Стелла Римингтон: The Moscow Sleepers

She paused, thinking. Then she continued, ‘One thing about him was that he seemed to be around all the time. If he had family back in Sweden he can’t have seen much of them; he didn’t go away for the summer vacation. I know that because he used to teach the students at the summer school. It’s a big thing here – we run summer schools in lots of disciplines, arts and sciences. They’re for high school kids – teenagers, mainly juniors and seniors, though in our department we often get them younger: fifteen or even fourteen sometimes. Kids with a real flair for computers develop it young. There’s a class going on at the moment. I’ll walk you along to Lars’s office and we’ll pass the lecture room.’

As they left her office, Emerson carried on: ‘We’re very proud of what we do. These are not kids from privileged backgrounds. We give bursaries for poor kids and for kids from developing countries and war zones, if we can reach them. It’s amazing how talented some of them are, even though they’ve had very little formal teaching. And they’re so keen.’

By now they had reached the lecture room door and she stopped to let Fitzpatrick look in through a large glass panel. He saw a room full of children, boys and girls of all races and nationalities it seemed, sitting at computer benches. At the front a young man was writing out lines of code on a white board.

‘How long do they stay?’ he asked.

‘About a month usually,’ she replied, opening the door of a small office. ‘This was Lars’s place.’

‘Thank you for all your help,’ said Fitzpatrick, stepping into the room with Boyd.

There was a note of dismissal in his voice, and Emerson took the hint. ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ she said, looking slightly disappointed. What had her late colleague been up to?

Fitzpatrick had intended to hire a car and drive up to Montreal to see how the Canadians were getting on with their inquiries into the mysterious Ohlson. However, when they returned to Boyd’s office to arrange the car hire there was a message waiting for him. The Canadians had established that Ohlson had flown into Montreal from Helsinki on a Swedish passport the day before he turned up in Burlington. He had stayed the night at the Marriott hotel at Montreal International airport and had hired the blue Volkswagen Passat there the following day. The car was recorded crossing into the United States at 15.30. It returned across the border at 21.40 and was photographed parking at the Marriott at 23:37.

Ohlson returned the car to the rental agency at 10.30 the following morning, checked out of the hotel at midday and flew out of Montreal airport on a flight to Copenhagen that left at 15.35. Photographs, a copy of the passport, copy of the credit card used at the hotel and driving licence were all on their way to FBI HQ in Washington.

‘Well,’ said Fitzpatrick when he’d finished reading, ‘it seems there’s no point my going to Montreal. Ohlson’s flown the coop.’ He looked at Boyd and shook his head. ‘This case is weird and getting weirder. One man’s dead and his supposed “childhood friend” has disappeared. Call me old-fashioned, but it would be nice to meet someone involved with this in the flesh.’

Liz was hanging up her wet raincoat on the back of her office door when her young colleague from the mail room walked in.

‘Lovely day again,’ he remarked. ‘There’s two for you.’ He dropped two brown envelopes on to her desk.

‘Thanks, and it isn’t,’ she replied. She knew what would be in the envelopes. Ever since her visit to Tallinn to meet Mischa the year before, she had been receiving fliers from the hotel she had stayed at, advertising unmissable weekend breaks at knockdown prices. She had used a cover address to go with her cover identity – she had been Liz Ryder, a former schoolteacher whose mother had recently died after a long illness. She had not given the hotel an email address so they were sending all their publicity by mail to the address she had used, where it was forwarded to her at Thames House.

She opened the first envelope; sure enough it was an advertisement for a Christmas break – full Christmas dinner with party hats and crackers, champagne and wine with dinner included. A tour of Tallinn to see the illuminations, plus carol service by candlelight in one of Tallinn’s famous churches. Liz shuddered at the idea and chucked the whole lot in the waste basket.

She slit open the next envelope expecting more of the same but this envelope felt different. Inside it was a picture postcard. The picture on the front of the card wasn’t of Tallinn. It was of a building she had never seen; it looked like an enormous glasshouse – examining it closely she saw it was an enormous glasshouse. When she turned the card over and read the caption, it turned out to be the main tropical greenhouse of the Botanical Gardens of Berlin – or strictly speaking, the Botanischer Garten.

Intrigued, she read the message written on the card in dark ink with slashing strokes:

I thought this looked a bit like St Olaf’s. M

St Olaf’s had been the church in Tallinn where she had met Mischa. But why was he sending her this picture? It didn’t look at all like St Olaf’s church. What was he trying to tell her? Was he in Berlin? That’s where it appeared to have been posted. And how had he got this address?

The last question was the easiest to answer – he could have quite easily found which tour group she was in, found which hotel they were staying in, and it wouldn’t have been too difficult to blag some unsuspecting receptionist to give out the name and address.

But what did this message mean?

The only thing written on the card, other than her name and address, were some numbers at the top, which she had at first taken to be the date the card was written. She looked at them more closely and suddenly understood that they were indeed a date and a time. Four days from now – that was the date. And 09:45 was the time. He was asking for a meeting, and it must be in this building – the greenhouse. Still staring at the card, she noticed that a small squiggle underneath the M, which she had taken to be part of the signature, was in fact a tiny drawing of a cup and saucer. So the meeting must be in the café.

Liz sat up in her chair, her mind racing. Four days – that was enough time; Berlin was a two-hour flight away. But she would have to get her ducks in a row first. There was Geoffrey Fane to get round, and just as urgently, the Americans. According to Fane they would put the kibosh on any attempts to contact Mischa. But it was Mischa who was trying to contact her. Would that make them change their minds? She hoped so.

She picked up her phone and punched in a number. The phone at the other end was picked up immediately. ‘Hello, Miles,’ she said, trying not to sound too excited.

‘That’s one hell of a coincidence if you ask me.’ The image of Andy Bokus loomed over the video feed from Langley, a look of outrage on his face, while Miles Brookhaven watched from a secure conference room in the CIA suite in the Embassy in London. Miles could just make out the bulky frame below the large head, currently clothed in a khaki-coloured summer suit, white shirt and royal blue tie.

When Bokus had been Station Head in London several years before and Miles had been a junior officer, the two had never got on. Now Miles had succeeded him and it rankled with Bokus. Bokus was a former American football player, the grandson of an immigrant, and a Midwesterner; Miles was East Coast, Ivy League and a classic ‘preppy’. They were oil and water – socially, politically, personally. When Bokus disagreed with Miles, Miles knew that it was often out of instinctive antipathy rather than from any actual difference of opinion.