a conspiratorial nod. A small burden of complicity had been established between them. Yet it was disconcerting to consider that choice of word: ‘opportunity’. An opportunity for what? Kell knew that nothing would ever erase the pain he had suffered over the loss of Rachel. Vengeance would not bring her back to life, nor alter the dynamics of his relationship with Amelia. Recruiting Minasian would bring Kell a modicum of respect from colleagues at SIS for whom he felt little but contempt. So why do it? Why not stand up, shake Mowbray’s hand, put fifty quid on the table to cover the bill and walk out of the restaurant? His better future lay outside SIS – he knew this, he had come to terms with it – and yet Kell felt powerless to suppress his hunger for revenge.
‘You know that I’m going to go after him, don’t you?’ he said.
‘I assumed that, yes,’ Mowbray replied.
The waitress brought the bill.
They had made it easy for Jim Martinelli.
Kyle Chapman had asked for his address in Peterborough. He had said that four separate UK passport application forms would arrive at his home within the next seven days. He told Martinelli that if he took the forms to work, processed them in the usual way in his capacity as an application examiner, and guaranteed that the passports would then be sent out to the individuals concerned, his debt of £30,000 would be cleared.
Chapman gave Martinelli a warning. He said that if he attempted to contact any law enforcement official in relation to the passports, or kept a record of any of the information contained in the application forms, he would be killed. Chapman told Martinelli that he was working on behalf of a ‘businessman in Tirana’ with connections to organized criminal groups in the UK who would ‘happily’ hunt him down and ‘enjoy listening to you begging for your life in some warehouse in Peterborough where the only thing that moves is a rat taking a shit and a fucked-off Albanian touching an electric cable to your testicles’. Chapman added that if, at any point, he or his client became aware that Martinelli was suffering from ‘stress’ or had taken sick leave, or was in any way considering a change of job within the next six months, he would suffer the same fate. It was a simple exchange. The passports for the debt. No behavioural problems at work. No midnight confessions to the Samaritans after ‘half a bottle of Smirnoff and a good cry’. If he delivered the passports, he would be free of his debt. Nobody would ever come near him again, nobody would ever finger him for abusing his position. Chapman and his associate in Albania were ‘men of their word who believed in loyalty and good professional conduct’.
Martinelli had agreed. He had felt that he had no choice. Five days later, the passport applications had arrived at his home. Two of them had the photographs of Caucasian males attached, the third a picture of a woman in her mid-twenties, possibly with roots in north-east Africa or the Arabian peninsular. The fourth showed a fit-looking male in his early twenties who was almost certainly of Indian or Pakistani heritage. His was the only name that Martinelli committed to memory, because he had felt – looking into the young man’s blank, pitiless eyes – that he was betraying not only himself by allowing such a man to possess a falsely obtained British passport, but also, potentially, the lives of many others.
The young man’s name was Shahid Khan.
As soon as he had shaken Mowbray’s hand outside the restaurant, Kell set to work.
He needed to discover more about Minasian, to find a way of running him to ground. He knew that the Russian would have left no trace of himself in Hurghada, save for a false passport and a few brisk, pixelated appearances on hotel CCTV. With that in mind, Kell instructed his old friend and ally, Elsa Cassani, a freelance computer specialist based in Rome, to try to find out the surname on which ‘Dmitri’ had been travelling in Egypt. To his surprise, her efforts failed. There was no record on the hotel computer of Bernhard Riedle’s companion; the room had been registered and billed solely in Riedle’s name. Kell assumed that if ‘Dmitri’ had presented a passport, the details had either been lost or transcribed by hand.
That meant going after Riedle. If Kell could befriend him and earn his trust, he could stripmine Riedle for information about Minasian’s habits, his character traits, his strengths and weaknesses. Such a psychological portrait would prove invaluable when the time came to try to recruit him. Above all, Riedle could provide Kell with a means of communicating with Minasian. Used correctly, the heartbroken lover could be the lure that would draw Kell’s quarry out into the open.
With Elsa having drawn a blank, Kell put his doubts about Mowbray to one side and hired him on £750 a day for ‘as long as it takes to get me face-to-face with Dmitri’. Such was Kell’s determination to pursue Minasian without involving Amelia Levene that he was prepared to spend much of the £200,000 fee SIS had deposited in his bank account following the Kleckner operation. It had always felt like blood money to Kell; to use it in pursuit of Rachel’s killer felt not only just, but liberating.
Mowbray was immediately successful. By Saturday he had located Riedle’s address in Brussels and ascertained that he was living in a block of luxury, serviced apartments in the Quartier Dansaert. Kell found the agents online and took out a three-week rental of his own on an apartment in the same building. He then travelled with Mowbray to Brussels on the Eurostar, taking two rooms at the Hotel Metropole. The next afternoon, less than five days after meeting Mowbray in Westbourne Grove, Kell had moved into the apartment.
Weekends were always the hardest. When he was busy with work, Bernhard Riedle could find distraction in a site visit, in a conversation with a structural engineer, even in lunch with his client. But when the meetings stopped, when the builders went home on a Friday evening and the office in Hamburg closed for business, Riedle was alone with his agony. He drank constantly, he sat on his own in the apartment, unable to read, to concentrate on watching the television, to do anything other than obsess about Dmitri.
He thought about him incessantly. Though there was no evidence for this, he was convinced that Dmitri had left his wife and that all of the promises he had made to Bernhard were now being made to a younger, more vital lover, a partner with whom he would build a meaningful future. He pictured them deep in conversation, laughing and sharing intimacies; devouring one another’s bodies. Everything physical between them was more satisfying for Dmitri, their intellectual life more stimulating and more meaningful than it had ever been with Bernhard. He could hear Dmitri betraying him in conversation, speaking contemptuously of his character. What they had shared over their three years together – the trips to Istanbul, to London and New York – had already become a subject of ridicule. The peculiar hardness in Dmitri’s personality, the chill ruthlessness Bernhard had fought so hard to ignore, was now all that remained of him. He felt discarded and forgotten. He felt weak and he felt old. He wanted, more than anything he had ever wanted in his life, to have the opportunity to confront Dmitri, to rail at him for his cruelty and selfishness, and then to restore their relationship to what it had once been. He felt that he could not live without Dmitri’s love. If he could not have it, he would kill himself. He was going mad.
Brussels was a prison. They had spent so much time in the city in recent months that every street corner held a memory of their relationship. Restaurants in which they had eaten, parks in which they had walked, cinemas where they had watched films, holding
