A Colder War. Charles Cumming
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the crystal afternoon sunshine, she briefly squeezed his hand and said: ‘Wish me luck.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ he told her. ‘The last thing you’ve ever needed is luck.’
He was right, of course. Shortly after three o’clock, as the congregation rose as one to acknowledge the arrival of Josephine Wallinger, Amelia assumed the dignified bearing of a leader and Chief, her body language betraying no hint that the man three hundred people had come to mourn had ever been anything more to her than a highly regarded colleague. Kell, for his part, felt oddly detached from the service. He sang the hymns, he listened to the lessons, he nodded through the vicar’s eulogy, which paid appropriately oblique tribute to a ‘self-effacing man’ who had been ‘a loyal servant to his country’. Yet Kell was distracted. Afterwards, making his way to the graveside, he heard an unseen mourner utter the single word ‘Hammarskjöld’ and knew that the conspiracy theories were gathering pace. Dag Hammarskjöld was the Swedish Secretary of the United Nations who had been killed in a plane crash in 1961, en route to securing a peace deal that might have prevented civil war in the Congo. Hammarskjöld’s DC6 had crashed in a forest in former Rhodesia. Some claimed that the plane had been shot down by mercenaries; others that SIS itself, in collusion with the CIA and South African intelligence, had sabotaged the flight. Since hearing the news on Sunday, Kell had been nagged by an unsettling sense that there had been foul play involved in Wallinger’s death. He could not say precisely why he felt this way – other than that he had always known Paul to be a meticulous pilot, thorough to the point of paranoia with pre-flight checks – yet the whispered talk of Hammarskjöld seemed to cement the suspicion in his mind. Looking around at the faceless spooks, ghosts of bygone ops from a dozen different Services, Kell felt that somebody, somewhere in the cramped churchyard, knew why Paul Wallinger’s plane had plunged from the sky.
The mourners shuffled forward, perhaps as many as two hundred men and women, forming a loose rectangle, ten-deep, on all four sides of the grave. Kell saw CIA officers, representatives from Canadian intelligence, three members of the Mossad, as well as colleagues from Egypt, Jordan and Turkey. As the vicar intoned the consecration, Kell wondered, in the layers of secrecy that formed around a spy like scabs, what sin Wallinger had committed, what treachery he had uncovered, to bring about his own death? Had he pushed too hard on Syria or Iran? Trip-wired an SVR operation in Istanbul? And why Greece, why Chios? Perhaps the official assumption was correct: mechanical failure was to blame. Yet Kell could not shake the feeling that his friend had been assassinated; it was not beyond the realms of possibility that the plane had been shot down. As Wallinger’s coffin was lowered into the ground, he glanced to the right and saw Amelia wiping away tears. Even Simon Haynes looked cleaned out by grief.
Kell closed his eyes. He found himself, for the first time in months, mouthing a silent prayer. Then he turned from the grave and walked back towards the church, wondering if mourners at an SIS funeral, twenty years hence, would whisper the name ‘Wallinger’ in country churchyards as a short-hand for murder and cover-up.
Less than an hour later, the crowds of mourners had found their way to the Wallinger farm, where a barn near the main house had been prepared for a wake. Trestle tables were laid out with cakes and cheese sandwiches cut into white, crustless triangles. Wine and whisky on standby while two old ladies from the village served tea and Nescafé to the great and the good of the transatlantic intelligence community. Kell was greeted with a mixture of rapture and pity by former colleagues, most of whom were too canny and self-serving to offer their whole-hearted support on the fiasco of Witness X. Others had heard word of his divorce on the Service grapevine and placed consoling hands on Kell’s shoulder, as if he had suffered a bereavement or been diagnosed with an inoperable illness. He didn’t blame them. What else were people supposed to say in such circumstances?
The flowers that had lain on Wallinger’s coffin had been set out at one end of the barn. Kell was standing outside, smoking a cigarette, when he saw Wallinger’s children – his son, Andrew, and his daughter, Rachel – bending over the floral tributes, reading the cards, and sharing a selection of the written messages with one another. Andrew was the younger of the two, now twenty-eight, reportedly earning a living in Moscow as a banker. Kell had not seen Rachel for more than fifteen years, and had been struck by her dignity and grace as she supported her mother at the graveside. Andrew had wept desperately for the father he had lost as Josephine stared into the black grave, frozen in what Kell assumed was a medicated grief. Yet Rachel had maintained an eerie stillness, as if in possession of a secret that guaranteed her peace of mind.
He was grinding out the cigarette, half-listening to a local farmer telling a long-winded anecdote about wind farms, when he saw Rachel bend down and pick up a card attached to a small bunch of flowers on the far side of the barn. She was alone, several metres from Andrew, but Kell had a clear view of her face. He saw Rachel’s dark eyes harden as she read the card, then a flush of anger scald her cheeks.
What she did next astonished him. Leaning down, with a brisk flick of her wrist she skidded the flowers low and hard towards the edge of the barn, where they hit the whitewashed wall with a soundless thud. Rachel then placed the card in her coat pocket and returned to Andrew’s side. No words were exchanged. It was as though she did not want to involve her brother in what she had just seen. Moments later Rachel turned and walked back towards the trestle tables, where she was intercepted by a middle-aged woman wearing a black hat. As far as Kell could tell, nobody else had witnessed what had happened.
The barn had become hot and, after a few minutes, Rachel removed her coat, folding it over the back of a chair. She was continually in conversation with guests who wished to convey their condolences. At one point she burst into laughter and the men in the room, as one, seemed to turn and look at her. Rachel had an in-house reputation for beauty and brains; Kell recalled a couple of male colleagues constructing Christmas party innuendoes about her. Yet she was not as he had imagined she would be; there was something about the dignity of her behaviour, the decisiveness with which she had dispatched the flowers, a sense in which she was fully in control of her emotions and of the environment in which she had found herself, that intrigued Kell.
In time, she had made her way to the far side of the barn. She was at least fifty feet from the coat. Kell, carrying a plate of sandwiches and cake towards the chair, took off his own coat and folded it alongside Rachel’s. At the same time, he reached into her outside pocket and removed the card.
He glanced across the barn. Rachel had not seen him. She was still deep in conversation, her back to the chair. Kell walked quickly outside, crossed the drive and went into the Wallingers’ house. Several people were milling about in the hall, guests looking for bathrooms, staff ferrying food and drink from the kitchen to the barn. Kell avoided them and walked upstairs.
The bathroom door was locked. He needed to find a room where he would not be disturbed. Glimpsing posters of Pearl Jam and Kevin Pietersen in a room further along the corridor, Kell found himself in Andrew’s bedroom. There were framed photographs from his time at Eton above a wooden desk, as well as various caps and sporting mementoes. Kell closed the door behind him. He took the card from his jacket pocket and opened it up.
The inscription was in an Eastern European language that Kell assumed to be Hungarian. The note had been handwritten on a small white card with a blue flower printed in the top right-hand corner.
Szerelmem. Szívem darabokban, mert nem tudok Veled lenni soha már. Olyan fájó a csend amióta elmentél, hogy még hallom a lélegzeted, amikor álmodban néztelek.
Had Rachel been able to understand it? Kell put the card on the bed and took out his iPhone. He photographed the message, left the bedroom and returned to the barn.
With Rachel nowhere to be seen, Kell removed his overcoat from the chair and, by simple sleight of hand, replaced the card in her coat pocket. It had been in his possession for no more than five minutes. When he turned around, he saw that she was coming back into the barn and walking towards her mother. Kell went outside for a cigarette.
Amelia was standing on her own in front of the house, like someone at the end of a party waiting for a cab.
‘What have you been up to?’ she asked.
At