‘That bad, eh?’
‘That bad. Venice was tricky enough; this time I can’t even tell him where I’m going. He’d totally freak if he knew. And even though he knows that you and I are absolutely, you know . . .’
‘Not having sex?’
‘Yeah, even though he knows that, I’m still going to wherever it is that I’m going with some other guy.’
‘You told him I was coming?’
‘I know I shouldn’t have. But better than not saying anything, or lying, and him then finding out.’
Lance glances at the passenger on his left, a bullet-headed figure wearing a bulky jacket in the black and red colours of FC Spartak Moscow, and shrugs. ‘There’s no answer. My ex-wife hated that I never talked to her about my work, but what can you do? She liked a gossip with her pals, and with a couple of drinks inside her she got very chatty indeed. There are couples who cope better than others, but that’s as far as it goes.’
Eve nods, and wishes she hadn’t. She feels hung over, sleep-deprived and emotionally fragile. She and Niko were up until almost 3 a.m., drinking wine that neither of them felt like drinking, and saying things that could not be unsaid. Eventually she announced that she intended to go to bed, and Niko insisted with wounded determination on sleeping on the sofa.
‘Don’t be surprised if I’m not here when you get back from wherever the fuck it is you’re going,’ he said, leaning balefully on his crutches.
‘Where will you go?’
‘Why? What difference does that make?’
‘I’m just asking.’
‘Don’t. If I don’t have the right to know your movements, you don’t have the right to know mine, OK?’
‘OK.’
She fetched him blankets. Sitting on the sofa with his head bowed and his crutches at his side he looked lost, a displaced person in his own home. It distressed Eve to see him like this, so steeped in hurt, but some cold and clear-thinking part of her knew that this battle had to be fought and won. That she might back down was an alternative she never considered.
‘How long’s this flight?’ she asks Lance.
‘About three and a half hours.’
‘Vodka’s good for a hangover, isn’t it?’
‘Tried and tested.’
‘As soon as we’re airborne, catch that stewardess’s eye.’
The hotel, as Lance has described, is vast. The lobby is the size of a railway station, its pillared expanse and functional grandeur redolent of high Sovietism. Their twenty-second-floor rooms are drab, with worn furnishings, but the views are spectacular. Opposite Eve’s window, on the far side of Prospekt Mira, is the complex of ornate pavilions, walkways, gardens and fountains comprising the former All-Russia Exhibition Centre. At a distance it still has a fading glamour, especially beneath the enamel-blue October sky.
‘So what’s the plan?’ Lance asks, as they drink a second cup of coffee in the hotel’s Kalinka restaurant.
Eve reflects. She feels renewed by the night’s sleep, and unexpectedly optimistic. The fight with Niko, and the issues surrounding it, have receded to a background murmur, a distant shimmer. She’s ready for whatever the day and the city might bring. ‘I’d like to go for a walk,’ she says. ‘Get some Russian air in my lungs. We could go to that park opposite; I’d love to take a closer look at that sculpture of the rocket.’
‘Oleg said we’d be contacted at the hotel at eleven o’clock.’
‘Then we’ve got two and a half hours. I don’t mind going by myself.’
‘If you go, I come with you.’
‘You seriously think that I’m at risk? Or that we are?’
‘This is Moscow. We’re here under our own names, and we can count on those names being on some list of foreign intelligence operatives. Our arrival won’t have gone unnoticed, trust me. And obviously our contact knows we’re here.’
‘Who is this person? Any idea?’
‘No names. Just that it’s someone Richard knows from his time here. An FSB officer would be my guess. Probably someone quite high-up.’
‘Richard was head of station here, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So does that happen a lot? Senior officers keeping lines of communication open with the other side?’
‘Not a lot. But he always had a way of getting on with people, even when things got frosty at the diplomatic level.’
‘I remember Jin Qiang saying much the same in Shanghai.’
‘I think Richard saw those relationships as a kind of fail-safe. So that if one of their leaders, or ours, were to go completely off the rails . . .’
‘Wiser heads might prevail?’
‘That sort of thing.’
Fifteen minutes later they’re standing at the foot of the Monument to the Conquerors of Space. This is a hundred-metre-high representation, in shining titanium, of a rocket rising on its exhaust plume. Beside them, a kebab vendor is setting up his stand.
‘I always felt so sorry for Laika, that dog they sent up,’ Eve says, pushing her hands deep into the pockets of her parka jacket. ‘I read about her when I was a child, and I used to dream of her alone in the capsule, far away in space, not knowing that she would never return to earth. I know there were humans who died in the space programme, but it was Laika that I found so heartbreaking. Don’t you think?’
‘I always wanted a dog. My Uncle Dave managed a waste depot outside Redditch, and every so often he’d invite us kids round and we’d send his terriers in after the rats. They’d kill maybe a hundred in a session. Complete bloody mayhem, and the smell was diabolical.’
‘What a lovely childhood memory.’
‘Yeah, well. My dad always said Dave made a fortune out of that place. Most of it from turning a blind eye when blokes turned up at night with lumpy shapes rolled up in carpeting.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Put it like this. He retired aged forty, moved to Cyprus, and hasn’t lifted a finger since, except to play golf.’ He hunches into his coat. ‘We should keep moving.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘If anyone’s got surveillance on us, and that’s somewhere between possible and probable, we’re not going to
