
ou.’ Kell knew from the shape and weight of the package that it was almost certainly a book. As he unwrapped it, he laid a private bet with himself that Minasian had bought him some Isaac Babel. He was mistaken.

  ‘A first edition of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock,’ Minasian exclaimed with evident pleasure. ‘It is the American edition, not the British. I hope this is satisfactory.’

  ‘More than satisfactory,’ Kell replied. He was genuinely pleased with the gift. ‘Did you inscribe it?’

  ‘Please?’

  For once, Minasian’s faultless English had failed him.

  ‘Did you write in it?’ Kell answered his own question by opening the book to the title page. In Minasian’s neat, schoolboy handwriting he had written:

  ‘He who thirsts for an answer must stock up with patience.’

  Isaac Babel

  Kell felt a chill run through him. ‘It’s a great quote,’ he said.

  Such was the ambiguity of Minasian’s dedication that he could not know if it referred to the Khan operation, to Rachel, or to something else altogether.

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Kell replied.

  Minasian was watching him intently. He sat down on a corner of the large double bed and bounced briefly, like a customer in a shop testing the springs. Kell offered him a drink from the minibar. Minasian asked for sparkling water.

  ‘I imagine that everything we say is being listened to,’ he said, as he unscrewed the cap. ‘Recorded by your people. That we are not alone.’

  Kell smiled at him. ‘What would you do in my place?’ he replied.

  ‘I would do what you have done.’

  The two men were silent for a moment. Kell no longer felt the desire to spar with Minasian, to wrestle with his moods or to fight against his charm. He wanted only two things: to resolve the nature of his relationship with SIS and to know the truth about Rachel’s death. Everything else was of no consequence.

  ‘First things first,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the book.’ He tapped the cover twice and placed it on a side table beside a flat-screen television. ‘I want to repeat what I said. The information you gave us …’ He hesitated. ‘In my twenty-year career, few agents have ever provided me with intelligence of that value. I know that you obtained it at great personal risk and under circumstances of severe duress. I doubted that you were telling me the truth – we all did, in fact – but you proved us wrong.’

  Minasian lowered his gaze. It struck Kell that something had altered in his demeanour. He was more relaxed, but somehow more resigned in spirit than at their previous meetings.

  ‘How is everything with Svetlana?’ Kell asked. ‘With your father-in-law?’

  Minasian looked up. His expression said: ‘What do you know that I do not know?’

  ‘Everything OK?’ Kell asked again.

  Minasian’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I am doing some business with him later this evening,’ he said. ‘Here in Warsaw. At six o’clock.’

  ‘With Andrei?’

  Minasian nodded. ‘We are meeting at Most Gdanski. The Gdansk Bridge. Then afterwards to dinner. The father-in-law and his – I have always liked this expression in English – errant son.’

  ‘Most Gdanski?’

  Kell wondered why Minasian was telling him this. Why disclose that there would be a meeting on Polish soil between an SVR officer and a Russian oligarch? Was he giving Kell a warning, or trying to lure him to the meeting? There had been a strange tone of fatality in Minasian’s voice ever since he had walked into the room. Kell had to remind himself that he was in the company of a supreme manipulator; that Minasian possessed a matchless ability to switch his moods to suit the requirements of any given conversation. He repeated lines to himself from the notes he had taken after meeting Riedle: ‘Adapts himself to give people what they need for as long as he needs them.’ Kell did not want to be dragged into another conversational tug-of-war.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ he asked, deciding that it was best to be unequivocal in his approach.

  ‘Am I not supposed to tell you things like that?’ Minasian had a smirk on his face. ‘I thought I belonged to you? I thought I was your creature?’

  ‘Alexander …’

  Minasian raised his hand, acknowledging that he had gone too far. He apologized for making a ‘bad joke’ and took a long swig from the bottle of water.

  ‘You don’t belong to me any more,’ Kell said, seizing the opportunity formally to break their relationship. ‘You never did. You were never anybody’s creature. Last time we met, you asked for clemency. You asked me to set you free. I will keep my word. If you give me what I asked for, when you walk out of here, my service will have no further hold on you. Our offer of asylum still stands, of course. You can continue working for the SVR and provide us with intelligence should you wish. But those are your decisions. You can do what you want. You are a free man.’

  Minasian took a long time to respond. He stared ahead at the black television screen, scanned the pictures in the room, each as bland as the last. There was the noise of a child running in the corridor outside and a parent scolding it in a language Kell did not recognize. Minasian coughed to clear his throat.

  ‘It’s funny,’ he said, returning to his mournful tone. ‘I thought about your offer a great deal. Could I change things? Could I change Russia? I thought about Ryan Kleckner, about his reasons for what he did, but I am a different sort of man. I believe Ryan acted as he did because he needed the excitement. He wanted to feel special in some way. Validated, better than the rest. In this sense, he was not unlike Shahid Khan, no? Young men seeking approval and power, and finding it in chaos. Young men seeking to exert control over themselves by exerting it over other people.’

  ‘That’s an interesting way of thinking about it,’ Kell replied.

  ‘I worked for you because I had no choice. And I was glad in the end to do it because it provided me with an opportunity to save lives. I liked the power that this gave me. I cannot deny it. For once, Alexander Minasian, the man who had recruited agents and run them with comparative success, was now on the other side of the fence. I was the agent. I was the man at risk. But as soon as I saw the news from Brighton, I knew that I did not want to continue. I knew that I wanted to see you here today so that I could explain myself.’

  ‘Explain yourself?’ Kell had a grim feeling that the Russian was going to produce a new piece of information, a revelation that would throw everything that he had come to understand into chaos.

  ‘I feel that lying is a kind of sickness. That prolonged exposure to deceit leaves a person feeling worn out. Either as an agent, or as the controller of that agent, the constant process of lying, of subterfuge, of concealment and second-guess, is exhausting. It is bad for the soul. Would you agree, Tom?’

  The observation chimed with Kell so deeply that he could only mutter a cracked ‘Yes’ before lapsing into silence.

  Minasian continued.

  ‘What I mean to say is that I have lived so much of my life in a secret way. In a false way. I have not been true to myself. I have not been true to my wife. I have not been true to my Service. I have not been true to you.’

  ‘What do you mean, to me?’ Kell asked, and felt a further tremor of discomfort.

  ‘I could work for you,’ he continued. ‘You could work for me. We could work together. But would we change anything?’

  ‘Doesn’t Brighton prove that we could?’

  Minasian waved a dismissive hand. ‘I don’t mean at the level of counter-terrorism. There will always be effective law enforcement. I mean at the level of policy. The projection of power. Let’s be honest. What can a spy do that a drone cannot? Are we more useful than a software virus, a piece of malware, a security camera, a satellite, a mobile telephone?’

  Kell realized what was happening. Minasian was talking himself out of the SVR and into a permanent job with Andrei Eremenko. That was why the two men were meeting in Warsaw. Minasian n
eeded to rationalize his decision to end his career as an intelligence officer by claiming that the business of human intelligence – of recruitment, of agent-running, the entire trade that both of them had known all their adult lives – was obsolete. And he needed Kell to validate that choice. There had to be a fault in the system rather than a fault with Alexander Minasian. It was a symptom of his narcissism.

  ‘I believe that we are better,’ Kell replied. ‘I believe that deeply. I believe in human beings. I believe in relationships.’

  ‘Then you are more romantic than me,’ Minasian replied. ‘More optimistic. I believe that so much of what we do in our business is pointless.’

  ‘Well, I think if we go into life expecting it to deliver results for us all the time, we’re going to be disappointed,’ Kell told him.

  Minasian smiled appreciatively. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He who thirsts for an answer must first stock up with patience.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Minasian chose this moment to take out the encrypted BlackBerry and to return it to Kell.