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 best side of ourselves.’
Rachel flooded Kell’s memory, her poise and her laughter, the way in which she had so quickly intuited so much about him. He felt the loss of her as a pain every bit as searing as that which he had faked only ten minutes earlier, clutching his stomach for Riedle’s benefit.
‘To care for somebody and to be cared for,’ Kell continued, now thinking of Claire and of everything that had gone missing between them. ‘To be excited about seeing them, hearing what they have to say, talking to them. Isn’t that what it’s all about? You obviously had that with Dmitri, when things were good between you. A person can be fifty-nine or nineteen and experience those things. There’s no shame in mourning them when they have been taken away from you.’
‘Then I thank you for your understanding,’ Riedle sighed with a gesture of collapsing gratitude, and finally stood up to go to the bathroom.
As he inched along the walkway, Kell looked across to the opposite balcony, where the maître d’ was only now informing Suda’s companion that her date had left for the evening via the back door. She took the news with laudable restraint, checking her face in a compact mirror before standing up, adjusting her hair and walking downstairs. As she tottered to the ground floor on four-inch heels, she took a smartphone from her purse and checked the screen for messages. At the same moment, Kell felt his own phone pulse in his trouser pocket.
It was a text from Suda.
I will tell Stephanie that it was a Polish police matter, not anything to do with my wife.
Tell her what you like, Kell muttered as a second text came in.
I will take her to Hotel Metropole. I apologize, Tom. My plane leaves for Warsaw at 8 tomorrow. In the morning.
Kell deleted the messages without replying and watched Stephanie collect her coat at the entrance. She must have felt his gaze because she looked up and stared at Kell, an almost imperceptible tremor of longing in her eyes. A beautiful young woman aware of her power over men, and testing it all the time. Kell thought of her in Rafal’s arms in a bed at the Hotel Metropole. Then he thought of Rachel and Claire, of Riedle and Minasian, of the whole sorry dance of sex and yearning, of love and betrayal.
There was one more glass of wine left in the bottle of Chianti. He finished it.
The two men walked home together, Riedle bidding farewell to Kell in the lobby of the apartment building where, just two days earlier, they had met for the first time. Kell rode the lift to the fourth floor, already taking the pen from his jacket pocket with which he would write down detailed notes about the dinner. It was an old habit from Office days. Get home, write up the telegram, no matter how late at night, then send it to London.
Kell entered the apartment. He was hanging up his jacket when he heard a cough from the living room. Walking inside, he saw Mowbray sitting on the sofa, a glass of single malt in front of him and a grin on his face like Arsenal had won the European Cup in extra time.
‘You’re looking very pleased with yourself, Harold.’
‘Am I, guv? Well, that makes sense.’ He leaned further back on the sofa. ‘How was your dinner? Bernie try and hold your hand?’
‘Very funny.’
‘Seriously, you wanna be careful, boss. Bloke like that, lonely and unhappy. Nice, good-looking British diplomat comes along, listens to his sad stories, protects him from antisocial elements on the mean streets of Brussels. He might be falling in love with you.’
Kell was pouring a whisky of his own and felt a sting at the edge of his vanity. He didn’t normally mind Mowbray’s joshing, but liked to maintain a level of hierarchical respect in his dealings with colleagues.
‘So why are you looking so smug?’ he asked, sitting in an armchair at right angles to the sofa. Kell kicked off his shoes, trusting his memory sufficiently to be able to write the report in an hour’s time.
‘Did Bernie say anything about how he used to contact lover boy?’
Kell shook his head. ‘We haven’t got that far yet. First night I met him he mentioned something about a friend “always losing his phones and changing numbers”. I assumed that was Minasian, that he had four or five different mobiles he used for contacting Riedle. Why do you ask?’
Kell took a sip of his whisky, sensing that Mowbray had made a breakthrough. The communications link between Riedle and Minasian was the holy grail of the operation. Find that and they could start to track the Russian, to lure him across the Channel to London.
‘I think I’ve cracked it,’ he said.
Kell moved forward. ‘Tell me.’
‘You know I put key-log software in his laptop? Every password entered, every sentence typed.’
‘Sure.’
There was a laptop on the table in front of them. Mowbray opened it up. ‘So it turns out they kept it simple. Least as far as email is concerned. I’ve been able to hack into his account. They encrypted their messages.’
It was the smart play, the easiest and most secure way for Minasian to communicate with Riedle without raising his suspicions or drawing the attention of the SVR.
‘PGP?’ Kell asked, an acronym for a popular piece of encryption software that he understood in only simple terms.
‘Very good!’ Mowbray replied, amazed that Kell – who was famously antediluvian when it came to technology – was even aware that PGP existed. ‘So Elsa got hold of the private key which Bernie stored on his laptop and Bob became my uncle. After that it’s just like reading a normal email correspondence.’
Mowbray swivelled the laptop towards Kell and said: ‘Take a look.’ There were three emails sitting in the account: two from Riedle, one from Minasian. Kell assumed that the others had been deleted or filed elsewhere. As Mowbray stood up and went outside on to the balcony to smoke a cigarette, Kell clicked on the most recent message.
It was dated ten days earlier and had been given the headline ‘Betrayal’. It was both a plea from Riedle, begging Minasian to come to Brussels so that they could patch things up, and a sustained attack on his character and behaviour. Reading it, Kell felt as if he was intruding on a private grief so intense as to be almost embarrassing in its candour.
You are not the man I recognize, the man I love. You are so cruel to me, so hard and objective. What happened to us? Your attitude when we talked on the phone yesterday degraded everything that we once shared.
That phrase – ‘when we talked on the phone’ – was as welcome to Kell as water in a drought,
