Permission for John Farmer to conduct his interviews, to research his forthcoming article on the work being done at Yarkovsky Station, had been granted nine days before Purkiss had met Vale in Hyde Park.
Purkiss stood up and went to the window. It was blacked out almost entirely by a heavy roller blind, a fine rim of external light marking the edges on either side. It’s essential during the summer months, Medievsky had said. Nobody would sleep otherwise, in the night-time sunlight. With a finger Purkiss drew back the blind and peered out.
The pocked snowscape stretched into darkness.
He needed sleep. Not just because his body was crying for it like a drowning man clawing for air, but because he had to let his brain rest, process, assimilate all it had learned in the previous two hours since his arrival at the station. But Purkiss knew the visual stimulus beyond his window, the starkness of the alien environment he found himself in, was necessary. It would be a backdrop against which his impressions of the faces, the actions of the ten people he’d met tonight might imprint themselves on his consciousness, so that his sleeping mind could do its work.
Purkiss’s primary conclusion was that two of the staff at Yarkovsky Station overtly disliked him. Ryan Montrose, who had met him together with Medievsky on his arrival. And the doctor, Douglas Keys, who’d barely exchanged a word but had lapsed into sullen silence almost immediately after they’d shaken hands.
His secondary conclusion was that two of them genuinely liked him. Medievsky himself, with his professionally detached manner, yet faint grin and quick look. And Efraim Avner, the joker in the pack, the loudmouth. His interest in Purkiss had come across as completely unfeigned.
The rest of them were an unknown quantity, for the time being at least.
Except Wyatt himself. He’d been the last to arrive, like a great actor sweeping onto the stage after the lesser players had been introduced. His grip on Purkiss’s proffered hand had been neither aggressive nor limply defensive. His manner had been entirely what one would expect from a research scientist greeting a journalist who’d come to popularise his work.
But there’d been a directness in Wyatt’s gaze, something he’d allowed to linger for a fraction of a second too long. And in the final instant, there’d been a recognition there, too, and a kind of acceptance.
Wyatt’s eyes had said: I know why you’re really here.
In one glance, Purkiss’s cover was blown.
But it didn’t matter. The cover was meant to provide access, and it had done its job. Now that he was in, all bets were off.
Purkiss lay back down on the bed and allowed fatigue, fumbling and ravening, to claim him.
Four
Semyon Lenilko’s father, Vladimir, had pointed out the Lubyanka to his son for the first time when Semyon was nine.
It was a spring morning in 1981, and father and son had been crossing Lubyanskaya Square on the way to their quarterly visit to Detsky Mir, Moscow’s premier toy store. Semyon had seen the enormous, boxy yellow building on previous trips, but it hadn’t captured his interest in the slightest.
His father halted him with a hand on his shoulder and turned him gently.
‘There,’ Vladimir Borisovich Lenilko said, standing behind his son and pointing. ‘Remember it. And never, ever find yourself surrounded by its walls.’
Even at the age of nine, Semyon detected something in his father’s voice, a subtle trace of bitterness. It was the closest he remembered the old man ever coming to making a statement of defiance. Of subversion, even.
Semyon had liked his father. Had loved him, even. But he’d never really respected him. Lenilko senior had been born during the Great Patriotic War and was therefore too young to have remembered it, or to have any interesting stories to tell about it. He’d come of age in the grey 1960s years of Brezhnev’s early premiership, and had shuffled stoically through life as a lower-middle-ranking accountant in the Department of Agriculture. As a Party member he was entitled to certain perks, but he failed to take proper advantage of them, in Semyon’s estimation, and the family had spent the seventies and most of the eighties in the same crappy apartment overlooking the Kiyevsky Rail Terminal. Like so many of his generation — like so many Russian men, period — Vladimir Borisovich Lenilko had died young, at fifty-nine, destroyed by disappointment and Gold Symphony vodka.
But his words on that spring day in 1981 had stayed with Semyon. Never, ever, find yourself surrounded by its walls.
As a teenager, Lenilko had made frequent pilgrimages to the square just to stare at the building. The awe and dread he felt every time he set eyes on it increased with each visit rather than diminishing. He steeped himself in the Lubyanka’s history: its Neo-Baroque design, its starting days as the headquarters of an insurance company until the Cheka took it over in 1918, its overcrowding during Stalin’s purges. The blank, silent windows had exerted a pull on him which all but compelled him to run headlong towards its doors, like a moth to a torch beam.
Lenilko hadn’t been a rebellious teenager. There’d been no parental authority to rebel against. As he advanced towards the façade of the great building, though, he felt as always the thrill of defiance.
I didn’t take your advice, father. I’m inside its walls every day.
The sentries inside the doors saluted smartly. Lenilko waved back, kicking the snow from his boots and shaking it off his cap. Unlike most other people of his seniority, he didn’t come to work by chauffeured car. His apartment was a twenty-minute walk away, and unless he was called to the office in the middle of the night on urgent business, he made the journey on foot every time, even in heavy snow like today’s.
A female clerical worker scurried out of his way deferentially, even anxiously, as Lenilko approached the inner doors, his electronic swipe card in his hand. He smiled. Natalya told him he was the least tyrannical FSB officer she’d ever met, and Lenilko assumed others saw him that way too. Yet his presence always inspired abject fear in those who didn’t know him.
Some things never changed, even after decades. The terror of the authority figure, and how he or she could wreck one’s life, had been imprinted on the Russian DNA since long before Stalin, or even Lenin.
The building was alive but not yet bustling. It was seven in the morning, the time Lenilko usually started his working day, unless he’d pulled an all-nighter and had slept in the office, when he’d begin work even earlier. He rode the elevator alone to the fourth floor, stepped out into the office suite, its carpet plush and freshly cleaned, its glass and metal surfaces sporting a uniform pin-sharp gleam.
The Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, FSB, was even more Byzantine in its structure than had been its predecessor organisations, the KGB and the FSK. It comprised seven distinct services. Within the Counterintelligence Service, there were in turn seven further directorates or departments. Lenilko worked for the Directorate of Special Activities, in a post he’d held for the last five years. He wasn’t top dog, yet, but he was going to get there. And he would do so before he was fifty years old, perhaps even forty-five. He was now forty-two. Three years didn’t leave him much time, but the pulling off of a major operation could swing it.
Anna and Konstantin were there already, hunched over their desktop computers. Lenilko pushed open the glass doors and swung his overcoat onto the hook.