“Nikolai Katinsky.”
“Minnow,” Molly said.
“Yes.”
“Cipher clerk. One of a shoal of the damn things, we couldn’t give them away in the nineties.”
“He came with a piece from a jigsaw,” Lamb said. “But it didn’t fit anywhere.”
“Not a side piece. Not a corner. Just a bit of the sky,” Molly’s face had altered now they’d reached the meat. Her grossly over-painted cheeks shone pinker, their natural colour showing through. “He claimed to have heard of the cicadas, that phantom network that other phantom set up.”
“Alexander Popov.”
“Alexander Popov. But it was all just one of those games Moscow Centre liked to play, before the board was tipped over.”
Lamb nodded. It was warm down here, and he was starting to feel clammy. “So what paper do we have on him?”
“It’s not on the Beast?”
The Beast was Molly Doran’s collective name for the Service’s assorted databases: she refused to differentiate between them on the grounds that when they crashed—which they were bound to, sooner or later—there’d be no telling them apart anyway. Just one dark screen after another. And she’d be the one holding the candle.
“Bare details,” Lamb said. “And the tapes of his debriefing. You know what it’s like, Molly. The young guns think a twenty-minute video’s worth a thousand words. But we know better, don’t we?”
“Are you trying to sweet-talk me, Jackson Lamb?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
She laughed again, and the sound went fluttering into the stacks like a butterfly. “I used to wonder about you, you know. Whether you’d go over to the enemy.”
Lamb looked affronted. “CIA?”
“I meant the private sector.”
“Huh.” He glanced down briefly, taking in his stained, untucked-in shirt, scuffed shoes and undone fly, and seemed to enjoy a moment’s self-awareness. “Can’t see me being welcomed with open arms.” Not that he bothered zipping up.
“Yes. Now I see you, there was nothing to worry about, was there?” Molly pulled away from the table. “I’ll see what we’ve got. Make yourself useful, and put the kettle on.”
As she rolled off, her voice floated back: “And you dare light up, and I’ll feed you to the birds.”
And here they were again.
Had River slept? Was that possible? He must have drifted off on some naturally produced anaesthetic; his body refusing to submit to more punishment. Through his mind, various nightmare pictures had flitted. Among them, a retrieved image; the page from Kelly Tropper’s sketchbook showing a stylised city landscape, its tallest building struck by jagged lightning.
And now they were here again, and every bone in his body groaned. Unless that was the noise the tree made as the wind shook its branches, scraping them against the ruined walls of the battered house.
“Home sweet home,” said Tommy Moult.
Lamb sucked a biro he’d found, and leafed through Katinsky’s file. This didn’t take long. “Not a hell of a lot,” he said.
“If it hadn’t been for his mentioning the cicadas,” Molly said, “he’d have been thrown back. As it was, he got the low-grade treatment. Background established he was who he said he was, then got onto frying bigger fish.”
“Born in Minsk. Worked in transport administration there before being recruited by a KGB talent spotter, subsequently spent twenty-two years at Moscow Centre.”
“His existence was first noted in December ’74, when we got hold of a staff rota.”
“And we never made a pass,” Lamb said.
“The file would be thicker if we had.”
“Odd. You’d think we’d at least have taken a look.”
Placing the file on Molly’s desk, he stared into the darkness of the stacks. The pen in his mouth rose slowly, slumped, and rose again. Lamb seemed unaware of this; unaware of anything, as his hand slipped inside his still open fly and he began to scratch.
Molly Doran sipped her tea.
“Okay,” Lamb said at last. It was quiet in Records, but grew quieter still now, as Molly held her breath. “What if he’s not a minnow? What if he’s a big fish pretending to be a minnow? How would that have worked, Molly?”
“A strange thing to do. Why would anyone hide their light? Run the risk of being chucked back with the rubbish?”
“Strange,” Lamb agreed. “But could he have done it?”
“Faked a cipher clerk? Yes. He could have done it. If he was a big fish, he could have done it.”
They shared a look.
“You think he was one of the missing, don’t you?” Molly said. “One of those we lost sight of when the USSR collapsed.”
Of whom there’d been more than a few. Some had probably found their way into shallow graves; others, they suspected, had reinvented themselves and flourished even now in different guises.
“He might have been. He might have been one of those Kremlin brains who gave us so much trouble. Who wanted out when the war was lost, but not to spend the rest of his life being poked at by the winners.”
Molly said, “It would have meant placing that name on the rota years in advance. He couldn’t have been sure we’d even see it.” And then checked herself. “Oh—”
“Yeah,” Lamb agreed. “Oh. Any idea how it came our way?”
“I could run it down,” Molly said doubtfully. “Possibly.”
He shook his head. “Not a top priority. Not right now.”
“My point stands though. He’d have had to do it years before he could know he needed it. December seventy-four? Nobody saw the end coming. Not that far in advance.”
“You didn’t have to see it coming,” Lamb said. “You just had to know it might.” He looked at the biro in his hand, as if wondering how it got there. “There’s nothing a joe likes more than knowing he’s got his exits covered.”
“There’s something else, isn’t there? You’ve got the look.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “There’s more.”
Tommy Moult’s breathing had slowed to normal. He’d wheeled the trolley over the rubble that had once been the house’s floor, a bone-wrecking distance for River, who was starting to feel his teeth loosen. He continued to tremble even now they’d come to a halt. Where his bonds cut into him he burned, and his ears throbbed in time to pounding blood. What was holding him together was rage; rage at himself for being so stupid twice in one night. And because he’d had a glimmer of what Moult was planning, and couldn’t believe it, but couldn’t disbelieve it either.
The tape was ripped from his mouth. The handkerchief was pulled free. Suddenly River was gulping mouthfuls of night air, making up for the night’s thin rations, breathing so deeply he almost gagged. Moult said, “You needed that.”
River could almost talk. “What the. Fuck. Are you doing?”
“I think you already know, Walker. Jonathan Walker, by the way? Bit of a tired old name.”
“It’s mine.”
“No. It’ll be the one Jackson Lamb gave you. Still, won’t be needing it much longer, will you?”
He knew Lamb; knew River was a spook. There was little point feigning innocence. River said, “I’m supposed to check in. An hour ago. They’ll come looking.”
“Really? Miss one call and they send out the coastguards?” Moult pulled his red cap off. His hair disappeared with it; those white tufts that had sprigged from underneath. He was bald, or nearly bald, with only a fringe stubbling his ears. “Miss tomorrow’s, and maybe they’ll get worried. Though by then they’ll have other things on their mind.”
“I saw what you had on the trolley, Moult.”
“Good. Give you something to think about.”