been to bed in three days, mumbled something about ‘links to terrorism’ as he strapped on his vest. Burak couldn’t believe what some people were prepared to swallow. Didn’t he know how the system worked? Ten to one Eldem had riled somebody in the AKP, and an Erdoğan flunkie had spotted a chance to send out a message. That was how government people always operated. You had to keep an eye on them. They were all early risers.
Burak and Metin were part of a three-man team ordered to take Eldem into custody at five o’clock in the morning. They knew what was wanted. Make a racket, wake the neighbours, scare the blood out of her, drag the detainee down to the van. A few weeks ago, on the last raid they did, Metin had picked up a framed photograph in some poor bastard’s living room and dropped it on the floor, probably because he wanted to be like the cops on American TV. But why did they have to do it in the middle of the night? Burak could never work that out. Why not just pick her up on the way to work, pay a visit to Cumhuriyet? Instead, he’d had to set his fucking alarm for half-past three in the morning, show himself at the precinct at four, then sit around in the van for an hour with that weight in his head, the numb fatigue of no sleep, his muscles and his brain feeling soft and slow. Burak got tetchy when he was like that. Anybody did anything to rile him, said something he didn’t like, if there was a delay in the raid or any kind of problem – he’d snap them off at the knees. Food didn’t help, tea neither. It wasn’t a blood sugar thing. He just resented having to haul his arse out of bed when the rest of Istanbul was still fast asleep.
‘Time?’ said Adnan. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, too lazy even to look at a clock.
‘Five,’ said Burak, because he wanted to get on with it.
‘Ten to,’ said Metin. Burak shot him a look.
‘Fuck it,’ said Adnan. ‘Let’s go.’
The first Ebru knew of the raid was a noise very close to her face, which she later realized was the sound of the bedroom door being kicked in. She sat up in bed – she was naked – and screamed, because she thought a gang of men were going to rape her. She had been dreaming of her father, of her two young nephews, but now three men were in her cramped bedroom, throwing clothes at her, shouting at her to get dressed, calling her a ‘fucking terrorist’.
She knew what it was. She had dreaded this moment. They all did. They all censored their words, chose their stories carefully, because a line out of place, an inference here, a suggestion there, was enough to land you in prison. Modern Turkey. Democratic Turkey. Still a police state. Always had been. Always would be.
One of them was dragging her now, saying she was being too slow. To Ebru’s shame, she began to cry. What had she done wrong? What had she written? It occurred to her, as she covered herself, pulled on some knickers, buttoned up her jeans, that Ryan would help. Ryan had money and influence and would do what he could to save her.
‘Leave it,’ one of them barked. She had tried to grab her phone. She saw the surname on the cop’s lapel badge: TURAN.
‘I want a lawyer,’ she screamed.
Burak shook his head. ‘No lawyer is going to help you,’ he said. ‘Now put on a fucking shirt.’
Thomas Kell had only been standing at the bar for a few seconds when the landlady turned to him, winked, and said: ‘The usual, Tom?’
The usual. It was a bad sign. He was spending four nights out of seven at the Ladbroke Arms, four nights out of seven drinking pints of Adnams Ghost Ship with only The Times quick crossword and a packet of Winston Lights for company. Perhaps there was no alternative for disgraced spooks. Cold-shouldered by the Secret Intelligence Service eighteen months earlier, Kell had been in a state of suspended animation ever since. He wasn’t out, but he wasn’t in. His part in saving the life of Amelia Levene’s son, François Malot, was known only to a select band of high priests at Vauxhall Cross. To the rest of the staff at MI6, Thomas Kell was still ‘Witness X’, the officer who had been present at the aggressive CIA interrogation of a British national in Kabul and who had failed to prevent the suspect’s subsequent rendition to a black prison in Cairo, and on to the gulag of Guantanamo.
‘Thanks, Kathy,’ he said, and planted a five-pound note on the bar. A well-financed German was standing beside him, flicking through the pages of the FT Weekend and picking at a bowl of wasabi peas. Kell collected his change, walked outside and sat at a picnic table under the fierce heat of a standing gas fire. It was dusk on a damp Easter Sunday, the pub – like the rest of Notting Hill – almost empty. Kell had the terrace to himself. Most of the local residents appeared to be out of town, doubtless at Gloucestershire second homes or skiing lodges in the Swiss Alps. Even the well-tended police station across the street looked half-asleep. Kell took out the packet of Winston and rummaged around for his lighter; a gold Dunhill, engraved with the initials P.M. – a private memento from Levene, who had risen to MI6 Chief the previous September.
‘Every time you light a cigarette, you can think of me,’ she had said with a low laugh, pressing the lighter into the palm of his hand. A classic Amelia tactic: seemingly intimate and heartfelt, but ultimately deniable as anything other than a platonic gift between friends.
In truth, Kell had never been much of a smoker, but recently cigarettes had afforded a useful punctuation to his unchanging days. In his twenty-year career as a spy, he had often carried a packet as a prop: a light could start a conversation; a cigarette would put an agent at ease. Now they were part of the furniture of his solitary life. He felt less fit as a consequence and spent a lot more money. Most mornings he would wake and cough like a dying man, immediately reaching for another nicotine kick-start to the day. But he found that he could not function without them.
Kell was living in what a former colleague had described as the ‘no-man’s land’ of early middle-age, in the wake of a job which had imploded and a marriage which had failed. At Christmas, his wife, Claire, had finally filed for divorce and begun a new relationship with her lover, Richard Quinn, a twice-married hedge fund Peter Pan with a £14 million townhouse in Primrose Hill and three teenage sons at St Paul’s. Not that Kell regretted the split, nor resented Claire the upgrade in lifestyle; for the most part he was relieved to be free of a relationship that had brought neither of them much in the way of happiness. He hoped that Dick the Wonder Schlong – as Quinn was affectionately known – would bring Claire the fulfilment she craved. Being married to a spy, she had once told him, was like being married to half a person. In her view, Kell had been physically and emotionally separate from her for years.
A sip of the Ghost. It was Kell’s second pint of the evening and tasted soapier than the first. He flicked the half-smoked cigarette into the street and took out his iPhone. The green ‘Messages’ icon was empty; the ‘Mail’ envelope identically blank. He had finished The Times crossword half an hour earlier and had left the novel he was reading – Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending – on the kitchen table in his flat. There seemed little to do but drink the pint and look out at the listless street. Occasionally a car would roll down the road or a local resident drag past with a dog, but London was otherwise uncharacteristically silent; it was like listening to the city through the muffle of headphones. The eerie quiet only added to Kell’s sense of restlessness. He was not a man prone to self-pity, but nor did he want to spend too many more nights drinking alone on the terrace of an upmarket gastro pub in West London, waiting to see if Amelia Levene would give him his job back. The public inquiry into Witness X was dragging its heels;
