He returned to his office twice more before giving up and concentrating on business in the main area. Anna and Konstantin would call him if they found anything of significance. As the morning wore on, Lenilko’s spirits sank. Perhaps his man at Yarkovsky Station had indeed been wrong; perhaps there really was no connection between the journalist Farmer and British Intelligence. Or, more likely, maybe the connection was so carefully concealed that Lenilko and his two underlings were destined never to find it.
No. Damn it. Lenilko must have clenched his fist with audible force, because one of the operatives looked up from his work station, terror in his eyes. Lenilko shook his head to reassure the young man. He stalked off, heading for the windows, isolating himself as best he could in a room full of people.
We are never doomed to be defeated. We will not be bested.
Lenilko had heard it widely repeated that the Soviet Union had won the espionage battle during the Cold War, but lost the war itself. Even the Brits and, to a lesser extent, the Americans conceded this. The KGB’s recruitment of agents within the Western intelligence services had been astronomically more successful than similar attempts on the other side. The West had never had anyone remotely like a Kim Philby or a George Blake in a position of influence in Moscow or any of the Warsaw Pact countries. The traitors Penkovsky and Popov represented the best the West could do.
The West had won, but the new Russia had regained a deep appreciation of the superiority of its own intelligence and counter-intelligence tradition. Part of Semyon Lenilko’s remit, his duty, was to uphold that tradition. More than that, he intended to enhance it, to raise it to a whole new level, as the Americans said.
John Farmer would be identified. His connection with British Intelligence would be exposed. As would his, and therefore Great Britain’s, interest in Yarkovsky Station.
At the periphery of his vision, his office door opened.
Lenilko was a rationalist and an atheist, and no believer in any notion of the supernatural. He included extrasensory perception within that realm. But he was struck by the oddness of the timing.
Anna was in the doorway. Her failed attempt at a nonchalant expression said it all.
Lenilko hustled into the office, flipped the door shut behind him, slamming it, said in almost a snarl, ‘Tell me, tell me.’
At his desk, Konstantin half-turned, his face crepuscular in the light from the monitor.
‘Look.’
The text on the screen was familiar to Lenilko. It gave a detailed account of the events of a Tuesday in October, the year before last.
Tallinn, Estonia. Every FSB employee knew what had happened there, on that date. Every Russian with a sliver of awareness knew.
The Russian president had been attending a summit meeting in the Baltic capital with his Estonian counterpart. A terrorist cell, a group of embittered ethnic Russian Estonians, had attempted to assassinate the President using a long-range missile launched from far out at sea. The assassination had been prevented… somehow. It was a source of intense, grating fury to Lenilko, and to many of his colleagues, that the FSB still didn’t know quite what had gone wrong with the terrorists’ plans.
It was also a source of profound, churning shame. Somebody else, not the FSB, had prevented the murder of the Russian president.
Somebody else.
These thoughts played through Lenilko’s head as familiar background, but his attention was focused on the picture which Konstantin’s scrolling finger had exposed.
It was a well-known photo, a lucky snap by a junior reporter on a local Tallinn rag, and it had been purchased by the Press Association for a high five-figure sum and syndicated across the world. It showed two men being helped out of a rescue boat onto dry land by emergency services, the sea behind them stretching towards the grey horizon and strewn with burning debris.
One of the men in the photo was unidentifiable, his huddled form obscured behind the second man, his face turned away.
The second man was John Farmer. There was no question about it.
Lenilko gazed at the picture. He didn’t blink. And it was probably that which caused the tears to brim on his lower lids and spill through the mesh of his lashes and down over his cheeks. The eyes had to lubricate themselves against prolonged exposure to the air.
He wrapped one arm around Anna’s neck, swung the other around Konstantin’s. Kissed each of them hard on the cheek in turn. Anna shrieked, Konstantin recoiled, and Lenilko let go. But when they stared round at him, into his beaming grin, he saw that Anna was smiling, and even Konstantin’s eyebrows had risen several millimetres up his long forehead.
‘Geniuses,’ Lenilko said, his voice catching embarrassingly. He lowered it to a near whisper, where he could better trust it. ‘The pair of you are true geniuses. You’ve just identified our journalist at Yarkovsky Station, John Farmer, as one of the men who was fished out of the sea after the attempt on our president’s life sixteen months ago. You’ve linked a man who was at the centre of the most significant political event of the last five years, with a developing situation at one of the most important research stations in the entire Russian Federation.’ He swatted each of them on the shoulder. They both seemed taken aback. Lenilko knew he was well-liked by his staff — it was a response he took pains to cultivate — but he knew also than Anna and Konstantin hadn’t seen such an overt expression of emotion from him before.
He calmed himself, bringing things down a notch. ‘Okay. Let’s find out who he is.’
This time it took only a few minutes. The two men who’d been hauled off the speedboat had disappeared before the FSB had a chance to interview them. An official statement from the Estonian authorities identified one of them, the man who was now John Farmer, as one Martin Hughes, a British photographer who’d rented a speedboat to try and capture pictures of the summit between the two heads of state from out in the bay. His boat had been directly under the Black Hawk helicopter the terrorists had used to launch the missile, and when the Black Hawk had been shot out of the sky the debris had landed on Hughes’s boat.
The second man, the one whose features were indistinct in the photo, was never identified.
The FSB had followed up on Martin Hughes, but had found nothing of interest. A scanned copy of his passport was on their files.
Lenilko looked at the passport photo. Yes, there was no doubt. It matched the one in John Farmer’s passport.
‘Get on the Hughes information, find out how extensively he was followed up, and what was missed,’ said Lenilko, his voice more businesslike now, but still tinged with good humour.
He rose, strode to the window once more, gazed out at the white sky, rapt, feeling as light and unburdened as the flakes of swirling snow.
Seven
Years earlier, Purkiss had met a man who had a phobia for cold temperatures. Not just an excessive dislike of them, but a full-blown clinical syndrome which resulted in severe panic attacks whenever he found himself caught outdoors with the weather turning bad, or even when a shower head in an unfamiliar bathroom failed to deliver within a few seconds water that was at least warm. The man had developed the phobia when, working on an oil rig in Alaska, he’d fallen into the sea after a partial collapse of the superstructure. He had been rescued half-drowned and with severe hypothermia, but his physical injuries had healed fully.