A Divided Spy (Thomas Kell Spy Thriller, Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

established between them. Yet it was disconcerting to consider that choice of word: ‘opportunity’. An opportunity for what? Kell knew that nothing would ever erase the pain he had suffered over the loss of Rachel. Vengeance would not bring her back to life, nor alter the dynamics of his relationship with Amelia. Recruiting Minasian would bring Kell a modicum of respect from colleagues at SIS for whom he felt little but contempt. So why do it? Why not stand up, shake Mowbray’s hand, put fifty quid on the table to cover the bill and walk out of the restaurant? His better future lay outside SIS – he
knew
this, he had come to terms with it – and yet Kell felt powerless to suppress his hunger for revenge.
    ‘You know that I’m going to go after him, don’t you?’ he said.
    ‘I assumed that, yes,’ Mowbray replied.
    The waitress brought the bill.

6
     
    They had made it easy for Jim Martinelli.
    Kyle Chapman had asked for his address in Peterborough. He had said that four separate UK passport application forms would arrive at his home within the next seven days. He told Martinelli that if he took the forms to work, processed them in the usual way in his capacity as an application examiner, and guaranteed that the passports would then be sent out to the individuals concerned, his debt of £30,000 would be cleared.
    Chapman gave Martinelli a warning. He said that if he attempted to contact any law enforcement official in relation to the passports, or kept a record of any of the information contained in the application forms, he would be killed. Chapman told Martinelli that he was working on behalf of a ‘businessman in Tirana’ with connections to organized criminal groups in the UK who would ‘happily’ hunt him down and ‘enjoy listening to you begging for your life in some warehouse in Peterborough where the only thing that moves is a rat taking a shit and a fucked-off Albanian touching an electric cable to your testicles’. Chapman added that if, at any point, he or his client became aware that Martinelli was suffering from ‘stress’ or had taken sick leave, or was in any way considering a change of job within the next six months, he would suffer the same fate. It was a simple exchange. The passports for the debt. No behavioural problems at work. No midnight confessions to the Samaritans after ‘half a bottle of Smirnoff and a good cry’. If he delivered the passports, he would be free of his debt. Nobody would ever come near him again, nobody would ever finger him for abusing his position. Chapman and his associate in Albania were ‘men of their word who believed in loyalty and good professional conduct’.
    Martinelli had agreed. He had felt that he had no choice. Five days later, the passport applications had arrived at his home. Two of them had the photographs of Caucasian males attached, the third a picture of a woman in her mid-twenties, possibly with roots in north-east Africa or the Arabian peninsular. The fourth showed a fit-looking male in his early twenties who was almost certainly of Indian or Pakistani heritage. His was the only name that Martinelli committed to memory, because he had felt – looking into the young man’s blank, pitiless eyes – that he was betraying not only himself by allowing such a man to possess a falsely obtained British passport, but also, potentially, the lives of many others.
    The young man’s name was Shahid Khan.

7
     
    As soon as he had shaken Mowbray’s hand outside the restaurant, Kell set to work.
    He needed to discover more about Minasian, to find a way of running him to ground. He knew that the Russian would have left no trace of himself in Hurghada, save for a false passport and a few brisk, pixelated appearances on hotel CCTV. With that in mind, Kell instructed his old friend and ally, Elsa Cassani, a freelance computer specialist based in Rome, to try to find out the surname on which ‘Dmitri’ had been travelling in Egypt. To his surprise, her