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

He sat down. ‘Imagine this situation in the eighties or nineties. It’s impossible to conceive. What happened? Why did we roll over? How did we let them do it?’

Reiner looked at him. ‘Do you have a drink?’

‘Yes, there’s a bottle of Scotch beside your chair.’

He grasped the bottle – Anastasia had consumed about a third – and went for one of the glasses wrapped in cellophane. ‘It’s more complicated than you think, Samson. People in our administration, the Russian government and the UK government are all unified at this time by a desire to see you, the Syrian boy and Mrs Hisami taken off the map. You need to hide and keep your cellphones switched off, and stop using the internet. That’s my advice to you for the next sixty hours. Get the hell off the grid.’

‘So you’ll get Stepurin to make the call?’

‘Here’s the deal. I will make sure that call happens tonight, but you have to give me the entire dossier before it’s made public. I mean everything! I need to know what’s going down.’

‘Okay. That won’t be until after the weekend. But you’ll let me know about the call either way, yes?’

He nodded. They shook hands and Reiner got up, contemplated the rest of his whisky, then washed it down the sink and rinsed out the glass. A careful and considerate man, Reiner.

At that moment they heard shouting. It was Anastasia. He ran the length of the corridor and tore past two nurses who had emerged to see what was causing the second disturbance of their shift. From Denis’s room hurried two men, both in jackets and ties, pursued by Anastasia, who was brandishing one of the hospital’s now empty drip stands. They brushed past Samson, one of them, absurdly, putting on dark glasses as he did so.

He reached Anastasia. She was heaving with anger and exertion.

‘I went to the bathroom, came back and found them searching the room. They were about to search the body.’ She shook her head, put the stand down and told the nurses that everything was all right. They looked doubtful, but left.

Samson and Anastasia turned to Denis’s body. Shrunken, and without the slightest hint of the energy that had propelled him from the dust and chaos of Kurdistan to the very top of American society, he was unrecognisable. Anastasia expressed what Samson was thinking. ‘This isn’t him, is it? He’s gone. He wouldn’t want us here. I think we should leave.’ She stood up, looked down at him and kissed his forehead. Then she slipped both hands under his body.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he hissed.

She withdrew the computer and put it in her shoulder bag. ‘If I’d come back a minute later, they would have found it.’ She looked at Denis once more, touched his folded hands and mouthed goodbye. ‘It was the only place I could think of. And Denis would have found it funny,’ she said, turning to the door.

‘I thought Naji had it.’

‘He didn’t take it when he left and, as I sat here with Denis, I began to think he’d want me to handle everything now.’ She closed the door behind her and didn’t look back.

Reiner had gone but when they reached the elevators Samson received a text: ‘That was Homeland Security.’

Anastasia and Samson slept for a few hours in a large suite in the Jefferson Hotel. He held her for most of that time and whispered to her, and in the morning she asked him to make love to her. Before dressing she sat on the side of the bed and phoned Marty Reid to tell him to bring the meeting forward and that it would take place in one of the Jefferson’s business suites. She ended the call before he could protest for a second time that it would take him two hours at least to reach DC by car; after his son’s death he didn’t take helicopters.

They had rearranged it so that the announcement of Denis’s death would be after Reid’s arrival, partly to see whether he already knew, in which case he had spoken with Daus or Gaspar, who could only have been informed that Denis was out of the way by Stepurin. On the advice of Macy Harp, who had arrived at the hotel and ordered himself breakfast, they would only play tough and use the existence of the film if absolutely necessary. Macy’s experience of questioning and turning traitors in the Cold War suggested that pressure worked best if it was implied. ‘The looming threat is always more terrifying than the stated one.’ He was greatly saddened by Denis’s death, but that didn’t inhibit a cold assessment of the challenge. ‘You lead,’ he said to Anastasia. ‘It’s fine to have Samson in the room with you, but use the position you’re in. If Samson talks too much, Reid will see it as a challenge. But you are grieving, and that will make him listen. It’s going to be hard, but use the history of the Cold War. Fighting communism means something to someone of my and his generation.’

There was no hint of Macy’s terminal illness in his manner, or his choice of a cooked breakfast.

‘We’re going to have to make ourselves scarce until Monday. What are you going to do for the weekend?’ asked Samson.

‘Cuth and I have plans to meet up with one or two old chums from the Agency in the eighties. Should be fun. And we thought we’d take a look at the spectacular countryside at some point.’ This was said into a plate of hash browns and sausage. When he looked up, he ignored Samson’s stare.

Reid arrived in golfing attire and a poor mood. He was shown into the meeting room, where there was coffee and iced tea and a selection of sandwiches. He gave Samson a suspicious look and sat down. ‘What is it that you so urgently needed to tell me in person?’ he asked.

He hadn’t asked about Denis, or why they were meeting at