Anastasia woke up to feel the old woman prodding her with her stick. She was stiff and cold and it was hard to open her eyes. When she did open them she thought there must be something wrong with her vision because the room was swimming with slow-moving coloured lights. She blinked and blinked again then spotted Igor at the far end of the room setting down a lantern and realised the lights came from about twenty other lanterns, all rather crudely made and with the same delicate propeller mechanism driven by a candle’s heat. Realising that the lanterns must be his and were perhaps even made by him, she smiled and clapped. He was delighted and so was Olga, who proffered an old metal flask and jerked her chin up to tell Anastasia to drink. She took two mouthfuls of a thick dark liqueur, possibly made from plums or apricots. It was delicious and warmed her and made her head spin. She lay back on the pile of rugs and old curtains to watch the lights, which reminded her of a childhood experience at an aquarium. Igor came over to take a stool by Olga’s feet and she stroked his hair. She wished she could talk to them and find out why they were out in the middle of the forest living such a strange life on their own. Igor looked so happy at that moment and she wondered what would become of him when Olga was gone.
The candles began to burn down and the lights stopped moving. Olga found a musty-smelling quilt, which Anastasia spread on the floor then wrapped around her to protect against draughts. The old woman disappeared to another room with Igor following. The last candle flickered and died and she was left in darkness, listening to the wind tearing through the pines at the back of the house. She slept.
She became aware of someone shouting. The stream of angry Russian continued and then there was a gunshot. She sat bolt upright, untangled her legs from the quilt and felt for the gun. It had gone. The pockets of her jacket had been emptied and nothing but a few smaller shells were left. She stuffed them back in, put the jacket on and crab-walked towards the two windows at the front of the house. It was getting light but the sun had not yet risen. She edged to the side of the window and peeped out. Her heart was thumping. The shouting was coming from the old lady, although Anastasia couldn’t see her. She slipped to the second window and saw two men standing in front of a car. They were laughing, but she noted they also had their hands in the air. One she recognised from the compound. She went to the other side of the window and saw Olga, in a red patterned shawl and green baseball cap, standing squarely on the wooden terrace with the gun pointed at the men. Igor was nowhere to be seen. Her diatribe did not cease, which the men thought was a huge joke. The one Anastasia recognised looked as if he were about to corpse. The old lady took the short flight of steps down from the terrace to an area of wild dead grass and began to walk towards the men. She looked crazy but her step did not falter and the gun in her hand remained quite steady. She went a few paces then spread her feet, threw back her head and let out a cry that pierced the forest’s quiet like nothing Anastasia had heard before. It was the scream of a banshee and, if she’d heard it out in the woods, she would have been terrified. It seemed to go on, circling the trees for seconds, and some of the fairy-tale dread that Anastasia momentarily felt seemed to affect the two men. But the smirk soon returned to their faces and they continued mocking the old lady.
With a throaty growl she now ordered them to do something – probably to get back into their car and return to wherever they’d come from. One shook his head and replied defiantly, at which Olga fired two shots, hitting both headlights without even bringing the gun up to aim. This accuracy was remarkable, but Anastasia was more surprised that Olga didn’t have to reload. Only then did it occur to her that the protrusion under the gun might be a magazine.
The young woman in the photograph was back in action and handling the weapon with relish. The men, even though they were probably armed, now understood that she would be able to shoot them before they could use their weapons and began to back away to their car. Olga let off another shot that made the driver’s wing mirror explode. They scrambled into the car, started it and, not being able to turn on the track, which was almost completely overgrown, began to reverse erratically. Olga’s fun was not over yet. She fired three more times and brought the gun up for a final shot to shatter the windscreen.
When she returned, looking wild and flushed, there was no question in Anastasia’s mind that the men had been there because of her. She realised she had to go, but she must first find out where the nearest civilisation was, a place where someone owned a phone. It was impossible to describe by gesture and she ended up drawing a picture of a row of houses and a man holding up a phone. It wasn’t much better than the drawings done by the refugee children in the camp at Lesbos. Olga, who had by now lost the exhilaration of battle, looked bored and shouted for Igor, who appeared from the kitchen and came over to tug at Anastasia’s jacket. She was being told to go. She made to take the gun but Olga raised it and said firmly, ‘Nyet!’ There wasn’t anything Anastasia could do and, besides, Olga made a good point by gesturing in the direction of the track that the men might return and she’d need protection. Anastasia took the rest of the shells from her jacket and held them out but then withdrew her hand and made an eating motion – she would exchange bullets for food to take with her. The old lady nodded and said something to Igor, who returned to the kitchen, and very soon she was given a plastic bag containing bread, water in an old water bottle and a pot holding some of the previous evening’s soup, and ushered from the door.
She made one last attempt to find the way to a village by showing her drawing to Igor, but he just smiled and shook his head uncomprehendingly. He led her a little way into the woods, to the path they’d used the day before, then took his leave regretfully. Her only choice now was to return to the road.
In the seaside cottage, before his hosts were up, Samson made Naji coffee and found some bread in Harland’s freezer that he warmed in the oven. Naji then took up a position by the window; he said the wifi was best there. He looked up when Samson handed him the toast and jam. ‘It’s beautiful here.’
‘Very,’ said Samson, looking out on the pristine morning and the glassy sea. ‘I’d like to own one of those little boats down there – the blue one.’ Naji nodded. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Looking at groups he gives money. Is possible to divert money, maybe?’
‘Not even you can hack a bank, Naji.’
Naji grinned. ‘Possible other way. I work on this today.’
‘You okay?’
Naji nodded, now fully absorbed in what he was doing. A few minutes later he looked up. ‘Mr Hisami has a lot of emails overnight. If I open, he will know he is being watched. But this one he has read.’ He brought the laptop over to Samson and set it down. It was from another numeric email address. There was no message, just a black-and-white photograph of a woman in a dark shirt speaking into a microphone on the desk in front of her. In the foreground some men were seated, their heads turned to the woman, their backs to the camera. A digital clock on the wall above the woman’s head showed the time as 02.24. Along the bottom of what was evidently a video still, the time was shown as 2.28.53 and the date as 03.23.95. It was impossible to identify the woman or the men, but Samson knew that Hisami would understand what the scene meant, and he was almost certain that the woman in the photograph was Denis’s dead sister, Aysel. There was something so familiar about the way she wore her hair – she never lost the parting on the left side.
Samson ignored one of his phones vibrating on the table for a few seconds more while he looked at the photograph, then answered. A familiar voice rasped at the other end – Vuk Divjak, the man he’d texted earlier without expecting a response. Vuk was a Serb who had helped in the search for Naji in Macedonia and was connected to a range of Balkan low-life. ‘I come now with disco pussies – Lupcho and Simeon. We driving into the night-time without the stopping and we are now in goddam, bastard country Litvanija.’
‘Lithuania.’
‘Yes, that is that which I am saying – Litvanija.’
‘So you’re five or six hours away from Tallinn?’
‘Fewer hours in Simeon’s car.’ Samson was aware of the hum of a powerful engine in the background.
‘I’ll send the map reference for a rendezvous from another phone. Keep me up to date with your progress. My guess is that you’ll be here by about two.’
‘I speaking to you when we enter Estonija in few hours,’ said Vuk, and hung up with a grunt. Samson wasn’t encouraged by the news that he was bringing Lupcho and Simeon, who were both involved in the early stages of the search for Naji. They were basically hired killers. Their shady appearance was grounds enough for ejection by any alert border police, though in the last twenty hours they’d crossed Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland without trouble. He sent the rendezvous to Vuk and returned to look at the photograph on Naji’s screen.
Another call came in on one of his other phones. It was Zillah Dee. Samson put up a hand to stop Naji making noise at the coffee machine.
‘The truck driver’s information checked out. The place was exactly as he described – a hundred and seventy kilometres north of the city of Pskov in dense forest, with very little human habitation anywhere nearby. We got there at 3 a.m. local. It was burned down. The main building was levelled by fire and the place was deserted. The ruins were still smouldering.’
‘Were they destroying evidence?’
‘No, another building was left untouched, a guard hut with eight bunks. That was vacated – no sign of possessions but a lot of food and fresh milk.’
‘What happened?’
‘No telling. It’s wild country. No towns, no locals, no witnesses. We did find the grave they dug for her, which complies with your description of what you saw on your phone. It was full of water and they left a new excavator right there in the middle of the forest. But there’s no sign of her. Nothing. My people have searched the area thoroughly in the last few hours. I don’t know what to say. It’s a big goddamn mystery. There’s another thing. I just got off the phone with Jonathan – my top guy out there. They heard gunfire an hour ago, maybe six shots in the space of a minute or two. Might be a hunter. They got a fix and they’re investigating that right now.’
‘How are you going to proceed?’
‘I’ll keep two of my people there – that’s on the house. But the whole situation with Denis isn’t good. His plane’s been grounded. He’s way overleveraged, got a lot of debt that no one knew about – not even Jim Tulliver – and it looks like he’s going to lose a real big slice of his empire. In addition to those problems, he’s got another court appearance today and it isn’t looking good. They’re going after him with new evidence.’
Samson was silent for a few moments. ‘Look, I’ll get you the money if we need to keep your people there. I’ll find a way.’
‘As I say, this is on me. And I know how much it means to you. But after a couple of days, I have to pull out. It’s not just that we can’t afford to pay for this ourselves. I have other work for them, so it’s a double loss to the company.’
‘I’ll go the distance for a few days.’
‘Thanks.’
‘One other thing,’ he said. ‘Can you have someone look at the bank-account activity?’
‘That costs a lot of money, but I’ll see what I can do.’ Then she rang off.
Without looking up, Naji said, ‘I heard what she said.’
Samson didn’t respond. He went through a sliding door to the patio, lit up and looked out across the bay at the small boats that hadn’t been brought ashore and chocked up for the winter. There was no guarantee Anastasia was alive. She might have escaped, but she couldn’t survive in that forest for very long, even if Crane’s people hadn’t yet hunted her down. The silence from the kidnappers could mean anything. She was already dead; they’d lost her and were in no position to make demands; or they didn’t have to continue with the pretence that she would be returned, because they knew Crane had completed his business in Tallinn. But the video still of Aysel, whatever that meant for Hisami, didn’t fit with the last solution because they clearly still needed to threaten Hisami. There would be no purpose to this if they had achieved all they wanted in Tallinn.
As he stubbed his cigarette out, Samson warned himself that he might have to accept he’d never see her again, even though there was another part of him that was still convinced she would survive.
He phoned the car-hire company to ask about the white Porsche like Crane’s he’d seen there the previous day, and it turned out to be available. He booked it and paid with a card. ‘Have we got a printer here?’ he said when he went back inside. Naji looked blank. ‘Maybe in the studio,’ said Samson. They found one, connected it to Naji’s laptop through the wifi and checked it worked.
Samson showed him a photograph he’d taken on his phone outside the bar. ‘Can you see if you can reproduce this?’
‘Maybe with best paper,’ he said.
Samson caught the expression on his face. He sat down, reached over and patted the top of his hand. ‘I am going to do everything I can, Naji. She’s as important to me as she is to you – believe me.’
‘Best person I meet in my life,’ he said, looking away to the sea. ‘In Lesbos she helped me and in Macedonia she helped me. In Germany she helps all my family. I am not here without her.’
Samson smiled, got up and squeezed his shoulder.
‘It’s an odd way of saying it, but I agree – I am not here without her either.’
Harland came in looking less than happy but he brightened when Naji offered to make him coffee.
‘There’s something I need,’ said Samson.
‘I imagine there is.’
‘You didn’t go into Leipzig to lift Abu Jemal all those years ago without this particular item.’
‘We were fighting the Cold War. It was an officially sanctioned operation by Western intelligence services, for Christ’s sake.’
‘We’re fighting a war now. It’s a war against the subversion of Western democracies, which is more dangerous than anything the communists pulled off.’
Harland groaned. ‘Oh God! I don’t need a bloody lecture from you, Samson. You’re doing this for your friend.’
‘Still, I need at least three guns, maybe four,’ he said quietly.
‘I have to go to town. Meet me at the back of the house in Tallinn in two or three hours. And bloody well phone before you arrive.’
Samson left instructions about the second Porsche that was about to arrive from the rental company with a tip for the driver, then departed for Tallinn.
It was less than an hour before he spotted a hardware and camping store in the northern outskirts. There he bought rope, duct tape, glue, black paint spray, two short lengths of heavy steel piping, a shovel, a hunting knife, torches and a sleeping bag, not knowing whether he’d need any or all of it. He charged it all on his card and went to collect money wired by Tina to the Danske Bank. He called Harland at ten thirty, at ten forty-five and got an answer only at eleven, whereupon he went to meet him at the rear of his house. Harland appeared in the street in an anorak with a spiked mountain walking stick, having left by the front entrance of his house. He was in a better mood than he had seemed to be on the phone and Samson wondered if the old spy was actually enjoying his return to the business. He gave Samson a crooked smile. ‘I’ve had that bloody tick Nyman there for the last three quarters of an hour. Couldn’t get rid of him.’
‘What did he want? Were you followed?’
‘Of course I bloody wasn’t. Nyman thinks that Crane still has much to do and he doesn’t want him disturbed. He’s told me to tell you to lay off. He was appealing to my patriotism and invoked the British Foreign Secretary. He forgets that, these days, no one gives a solitary shit what the Foreign Secretary or what Her Britannic Majesty’s government think about anything. He wanted to know where you were. Said I hadn’t seen you and you’d gone east, possibly crossed over to Russia. He’s struggling to keep up and he’s got no help from the locals.’ Harland seemed pleased about this. ‘Where’s your car?’ Samson pointed downhill and they moved off, Harland using his stick to spear the gaps between the cobbles.
‘I’ve got help coming from the south,’ said Samson. ‘Three Balkan ruffians. I’ve used them before and they’ll only be here a very short while. I don’t imagine they’ve attempted to smuggle weapons across the six or seven different borders, so I’ll have to provide them with some.’
They drove to the southern suburbs and parked outside a house with a white picket fence, an impressive cord of wood under a shelter and an old camper van in the yard. Johannes, the Dutchman living in the house with a number of dogs and a young Sri Lankan wife, was a licensed dealer of hunting weapons with a sideline in fly rods, which was legal, and handguns and automatic pistols, which wasn’t. Samson bought two Glock Compacts and a Sig Sauer, plus ammunition, for €2,250. After a beer and having listened to a number of fishing stories, he and Harland left with the guns in a supermarket bag.
‘Odd character,’ said Samson as they got into the pick-up.
‘You can say that again. His main business is renting out fishing lodges with women. It’s a great business. Very little fishing is done, except by the women, one or two of whom have become excellent with a trout rod.’
On the way back to the city centre, he told Samson to make a couple of sudden detours. ‘What’s up?’ asked Samson, searching his wing mirror.
Harland took his time to answer. ‘You should know that someone is interested in what you’re up to, and I’m not talking about Nyman. My pal at KaPo says you’ve been followed while you’ve been here. A third party, they think. They don’t know who.’ That made sense, Samson thought, with the men at the hotel and the armed individual who gave the two amateur thugs a beating outside the bar. ‘Could be the Russians,’ Harland said slowly. ‘Might be the Americans, though I doubt it, and I suppose you can’t rule out your friend Crane.’
Samson spent the next few hours recceing the streets around the bar and timing the ride from Crane’s villa to the restaurant he habitually ate at and then to the bar. He received a call from Zillah Dee as he finished the final run and stopped to speak to her.
‘She got out and she’s in the woods somewhere. My two guys traced the gunfire I told you about to a house in the back of beyond where she stayed the night. They aren’t certain what happened because the old woman was crazy and threatened them with a hunting rifle. But they talked her down. Seems she fired at two men looking for Anastasia, which gave her a chance to escape. So we are actively looking in that area.’
‘You’ll tell me immediately if they find her.’
‘Of course.’
‘But I’m going to assume you won’t find her and I will proceed with my operation.’
‘I’m with Denis. He doesn’t want you to do anything until we have definite news.’
‘Zillah, you’ve got a couple of people searching for her in terrain they don’t know. You said there was a guardhouse with several bunks. That means they’ll have a lot of men looking for her. And Anastasia’s going to be in pretty bad shape.’
‘We’ll find her.’
‘I’m glad to hear that, but what if you don’t? What’s the back-up plan? There isn’t one, right? I hear Denis has another play – what is it?’
‘You can ask him.’
‘I will, because I know he’s praying they keep their word and let her go. Does that sound a reasonable expectation, after what they’ve done? Does it? No, it fucking doesn’t, Zillah. It sounds like the same shit that got her into this mess.’
‘Can you stop yelling at me for one second? Denis wants to talk to you. It looks like he may go back to jail for a few days. And that’s a problem in more ways than one. Samson, I know this means a lot to you but, for Christ’s sake, keep your cool.’
He took no notice. ‘Did you have any luck with the bank accounts?’
‘Yes, I’ll send you the data.’
As she walked the phone to Hisami, Samson heard New York’s soundtrack, the whoop-whoop of a patrol car, people leaning on their horns, the crash of a dumpster being lowered on to the street.
Hisami came on. ‘Hello, Paul.’
‘Denis.’
‘We need you to sit on your hands. We think we’re going to find her. And if we don’t and they do, I have an alternative plan. Do nothing to endanger my wife’s life. That’s what I am telling you.’
‘Denis, I didn’t put her where she is. You did. If she doesn’t come out of that forest, I’ll continue with my operation and it’ll all be on me.’
‘You have no idea what you’re dealing with.’
‘Crane is stalling for time. They don’t give a damn about honouring an agreement with you because there isn’t one. They’ll keep her alive just so long as they need to. If Zillah’s men get to her first, there’s nothing to worry about, but if Crane’s people find her out in the woods, you can forget your back-up plan.’ He remembered the video still in Hisami’s email inbox. ‘They’ve got something else, haven’t they? And you’re afraid they’ll use it?’
Hisami didn’t answer.
‘It’s your sister,’ said Samson. ‘They’re threatening to reveal something about her past?’
At length, he said, ‘Yes, but it’s really not the point. Anastasia is what I care about.’
‘And you think we’d be raising the stakes by taking Crane.’
‘Yes, and they will respond,’ said Hisami.
‘It’s a paradox, Denis. If you don’t raise the stakes, you’ll be gambling with your wife’s life. It’s as simple as that. These people have killed multiple times. Crane is our insurance policy. If we’ve got him, they can’t kill her if they find her.’
‘This is not something you can gamble on.’
‘But that’s the game you joined, Denis, a game of the highest stakes. So let’s hope Zillah gets to her first.’ There was nothing more to say and he hung up.