Cold (27 page)

Now it was Gennady’s turn to be nonplussed. ‘What old man? I’m not interested in an old man. I’ve come about my daughter, Iryna Dozhd.’

‘Dozhd, do you say? They’re looking for a Dozhd, a retired general who’s gone psycho. He needs psychiatric treatment.’

A flicker of unease clouded Gennady’s face.

‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ Oblamov said. ‘I recognise your face from the poster at the station. You’re the psycho they’re looking for.’ Oblamov backed away two feet, his hand inching towards his gun holster.

Gennady, saying nothing, walked slowly back to the Volga, opened the boot, found his rucksack, rummaged through it.

‘Hey you! You come back here. I’ve got to arrest you . . .’ The officer’s voice tailed off as he realised that Gennady was aiming a gun straight at him.

‘I was in the Spetsnaz before they made me a general,’ Gennady said. ‘I came top of my year for sharpshooting, three years in a row. I’m an old man now. Do you want to take the risk that I’ve forgotten my old tricks?’

Oblamov shook his head. ‘Listen, psycho—’

‘I’m not mad. I’m entirely sane.’

‘Listen, General . . . OK, you’re entirely sane. I don’t know anything about your daughter. I can’t help you.’

Gennady waved his gun, suggesting that wasn’t a good thing to say.

‘Tell me about the old man,’ said Gennady. ‘Tell me about him then, instead.’

Oblamov – troubled, anxious, uncertain – came to a decision.

‘If they find out, they’ll make trouble for me,’ he said.

‘Better be in trouble than dead.’

‘I can take you to someone else. I’ll say nothing. But there’s an old woman, hereabouts, she found the body. She can tell you.’

Gennady pondered this for a moment. ‘Do that,’ he said.

Oblamov got inside his Lada police car. Gennady took the passenger seat, his gun held over his lap. They drove along the main road for a short distance and then turned up a dirt track, full of potholes, the Lada bouncing this way and that like a fishing boat in a choppy sea.

‘Screw the minister of transport for not building proper roads,’ said Gennady as the gun almost fell from his fingers.

The officer grinned. ‘Yes, screw him.’ Oblamov glanced at the general and reflected that this guy didn’t seem so crazy.

They pulled up just short of a big sump, now covered in ice, and a few yards farther on stood a poor wooden shack with just a thin trickle of woodsmoke emerging from a tin chimney. They got out and Gennady hid his gun in the pocket of his leather jacket, but he let Oblamov see the shape of it and waggled it at him, just in case.

Ludmilla opened the door, her faced engraved with suspicion. Still, she let them in, sat them down when the fat monster of her cat deigned to give up its rightful place on the chair by the stove, offered moonshine, declined by Gennady, accepted by Oblamov – ‘just a small one, for the road’ – and stared at the two of them.

Oblamov couldn’t bear silences and started huffing and puffing but said nothing sensible. The old lady sneaked a glance at the officer, who hurriedly shook his head. It was comically obvious to Gennady that they knew something and that, unless he worked hard, they were never going to tell him what it was.

‘My name is Gennady Semionovich Dozhd and I am a retired general of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment.’

‘Where were you stationed?’ Ludmilla asked.

‘For much of the time, Afghanistan.’

‘That was a stupid war,’ she snapped.

‘I didn’t start it,’ replied Gennady.

Ludmilla didn’t seem very impressed by this answer or by any general. He was getting nowhere.

From his wallet, Gennady produced a photograph of Iryna, taken last summer. She was wearing a cobalt-blue dress, sleeveless, her image reflected in the still waters of Patriarch Ponds in Moscow, so that you saw two Irynas. What ignited the photograph was that she was laughing at someone else’s joke, her body almost bent double with reckless glee. The photograph captured a young woman, bursting with life, energy, humour.

‘Beautiful,’ said Ludmilla. Oblamov nodded.

Gennady told them some of the story, how Iryna had vanished from her job in Moscow, how he’d followed a lead down to Rostov. In the cemetery, a gravestone with her name on it but, once the coffin had been dug up, not her body inside the grave but the body of a complete stranger, an old lady. Another lead had taken him to Novo-Dzerzhinsky and then on to Oblamov.

‘The officer here has told me that there’s a “Wanted” poster for me, that I’ve gone nuts, that I’m a lunatic, that I need psychiatric help,’ Gennady said. ‘I swear on my daughter’s life everything I just told you is true. I’m not a mental case, just a father looking for his daughter. So, can you help me?’

It was Oblamov who broke the silence first. ‘Tell him, mother. Tell him what we saw.’

The old lady considered Gennady, poured the officer and herself another slug of moonshine, downed hers and began speaking in a low voice: ‘I’m past ninety and I don’t care what they do to me. My neighbour, Pyotr, up the track. They killed him. That happens here, in the countryside. Neighbours fall out over a woman, a pig, too much drinking. But this was different. They poured boiling fat on him. This is the cruellest thing I’ve ever seen and I lived through Stalin’s famine. I call the police, he comes here, and then they call him and order him to write it down’ – Oblamov was examining his boots – ‘as suicide.’

‘The guy who died . . . Pyotr. Was he’ – Gennady hesitated, reaching out for the right word – ‘important? Was he connected?’

‘No. No one is around here. A small farmer – a few cows, some pigs. He hit his wife too much. She ran away, maybe fifteen, twenty years ago. He drank too much, got in a few fights, never did me no harm.’

‘Did anyone take a photograph of the dead guy, what they did to him?’

Gennady had never heard a more conspiratorial silence in all his life.

Ludmilla knelt down, shifted an elderly carpet, lifting up a small cloud of dust, prized up a floorboard and reached inside to find a small wooden box. She took it out, opened it and handed Gennady a roll of film.

‘What’s on this film?’ asked Gennady.

‘Pyotr lying on the floor,’ said Ludmilla, listing the details as if she were playing a child’s memory game. ‘His hands cuffed behind his back. Dead, in a mess of wood, a broken chair. Half naked – naked from the belly down. They’d poured hot fat on his penis, and something else – sugar, I don’t know what. They tried to burn his place down but the fire hadn’t taken. This . . . this is the worst thing I’ve seen,’ and she crossed herself again.

‘Every word is true, General,’ said the policeman. ‘I saw it too, with my own eyes. It’s all on the film.’

‘Why do this? Why kill a lonely old man? Why kill a nobody in this extravagantly cruel way?’

‘There are some sick people amongst us,’ said Oblamov.

‘Yes, maybe you’re right.’

He studied the film canister, holding it in his fingers. The colours on its plastic casing had faded with age and, even as he examined it, the casing cracked open, exposing it to the light.

‘I’ll see if someone can get a picture out of this, but I think the film is too old.’

Ludmilla bit her lip.

‘Is there a photograph of Pyotr alive?’

Ludmilla shook her head. The big fat cat gave out a loud miaow. Time to leave. And then it hit him: ‘I know someone who can draw. If you describe Pyotr to her, she can draw him. That way, I may have something to work with.’

The old lady nodded. ‘Of course.’ Then she added, ‘Oh, I took down the last part of the number plate of the car they came in. Do you want it?’

Gennady could have kissed her. She opened her box again and this time extracted a slip of paper, on it in spidery writing part of the number plate:
EK61
.

‘It was a big black one. Like a box. Foreign.’

‘Did you recognise what make it might have been, granny?’

‘I’m past ninety. No. Don’t ask an old lady such a question.’

Gennady twiddled the piece of paper in his fingers. ‘I’m not sure what I can do with this,’ he said ruefully.

Oblamov was not a forceful man but he made a little wheezing noise. ‘I’ve been a police officer for three decades. It’s about time I started doing some detective work.’

He took out a pen and scribbled three small diagrams in his police notebook. The first was four interconnected rings; the second a circle, quartered, top left and bottom right shaded blue, top right and bottom left unshaded; the third was a circle divided into thirds, a chicken foot the wrong way round.

Ludmilla took an age to make up her mind and then, with an air of complete certainty, she jabbed her finger at the third.

‘Chicken foot, the wrong way round.’

‘Mercedes,’ said Oblamov.

Gennady bowed his head. ‘Mr Sherlock Holmes, I presume.’

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

N
othing. They’d vanished from the surface of the earth. The most sophisticated data-set-analysis tool in human history, powered by a computer net hidden in H-bomb-proof vaults underneath the Allegheny Mountain chain, was hunting in real time through every CCTV image, every passport traffic node, every credit and debit card transaction on the planet – both legally and otherwise available – and had come up with diddly-squat. Worse, he’d banked a lot of his capital with the Director on being able to land the Agency’s technician, the traitor. So far, his investment had not paid off.

Worse still, his private arrangement with Grozhov regarding the absurd Lightfoot had been a high-risk operation. He’d not foreseen that Lightfoot would refuse to take the play and instead exit the game altogether.

The British, thus far, were unhappy at what had happened to Lightfoot but they had no hard evidence to go on. An internal inquiry at Langley would be unfortunate. Dave Weaver dismissed the thought as absurd, nihilistic.

It was three o’clock in the morning and time to go home. He powered down his computer, yawned, and observed himself in the reflection of the screen. His body was rebelling against him. He’d gone to see his doctor, who told him there was nothing he could do.

‘Unless . . .’ said the physician.

‘Unless what?’ he pressed.

‘Unless you’d care to consider retirement.’

Weaver changed his doctor. His rise to the top of the Agency had been long and agonisingly slow. For years, Ezekiel Chandler had blocked his advance, promoted others, sidelined him. Now, with Chandler out, he was at the summit of his power, but people were mocking him to his face.

Weaver revisited the humiliation he had endured the previous evening. It had always been a mystery to him why Chandler, an abstemious Mormon throughout his career at the Agency, had put up with Conor Murphy, whose only constant in life was the attainment, then management of, cirrhosis of the liver. Murphy couldn’t analyse himself out of a paper bag. He had no idea of protocol, of content tabulation, of the proper management of an issue in-house, with an executive summary, notes, recommendations on sensitive matters unminuted. He drank too much, squirted emails without thought for the consequences, generated trouble.

It was true he had been to bad places for the Agency, and then some. The Murphy legend was that he would disappear, go off radar, and then re-emerge weeks later. Once he disappeared for a whole two months, only to surface in Taiwan with the intelligence equivalent of a crock of gold in his hand luggage. The legend was not wholly untrue, but the value of Murphy’s gold was often wildly overstated. He was a chancer. While Chandler had always been subtle and coded in his dislike of Weaver, Murphy had been open in his contempt.

Weaver had finally managed to get the Director to give Murphy the push, when he had been past his sell-by date for a long time, but his leaving do was grim. Weaver had had no choice but to attend. It was expected of him.

Murphy had stood on a table in the Georgetown bar, swaying slightly, like an oak in a storm: ‘I’ve had enough to drink to kill a small horse, so forgive me that what I have to say is in plain English. I’ve been a spy for this agency for almost four decades. I’ve spied for the good of the people of these United States and, much of the time, that’s also meant the good of the people of the world. There have been times when we’ve got – I’ve got – things wrong. For those transgressions, please forgive me. But I did not become a spy in order to elevate to that higher form of being, to become a bureaucrat. The danger is that the trading of influence and power in the office supplants what we’re supposed to be doing, what we’re supposed to be fighting for. Here’s a new form of Murphy’s Law . . .’ He shifted his heft, his fat belly protruding out of his shapeless suit, directly facing Weaver. ‘Better be a spy on the front line than a faceless, halfwit bureaucrat.’

The crowd at the farewell party had gone quiet, faces examining Weaver for a reaction. Weaver had shrugged, knowing that making a fight of it would never be a good move. Better to reply to Murphy, he judged, when no one was taking any notice.

‘So there is our new master,’ said Murphy, suppressing a hiccough. ‘You challenge him to defend himself, and he acts like the thing he really is – a gimp in a gimp suit.’

Cackles of laughter had rippled across the bar, far too strong and uproarious for Weaver’s own piece of mind. Thinking back on that moment was not the way forwards, he told himself.

In the last forty-eight hours Weaver had noticed people – in his management pod, in the canteen, in the executive car lot – had begun to study him, but not with respect and not with fear. They were looking at him as if they knew he was under pressure, that something was not right.

Weaver did not believe that everyone in Langley knew that there could be no deal on the rendition of Comolli, the traitor in Moscow, until the two neutrals arrived in Russia. Nevertheless, he felt under examination for the first time since Chandler had left the building.

Weaver picked up his office phone and dialled a Moscow number.

‘Grozhov speaking.’

‘Anything?’

‘Nothing.’

‘The deal . . .’

‘The deal does not exist until you and your peculiarly conflicted allies in England hand over the assets we have requested. No assets, no deal. Goodbye.’