A Colder War by Charles Cumming

Author:Charles Cumming [Cumming, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-04-23T23:00:00+00:00

It was customary for officers filing CX to offer little interpretation of their own product. That was left to the wonks and analysts in London who would direct the intelligence further upstream until a more senior colleague or minister of sufficient rank and distinction chose to act upon it. Nevertheless, the thrust of Haydock’s report could not have been clearer. As far as he was concerned, there was no evidence of American interference on the island, nor any sense that Christidis had been compromised or manipulated. Haydock knew that ‘C’ was suspicious of the circumstances surrounding Wallinger’s crash and was aware that Kell had his own private suspicions about CIA involvement in the case. Nevertheless, against this background, he had maintained that there was no foul play or coercion involved in the death of Iannis Christidis. It was suicide, pure and simple.

All of which left Kell with a sense that he would never know the truth about the accident. If nobody had tampered with Wallinger’s plane, why had it crashed? He thought of Rachel, of the anger she felt towards her father, of the letter Paul had written to Cecilia, the intensity of his love for a woman who might not have loved him in return. A woman who, while apparently grieving Wallinger’s death, had allowed another man to caress her back, stopping him only when those caresses became too intimate, too public. Had Paul taken his own life because he had discovered that Cecilia was two-timing him? Surely not.

Perhaps there was no mystery at all, no foul play, no conspiracy. Just the random accident of engine failure, bird strike, pilot error. It was one of the lessons Kell had learned many years earlier: there were always operational questions that could not be answered. Questions of motive, of circumstance, of fact. Despite all of the resources at the disposal of SIS, the tenacity and skill of her employees, human behaviour was too unpredictable, the capacity to disguise and dissemble limitless. ‘I just don’t buy the trail of breadcrumbs,’ Amelia had said. But perhaps she wanted to see conspiracy where none existed. God knows, it was a fault of which they had all been guilty, at some point in their careers. Amelia’s desire to explain and rationalize the sudden death of a man she loved had obscured an inconvenient truth: that Paul Wallinger had most probably got into the wrong plane on the wrong afternoon, and fate had taken care of the rest.

Kell stood up, his calves aching. He took a half-litre of water from the mini-bar and drank it down. Dinner was now an hour away and he was aware that he needed to formulate a strategy for meeting Sandor. First, though, he checked his emails. Rachel had been out of touch all afternoon.

He opened his private account and saw that she had replied to an earlier message, saying that she was booked on to a flight back to London in two days’ time.

Am I going to get to see

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