A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3)
Page 32
Minasian looked past him. He saw Stenbeck standing on the opposite side of the tramlines.
‘Who is that?’
‘A friend,’ Kell replied. ‘He can take you to our Embassy. He can make you safe. He will get you back to London and protect you.’
The tram was less than a hundred metres away, slowing as it approached the station. Kell was certain that the gunman was on board. He walked back across the tracks, hoping that the Russian would follow him. He felt that he had only seconds before the doors of the tram opened and Minasian was shot.
‘Tell me,’ he shouted. ‘After London. In the last two weeks. Have there been other men? Have you been tempted?’
The question unlocked the last of Minasian’s reluctance to act. Kell saw a secret pass across his face, the memory of a man, of a body, of a night without Svetlana. It was this that Eremenko had known about, the catalyst for his decision finally to be rid of the son-in-law who had betrayed him.
‘Andrei knows,’ Kell said. ‘He has you followed. Everywhere. You swore to remain faithful to his daughter and you broke your word. He wants you dead.’ He held out his hand, imploring Minasian to cooperate. ‘Come with us,’ he said. ‘You wait here, on this platform, in this place, you will not survive.’
The bell rang out on the tram. Kell heard the hiss and crackle of electricity in the cables overhead. At the last instant, Minasian made up his mind and stepped in front of the tram. He was across the tracks just as the front carriage passed him, sending a breeze sweeping upwards into Kell’s face. Kell grabbed him, pulled him towards Stenbeck, and felt a wave of nausea that he had saved the life of a man who had killed the woman he loved.
‘This cannot be correct,’ Minasian told them. Stenbeck was studying him, still trying to work out if Kell was being sucked into a trap.
‘The car is down below,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the zoo. ‘Let’s go. Let’s go quickly.’
Passengers were leaving the tram. Kell looked back at them as he pushed Minasian towards the top of the path. He was sure that he saw a man looking in their direction from the platform, eyes concealed by sunglasses, relaying a message into a mobile phone.
‘What is going to happen to me?’ Minasian asked. ‘I do not understand.’
A mother and her young child were walking up the path from the road. Kell stepped to one side to allow the child to pass.
‘Don’t worry about that now,’ he said. ‘Let’s just get to the car.’
Stenbeck was on the phone to the driver, telling him to start the engine. They were halfway along the path. Kell looked back up and saw the man in sunglasses looking over the rim of the bridge. He was still talking into the phone. It was one of the hottest days of the summer and he was wearing a black leather jacket.
‘We need to move,’ he said.
He held Minasian tighter by the arm. Stenbeck was ahead of them, trying to locate the car.
‘Where the fuck is Krzysztof?’ he said, looking east towards the zoo, panning his eyes along the forested banks of the river.
Kell looked back up towards the bridge. The man in the sunglasses was following them. Kell remembered Simon’s description of Riedle’s killer: squat, dark hair, balding at the back. Early thirties. Greek or Turkish. He was certain it was the same man.
‘You recognize that guy?’
Minasian turned, looking towards him. ‘No,’ he said.
Stenbeck had located the car. He was sweating profusely, pale English skin flushed by the sun.
‘Coming any second,’ he said, as Kell saw the man place a hand inside his leather jacket.
‘Gun,’ he said.
Simultaneously, Minasian and Stenbeck said: ‘Where?’ and followed Kell’s eyes up the ramp towards the bridge. The man did not withdraw his hand from the jacket. Instead he reacted to the sudden squawk of a siren nearby. Kell turned in the direction of the zoo. A handcuffed prisoner was being bundled into the back of a police vehicle. A man in plain clothes standing beside the vehicle was holding a scoped rifle. At the last moment, as he was forced down into the back seat, the prisoner glanced up at the ramp and appeared to signal to his accomplice. Seeing this, the man in the leather jacket immediately turned and walked back up the path towards the bridge.
‘Jesus,’ said Stenbeck. ‘They got him.’
‘What’s happening?’ Minasian asked.
Kell realized that Stenbeck had tipped off the Polish ABW. They had conducted a search of the area beneath the bridge and found an armed man. Kell looked at Stenbeck, who confirmed his suspicion with a brisk nod. Krzysztof pulled up beside them in a Lexus. Stenbeck opened the back door and pushed Minasian inside.
‘Get in,’ he said.
Kell was watching the man in the leather jacket. Eremenko’s house-trained assassin.
‘You see that man?’ he said, climbing into the back seat and pointing up towards the bridge. ‘The one in the leather jacket? Short. Dark hair.’
The Russian looked out of the window.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘That’s the man who shot Bernhard.’
Minasian was appalled.
‘What did you say?’ He pressed his face closer to the window. His forehead bumped against the glass as Krzysztof pulled away from the kerb.
‘Your father-in-law sent him. The SVR had Gachon. Eremenko has that guy.’
‘And that was his buddy,’ Stenbeck added, indicating the plain clothes ABW team behind them. ‘You were being walked into a trap. Your friend Tom just saved your life.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Minasian was craning in the back seat, trying to see what was behind him. ‘None of this is true. You are setting me up. Put me out of the car. I want to confront this man.’
Kell held Minasian by the arm. ‘Not today,’ he said. ‘We’re going home.’
‘He killed Bernhard.’
Against all expectations, Kell found that he was touched by Minasian’s expression of despair.
‘Another time,’ he said, sinking back in his seat as the car moved south towards central Warsaw. ‘We lose the things we love.’
67
They drove to an SIS safe house on the western side of the city. Minasian was taken inside by Krzysztof, leaving Stenbeck and Kell on the street.
‘What happens now?’ Stenbeck asked. ‘He’s your source, Tom.’
Kell shook his head and looked down at the cobbled road.
‘Minasian is nothing to do with me,’ he said. ‘Amelia will want to get him back to London. They’ll do a trade. In return for telling her everything he knows, she’ll set him up for a new life in the UK. Quid pro quo.’
‘Don’t you want a piece of that?’ Stenbeck was astonished at Kell’s nonchalance.
‘I’m done,’ Kell told him. ‘Getting out.’
‘What?’
Kell did not have the patience to explain himself. He had reached the point of no return. He was grateful that nobody had been harmed on the bridge, but sick of vengeance and death. He thanked Stenbeck and wished him well. He assured him that he would write up a report of the incident and tell Amelia that Stenbeck had acted at all times with professionalism and integrity.
‘I appreciate that. Thank you.’
Stenbeck ordered a car to take Kell back to his hotel. He packed his bags, checked out and hailed a taxi that took him to the railway station. There was an overnight train leaving for Berlin at half past eleven. Germany seemed a good place to aim for. He could disappear for a while.
Kell bought a ticket and ate a kebab at a counter inside the station. He had switched his phone to mute, but when he saw Amelia’s name light up on the screen he decided to answer.
‘Max says you’ve left. What’s going on?’
‘It’s simple,’ Kell replied. ‘My dealings with Minasian are finished. I’ve brought him to you. Call it a parting gift.’
‘What do you mean “a parting gift”? I don’t understand.’
He wondered where she was calling from. The grac
e-and-favour flat? The fringes of an official meeting?
‘I’ve decided to stop,’ he said.
‘Stop?’
‘Move on.’
There was a pause as Amelia absorbed what he had said.
‘But I want you to come back. I need you to come back.’
‘It’s no good, Amelia. I’m done.’
Kell felt no pleasure in telling her this. He did not enjoy the feeling of walking away from a challenge, nor did he like letting Amelia down.
‘Too much has happened,’ he said. ‘I don’t enjoy the work any more. I think of it as unhealthy.’
‘Unhealthy? But you just had the greatest triumphs of your career!’
Kell could hear the consternation in her voice. He knew that he would never effectively be able to explain to her why his life was more important to him than his career. For Amelia, the two things were inextricable.
‘Those weren’t my triumphs,’ Kell replied. He was being disingenuous because he wanted the conversation to end. ‘Carnelian saved Minasian. Minasian stopped Brighton. If it weren’t for Rachel, I would never have gone after him. And what was the end result? Riedle dead, Minasian’s marriage and career finished—’
‘Tom, for goodness’ sake. You must be tired.’
‘Very,’ Kell replied. They were showing the platform number for the Berlin train. ‘It’s simple,’ he said. ‘I don’t want this life any more, this divided life. I can’t remember a time when what I did for a living made me happy. Fulfilled. I don’t feel as though I was making a difference to anyone or anything. It was all just moves on a board.’
‘Tom, please. Just come home. Come back to London. We’ll talk. You’ve been through hell in the last few years. I owe you. The Service owes you. Let’s find a way.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I am deeply grateful to you, Amelia. I thank you for everything you have done for me. Even for what you have not done, because I learned from that. It has been an honour to know you and to serve alongside you. I think you are a remarkable woman. I think you are devious and cunning, too. You are complicated. We are all complicated. But I want no further part in your secret life.’
‘This is senseless. You’re tired. Come back.’
‘I won’t be coming back for a long time.’ Kell put a handful of coins on the counter and picked up his bags. ‘I just want to live, Amelia. I want to start again.’
Acknowledgements
My thanks to:
Julia Wisdom, Kate Stephenson, Lucy Dauman, Jaime Frost, Anne O’Brien, Kate Elton, Roger Cazalet, Oliver Malcolm, Katie Sadler, Liz Dawson, Claire Ward, Richard Augustus and everyone at HarperCollins.
Will Francis, Kirsty Gordon, Jessie Botterill and Rebecca Folland at Janklow & Nesbit in London. To Luke Janklow, Claire Dippel, Stefanie Lieberman and Dmitri Chitov at the New York office.
Sally Richardson, Charles Spicer, April Osborn, Dori Weintraub and the team at St Martin’s Press.
To Jeff Silver at Grandview, Jay Baker, Jon Cassir and Matt Martin at CAA, and Ged, Colin, Claudia and Oliver at Raindog.
I am also indebted to: Sarah Gabriel (www.sarahgabriel.eu), Elizabeth Best, Caroline Pilkington, Ian Cumming, Salomé Baudino, Paolo Risser, Laila Danesh, Helena Tedal, Nick Lockley, Melissa Hanbury, Stanley and Iris Cumming, Barney Bristow, Damian Lewis, Rory Carleton Paget, Ludmilla Linkevich, Masha Hayward, Vera Obolonkina, Leyla Sabauri, Chris and Sarah Wright, Peter Frankopan, Ben Higgins, Mark Pilkington, Rowland White, Amos Courage, Bard Wilkinson, Boris Starling, Peter Caddick-Adams, James Maby, Kam Heskin, Alice Kahrmann, Dr Fatema Jan, Clementine Gaisman, JAF, Charlotte Cassis, Owen Matthews, Ron Amram, Chris Morgan-Jones, Marta Januszewska, Aurore de Broqueville, Nick Green, Raymond Lief and Natasha Fairweather.
Thank you to Roddy Campbell, Elit Kutsal, Constance Watson, Ian Johnson, Chelsea Carter and everyone at www.vrumi.com for the office. I discovered the Montaigne epigraph in John Yorke’s book, Into the Woods. Deeyah Khan’s extraordinary film, Jihad: A Story of the Others, helped me better to understand the choices made by Azhar Ahmed Iqbal. Mark Lilla’s essay ‘Slouching Toward Mecca’ (New York Review of Books), Ben Taub’s ‘Journey to Jihad’ (New Yorker) and ‘We and You’ by Owen Bennett-Jones (London Review of Books) were all extremely useful.
C.C. London 2016
Want more Thomas Kell? Try another book in the series:
Six weeks before she is due to become the first female head of MI6, Amelia Levene disappears without a trace.
Disgraced ex-agent Thomas Kell is brought in from the cold with orders to find her – quickly and quietly. The mission offers Kell a way back into the secret world, the only life he’s ever known.
Tracking her through France and North Africa, Kell embarks on a dangerous voyage, shadowed by foreign intelligence services. This far from home soil, the rules of the game are entirely different – and the consequences worse than anyone imagines…
Click here to order A Foreign Country
When MI6’s top spy in Turkey is killed in a mysterious plane crash, Service Chief Amelia Levene turns to the only man she can trust: disgraced agent, Thomas Kell.
In Istanbul, Kell soon discovers that there is a traitor inside Western Intelligence. Then he meets Rachel – the dead spy’s daughter – and the stakes grow higher still.
From London to Greece and into Eastern Europe, Kell tracks the mole. But a betrayal close to home transforms the operation into something more personal. Soon Kell will stop at nothing to see it through.
Click here to order A Colder War
About the Author
Charles Cumming was born in Scotland in 1971. In the summer of 1995, he was approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). A year later he moved to Montreal where he began working on a novel based on his experiences with MI6, and A Spy By Nature was published in the UK in 2001. In 2012, Charles won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller and the Bloody Scotland Crime Book of the Year for A Foreign Country. A Divided Spy is his eighth novel.
www.charlescumming.co.uk
@CharlesCumming
facebook.com/AuthorCharlesCumming
By Charles Cumming
THE THOMAS KELL SERIES
A Foreign Country
A Colder War
A Divided Spy
THE ALEC MILIUS SERIES
A Spy By Nature
The Spanish Game
OTHER WORKS
The Hidden Man
Typhoon
The Trinity Six
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