London, England
Winter was fast asleep in his bed when the phone call came. It was eight a.m., far later than he’d normally be asleep on a working day. He usually set his alarm for six and was at his desk at the JIA office for half seven, unless he was off on one of his many trips around the world.
The previous night had been anything but usual, though. Having found the startling intelligence on Lindegaard that the Russian FSB agent Lena Belenov was his niece, Winter had at first been on a high. The high had quickly faded, though, as he’d contemplated exactly what it all meant. That was when the anxiety had started to build.
What Winter had found meant a lot of the unexplained events suddenly made more sense. He’d never warmed to Lindegaard, and finding that he had a close family connection to an FSB agent was astonishing. Sure, such a connection was entirely legitimate if appropriately disclosed and if their work for their respective organisations was correctly siloed. But Winter didn’t believe that to be the case at all. Certainly he could see no disclosure of the relationship in JIA records – not that he was privy to the committee’s official papers, although he had managed to hack into the archived databases to check.
He had no way of knowing what disclosures Lindegaard had made to the CIA, but if Winter were a betting man, he’d say there had been none. And given Lena Belenov’s connection to Logan’s imprisonment in Russia and the subsequent negotiations with the JIA and the CIA for his release, finally some answers were falling into place.
Just how far did Lindegaard’s role in this sordid mess stretch?
After some hours of quiet deliberation, Winter had ultimately decided that perhaps what he’d found, rather than being a help, may in fact be a huge hindrance. Because he now knew that he, the JIA and everyone else involved were playing one huge game of cat and mouse, and Jay Lindegaard seemed to be at the centre of it all.
Winter was at a loss as to whom exactly he could trust with what he’d found. In the end, he decided there wasn’t a single person he could share the information with. Not until he’d figured out more of the story on his own.
Winter had spoken to Paul Evans twice in the small hours of the night. Winter had said nothing to his agent about Lindegaard and Belenov. It wasn’t something he could just blurt out over a phone line to someone a couple of thousand miles away. Instead, the two men had discussed at great length Evans’s plan for the following day – the meet with Nikolai Medvedev.
It was Evans who had proposed the meeting; he was Medvedev’s handler after all. Winter had okayed it even though he wasn’t one hundred per cent comfortable with the rushed nature of the organisation – despite his reservations, the time was hardly right to be causing needless delays. Evans had been resolute, calm on the phone. Nothing amiss, as far as Winter had been aware.
He wasn’t sure what time he’d finally fallen asleep, in his chair by the computer. Claire had found him like that when she’d returned home sometime after three a.m. A half-hearted argument had followed over just how much of an arsehole he was. His reluctance to fully defend himself against her drunken onslaught had only seemed to make her angrier, culminating in her giving him a ferocious slap across his face. He’d said and done nothing in response.
As angry as she’d got, as close to the brink he could feel their relationship was coming, his mind was too clouded by the task at hand. In the end, Claire had skulked off to bed and he’d followed not long after, passing out within seconds from mental exhaustion.
When the phone rang at eight a.m., Claire had already upped and left for the day without saying goodbye or attempting to wake him. Winter knew he was in the doghouse. He hoped in time he would get the chance to make it up to her. But as he listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, any thoughts he had about Claire and the work he needed to put into their strained relationship were quickly forgotten.
Something had gone badly wrong. The man calling Winter, an asset who was a British expat making a living in Russia as a language tutor to the rich, knew little of the details of what had happened. He’d simply gleaned what he could from news reports about a shooting that had taken place in central Moscow, and from making a few phone calls to his own well-connected contacts. Two things were abundantly clear, though: Nikolai Medvedev was dead, and there was no sign of Paul Evans.
After putting the phone down, Winter immediately tried contacting Evans. No response. The early news reports coming out of Moscow were vague and spurious, simply stating that there had been a shooting incident. No identification of the victim or any perpetrators. Certainly no mention of a missing British spy.
The vagueness wasn’t unusual, given the identity of the dead man – a senior official for the FSB. The Russians would be keeping tight-lipped about that for as long as it suited them. In fact, by the time Winter had left his flat, the news channels in the UK weren’t carrying the story at all. What interest was there in the shooting of a single unknown person in a foreign city?
Once Winter had fought his way across London to the JIA office, though, a whole new mess awaited him. By that point, some three hours after the meet that Evans had planned with Medvedev, the shooting was making headlines not just in Moscow and Russia but on every major TV network in the Western world. And the reports coming from Moscow changed the landscape significantly: Carl Logan – identified by the Russians as a British spy – had been named the number one suspect in Nikolai Medvedev’s murder.