49

 

Kell went to the lifts, walked quickly out onto Redan Place and called Amelia’s private number.

“Where are you?”

“Tom?”

“I need to speak to you. As soon as possible.”

“You sound agitated. Is everything all right?”

Her brusque, formal manner—at the edge of condescension, even contempt—was a further irritant to him.

“I’m fine. But we need to meet.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Kell came to a standstill and briefly separated the phone from his ear, swearing under his breath. “Why do you think?” he said. “Because of work. Because of ABACUS.”

“And it’s urgent?” Amelia managed to make it sound as though she had a hundred better things to do.

“Yes. It’s urgent. Where are you?”

“Shouldn’t you be at the office?” she asked, as if Kell was being insubordinate. “Where’s ABACUS now?”

“Danny has him. Danny’s in charge. This is more important.”

A long silence. Finally, Amelia deigned to reply.

“It’ll have to wait,” she said. “I have a lunch that I can’t cancel. Can you meet me at my house at half past three?”

“Done,” Kell replied. “Half past three.”

*   *   *

He was early. This time there was a security goon on the door who made Kell wait in the atrium on another afternoon of incessant rain. When Amelia texted to say that she was stuck in traffic and running late, Kell went for a brisk, umbrella-sheltered walk along Kings Road, up and down Bywater Street, then into Markham Square, past the house in the northeast corner that had once belonged to Kim Philby. He bought a packet of cigarettes in a branch of Sainsbury’s and was smoking one outside Amelia’s house when she finally pulled up in her official car and nodded him toward the front door.

Moments later Kell was pacing in the sitting room of the Chelsea house waiting for Amelia to reappear. She had excused herself for five minutes, wanting to change out of a business suit into “something more comfortable.” Kell had always felt less fully-formed, a generation younger whenever he was in Amelia’s company. He put it down to a mixture of professional awe and natural deference.

“Look at you hopping up and down,” Amelia said, coming into the room while still tying the buckle on the belt of her jeans. Kell saw the flash of a tanned, gym-toned stomach beneath a sheer white blouse. “I feel like you’ve come to ask for my hand in marriage.”

She had sprayed herself with perfume. Hermès Calèche.

“I haven’t come for that,” he replied.

She shot him an appraising glance, quick with the realization that her visitor was not going to be finessed with feminine charm. Kell was angry, and Amelia knew exactly why.

“Drink?” she said.

“The usual.”

He regretted that response, because it sounded chummy and forgiving. The last thing Kell wanted was to generate an atmosphere of complicity.

Amelia moved toward the drinks cabinet and plucked out a bottle of single malt. “There’s no ice,” she said, and was turning toward the kitchen when Kell stopped her and said: “I don’t need ice. Forget it. Just some water.”

“You sound awfully tense, Tom.”

He did not respond. Amelia continued to pour the whiskey, the glug of three fingers, then passed him the glass over a sofa. Kell remained where he was as Amelia sat down in her favorite armchair, the sofa a barrier between them, a net dividing opponents.

“So.”

Two children moved past the street window ringing the bells on their bicycles. Amelia’s tone of voice, allied to impatient body language, conveyed the impression of a woman who had five, perhaps a maximum of ten, minutes to spare before she would be called off to a more important assignation.

“Why did you destroy the tapes?” Kell asked.

To his surprise, she began to smile. “Isn’t that how David Frost began his interview with Richard Nixon? Only I think it was the other way around. Why didn’t you destroy the tapes?”

“Rachel,” Kell said.

Amelia did not look up. “What about her?”

“Why was she in the hotel? Do you know about that? Do you know why she was with Kleckner? Did you encourage that relationship?”

“You’re angry with me when perhaps you should be angry with Rachel.”

Kell almost flew at her, but managed a swift return of serve. “Don’t worry. I’ll get to Rachel in my own good time. Right now I’m extremely angry with you.”

Amelia looked to one side of the room, as if weighing up a number of options. She could pull rank and tell Kell to go back to Redan Place and do the job he was being paid to do. She could admonish him for the sin of becoming involved with Rachel Wallinger. She could credit Kell with enough intelligence and strength of character to be able to hear the truth of what had occurred at the Rembrandt. Or she could simply keep her counsel, shielded by silence and secrecy.

“I would be lying if I told you that I was not aware of your feelings for each other.”

Those two words—“each other”—gave Kell a jolt of hope. They implied that Rachel had confided in Amelia. They implied that she cared for him. He took a sip of the whiskey.

“How did you know we were involved?” he asked.

“I guessed.”

“How?”

“Is that important?”

“I’d like to know.” Kell did not particularly need to hear Amelia’s answer, but he was annoyed that he had been caught out, irritated that he had left clues for her to follow. Perhaps Rachel had confessed everything.

“I’ll tell you another time,” she replied. “Come and sit, Tom. You’re making me nervous.” She gestured Kell toward an armchair. He moved around the sofa, stood in front of the chair, but did not sit down. Amelia clasped her hands together and appeared to be wary of what she was about to say. “It’s serious between the two of you, isn’t it?”

“You tell me,” Kell replied.

“I want to hear your end of it. All I know is what Rachel has told me.”

“Forgive me, but I’m wondering if any of this is your business?”

“By coming here today, you have made it my business. You seem extremely upset.”

“I am extremely upset. I want answers. I want to know what the hell is going on and I want to know what else you’ve concealed from me.”

Amelia’s normally impassive face was gradually flushed with something close to regret.

“It’s important for you to know that Rachel had only one condition.”

“One condition on what?”

“One condition that would guarantee her cooperation.”

Kell remembered what Elsa had said to him the previous evening. When I met Rachel, she seemed to be friendly with Amelia. Everything was becoming clear to him. Everything was falling into place.

“She agreed to help me, she agreed to cooperate, as long as you weren’t informed. She was aware that something could happen with Ryan that would undermine her relationship with you. She cares about you very deeply. She likes you. But ABACUS was more important.”

Kell found himself repeating the phrase “ABACUS was more important” as he stared out of the window at the gray, rain-soaked street. His pride, his professional and personal self-esteem, were teetering on a precipice.

Amelia twisted in her seat and reached for a glass that wasn’t there. Kell was drinking alone. “It would be disingenuous of me to say that the arrangement I struck with Rachel didn’t suit the Office,” she said, adding: “Down to the ground” after a slight pause.

“What kind of arrangement?” But Kell already knew the answer, in the same way that he had known, when Harold had informed him about the tapes, that Amelia had been the one to give the order to destroy them.

“An arrangement to track Kleckner. An arrangement to know where he was, what he was doing, who he was meeting, what he was saying.”

Kell felt a skin crawl of disgust, Rachel co-opted into sleaze. He said: “You wanted Rachel as Kleckner’s girlfriend.”

“Something like that.” To her credit, Amelia managed to look ashamed.

“You’re saying you deliberately and consciously sidelined me on an operation over which I was supposed to have tactical control? And you used my girlfriend to do that? Is that what you’re telling me?”

Amelia did not need to respond. They both knew the answer. Instead, she said: “I was worried that it would take months, years to get the proof on Kleckner, to have him arrested. I wasn’t even sure that ABACUS was the mole. I wanted to have a backup plan just in case. For very obvious reasons, I could hardly ask your permission. And your instincts about the teahouse, the discovery of the DLB, your triumph, Tom, meant that I could put the plan into action.”

Draining his whiskey, Kell reflected on Amelia’s tireless, Blairite ability to turn disaster into triumph; to make her opponents feel that they had misjudged her; to give a watertight impersonation of blamelessness and virtue, even in the aftermath of gross, cynical negligence.

“So my triumph became my undoing?” he said. “That’s what you’re telling me. That’s how you’re spinning this?”

Amelia nodded. Kell stood up, went to the cabinet, poured himself another three fingers of whiskey, did not offer Amelia a drink of her own, sat back down and produced a resigned sigh.

“You’d better tell me the whole story then,” he said, and even lit a cigarette in the living room, in flagrant breach of Amelia’s house rules on smoking. She did not tell Kell to stub it out. “Start at the beginning,” he said, settling back in the armchair and crossing his legs as the whiskey began to work through him. “Try not to leave anything out.”

*   *   *

So she told him. Everything.

Over the course of the next three-quarters of an hour, Amelia Levene confirmed to Thomas Kell that she had made a private arrangement with Rachel that would help bring Kleckner to justice.

Having met Rachel in Istanbul and established that Kleckner found her attractive, Amelia told her that there was a mole inside western intelligence, a mole threatening every SIS operation in the Middle East and beyond. That evidence had shown that the mole was most likely to be Ryan Kleckner. She had told her that Kleckner may have been involved in the death of her father.

“You couldn’t possibly have known that at the time,” Kell interjected. “We still have no proof of that.”

Amelia appeared to concede the point. It had simply been a useful weapon in the armory of her recruitment. Tell Rachel that Kleckner was instrumental in the murder of her father. That would ensure her cooperation. Kell knew the tricks, the cynicism of his own trade. He allowed Amelia to keep talking.

In the event that Kleckner’s guilt was proven, she said, Rachel had agreed to get alongside him, by staging a meeting in Istanbul. As luck would have it, on the day that Kell had discovered the dead letter box, Kleckner was on his way to London. Lo and behold, who should he look up in his little black book but Rachel Wallinger—the one who got away. The beautiful daughter of the dead British spy who had made eyes at him at her father’s funeral. It was a slice of great good fortune, of which Amelia was initially suspicious, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. Rachel was ready to avenge Paul; she would even risk losing Kell to do so.

Kleckner’s invitation was all that they needed. He was coming to London, was Rachel free? Love to take you to dinner. Love to see you in your hometown. That was all it took. Everything had fallen into place after that; everything was given the green light. All that mattered was that Rachel be smart, keep calm, hold her nerve—not exactly a challenge for a woman of her caliber. After all, she was the daughter of a master spy. The DNA, the intellect, the toughness, had been passed down to the next generation.

“You do know that we tried to recruit her at Oxford, don’t you?”

Kell was floored. “What?”

“After graduation, she applied for Fast Stream. Got all the way to the IONEC, then walked away. Her head wasn’t right.”

Kell stared blankly ahead. I loathe spies, Rachel had told him. There had been nothing about SIS Fast Stream, nothing about the IONEC. Just her contempt for her father’s trade—for Kell’s trade. He remembered Rachel’s words. A part of Pappa dried up inside. He had a piece missing from his heart. Decency. Tenderness. Honesty.

“Honesty.”

“What?” Amelia asked.

Kell gestured at her to continue.

“I gave her two objectives,” she said, as if Rachel was just another officer on just another operation. “We needed to get to Kleckner’s BlackBerry. If possible, to his satchel as well. Tech-Ops have replacement batteries, devices which, when switched with an existing BlackBerry battery, will continue to act as a power source, but can also provide us with audio coverage as well as precise location data.”

“So that’s what Rachel was doing in the hotel last night? That was her chance? That’s why she went back to Kleckner’s room?”

Amelia nodded.

“And did she succeed?”

The chief of the Secret Intelligence Service smiled, a lioness pleased with a cub’s first kill. “Oh, yes. She did brilliantly.”

“And did she have to fuck him first?” Kell spat the question.

“Tom, for God’s sake.”

“Did you make her do that? Is that who we are now? No better than the Russians? No better than the Mossad?”

Amelia had been seated for the best part of an hour. She stood up and walked across to the window, closing the curtains. It was some time before she deigned to respond to Kell’s question, as though he had not merely offended her at a professional level, but also as a woman.

“Right from the start,” she said, “Rachel was very clear about what she was and was not prepared to do. I think she finds Mr. Kleckner physically attractive. Plenty do.” Kell interpreted the remark as an attempt to annoy him. “In other words, to flirt with Mr. Kleckner, to seduce him if you like, would not cause a woman of Rachel’s temperament much in the way of distress. Does that make sense to you, Tom?”

“It makes sense to me, Amelia,” Kell replied pointedly, and could feel his affection for her, his loyalty to his friend and to their rotten profession, disintegrating like a worn-out rag. “What doesn’t make sense—”

“Let me finish.” Amelia was pouring herself a glass of wine and almost barked the interruption, as if Kell was about to offend her yet again with more preposterous morality. “Rachel was prepared to kiss Ryan. She was prepared even to go to bed with him. These were all choices that she made of her own volition…”

“Oh, come off it.”

“Of her own volition,” Amelia repeated, very clearly and steadily. “I never believed that she would sleep with him, have sex with him, that she would allow herself to become physically intimate with him in the way that you are implying. I didn’t think I had created a prostitute or a whore or that what she had shared with you meant so little to her that she would trade you in for a man she despises.”

Kell was rendered silent. He felt the shame of his jealousy as something feeble and humiliating. But Amelia was not yet done.

“Find out if they fucked!” She was almost laughing, as if something as meaningless as the brief, drunk copulation of two people was of any lasting consequence to anyone. “They didn’t, if that’s all you care about, Tom. Fucking men and your fucking egos. Why do you think she got him so drunk at the dinner, at the nightclub? Why did she lay on the promise of a steamy night at the Rembrandt Hotel, only to see him fall asleep in his own bed just as things were heating up?”

“She drugged him.”

“Bingo! Glad you could join us. Welcome to the operation.”

“How did she do that?” Kell’s experience told him that the use of a sedative, however mild, was catastrophically risky. He remembered Kleckner on the phone at the hotel. I pass out? That never happens to me. What if he suspected that Rachel had spiked his drink, spiked his food? What if he took a good look at his BlackBerry and realized that Rachel had tampered with the battery?

“A sedative,” Amelia confirmed. “I believe it’s called lorazepam.”

“How strong?”

“Strong enough. Ours was delayed release.” Kell shook his head. He could feel his anger at Amelia returning. “Enough to make a drunk, stressed, exhausted man feel even more drunk and stressed and exhausted—shortly before it knocks him out. And that’s exactly what happened.”

“Hence the reason Kleckner woke up at midday.”

“Hence,” Amelia replied, seemingly restored to a more acquiescent mood.

“And how did Rachel administer this lorazepam, this delayed release Mickey Finn? Don’t tell me. A vial of white powder tipped into Ryan’s mojito?”

Amelia took a sip of her wine. “Almost,” she replied, weaving around any implied condescension in Kell’s tone by producing an amused grin. “Rachel had it in chewing gum, as a matter of fact. Liquid as a backup if Kleckner didn’t take the bait. But he was keen to freshen his breath after Boujis, accepted her offer of some spearmint, chewed it for ten minutes, kissed her, and was asleep about an hour later. The booze did the rest.”

“And Rachel?”

“What about her?”

“What if Kleckner realizes that he’s been duped? What if he has doubts about the new battery? What if he already knows that we are onto him and that Rachel’s trip to Istanbul tomorrow is just a ruse to draw him in? He could have her killed.”

“That’s a little excitable, isn’t it? The SVR is hardly likely to start a third world war by murdering MI6 officers.”

“They killed Cecilia Sandor and she was working for them.”

“Precisely.” Amelia seemed pleased to have won the argument so easily. “In moments of disappointment, the Russians tend to kill their own. They don’t kill ours.” She surprised Kell by touching his shoulder as she passed him. “Besides, Rachel may not even have to see Kleckner in Istanbul.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s done her job. She switched the battery.” Amelia allowed herself the trace of a smile. “The phone is working. We can see Kleckner. We can hear Kleckner. If ABACUS takes the phone to the meeting, takes the battery out and leaves it even within fifty feet of their conversation, we will be able to isolate every single word.”