The Old Enemy by Henry Porter (read with me .TXT) 📕

only say yes or no by blinking. And there’s no guarantee he remembers it. Maybe the nerve agent has taken its toll.’

‘I don’t want to put pressure on you, but we do need to get into Denis’s laptop. I can bring Naji with the calculator. Denis likes him. They worked together to make this code and, of course, now Naji can’t break it.’ He paused. ‘Sorry, I know I’m pushing, but you can ask him, can’t you? Allow him to make the decision.’

In the middle of the night, and after Carrew had spent an hour examining Denis with questions that required only the answer yes or no but added to his obvious perplexity, Anastasia did ask her husband, half expecting him to close his eyes and go back to sleep. But the question drew a single, definite blink and sudden miosis in his pupils – a narrowing with which she was all too familiar, one which conveyed the strength of her husband’s feelings.

Samson brought Naji over to the hospital but decided to stay outside Denis’s room. Naji shambled in, smiled and sat down beside Denis. They looked at each other long and hard, and much passed between them – not just their shared history in which both the young boy and the seasoned commander struck at an ISIS terrorist at the same moment in a barn in Macedonia, or the time when Naji, on the old rail bridge at Narva, diverted vast amounts of money electronically to the mafia shooter in payment for three well-aimed bullets that killed Anastasia’s Russian kidnapper and saved her life, but perhaps a deeper connection between two people who had escaped the violence of the Middle East as young men and, with their high intelligence, had found a life in the West, even though there would always be something about them both that was dispossessed, uprooted.

‘Hi,’ said Naji, eventually.

Denis gave him a single blink and Naji held up the calculator in his left hand. Denis blinked again.

‘You have twenty digits. Is that correct?’

Blink.

‘I point finger at each number and you tell me when I have right one.’

Blink.

At first it went well: Naji noted down 40782366. Then Denis’s response time slowed and Anastasia began to worry the effort was too much for him. His breathing seemed to have become shallower and his face was drained of colour. It took minutes to acquire the next three numbers – 4, 5 and 9. Then Denis looked away. After a full minute his eyes returned to Naji and he gave three blinks.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Naji.

He waited. So did Denis, gazing at him.

‘Do you want me to use another key?’

Blink.

Naji looked at the keypad. ‘Memory key?’

Two blinks.

‘Square root key?’

Blink.

‘Ah! So you need the square root of 40782366459, right?’

Blink.

‘And that gives us 2019464445317124 – but that’s only sixteen digits. So we have to find four more digits, Mr Hisami.’

He returned to the keypad and they added 1, 1, 2 and 0, which took little time because Naji started with the lower numbers. He now had a twenty-digit code on the piece of paper and entered it into the calculator. The moment the final zero was keyed in the digits were rearranged into the code that would unlock the computer. Naji made a note of it and handed it to Anastasia, who folded it and placed it in her back pocket. She gently moved Naji out of the way and sat down beside Denis. ‘What is it, Hash?’ she asked, again taking his hand in both hers.

His eyes rested on her, but they seemed distant and she wondered if he could see her. And she didn’t like the short, shallow breaths, which seemed to have grown more irregular in the last minute or two. She glanced at the monitors and saw that his heart rate had slowed. She pressed the call button and told Naji to go and find a nurse quickly, but before he had moved to the door they heard shouting from the corridor. She let go of Denis’s hand, jumped up and pushed Naji aside so she could block the door. The shouting continued – several voices demanding that someone put down their weapon. She cracked open the door but could see nothing, so moved a little way out. Nurses had surrounded a man in blue scrubs, face mask and theatre cap. All had guns drawn. One of the nurses, also in a face mask, patted the man down from behind while another moved closer to him, aiming a gun with two hands at his forehead. The search ended with a pistol equipped with a silencer, a large wad of medical dressing and a vial being thrown on to the linoleum. The vial rolled away and was snatched up by one of the nurses.

This had all taken place just beyond the nurses’ station. Anastasia saw Samson, together with two of Zillah’s guards, rising from the floor, where they had presumably thrown themselves when undercover police intercepted the man in scrubs. Special Agent Reiner appeared from behind the station with two men who looked like detectives. One of these stepped forward and pulled the mask from the man’s face. Naji, who had slipped out of the room behind Anastasia, recognised him as the man who had checked into their hotel at Vilnius and whose key fob and car he had stolen. With the mask hanging from his neck and face turned to the ground, Anatoly Stepurin was handcuffed.

Anastasia glanced back through the door at Denis and realised something was wrong. His eyes were turned upwards and his mouth hung open. The pallor of death had taken hold of his face. She shouted for help. A nurse ran towards her, followed by a duty doctor who had come to see what the shouting was about. The nurse began CPR, pushing down on Denis’s chest with both hands, while the doctor moved a defibrillator to the bedside, turned it on and placed the pads either side of his chest. He consulted the monitor and told