‘Do you think he might have crashed the plane deliberately?’
Tremayne had the decency to make a momentary, glancing eye contact as he pitched the question, but the timing of it still irked Kell.
‘You tell me. Did Paul strike you as the suicidal type?’
‘Not at all.’ Tremayne’s response was quick and forthright, though he added a caveat, like a quick adjustment to the steering wheel. ‘Truth be told, we didn’t see a great deal of one another. We didn’t fraternize. Paul spent the majority of his time in Istanbul.’
‘Any particular reason for that?’
Tremayne hesitated before responding. ‘It’s an attack Station.’
‘I’m well aware of that, Doug. That’s why I said “particular reason”?’
Kell was trawling again, for anything: Wallinger’s assets – conscious or unconscious – his contacts, his women. The files and telegrams he would pore over in the next forty-eight hours would give an official version of Wallinger’s interests and behaviour, but there was no downside to the raw intel of gossip and rumour.
‘Well, for one thing, he loved the city. Knew it like the back of his hand, enjoyed it as Istanbul deserves to be enjoyed. Things are always more formal here. Ankara is a government town, a policy town. As you will be aware, most of the important discussions on Iran, on Syria and the Brotherhood, are taking place in Istanbul. Paul kept a lovely house in Yeniköy. He was surrounded by his books, his paintings. That’s where Josephine would visit him. She loathed Ankara. The children did, too.’
‘Rachel came here?’
Tremayne nodded. ‘Only once, I think.’
Kell took out his iPhone and checked the screen for activity. There was a single text, which turned out to be a welcome message from his mobile phone provider, and three emails, two of which were spam. It was a bad, addictive habit he had developed after spending too many solitary days and nights in London without sufficient intellectual stimulation: a craving for news, for the tiny narcotic fix of contact from the outside world. Most days he hoped for a friendly message from Claire, if only to reassure himself that she had not entirely vanished from his life.
‘Is that the new one?’ Tremayne asked.
‘I’ve no idea.’ Kell put the iPhone back in his pocket. ‘Tell me what Paul was working on when he died. Amelia said you’d be able to bring me up to speed.’
A change of gear and Tremayne crawled towards a red light.
‘I suppose you’ve heard about the Armenian fiasco?’
It was a reminder to Kell that he had been out of the loop for too long. Whatever operation Tremayne was referring to had not even been mentioned by Amelia in Cartmel.
‘Assume that I’m starting at zero, Doug. The decision to send me here was only taken two days ago.’
The traffic light began to flash. Tremayne moved off in bunched suburban traffic, passing beneath a giant billboard of José Mourinho advertising what appeared to be contents insurance.
‘I see,’ he said, plainly surprised by Kell’s ignorance. ‘Well, best described as a bloody farce. Eight-month joint operation with the Cousins to bring a high-ranking Iranian military official across the border. Everything going like clockwork from Tehran, he gets as far as the frontier with his courier, Paul and his opposite number in the CIA about to pop the champagne and then – bang!’
‘Bang?’
‘Car bomb. Asset and courier both killed instantly. Paul apparently had the whites of his eyes, the Cousin bloody waved at him. It’s all in a report you’ll read tomorrow.’ Tremayne overtook a truck belching fumes into the Ankaran evening and changed into a lower gear. ‘Amelia didn’t tell you?’
Kell shook his head. No, Amelia didn’t tell me. And why was that? To save face, or because there was more to the story than a simple botched joint op?
‘The bomb was planted by the Iranians?’
‘We assume so. Remote controlled, almost certainly. For obvious reasons we weren’t able to get a look at the wreckage. It’s as though we were allowed to glimpse our prize, and then that prize was snatched from his grasp. A very deliberate snub, a power play. Tehran must have known about HITCHCOCK all along.’
‘HITCHCOCK was the cryptonym?’
‘Real name Sadeq Mirzai.’
Again, Kell wondered why Amelia had not told him about the bomb. Had the operation been spoken of at the funeral? Were there half a dozen conversations in the barn about HITCHCOCK to which he had not been privy? He felt the familiar, numb anger of his long exclusion from privileged information.
‘What’s the American line on what happened?’
Tremayne shrugged. He was of the view that the post-9/11 Cousins were a law unto themselves, best treated with deference, but kept at arm’s length as much as possible. ‘You’re meeting them on Monday,’ he said. There was a note-change in Tremayne’s voice, as if he was about to apologize for letting Kell down. ‘Tom, there’s something I need to discuss with you.’
‘Go on.’
‘The CIA Head of Station here. I assume you’ve been told?’
‘Been told what?’
Tremayne stretched the muscles in his neck, releasing another puff of aftershave into the car. ‘Tom, I’ve been made aware of your situation. I’ve known about it for some time.’ Tremayne was referring to Witness X. It sounded as though he wanted Kell’s gratitude for remaining circumspect. ‘For what it’s worth, I think you were strung up.’
‘For what it’s worth, I think I was too.’
‘Hung out to dry to protect HMG. Made a scapegoat for the numberless failings of our superiors.’
‘And inferiors,’ Kell added, squeezing the cigarette out of the gap in the window. In that moment, passing a group of men standing idly beside the road, he knew exactly what Tremayne was about to tell him. He was back in the room with Yassin Gharani, back in Kabul in 2004, with a pumped-up CIA officer throwing punches in the face of a brain-washed jihadi.
‘Jim Chater is in town.’
Chater was the man whose reputation and good name Kell had protected at the expense of his own career. That naïvety, in itself, had been a principal component of his anger in the past two years, not least because he had never received adequate thanks for suppressing what he knew about the worst aspects of Chater’s conduct. Gharani had been beaten senseless. Gharani had been waterboarded. For his uncommitted sins he had then been dispatched to a black site in Cairo and – when the Egyptians were done with him – to Cuba and the prolonged humiliations of Guantanamo. And Chater was now the man with whom Kell would have to discuss the death of Paul Wallinger.
Kell turned to Tremayne, wondering why ‘C’ hadn’t warned him. Amelia had placed her own needs – her desire for her affair with Paul never to become public knowledge – above the good sense of putting
