by Mick Herron
“Good point. So, when’s your passport up for renewal?”
Katinsky gave him a weary look. “Ach. It’s not enough to suck a man dry. You have to come back and grind up the bones.” In an attempt to rehydrate himself, he gulped more wine. It was a big gulp, a drinker’s gulp, requiring him to wipe his chin after. “Ever been debriefed, Jackson Lamb?”
That was such a stupid question, Lamb didn’t even bother.
“As a hostile? That’s how I was treated. They want to know everything I ever heard or saw or did, and after a while I don’t know if they’re looking for reasons to throw me back or reasons to keep me. Like I say. They suck a man dry.”
“Are you trying to tell me you were making stuff up?”
“No, I’m trying to tell you that every scrap of information I ever had, everything I thought was useful, everything I knew wasn’t, everything I didn’t know what it was, I spilled it all. Every last drop. If you’ve watched the video, you know as much as I ever did. Maybe more, because believe me, I have forgotten more than I ever knew.”
“Including cicadas.”
Katinsky said, “Maybe not so much cicadas, no.”
There was no way to measure the distance between Min and the end of his life in that moment. The van slammed its brakes to avoid slamming into Min instead, and the displaced air kissed Min all over, and then he was gone, leaving chaos behind him. In his wake a horn sounded, but what the hell. Near-death experiences were two-a-penny on the city roads, and it would all be forgotten in minutes.
As for now, speed had become its own point and purpose. Min’s legs were pumping easily, his fists were moulded to the handlebars, and with the road disappearing beneath his wheels, the gift of being alive flowed through him like a shot of tequila. The noise he suddenly barked was halfway between a laugh and a shout, and barely human. Pedestrians stared. Few had been lucky enough to see a cyclist going this fast.
And up ahead lay the junction with Clerkenwell Road, and yet more lights, and the backed-up traffic included at least three black cabs. Min, now immortal, stopped pedalling, and freewheeled towards the waiting cars.
So you’ve caught up with them. Possibly. Now what?
Kyril understood every word we were saying.
Of course he did. So?
Cruising the cycle lane he pulled level with the first cab, and risked a sideways glance. Its lone passenger was on her mobile phone. The second was its mirror image; a male, holding a phone to the opposite ear. Maybe they were talking to each other. Almost at the front of the queue now, Min stopped alongside a bus, perhaps the same one he’d had the altercation with earlier; there were now just two cars between him and the remaining black cab, which was hovering impatiently under the lights. For a moment, the world shimmied. Then his vision cleared, and he was looking at the backs of their heads: Piotr and Kyril, both facing front, lacking all interest in bedraggled cyclists.
So he had caught up with them. Now what?
He had his answer almost immediately: now the lights changed, and the taxi pulled away. Min barely had time to register the first half of its plate, SLR6, before it was through the junction, and heading down Clerkenwell Road. And with it went that feeling he’d had that he could cycle forever; it drifted from him like one of those Chinese lanterns you lit and let go and watched burn into nothingness. Each breath rasped through him like a match on a sanded surface—he could taste blood, never a good sign. By the time he was through the crossroads, the black cab was gone, might be miles away … When he registered that he was being overtaken by a pedestrian, Min pulled over, gave the finger to the car behind him out of cyclist habit, and pulled his mobile from his trouser pocket. His hands shook as he used it. His bicycle fell to the pavement.
“Yes?”
“Do you have pull at the Troc?”
“I’m fine, Min, thanks for asking. How’s your morning?”
“Jesus, Catherine—”
“I don’t know about pull, but I did a comms course with one of the admin staff back in the Dark Ages. What do you want?”
“I’ve got a taxi heading west along Clerkenwell Road. Partial plate reads—”
“A taxi?”
“Just see if they’ll run it, Cath, yeah?” He half-spat the halfplate he had: SLR6.
“I’ll do my best.”
Min slid the phone back into his pocket, then leaned to one side and very neatly threw up into the gutter.
This time, Katinsky drained his glass. Glancing at his own, Lamb found that it, too, was empty. With a grunt he headed back to the bar, where a pair of old women, dressed in what looked like their entire wardrobes, huddled in furtive conversation, while a pony-tailed man in a streetsweeper’s jacket confided in a pint of lager. The drinks arrived. He’d barely delivered Katinsky’s wine before the Russian was off again.
“At the Park, I was given to understand I was old news. As if there’d been a fire-sale, and you’d already bought everything you’d ever need. Tell us something new, I was told. Tell us something new. Or we throw you back. And I don’t want to be thrown back, Jackson Lamb.” He clicked his fingers, in response to some mental trigger. “KGB agents weren’t so popular at that point in history. Actually, I’ll tell you a secret. We were never popular. It’s just that we were no longer in a position where that didn’t matter to us.”
“Guess what?” Lamb said. “Nobody likes you yet.”
Katinsky rolled over this. “But low grade information was all I had. Office gossip, interesting because the office was Moscow Centre, but nothing that hadn’t been giftwrapped a hundred times over by men who’d forgotten more than I’d ever known.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “I was a cipher clerk. But you already know that.”
“I’ve read your CV. You never set the world alight.”
The Russian shrugged. “I comfort myself with the knowledge that I’ve outlived more successful colleagues.”
“Did you bore them to death?” Lamb leaned forward. “I don’t want your life story, Nikky. All I’m interested in is anything you know about cicadas that you didn’t spill then. And in case you’ve got thoughts of stretching this out all night, that’s the last drink I’m buying. We on the same page?”
A puzzled expression crossed Nikolai Katinsky’s face, and he began to cough. Not the healthy, clearing out your lungs type cough, with which Lamb was familiar, but as if there were something inside him trying to force its way out. A lesser man might have offered to do something, like fetch water or call an ambulance, but Lamb contented himself with his drink until Katinsky got his shuddering under control.
When he thought he might receive a reply, Lamb said, “Do you get that often?”
“It’s worse in the damp,” Katinsky wheezed. “Sometimes I—”
“No, I meant, if it’s gunna happen again, I’ll pop out for a smoke.” He waggled his lighter in illustration. “And if I decide that display was to avoid answering questions, I’ll drag you out with me and put this to use.”
Katinsky stared at him without speaking for twelve long seconds, then shifted his gaze to the tabletop. When he started speaking again his voice was steady. “Cicadas is a word I overheard, Jackson Lamb. Alongside a name I think you’re familiar with. Alexander Popov. It meant nothing to me then, but it was spoken in a tone approaching … what would I say? I think I would say awe, Jackson Lamb. In a tone approaching awe.”
“Where was this?”
“It was in a lavatory. A shithouse, if you prefer. That was the use I was putting it to, certainly. It was an ordinary work day, except that it was not long before the Wall came down, so no days were ordinary. I’ve heard it said many times that the fall came suddenly, that nobody was prepared, but you and I know it wasn’t like that. They say animals sense an earthquake before it happens, and the same holds true of spooks, yes? I don’t know what life was like in Regent’s Park, but in Moscow Centre it was like waiting for the results of a medical exam.”
“Jesus wept,” said Jackson Lamb. “You
were in a shithouse.”
“I had stomach cramps, so I retreated to the lavatory where I succumbed to an attack of diarrhea. And that is where I was, in a stall, when two men came in and used the urinals. And while they did so, they exchanged words. One said, You think it still matters? And his companion said, Alexander Popov thinks it does. And the first said, well, of course he does. The cicadas are his baby.” Katinsky paused. Then said, “He did not actually say ‘his baby’. But that’s the closest I can come.”
“And that was that?” Lamb said.
“They finished their piss and left. I remained there some while, more concerned with my stomach than the meaning of their words.”
“Who were the men?” Lamb asked.
Katinsky shrugged. “If I knew, I’d have said.”
“And they had this conversation without checking they weren’t being overheard?”
“They must have done. Because I was there, and they had the conversation all the same.”
“Convenient.”
“If you say so. But it meant nothing to me. I gave it no thought until I was dredging things up from the back of my mind in a room under Regent’s Park.” His brow furrowed. “I didn’t even know what cicadas were. I thought they were fish.”
“Instead of some kind of funny insect.”
“Funny insect, yes. With one particularly funny trait.”
Lamb said, “For Christ’s sake,” and sounded genuinely pained. “You think I don’t know?”
“They bury themselves underground for long periods,” Katinsky went on. “Seventeen years in some cases, I believe. And then they burst out and they sing.”
“If it was a genuine code word,” Lamb said, “it would only mean one thing.”
“But it wasn’t genuine, was it?”
“No. You were a dupe. Just another straw man feeding us a line about Alexander Popov, who didn’t exist. So we’d end up chasing our tails, trying to find a sleeper network which didn’t exist either.”
“So why keep me, Jackson Lamb? Why not throw me back?”
Lamb shrugged. “They probably thought you were cheap enough to be worth a punt. Just in case.”
“In case it turned out that what I overheard was real.” Katinsky was recovering from his coughing fit. The gaps between his sentences were diminishing, and he began rolling another of his old lag’s cigarettes. Placing it on the table as carefully as if it were a holy relic, he addressed his next words to it. “Which would mean what? That your bogeyman’s real too, and not only real but with an actual network. All these years after the fall. Here in dear old Blighty.”
Lamb said, “Thanks. Now I’ve heard it out loud, it’s clearly bollocks.”
“Of course.” Katinsky bowed his head. “Clearly. There is no precedent for such a thing.”
“Funny.”
“Except the whole world knows there is. Is that why you turned up at my door, Jackson Lamb? You’ve been reading last year’s papers, and got to worrying it could happen again?” He was enjoying himself now. “It’s going to look careless, isn’t it? Allowing not one but two nests of communist spies to bed down in western comfort all these years.”
“I’m not sure anyone would care about their politics,” Lamb said. “That dog died a while ago.”
“It certainly did. The workers’ paradise is today run by gangsters and capitalists. Much like the west.”
“Missing the good old days, Nicky? We could always ship you back.”
“Not me, Jackson Lamb. I look around your green and pleasant land and I just love what you’ve done with the place. But you’re here because you’ve started to think what if, haven’t you? What if the cicadas are real after all? Who would they answer to? Not the national Soviet interest that put them here, because that no longer exists.” Raising his empty glass to the light, he tilted it so its faint red tidemark showed up like a scar. “Imagine that. Buried underground for years and years. Waiting for the word to start their song. But whose word?”
Lamb said, “Alexander Popov was a scarecrow. A hat and a coat and two old sticks, no more.”
“They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to make people stop believing in him,” Katinsky said. “But all joes believe in the devil, don’t they? Deep down, during their darkest nights, all joes believe in the devil.”
He laughed at this, which turned into another cough. Lamb watched him heave for a minute, then shook his head and dropped a fiver on the table. “Wish I could say you’d been a help, Nicky,” he said. “But on the whole, I think we should’ve thrown you back.”
When he looked back from the door, Katinsky was still heaving on the rack of his own body. But the five pound note had disappeared.
Earlier, from his car, Kenny Muldoon had watched Shirley Dander get behind the wheel of her own, slip a pair of shades on, and go roaring out of Moreton-in-Marsh station car park. She wants to be careful, he thought. The locals didn’t care for reckless drivers, and there’s no one more local than a local policeman. But that wasn’t his problem. He patted his breast pocket, where he’d tucked the money she’d handed him, then patted his stomach, into which he’d shovelled the breakfast she’d bought. Not a bad morning’s work. And it wasn’t over yet.
From his glove compartment he took a scrap of paper on which was scrawled a mobile number. Mumbling it aloud, he punched it into his phone.
A train was pulling out; one of the commuter wagons, stuffed to the gills.
The phone rang.
A woman stood on the bridge, holding a baby. She was making the child wave its hand at the departing train; holding it at the elbow, moving it left then right.
The phone rang.
A young couple in bright jackets and rucksacks examined a timetable by the platform gate. They appeared to be arguing. One gestured after the vanishing train, as if making a point.
The phone was answered.
Muldoon said, “It’s Muldoon. From the taxi. I was given this number.”
And he said, “Yes. It was a woman, though.”
And he said, “Yes, that’s what I told her.”
And he said, “So when do I get my money?”
Ending the call, he tossed the phone onto the passenger seat, then crumpled the scrap of paper and dropped it at his feet. And then he too left the car park.
After a while, the young couple in their bright jackets wandered onto the platform, to await the next train.
Roderick Ho was pissed off.
Roddy Ho felt betrayed.
Roderick Ho was wondering what it all added up to, if you couldn’t trust your fellow man, your fellow woman. If your fellow woman lied to you, misrepresented herself, was not who she claimed to be …
A lesser man might weep.
Because you put your whole damn self into a relationship, and what did you find? You found yourself reaching out to this hot blonde chick who was into hip-hop, action movies and snowboarding, who’d reached level five of Armageddon Posse and was taking evening classes in 20th century history, and then—and he’d only discovered this because she mentioned her make of car and that she had SkyPlus, two hard facts which allowed him to trace her corporeal identity as opposed to her online character—and then it turned out that if she was into snowboarding she’d better be doing it carefully, because not many insurance companies were going to cover a fifty-four-year-old woman on a snowboarding holiday, because fifty-four was the kind of age when your bones turned brittle and you had to worry about catching a chill in case it developed into something nasty. Christ. She didn’t need evening classes in twentieth century history. She just had to cast her mind back. Roddy Ho wasn’t sure his own mother was fifty-four yet. The bitch.
But anyway. Water under the bridge. The adjustments he’d made to his e-mail set-up ensured that any further communications from Ms. Geriatric Ward would be blocked. If she wondered what she’d done to upset Roderick Ho—or Roddy Hunt, rather; the DJ superstar with the Montgomery Clift profile she’d thought she was hooking
up with—she needed to take a long hard look in the mirror, that was all. Truth in advertising was what she needed evening classes in. Ho wasn’t easily offended—he was an easygoing guy—so it was with both sorrow and disgust that he wiped out Ms. Coffin Dodger’s credit rating. He only hoped she’d learn her lesson, and stick to her own side of the generation gap in future.
And as if the afternoon wasn’t stressful enough, here came Catherine Standish, bearing gifts.
“Roddy,” she said, and placed a can of Red Bull on his desk.
Nodding suspiciously, Ho moved it a few inches to the left. Everything’s got its place.
Catherine settled herself behind the other desk. She’d brought a cup of coffee too, and cradled it in her hands. “Everything okay?” she asked.
He said, “You only come in here when you want something.”
An expression he didn’t recognise flickered across her face. “That’s not entirely true.”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m busy, anyway. And besides …”
“Besides?”
“Lamb says I’m not to help you any more.”
(What Lamb had actually said: “I catch you freelancing again, I’ll pimp you out to IT support. Photocopier division.”)
“Lamb doesn’t have to know everything,” Catherine said.
“Have you told him that?” She didn’t reply. Taking this as proof of his unassailable rightness, Ho popped the tab on his Red Bull, and took a long swallow.
Watching him, Catherine sipped her coffee.
Ho thought: here we go again. Another older woman with designs. To be fair, she was after Ho’s skills rather than his bod, but it all came down to exploitation in the end. Good thing he was more than a match for her. He looked at his screen. Then back at Catherine. She was still watching him. He turned back to his screen. Studied it for half a minute, which is a lot longer than it sounds. When he risked another glance, she was still watching him.
“… What?”
She said, “How’s the archive going?”
The archive was an online Service resource; a “tool for correlating current events with historical precedents,” and thus of enormous strategical use, or so an interim Minister had decided a few years back. As was frequently the way with the Civil Service, a notion once decreed was difficult to countermand, and the Minister’s mid-morning brainwave had outlived his career by several administrations. And since Regent’s Park rarely encountered a makework task that couldn’t more usefully be done by a slow horse, archive maintenance and augmentation had long since ended up on Roderick Ho’s desk.