‘I’m so glad you were able to join us. It is nice to have someone more my own age,’ he replied with a grin. ‘These tours can tend towards the geriatric. I have to be careful not to overdo the walking, but there will be time for wandering around. I don’t pack too much in or people start to flag.’
That’s good, thought Liz. I should be able to get away without being noticed.
They chatted on and off for the rest of the flight. Liz found out that his father, now dead, had been a banker in Gothenburg, and his mother was from Sweden. He’d spent a lot of his childhood there. When his father retired the family had moved to Cambridge and he now lived with his mother in the old family home. He was unmarried.
In return for all this information, she fed in a bit more of her cover story: she had been a primary school teacher in Norfolk until her mother had fallen ill, and had given up work to look after her mother at home in Wiltshire. Norfolk turned out to be a bit of a cover mistake as Curtis knew the county well and wanted to know where she had lived and which school she had taught at.
‘I lived in Swaffham,’ she said, mentally thanking Peggy for her thorough brief, ‘and I taught at a school in a nearby village, but it’s closed now.’ Thankfully he turned out not to know Swaffham, so she was spared deploying her detailed knowledge of the Market Place and surrounding pubs.
By the time they’d arrived in Tallinn and checked into the hotel, it was five in the afternoon local time. Nothing was in the programme until a pre-dinner orientation talk by the Professor at seven, so Liz took the opportunity to go off by herself and reconnoitre the town – and locate where she was due to meet Mischa in two days’ time.
The hotel was in the centre of the old town in what had formerly been a merchant’s house. Liz stood in the street outside for a moment, looking at it and thinking how charming it was with its white-painted walls, gables and steeply sloping red-tiled roofs. Like an illustration in a copy of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, she thought.
The town was busy, full of tourists of various nationalities. As she strolled around she was alert for surveillance but could discern no sign of anyone taking a particular interest in her. She returned to the hotel in time for the talk, confident that her real purpose for being there remained undetected – or as confident, she thought, as you could be in an ex-Soviet republic.
She listened with interest to what Anthony Curtis had to say about the troubled recent history of Estonia – how it had been often overrun, first by the Danes and the Swedes and, more recently, in turn by the Russians, the Germans, and the Russians again. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Estonia had flourished commercially. It had become known for its entrepreneurial ventures in IT, with dozens of start-up companies forming a Baltic version of Silicon Valley. But it was a precarious prosperity. The ethnic mix of the country made it vulnerable to the sort of destabilisation that had taken place in Ukraine.
Liz thought of Mischa who, if the Americans were right, was there to assess what weapons would be needed if the Russians did decide to act; she thought too of the covert CIA Station that Andy Bokus was so anxious to protect. It was clear to her that meddling was already going on here in a big way.
By dinnertime the whole party seemed to know that Liz Ryder had just lost her mother, and everyone was being so sympathetic that she began to feel rather guilty about killing off her remaining parent. The Misses Finlaison showed signs of wanting to mother her themselves, enquiring solicitously where she was going to live and what she would do next. She managed to avoid sitting next to them at dinner and chose a seat next to Major Sanderson, whose wife had temporarily deserted him to join a group of ladies. Anthony Curtis sat on Liz’s other side.
She soon discovered why the Major’s wife had chosen to sit somewhere else. Like most of his generation of middle-class Englishmen, the Major had superficially good manners but a penchant for talking exclusively about himself. Liz relaxed and let her mind wander as, for the better part of two courses, the Major described in detail his long career, which stretched from Aden to Antrim. It was only as he paused to spear his last piece of pork, cooked with potatoes in a briny sour cream sauce, that Anthony Curtis was able to weigh in from Liz’s other side.
By this time she had let her guard drop to the point that when he suggested they go to the bar to try one of the Estonian liqueurs, she agreed. This turned out to be a mistake: by the second glass of something fiery with an unpronounceable name, Professor Curtis was showing unmistakably amorous intentions. ‘It is so good to have someone young here for a change,’ he said dreamily, moving closer to her on the sofa.
‘It’s lovely to be here,’ said Liz, with a mournful smile. ‘But I feel sad about my poor mother. She suffered a lot, you know. It was cancer of the pancreas. Very nasty and painful and nothing could be done for her. They say it’s the silent killer; you can have it and not know until it’s too late.’
When Professor Curtis recoiled slightly, Liz stood up and said tearfully, ‘I think I had better go to bed now. Thank you for such an interesting day.’ And with that she walked mournfully out of the bar, leaving Curtis to finish his drink alone.
32
The following day had a full programme of visits to the sights of Tallinn, led by Professor Curtis. Liz went with the party, not wanting to appear anything other than a normal, interested tourist, and spent the day keeping in the centre of the group, trying not to be left alone with Curtis. He had suggested the previous evening that on the third day, which was a free day for tour members to do what they liked, he might give her a private tour of the city. As that was the day fixed for her rendezvous with Mischa, the last thing she wanted was Curtis hanging around. She needed to prevent him from getting any opportunity to renew his offer.
She was also trying to spot any surveillance, though it was impossible to know where it might be coming from. Both Andy Bokus’s covert Station in Tallinn and MI6’s in Riga knew that she was here, and they also knew her alias and the programme of her tour party. She had agreed this was a sensible precaution in case she got into any difficulties, and she had also been given a method of contacting them. But Liz had insisted that they keep well out of the way, since she didn’t want either Mischa or any of his colleagues who might be watching him to become aware of interest from the other side.
As her party went from church to church, she saw nothing to concern her. The churches were full of tourists grouped round their respective leaders, each no doubt explaining in their own language, as Professor Curtis was in his, how much the styles of architecture here varied, ranging from the elaborate onion domes of the Russian Orthodox churches to the stark simplicity of the Scandinavian Lutheran buildings, with their needle spires pointing to the sky. It was a reminder, said Curtis somewhat portentously, of how occupying regimes may come and go, but religious faith endures. Liz wondered how much of this would survive if Tallinn became the front line of a trial of strength between NATO and a newly aggressive Russia.
In the afternoon the focus changed from religion to politics with a visit to the Hotel Viru, the Cold War tourist hotel, where the rooms were bugged by the KGB. On the twenty-second floor there was a control room for the wiretapping operations, and the party marvelled at the antiquated technology – the enormous tape recorders and the little room at the back with the notice on the door saying Zdes Nichevo Nyet, where listeners had sat with headphones on, eavesdropping on the tourists in their bedrooms.