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, because it held out the possibility that Minasian would risk contacting Riedle again, perhaps making a call on Skype that Mowbray’s microphones would pick up.
You coldly announce that you are still in love with Vera, that you are now disgusted by your true sexuality, by what passed between us. How do you think that makes me feel? You tell me that you still love her, that you now find Vera attractive, when we both know this is a lie. You have never wanted to be with her in that way. Why now? Why the change? Then you told me on the telephone that you feel more relaxed in her company than you ever did with me. What kind of a person says those things?
A sociopath says those things, thought Kell. Someone incapable of compassion, of feeling anything but contempt for those who might ask something of them.
I always admired your commitment to the ‘truth’. There had been so many lies in my own life when we met that I found your determination to act honestly in all things captivating. But I realize now that you are a hypocrite. Your ‘truth’ is just what suits you at the time. It disguises your ruthlessness, because you are indeed ruthless and unkind. You lie to Vera, you lie to me, you lie to your unborn children. You lie to yourself.
Kell no longer knew if he was reading the email for operational reasons or purely out of human fascination. He worried that Riedle’s anger and spite, if it continued, would drive Minasian further and further away. At times he sounded like a man who had lost all reason and context.
You have left me, but you have not tried to soften the blow or to use the simple white lies people use in these situations when they care about not hurting a lover. What I hope for, what I need, is a small amount of compassion, of kindness, some sense that what we have been through together over the past three yearsmeanssomething to you. All I am asking for is a sense that you understand and are sensitive to the depth of my love for you. You know, better than anyone has ever known, how I think and how I feel and how difficult my life is now that you are not in it – and yet you treat me as if I was no more important to you than a boy picked up in a sauna.
There was more. Much more. The suggestion that Minasian, a year earlier, had been introduced to one of Riedle’s friends and had slept with him. The accusation that he had taunted Riedle continuously with stories about the men (and women) he met in different European cities while working for the bank. There had clearly been a sado-masochistic element to the relationship which Minasian had encouraged and enjoyed. Added to what Riedle had told Kell at dinner about Minasian’s aggressive, sullen behaviour, the relationship amounted to a catalogue of emotional abuse. Kell wanted to go downstairs, to knock on Riedle’s door, ask him why the hell he had put up with it for so long, and then pour him a large Scotch.
He clicked to the second email. It was, as Kell expected, a brief reply from Minasian, written four days after Riedle’s message, with no Subject line. The language was distant, cold and supremely controlled.
I hoped that you would behave with more dignity, more courage. If you write to me like this again I will have nothing more to do with you. I refuse to engage with your insults and accusations.
Kell noted the absence of any consoling words. Nothing to acknowledge