own vanity, their own appetites, even at the expense of friends or loved ones, that can be enormously distressing for the person left behind.’
‘You understand a great deal, Peter,’ Riedle replied, lifting a final mouthful of lamb towards his gaping mouth. Kell watched the rising fork as he might have watched a clock ticking down to zero hour. He was convinced that Riedle was going to leave the table as soon as he had finished eating. ‘Tell me about your own experience,’ Riedle asked. ‘Tell me how you coped with the end of your marriage.’
If it would guarantee the German’s undivided attention for the next hour, Kell would happily now have told him the most intimate and scandalous details of his relationship with Claire. Besides, wasn’t it one of the golden rules of recruitment? Share your vulnerabilities. Confide in a prospective agent. Tell him whatever he needs to hear in order to establish complicity. But before he had a chance to answer, Riedle added a coda.
‘First, however, will you excuse me?’ He was dabbing his mouth with his napkin and preparing to stand up. ‘I must go to the bathroom.’
At that same moment, Kell looked across the room and saw Rafal Suda in the midst of precisely the same ritual. The dabbed napkin. The soundless request to his companion. It was as though the two men had made a secret plan to meet. Rising to his feet, Suda laughed as his date cracked a toothy joke. If Riedle left now, he would bump into Suda within thirty seconds.
‘Would you mind if I went first?’ Kell asked and did something that he had never done in all his life as an intelligence officer. He clutched at his waist and pretended to be hit by a searing pain in his stomach.
‘But of course,’ Riedle replied, settling back into his seat. ‘Are you all right, Peter?’
Kell struggled to his feet, wincing in apparent agony. ‘Fine,’ he gasped, ‘Fine’, and ducked to avoid a low-hanging lamp. ‘Happens from time to time. Just give me five minutes will you, Bernie? I’ll be right back.’
Kell was only a few feet behind Suda as he walked into the bathroom. A man in a dark grey suit came out at the same time and held the door for him as they passed.
‘Merci,’ Kell said, going inside.
Suda was standing at a urinal, staring down into the bowl. He was alone in the room. There were two cubicles beyond him, both of which Kell checked for occupants before lighting the blue touchpaper.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
Suda looked back, urinating, and swore in Polish.
‘Tom.’
‘I’m eating dinner ten feet away from your fucking table with Bernhard fucking Riedle. Why are you still in Brussels?’
The shock oozed into Suda’s face as he began to reply, his blue-black birthmark creased with fatigue. Still urinating, he was unable fully to turn around. Kell was riding the adrenaline of the previous fifteen minutes and did not hold back.
‘You realize if he sees you, I’m fucked? You realize if he so much as turns around and looks at your underage, I-still-haven’t-graduated-from-high-school girlfriend and recognizes the man sitting opposite her, that my operation – for which you were extraordinarily well paid and which has cost me outside of ten thousand pounds and almost two weeks of planning – will not only be over, but will involve you being arrested in front of a room full of people carrying iPhones – iPhones with cameras and zoom lenses and microphones – and me standing right beside Riedle as he asks me to positively identify the street criminal who tried to mug him two nights ago?’
Suda was zipping up his trousers and trying to interrupt, but Kell wasn’t done.
‘I’m not interested what excuse you have, why you felt that you had to stay in Brussels with your newly adolescent, fake eyelash, breast-enhanced babysitter, rather than go home to your wife and children in Warsaw as you promised me you would do when I hired you, but here’s what’s going to happen, Rafal. There’s a kitchen outside. You go into it. You walk very quickly and very confidently to the back of that kitchen and you leave by any exit possible. You leave the way the staff leave. If anybody tries to stop you, pay them. Do you have money?’
Suda nodded. It was like scolding a schoolboy who had been caught cheating in an exam.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I will tell a waiter that I saw you leaving, that you had to go out the back because your wife had walked into the restaurant and that you gave me money. I will pay your bill. The waiter will then explain to Kim Kardashian that you’re waiting for her outside. Maybe she’ll finish her oysters. Maybe she won’t. You can call her. Do what you want. But if you don’t get out of here and get permanently out of Riedle’s sight, I will personally see to it that no intelligence agency, no corporate espionage outfit, no police department, no bank or multinational will ever give you any business again. You won’t teach. You won’t drive cabs. You won’t change a fucking lightbulb in this shitty Belgian bathroom. All you will do is get out of this restaurant. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred pounds. Leave.’
Suda did as he was told.
Kell watched him walk briskly through the swing doors of the kitchen and waited outside to make sure that he did not double back. He then took the maître d’ to one side, explained that he had met a man in the bathroom who was at risk of being compromised by his wife while dining with his mistress, paid Suda’s bill in cash, tipped the maître d’ a further twenty euros to break the news gently and discreetly to the girlfriend, then made his way back to Riedle.
Several minutes had passed since Kell had left the table, but the German was relaxed and companionable, fussing and fretting over Kell’s condition. Have you had these incidents before? Do you require a doctor? Perhaps it was something in your food? Kell brushed aside his concerns, realizing – as their conversation continued – that Minasian would almost certainly have taken advantage of Riedle’s innate decency; there was a neediness about him, a desire to win affection through acts of kindness and generosity, which to a sadist like Minasian would have been like the scent of blood to a shark.
‘I was thinking, while you were away, that I feel rather ashamed.’
‘Ashamed, Bernie? Why?’
Kell wondered why Riedle hadn’t yet taken the opportunity to go to the bathroom. His napkin was still balled on the table.
‘It is embarrassing for a man of my age, a man almost sixty, to be at the mercy of an infatuation, don’t you think? To be so broken-hearted. So weak. I feel like a fool.’
‘Don’t,’ Kell replied firmly, and tried to comfort Riedle with a gentle smile. ‘I think it shows that you are alive. That you haven’t given up on people, become stale or jaded.’ Riedle asked him to translate the word ‘jaded’ and Kell offered ‘tired’ as a lazy synonym. ‘We all have a need for company. Most of us, anyway. What you are going through speaks to our deep need to feel connected, to share our lives with somebody who understands us, who makes us feel cherished. We want to feel free to be who we are. We want somebody who will help to open up the
