“Go ahead, sir.”
Across the street, two bored cops were checking driver’s licenses at random from passing cars and mopeds. Turkey: still a light-touch police state.
“It’ll mean going to Chios with a Tech-Ops team. It’ll mean getting clearance from London.”
“From Amelia?” Adam asked.
“From ‘C,’” Kell replied.
17
Kell woke before dawn on the Istanbul sleeper with a coronary headache and a raging thirst directly linked to the bottle of Macallan he had polished off the night before with two young Turkish businessmen who were en route to Bulgaria for a three-day conference on “white goods.” Two ibuprofen and half a liter of water later, Kell was gazing out of the scratched window of his four-man sleeper compartment drinking a cup of sweetened black Nescafé and listening to the snores of the mustachioed widower occupying the bunk below his own.
The train shunted into Haydarpasa station just after six o’clock. Kell zipped up his bag, bade farewell to his traveling companions, and took a ferry across the Bosporus to Karakoy. Ordinarily he might have felt the traditional romantic excitement of the Western traveler arriving by sea in one of the great cities of the world, but he was in a frustrated mood, hungover and tired, and Istanbul felt like just another staging post on his quest to solve the riddle of Paul Wallinger’s death. He might just as well have been arriving in Brussels or Freetown or Prague. There would be endless meetings at the consulate. There would be long telephone calls to London. He would have to spend many hours searching Wallinger’s yali in Yenikoy. An indoor life. At no point—if past experience was anything to go by—would he have the chance to relax and to enjoy the city, to visit the Topkapi, for example, or to take a boat trip to the Black Sea. He remembered visiting Istanbul as a twenty-year-old university student, Claire at his side on their first summer together as boyfriend and girlfriend. They had stayed for five days in a cheap backpacker’s hostel in Sultanahmet, surviving on raki and chickpea stews. A few months later, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, Kell had received the tap on the shoulder from SIS. It was like remembering a bygone era. His twenty-year-old self was now a stranger to him; Claire had walked the streets of Istanbul with a different man.
He texted Claire then walked through sporadic crowds toward the Galata Bridge. It was a warm, blustery morning. Ferries were bumping the quay, eight lanes of traffic stalled in both directions in the rush-hour crush of Kennedy Avenue. Men were selling steamed mussels and blackened husks of corn from makeshift barbecues erected beside the newspaper kiosks and ticket booths on the promenade. Kell bought a copy of the International Herald Tribune and walked along the lower, pedestrianized section of Galata Bridge, aiming for a restaurant that he knew fifty meters along the walkway. Above him, clumps of men were fishing from the eastern side of the bridge; thin plastic lines dropped down in front of the restaurant, near-invisible against the bright clouds and silver waters of the Bosporus. A young, unshaven waiter showed Kell to a table adjacent to a group of German tourists who were drinking glasses of tea and staring at a fold-up map of Turkey. As he sat down, Kell immediately pointed at a photograph of some fried eggs on a five-language, laminated menu. The waiter smiled, said: “Chips?” and Kell nodded, eager to see off his hangover.
It was only then, settling into his chair and looking out across the water at the boats on the swollen sea, at the far Asian shore, that the city at last began to open up for him, the magic and the romance of Constantinople. Kell was himself again. To the southeast, he could see birds twisting on warm swells above the minarets of Hagia Sophia; to the north, the huddled wharfs and buildings of Galata, splashed by sun. He drank a double espresso, smoked a Winston Light, and read the headline stories on the Tribune as a sudden wind cracked the pages of his newspaper. A tourist poster of Cappadocia was tacked to the wall of the restaurant. Kell mopped up the yolks of his fried eggs with hunks of soft white bread, ordered a second cup of coffee, then paid his bill.
Half an hour later he was walking into the dimly lit lobby of the Grand Hotel de Londres, an old-world Istanbul institution a stone’s throw from the British consulate. The small, red-carpeted lobby was empty save for a cleaning lady dusting a framed oil painting on the stairs. Above her, an ancient glass chandelier rattled in the draft of the street door as it closed behind Kell. A tap on the reception desk bell summoned a voluminous man from an office hidden behind a small brown door. Kell signed the register in his own name, handed over his battered passport, and took his bags upstairs in a cramped lift to a bedroom with views over Beyoglu and, in the distance, a slim, shimmering strip of the Golden Horn.
Around eleven o’clock, having showered and shaved and swallowed two more painkillers, he wandered downstairs. He wasn’t due at the consulate until after lunch and wanted to finish My Name Is Red in the hotel bar. He took the stairs, passing the same cleaning lady, who had now made her way to the second floor, where she was reverently wiping the glass on a framed picture of Ataturk.
Kell heard their conversation long before he saw their faces. A singsong English, decorated by laughter, and the elegant, well-spoken tones of his old friend and colleague, suddenly not in London anymore, but staying in the very same hotel.
Amelia Levene and Elsa Cassani were seated opposite each other on an ornate sofa in the resident’s lounge looking, for all the world, like a mother and daughter who had just returned from a sightseeing trip to Sultanahmet. Kell instantly sensed the rapport between them; it had been evident in the timbre of Amelia’s voice, a particular softness that she employed only with trusted friends and confidantes. Elsa was plainly in awe of her, yet her manner was not nervous or overly respectful; she seemed relaxed, even slightly mischievous in Amelia’s company. There were two glasses of tea in front of them, on small white saucers, and a packet of Turkish chocolate biscuits, doubtless bought at a nearby shop.
“We must stop meeting like this,” Kell said as he walked toward them. Amelia looked up and smiled at the joke. Elsa turned to see who had spoken and seemed to suppress a desire to yell “Minchia!” again at the sight of him.
“I was wondering when you’d get here,” Amelia said, glancing pointedly at her watch. “Elsa told me you were on the sleeper?”
“And I thought you were in London,” he replied, and could not work out if he was pleased to see her or irritated that Amelia had yet again kept him out of the loop. They kissed one another and a waiter appeared, asking Kell if he would like a drink. He ordered a tea and sat beside Elsa, wondering how long it would take for somebody to tell him what the hell was going on.
18
An hour later, Kell had his answer. At Amelia’s suggestion they left Elsa to work at the hotel and went for a walk through the streets of the city, arm in arm at certain points, at others split by surges of oncoming pedestrians on Istiklal Caddesi. Amelia was wearing a floral-print headscarf and a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows; Kell thought that she looked like a lady-in-waiting attending to the queen at Sandringham, but wasn’t in the mood to tease her. More casually dressed in jeans and a sweater, he smoked as he walked, pressing Amelia for answers.
“You didn’t tell me about the SIM they recovered from the wreckage.”
“There’s a lot I haven’t been able to tell you, Tom.”
Amelia’s reaction was typically inscrutable. An elegantly dressed Turk with a gleaming bald patch and polished brown brogues was sitting on a plastic stool in front of a shop window in which balls of wool of different colors were displayed in small wooden boxes. He was playing a lute and singing a mournful song. Beside him, a boy in a Besiktas football shirt was eating a pretzel.
“How was Ankara?” Amelia asked, watching them.
Kell could only assume that she had good reason to be so evasive. On Ankara, he hardly knew where to begin: Chater’s conduct at the embassy had been both a calculated snub to Kell’s uncertain status and an apparent attempt to avoid helping SIS with their enquiries into Wallinger’s death.
He didn’t want to start by telling Amelia about that. As far as she was concerned, anything Kell said about Chater would have to be filtered through his own animus against the man who had poleaxed his career. He wanted Chater to be hiding something; Amelia knew that as well as he did.
So he talked about the long hours at SIS Station and was struck by how often Amelia interrupted him to ask supplementary questions, to cross-check a fact, to be certain that Kell had accurately recalled the details of the many files and telegrams he had read in Wallinger’s office. The conversation took them north toward Taksim Square, where they doubled back along Istiklal, stopping briefly to browse in an English-language bookshop where Amelia bought Team of Rivals, “because everyone I know is reading it.” When, finally, she had stopped asking questions about HITCHCOCK, Kell returned to the SIM.
“Who went through the wreckage? Who found the phone?”
“The Turkish authorities. I had somebody there acting as a liaison for the family. He managed to get hold of the phone and bring it back to London.”
“And?”
They stopped walking. Amelia adjusted her scarf and turned one hundred and eighty degrees, looking north along the broad street. They were no more than twenty feet from the entrance to the Russian consulate. Ordinarily Kell would have pointed this out, as an amusing curiosity, but did not want to interrupt Amelia’s train of thought.
“There are some numbers that we’re still trying to trace.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that it’s too early to say.”
Of course. Even with a colleague as trusted as Thomas Kell, Amelia would not disclose anything more than was absolutely required by the demands of the conversation. Kell concealed his anger at being treated like a second-rate gumshoe. “Too early to say” meant that Elsa—or one of her ilk—had dragged something off the SIM which would be useful in the context of a secondary piece of intelligence; without that, there was no point in getting anybody’s hopes up. Amelia would tell him only what he needed to know. As he looked up at the first-floor windows of the consulate, wondering if somebody inside was having Moscow kittens at the sight of “C” loitering in the road, Kell felt something of the same frustration he had experienced in his meeting with Chater. To be obstructed in his work was one thing; to be finessed, even patronized by his friend, quite another.
“You might find that one of the numbers was to a former Hungarian intelligence officer named Cecilia Sandor.”
It was a cruel strike, but something in Kell had wanted to wound Amelia.
“Who?”
He put his arm across Amelia’s back and tried to steer her away down the street. She seemed to flinch at the contact, knowing that Kell was about to break bad news.
“Paul was on the island with her.”
“On Chios?”
“Yes.”
He allowed Amelia to process what he had told her. It took only a couple of seconds, but in that time Amelia seemed to separate herself from the thick crowds on Istiklal, from the laughter of passing couples, the chatter and music of the street.
“They were seeing each other?”
“Looks that way. She left flowers and a handwritten note at the funeral. She rented a villa on the island. They stayed there for about a week.”
Amelia began to walk more briskly, as if to surge away from what Kell was telling her. “How do you know Sandor was NSA?”
“You ever come across Tamas Metka?” Amelia shook her head. “Old contact of mine from Budapest. Met him when he was in London about ten years ago. I had him run the name. Sandor is midthirties. Quit Hungarian intelligence in 2009 to run a restaurant in Croatia. Before that, according to Metka she did plenty of operational stuff with us, with the grass skirts, too.” “Grass skirts” was an old in-house euphemism for MI5. “It might be worth cross-checking her name with Paul’s operations. That’s probably how they met.”
“Probably,” Amelia muttered.
He wanted to tell her about the photograph, to lift her spirits, to say that Paul had kept a picture of her beside his bed until the day he died. But what would be the point? Soon enough Amelia would find a way of suppressing her feelings. He knew how effectively, even cynically, she could disentangle her head from her heart. It was how she had lived for thirty years with the knowledge that she had given up her only child for adoption at birth: by compartmentalizing her feelings, by rationalizing the pain. Yet the thought occurred to him: if Wallinger had kept a ten-year-old photograph of Amelia in a book beside his bed, what had Amelia retained as her own private keepsake?
“I understand that you’ve asked Adam Haydock to trace the engineer who worked on Paul’s plane?”
“That’s right.”
“And to look at some CCTV on Chios? Is that correct?”
Kell explained that Wallinger had been observed talking to a bearded man in a restaurant on the harbor. He wanted to float a theory that the individual in question had been Jim Chater, but didn’t want to give Amelia the opportunity to tell him that he was being absurd.
“Who saw him?”
“The woman who rented the villa to Sandor. Marianna Dimitriadis.”
“Was he American?”
“No idea,” Kell replied. “She didn’t get an accent.”
They had arrived at the southern end of Istiklal. A small red tram was moving slowly along the boulevard, two young boys hanging off the back running board. Kell dropped the cigarette he had been smoking and suddenly felt hot. He took off his sweater.
“At first it looked as though Paul had covered his tracks because he didn’t want Josephine to know that he was having an affair.” Amelia produced a quiet, knowing snort. “But did he have other reasons to be there? Operational reasons?”
“I’ve told you that. He had no business…”
“My question was rhetorical. What if he was meeting a contact off the books?” Kell pointed out that Wallinger had shelved his passport, his credit cards, and his cell phones after landing on Chios. That was an awful lot of cover for a dirty weekend.
“Perhaps he didn’t want me to know he was there.”
Kell admired Amelia’s candor, not least because she had saved him from making an identical observation.
“Oh, come off it,” he replied. “How long is it since you two were an item?”
“We were never ‘an item,’ Tom.”
That shut him up. Kell watched a stray cat scampering under the wheels of a parked van, tracking its progress downhill along a side street cloaked in scaffolding. There was a strong smell of frying fish; he imagined that the cat was trying to locate the source of it.
“Hungry?” Amelia asked. She, too, had reacted to the warmer weather, removing her jacket and looping it over her arm. There was a large, brightly lit restaurant across the street, manned by white-aproned chefs tending to metal containers of food displayed in high windows. The place looked cheap and popular; most of the tables were already occupied.
“How about that place?” Kell suggested, as a jackhammer drill started up in the distance.
“Perfect,” said Amelia, and they went inside.
19
Amelia’s choice of seat was telling. Rather than pick a vacant table in the window, with a view out onto Istiklal, she jammed herself into a noisy corner of the restaurant alongside a geriatric Turk sporting an antediluvian hearing aid. Even if he spoke or understood English, it was unlikely that the man would be able to hear what Kell and Amelia were saying; less likely still that he would then go running to MIT with a verbatim account of their conversation.
Kell ordered lamb shanks and mashed potatoes; Amelia a lamb stew with a side order of pureed eggplant that had the look and texture of baby food. Within a couple of mouthfuls they had both pronounced the food to be “disgusting,” but ate as they talked, sipping from glasses of sparkling water.
“You haven’t talked about your meeting with Jim Chater,” she said.
“I thought I’d wait for a full moon. Why
didn’t you tell me he was out here?” Amelia produced another trademark look of inscrutability, adjusting the sleeves of her blouse. Kell felt a rising irritation once again. “I’m assuming there’s method in all this madness,” he said.
“Come again?” Her tone of voice suggested that Kell was being unnecessarily provocative.
“Why didn’t you mention it? Why haven’t you asked me about him until now?”
“You sent a report last night, didn’t you?”
“Which you’ve seen?”
Kell was surprised to discover that Amelia had not read his account of the meeting with Moses and Chater, which he had telegrammed to London shortly after he had finished talking to Adam Haydock in Athens.
“I wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth,” she said, as though she were paying Kell a compliment.
“Well here’s the horse,” he replied, biting off a mouthful of bread.
To avoid creating an impression of bias, Kell reproduced the characteristics of the meeting as blandly and as factually as he could: the Moses monologue; Chater’s obvious time-wasting; the American’s brusque reaction to Kell’s questions about HITCHCOCK. When it came to Iannis Christidis, Kell told Amelia only that he felt Chater was already familiar with the name.
“Iannis Christidis,” she repeated. “The one you’ve asked Adam to track down?” Her interest was piqued. “You really think Jim recognized the name?”
Kell had to proceed carefully. To suggest as much to Amelia, with the clear inference that the CIA had been involved in Wallinger’s crash, would be a grave accusation.
“Who knows?” he said, fudging it. “I thought I saw something. I might have been projecting.”
“Projecting what?”
Kell shot her a look. It had been many months since they had last spoken about what had happened in Kabul.
“Look. You know there are decisions I made which I regret…”
“Okay, okay,” Amelia said quickly, as though Kell had embarrassed her. Angered as much by this as by his own persistent need to explain his actions, he lapsed into silence. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Tom. Don’t be like that. I just don’t want us to get sidetracked. I want to know about Chater’s state of mind.”
A Colder War Page 10
