He noted Adrian’s blue suit and black shoes—Parkinson had changed into his gardening clothes as soon as they’d arrived. Adrian’s very stance as he stood on the top of the hill suggested to him someone deeply uncomfortable with the relentless ordinariness of nature. He was someone who needed action, for which the city was an illusory substitute, in his opinion.
Adrian now leaned down and picked up a smooth stone from the grass, though not from any admiration for the fossil that Parkinson saw in it. It was a tool, something to play with, an accessory to Adrian’s central purpose. Adrian handled its smoothness, turning it in his palm.
“There is an additional factor,” Adrian said suddenly.
“Let’s walk down here and come back through the village,” Parkinson said, ignoring the remark. “There’s a very ancient Saxon monument I’d like to show you.”
He could see the impatience flash across Adrian’s eyes as the other man said brusquely, “As you know, Teddy, Bykov has actually been rewarded for killing our officer. With a seat in Russia’s parliament. They’re laughing in our face.”
“Well, I know, I know,” Parkinson said. “But killing MPs isn’t exactly our beat, Adrian.”
“They don’t play by the rules, why should we?”
“What if they retaliate?” Parkinson said. “Suppose they suddenly decide it’s open season on our MPs for instance? I say this just for the sake of argument, you understand.”
“I’m not sure that would be such a bad thing, would it?” Adrian replied.
“Adrian, Adrian…”
Adrian smiled without apology.
“The point I’m making is that if the Kremlin can come here and murder our people, they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it just because they turn their killers into MPs.”
“All right, I take the point. You made the same one in January, I remember.”
They’d reached the bottom of the hill, on the other side from where they’d walked up.
A man and a woman were walking a pair of identical dogs. Parkinson hailed them. It was his way of saying to Adrian that they were back in the real world, a world where spies being murdered wasn’t really of much relevance to anyone.
“We’ll have to see how this might play with the PM,” he said, when the couple had passed. They stood in front of a stile, the crossing of which, Adrian knew, signalled the end of the conversation. “Politicians, Adrian, don’t like other politicians getting murdered, even their direst enemies. And certainly not on their orders. It sets a precedent. Leaves them feeling exposed.” He tapped his stick on the stile. “And they don’t like other politicians getting murdered even if they’re fake politicians,” he added.
“They’re all bloody fake,” Adrian said.
Parkinson chose to ignore another of Adrian’s explosive verbal devices—EVDs, as they were known at SIS headquarters.
“Do we have to include them in the decision, then?” Adrian persisted. “The politicians? Shouldn’t it just be an SIS matter?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to have a think about that.”
Parkinson looked down the lane and pointed. “See that stone there? Saxon monument with a Celtic cross on it. See it? Very strange,” he said.
“I’d appreciate it very much, Teddy,” Adrian said, ignoring the monument, “if you could back me on this.”
Parkinson showed no sign yet of stepping over the stile.
“Any contact with Finn’s old source in Moscow?” he suddenly said instead, looking almost in the opposite direction to Adrian, back up the hill. “High-placed, inside Putin’s coterie, wasn’t he. Someone we could do with now, I’d have thought. Mikhail, wasn’t that it?”
It was a question Adrian would have preferred not to be asked, and Parkinson’s archly vague memory of the most important source Britain had had in living memory irritated him still further.
“Not since Finn was murdered,” he replied. “As you know, Source Mikhail only ever communicated through Finn. That was why Finn was murdered.”
“Pity we didn’t get through to him before Finn’s death,” Parkinson demurred.
Adrian detected the criticism, as he was intended to, he realised.
“That wasn’t our brief, Teddy,” he countered. “In fact, the opposite was the case. Back then we were told that Mikhail was discredited. Told by the politicians, if you remember.”
“But he isn’t discredited now,” Parkinson said.
“We know that, yes. Now. Come on, Teddy, you were there back then. You know we were told to lay off the information from Finn’s source as it was deemed anti-Putin. That’s why Finn left the SIS, walked out on us. He was disgusted. And he was right.”
“You didn’t defend Finn then, I seem to remember.”
“Nobody did. But I am now.”
For a moment, Adrian uncomfortably recalled his last conversation with Finn, under a tree in St. James’ Park in an autumn downpour. It had been a cold, wet October day. Back then, almost three years ago now, he’d practically told Finn he was dead meat, not for leaving the SIS, but for carrying on his investigations solo. And, worse than that, he’d threatened Finn’s woman, the KGB colonel.
As if picking up his thoughts, Parkinson said, “And the woman—his wife, wasn’t she?”
“They married, yes,” Adrian said patiently. “After she defected from Russia.”
“Well?”
“Not a word, not even a whisper. She’s disappeared.”
“Any ideas?”
“We think the French have her.”
“And they’re not talking.”
“No.”
Teddy Parkinson let the silence grow. Eventually he said, “With Finn dead, she’s the last possible hope we have of ever reviving Mikhail.” He looked steadily at Adrian. “We need that source now. Mikhail, Adrian. We really do need him now.”
“I know that, Teddy.”
Parkinson put his hand on Adrian’s shoulder, but it was not a gesture of friendship.
“Find her, Adrian. And when you have, I’ll do all I can to make sure you have free rein with this Bykov. But not until you’ve found the woman. Bargain?”
Adrian gritted his teeth in frustration.
It was the same instruction he’d received from the damn Russian, Sergei Limov, back in Helsinki in January. Find the Russian colonel. But the bitch had disappeared.
“Thank you,” he managed to say. “I appreciate it.”
“Now let me show you this monument,” Parkinson said. “It really is very intriguing.” He stepped with surprising agility over the stile.
Chapter 7
ANNA RESNIKOV WALKED DOWN the slight hill from the house, holding her son’s hand. They paused outside the wrought iron fence at the rear of the house, behind which the tall palm tree in the garden dropped its dead fronds into the road. The boy stooped to look at something on the ground. A trail of ants were crawling up into a hole in the wall like a party of sherpas.
They often stopped here on the two-hundred-yard journey to the square, where the boy’s crèche was situated. The place held some magic, some child’s attraction that was important to him. She let go of his hand and watched him as he squatted and stared at something in the road. Sometimes he picked up a bug that crawled slowly across their path, or just watched the ants that lived under the holm oak that had split its way up through the tarmac. She liked his curiosity. It echoed her own and his father Finn’s. And it made her even more watchful herself.
It was her birthday. She was thirty-eight. Finn would have been fifty, she thought, and she smiled at the memory of her grandmother once chiding her to find a man her own age.