Somerville did not pick up.
Carradine tried a second time. There was still no answer. He assumed that the phone was on mute or that there was no signal in the basement. For all the times that he had written about mobile phone technology in his books, he still did not know if a phone rang out if there was no signal or if it had failed to connect.
A WhatsApp message came through from the number.
Everything OK? Sorry to leave you in the lurch.
Carradine tapped out a reply. He did not know how to express what had happened.
Slight problem at my flat. Need advice.
Carradine saw that Somerville was “typing.” It was like texting Mantis all over again.
Someone will come round within the hour. Stay put.
Carradine didn’t bother to give his address. He assumed the Service already knew where he lived. He replied “OK” to Somerville’s message, lit a cigarette, and poured himself three inches of vodka.
Less than forty minutes later a new message came through from Somerville telling Carradine to go to a pub on Bayswater Road. Somebody from the Service would meet him there. Carradine knew the pub—it was his local—and described what he was wearing so that the contact would be able to recognize him.
Don’t worry about that. They know exactly who you are.
He grabbed his keys, his wallet and his phone and left the flat. He tugged three separate strands of hair from his head and glued them to the frame of the door with saliva so that he might be able to tell if someone had broken in while he was gone. He applied the last of the strands to the bottom of the doorframe and hoped that one of his neighbors wouldn’t come out of their flat and ask what on earth he was doing.
He rode the lift to the ground floor. It was dark outside and the street was deserted. The pub was no more than half a mile away. He hadn’t eaten for hours and was suddenly famished.
He heard the men coming up behind him before he had time to react. They came quickly, running with light steps. Carradine swung around and saw two of them less than three meters away, closing in. To his consternation, he realized that the man closest to him was the Russian he had knocked out cold in Marrakech.
“Hello, Mr. Considine,” he said.
That was the last thing Carradine remembered.
47
Carradine woke up in a comfortable, beautifully furnished bedroom. There was no sound of traffic, only the occasional rush of wind and the regular tweet of birdsong. He felt as though he had slept for twelve hours straight. He was dressed in the same clothes he had been wearing when he had left the flat. His wallet and keys were on a bedside table stacked with antiquarian books. His phone was nowhere to be seen.
Carradine sat up in bed. He was desperately thirsty. There was an en-suite bathroom on the far side of the room. He filled a tooth mug at the basin and drank three glasses of water in quick succession. His muscles were stiff and his head ached but when he looked in the mirror, he saw that his face was unmarked. He needed to shower and shave but was surprised by how calm he felt. He understood that he was probably in a state of shock.
He walked back into the bedroom and pulled back the curtains on the set of windows closest to the door. Carradine was momentarily blinded by bright sunshine but saw that he was standing in a room on the first floor of a dilapidated farmhouse overlooking a muddy yard and, in the distance, a checkerboard of fields. He remembered Somerville telling him that Moscow would leave him alone on the assumption that he was working for the Service. There was a tiny slice of consolation in that thought. Then he remembered that his flat had been turned upside down and his laptop destroyed. He stepped away from the window and sat back on the bed. He was now afraid.
Carradine tried to shake off a growing dread. He needed to think more clearly. He told himself that he was on a property controlled by Russian intelligence. There was surely no other possibility. It occurred to him that Somerville and Hulse were subjecting him to some kind of training exercise or test, but that theory was too absurd to be taken seriously. Whoever had kidnapped him wanted answers. That was all anybody ever wanted from him. Hulse. Bartok. Somerville. They had all been the same. They had stripped him for information then vanished into the night.
Footfalls on a staircase. Somebody was coming up to the room. Carradine pushed a hand through his hair and stood up, preparing to meet whoever came through the door. He did not know who or what to expect. He assumed that the man from Lara’s apartment in Marrakech was the most likely candidate.
It was not him.
The man who came into the room was slim and tan, with shoulder-length black hair tied in a ponytail. He was wearing glasses and sporting a thick, biblical salt-and-pepper beard. His fast, intelligent eyes grinned at Carradine as he flashed him a benevolent smile.
“Kit,” he said. “Welcome to our temporary home. Do you like it?”
The voice was deep and rich, the slick international accent hard to place. He was wearing designer jeans and what appeared to be a brand-new pair of Red Wing boots. He oozed the easy confidence and poise of the self-made man.
“Who are you?”
The answer to the question revealed itself even as Carradine was asking it. The man standing in front of him, his appearance subtly altered by the addition of glasses and by the fullness of the beard, was the same man whose face Carradine had stared at in dozens of articles and obituaries over the course of the previous fortnight.
He was talking to Ivan Simakov.
48
“You are a hard man to pin down, Kit. Are you just a writer or are you also a British spy? Do you know this world you have fallen into or is all of this a novelty?” Simakov smirked as he gestured outside, loving the sound of his own voice, enjoying the power he was exerting over his stunned and frightened prisoner. “Are you Lara’s new boyfriend, the man who has taken her from me? Or did she play you and manipulate you as she has played and manipulated so many others? Who are you, Kit Carradine? A genius or a fool? Tell me, please. I am fascinated.”
Carradine felt that he was staring at a ghost, a dream of a dead man. Ivan Simakov had been killed in a Moscow apartment and buried in an unmarked grave. The man standing in front of him had somehow managed to fake his own death and to make a new life in the West. How was this possible?
“You are who I think you are?” he said.
“I am!” Simakov replied, reveling in his own myth.
“How?” said Carradine.
Simakov waved a dismissive hand, as if the whys and wherefores of his miraculous rebirth were of no greater consequence than the sound of the wind outside or the persistent tweet of birdsong. He clutched his hands behind his back.
“Where am I?” Carradine asked.
Simakov tipped back his head and smiled.
“Rest assured you are still in your beloved England, that green and pleasant land. Within two hours, driving along the motorway, you could be back at your desk writing another thriller, another little story about spies.”
Carradine was too stunned to be irritated by the slight. He saw that Simakov intended to keep talking. He had the air of a man who was used to supplicants hanging on his every word.
“We are on a farm at the edge of a typical country estate once owned by the English aristocracy, but now lost to those who could afford to keep it in the correct style.” Carradine wondered how and why Simakov had been given access to the property; he assumed that it was under Russian ownership. “The British ruling class are inexplicably pleased with themselves, don’t you think?” He moved toward the window closest to the bathroom and drew back the curtains. “Your aristocrats can no longer afford to heat their homes. Your banks are owned by Arabs and Chinese. The finest buildings in London belong to Russians. The great English writers and poets have all vanished. Your culture, like so many other cultures today, is an American culture of karaoke, of recycled stories, of political decay and mass stupidity. The great English churches are in the hands of property developers, the schools, so
far as I can tell, are controlled not by teachers, but by their pupils. There is no discipline in your society. No discipline or intellectual curiosity, only ignorance. Above all, despite this, there seems to be a complete absence of self-doubt in the British character! What is it, exactly, that you are so proud of? You lost an empire and replaced it with—what?”
Carradine saw that he was expected to answer.
“With views like that you sound like you’d fit in very well in Moscow,” he said. “Everything’s a bit binary with you so far, Ivan. Genius or fool? Old Britain good, new Britain bad. I thought you were fighting for freedom of choice, for openness, for decency? I didn’t have you down as a reactionary.”
Rather than express any discomfort or annoyance with what Carradine had said, Simakov merely touched his beard and looked out at the farmyard, like an admiral surveying his fleet.
“It’s true. All through my life I have been confused by your country. I used to tell Lara this.” Carradine knew the reference to Bartok was intended to unsettle him. Simakov suddenly turned from the window and looked back across the room. “I thought you would be more upper-class.”
“Excuse me?”
“Kit. It sounds like a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel. Nobody is called ‘Kit’ anymore. What was William thinking?”
At the mention of his father’s name, Carradine felt sick with worry. Simakov pretended to reassure him.
“Please do not worry,” he said, raising a conciliatory hand. “The old man has not been harmed. Yet.”
The menace of that last word floored Carradine. He wanted to know what had happened, where his father was being held, to demand that Resurrection release him. But he knew that to show his fear would be to play into Simakov’s hands.
“Where is he?” he said, trying to remain as calm as possible. “What is it you want with us?”
Simakov ignored the question.
“Here’s the thing.” He offered Carradine a cigarette. Carradine wanted one but refused it. Simakov smiled as he placed the packet in his pocket. “Mankind has reached its zenith. Homo sapiens has come as far as he can come.” He inhaled deeply. “We can eat, we can drink, we can fuck, we can communicate, we can travel, we can do whatever we want. About the only thing we are not permitted to do is smoke!” He smiled at his own joke. Carradine knew that he was listening to a man with no moral compass, no values or kindness, only his own self-love. “There are cures for AIDS and cures for cancer, artificial limbs for the disabled, central heating and hot water and electricity in every home. Every book and film and play and poem and fragment of knowledge ever assembled is available at the click of a mouse or the weight of a finger on the screen of a cellphone. The world has never had it so good. And yet people are still not satisfied! They are so spoiled.” Was this a speech Simakov had prepared in advance or was he making it up off the top of his head? Bartok had spoken about being mesmerized by Simakov’s words, but this felt more like an actor giving a performance that had been rehearsed time and time again. “It turns out that mankind is so competitive, so adversarial, so frightened of change, so geared to cruelty that he will willfully destroy his own society, his own culture—for what? Independence? Freedom? What do Americans mean when they say that they crave ‘freedom’? Do they not realize that they are already free!”
Carradine could hardly take in what Simakov was saying. He was thinking about his father, wondering if he was a prisoner in the same house. What would Resurrection try to extract from him in return for his father’s safety? Did Simakov know that he had once been a British spy? He wished that he had never set eyes on Stephen Graham, that he had never been so reckless or so vain as to agree to work for the Service.
“I will tell you why they destroyed their own societies.” Simakov opened a window. A smell of manure burst into the room. “They blew it all up for the chance to hate. For a sentimental version of an all-white past that didn’t exist and can never exist in the future. People by their millions, here and in America, in Poland, in Hungary, in Turkey, voted for going backward when they didn’t even need to go forward. All they had to do was stand still. Life was never going to get any better. They were never going to be more ‘free.’ There were never going to be more steaks in the freezer, more ways in which they could be happy and content. That was the tragedy. Resurrection merely took advantage of that.”
Carradine was confused by that final remark.
“What do you mean?” he said. “What do you mean you took advantage of it?”
Simakov looked as though he had not intended to speak so candidly. It was the first time Carradine had witnessed a crack in his overweening, theatrical self-confidence. He had the sensation—so familiar from conversations with Bartok and Somerville—that he was at the edge of a secret that was being deliberately withheld from him.
“So.” Simakov wanted to change the subject. “You must answer me. Can I expect a visit from the British Secret Service, come to rescue one of their own? Or are you just another penny thriller writer of no great importance who spends his life making up stories rather than engaging with the real world and effecting necessary change?”
Carradine knew that Simakov was not interested in the answer. It was just part of a game designed to unsettle him. All he could do was wait and bide his time and find out what it was that Simakov wanted. Carradine’s only concern was to work out where he was and how he was going to save his father.
“Where’s my dad?” he said.
Simakov shrugged. “Safe.”
“My family is not a threat to you. What do you want?”
Simakov walked into the bathroom, ran a tap at the sink, extinguished his cigarette in the stream of water and threw it into the toilet.
“You are well rested!” he exclaimed. “You feel fit! You feel good! You want to ask me questions and be direct.” He came back into the room and stood in front of Carradine. “OK, I will be direct with you. You are here because you have been with Lara.”
In that moment Carradine understood that Simakov was still working for Russian intelligence. He had instructed them to find Lara and to bring her to him. That was why Graham had acted as he did; he had known of the operation and had wanted to save LASZLO. There was no other explanation for Simakov’s miraculous survival. Moscow had detonated the bomb in the apartment knowing that their prize agent had long since left the building. Zack Curtis, the Resurrection volunteer who was killed in the blast, had been merely a sacrificial pawn.
“How do you know I’ve seen her?”
Simakov looked as though he had been insulted.
“Do I look to you like somebody who is short of information? Do I look like a man who has trouble finding things out?”
“Your friends in Moscow told you?”
Simakov did not bother to deny it.
“Yes,” he replied cautiously. “They heard that you were looking for Lara on behalf of Stephen Graham. Is that correct?”
“Stephen Graham is dead,” Carradine replied. “But I don’t imagine that’s news to you. Or to Moscow.”
Simakov removed something from his mouth and said, “Stephen caused a lot of problems.”
“Really? In the same way Ramón Basora and Zack Curtis caused a lot of problems, or was it something different this time?” Simakov winced. “Tell me, which one of your flunkies threw Graham under the train?”
It was a brave question. Carradine knew that he was pushing his luck. In his sudden understanding of Simakov’s real identity, he had intuited a deeper, terrifying truth.
“You deflect very well, Mr. Carradine,” Simakov exclaimed. “You avoid the questions you do not wish to answer. You ask me the questions which perhaps your masters have told you to ask. Perhaps you have been trained after all!”
“Only media training, Ivan,” he said and regretted it immediately. He knew that Simakov’s vanity would be offended by the fact that he did not seem to be afraid. The Russian duly exploded with laughter, the noise carrying outside into the farmyard an
d beyond to whoever was protecting him, to whoever knew that the supposed icon of nonviolent resistance was in fact a murderous thug still in the employ of Russian intelligence.
“You are funny!” he said, and suddenly swept his right arm across Carradine’s face. The back of Simakov’s hand connected with his jaw, sending him crashing to the ground. Carradine had been hit before, with greater force and skill, but never with such unexpectedness. The side of his face screamed in pain. He could feel a warm, alkaline pooling of blood in his mouth as he tried to stand up. “You should know when is the correct time to make jokes.”
Carradine’s mind was spinning in loops, from fear to determination, from despair to hope. He stood up and faced Simakov. He steadied himself. With the awful clarity of a man waking up to a truth long withheld from him, Carradine realized that, all along, Resurrection had been a Kremlin-approved operation to bring chaos to the West. The movement had been funded and organized with the express purpose of bringing chaos to the streets of New York and Washington and Los Angeles, to the neighborhoods of Berlin and Madrid and Paris. Bartok had been duped, Somerville and Hulse as well. There had been so few attacks in Russia not because the friends and relatives of Resurrection activists were being assassinated, but because there were no active Resurrection cells in Russia. There was no other explanation for the ease with which Simakov had been able to fake his own death, to continue to organize Resurrection strikes and to live, like some latter-day bin Laden, on a farm in the middle of the English countryside.
“Who owns this place?” he asked, wanting to swing a punch of his own but knowing that any number of Russian heavies were doubtless on the other side of the door waiting to burst in and defend their boss.
The Moroccan Girl Page 29