by Henry Porter
That evening Samson texted her to say that there was a match between the two DNA samples – the nineteen-year-old student who’d been arrested by the Stasi on 12 December 1974 was the same person who had shaved her legs and combed her hair at Seneca Ridge. She called him.
‘I’m relieved, and not just for the obvious reasons,’ said Samson. ‘I paid twenty thousand of Denis’s money for that. Half of me thought I was being had.’
‘You deserved to be, for taking that risk.’
‘Zillah says this won’t cut any ice and we’ll need to take a sample if we get her in the room, but that of course is impossible. But I have another idea, which I’ll tell you about when I see you. By the way, you need to start thinking about talking to Reid. Maybe tomorrow evening.’
They ended the call and she walked the corridors of the hospital, nodding to the three members of Zillah’s security team and two new faces at the nurses’ station. They seemed better disposed to her since her disagreement with the supervisor. She tried then gave up trying to plan the conversation with Reid and went to the area by the vending machines and called him.
‘Marty, I felt our last meeting went badly and I wanted to apologise.’
‘Oh, that’s quite all right, my dear. You’re under a lot of stress.’
‘I have some news and wanted to deliver it personally, but I guess you’re out of town.’
‘I’m not far away. In Virginia.’
‘But I don’t want to ruin your weekend. Maybe it should wait until next week.’
‘What’s this about?’
‘Denis.’
‘Not bad news, I hope.’
‘On the contrary, things are good. But it’s something that I can only speak to you about in person.’
‘Maybe I can drop by the hospital tomorrow afternoon.’
‘At what time?’
‘Say four.’
‘I’ll see you then.’
She hung up then became aware of Angel signalling to her with a frantic smile. ‘What is it?’
‘Mr Hisami is communicating.’
They tore back to the room. Denis’s eyes were turned to the speaking chair. She was horrified. He looked paler and the flesh on his cheeks sagged, as though his body had suddenly resigned itself to paralysis. ‘One blink for yes, two for no – right, Mr Hisami?’
A slow blink followed.
She sat down and took Denis’s hand. ‘Oh, Hash, I can’t tell you how relieved I am.’
Blink.
She kissed him, something that she hadn’t done since the attack because of the risk of contamination. Angel said he would be down the hall and left.
‘Do you know what happened to you? Why you’re here?’
Blink, then two blinks. He knew something, but not all. She repeated everything she’d told him before, holding his hand and looking into his eyes. Occasionally, he blinked when he already knew something; he used the double blink if he wanted explanation and enlargement. Because she had moved him and either she or Angel had been with him all that time, she felt there was no risk of being bugged, which she’d half suspected in the other room. Even so, she spoke quietly about her trip through the Balkans, seeing the farm where he had rescued her, Samson and Naji, then the race through the Baltic States with Naji stealing a car and bursting through the Estonian border. His eyes watched her without blinking. He was taking it all in. Sometimes his pupils dilated and she wondered if this was love for her or the realisation of his imprisonment.
She had spared him the details about the killing of Robert Harland on the same day as his appearance in Congress, but she told him now and described the funeral and the encounter with Herr Frick. ‘And we know everything, Hash,’ she said. ‘What you and Bobby have pulled together is so impressive.’ He blinked. She told him about the attack on Tulliver and Angel bringing the computer on the train. ‘We’ll talk about that later maybe,’ she said. ‘Jim will be okay, but he’s going to be out of action for a while so I’ll have to handle things. I hope you’re good with that.’ Blink. ‘There’s a lot of business stuff I have to go through with you.’ Two blinks. ‘Does that mean you want to do the business stuff now?’ Two blinks.
‘I don’t want to tire you with all these questions.’ Two blinks. ‘Shall I go on?’ Blink. ‘Would you like a freshener for your mouth?’ Blink. ‘And some water?’ Blink. ‘Can you drink through a straw?’ Blink. She pressed the call button. The nurse came and Anastasia told her to phone Dr Carrew and bring water and freshener. She turned to her husband. ‘Would you like a shave? I know you hate the feeling of stubble.’ Blink.
A razor, brush and soap were found and Anastasia set about the task expertly, for, in the last days of her domineering, faithless father, she had shaved and washed him, though she had no love whatsoever for him. She asked the nurse, who looked on admiringly, if she could soak a small towel in hot water so she could press it to Denis’s skin. When she’d finished, she stepped back and smoothed his hair forward. ‘You look more yourself now. Open wide,’ she said, tickling his chin. ‘Come on, Hash. I know you can open your mouth.’ But he couldn’t, so she opened it for him and swabbed his gums and the inside of his cheeks then sprayed a little breath freshener on to his tongue. ‘Better?’ Blink.
She sat down and smiled at him. His eyes watered. Tears ran down his cheeks. She kissed him and dried his cheeks with a tissue then held his hand. ‘We’re going to survive this somehow,’ she said. ‘You’re going to get better and we’ll have that holiday in Jordan that you promised me.’ Two blinks. ‘We have to be positive, Hash. We have to be!’ Two blinks and his eyes moved away. It was a little while before they closed and, for the first time since her return, she saw him sleep.
She waited for half an hour then went out into the corridor and phoned Samson to tell him that Denis was communicating but he had changed drastically in the last twelve hours. ‘I think he just wants to die,’ she said in a whisper. ‘He’s given up.’
‘What do the doctors say?’
‘Dr Carrew is coming. He’s got people to dinner, but says he’ll come by when they’ve gone.’
‘I’m sorry to ask this, but is there any way you can find out the code to enter into the calculator?’
‘He’s asleep. And he can only say yes or no by blinking. And there’s no guarantee he remembers it. Maybe the nerve agent has taken its toll.’
‘I don’t want to put pressure on you, but we do need to get into Denis’s laptop. I can bring Naji with the calculator. Denis likes him. They worked together to make this code and, of course, now Naji can’t break it.’ He paused. ‘Sorry, I know I’m pushing, but you can ask him, can’t you? Allow him to make the decision.’
In the middle of the night, and after Carrew had spent an hour examining Denis with questions that required only the answer yes or no but added to his obvious perplexity, Anastasia did ask her husband, half expecting him to close his eyes and go back to sleep. But the question drew a single, definite blink and sudden miosis in his pupils – a narrowing with which she was all too familiar, one which conveyed the strength of her husband’s feelings.
Samson brought Naji over to the hospital but decided to stay outside Denis’s room. Naji shambled in, smiled and sat down beside Denis. They looked at each other long and hard, and much passed between them – not just their shared history in which both the young boy and the seasoned commander struck at an ISIS terrorist at the same moment in a barn in Macedonia, or the time when Naji, on the old rail bridge at Narva, diverted vast amounts of money electronically to the mafia shooter in payment for three well-aimed bullets that killed Anastasia’s Russian kidnapper and saved her life, but perhaps a deeper connection between two people who had escaped the violence of the Middle East as young men and, with their high intelligence, had found a life in the West, even though there would always be something about them both that was dispossessed, uprooted.
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br /> ‘Hi,’ said Naji, eventually.
Denis gave him a single blink and Naji held up the calculator in his left hand. Denis blinked again.
‘You have twenty digits. Is that correct?’
Blink.
‘I point finger at each number and you tell me when I have right one.’
Blink.
At first it went well: Naji noted down 40782366. Then Denis’s response time slowed and Anastasia began to worry the effort was too much for him. His breathing seemed to have become shallower and his face was drained of colour. It took minutes to acquire the next three numbers – 4, 5 and 9. Then Denis looked away. After a full minute his eyes returned to Naji and he gave three blinks.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Naji.
He waited. So did Denis, gazing at him.
‘Do you want me to use another key?’
Blink.
Naji looked at the keypad. ‘Memory key?’
Two blinks.
‘Square root key?’
Blink.
‘Ah! So you need the square root of 40782366459, right?’
Blink.
‘And that gives us 2019464445317124 – but that’s only sixteen digits. So we have to find four more digits, Mr Hisami.’
He returned to the keypad and they added 1, 1, 2 and 0, which took little time because Naji started with the lower numbers. He now had a twenty-digit code on the piece of paper and entered it into the calculator. The moment the final zero was keyed in the digits were rearranged into the code that would unlock the computer. Naji made a note of it and handed it to Anastasia, who folded it and placed it in her back pocket. She gently moved Naji out of the way and sat down beside Denis. ‘What is it, Hash?’ she asked, again taking his hand in both hers.
His eyes rested on her, but they seemed distant and she wondered if he could see her. And she didn’t like the short, shallow breaths, which seemed to have grown more irregular in the last minute or two. She glanced at the monitors and saw that his heart rate had slowed. She pressed the call button and told Naji to go and find a nurse quickly, but before he had moved to the door they heard shouting from the corridor. She let go of Denis’s hand, jumped up and pushed Naji aside so she could block the door. The shouting continued – several voices demanding that someone put down their weapon. She cracked open the door but could see nothing, so moved a little way out. Nurses had surrounded a man in blue scrubs, face mask and theatre cap. All had guns drawn. One of the nurses, also in a face mask, patted the man down from behind while another moved closer to him, aiming a gun with two hands at his forehead. The search ended with a pistol equipped with a silencer, a large wad of medical dressing and a vial being thrown on to the linoleum. The vial rolled away and was snatched up by one of the nurses.
This had all taken place just beyond the nurses’ station. Anastasia saw Samson, together with two of Zillah’s guards, rising from the floor, where they had presumably thrown themselves when undercover police intercepted the man in scrubs. Special Agent Reiner appeared from behind the station with two men who looked like detectives. One of these stepped forward and pulled the mask from the man’s face. Naji, who had slipped out of the room behind Anastasia, recognised him as the man who had checked into their hotel at Vilnius and whose key fob and car he had stolen. With the mask hanging from his neck and face turned to the ground, Anatoly Stepurin was handcuffed.
Anastasia glanced back through the door at Denis and realised something was wrong. His eyes were turned upwards and his mouth hung open. The pallor of death had taken hold of his face. She shouted for help. A nurse ran towards her, followed by a duty doctor who had come to see what the shouting was about. The nurse began CPR, pushing down on Denis’s chest with both hands, while the doctor moved a defibrillator to the bedside, turned it on and placed the pads either side of his chest. He consulted the monitor and told the nurse to stand back so he could deliver the electric shock. He felt for a pulse at Denis’s neck but, failing, listened through his stethoscope to his patient’s chest, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. He shook his head and called for help. An adrenalin shot was needed. This was administered, but to no avail. Denis’s body bounced lifelessly on the mattress as the nurse continued the rhythmic compression of his chest. Denis Hisami had passed from this life the very moment the man who’d come to kill him was apprehended.
And she had not said goodbye, hadn’t said she loved him and respected him above every man she had ever known, although those things were in her mind when the commotion had started out in the corridor and she’d stupidly gone out to see what was happening. She recoiled, her hands covering her face, her mind flooding with regret and guilt and shock. She looked again at his face, swamped by shock and an odd disbelief. Never for one moment had it occurred to her that she would lose him.
When Samson got out of the elevator, having handed Naji over to the Bird so they could go back to the hotel they were currently working in, he was met by Special Agent Reiner. It was past one in the morning and Anastasia was still in the room with Denis’s body, which had yet to be removed to the morgue. She had said she needed this time with him and the hospital authorities didn’t press the matter.
Reiner and Samson went to the room where she slept. ‘We need to know all about this man – everything you have on him.’
Samson looked at him with disbelief. ‘Is that so? Seems to me you used Denis as bait to catch him. You withdrew the officers when his wife returned from Europe and waited, sure they would try to kill him. That was pretty risky behaviour – you put other people’s lives in danger.’
Reiner mumbled a demurral that included the phrase ‘national security’, but it didn’t add up to much.
‘You were here all the time. Your agents in the garage were following Anastasia until they saw me hurling rocks at them. You set her up. She could easily have been killed.’
Reiner ignored this. ‘There’s a question of evidence about this individual.’
‘Toombs knows all about him. Why do you need me?’
‘Things are difficult, as you know.’
‘They’ve shut him down and he’s forbidden to cooperate with the Bureau. And from what I hear, you’re overstepping the mark by carrying out this operation.’
‘It’s a criminal justice matter. We were intercepting an assassin.’ He smiled, and went on: ‘What do you want?’
‘Time,’ said Samson. ‘About sixty hours.’
‘Go on.’
‘Denis’s death will be announced tomorrow morning by his office on the West Coast and they will state that he died from an underlying heart condition, which is the truth. This was how Stepurin planned to make it look. I don’t know what was in that vial, but I guess it’s something that interferes with the rhythm of the heart and causes cardiac arrest. We want the people who are paying Stepurin to believe that he succeeded in killing Denis without being detected. And for that you need Stepurin to make a call tonight.’
‘Why?’ said Reiner.
‘We need them to think they’ve won, that with the elimination of Denis Hisami and Robert Harland the threat no longer exists.’
‘And what does that serve the American people?’ asked Reiner. ‘Because that’s my job.’
‘A job you are being prevented from doing. High-level penetration in the US and the UK by the same network is deemed to be just too damaging to both governments, and you were taken off the case.’ He leaned forward and spoke confidentially. ‘I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, but we do kind of recognise each other. What I’m asking you is to give us sixty hours and we’ll try and break this thing open. Then the people who have blocked a legitimate investigation on behalf of the American people can go fuck themselves, because you will have to act on the knowledge that’s in the public domain. Look, you’re on our side. I know that!’
‘How do you propose we persuade Stepurin to make that c
all?’ asked Reiner.
‘Keep him out of the criminal justice system and put him on ice, which isn’t so hard because he is, after all, a Russian spy. Tell him that if he makes that call, there could be a deal – maybe a swap – and he can go back to Russia or Cyprus, wherever the hell he’s based. That’s credible – he knows the last thing the Russian government wants is for him to be questioned in an open court. He has to make the call tonight, and to the right number. Not some fucking number he pulls out of the air.’ He took his phone out and gave him Gaspar’s cellphone number.
Reiner thought about it. ‘Okay, what are you going to do in these sixty hours?’
‘Draw them out in the open, but it will take a lot of luck, and it all hangs on Anastasia. As you can see, she’s extremely upset. I’m not sure she’ll be up to it.’
‘You know her well – what’s your bet?’
Samson got up, went to the basin and poured himself a glass of water. ‘She’s been through a lot, and everything she’s suffered has been caused by the woman whose name neither of us has mentioned. Mila Daus.’ He watched for a reaction, but there was none. Samson was convinced Reiner knew the name but he wasn’t going there. ‘I think she’ll be up for it. I know she will, but we need the weekend.’
‘And what happens if she isn’t?’
‘Nothing! We’ll go back to pretending that Russia hasn’t got its people at the top of the American and British governments. And all those bit players who feed information into an enormous human eavesdropping operation will be free to continue to betray their country, whether they are doing it consciously or not.’ He sat down. ‘Imagine this situation in the eighties or nineties. It’s impossible to conceive. What happened? Why did we roll over? How did we let them do it?’
Reiner looked at him. ‘Do you have a drink?’