A Colder War

by Charles Cumming

  “Looks like a slow three sixty,” Aldrich reported, confirming Kell’s suspicion that Kleckner was slowly turning a complete circle in order to make an assessment of the area. “Now he’s going for the trains.”

  Carol could not follow. Not in running gear. Instead, Aldrich and two other officers followed ABACUS into the Tube. This was the worst time on a surveillance job. Dead time. No communication from underground, save for the odd lucky text with a bar of signal, or a miracle burst on free Virgin Wi-Fi. Otherwise Kell was forced to pace and to wait, trying to communicate a sense of calm and well-being to Elsa and Harold, but inside churning with tension. He used to love this feeling in his younger days, the adrenaline surge of high stakes and risk, but Kleckner was too important—his sins too grave—for Kell to have any sense other than an intense desire to bring him to justice. He thought of Rachel, and of her dead father, and the pleasure he would gain from presenting her with Kleckner’s head on a platter. If the London mission failed—and Kell was aware that there was every chance they would lose ABACUS in the next five days and fail to identify his handler—Kell would be forced back to Istanbul and to weeks, possibly months, of waiting for a second chance. His fallback plan, which he had discussed at length with Amelia, was to switch the intelligence dropped by ABACUS in the Buyukada football for chicken feed. But such a plan would mean allowing Kleckner to continue to operate, and would almost certainly require the assistance of the CIA. That would mean Chater big-footing the SIS operation, thereby spelling the end of Kell’s involvement.

  A signal from Elsa. A hand in the air, tapping her ear with the other.

  “Text from Nina. Piccadilly Line. Hyde Park Corner.”

  Nina was one of the two officers who had followed Kleckner into the tube. She was short and slightly cross-eyed, with capped front teeth that produced an unsettling range of colors in her mouth; Kell had met her only once and taken an instant dislike to her.

  “Is he coming out?”

  Elsa shrugged.

  It was another twenty minutes before Kell heard anything more.

  “Boss?”

  Aldrich this time.

  “Danny. What’s the situation?”

  “He’s doing circuits. I got him to Green Park. He gets off, he gets on. One more stop to Piccadilly. Then he goes north to Oxford Circus.”

  “Have you got him now?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got him. I’m looking at him. But I’m down to myself.”

  “What happened to Nina?”

  “Fuck knows.”

  Kell swore under his breath but was glad to have Aldrich as a last pair of eyes. “Where are you?”

  “Hyde Park Hotel.”

  A possible site for meeting a handler? Almost certainly not. It was too obvious, too quick out of the gates. An officer of Kleckner’s experience would run at least two hours of countersurveillance before contemplating such a risk. The Hyde Park Hotel had to be just another stepping post on a preplanned route.

  “Visual?”

  “Impossible. He’d make me.”

  At that moment, a text came through from Jez, who, by a miracle Kell would never entirely understand, had somehow contrived to get into the hotel ahead of Kleckner and to track him as far as the men’s bathroom. Acting on this information, Kell instructed the other members of the team to move back into the Knightsbridge area and to await further instructions.

  “You think Harrods is coming, don’t you?”

  Elsa was standing beside Kell at one of the windows looking out over Whiteleys. To his surprise, she put her arm across his back, as if to try to reassure him.

  “I do,” he replied, turning and smiling at her. “He’s less than five hundred meters away. It’s always been a favorite Russian watering hole. They would have told him to go there, if he didn’t know already. NKVD. KGB. FSB. Been using the place for decades.”

  “Watering hole?” she said, screwing up her face. “What does this mean, please?”

  “Never mind.” Kell looked out across the skyline roofs and cranes of London.

  ABACUS was about to go shopping.

  45

  Jez saw ABACUS out of the Hyde Park Hotel and passed him on to Carol, who had changed out of her running gear, tied her hair up in a bun, and put on a business suit with heels. She was close enough to touch Kleckner as the American walked west along Knightsbridge, crossing the street at a set of traffic lights and heading toward Harrods.

  The entire team, barring Nina, was back in the area, but Kell had put only one officer—a sixty-two-year-old named “Amos”—inside the store. To gamble more, only to have Kleckner leave the building within three minutes and drop down into Knightsbridge Underground, was too risky. Instead, he would spread the rest of the team around all four sides of the building, covering each of the ground-floor exits. There was no point trying to follow Kleckner every step of the way around Harrods. Let him do his thing, let him adopt his tricks. ABACUS could spend five hours trying to duck and weave through eight different departments but, when all was said and done, he still had to leave the building.

  “He’s in,” said Carol.

  Kleckner had used the Hans Crescent door in the north corner, still wearing the baseball cap, still wearing the black Carhartt jacket. Jez went in behind him, continuing the live conversation with Kell while Carol stayed on the entrance.

  “Moving through men’s clothing. Fifteen meters.” Jez’s voice was a low, gravelly Cockney. “How are my exits?”

  Kell and Elsa had more than half a dozen cell phones laid out in front of them, each feeding positional information from members of the team. Absorbing their messages, using them to create and maintain a mental map of the area, required Kell to focus and to concentrate in ways he had not known for years; it was exhilarating.

  “All covered,” he replied, as Jez moved upstairs to the first floor, allowing Amos to pick up Kleckner in the Food Hall.

  “Visual,” Amos said, the trace of a Somerset accent. While most of the members of the team were using earpieces and concealed microphones, Amos had been given an antediluvian Nokia of the sort favored by grandparents and lonely widowers. Kell had banked on the phone giving plausible cover. “Looking at some caviar, I think. In the delicatessen. Baseball cap still on.”

  Working in partnership, Jez and Amos were able to move with Kleckner as he ran countersurveillance for the next fifty minutes. Through the mists and the pretty girls in Perfumes and Cosmetics, he next went up two floors to linens, then down via the Egyptian-themed escalators past the candlelit memorial to Diana and Dodi Fayed. Whenever the American dropped out of sight, making a sudden left- or right-hand turn, Harold used a link to the Harrods closed-circuit security cameras to try to track him. This worked only twice—a sudden flickering image of a figure in a dark jacket and a baseball cap—but on both occasions Kell was able to establish Kleckner’s approximate position and to feed it back to the team. At the same time, Nina had reappeared, having traveled east on the Piccadilly Line for almost half an hour under the misguided impression that Kleckner was seated in the adjacent carriage.

  “I had the wrong guy,” she explained sheepishly. “Fucking baseball cap. Same jacket.”

  “Never mind,” Kell told her, and put her in Beauty and Fashion, covering doors 6 and 7 on the right angle in the southeast corner. Meanwhile, Aldrich, Carol, and three others were standing outside under natural cover, using umbrellas to shield them from a sudden shower of rain.

  Just before midday, Kell was informed by Amos that ABACUS had made his way to the toy department on the third floor, via the large bookstore in the center of floor two. He had bought a copy of Wired magazine and was presently playing a computer game on a large-screen television in the north apex. Kell took the opportunity to switch out Jez and Amos, putting them on exterior ground-floor exits while Carol and Lucy continued visual surveillance on separate floors. Throughout the slow minutes of watching, the texts, the closed-circuit images, the bursts of talk and the long, agonizing silences,
Kell nevertheless felt that he was on top of the operation, spinning the right plates, making the right decisions. Kleckner would eventually leave the building, fail to notice that Danny or Carol or Nina had picked him up, and lead SIS to his SVR handler.

  In the blink of an eye, however, it was all lost.

  One moment Lucy had a confirmed sighting of ABACUS in Toys, the next Carol saw him moving through Children’s Clothing on the fourth floor. Then he was gone. No closed circuit. No sightings at any of the ground-floor exits. The cell phones in Redan Place stopped buzzing, the laptop screens went quiet. Eight highly experienced surveillance officers stopped talking to Thomas Kell, who felt a gathering storm of frustration as the realization hit him that he had lost Ryan Kleckner. For two hours Kell had the team watching all ten doors at street level while Aldrich and Nina swept through Harrods trying to find the American. But there was no sign of him. Shortly before three, Kell called them off and rang Amelia.

  “I lost him.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  She sounded sanguine, rather than irritated, but Kell said: “Gee, thanks,” as though Amelia had doubted him all along.

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Harrods,” he said. “Fucking Harrods.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Kell had called her at the Cross. He could hear another telephone ringing in Amelia’s office. “We know that ABACUS has agents outside Turkey. There’s every possibility that he’s meeting one of them, not his handler. He’ll come back to the hotel at some point, and we can start all over again.”

  Kell thanked her and hung up. He took the lift down to the ground floor and went for lunch at a fish-and-chip shop on Porchester Road. He tried texting Rachel, but heard nothing back. By the time he had returned to the hub, Elsa was on her way out to a movie at Whiteleys, Harold coming back from a Thai massage on Queensway.

  “Smell that, guv?” he said. “Tiger Balm.” Kell squeezed out a smile. “Don’t worry about it,” Harold said, planting a hand on Kell’s elbow. “These things happen. We have other plans up other sleeves.”

  “We do?” Kell replied, sounding and feeling uncertain.

  Harold winked. Kell couldn’t tell if he was being serious or merely trying to cheer him up.

  “Anybody find the baseball cap?” Harold asked. “The jacket?”

  Kell shook his head. Perhaps Kleckner had effected a complete change in his appearance—stealing a Harrods uniform, buying a new outfit in Menswear—or had simply managed to slip through one of the exits just at the point when Jez or Carol or Nina or Danny had been looking the other way. Eyes became tired. Concentration sagged. It was inevitable. Either way, ABACUS was now a ghost.

  For the next several hours Kell moved his chess pieces around the board—Aldrich back to the first floor of the Rembrandt, Carol jogging through Grosvenor Square on the off chance that Kleckner would show up on a visit to the embassy—but it was a game against an opponent who would not show his face. Elsa returned from the cinema (“I see a film about Earth with Will Smith and the son of Will Smith. It was not a good film.”) and began to work Kleckner’s Facebook account, looking for an exchange of messages with one of his many London girlfriends. Amelia had overruled Kell’s decision to wire two of the flats belonging to Kleckner’s earlier one-night stands, on the basis that it would be a waste of time to do so, thereby leaving Kell with no further moves. Kleckner was somewhere in London—somewhere in England; it might be days before he resurfaced. All Kell could do was sit and kill time by overseeing a change of shift in the surveillance team, Carol and Jez and the rest heading home, to be replaced by eight MI5 watchers, none of whom had ever seen Ryan Kleckner in the flesh. Kell felt the frustration of a man prevented from seeing direct action in the field. He was used to playing an active part in operations, not sitting passively in an office trying to second-guess an opponent. Spying was waiting, yes, but Kell wanted to be in the Rembrandt, in the taxi on Egerton Gardens, on the streets of Knightsbridge, not stewing in Redan Place in front of banks of surveillance screens with Harold stinking of Tiger Balm and Elsa lost in her world of codes and bits and algorithms.

  At ten he went out for dinner, wandering down Westbourne Grove to a Persian restaurant where he ate a lamb kebab and drank mint tea, thinking of the horses and carts on Buyukada and the moan of the ships on the Bosporus. Harold had gone home for a few hours but was due back at midnight. Elsa had fallen asleep on the mattress in Kell’s office. Danny Aldrich was minding the fort, and had promised to call Kell as soon as there was any news on ABACUS.

  Just after eleven, Kell’s phone rang.

  “Boss?”

  It was Danny. Kell was smoking a cigarette outside a newsagent. Across the street, two drunk girls were climbing into a taxi. It looked as though one of them was about to be sick.

  “Yes?”

  “He’s back.”

  “At the Rembrandt?”

  “No. Pat picked him up walking north from South Ken tube. But looks like they’re heading there.”

  Kell was already walking back toward Redan Place. He dropped the half-finished cigarette in a puddle, heard it fizz.

  “They?” he said.

  “He’s got a girl with him.”

  “The same one as last night? Zena?”

  “Negative. Someone else. Could be one of the Facebookers. We’ll have visual in a couple of minutes.”

  Kell began to sprint down Redan Place, drawing the fob key from his pocket, jogging into the lobby and turning toward the bank of lifts. He had to wait more than a minute for the doors to open. There was a smell of curry in the cabin. Somebody had come back with takeout.

  “We’re in here,” Danny called out, summoning Kell into the surveillance room.

  Harold and Elsa were seated in front of the Rembrandt screens. Neither of them looked up, but Elsa mumbled: “Ciao.”

  “They in the hotel?” Kell asked.

  “Yup. Just got out of the lift.” Harold was leaning forward. “You should see the bird. Fucking unbelievable. This bloke’s a machine.”

  The audio feed from Kleckner’s room was switched on. Kell could see a long shot down the corridor of Kleckner and the woman. As the door opened, Kell heard the woman’s voice first, an American accent, mimicking a line from Pink Floyd.

  “Oh my God, what a fabulous room. Are all these your guitars?”

  Kleckner laughed, Harold smiled, and they all watched as the woman walked inside. It was only then that Kell realized who she was.

  Rachel.

  46

  Kell turned away and walked out of the room, stumbling toward the door, the lifts. He was aware of somebody behind him calling out “Tom?”—as he walked down the short passage toward the men’s bathroom. He pushed through the door and as he thought of Rachel touching Kleckner, her hands on his body and her mouth on his skin, he bent double as the shock worked through him. He pitched against the wall of the bathroom, his lungs pulling at the room for air.

  He reached for a cigarette. He walked over to the bank of sinks and sat against them, lighting it. He opened the window, holding the cigarette out toward the frame, somehow still dully conscious of sprinklers and smoke alarms and rules. With his first inhalation of smoke Kell experienced a surge of rage so intense in its coiled violence that he almost smashed his fist into the wall. He thought of Kleckner’s broken jaw, blood on his face, and considered how and where and in what way he would exact his revenge. He would kill Kleckner. Kell was sure of it. He knew that the American had lured Rachel to the hotel to humiliate him. ABACUS had known that Wallinger’s former colleagues were watching.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Tom?”

  It was Elsa. Kell found that he was grateful to hear her voice. He tossed the cigarette through the window, turned toward the sinks and switched on a tap.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you all right?”

  Kell looked at his reflection in the mirror, the collar of his shirt frayed, the
cumin stench of his daylong sweat mingling with a taste of tobacco.

  “I’m fine.”

  He thought of Rachel with her mouth on Kleckner’s cock, swallowing him, then that cock inside her, her legs wrapped around his back. It was happening now, right now. Kell put his face down into the sink and covered it in water.

  Elsa had come into the bathroom.

  “Tom, what happened?”

  “Just felt sick,” Kell replied, the lie springing into his mouth. “Something I ate. Sorry for the cigarette…”

  “Do not be sorry!” Elsa’s singsong voice, the happiness in it, was a balm to him, even as he thought of the hotel room again, the noise of Rachel’s orgasm slicing through him like a blade. Kell had his phone in his pocket. He could call her, right now, bring the whole thing to an end.

  “I need another cigarette,” he said.

  “No.” Elsa’s arm was around his back. “You need to go home. You need to rest. Do you need to be sick?”

  Kell knew that Elsa had intuited what had happened. He shook his head. If he stayed, he would be forced to watch the screens, forced to act like a man who did not know the girl, who did not care what was happening. He would have to sit and listen as Harold commented on ABACUS’s prowess as a lover, made lewd jokes about Rachel’s body, made fun of yet another girl who had fallen prey to the charms of Ryan Kleckner.

  “Maybe it’s a good idea,” he said.

  “To go home?”

  “Yes.”

  47

  Fifteen minutes later Elsa was sitting beside Kell in the backseat of a black cab pulling up outside his flat in Holland Park. She paid the driver. Kell walked ahead of her into the building, turning the key in the door, picturing Rachel asleep on Kleckner’s chest, laughing and joking over room service in bed, showering together. He should have been more careful. He should not have let his guard down. People always betray you in the end. Kell himself had betrayed many others.