A Divided Spy: A gripping espionage thriller from the master of the modern spy novel. Charles Cumming

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      Thomas Kell stood on the westbound platform at Bayswater station, one eye on a copy of the Evening Standard, the other on the man standing three metres to his left wearing faded denim jeans and a brown tweed jacket. Kell had seen him first on Praed Street, reflected in the window of a Chinese restaurant, then again twenty minutes later coming out of a branch of Starbucks on Queensway. Average height, average build, average features. Tapping his Oyster card on the reader at Bayswater, Kell had turned to find the man walking into the station a few paces behind him. He had ducked the eye contact, staring at his well-worn shoes. That was when Kell sensed he had a problem.

      It was just after three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in June. Kell counted eleven other people waiting on the platform, two of them standing directly behind him. Drawing on a long-forgotten piece of self-defence, he placed his right leg further forward than his left, shifted his weight back on to his rear heel as the train clattered into the station – and waited for the shove in the back.

      It never came. No crowding up, no crazed Chechen errand boy trying to push him on to the tracks as a favour to the SVR. Instead the District Line train deposited half a dozen passengers on to the platform and eased away. When Kell looked left, he saw that the man in the faded jeans had gone. The two men who had been standing behind him had also boarded the train. Kell allowed himself a half smile. His occasional outbreaks of paranoia were a kind of madness, a yearning for the old days; the corrupted sixth sense of a forty-six-year-old spy who knew that the game was over.

      A second train, moments later. Kell stepped on board, took a fold-down seat and re-opened the Standard. Royal pregnancies. Property prices. Electoral conspiracies. He was just another traveller on the Tube, traceless and nondescript. Nobody knew who he was nor who he had ever been. On the fifth page, a photograph of an aid worker murdered by the maniacs of ISIS; on the seventh, more wretched news from Ukraine. It was of no consolation to Kell that in the twelve months he had spent as a private citizen following the murder of his girlfriend, Rachel Wallinger, the regions on which he had worked for the greater part of his adult life had further disintegrated into violence and criminality. Though Kell had deliberately avoided making contact with anyone in the Service, he had occasionally run into former colleagues in the supermarket or on the street, only to be treated to lengthy discourses on the ‘impossible task’ facing SIS in Russia, Syria, Yemen and beyond.

      ‘The best we can hope for is a kind of stasis, somehow to keep a lid on things,’ a former colleague had told him when they bumped into one another at a Christmas party. ‘God knows it was easier in the age of the despots. There are some mornings, Tom, when I’m as nostalgic for Mubarak and Gaddafi as a Dunkirk Tommy for the white cliffs of Dover. At least Saddam gave us something to aim for.’

      The train pulled into Notting Hill Gate. In the same conversation, the colleague had offered his ‘sincere condolences’ over Rachel’s death and intimated to Kell how ‘devastated’ the ‘entire Service’ had been over the circumstances of her assassination in Istanbul. Kell had changed the subject. Rachel’s memory was his alone to curate; he wanted no part in others’ recollections of the woman to whom he had lost his heart. Perhaps he had been naive to fall so quickly for a woman he had barely known, yet he guarded the memory of his love as jealously as a starving animal with a scrap of food. Every morning, for months, Kell had thought of Rachel at the moment of waking, then steadily throughout the day, a debilitating punctuation to his solitary, unchanging existence. He had raged at her, he had talked with her, he had drenched himself in memories of the short period in which they had been involved with one another. The loss of the potential that Rachel had possessed to knit together the broken strands of Kell’s life constituted the most acute suffering he had ever known. Yet he had survived it.

      ‘You must be having a mid-life crisis,’ his ex-wife, Claire, had told him at one of their occasional reunion lunches, commenting on the fact that Kell had given up alcohol, was taking himself off to the gym three times a week and had broken a twenty-year, twenty-a-day smoking habit. ‘No alcohol, no fags. No spying? Next thing you’ll be buying an open-topped Porsche and taking twenty-two-year-olds to the polo at Windsor Great Park.’

      Kell had laughed at the joke even as he inwardly acknowledged how little Claire understood him. She knew nothing, of course, about his relationship with Rachel, nothing about the operation that had led to her death. This was just the latest in a lifetime of secrets between them. As far as Claire was concerned, Kell would always be the same man: an intelligence officer through and through, a spy who had spent more than two decades in thrall to the lustre and intrigue of the secret world. She believed that their marriage had failed because he had loved the game more than he had loved her.

      ‘You’re wedded to your agents, Tom,’ Claire had said during one of many similarly unequivocal conversations that had heralded the end of the marriage. ‘Amelia Levene is your family, not me. If you had to choose between us, I have no doubt that you would pick MI6.’

      Amelia. The woman whose career Kell had saved and whose reputation he had salvaged. The Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, appointed three years earlier, now approaching the end of her tenure, with the Middle East on fire, Russia in political and economic turmoil and Africa ravaged by Islamist terror. Kell had neither seen nor heard from her since the afternoon of Rachel’s funeral, an occasion at which they had deliberately ignored one another. By recruiting Rachel to work for SIS behind his back, Amelia had effectively signed her death warrant.

      Earl’s Court. Kell stepped off the train and registered the familiar acid taste of his implacable resentment. It was the one thing he had been unable to control. He had come to terms with the end of his marriage, he had mastered his grief, reasoned that his professional future lay beyond the walls of Vauxhall Cross. Yet he could not still a yearning for vengeance. Kell wanted to seek out those in Moscow who had given the order for Rachel’s assassination. He wanted justice.

      The Richmond service was due in a few minutes. A pigeon swooped in low from the Warwick Road, flapped towards the opposite platform and settled beside a bench. There was a District Line train standing empty behind it. The pigeon hopped on board. As if on cue, the doors slid shut and the train moved out of the station.

      Kell turned and joined the huddle of passengers on platform 4, heads ducked down in text messages, Twitter feeds, games of Angry Birds. A huge bearded man with a ‘Baby on Board’ badge attached to the lapel of his jacket stood beside him. Kell half-expected to spot his old friend from Bayswater: faded denim jeans and a brown tweed jacket. A woman behind him was talking in Polish on a mobile phone; another, shrouded in a black niqab, was scolding a small child in Arabic. These were the citizens of the new London, the international masses whom Amelia Levene was charged to protect. More than twenty years earlier, Kell had joined SIS in a spirit of undiluted patriotism. To save lives, to defend and protect the kingdom, had seemed to him both a noble and an exhilarating pursuit for a young man with СКАЧАТЬ