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

efforts failed. There was no record on the hotel computer of Bernhard Riedle’s companion; the room had been registered and billed solely in Riedle’s name. Kell assumed that if ‘Dmitri’ had presented a passport, the details had either been lost or transcribed by hand.
    That meant going after Riedle. If Kell could befriend him and earn his trust, he could stripmine Riedle for information about Minasian’s habits, his character traits, his strengths and weaknesses. Such a psychological portrait would prove invaluable when the time came to try to recruit him. Above all, Riedle could provide Kell with a means of communicating with Minasian. Used correctly, the heartbroken lover could be the lure that would draw Kell’s quarry out into the open.
    With Elsa having drawn a blank, Kell put his doubts about Mowbray to one side and hired him on £750 a day for ‘as long as it takes to get me face-to-face with Dmitri’. Such was Kell’s determination to pursue Minasian without involving Amelia Levene that he was prepared to spend much of the £200,000 fee SIS had deposited in his bank account following the Kleckner operation. It had always felt like blood money to Kell; to use it in pursuit of Rachel’s killer felt not only just, but liberating.
    Mowbray was immediately successful. By Saturday he had located Riedle’s address in Brussels and ascertained that he was living in a block of luxury, serviced apartments in the Quartier Dansaert. Kell found the agents online and took out a three-week rental of his own on an apartment in the same building. He then travelled with Mowbray to Brussels on the Eurostar, taking two rooms at the Hotel Metropole. The next afternoon, less than five days after meeting Mowbray in Westbourne Grove, Kell had moved into the apartment.

8
     
    Weekends were always the hardest. When he was busy with work, Bernhard Riedle could find distraction in a site visit, in a conversation with a structural engineer, even in lunch with his client. But when the meetings stopped, when the builders went home on a Friday evening and the office in Hamburg closed for business, Riedle was alone with his agony. He drank constantly, he sat on his own in the apartment, unable to read, to concentrate on watching the television, to do anything other than obsess about Dmitri.
    He thought about him incessantly. Though there was no evidence for this, he was convinced that Dmitri had left his wife and that all of the promises he had made to Bernhard were now being made to a younger, more vital lover, a partner with whom he would build a meaningful future. He pictured them deep in conversation, laughing and sharing intimacies; devouring one another’s bodies. Everything physical between them was more satisfying for Dmitri, their intellectual life more stimulating and more meaningful than it had ever been with Bernhard. He could hear Dmitri betraying him in conversation, speaking contemptuously of his character. What they had shared over their three years together – the trips to Istanbul, to London and New York – had already become a subject of ridicule. The peculiar hardness in Dmitri’s personality, the chill ruthlessness Bernhard had fought so hard to ignore, was now all that remained of him. He felt discarded and forgotten. He felt weak and he felt old. He wanted, more than anything he had ever wanted in his life, to have the opportunity to confront Dmitri, to rail at him for his cruelty and selfishness, and then to restore their relationship to what it had once been. He felt that he could not live without Dmitri’s love. If he could not have it, he would kill himself. He was going mad.
    Brussels was a prison. They had spent so much time in the city in recent months that every street corner held a memory of their relationship. Restaurants in which they had eaten, parks in which they had walked, cinemas where they had watched films, holding hands and touching in the darkness. The bed in which Bernhard slept was the