Since his arrival, he’d encountered overt hostility from Montrose. The medic, Keys, had displayed a sullen resentfulness which appeared to be directed at everybody, not just Purkiss. Although Efraim Avner came across as genuinely affable, there was a neediness about him, as though he was in search of a friend, or at least someone who would validate him. Patricia Clement seemed out of place, a cool observer more at home in a diverse, urban environment.
They were an odd group, with an eccentricity that might be a reflection either of the academic world they moved in or of the isolated setting in which they’d been thrown together.
Or it might be due to something else.
And there was the matter of Nisselovich and his disappearance. Purkiss hadn’t given it much thought when he’d first read about it in the briefing documents, assuming that the official line was correct and that the scientist had been a straightforward casualty of the terrain and the weather. But Medievsky’s account put a different spin on things. Purkiss found it hard to believe that a man of Nisselovich’s education and presumed intelligence would have ventured out alone in the face of an impending Siberian storm, purely to gather grass samples.
He had the sense that Medievsky found it implausible, too.
Six
Lenilko was speedreading and digesting a memorandum of such utter tedium he wondered if its author was playing a joke, when the door to his office opened almost before he’d registered the knock.
It was Anna. ‘Yarkovsky Station,’ she said as neutrally as she could, though her flushed face betrayed her excitement.
Lenilko stabbed his finger repeatedly at the handset on his desk and Anna disappeared, closing the door behind her. A few seconds later the phone rang. Lenilko drew a long breath and picked it up.
The voice echoed hollowly as though filtered through water.
‘I would have been in contact sooner but I needed time to reflect. The journalist arrived last night. John Farmer.’
Because of the delay on the line, it took Lenilko a few seconds to realise the voice had paused.
‘Yes?’ said Lenilko.
‘I recognise him.’
Lenilko felt a pulse beat in his throat.
He said, ‘Who is he?’
‘British Intelligence, I think. I’ve never met him, but I’ve seen his picture before. He looks vaguely like the Reuters photo. You need to enhance that one and cross-reference it again with your SIS files, see if he comes up.’
‘Can you provide a better photo?’ said Lenilko, trying to keep his voice calm, and managing to do so, he thought.
‘Not yet. He’s about to accompany us on a field expedition. I haven’t had the opportunity to take his picture, and out there the conditions won’t allow it.’
‘What are your impressions of him?’
‘Too early to tell. He’s taking pains to be friendly and not to get in our way. Some of the others are reacting badly to his presence.’
Lenilko paused, trying to think if there was anything more to be asked. There wasn’t, not at this point.
He said, ‘I’ll work on the link with SIS. Get me a quality photograph as soon as you can.’
‘Understood.’
A crackle of static erupted before the connection was cut.
Lenilko folded his hands on the desk to stop them from shaking. He stared, as he always did at moments like this, breakthrough moments, at the framed picture of Natalya and the twins beside his computer.
This is it, he told them silently.
He reached for the phone, the normal internal one, and hit a single number. His office door was thick enough that he heard Anna’s voice down the line only.
‘Drop what you’re doing and get in here with Konstantin.’
Six hours later, after a marathon lasting all the way through lunch and beyond, it was Konstantin who found the connection. But Anna had come up with the idea.
The three of them had enhanced the Reuters and passport photos of the journalist to the maximum, using software of every variety they had access to, which was most kinds. This had already been done before, during the initial vetting of Farmer, but it never hurt to repeat the process. Once the images were as clear as they were ever going to be, they was cross-referenced with the FSB’s database of known and suspected members of British Intelligence, both SIS, the foreign service, and the domestic Security Service known as MI5.
Nothing came up.
Lenilko suggested they try known or presumed former members of the services. It was a hoary tactic used by intelligence services all over the world: let it be known that an operative was retiring, but keep him or her on clandestinely.
Again, nothing. No match that was even close. And that was after factoring in possible changes in appearance, up to and including minor plastic surgery.
‘Broaden it,’ said Lenilko. ‘Include known associates of British SIS and MI5 assets, even those not considered to be official employees.
Anna raised an enquiring eyebrow. ‘Everyone?’
‘Everyone. Informants, chauffeurs, the guys who they send to collect their dry cleaning for them.’
On the monitors, the images flashed by at the rate of scores every second. Beside them, the enhanced passport and press photographs of Farmer remained static. If there was a match, the flow of images would be arrested. But it continued apace, until the dreaded words appeared across the monitors: No match found.
‘Damn it,’ said Lenilko.
Konstantin intoned glumly: ‘Our man must be wrong about the British Intelligence connection.’
‘Our man doesn’t get that kind of thing wrong,’ said Lenilko. He stood up, began to pace his modest office in small circuits. The three of them were alone, Anna and Konstantin having brought their laptops in with them. This was work he’d decided not to share with the rest of the office, because the more people there were involved in it, the greater the risk of leaks.
‘Think, guys. What are we missing? What cross-check haven’t we done?’
Anna sat up, stared into the distance. ‘Operations.’
‘What?’
‘Farmer’s given age is thirty-eight, yes? We assume he may have been a British agent since he was eighteen at the very youngest. So we run the files on all the SIS/MI5 operations we know about and have data on, covering the last twenty years. There may be a match there. Someone in a photograph, even an apparent bystander.’
‘Yes.’ Lenilko jabbed a finger at her. ‘Good. Let’s get on it.’
The search was slower this time. Between them, Anna and Konstantin opened each file manually, ran through it for images, immediately rejected those that didn’t include photographs. There were relatively few files dating back to the nineteen nineties. It had been a time when the Russian Federation and Great Britain were notional allies, and while it was perfectly commonplace for even friendly nations to keep tabs on one another, during the Yeltsin era there hadn’t been the intense, painstaking analysis of every move SIS made that was standard nowadays.
All of that changed abruptly in 2000. The new president took a very different view of perfidious Albion, and the numbers of files and case reports exploded. Anna’s and Konstantin’s fingers blurred over their respective keyboards as they screened, sorted and rejected documents.
Lenilko blinked, the prolonged focus on the screens giving him a headache. He stood and stretched and went out into the main office, checked on the progress of a few other projects. Through the high windows, the snow flurries were gathering pace outside. Unusually, The precipitation felt oppressive to Lenilko: an impenetrable stratum between him and the fantastically distant Yarkovsky Station.