telegrams on Iranian centrifuges that had been seen only by H/Istanbul, Amelia, the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister. The classified internal report into the failed defection of Sadeq Mirzai had been copied to Jim Chater, who had added his own remarks in anticipation of a similar CIA report into the incident. Kell could find nothing in the manner in which the recruitment of Mirzai had been handled, nor in the planning and execution of the operation, that seemed problematic or misjudged. As Tremayne had suggested, the Iranians must have been alerted to the defection, likely because of an error in Mirzai’s tradecraft. Only by talking to Chater face-to-face would Kell be able to get a fuller picture.
On his third afternoon in Ankara, Kell took a taxi to Wallinger’s suburban villa in Incek, a property owned by the Foreign Office and occupied by successive Heads of Station for most of the previous two decades. Turning the key in the front door, Kell reflected that he had searched many homes, many hotel rooms, many offices in his career, but had only had cause to snoop on a friend once before – when searching for Amelia two years earlier. It was one of the healthier house rules at SIS and MI5: staff were required to sign a document pledging not to investigate the behaviour of friends or relatives on Service computers. Those caught doing so – running background checks on a new girlfriend, for example, or looking for personal information about a colleague – would quickly be shown the door.
The villa was starkly furnished in the modern Turkish style with very little of Wallinger’s taste apparent in the décor. Kell suspected that his yali in Istanbul would be quite different in atmosphere: more cluttered, more scholarly. It appeared as though a cleaner had recently been to the property, because the kitchen surfaces were as polished as a showroom, the toilets blue with detergent, the beds made, the rugs straightened, not a speck of dust on any shelf or table. In the cupboards, Kell found only what he would have expected to find: clothes and shoes and boxes; in the bathroom, toiletries, towels and a dressing-gown. Beside Wallinger’s bed there was a biography of Lyndon Johnson; beneath the television downstairs, box sets of all five series of The Wire. The villa, as soulless as a serviced apartment, revealed very little about the personality of the occupant. Even Wallinger’s study had a feeling of impermanence: a single photograph of Josephine on the desk, another of Andrew and Rachel as children hanging on the wall. There were various magazines, Turkish and English, paperback thrillers on a shelf, a reproduction poster of the 1974 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. Kell read through a few scribbled notes in a foolscap pad, found an out-of-date diary in the desk, but no hidden documents, no letters concealed behind pictures, no false passports or suicide note. Wallinger had kept a tennis racket and a set of golf clubs in a cupboard under the stairs. Feeling somewhat foolish, Kell checked for a hidden compartment in the handle of the racket and for a false bottom in the golf bag. He discovered nothing but some old tees and two hardened sticks of prehistoric chewing gum. It was the same story upstairs. Checking behind drawers, unscrewing lampshades, looking under cupboards – Wallinger had hidden nothing in the house. Kell moved from room to room, listening to the intermittent sounds of birdsong and passing cars in the suburban street outside, and concluded that there was nothing to find. Tremayne had been right – Wallinger’s heart had been in Istanbul.
Kell was in a bathroom adjacent to the smaller of two spare bedrooms when he heard the front door opening and then slamming shut. The sound of a set of keys falling on to the surface of a glass table. Not an intruder; it had to be someone who had legitimate access to the villa. A cleaner? The landlord?
Kell left the bathroom and walked out on to the landing. He called out: ‘Merhaba?’
No reply. Kell began to walk downstairs, calling out a second time: ‘Merhaba? Hello?’
He could see down into the hall. A faint shadow moved across the polished floor. Whoever had come in was now in Wallinger’s office. As he reached the mid-point of the stairs, Kell heard a reply in a sing-song accent he recognized instantly.
‘Hello? Somebody is there, please?’
A woman came out of the office. She was wearing blue leggings and a black leather jacket and her hair was grown out and tied at the back. Kell hadn’t seen her since the operation to save François Malot, in which she had played such a crucial role. When she saw him, her face broke into a wide smile and she swore excitedly in Italian.
‘Minchia!’
‘Elsa,’ Kell said. ‘I wondered when I’d run into you.’
They hugged one another in the hall, Elsa wrapping her arms around Kell’s neck so tightly that he almost lost his balance. She smelled of a new perfume. The shape of her, the warmth in her greeting, reminded Kell that they had almost become lovers in the summer of the Malot operation, and that only his loyalty to Claire, allied to a sense of professional responsibility, had prevented that.
‘It is so amazing to see you!’ she said, raising herself up on tiptoes to kiss him. Kell felt like a favourite uncle. It was not a feeling he enjoyed, yet he remembered how easily Elsa had broken through the wall of his natural reticence, how close they had become in the short time they had spent together. ‘Amelia sent you?’ she asked.
Kell was surprised that Elsa did not know that he was going to be in Ankara. ‘Yes. She didn’t tell you?’
‘No!’
Of course she didn’t. How many other Service freelancers were working on the Wallinger case? How many other members of staff had Amelia dispatched to the four corners of the Earth to find out why Paul had died?
‘You’re picking up his computers?’
Elsa was a Tech-Ops specialist, a freelance computer whizz who could decipher a software program, a circuit board or a screen of code as others could translate pages of Mandarin, or sight-read a Shostakovich piano concerto. In France, two summers earlier, she had unearthed nuggets of intelligence in laptops and BlackBerrys that had been critical to Kell’s investigation: without her, the operation would certainly have failed.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Just picked up the keys.’
She glanced towards the glass table. Kell saw the keys resting against the base of a vase containing fake plastic flowers.
‘I guess that’s what you call good timing,’ he told her. ‘I was about to start downloading the hard drive.’
Elsa’s face screwed up in confusion, not merely at the obvious overlap in their responsibilities, but also because she knew that, to Kell, computer technology was a gobbledygook language of which he had only a rudimentary understanding.
‘It’s a good thing I am here, then,’ she said. And it was only then that she let go of his hands, pivoting back in the direction of the office. ‘I can tell you which plug goes in the wall and which one goes in the back of the computer.’
‘Ha, ha.’
Kell studied her face. He remembered the natural ebullience, a young woman entirely at ease in her own skin. Running into Elsa so suddenly had lifted his spirits out of the despondency that had plagued him for days. ‘When did you get here?’ he asked.
She glanced outside. She had three earrings in her right lobe, a single stud in the left. ‘Yesterday?’ It was as though she had forgotten.
‘You’re going into the Station at some point?’
Elsa nodded. ‘Sure. Tomorrow,
