That was what he’d heard one of the techies say once.
He was halfway along the corridor when the lights went out.
“Never heard of him.”
“Oh, poppycock!”
Which was unlike the old man. Put it down, River thought, to being on his third glass. He said, “No, all these years you’ve been telling me spook stories, Alexander Popov’s never rated a mention.”
That earned him a sharp look. “I haven’t been telling stories, River. I’ve been educating you. At least, that’s always been my intention.”
Because if the O.B. ever learned he’d turned into an old gossip, it would destroy something deep inside him.
River said, “That’s what I meant. But Popov’s never formed part of my education. I’m guessing he was Moscow Centre, yes? One of their secret wizards, pulling levers?”
“Pay no attention to the man behind the Curtain,” the O.B. quoted. “That’s quite good, actually. But no. What he was was a bogeyman. Smoke and a whisper, nothing more. If information was hard currency, the best we had on Popov was an IOU. Nobody ever laid a finger on him, and that was because he didn’t exist.”
“So how come,” River began, and stopped himself. Asking questions is good. An early lesson. If you don’t know something, ask. But before you ask, try to work it out for yourself. He said, “So the smoke and the whispers were deliberate. He was invented to have us chasing someone who wasn’t there.”
The O.B. nodded approval. “He was a fictional spymaster, running his own fictional network. It was meant to have us tying ourselves in knots. We did something similar in the war. Operation Mincemeat. And one of the lessons we learned from that was you can discover an awful lot from the details you’re asked to believe. You know how the Service works, River. The boys and girls in Background prefer legends to the real thing. Truth walks a straight line. They like to peep round corners.”
River was used to ironing out the kinks in his grandfather’s conversation. “If the details you were being fed were fake, that didn’t mean they couldn’t tell you anything.”
“If Moscow Centre said ‘Look at this’, the sensible thing was to look in the opposite direction,” the O.B. agreed. And then said, “It was all a game, wasn’t it?” in a tone suggesting he’d fallen upon a long-hidden secret. “And they were still playing it when everything else they owned was up for grabs.”
The fire crackled, and the old man turned his attention to it. Watching him fondly, River thought what he often thought when they dwelt on such subjects: that he wished he’d been alive then. Had had a part to play. It was a wish that kept him at Slough House, jumping through hoops for Jackson Lamb. He said, “There was a file, then. On Alexander Popov. Even if it was full of fairy tales. What was in it?”
The O.B. said, “God, River, I haven’t given it a thought in decades. Let me see.” He peered into the fire again, as if expecting images to emerge from the flames. “It was patchwork. An old woman’s quilt. But we had his birthplace. Or what we were led to believe was his birthplace … But let’s not go round that bush again. The story was he came from one of the closed towns. You know about them?”
Vaguely.
“They were military research stations, served by civilian populations. His was in Georgia. Didn’t have a name, just a number. ZT/53235, or something like that. Population of maybe thirty, thirty-three thousand. The crème were scientific staff, with a service industry propping them up, and military to keep them under control. Like most of these places it was founded in the post-war years, when the Soviet nuclear programme was in overdrive. That’s what the town was about, you see. It was … not organic. It was purpose-built. A plutonium production plant.”
“ZT/53235?” said River, who liked to keep his memory sharp.
His grandfather looked at him. “Or something like that.” He turned back into the fire. “They all had names something like that.” Then he sat straighter, and got to his feet.
“Grandad?”
“It’s just a—it’s okay. Nothing.” Reaching into the log basket to the side of the fireplace, the old man pulled a long dry twig from the sheaf of kindling. “Come on, now,” he muttered. “Let’s be getting you out of there.” He held the twig into the flames.
He’d seen a beetle, River realised. A wood louse, scuttling blindly on the topmost log of the burning pyramid. Despite the heat, his grandfather’s hand remained steady as he leaned forward, the end of the twig positioned so that the beetle’s next circuit would bring it immediately into its path, whereupon the dying creature would presumably launch itself gratefully upwards, as if upon a rope dangled from a helicopter. What was beetle for deus ex machina? But the beetle had no words, Latin or otherwise, and avoided the offered escape route, making instead for the uppermost point of the log, where it balanced for a moment then burst into flames. River’s grandfather made no comment. He simply dropped the twig into the fire, and settled back in his armchair.
River was going to say something, but turned the words into a throat-clearing noise instead.
The old man said, “This was back in Charles’s day, and he got quite exercised about it in the end. Talked about wasting time on fun and games when there was still a war on, if nobody had noticed.” The O.B.’s voice changed with these words, as he indulged in that harmless habit of imitating someone your listener had never met.
Charles Partner had been the Service’s First Desk, once upon a time.
“And this was the man Dickie Bow claimed kidnapped him.”
“Yes. Though to be fair to Dickie, when he came up with his story, it hadn’t been firmly established Popov didn’t exist. He must have seemed like a good-enough alibi at the time for whatever Dickie was up to. Drinking and whoring, probably. When he realised his absence had sent balloons up, that was the story he invented. Kidnapped.”
“And did he say what Popov wanted? I mean, kidnapping a streetwalker …”
“He told everyone who’d listen, and quite a few who wouldn’t, that he’d been tortured. Though as this took the form of being made forcibly drunk, he had difficulty summoning up sympathy. Speaking of which …”
But River shook his head. Any more, and he’d know about it in the morning. And he ought to be getting home soon.
To his surprise, his grandfather refilled his own glass. Then he said, “That closed town. The one he was supposed to come from.”
River waited.
“It disappeared from the map in ’55. Or would have done, if it had been on a map.” He looked at his grandson. “Closed towns didn’t officially exist, so there wasn’t a lot of admin involved. No photographs to airbrush, or encyclopedia pages to replace.”
“What happened?”
“Some kind of accident at the plutonium plant. There were a few survivors, we think. No official figures, of course, because officially it never happened.”
River said, “Thirty thousand people?”
“Like I said. There were some survivors.”
“And they wanted you to believe Popov was one of them,” River said. His mind was conjuring a story from a comic book: an avenger arising from the flames. Except what was there to avenge, after an industrial accident?
“Perhaps they did,” his grandfather said. “But they ran out of time. Our net filled up once the Wall came down. If he’d been flesh and blood, one of the bigger fish would have offered him up. We’d have had the whole biography, chapter and verse. But he remained scraps, like an unfinished scarecrow. Some reptile dropped his name in a debriefing session, but that was an admission of ignorance by then, because nobody believed in him any more.”
The O.B. turned from the fire as he finished. Light from the flames emphasised the creases in his face, turning him into an old tribal chief, and a pang ran through River as he realised there wouldn’t be many more evenings like this one; that there ought to be something he could do to eke them out. But there was nothing, and never would be. Learning that was one thing. Living with it, another entirely.