A Colder War by Charles Cumming

Claire, allied to a sense of professional responsibility, had prevented that.
    “It is so amazing to see you!” she said, raising herself up on tiptoes to kiss him. Kell felt like a favorite uncle. It was not a feeling he enjoyed, yet he remembered how easily Elsa had broken through the wall of his natural reticence, how close they had become in the short time they had spent together. “Amelia sent you?” she asked.
    Kell was surprised that Elsa did not know that he was going to be in Ankara. “Yes. She didn’t tell you?”
    “No!”
    Of course she didn’t . How many other Service freelancers were working on the Wallinger case? How many other members of staff had Amelia dispatched to the four corners of the earth to find out why Paul had died?
    “You’re picking up his computers?”
    Elsa was a Tech-Ops specialist, a freelance computer whiz who could decipher a software program, a circuit board, or a screen of code as others could translate pages of Mandarin, or sight-read a Shostakovich piano concerto. In France, a summer earlier, she had unearthed nuggets of intelligence in laptops and BlackBerries that had been critical to Kell’s investigation: without her, the operation would certainly have failed.
    “Sure,” she said. “Just picked up the keys.”
    She glanced toward the glass table. Kell saw the keys resting against the base of a vase containing fake plastic flowers.
    “I guess that’s what you call good timing,” he told her. “I was about to start downloading the hard drive.”
    Elsa’s face screwed up in confusion, not merely at the obvious overlap in their responsibilities, but also because she knew that, to Kell, computer technology was a gobbledygook language of which he had only a rudimentary understanding.
    “It’s a good thing I am here, then,” she said. It was only then that she let go of his hands, pivoting back in the direction of the office. “I can tell you which plug goes in the wall and which one goes in the back of the computer.”
    “Ha, ha.”
    Kell studied her face. He remembered the natural ebullience, a young woman entirely at ease in her own skin. Running into Elsa so suddenly had lifted his spirits out of the despondency that had plagued him for days. “When did you get here?” he asked.
    She glanced outside. She had three earrings in her right lobe, a single stud in the left. “Yesterday?” It was as though she had forgotten.
    “You’re going into the Station at some point?”
    Elsa nodded. “Sure. Tomorrow, I have an appointment. Amelia wants me to go through Mr. Wallinger’s e-mails.” She pronounced “Wallinger” in two separate parts—“Wall” and then a Scandinavian “Inga”—and Kell smiled. “Is that not correct, Tom Kell? Wallinger?”
    “It’s perfect. It’s your way of saying it.”
    It was good to hear the music of her voice again, the mischief in it. “Okay. So I take a look at this man’s computers, take the phones and maybe the drives back to Rome for analysis.”
    “The phones?” Kell followed her into the office and watched as Elsa powered up Wallinger’s desktop.
    “Sure. He had two cell phones in Ankara. One of the SIM cards from his personal phone was recovered from the airplane.”
    Kell did not disguise his astonishment. “What?”
    “You did not know this?”
    “I’m playing catch-up.” Elsa squinted, either because she did not understand the expression, or because she was surprised that Kell appeared so far off his game. “Amelia only brought me in a few days ago.”
    During the operation in which they had first worked together, Kell had spoken to Elsa about his role in the interrogation of Yassin Gharani. She knew that he had been sidelined by SIS, but made it clear that she believed in Kell’s innocence. For this, she occupied a special place in his affections, not least because her trust had been more than Claire had ever been able to afford him.
    “You’re going to Istanbul?” she asked.
    “As soon as I’m