43

 

Ryan Kleckner boarded Turkish Airlines flight TK1986 at Istanbul Ataturk Airport at 1730 hours on Tuesday, April thirtieth. Fifteen rows behind him, Javed Mohsin settled into a window seat, placed his Pakistani passport in the inside pocket of his jacket, inflated a travel pillow, and went to sleep. Five hours later, following a delay in the air, Mohsin was watching ABACUS flash a diplomatic passport at Terminal Three immigration, thereby cutting out a snaking line that would have delayed the American by at least forty-five minutes. Mohsin telephoned ahead to a second surveillance officer in the baggage area, confirming Kleckner’s outfit—white Converse sneakers, blue denim jeans, white button-down shirt, black V-neck sweater—and giving a description of his carry-on bag (a molded black wheeled suitcase with a Rolling Stones lips sticker peeling on the left panel) as well as the leather satchel from which he was rarely parted. ABACUS had no checked baggage and would be mobile in the terminal building within less than three minutes.

The second officer—known to the team as “Carol”—picked up ABACUS as he walked into the baggage area and called ahead to Redan Place when she saw him buying a SIM card from an automated machine in the south corner.

“Which brand?” Kell asked. He was sitting in the smallest of the six rooms, the one he had chosen as his own office. Kleckner’s move was predictable, but it was nevertheless a potential headache to Elsa and GCHQ.

“Difficult to say. Looked like a Lebara pay-as-you-go.”

“Has he fitted it in the BlackBerry?”

“Not yet. Negative.”

Carol followed ABACUS through the automatic doors at customs and established line of sight with a third watcher—Jez—who had joined the massed ranks of minicab drivers clustered in arrivals. Jez was dressed in a cheap black suit and holding a sign with the name “Kerin O’Connor” scrawled on the front in green marker pen. Lowering the sign, he turned and tailed ABACUS at five meters while Carol moved ahead, taking up an advanced position on the platform of the Heathrow Express in anticipation of Kleckner choosing to travel into London by train.

As it turned out, he took a cab. Jez texted the license plate to an SIS vehicle idling near the Parkway intersection at junction 3 of the M4. With Jez on a follow, the driver of the vehicle picked up the ABACUS cab as it paused at a set of traffic lights three hundred meters short of the motorway. Both cars tailed the target into central London and housed ABACUS at the Rembrandt Hotel. Carol went back to Paddington on the Heathrow Express, then made her way to a restaurant in Knightsbridge awaiting further instructions from Kell. Jez parked in a mews behind the hotel and hoped that he would be able to get some sleep; the driver of the second SIS vehicle was called onto a separate job. Javed Mohsin went home to his wife, whom he had not seen for more than six weeks.

*   *   *

Every detail of Kleckner’s arrival was relayed live to Redan Place. As soon as ABACUS was on the road, Kell had called Danny Aldrich in his room at the Rembrandt. Harold had piped the hotel’s surveillance cameras to Aldrich’s laptop so that he could keep an eye on the corridor outside Kleckner’s room, as well as the lobby and front and side entrances. If the American checked in and went walkabout, Aldrich would form part of the mobile surveillance team attempting to follow him. If he ordered room service and went to sleep, most of them would get an early night.

As it turned out, Amelia was right about Kleckner’s desire to switch rooms. Having checked in to 316, which had taken four painstaking hours to rig with cameras and microphones, the American made a cursory assessment of the room before returning to reception and requesting an upgrade. A female officer on secondment from Australian SIS was role-playing the Rembrandt receptionist—with the connivance of the hotel manager—and reacted quickly and calmly to Kleckner’s request, even throwing in the bone of a “lovely view over Knightsbridge.” ABACUS was duly reassigned a room on the top floor of the hotel that had also been wired for sight and sound.

Kell wondered at Kleckner’s motive. Did he simply want a more pleasant room, or did he have concerns about liaison surveillance? If the latter was the case, was the American simply being cautious, or did his decision speak of a gathering paranoia?

“We just have to hold our nerve,” he told Amelia on the phone just after ten o’clock.

“We do, Tom. We do,” she replied, and with that announced that she was going to bed.

It became a long night. Kleckner took a shower in his room, ordered a club sandwich, then changed into a pair of jeans and a fresh shirt before heading out into the late London evening. Jez, who had briefly fallen asleep in the mews, awoke to a telephone call from Kell instructing him to drive in loops around ABACUS while Aldrich, Carol, and two other foot surveillance officers tailed the American into Kensington.

It transpired that he had made a date to meet a Lebanese girl at Eclipse, a bar on Walton Street. The youngest female member of the team—Lucy—entered the bar ten minutes later, where the attentions of two Dubai-based businessmen briefly interfered with her efforts to photograph Kleckner’s companion.

“She’s about twenty-five,” she told Kell, speaking to him from the bar. It was almost impossible to hear what she was saying. “The name I heard was ‘Zena.’ They are intimate. They’ve either met before or he’s on a promise.”

“Why didn’t we know about her?” Kell asked Elsa, texting Danny and instructing him to hold on Walton Street. It had been a long time since he had heard the phrase “on a promise.” “Who’s Zena?”

Elsa shrugged. “Maybe the new SIM?” she said.

Kell had asked for one of the separating walls in the office to be dismantled so that there would be a larger communal area in which the various members of the team could sit. An extra sofa had also been brought in from a shop on Westbourne Grove. Elsa was lying on it, staring up at the ceiling, tired and faintly irritable.

“It is always the case that people have e-mails, sites, new IPs that they can use to make contacts.”

“True,” Kell replied. “But we still need to get hold of that SIM.”

Kleckner was another hour at Eclipse, leaving with Zena as the bar closed. Lucy had allowed the Dubai businessmen to pay her bill and had left in their company half an hour earlier, thereby giving Kleckner—had he noticed her—the impression that she had intended to meet the men and was not a surveillance threat. As soon as she had left the bar, however, she brushed off the men and returned home, “red” for the duration of Kleckner’s visit on the basis that he would recognize her as a repeating face should she continue to follow him.

Meanwhile, Aldrich had purloined a dummy black cab from the Security Service and was able to tail Kleckner and Zena to a nightclub at the eastern end of Kensington High Street. With Lucy out of the game, Kell was aware that they were down to a team of only five. He could not risk sending another watcher into the venue. He had a hunch that Kleckner would get the girl drunk, take her out onto the dance floor, then suggest a nightcap at the Rembrandt. That was his normal Istanbul modus operandi and it seemed highly unlikely to Kell that Kleckner would break off, on the cusp of a one-night stand, to meet Minasian.

So it proved. Just after three in the morning, Kell had a text from the receptionist confirming that ABACUS was “back in his room with a woman (Arabic appearance, mid-20s). Both drunk/flirtatious.” Switching on the surveillance screens, Kell and Harold were able to see Zena frantically brushing her teeth in the bathroom while a shirtless Kleckner searched the minibar for champagne. The bedspread had been disturbed, suggesting that the pair had already kissed.

“Lucky bastard,” Harold muttered. “What I would give to be twenty-nine again.”

“I’m sure a lot of women feel the same way,” Kell replied. “Take Zena. If she had a choice tonight between you and Ryan, and you were staying in the hotel, well…”

“Well it’s no competition, is it? She’s only human.”

Harold switched off the audio feed from the bathroom. The television had been turned on in the room and tuned to a music channel. There was a song playing that Kell didn’t recognize.

“Shall we leave them to it?” he suggested, remembering the first night with Rachel at the Londres.

“Good idea,” Harold replied, and they moved next door.