A Colder War. Charles Cumming

       3

      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; Kell had been hanging on almost two years to find out whether he would be cleared of all charges or laid out as a sacrificial lamb. With the exception of the three-week operation to rescue Amelia’s son, François, the previous summer, and a one-month contract working due diligence for a corporate espionage firm in Mayfair, that was too long out of the game. He wanted to get back to work. He wanted to spy again.

      Then – a miracle. The iPhone lit up. ‘Amelia L3’ appeared on the screen. It was like a sign from the God in whom Kell still occasionally believed. He picked up before the first ring was through.

      ‘Speak of the devil.’

      ‘Tom?’

      He could tell immediately that something was wrong. Amelia’s customarily authoritative voice was shaky and uncertain. She had called him from her private number, not a landline or encrypted Service phone. It had to be personal. Kell thought at first that something must have happened to François, or that Amelia’s husband, Giles, had been killed in an accident.

      ‘It’s Paul.’

      That winded him. Kell knew that she could only be talking about Paul Wallinger.

      ‘What’s happened? Is he all right?’

      ‘He’s been killed.’