10

 

“Recruiting an agent is an act of seduction,” an instructor at Fort Monckton had told a class of eager SIS pups in the autumn of 1994. “The trick with agents of the opposite gender is to seduce them without, well, seducing them.”

Kell remembered the ripple of knowing laughter that had followed that remark, a room full of high-functioning trainee spooks all wondering what would happen if they one day found themselves in a situation where they were sexually attracted to an agent. It happened, of course. To gain the trust of a stranger, to convince a person to believe in you, to compel them to act, sometimes against their own better instincts—was that not the first step to the bedroom? Good agents were often bright, ambitious, emotionally needy: to run them required a mixture of flattery, kindness, and empathy. It was the spy’s job to listen, to be in control, to remain strong, often in the face of impossibly difficult circumstances. The men employed by SIS were often physically attractive, the women also. Several times in his career, Kell had been in situations where, had he wanted to, it would have been easy to take a female agent to bed. They came to rely on you, to trust and admire their handler completely. Right or wrong, the mystique of spying was an aphrodisiac. For much the same reason, the atmosphere within the four walls of Thames House and Vauxhall Cross had often been likened to a bordello, particularly where younger employees were concerned. Secrecy bred intimacy. Officers could only discuss their work with other officers. Often they would do so at night, over a drink or two in the MI5 bar, or a local pub in Vauxhall. Inevitably, one thing led to another, both at home and abroad. It was the way of the business. It was also one of the reasons the divorce rate in SIS was as high as in Beverly Hills.

The trick with agents of the opposite gender is to seduce them without, well, seducing them. Kell sat on the harbor wall at quarter to three, the instructor’s words running through his mind as he kept an eye on the first-floor windows of Villas Angelis. At exactly one minute past three, Marianna and Delfas emerged to begin their hour-long lunch break. Delfas went into the restaurant downstairs, to be greeted by several nodding patrons who were seated at tables beneath a burgundy awning. Marianna began to walk south along the harbor road. Kell followed her at a discreet distance and watched as she went into a restaurant adjacent to the ferry terminal. From his position on the street he had clear sight of her table. There was a second door at the side of the restaurant through which he could enter without being seen. He would sit down, order some food, then contrive a reason to walk past.

He took five hundred euros out of an ATM, entered the restaurant, nodded at a waitress, and sat down. Within a minute, Kell had a menu open in front of him; within two, he had ordered sausages, fried potatoes, and salad, as well as a half-liter bottle of sparkling water. Marianna was on the opposite side of the room, beyond the bar, one of perhaps fifteen or twenty other customers spread out around the restaurant. Kell could not see her table, but had glimpsed the top of her head when he walked in.

As soon as the waitress had brought the water, Kell stood up and headed toward the bar. He turned right, ostensibly looking for the toilets, but made a point of staring at Marianna’s table. Sensing movement in her peripheral vision, she looked up and instantly recognized Kell. She smiled warmly and set aside the book she was reading.

“Oh, hello.” Kell managed to convey a look of complete surprise as he came to a halt beside her. He was pleased to note that Marianna was blushing.

“Mr. Harding!”

“Hardwick. Call me Chris. Marianna, yes?”

She looked embarrassed not to have remembered his name. “What are you doing here?”

Kell turned and nodded back in the general direction of his table. “Same as you, I suppose. Just having some lunch.”

“Have you eaten?”

Marianna looked at the chair opposite her own, as though mustering the courage to invite Kell to join her.

“I’ve just ordered,” he replied, adding a warm smile. “What have you got there? Some soup? Looks delicious.”

Marianna looked down at what appeared to be a bowl of clear chicken soup. She lifted up the spoon. For a moment, Kell wondered if she was going to offer him a taste.

“Yes, soup. I am very sorry about Nico.”

Kell played dumb with the name. “Nico?”

“My boss…”

“Oh. Him. Yes, that was frustrating.”

She appeared to have run out of things to say. Kell looked ahead toward the door of the bathroom.

“Sorry,” she said, taking the cue. “I didn’t mean to stop you.”

“No, no,” Kell replied. “It’s really nice to see you. I enjoyed meeting you this morning.” Marianna appeared not to know how to react to the compliment. Her hand moved toward her face and the tips of her fingers brushed her eyebrows. Kell hooked the ensuing silence with an appropriate amount of bait. “I was just frustrated. It would have been useful to find out why Mr. Wallinger had your number.”

Marianna looked as though she was in possession of the answer to Mr. Hardwick’s simple question.

“Yes,” she replied, her hand reaching for the spine of the book, as though to reassure herself about something. The flush had gone from her cheeks and she looked eager to continue the conversation. “Nico can be difficult in the mornings.”

Kell nodded, allowing another brief silence to envelop them. Marianna shot a nervous glance toward the bar.

“Where are my manners?” she said. “You are a guest in Chios. Would you like to eat at my table? I can’t leave you on your own.”

“Are you sure?” Kell felt the small but unmistakable buzz of a successfully executed plan.

“Of course!” Marianna’s natural bustle and bonhomie was suddenly in full flood. She looked buoyant. “I can tell the waitress to bring your food to my table. That is, if you’d like me to?”

“I would like that very much.”

After that, it was easy. Kell hadn’t recruited an unconscious asset for over a year, but the tricks of the trade, the grammar of a successful pitch, were second nature to him. “If you’re doing it properly,” the same instructor at the Fort had told the same 1994 class, “a recruitment shouldn’t feel cynical or manipulative. It should feel as though both parties want the same outcome. It should feel as though the prospective agent requires something from you, and that you can meet that requirement.”

And so it was that Kell discovered the limits of Marianna Dimitriadis’s loyalty to Nicolas Delfas.

From the outset, he avoided talking about Wallinger. Instead, Kell concentrated on finding out as much about Marianna as possible. By the time they were eating dessert—a rice pudding flavored with lemon—he knew where she had been born, how many brothers and sisters she had, where those siblings lived, the names of her best friends, how she had come to work at Villas Angelis, why she had remained on Chios (rather than pursue a career in Thessaloniki in public relations), as well as the identity of her last boyfriend, a German tourist who had lived with her for six months before returning to his wife in Munich. In her natural warmth and good cheer, Kell detected the loneliness of the maiden aunt, the romantic and social frustration of the lifelong spinster. He rarely shifted his gaze from Marianna’s lively and melancholy eyes. He smiled when she did; he listened as carefully and as intelligently as she required. He was certain that, by the time it came to settle the bill, she would agree to the simple task that he was about to set her.

“I’ve got a problem,” he said.

“You do?”

“If I can’t find out why Paul Wallinger used the number of your office on his flight plan, my boss is going to go crazy. He’ll have to send somebody else out to Chios, I’ll get the blame, the whole thing will take weeks and cost a fortune.”

“I see.”

“Forgive me for saying this, Marianna, but I felt like Nico was hiding something from me. Was that the case?” His companion’s eyes dropped to the table. Marianna began to shake her head, but Kell could see that she was smiling to herself. “I don’t mean to pry,” he added.

“You’re not prying,” she replied instantly. She looked up and gazed into his eyes, a look of yearning with which he had become familiar throughout the meal.

“What was it then?”

“Nico is not very…”—she searched for the correct adjective—“kind.” It was not the word that Kell had been expecting, but he was glad of it. “He does not like to help people unless they can help him. He does not like to involve himself in anything … complex.”

Kell nodded in appreciation of Marianna’s stark analysis of character. The waitress passed their table and Kell took the opportunity to order an espresso.

“How would it be complex?” he asked. “Was he involved in business with Mr. Wallinger?”

A burst of laughter and a beaming smile told Kell that this was not the case. Marianna shook her head.

“Oh, no. There was nothing wrong in their relationship.” She glanced out of the window. A ferry was easing into the harbor, passengers on the bow waving at the mainland. “He just decided not to help you.” Marianna could see that Mr. Hardwick was affronted by Delfas’s belligerence. “Do not take it personally,” she said, and for a moment Kell thought that she was going to reach for his hand. “He is like this with everyone. I am not like that. Most Greek people are not like that.”

“Of course.”

The moment had arrived. Kell felt the bulge of five hundred euros in his wallet, money that he had been prepared to offer Marianna in exchange for her cooperation. He had laid a private bet with himself that he would not need it.

“Would you be prepared to help me?” he asked.

“In what way?” Marianna was blushing again.

“Can you tell me what Nico wasn’t prepared to say? It would save me a lot of trouble.”

If Marianna experienced a moment of ethical conflict over the matter, it passed in no more than a second. With a matter-of-fact sigh, her loyalty to her boss was shaken off like a passing fad.

“From my memory,” she said, taking Kell into her immediate confidence, “Mr. Wallinger was staying in one of our villas. For a week.”

“Then why didn’t Nico tell me that?”

She shrugged. It seemed that they were both at the mercy of a stubborn and irascible man. “He came into the office to collect the keys.”

Kell buried his surprise. The news of the sighting was like a vision of Wallinger coming back from the dead.

“You met him?”

“Yes. He was very nice, a quiet man, quite serious.” Marianna hesitated, taking a risk with Mr. Hardwick’s ego. “I thought he was very tall—and extremely handsome!”

Kell smiled. That sounded like Paul.

“So he was on his own?”

“Yes. Although I saw him later that day. With somebody else.”

“Oh. Who was that?” Kell was about to say: “A woman?” when he checked himself. “Another tourist?”

“A man,” Marianna replied matter-of-factly. Kell wondered if her memory was playing tricks on her. It was not the answer he had been expecting. “I walked past their table,” she said. “One of the cafés near my office.”

Kell found that he was turning Amelia’s words over in his mind. Tread carefully around the Yanks. Tricky out there at the moment.

“This man. Was he American by any chance?”

Kell was concerned that he was asking too many questions. He was relying on the atmosphere of broad agreement which had grown up between the two of them, a relaxed complicity.

“I don’t know,” Marianna replied. “I never saw him again.”

“Was he as handsome as Mr. Wallinger?”

Kell put a grin on the question, trawling for a description in a way that he hoped would not raise Marianna’s suspicions.

“Oh, no!” she said, obliging him. “He was younger, but he had a beard, and I don’t like beards. I think the villa was rented by a woman. In fact, I am sure of that, because I spoke with her on the telephone.”

This was the name Kell needed. Find the woman and he could find the man. He was sure of it.

“I don’t want to get you into trouble,” he said, suggesting quite the opposite with his eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“All I would need is a copy of the rental agreement. If there’s nothing sinister or illegal going on, it would really save me a lot of…”

Marianna did not even bother to hear him out. They were friends now—perhaps more than that. Mr. Hardwick had successfully earned her trust. She leaned forward and at last touched the top of his wrist. Kell heard the buzz of a moped as it tore along the port, the crack of seagulls circling above the restaurant.

“No problem,” she said. “Where are you staying? How would be the best way of sending it? I could fax?”

*   *   *

Three hours later, lying on his bed, almost halfway through My Name Is Red, Kell heard a knock at the door of his hotel room. He opened it to find the same receptionist who had assisted him with the recorded message the previous evening. She was holding up a piece of paper.

“Fax.”

Kell tipped her five euros and went back into the room. Marianna had sent through the rental agreement, as well as a short handwritten note scribbled at the top of the page: “Great to meet you! Hope to see you again!” The document was dual-language, so Kell was able to see that the villa in question had been rented, at a cost of €2,500, for the seven days prior to the crash. There was no sign of Wallinger’s name on the document, only the signature and date of birth of a woman who had given a Hungarian passport and cell phone number for ID. Seeing her handwriting, Kell felt the mystery of Rachel’s note opening in front of him like a blooming flower. Checking the camera roll on his iPhone, he saw that there was a clear match with the signature on the rental agreement.

He was on the phone to Tamas Metka within minutes.

“Tom!” he exclaimed. “Tell me. Why am I so popular all of a sudden?”

“I need a profile on somebody. Hungarian passport holder.”

“Is he the poet?”

Kell laughed. “Not he. She. Our usual arrangement?”

“Sure. The name?”

“Sandor,” Kell replied, reaching for a packet of cigarettes. “Cecilia Sandor.”