A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3) by Charles Cumming Read Free Book Online Page A

drawer beside his bed.
    ‘Ice?’ Riedle asked.
    ‘No, thank you. Just a splash of water to open it up.’
    Riedle disappeared and returned with the drink. Kell sat down in a suede-covered armchair identical to the one upstairs in which he had read Rafal and Xavier’s surveillance reports on Riedle’s movements around Brussels. The staged mugging had been planned for the night before, only to be called off at the last moment when a taxi had pulled up on the opposite side of the street, just as Xavier was taking up position.
    ‘I like this expression,’ said Riedle, passing Kell the whisky. Kell thanked him with a brisk nod. ‘To “open it up”. The water does this with the flavour, yes? I do not drink whisky.’
    Riedle himself was holding a long-stemmed glass of red wine and appeared to be slightly unsteady on his feet. Xavier had been tailing him all evening and had reported the consumption of two beers in the old town before eight o’clock, then an entire bottle of white wine at an Italian restaurant in the Rue de la Montagne. Shock usually took the edge off drunkenness, but Riedle had been saved from the lions and might easily be slipping into a state of euphoria.
    ‘Cheers.’
    Kell lifted the whisky – blended, to judge by the smell – and the two men touched glasses.
    It had begun.

10
     
    They were smiling as they handed the envelope to Azhar Ahmed Iqbal. There were three of them. The oldest of the men, whom Azhar had never seen before, said that it was a genuine British passport that had come by diplomatic bag from Amman. An official in the UK Passport Office had been compromised by brave and resourceful agents of ISIS and had produced the passport in return for a sum of money.
    Azhar opened the envelope. The passport was hard and cold to the touch. It was clean and new and would not easily bend in his hands. They were still smiling at him as they watched him look at it and flick through the pages.
    Three months earlier, Azhar had been taken into a room in Raqqa and had sat on a stool beside a blank white wall. Someone had taken his photograph. One of the men, a fighter from Tunisia who had worked as a barber, had shaved off Azhar’s beard and cut his hair so that he would look good in front of the camera. Azhar saw that this photograph had now been laminated inside the passport. He looked successful and educated. He looked like a businessman. It was exactly what they wanted.
    ‘You like the way you look?’ Jalal asked with a sly grin.
    ‘Yeah. I like it,’ Azhar replied.
    ‘But now you are not Azhar Ahmed Iqbal from Leeds, no? You are no longer Omar Assya. Who are you, my friend?’
    Azhar looked down at the name printed beneath the photograph. He had been using the
kunya
‘Omar Assya’ for at least three years as a way of obscuring his identity from the West Yorkshire Police. He had grown used to it.
    ‘Shahid Khan.’ Azhar did not mind the name. They had made him a year older. But then he saw his place of birth. ‘From
Bradford
?’ he said. ‘Why did you say I was from fookin’ Bradford?’
    All the men laughed. When they had calmed down, when Azhar had finished talking about the rivalry between Leeds and Bradford, and when he had started to get used to being called ‘Shahid’, Jalal told him that he had to protect the passport at all costs. He should also carry it around with him so that it became slightly worn and looked less new. Before returning to the United Kingdom, Shahid was to fly to Dubai and then to Cairo so that the passport would show arrival and departure stamps from the UAE and Egypt. This would help to dispel any suspicion if a member of the UK Border Police at Heathrow looked more closely at the passport and decided to question Shahid about his movements. Should this happen, Shahid was to say that he had been attending his cousin’s wedding in Dubai and had returned home via Cairo so that he could visit the Pyramids. If he was subjected to more intense scrutiny –