A Colder War (43 page)

“Long story,” Kell replied, beginning to feel the edges of a long-suppressed rage. It was as though Minasian’s call had put him in shock. He lit a cigarette and, without offering one to Chater, put the packet back in his pocket. Kell could still hear Amelia talking in the cockpit. He did not like it that Chater seemed so relaxed.

“Do you know where she was taken?” the American asked. Kell shook his head. “How do you know Minasian isn’t bluffing?”

“We don’t,” Kell replied.

“So a few hours ago, he’s lying on his ass in Odessa. Now he’s somehow orchestrated the kidnapping of an SIS asset five hundred miles away?”

“Apparently.” Kell could not afford to take the chance that Minasian was lying. The clock was ticking. He said: “Presumably Rachel was taken in the last thirty-six hours. As an insurance policy. In case Ryan didn’t make it.”

“Presumably,” Chater replied, as though Kell was being willfully naïve. “Got a proof of life?”

The question had a ghastly simplicity. Chater’s tone of voice suggested that he did not care, one way or the other, what Kell’s answer might be.

“Amelia is trying to find out more.”

Proof of life. Did Chater know more than he was letting on? Kell drew on the cigarette, taking the smoke deep into his lungs. He felt no loyalty to the Service, no concern that Langley might lose ABACUS to the SVR. All he cared about was Rachel’s safety. The rest was just a game between spies.

“We have less than six hours,” he said. “If we do the swap, we take Kleckner to the Russian embassy in Kiev, they take Rachel to the British—”

Chater did not let him finish.

“
If
we do the swap,” he said pointedly.

Kell now experienced an intense anger. He knew that it was of paramount importance not to corner Chater, not to make him feel that the decision was being taken away from him; but nor did he want to give the CIA any sense that there was a choice to be made about Rachel’s future.

“Once we have confirmation that Rachel is alive,” Kell said, “I suggest that you prepare a press release about Ryan, counter whatever claims Moscow will make about the nature of his work for the SVR, try to get ahead of the PR battle before—”

Chater interrupted again, shaking his head and muttering: “Tom, Tom, Tom…” as though Kell was being naïve. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I don’t like the idea of doing anything until we have all of the facts about your girl.”

It had been a mistake to tell him that Minasian had created a six-hour window. Chater was going to try to run down the clock. He didn’t care about Rachel. He didn’t care about the life of a British agent. All he cared about was making sure that Kleckner was debriefed and then thrown into prison for the rest of his days. Chater knew that Langley would most likely not survive another spy scandal. Moscow had been scoring too many points for too long.

“All of the facts,” Kell said, loading the remark with as much contempt as he could risk. “Here are the facts, Jim. Rachel works for us. Her life is in danger. If we don’t give Kleckner to Minasian, she will be murdered. It’s that simple.”

To his absolute astonishment, Chater said: “I understand.” At first, Kell was not sure that he had heard him correctly, but the American looked up and nodded his head, conveying in a simple gesture of reconciliation that he would not countenance the idea of risking Rachel’s life.

Kell was briefly speechless. For so long he had thought of Jim Chater as little more than a thug, the living embodiment of a certain brand of American recklessness, swinging from country to country on missions of vengeance and control. But beneath the anger and the bravado there was a keen mind, a man of learning, even of reason. Unable to shake off the memory of Kabul, and convinced that Chater would put Rachel’s life at risk, Kell had allowed himself to forget that.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“I’m saying that obviously we have no choice. We’ve got to get your girl back, right? But I don’t want to be rushed. I don’t want us to make a move without knowing exactly what Minasian is doing. He says we have six hours. Fuck him. He knows anything happens to Rachel, I take Ryan back to Virginia and Minasian loses his career.”

Kell felt an enormous sense of relief, even as he became aware that he could no longer hear Amelia’s voice in the cockpit. It would be necessary to involve her in the conversation as soon as possible, to put together an agreed strategy, then to contact Minasian, whether he was still in Odessa or en route to Kiev.

As if reading his thoughts, Chater said: “We need to get ‘C’ in on this,” and Kell nodded, dropping the cigarette into an empty bottle of water.

At that moment, the door of the cockpit opened. Amelia’s head was lowered as she emerged into the cabin, but when she looked up Kell could see that something was terribly wrong. There were tears in her eyes.

“What is it?” he said.

Kell knew the answer. He dreaded it. Amelia was looking at him with utter dismay.

“Tom.” He wanted to stop her saying what she was going to say. Kell would have given his life not to hear her words. “I am so sorry.” She was imploring his forgiveness with her eyes. She walked toward Kell and held his wrists, squeezing hard at the bones, just as she had held them at Paul’s funeral. “It was a bluff. Minasian was bluffing. They didn’t have her. Station rang the house. The police were there. There was never going to be any exchange. Rachel has been killed.”

71

A small boy swimming in the shallows of the Bosporus had seen blood sprayed on the ground-floor windows of the
yali
. The body of Rachel Wallinger was found in the kitchen, a single bullet wound to the head. Minasian, stranded in Odessa knowing that Kleckner would be out of the country in less than six hours, had played a final, desperate card, not knowing that his superiors in Moscow had ordered Rachel to be killed.

Kell and Danny immediately flew to Istanbul. Amelia returned to London on the Gulfstream, breaking the news to Josephine at the flat in Gloucester Road. In his anger and despair at what had happened, Kell became numb to the sinister ease with which SIS conspired with the Turkish authorities to make the murder look like a random act of violence. Press reports described Rachel as “the daughter of a former British diplomat killed in a plane crash earlier this year.” Though Kell blamed himself as much for Rachel’s death as he blamed Amelia, he avoided speaking to her and refused to meet when she asked if they could discuss the case over lunch.

“What’s left to discuss?” he wrote back. “Rachel is dead.”

Kell also made it clear that he no longer had any interest in taking over as H/Ankara.

The day of Rachel’s funeral, Kell was woken at five in the morning by a call from Elsa Cassani. She told him that the wires were reporting the death of a twenty-nine-year-old American diplomat in Kiev. The story, subsequently carried in the international sections of all four British broadsheets, described Ryan Kleckner as a “health attaché” at the U.S. consulate in Istanbul.

Eyewitnesses reported that Kleckner, who was on holiday in Kiev, became involved in a heated argument outside a nightclub in the small hours of Tuesday morning. His body was discovered in a suburb east of the city.

“SVR?” Elsa asked.

“No,” Kell replied. “The Russians have always prided themselves on getting their people home.”

“The Americans, then?”

“Yes.”

Chater would have given the order. Made it look like a violent crime. Ukrainian tough guys taking exception to an uppity Yank and putting a bullet through his brain. Further “eyewitnesses” would emerge in the coming days claiming to have seen Kleckner in a brothel or lap-dancing club, behaving in a drunken or sleazy fashion. Something to put a slight stain on his reputation so that he did not return to Missouri as a hero. Something for his family and friends to be ashamed of as they stared at the coffin.

“He was too much trouble to Langley,” said Kell. “They couldn’t have survived the scandal.”

“What about you?” Elsa asked.

“What about me?”

“How are you, Tom?”

Kell looked across the room at the black suit hanging near the window. The light was coming up outside. He had to drive to Cartmel in a few hours’ time, to sit in a church surrounded by Rachel’s friends and family, nobody knowing what had happened between them, what Rachel Wallinger had meant to him. He could be no comfort to Josephine, to Andrew. Kell felt that he had betrayed them all.

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Will you be there today?”

“Yes.”

He was wide awake now. He reached for a packet of Winstons, sitting on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. He was determined to avenge Rachel, to make Minasian pay.

“So I will see you later?” Elsa asked.

She had rung on the landline. Kell knew that the SVR would be listening to the call, picking up every word of the conversation. He spoke very clearly and steadily into the receiver.

“You will see me later.”

Acknowledgments

To Keith Kahla, Hannah Braaten, Steve K., Sally Richardson, Bethany Reis, Rafal Gibek, Paul Hochman, Dori Weintraub, Justin Velella, and everybody at St. Martin’s Press in New York (and beyond) for their patience, professionalism, and support.

To my agents, Will Francis and Luke Janklow, and to everyone at Janklow & Nesbit, on both sides of the Atlantic: Kirsty Gordon, Rebecca Folland, Jessie Botterill, Claire Dippel, Dmitri Chitov, and Stefanie Lieberman.

My thanks to Marika and Malachi Smythos for guidance on Chios. To Owen Matthews, for his generosity and kindness, not least in introducing me to the wonderful Ebru Taskin in Ankara. Owen has written two great books—
Stalin’s Children
and
Glorious Misadventures
—both of which I strongly recommend. Jonny Dymond, Cansu Çamlibel, Nick Lockley, Banu Buyurgan, Alex Varlick at Istanbul’s Georges Hotel, Omar, GG, and Frank R. were all great sources of information in Turkey. Thanks to A. D. Miller and Simon Sebag Montefiore for Odessa tips. Narges Bajoghli and Christopher de Bellaigue, author of
Patriot of Persia
and
In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs,
gave me very useful insights into life in Tehran.

I am also grateful to: Harry de Quetteville, Mr. and Mrs. Adam le Bor, Boglárka Várkonyi, Ben Macintyre, Ian Cumming, Mark Pilkington, Siobhan Vernon, Mark Meynell, Rowland White, Robin Durie, Alice Kahrmann, Rory Paget, Catherine Heaney, Bard Wilkinson, Anna Bilton, Hasmukh and Minesh Kakad, Boris Starling, Pat Ford, Saveria Callagy, Meredith Hindley, Kate Mallinson, Ros O’Shaughnessy, my mother, Caroline Pilkington, and all the staff at
The Week
in London.

I owe unrepayable debts to Elizabeth Best and Sarah Gabriel (www.sarahgabriel.eu). I would not have started
A Colder War
without one, nor finished it without the other. Thank you.

C.C., London, 2013

ALSO BY CHARLES CUMMING

Typhoon

The Trinity Six

The Thomas Kell Novels

A Foreign Country

A Colder War

The Alec Milius Novels

A Spy by Nature

The Spanish Game

About the Author

CHARLES CUMMING is the author of the first Thomas Kell book,
A Foreign Country,
as well as the
New York Times
bestselling thriller
The Trinity Six
and others, including
A Spy by Nature
and
Typhoon
. He lives in London.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A COLDER WAR.
Copyright © 2014 by Charles Cumming. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint from the following:

Epigraph
from
The Double-Cross System
by Sir John Masterman. Published by Vintage. Reprinted by permission from The Random House Group Limited.

Cover design by Ervin Serrano

Cover photographs: man by Mark Owen /Arcangel Images; Trafalgar Square by Howard Kingsnorth/Getty Images; street by Taiga/
Shutterstock.com

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

ISBN 978-1-250-02061-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-02060-4 (e-book)

e-ISBN 9781250020604

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers

First U.S. Edition: August 2014