1
Put it all on red. Put it all on black.
Jim Martinelli stacked five thousand pounds of chips into two six-inch piles. He held each of the piles in the tips of his fingers. One of them was fractionally higher than the other, the other slightly crooked at the base. He stared at them. His whole future, the mountain of his debt, just twenty disks of plastic in a casino. Double the money and he could keep Chapman at bay. Lose it and he was finished.
Arms across the baize, a blur of hands as the players around him reached out to place their bets. The suit from Dubai putting single chips on eighteen through thirty-six, the other Arab putting a grand on red. The Chinese tourist to Martinelli’s left put a carpet of blue chips in the upper third, smothering the table with piles of five and six. Big wins for him tonight. Big losses. Then he put twenty grand on ten and walked away from the table. Twenty thousand pounds on a one–in–thirty-five chance. Even in the worst times, in the craziest urges of the last two years, Martinelli had never been stupid enough to do something like that. Perhaps he wasn’t as messed up as he thought. Maybe he still had things under control.
The wheel was spinning. Martinelli stayed out of the play. It didn’t feel right; he wasn’t getting a clear reading on the numbers. The Chinese tourist was hovering near the bar, now almost twenty feet away from the table. Martinelli tried to imagine what it must be like to have so much money that you could afford to blow twenty grand on a single moment of chance. Twenty grand was four months’ salary at the Passport Office, more than half of his debt to Chapman. Two wins in the next two rounds and he would be holding that kind of dough. Then he could cash out, go home, call Chapman. He could start to pay back what he owed.
The croupier was tidying up. Centering chips, straightening piles. In a low, firm voice he said: “No further bets, please, gentlemen,” and turned toward the wheel.
The house always wins, Martinelli told himself. The house always wins …
The ball was beginning to slow. The Chinese tourist was still hovering near the bar, back turned to the play, his little chimney of twenty grand on ten. The ball dropped and began to jump in the channels, the quiet innocent clatter as it popped from box to box. Martinelli laid a private bet with himself. Red. It’s going to be red. He looked down at his pile of chips and wished that he had staked it all.
“Twenty-seven, red,” said the croupier, placing the wooden dolly on a low pile of chips in the center of the baize. Martinelli felt a sting of irritation. He had missed his chance. Across the room, the tourist was returning from the bar, watching the croupier clear away the losing bets, the cheap plastic rustle of thousands of pounds being dragged across the baize and scooped into the tube. There was no expression on his face as the stack on ten was pulled; nothing to indicate loss or sorrow. Washed out and inscrutable. The face of a gambler.
Martinelli stood up, nodded at the inspector. He left his chips on the table and walked downstairs to the bathroom. They were playing Abba on the sound system, a song that reminded Martinelli of driving long distances with his father as a child. The door of the gents was ajar, paper towels littering the floor. Martinelli scraped them to one side with his foot and checked his reflection in the mirror.
His skin was pallid and gleaming with sweat. In the bright fluorescent light of the bathroom the tiredness under his eyes looked like bruises from a fight. He had worn the same shirt two nights in a row and could see that a thin brown line of dirt had formed inside the collar. He bared his teeth, wondering if a chunk of olive or peanut had been lodged in his gums all night. But there was nothing. Just the pale yellow stains on his front teeth and a sense that his breath was stale. He took out a piece of gum and popped it into his mouth. He was exhausted.
“All right, Jim? How’s it going for you tonight?”
Martinelli swung around.
“Kyle.”
It was Chapman. He was standing in the door, looking at a stack of leaflets in a plastic box beside the sink. Advice for gamblers, advice for addicts. Chapman picked one up.
“What does it say here?” he began, reading from the leaflet in his abrasive London accent. “How to play responsibly.”
Chapman smiled at Martinelli. The eyes were dead, menacing. He turned the page.
“Remember. Gambling is a way for responsible adults to have some fun.”
Martinelli had never had the balls to read the leaflet. They said that the addict had to want to quit. He felt his stomach dissolve and had to steady himself against the wall.
“Most of our customers do not see gambling as a problem. But for a very small minority, Jim, we know that this is not the case.”
Chapman looked up. He moved the side of his mouth in a way that made Martinelli feel like he was going to spit at him.
“If you think you are having trouble controlling your gambling, this leaflet contains important information on where to seek help.” Chapman lowered the leaflet and looked into Martinelli’s eyes. “Do you need help, Jim?” He tilted his head to one side and grinned. “Do you want to talk to someone?”
“I’ve got five grand on the table. Upstairs.”
“Five? Have you?” Chapman sniffed loudly, as if he were struggling to clear his sinuses. “You and I both know that’s not what we’re talking about, don’t we? You’re not being straight, Jim.”
Chapman took a step forward. He raised the leaflet and held it in front of him, like a man singing a hymn in church.
“Only gamble what you can afford to lose,” he said. “Set yourself personal limits. Only spend a certain amount of time at the tables.” He stared at Martinelli. “Time, Jim. That’s what you’ve run out of, isn’t it?”
“I’ve told you,” he said. “Five grand. Upstairs. Let me play.”
Chapman walked toward the basins. He looked at himself in the mirror, admiring what he saw. Then he kicked out his leg behind him and slammed the bathroom door.
“I can tell you that you’ve got a problem,” he said. “I can tell you that if you don’t give me what’s owed by tomorrow morning, I won’t be—how do they say—responsible for my actions.”
“I understand that.” Martinelli could feel himself freezing up, his mind going numb.
“Oh, you understand that, do you?”
“Can you just let me past?” Martinelli pressed away from the wall and moved toward the basins. “Can you open the door, please? I want to go upstairs.”
Chapman appeared to admire his display of courage. He nodded and opened the door. An ominous smile was playing on his face as he indicated that Martinelli could leave.
“Don’t let me stop you,” he said, stepping to one side with the flourish of a matador. “You go and see what you can do, Jim. Be lucky.”
Martinelli climbed the stairs two at a time. He needed to be back at the tables in the way that a man who has been held underwater craves to reach the surface and to suck in a deep breath of air. He headed back to his seat and saw that a play was coming to an end. The pop and clatter of the ball, the rapt attention of the gamblers waiting for it to settle.
“Six. Black,” said the croupier.
Martinelli saw that the Chinese tourist had a split of five grand on five and six. A small fortune. The croupier placed the dolly on the winning square and began to sweep the losing chips from across the table. Then he paid out what he owed—more than eighty grand to the Chinese in a stack of twenty, with no discernible reaction from either man.
Martinelli took it as a sign. He waited until the table was clear, then moved his stack of chips onto black. All or nothing. Take it or leave it. The house always wins. Fuck Kyle Chapman.
Then it was just a question of waiting. The bloke from Dubai put his usual spread on eighteen through thirty-six, the other Arab going big on six-way splits along the baize. It worried Martinelli that the Chinese stayed out of the play and wandered over to the bar. It was like a bad omen. Maybe he should take back his chips.
“No more bets, please, gentlemen,” said the croupier.
Too late. Martinelli could do nothing but stare at the wheel, praying for the chance on black, mesmerized—as he had always been—by the counterpoint of spokes and ball, the one hypnotically slow, the other a blur as it raced beneath the rim.
Slowing now, the ball about to drop. Nauseated with anxiety, Martinelli took his eyes away from the wheel and saw Kyle Chapman standing in his eyeline. He had come back upstairs. He wasn’t looking at the wheel. He wasn’t looking at the baize. He was looking directly at the man who owed him thirty thousand pounds.
Martinelli’s eyes went back to the table. All or nothing. Feast or famine. He heard the rattle and click of the ball, watched it drop and vanish beneath the rim like a magic trick.
The inspector looked down. He would see it first. The croupier leaned over the wheel, preparing to call the number.
Martinelli closed his eyes. It was like an ax falling. He always felt sick at this moment.
I should have put it all on red, he thought. The house always wins.
2
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 meters 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-defense, he placed his right leg farther 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 onto the tracks as a favor to the SVR. Instead the District Line train deposited half a dozen passengers onto 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 reopened the Standard. Royal pregnancies. Property prices. Electoral conspiracies. He was just another traveler 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 MI6 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 naïve to fall so quickly for a woman he had barely known, and a fool to trust her, 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 midlife 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 luster and the intrigue of espionage. 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 Kell could not still a yearning for vengeance. He 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 toward 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 adventure in his blood. Now that London was a city of Africans and Americans, of Hollande-fleeing French, of Eastern Europeans too young to have known the impediments of communism, he felt no different. The landscape had changed, yet Kell still felt wedded to an idea of England as the country evolved, even as that idea shifted and slipped beneath his feet. There were days when he longed to return to active duty, to stand once again at Amelia’s side. But he had allowed the personal to overcome the political.
The train pulled into the platform. Carriages as empty as his days flickered in the afternoon light. Kell stepped aside to allow an elderly woman to board the train, then took his seat and waited.
3
Kell was at his flat in Sinclair Road within twenty minutes. He had been inside for less than five when his phone rang, a rare landline call that Kell assumed would be from Claire. The number was otherwise known only to SIS Personnel.
“Guv?”
It didn’t take long for Kell to pick the voice. Born and raised in Elephant and Castle, then two decades in Tech-Ops at MI5.
“Harold?”
“The one and only.”
“How did you get this number?”
“Nice to hear from you, too.”
“How?” Kell asked again.
“Do we have to do this?”
It was a fair question. With half a dozen clicks of a mouse, Harold Mowbray could have found out Kell’s blood type and credit rating. Now private sector, he had worked closely with Amelia on two occasions in the previous three years: Kell’s home number might even have come directly from “C.”
“Okay. So how have you been?”
“Good, guv. Good.”
“Arsenal doing all right?”
“Nah. Gave them up for Lent. Too many pretty boys in midfield.”
Kell found himself reaching for a cigarette that wasn’t there. He thought back to the previous summer, sitting with Mowbray in a Bayswater safe house killing time waiting for a mole. Harold had known that Kell was in love with Rachel. He had come to the funeral, paid his respects. Kell trusted him insomuch as he had always been efficient and reliable, but knew that theirs was a professional relationship that would never transcend Mowbray’s loyalty to whoever was paying his bills.
“So what’s up?” he asked. “You selling something? Want me to buy your season ticket to Highbury?”
“Keep up. Arsenal moved out of Highbury years ago. We’ve been playing at the Emirates since 2006.”
It occurred to Kell that, save for a perfunctory exchange in Pret a Manger at lunch, this was the first conversation he had held with another human being in more than twenty-four hours. The night before he had cooked spaghetti bolognese at home and watched back-to-back episodes of House of Cards. In the morning he had gone to the gym, then wandered alone around an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Sometimes he would go for days without any meaningful interaction whatsoever.
“Still,” said Mowbray, “we need to have a chat.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
“Face to face. Mano a mano. Too long and complicated for the phone.”
That could mean only one thing. Work. Blowback from a previous operation, or a dangled carrot on something new. Either way, Mowbray didn’t trust Kell’s landline to keep it a secret. Anybody could be listening in. London. Paris. Moscow.
“You remember that Middle Eastern place we used to go to on the American gig?”
“Which one?” “The American gig” had been the molehunt. Ryan Kleckner. A CIA officer in the pay of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service.
“The one with the waitress.”
“Oh, that one.” Kell made a joke of it, but understood that Mowbray was being deliberately obscure. There was only one Middle Eastern restaurant that both of them had been to on the Kleckner operation. Westbourne Grove. Persian. Kell had no recollection of the waitress, pretty or otherwise. Mowbray was simply making sure that their table wouldn’t be covered in advance.
“Can you make dinner tonight?” he asked.
Kell thought about stalling but was too intrigued by the invitation. Besides, he was looking at another night of leftovers and House of Cards. Dinner with Harold would be a fillip.
“Meet you there at eight?” he suggested.
“You will know me by the smell of my cologne.”
4
Kell arrived at the restaurant at quarter to eight, early enough to ask for a quiet spot at the back with line of sight to the entrance. To his surprise, Mowbray was already seated at a table in the center of the small, brick-lined room, his back to a group of jabbering Spaniards.
It was fiercely hot, the open mouth of a tanoor bread oven blowing a furnace heat into Kell’s face as he walked inside. A waitress, whom he vaguely recognized, smiled at him as Mowbray stood up behind her. Iranian music was playing at a volume seemingly designed to guarantee a degree of conversational privacy.
“Harold. How are you?”
“Salam, guv.”
“Salam, khoobi,” Kell replied. The heat of the tanoor as he sat down was like a summer sun against his back.
“You speak Farsi?” They were shaking hands.
“I was showing off,” Kell said. “Enough to get by in restaurants.”
“Menu Farsi,” Mowbray replied, smiling at his own remark. “Iranians don’t like being confused for Arabs, do they?”
“They do not.”
Mowbray looked to be recovering from a bad case of sunburn. His forehead was scalded red and there were flaking patches of dry skin around his mouth and nose.
“Been away?” Kell asked.
“Funny you should mention that.” Mowbray flapped a napkin into his lap and grinned. “Went to Egypt with the wife.”
“Why funny?”
“You’ll see. Shall we order?”
Kell wondered why he was playing hard to get. He opened his menu as the waitress passed their table. Mowbray looked up, caught Kell’s eye, and winked.
“So,” he said, spring-loading another joke. “You can have a skewer of minced lamb with taftoon bread, two skewers of minced lamb with taftoon bread, a skewer of marinated lamb cubes with taftoon bread, two skewers of marinated lamb cubes with taftoon bread, a skewer of minced lamb and a skewer of marinated lamb cubes with taftoon…”
“I get it,” said Kell, smiling as he closed the menu. “You order. I’m going to the bathroom.”
There was a strong smell of hashish leading up to the gents. Kell stopped to look at a wall of turquoise tiles inlaid on the staircase, breathing in the smoke. He wanted to trace the source of the smell, to find whoever had rolled the joint in a backroom office and to share it with them. In the bathroom he washed his hands and glanced in the mirror, wondering why Mowbray was coming to him with tall tales from Egypt. What was the scoop? ISIS? Muslim Brotherhood? Maybe he was the bagman for a job offer in the private sector, an ex-SIS suit using Kell’s friendship with Mowbray as a lure. There had been five or six such offers in the previous twelve months, all of which Kell had turned down. He wasn’t interested in private security, nor did he want to be a nodding donkey on the board of Barclays or BP. On the other hand, if the pitch was something Russian, something that would get Kell close to the men who had ordered Rachel’s assassination, he would give it serious consideration.
“I forgot,” Mowbray announced as Kell settled back into his seat. “They don’t serve booze.”
“Don’t worry about it. I gave it up.”
“Fuck off.”
“Seven months dry.”
“Now why would you want to go and do a thing like that?”
“Tell me about Egypt.”
Mowbray leaned forward and put a hand in his pocket. Kell thought he was going to produce a photograph or a flash drive, but he kept it there as he spoke. If Kell hadn’t known that Mowbray was capable of far greater subtleties, he might have assumed that he was triggering a recording device.
“Hurghada.”
“What about it?”
“One-horse town on the east coast. Mainland Egypt, Red Sea, facing Sinai.”
“I know where it is, Harold.”
“Last three years, Karen and me have been flying there for a bit of winter sun; easyJet goes three times a week. Car picks us up and drives us an hour south to a place called Soma Bay. Four hotels and a golf course, back to back, arse end of nowhere. Fresh water piped in from the Nile turns the fairways green, fills the swimming pools. Coral reefs and scuba diving for the grown-ups, camel rides on the beach for the kids. In the tourist industry they call it a ‘hot flop.’”
The food arrived. Mashed aubergines with garlic and herbs. Feta cheese mixed with tarragon and fresh mint. A bowl of hummus was placed in front of Kell, nestled beside a basket of flatbread.
“There’s your taftoon,” he said, encouraging Mowbray to continue.
“Anyway, we always stay at the same place. German owned, German efficient, German-occupied sunbeds. Never seen a Yank there, never met a Frog. The occasional Brit, from time to time, but mostly German pensioners and Russian oligarch types with dyed hair and third wives who probably weren’t alive under Gorbachev. Am I painting the picture?”
“Vividly,” said Kell, and took a bite of taftoon.
“So, guv, here’s the thing. Here’s the reason I wanted to see you. Something very strange happened, something I can still hardly believe.”
Mowbray looked like he meant it. There was an expression of amused consternation on his face.
“They do breakfasts,” he said, nodding slowly and looking across the table, as though half expecting Kell to finish his sentence. “They do breakfasts every morning…”
“What a breakthrough in hospitality,” Kell replied. “I must go and stay there.”
Mowbray was staring across the table, eyes fixed somewhere around Kell’s left ear.
“On the second-last day we were there, this couple walks in. Two men. You get that kind of thing at the hotel. They’re comfortable with gays, lots of it about, even for a Muslim country.” Mowbray sipped his tap water, trying to slow himself down. “Karen looks up and makes a noise of disapproval.” He checked himself. “No, not disapproval, she’s not homophobic or anything. More conspiratorial than that. Like a joke between us. ‘Look at the fruits,’ you know?”
“Sure,” said Kell.
“They were both dressed in white shirts and white trousers. That’s very German, too. Ninety percent of the guests look like they’re playing at Wimbledon or members of some cult. Pristine white, like an advert for one of those soap powders that really deliver at low temperatures.” Kell resisted telling Mowbray to “get on with it” because he knew how he liked to operate. “And there’s an age gap between them,” he said, “maybe fifteen or twenty years. The older bloke is the one facing me. German money, you can tell. He sits down with what looks like a fruit salad, black-rimmed glasses, suntan. I can’t see the boyfriend, but he’s younger, fitter. Late thirties, at a guess. The old boy is camp, a bit effeminate, but this one looks straight, macho. There’s something about him that triggers me, but I can’t yet tell what it is.”
Kell had stopped eating. He knew what Mowbray was going to tell him, a giddy premonition of something so improbable that he dismissed it out of hand.
“Anyway, Karen had finished her orange juice. Wanted to get another one. She’d hurt her foot on the coral so I offered to go instead. There’s an egg station at the buffet and I waited there while the chef made me an omelette. Got the wife’s orange juice, got some yogurt, then started to walk back toward our table. That was when I saw his face. That was when I recognized him.”
“Who?” said Kell. “Who was it?”
“The boyfriend was Alexander Minasian.”
Copyright © 2017 by Charles Cumming
