The events on the rail bridge didn’t become clear to Samson until after he had received surgery for a bullet wound in the shoulder and the hole in his chest where the bullet had exited four inches below his clavicle on its downward path to Anastasia. Harland came into his room wearing a large square bandage at the back of his head that covered the cut he had received when he was bludgeoned at the door of the observation post. He said hello with a slightly sheepish smile and dragged a chair over to Samson’s bed.
‘All right, then?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ said Samson.
‘She’s still asleep,’ Harland said. ‘She’s been out for a straight twenty-four hours. Utterly exhausted. But she’s going to be fine. Hisami has been informed, but he has a fresh set of difficulties.’
Samson ignored this. He’d got Anastasia out and he didn’t give much of a damn about Hisami’s problems. ‘Where’s Naji?’
‘With Ulrike. He’s required to extend his stay in the country by KaPo. Ulrike, needless to say, is furious with me, so I’m rather glad of Naji’s company at home. Extraordinary boy. He’s been teaching her the Arab flute.’ He grunted. ‘Oh yes, Vuk sent this in for you.’ He proffered Vuk’s battered silver flask. Samson took it with his right hand and poured a little slivovitz into his mouth. ‘We have a lot to get through. Where do you want to start?’ Harland continued.
‘I’ve been sitting here wondering how they traced us, but of course it was the phone – the Carabinieri gave the number to them and someone in Italian intelligence traced it. That’s how they found me in the car park in Naples.’ He looked out over the roofs of Narva, now lightly dusted with snow. ‘Dumb of me not to realise.’
Harland’s eyes twinkled agreement. In the cold winter light his skin was a ghostly white and he looked his age. ‘How’s your head?’ asked Samson.
‘It’s fine, just a small cut, and I wasn’t unconscious for long. It turned out that being set upon by your Italian mobster friends worked out very well for us. Because they disarmed Vuk and me and tied us up with the guards, we couldn’t possibly be accused of committing any crime.’
‘Except the small matter of the kidnap of Adam Crane?’
‘Doesn’t seem to be a priority to the police – they let Vuk go back to Serbia this morning. The intelligence services are keen to talk to Naji, as are MI6. Things have broken well for us, Samson.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, for one thing, no weapons found on any of us. And there was nothing to tie either of the vehicles to the kidnap and murder outside the bar.’
‘But the bodies on the bridge?’
‘There were none. The Russians collected their dead. And the Italians wiped the CCTV footage of the incident from the system, though they used it right up until they left. In fact, the infrared camera was the thing that saved you and Anastasia because they could see exactly what was happening – we all could. By that time, I’d come round.’
‘And where the hell did Naji come in?’
Harland shook his head in amazement. ‘He just walked in, bold as brass, looking for me, and they didn’t know quite what to make of this lad with an open laptop in his hands. Luckily, one of them had good English.’ Samson remembered the man in the car park who spoke for the Mafia boss Esposito. ‘Just at that moment, we saw you had been shot and a stocky fellow – Bukov – emerge from the shadows. The Italians had got their man and weren’t interested, but Naji explained that he was on the point of breaking into one of the bank accounts – all he needed was the small iPad and Crane’s palm print. They knew about the bank accounts so they were inclined to believe that this might be possible, especially as Naji showed them a lot of information on his laptop that seemed authentic. He bought your lives for the whole amount in one bank account – €2.2million.’ Harland waited for this to sink in. ‘It was extremely fortunate that we took him along for the ride.’
‘He’s some piece of work,’ said Samson.
‘A fast talker, very persuasive and very clever – a natural for our trade.’
‘And where are they now?’
‘The Italians? Oh, I should imagine they’ve taken their friend’s jacket back to Naples. Two men matching their description boarded a plane to Frankfurt early yesterday morning.’
Samson poured a little more of Vuk’s slivovitz into his mouth. ‘And Gil Leppo – what happened to him? Before my surgery Macy Harp told me he had lost a kidney but was expected to survive.’
‘He’ll wish he hadn’t. He’s the subject of several criminal investigations for fraud, money-laundering, wire fraud, conducting illegal arms deals from United States soil and sex with an underage girl and he’ll be arrested on his return to the United States. Macy filled me in this morning. He was working with Crane from early on. The reason he was in Estonia was because Hisami had found out enough about the abuse of a minor and the arms deals to blackmail him to beg for Anastasia’s life, which we now know was a hopeless endeavour. Crane had already given the order to kill her, as well as arranging the release of the video of Aysel Hisami.’
Harland took out a phone, poked at the screen and held it up so Samson could see. The still of the woman in fatigues who he’d seen in Hisami’s email was now animated and in the clip she glanced up to the ceiling. Samson found himself looking at the young Aysel Hisami, as he knew he would. She was probably no more than twenty and was very striking, with a fiercely handsome face. A caption crawled across the bottom of the footage: ‘Aysel Qasim – also known as Dr Aysel Hisami, sister of billionaire Denis Hisami, confesses to American investigators her part in the attack on a Turkish border post in south-eastern Turkey carried out in 1993.’
The interrogation that followed was carried out in Kurdish. Samson saw Aysel nod candidly at the two men as they asked questions. At the critical point, subtitles had been added. ‘Can you explain what part you took in the action?’ Onscreen, Aysel felt in her pockets for something. A man with his back to the camera leaned forward and offered her a cigarette. She lit it and blew the smoke towards the ceiling, then looked at the interrogator. ‘I drove one of the vehicles.’
‘And were you yourself involved in the attack?’
She shook her head and took another drag on the cigarette.
‘But you were armed. Did you use your weapon?’
‘When the army returned fire, yes.’
‘Did you kill anyone?’
She gestured with the cigarette. ‘Maybe – I cannot say for certain. This was a battle and several people were killed. There were many casualties on our side. I helped two of our wounded fighters escape.’
‘And this was an action with the PKK?’
She shrugged a yes.
‘So you confirm that at this period you were with the PKK, not the PUK?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And your brother, was he a member of the terror group?’
She paused. ‘You ask my brother about his life. You talk to Karim.’
‘We have,’ said the interrogator.
‘What he tells you is the truth. He always tells the truth.’ She stubbed out the cigarette half smoked. ‘Karim is too proud to lie.’
‘You confirm that you were a member of the PKK and took part in several actions, which resulted in the deaths of Turkish citizens?’
She shook her head several times and continued speaking for a few seconds longer, but there the sound and the subtitles ended. Samson said, ‘It does what it was meant to do – implicates Denis and makes things much harder for him.’ He paused for a beat. ‘And for Anastasia, too: it’s not going to be easy to run a humanitarian operation that’s named after a terrorist.’
‘Mandela was a terrorist at one time,’ said Harland. ‘And she only admits to firing back at Turkish troops. That’s hardly terrorism. If they’d got anything worse, they would have used it.’
‘But she was with the PKK – that matters. All those months I was looking for her, I had this sense that she’d been more closely involved in active combat than Denis ever told me. The risks she took on the front line three years ago wasn’t the behaviour of someone who’d never seen action.’ He stopped and looked out of the window, Syria and the knowledge of Aysel’s appalling end flickering in his mind. ‘Where’s Denis? Still in jail?’
‘Yes, and if he is released, he’s not going to be allowed to leave the United States until the whole business is settled.’
‘Have Anastasia and Denis talked?’
Harland shook his head. ‘He’s still banged up, no access to a phone.’ They were silent for a few moments. Samson closed his eyes. ‘You can’t go to sleep yet,’ said Harland. ‘There’s much more. There’s Peter Nyman …’
His eyes flashed open. ‘Jesus, yes! And Sonia bloody Fell said I shot him.’
‘She’s withdrawn that. Nyman was only grazed – a fuss about nothing. But you won’t have any more trouble from him for some time, I suspect. Nyman and Fell were acting completely outside their remit. They had told SIS nothing and achieved even less. He has seriously angered his superiors by failing to give them the big picture. It’s the stuff he’s paid to do, but he kept all of it to himself. Now, the Kaitsepolitseiamet – an Estonian government intelligence agency – has scooped SIS and they have to beg for the material, so that’s pissed them off royally.’
‘You gave it all to KaPo?’
‘Of course! My friends have cut us a lot of slack over the last few days. They needed a reward. Naji has agreed to share everything he’s got on the groups, their finance and all the rest of it. As soon as you’re out of here, we’ll meet for the debrief. You should get some rest – you look bloody awful.’
He rose and did an odd thing with his shoulders and neck.
‘I’ll leave you Vuk’s flask to see you through the night.’ He stopped and laid a hand on his good arm. ‘You won, Paul, you won.’
‘Couldn’t have done it without you.’
‘It was you, Samson. You brought her back.’
Two days later at eight in the evening Samson arrived at the Harlands’ seaside cottage, with a police escort, because the authorities believed he might still be at risk. Anastasia had arrived in very similar circumstances the day before.
Harland was making soup – apparently, a speciality of his – at the stove. He lowered a small silver ladle from his lips, greeted Samson with a wry smile and explained that Anastasia was upstairs sorting through clothes she could borrow during her enforced stay in Estonia, occasioned by the security services, who wanted to interview her a second time, and the need for a new US passport. Earlier in the evening she had spoken to Hisami, who was now out of detention but was still confined to his apartment. It was around that time that Samson noticed he’d missed a call from Denis, followed by a text that thanked him and wished him a speedy recovery. Samson spared himself the embarrassment of returning the call and talking to Hisami in person. As long as Hisami paid what he owed Macy Harp and Zillah Dee and all Samson’s expenses, they were quits.
Naji had bobbed up from the table when he entered then seemed not to know quite what to do or say and returned to his computer. ‘How’re you doing, Naji?’ asked Samson when he was settled with a glass of wine.
‘Good,’ he said, and told him about some work that he had been asked to contribute to at the university – his first job as a research assistant. He was bubbling over with it.
Samson listened and said quietly, ‘Thank you, Naji.’
‘It is not a problem for me to save your life. I am getting used to it.’
Anastasia came down in a big black polo-neck sweater and a grey skirt. They kissed and made oddly formal enquiries about each other’s injuries, yet much more passed between them – a mute wonder that they were still alive, as well as a kind of helpless acknowledgement of their love for each other. The five of them sat down to dinner, Harland having taken soup to the armed officers who were guarding the house. Ulrike raised her glass in silence to the table, directing just a hint of reproof to her husband, who replied with a squeeze of the eyes that meant something to both of them. She smiled.
The wine, the warmth and the enormous sense of relief affected Samson, who staggered to his feet forty-five minutes later and said he must sleep, which he did in a neat white bedroom where there was a wooden half tester bed and a nightlight in a frosted glass jar.
In his dream he was with Anastasia, back on that huge black bridge slung between two worlds. The waters of the River Narva had risen impossibly high and lapped the structure, threatening to sweep them away. He couldn’t move. He was calling out. Then he became aware of a hand stroking his cheek, the back of a hand, moving in a particular way. He opened his eyes and saw in the candlelight a face in shadow and the blur of a white robe. ‘Thank you for being with me: thank you, dear Samson,’ she said. She kissed his forehead, lingered for a few seconds, during which the scent of soap reached him, then her finger ran down to find his lips and she bent again to kiss him, saying, ‘Thank you,’ as her lips touched his.
‘Stay,’ he said. ‘I’m awake now. What time is it?’
‘Two. I couldn’t sleep.’ She kissed him again and climbed in beside him so she was lying on his right side and they did not touch each other’s injuries. They held hands and looked up at the shadows on the ceiling made by the patterns in the frosted candle glass. It reminded her of Igor’s lamps and she told Samson about the elfin boy and the old partisan lady out in the woods. Then they lay, more or less wordless, until she said, ‘It’s like we’re being repeatedly shipwrecked together – only you and I know what we’ve been through. All that terror!’
‘The ultimate nakedness,’ said Samson.
‘You remember I said that?’
He looked at her in the half-light and nodded. She struggled out of her nightie and stood for a moment. There was a large bandage just below her right shoulder. She was incredibly thin – she said she’d lost twelve pounds and dropped a whole size. She stripped the covers back and, holding on to the bed post for balance, straddled him and leaned forward so her breasts pressed against his chest and she was looking into his face. ‘I need a gambler in my life,’ she whispered.
‘I’ve given up,’ he said.
‘You’re still a gambler. You took so many huge risks! How can anyone just decide to kidnap a man off the street? I mean, who does that?’
‘It was the only thing I could come up with.’
‘I’m glad you did, and I am so, so glad to be here with you. It’s just the most perfect sensation in the world. I love the smell of you and that funny little-boy look of excitement in your eyes when you think you’re going to have sex.’ She straightened and moved down and let him inside her. ‘I love you, Samson, but God you’re infuriating. You’re so obstinately you!’
‘You’ve said all that before. Please stop talking and kiss me,’ he said.
‘Of course! And now I’m going to have to do all this by myself, I suppose.’
‘You suppose right. I’m hardly in a position to do anything with this.’ He jerked his chin towards his bandaged and bound arm. Then she began to move and they found the wonder of the first days in Venice again.
The next day, the team from KaPo – all of them, it seemed, around Samson’s age, or younger – arrived, together with a whey-faced individual from British GCHQ who was just about tolerated.
Samson abruptly changed his mind about Denis Hisami’s determination to expose Crane’s operation. He realised he had been so focused on freeing Anastasia that he hadn’t fully absorbed the implications of what lay in Misak’s dossier, or the blizzard of discoveries made by Naji. Hisami had stumbled on the project to destabilise Europe with Russian money channelled through a respectable American start-up and had gone ahead and exposed it all, with the gravest consequences for himself and Anastasia. Of unprecedented scale and wickedness, the operation was now the priority of all Europe’s intelligence agencies and KaPo had distributed the relevant evidence for each territory to react to the threats that faced them.
The media blackout on Crane’s demise and what had come to pass on Narva’s rail bridge had allowed them a little time to round up the key suspects and freeze assets before the networks were properly alerted to the implications of Crane’s disappearance. As the head of the French DGSI – the General Directorate for Internal Security – later observed, the response of the European agencies to the networks of violent right-wing extremists was almost exactly the same as three years before, when a Syrian boy named Naji Touma produced a hoard of intelligence on IS. But no one appreciated Naji’s vital role in this affair because, while Samson and Anastasia were being treated in hospital, Harland had ensured that his name was never mentioned.
Naji was nevertheless as irrepressible as ever and was rather enjoying himself, taking seasoned intelligence officers through his latest discoveries about the shell companies, bank accounts and many false identities used by Crane’s Russian beneficiaries, as well as Crane’s operation to skim millions from the money transferred from TangKi. Yet he was also modest and kept saying that his work would not have been possible without help from Jamie, his source on the other side of the Atlantic, or the digging done by Daniel Misak before he was murdered by Crane. Nearly $165 million of the $270 million was accounted for, though a good portion of that had been skimmed or invested in artworks now stored in Switzerland, Luxembourg and Italy. Through one scam or another, Crane had stolen in the region of $32 million from the Russian terror fund. Samson argued that any money that was recovered should be returned to TangKi so that the board members would have to own what had happened on their watch.
That point made, he stepped away to call Jim Tulliver in New York and gave him the bare bones of what was happening. Tulliver still had no idea that Samson had arranged for his boss’s email to be hacked. He wanted to keep it that way and left a lot out but, clearly, Tulliver had now read the Misak dossier. A team of forensic accountants was already putting together the story of how the company was used to launder money and they were paying particular attention to the source of funds in America.
‘There is some good news, however,’ said Tulliver. The authorities are backing off on the citizenship issue. It looks like Denis will be free to move about the country in the next twenty-four hours. His passport is still suspended.’
‘And the film of Aysel made no difference?’
‘Denis expected much worse. He can survive that.’
‘But can Anastasia? Can the Foundation survive that publicity?’
‘We’ll see,’ said Tulliver. ‘There’s also now a question of funding it.’ He tried to congratulate and thank Samson, but Samson brushed him off. ‘Is Anastasia there? Can I speak with her?’
At that moment Anastasia entered the room with Ulrike. Everyone rose and Ulrike gestured that they should return to their seats. Anastasia’s eyes met Samson’s and she smiled.
‘I’m afraid not,’ Samson told Tulliver. ‘She’ll be in touch when she’s feeling stronger.’
Tulliver began to thank him again.
‘Jim …? Jim …? Sorry – you’re breaking up,’ Samson said, and hung up.
He tipped his head towards the door. Anastasia smiled and nodded enthusiastically.
Later, on the beach, he said he liked the clothes Ulrike had lent her. ‘Those colours suit you.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, and looked down at the prints her borrowed Wellington boots had made in the wet sand. Her face had clouded. He said nothing and they walked to the great boulders at the water’s edge. The sea was calm. A little way out a cormorant stood on one of the boulders, drying its outstretched wings in the weak winter sun. ‘It looks like a sculpture,’ she said, then moved to his other side, her hand seeking his uninjured right arm. She turned and looked into his eyes. ‘I still can’t believe what you did for me, Samson.’
‘Don’t forget what you did for yourself,’ he said. ‘You decided you were going to survive.’
‘Yes, but you …’
‘Don’t thank me,’ he said, grinning. ‘Anyway, I have to admit I was in two minds until I found your phone and realised you’d kept all those photographs from Venice and that my birthday was still your passcode.’
‘You found the phone! My phone! The one I put in Louis’s pocket? Jesus!’
‘It’s a long story. The Carabinieri missed it. But for one reason or another, it was really helpful to us. You can have it back, of course.’
‘And you went through it,’ she said with dawning horror.
‘For professional reasons only,’ he said, and she gave him a light punch on his bicep. ‘Then I understood,’ he continued, after a long pause in which he held her searching gaze, ‘that I loved you and I had to tell you this in person, which could not be done while you were being held by those bastards in Russia. So, here I am, doing precisely that. I love you, Anastasia.’
‘I know that!’ she said with irritation, and stamped a boot into the sand. He waited. They looked out to the horizon in silence. ‘The thing is,’ she said at last, ‘I’m not yet used to the idea that I’m not going to be killed at any moment. The absence of terror is weirdly hard to deal with. Somehow, I’m going to have to find my normal, fucked-up self again. Do you understand?’
‘I do,’ he said.
‘Of course you do. You’ve been through it more than me.’ She looked along the beach to the line of trees that ran down to a bank of grey shingle. ‘Last night was so …’
‘Wonderful,’ he said.
‘Yes, it was wonderful, and we are so very close like that. What are we going to do? Please tell me how this ends. What do we do now? I mean, I have to go back to Denis. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where does that leave us?’ Tears were springing to her eyes.
‘You need time,’ he said. ‘Denis is in real trouble and he needs you.’
‘I’m being realistic, but at least you can never doubt what I feel for you. You are married, and that matters, and I had a kind of a sort of a thing going with someone in London, but I mean it – I love you and I always will love you.’
‘I don’t care who you’ve been to bed with. It’s really not the point. What about us? How do we go on?’
He shook his head. ‘I have no idea.’
‘And we’ve got so little in common – it’s just sex and Venice.’
‘We shared a bullet, too. That must count for something.’
She smiled, her eyes still glistening with tears. They turned to see a figure waving from the boat sheds and starting towards them.
‘And we have Naji Touma in common,’ he said. ‘And Naji,’ she agreed, and darted a kiss to his lips. ‘Thank you, Samson.’