Kitabı oku: «A Colder War»

6

It had dawned on Thomas Kell that the number of funerals he was attending in a calendar year had begun to outstrip the number of weddings. As he travelled north with Amelia in a packed first-class carriage from Euston, he felt as though the change had occurred almost overnight: one moment he had been a young man in a morning suit throwing confetti over rapturous couples every third weekend in summer; the next he had somehow morphed into a veteran forty-something spook, flying in from Kabul to bury a friend or relative dead from alcohol or cancer. Looking around the train gave Kell the same feeling: he was older than almost everyone in the carriage. What had happened to the intervening years? Even the ticket inspector appeared to have been born after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

‘You look tired,’ Amelia said, looking up from an op-ed in the Independent. She had taken to wearing half-moon reading glasses and almost looked her age.

‘Gee thanks,’ Kell replied.

She was seated opposite him at a table sticky with half-eaten croissants and discarded coffee cups. Beside her, oblivious to Amelia’s rank and distinction, a clear-skinned student with an upgraded ticket to Lancaster was playing Solitaire on a Samsung tablet. Both had their backs to the direction of travel as the fields and rivers of England whistled by. Kell was jammed in at a window seat, trying to avoid touching thighs with an overweight businesswoman who kept falling asleep in a Trollope novel. He had packed a bag because he was planning to stay in the north for several days. Why hammer back to London when he could go walking in Cumbria and eat two-star Michelin food at L’Enclume? There was nothing and nobody waiting for him back home in Holland Park. Just the Ladbroke Arms and another pint of Ghost Ship.

Kell was wearing a charcoal lounge suit, a white shirt and a black tie; Amelia was dressed in a dark blue suit and black overcoat. Their funereal garb drew occasional sympathetic stares as they walked across Preston station. Amelia had booked a cab on SIS and, by half-past twelve, they were wandering around Cartmel like a married couple, Kell checking into his hotel, Amelia calling the Office more than once to ensure that everything back in London was running smoothly.

They were eating chicken pie in a pub in the centre of the village when Kell spotted George Truscott at the bar, ordering a half-pint of lager. As Assistant to the Chief, Truscott had been lined up to succeed Simon Haynes as ‘C’, before Amelia had stolen his prize. It had been Truscott, a corporatized desk jockey of suffocating ambition, who had authorized Kell’s presence at the interrogation of Yassin Gharani; and it had been Truscott, more than any other colleague, who had gladly thrown Kell to the wolves when the Service needed a fall guy for the sins of extraordinary rendition. Roughly three minutes after taking over as Chief, Amelia had dispatched Truscott to Bonn, dangling the top job in Germany as a carrot. Neither of them had seen him since.

‘Amelia!’

Truscott had turned from the bar and was carrying his half-pint across the pub, like a student learning how to drink during Fresher’s Week. Kell wondered if he should bother disguising his contempt for the man who had ruined his career, but stage-managed a smile, largely out of respect for the sombre occasion. Amelia, to whom false expressions of loyalty and affection came as naturally as blinking, stood up and warmly shook Truscott’s hand. A passer-by, glancing at their table, would have concluded that both were delighted to see him.

‘I didn’t know you were coming, George. Did you fly in from Bonn?’

‘Berlin, actually,’ Truscott replied, hinting archly at work of incalculable importance to the secret state. ‘And how are you, Tom?’

Kell could see the wheels of Truscott’s ruthless, back-covering mind turning behind the question; that cunning and inexhaustibly competitive personality with which he had wrestled so long in the final months of his career. Truscott’s thoughts might as well have appeared as bubbles above his narrow, bone-white scalp. Why is Kell with Levene? Has she brought him in from the cold? Has Witness X been forgiven? Kell glimpsed the tremor of panic in Truscott’s wretched and empty soul, his profound fear that Amelia was about to make Kell ‘H/Ankara’, leaving Truscott with the backwater of Bonn; a Cold War, EU hang-up barely relevant in the age of Asia Reset and the Arab Spring.

‘Oh look, there’s Simon.’

Amelia had spotted Haynes coming out of the Gents. Her predecessor produced a beaming smile that instantly evaporated when he saw Kell and Truscott in such close proximity. Amelia allowed him to kiss both her cheeks, then watched as the male spooks became stiffly reacquainted. Kell barely took in the various platitudes and clichés with which Haynes greeted him. Yes, it was a great tragedy about Paul. No, Kell hadn’t yet found a permanent job in the private sector. Indeed it was frustrating that the public inquiry had stalled yet again. Before long, Haynes had shuffled off in the direction of Cartmel Priory, Truscott trotting along beside him as though he still believed that Haynes could influence his career.

‘Simon wanted to give the eulogy for Paul,’ Amelia said, checking her reflection in a nearby mirror as she slipped into her coat. They had polished off their chicken pies, split the bill. ‘He didn’t seem to think it would be a problem. I had to put a stop to it.’

Having collected his knighthood from Prince Charles the previous autumn, Haynes had appeared at The Sunday Times Literary Festival, spoken at an Intelligence Squared debate at the Royal Geographical Society and enthusiastically listed his favourite records on Desert Island Discs. As such, he was the first outgoing Chief of the Service actively to be seen to be benefiting, both commercially and in terms of his own public profile, from his former career. For Haynes to have given the eulogy at Wallinger’s funeral would have exposed the deceased as a spy to the many friends and neighbours who had gathered in Cartmel under the impression that he had been simply a career diplomat, or even a gentleman farmer.

‘A bad habit we’ve acquired from the Security Service,’ Amelia continued. She was wearing a gold necklace and briefly touched the chain. ‘It’ll be memoirs next. Whatever happened to discretion? Why couldn’t Simon just have joined BP like the rest of them?’

Kell grinned but wondered if Amelia was giving him a tacit warning: Don’t go public with Witness X. Surely she knew him well enough to realize that he would never betray the Service, far less breach her trust?

‘You ready for this?’ he asked, as they turned towards the door. Kell had been drinking a glass of Rioja and drained the last of it as he threw a few pound coins on to the table as a tip. Amelia found his eyes and, for an instant, looked vulnerable to what lay ahead. As they walked outside into the crystal afternoon sunshine, she briefly squeezed his hand and said: ‘Wish me luck.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ he told her. ‘The last thing you’ve ever needed is luck.’

He was right, of course. Shortly after three o’clock, as the congregation rose as one to acknowledge the arrival of Josephine Wallinger, Amelia assumed the dignified bearing of a leader and Chief, her body language betraying no hint that the man three hundred people had come to mourn had ever been anything more to her than a highly regarded colleague. Kell, for his part, felt oddly detached from the service. He sang the hymns, he listened to the lessons, he nodded through the vicar’s eulogy, which paid appropriately oblique tribute to a ‘self-effacing man’ who had been ‘a loyal servant to his country’. Yet Kell was distracted. Afterwards, making his way to the graveside, he heard an unseen mourner utter the single word ‘Hammarskjöld’ and knew that the conspiracy theories were gathering pace. Dag Hammarskjöld was the Swedish Secretary of the United Nations who had been killed in a plane crash in 1961, en route to securing a peace deal that might have prevented civil war in the Congo. Hammarskjöld’s DC6 had crashed in a forest in former Rhodesia. Some claimed that the plane had been shot down by mercenaries; others that SIS itself, in collusion with the CIA and South African intelligence, had sabotaged the flight. Since hearing the news on Sunday, Kell had been nagged by an unsettling sense that there had been foul play involved in Wallinger’s death. He could not say precisely why he felt this way – other than that he had always known Paul to be a meticulous pilot, thorough to the point of paranoia with pre-flight checks – yet the whispered talk of Hammarskjöld seemed to cement the suspicion in his mind. Looking around at the faceless spooks, ghosts of bygone ops from a dozen different Services, Kell felt that somebody, somewhere in the cramped churchyard, knew why Paul Wallinger’s plane had plunged from the sky.

The mourners shuffled forward, perhaps as many as two hundred men and women, forming a loose rectangle, ten-deep, on all four sides of the grave. Kell saw CIA officers, representatives from Canadian intelligence, three members of the Mossad, as well as colleagues from Egypt, Jordan and Turkey. As the vicar intoned the consecration, Kell wondered, in the layers of secrecy that formed around a spy like scabs, what sin Wallinger had committed, what treachery he had uncovered, to bring about his own death? Had he pushed too hard on Syria or Iran? Trip-wired an SVR operation in Istanbul? And why Greece, why Chios? Perhaps the official assumption was correct: mechanical failure was to blame. Yet Kell could not shake the feeling that his friend had been assassinated; it was not beyond the realms of possibility that the plane had been shot down. As Wallinger’s coffin was lowered into the ground, he glanced to the right and saw Amelia wiping away tears. Even Simon Haynes looked cleaned out by grief.

Kell closed his eyes. He found himself, for the first time in months, mouthing a silent prayer. Then he turned from the grave and walked back towards the church, wondering if mourners at an SIS funeral, twenty years hence, would whisper the name ‘Wallinger’ in country churchyards as a short-hand for murder and cover-up.

Less than an hour later, the crowds of mourners had found their way to the Wallinger farm, where a barn near the main house had been prepared for a wake. Trestle tables were laid out with cakes and cheese sandwiches cut into white, crustless triangles. Wine and whisky on standby while two old ladies from the village served tea and Nescafé to the great and the good of the transatlantic intelligence community. Kell was greeted with a mixture of rapture and pity by former colleagues, most of whom were too canny and self-serving to offer their whole-hearted support on the fiasco of Witness X. Others had heard word of his divorce on the Service grapevine and placed consoling hands on Kell’s shoulder, as if he had suffered a bereavement or been diagnosed with an inoperable illness. He didn’t blame them. What else were people supposed to say in such circumstances?

The flowers that had lain on Wallinger’s coffin had been set out at one end of the barn. Kell was standing outside, smoking a cigarette, when he saw Wallinger’s children – his son, Andrew, and his daughter, Rachel – bending over the floral tributes, reading the cards, and sharing a selection of the written messages with one another. Andrew was the younger of the two, now twenty-eight, reportedly earning a living in Moscow as a banker. Kell had not seen Rachel for more than fifteen years, and had been struck by her dignity and grace as she supported her mother at the graveside. Andrew had wept desperately for the father he had lost as Josephine stared into the black grave, frozen in what Kell assumed was a medicated grief. Yet Rachel had maintained an eerie stillness, as if in possession of a secret that guaranteed her peace of mind.