and drank from it. ‘He hired a plane. You know how he loved to fly. Attended a Directorate meeting at the Station in Athens, stopped off on Chios on the way home. He was taking the Cessna back to Ankara. There must have been something wrong with the aircraft. Mechanical fault. They found debris about a hundred miles north-east of Izmir.’
‘No body?’
Kell saw Amelia flinch and winced at his own insensitivity. That body was her body. Not just the body of a colleague; the body of a lover.
‘Something was found,’ she replied, and he felt sick at the image.
‘I’m so sorry.’
She came towards him and they embraced, glasses held awkwardly to one side, like the start of a dance with no rhythm. Kell wondered if she was going to cry, but as she pulled away he saw that she was entirely composed.
‘The funeral is on Wednesday,’ she said. ‘Cumbria. I wondered if you would come with me?’
The agent known to SVR officer Alexander Minasian by the cryptonym ‘KODAK’ had near-perfect conversational recall and a photographic memory once described by an admiring colleague as ‘pixel sharp’. As winter turned to spring in Istanbul, his signals to Minasian were becoming more frequent. KODAK recalled their conversation at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London almost three years earlier:
Every day, between nine o’clock and nine thirty in the morning, and between seven o’clock and seven thirty in the evening, we will have a person in the tea house. Somebody who knows your face, somebody who knows the signal. This is easy for us to arrange. I will arrange it. When you find yourself working in Ankara, the routine will be the same.
KODAK would typically leave his apartment between seven and eight o’clock in the morning, undertake no discernible counter-surveillance, drive his car or – more usually – take a taxi to Istiklal Caddesi, walk down the narrow passage opposite the Russian Consulate, enter the tea house and sit down. Alternatively, he would leave work at the usual time, take a train into the city, browse in some of the bookshops and clothing stores on Istiklal, then stop for a glass of tea at the appointed time.
Whenever you have documents for me, you only need to go to the tea house at these times and to present yourself to us. You will not need to know who is watching for you. You will not need to look around for faces. Just wear the signal that we have agreed, take a cup of tea or take a coffee, and we will see you. You can sit inside the café or you can sit outside the café. It does not matter. There will always be somebody there.
Of course KODAK did not wish to establish a pattern. Whenever he was in the area around Taksim, day or night, he would try to go to the tea house, ostensibly to practise his Turkish with the pretty young waitress, to play backgammon, or simply to read a book. He frequented other tea houses in the area, other restaurants and bars, often purposefully wearing near-identical clothing.
If it suits you, bring a friend. Bring somebody who does not know the significance of the occasion! If you see somebody leaving while you are there, do not follow them. Of course not. This would be dangerous. You will not know who I have sent to look for you. You will not know who might be watching them, just as you will not know who might be watching you. This is why we do not leave a trace. No more chalk marks on walls. No more stickers. I have always preferred the static system, something that cannot be noticed, except by the eye which has been trained to see it. The movement of a vase of flowers in a room. The appearance of a bicycle on a balcony. Even the colour of a pair of socks! All these things can be used to communicate a signal.
KODAK liked Minasian. He admired his courage, his instincts, his professionalism. Together they had been able to do significant work; together they might bring about extraordinary change. But he felt that the Russian, from time to time, could be somewhat melodramatic.
If you feel that your position has been compromised, do not show yourself at the tea house or at the Ankara location. Instead, obtain or borrow a cell phone and text the word BEŞIKTAŞ to my number. If this is not possible, for whatever reason – you cannot obtain a signal, you cannot obtain a phone – go to a callbox or other landline and speak this word when there is an answer. If we contact you using this word, it is our belief that your work for us has been discovered and that you should leave Turkey.
It seemed highly improbable to KODAK that he would ever be suspected of treachery, far less caught in the act of handing secrets to the SVR. He was too clever, too cautious, his tracks too well covered. Nevertheless, he remembered the meeting points, and the crash instructions, and committed the numbers associated with them to memory.
There are three potential meeting points in the event of exposure. Remember them. If you say BEŞIKTAŞ ONE, a contact will meet you in the courtyard of the Blue Mosque at the time agreed. He will make himself known to you and you will follow him. If you consider Turkey to be unsafe, make your way across the border to Bulgaria with the message BEŞIKTAŞ TWO. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to board an aeroplane. A contact will make himself known to you at the time agreed, in the bar of the Grand Hotel in Sofia. In exceptional circumstances, if you feel that it is necessary to cross into former Soviet territory, where you will be safer and more easily escorted to Moscow, there are boats from Istanbul. You will always be welcome in Odessa. The code for this crash meeting is BEŞIKTAŞ THREE.
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
