by John Sweeney
‘Where were you stationed?’ Ludmilla asked.
‘For much of the time, Afghanistan.’
‘That was a stupid war,’ she snapped.
‘I didn’t start it,’ replied Gennady.
Ludmilla didn’t seem very impressed by this answer or by any general. He was getting nowhere.
From his wallet, Gennady produced a photograph of Iryna, taken last summer. She was wearing a cobalt-blue dress, sleeveless, her image reflected in the still waters of Patriarch Ponds in Moscow, so that you saw two Irynas. What ignited the photograph was that she was laughing at someone else’s joke, her body almost bent double with reckless glee. The photograph captured a young woman, bursting with life, energy, humour.
‘Beautiful,’ said Ludmilla. Oblamov nodded.
Gennady told them some of the story, how Iryna had vanished from her job in Moscow, how he’d followed a lead down to Rostov. In the cemetery, a gravestone with her name on it but, once the coffin had been dug up, not her body inside the grave but the body of a complete stranger, an old lady. Another lead had taken him to Novo-Dzerzhinsky and then on to Oblamov.
‘The officer here has told me that there’s a “Wanted” poster for me, that I’ve gone nuts, that I’m a lunatic, that I need psychiatric help,’ Gennady said. ‘I swear on my daughter’s life everything I just told you is true. I’m not a mental case, just a father looking for his daughter. So, can you help me?’
It was Oblamov who broke the silence first. ‘Tell him, mother. Tell him what we saw.’
The old lady considered Gennady, poured the officer and herself another slug of moonshine, downed hers and began speaking in a low voice: ‘I’m past ninety and I don’t care what they do to me. My neighbour, Pyotr, up the track. They killed him. That happens here, in the countryside. Neighbours fall out over a woman, a pig, too much drinking. But this was different. They poured boiling fat on him. This is the cruellest thing I’ve ever seen and I lived through Stalin’s famine. I call the police, he comes here, and then they call him and order him to write it down’ – Oblamov was examining his boots – ‘as suicide.’
‘The guy who died . . . Pyotr. Was he’ – Gennady hesitated, reaching out for the right word – ‘important? Was he connected?’
‘No. No one is around here. A small farmer – a few cows, some pigs. He hit his wife too much. She ran away, maybe fifteen, twenty years ago. He drank too much, got in a few fights, never did me no harm.’
‘Did anyone take a photograph of the dead guy, what they did to him?’
Gennady had never heard a more conspiratorial silence in all his life.
Ludmilla knelt down, shifted an elderly carpet, lifting up a small cloud of dust, prized up a floorboard and reached inside to find a small wooden box. She took it out, opened it and handed Gennady a roll of film.
‘What’s on this film?’ asked Gennady.
‘Pyotr lying on the floor,’ said Ludmilla, listing the details as if she were playing a child’s memory game. ‘His hands cuffed behind his back. Dead, in a mess of wood, a broken chair. Half naked – naked from the belly down. They’d poured hot fat on his penis, and something else – sugar, I don’t know what. They tried to burn his place down but the fire hadn’t taken. This . . . this is the worst thing I’ve seen,’ and she crossed herself again.
‘Every word is true, General,’ said the policeman. ‘I saw it too, with my own eyes. It’s all on the film.’
‘Why do this? Why kill a lonely old man? Why kill a nobody in this extravagantly cruel way?’
‘There are some sick people amongst us,’ said Oblamov.
‘Yes, maybe you’re right.’
He studied the film canister, holding it in his fingers. The colours on its plastic casing had faded with age and, even as he examined it, the casing cracked open, exposing it to the light.
‘I’ll see if someone can get a picture out of this, but I think the film is too old.’
Ludmilla bit her lip.
‘Is there a photograph of Pyotr alive?’
Ludmilla shook her head. The big fat cat gave out a loud miaow. Time to leave. And then it hit him: ‘I know someone who can draw. If you describe Pyotr to her, she can draw him. That way, I may have something to work with.’
The old lady nodded. ‘Of course.’ Then she added, ‘Oh, I took down the last part of the number plate of the car they came in. Do you want it?’
Gennady could have kissed her. She opened her box again and this time extracted a slip of paper, on it in spidery writing part of the number plate: EK61.
‘It was a big black one. Like a box. Foreign.’
‘Did you recognise what make it might have been, granny?’
‘I’m past ninety. No. Don’t ask an old lady such a question.’
Gennady twiddled the piece of paper in his fingers. ‘I’m not sure what I can do with this,’ he said ruefully.
Oblamov was not a forceful man but he made a little wheezing noise. ‘I’ve been a police officer for three decades. It’s about time I started doing some detective work.’
He took out a pen and scribbled three small diagrams in his police notebook. The first was four interconnected rings; the second a circle, quartered, top left and bottom right shaded blue, top right and bottom left unshaded; the third was a circle divided into thirds, a chicken foot the wrong way round.
Ludmilla took an age to make up her mind and then, with an air of complete certainty, she jabbed her finger at the third.
‘Chicken foot, the wrong way round.’
‘Mercedes,’ said Oblamov.
Gennady bowed his head. ‘Mr Sherlock Holmes, I presume.’
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Nothing. They’d vanished from the surface of the earth. The most sophisticated data-set-analysis tool in human history, powered by a computer net hidden in H-bomb-proof vaults underneath the Allegheny Mountain chain, was hunting in real time through every CCTV image, every passport traffic node, every credit and debit card transaction on the planet – both legally and otherwise available – and had come up with diddly-squat. Worse, he’d banked a lot of his capital with the Director on being able to land the Agency’s technician, the traitor. So far, his investment had not paid off.
Worse still, his private arrangement with Grozhov regarding the absurd Lightfoot had been a high-risk operation. He’d not foreseen that Lightfoot would refuse to take the play and instead exit the game altogether.
The British, thus far, were unhappy at what had happened to Lightfoot but they had no hard evidence to go on. An internal inquiry at Langley would be unfortunate. Dave Weaver dismissed the thought as absurd, nihilistic.
It was three o’clock in the morning and time to go home. He powered down his computer, yawned, and observed himself in the reflection of the screen. His body was rebelling against him. He’d gone to see his doctor, who told him there was nothing he could do.
‘Unless . . .’ said the physician.
‘Unless what?’ he pressed.
‘Unless you’d care to consider retirement.’
Weaver changed his doctor. His rise to the top of the Agency had been long and agonisingly slow. For years, Ezekiel Chandler had blocked his advance, promoted others, sidelined him. Now, with Chandler out, he was at the summit of his power, but people were mocking him to his face.
Weaver revisited the humiliation he had endured the previous evening. It had always been a mystery to him why Chandler, an abstemious Mormon throughout his career at the Agency, had put up with Conor Murphy, whose only constant in life was the attainment, then management of, cirrhosis of the liver. Murphy couldn’t analyse himself out of a paper bag. He had no idea of protocol, of content tabulation, of the proper management of an issue in-house, with an executive summary, notes, recommendations on sensitive matters unminuted. He drank too much, squirted emails without thought for the consequences, generated trouble.
It was true he had been to bad places for the Agency, and then some. The Murphy legend was that he w
ould disappear, go off radar, and then re-emerge weeks later. Once he disappeared for a whole two months, only to surface in Taiwan with the intelligence equivalent of a crock of gold in his hand luggage. The legend was not wholly untrue, but the value of Murphy’s gold was often wildly overstated. He was a chancer. While Chandler had always been subtle and coded in his dislike of Weaver, Murphy had been open in his contempt.
Weaver had finally managed to get the Director to give Murphy the push, when he had been past his sell-by date for a long time, but his leaving do was grim. Weaver had had no choice but to attend. It was expected of him.
Murphy had stood on a table in the Georgetown bar, swaying slightly, like an oak in a storm: ‘I’ve had enough to drink to kill a small horse, so forgive me that what I have to say is in plain English. I’ve been a spy for this agency for almost four decades. I’ve spied for the good of the people of these United States and, much of the time, that’s also meant the good of the people of the world. There have been times when we’ve got – I’ve got – things wrong. For those transgressions, please forgive me. But I did not become a spy in order to elevate to that higher form of being, to become a bureaucrat. The danger is that the trading of influence and power in the office supplants what we’re supposed to be doing, what we’re supposed to be fighting for. Here’s a new form of Murphy’s Law . . .’ He shifted his heft, his fat belly protruding out of his shapeless suit, directly facing Weaver. ‘Better be a spy on the front line than a faceless, halfwit bureaucrat.’
The crowd at the farewell party had gone quiet, faces examining Weaver for a reaction. Weaver had shrugged, knowing that making a fight of it would never be a good move. Better to reply to Murphy, he judged, when no one was taking any notice.
‘So there is our new master,’ said Murphy, suppressing a hiccough. ‘You challenge him to defend himself, and he acts like the thing he really is – a gimp in a gimp suit.’
Cackles of laughter had rippled across the bar, far too strong and uproarious for Weaver’s own piece of mind. Thinking back on that moment was not the way forwards, he told himself.
In the last forty-eight hours Weaver had noticed people – in his management pod, in the canteen, in the executive car lot – had begun to study him, but not with respect and not with fear. They were looking at him as if they knew he was under pressure, that something was not right.
Weaver did not believe that everyone in Langley knew that there could be no deal on the rendition of Comolli, the traitor in Moscow, until the two neutrals arrived in Russia. Nevertheless, he felt under examination for the first time since Chandler had left the building.
Weaver picked up his office phone and dialled a Moscow number.
‘Grozhov speaking.’
‘Anything?’
‘Nothing.’
‘The deal . . .’
‘The deal does not exist until you and your peculiarly conflicted allies in England hand over the assets we have requested. No assets, no deal. Goodbye.’
Weaver fired up his computer once more and hunched over it, hauling up more teraflops of computing power than any other single individual on the planet could command. They’d gone off the grid in Windsor Great Park. Clearly that fag Lightfoot had been helping them. What was so extraordinary was that from the day they’d disappeared, there had been no trace. Nothing.
Weaver logged out, yawned, stood up, walked away from his desk, hit a too brilliantly lit corridor, grabbed a cappuccino, sipped it, returned, logged on afresh, and – hey presto – there they were.
He picked up the phone and redialled Grozhov.
‘What?’ barked the Russian.
‘Their passports have surfaced on our grid.’
‘Where?’
‘Manaus.’
‘Where’s Manaus?’
‘Brazil. Put someone good on this. Neither of us wants any mistakes.’
‘I’m sending my best man. He’ll be on the next plane out of Moscow.’
‘Send him now,’ said Weaver.
‘He’s been to the dentist today. Very soon.’
Weaver put the phone down and allowed himself a cautious smile. Things were beginning to look up. There would be no more screw-ups.
NOVO-DZERZHINSKY
No, not like that – like this, his trousers had been cut off completely . . . Yes that’s right. He had more muscle on him, he didn’t look so bad for a man his age. Yes, good, good.’
Yellow Face was concentrating, an artist’s pencil in her hand, working on the shading of the drawing of Pyotr, but Gennady couldn’t resist trying to sneak a glance. ‘You can look at it when I’ve finished and not before,’ she snapped.
She was sitting in the back seat of the Volga with Ludmilla, drawing to the old woman’s instructions. They were parked outside the hospital.
When she was content with her work, Iryna angled it so that Gennady could inspect it from his seat behind the wheel.
‘You’ve certainly got a gift.’
‘The likeness is excellent,’ said Ludmilla. ‘That’s Pyotr as I last saw him.’ The drawing captured the victim in his kitchen, an icon on the wall, him lying on the floor, hands cuffed behind his back, half naked from the waist down, his groin a grim pudding of blisters and blood, his mouth, nose and eyes darkened, too.
‘You’ve drawn his face quite dark,’ said Gennady. ‘Was he a drinker?’
‘Yes, sure,’ said Ludmilla. ‘But for a big drinker his nose was not so bad. The making of the drawing reminded me of something, that in death his mouth looked raw, as if maybe they had choked him, gagged him. His eyes and nose were red, too.’
‘His nose was red, not blue?’ asked Gennady.
‘Definitely red – red raw.’
‘Thank you, Iryna.’
‘It’s nothing.’
Yellow Face left him the drawing and disappeared back into the hospital. Gennady offered to take Ludmilla all the way home, but she declined. He had just dropped her off at the bus station when his phone rang.
‘It’s Leonid here,’ said Oblamov. ‘The computer has seven thousand and something cars with the registration plate ending EK61.’
‘So, no joy?’
‘And only three with the wrong-way-round chicken foot of Mercedes. One was in a crash seven months ago, a total write-off. Another is a beige cabriolet. The third is registered at an address in the centre of Rostov.’
‘Come on, Sherlock, don’t tease.’
‘The Tax Inspectorate. The people who did this to Pyotr, they are connected.’
Gennady thanked Oblamov and concluded the call.
The connected weren’t going to help him find his daughter. The cold fact of the dead end left him profoundly depressed. Sitting in the Volga across the road from the bus station, he phoned Venny, but got her answering machine. He left a message saying he would see her soon, and then he thought through what he knew – or, correction, what he thought he knew.
He knew that his daughter was dead, because otherwise she would have called him. He didn’t know that with absolute certainty, but Iryna had always been a considerate daughter. He knew that a grave existed with her name on it. He knew that the body within the grave belonged to an old woman, a total stranger, who had been poisoned with a nerve agent. He knew that the least bent cop in a miserable town had evidence that an old man in the countryside had been murdered in the cruellest way possible, by someone from the Tax Inspectorate.
He knew that none of this added up. He suspected, but did not know, that the disappearance of his daughter, the torture of the old man, and the old woman killed by a nerve agent were all mixed up. But how exactly?
He watched the ordinary people of Russia come and go, passing through the bus station, and the thought of their helplessness in the face of the powers in the land left him defeated and afraid.
THE TRENT AND MERSEY CANAL
Reilly made a low woofing sound – not a full-throated bark – at middle England, set out like a badly made chessboard, far more white squares t
han black. Snow quilted the pastures, ice-grime fingered the locks, and frost gripped the rushes on the banks. Only the canal remained unfrozen, black and smooth and viscous.
Never been such a cold winter for years, thought Joe as he patted Reilly on the head and gently edged the tiller over. The Daisy, seven feet wide and sixty long, negotiated a bend in the navigation and plodded on at four miles an hour.
Hunted by the FSB and the CIA, by MI5, MI6 and every police force in Britain, they had ended up travelling more slowly than a toddler could run. Reilly scratched a paw at the hatch and Joe opened it so the dog could return to the warmth of the cabin below. Katya was still sleeping, and the dog curled up at her feet.
Joe ran through the events of the past two days. After Lightfoot had concluded his phone call with the Very Important Person, he’d asked them a simple question: ‘Do you want to go to Moscow?’
‘No,’ said Joe. By his side, Katya shook her head.
Reilly had cocked a leg and started to lick his privates, suggesting that the offer was not to his liking either.
Lightfoot sighed. ‘If you were to go on the run,’ he said, ‘where would you go and how would you do it?’
‘Fly to . . .’ offered Katya.
Lightfoot grimaced. ‘You fly, you die. They’ll be tracking your passports, watching for you. If you fly anywhere in the world, they’ll find you. You’ve got to stay off the radar. No passports, no mobile phones, no calls home. Not all CCTV is connected, they can’t see you all of the time, but they can track you backwards in time and work out where you’ve been. They know where you are now, pretty much exactly. We know the odds are against you, so we’re privately offering you a small head start.’
‘Who’s we?’ Joe asked.
Lightfoot studied him with contempt. ‘Where would you go?’
‘Ireland,’ said Joe. ‘I’ve got some troubles back home, but it makes sense. A good place to lie low.’
‘OK. How do you get there?’
‘Drive? Ferry?’
‘There’s CCTV, connected to the grid, at every ferry port and on every major road to all the Irish Sea ports.’