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

New York? No, of course you weren’t. You don’t have the first bloody clue what he did for our country, Peter.’

Ott intervened. ‘Can I suggest you run your notes past Macy before sending them to the paper, Peter? That all right with you, Macy?’

Macy nodded, but the outrage hadn’t left his expression. ‘And on the funeral, make sure you go along with whatever Ulrike wants. It’s likely to be modest.’

‘What about a memorial service in London, then? Grosvenor Chapel is a marvellous space. There are a lot of people who would want to attend, you know.’

‘Ask Ulrike before you start thinking about arranging that. It’s the bloody last thing Bobby would have wanted. Anyway, this is all beside the point. You haven’t asked us here to talk about the obituary and the funeral.’ Macy wiped a handkerchief around his chin and neck. He looked ill, but then Samson had seen him sink a lot of booze the night before. ‘You’ve got something to say to us, so you might as well get on with it.’

‘Thank you, Macy!’ Ott bowed to his senior status, which of course was an entirely sarcastic gesture. ‘Naturally, we’ve linked yesterday’s two incidents and have concluded that this is blowback from events at Narva, at which Denis Hisami and Robert Harland were key participants, as indeed you were, Paul. And we believe it would be helpful to the Americans if they viewed the events in Congress in that context, rather than as an attack on the American state. We think it’s best to downplay things at the moment. The phrase “nerve agent” is not helpful in this regard and in fact the substance used was much less potent than Novichok.’

‘Yet it was a nerve agent,’ said Samson. ‘The symptoms were all there – sweating, loss of body control, muscle paralysis, salivation. The lawyer Steen died within half an hour or so of coming into contact with it.’

‘It seems that after he handled the papers he must have touched his lips. He probably ingested quite a large amount,’ said Ott. ‘But moving on, what interests us are the common denominators, which is why we have asked you in, Paul.’

He signalled to Caroline. She spun a laptop that was primed to show a short video and hit ‘play’. It was the film from the Junction. Samson saw himself block the attacker to the left, go to the right, grab his upper arm, start to punch his Adam’s apple and chin and aim a kick at his groin. Even when the police officer shouted and Samson turned there was never a clear shot of his face.

‘Impressive self-defence,’ said Ott. He waited for a reaction but got none. ‘We know it was you, Samson, because Shriti here was part of an operation at that intersection and she saw you. But we needed her to see you again in the flesh, which is why I’m so pleased you could make it this morning.’

Samson still didn’t react.

‘I suppose the immediate interest for us is this character who attacked you. Since we have had the film, our friends at the Security Service have been beavering away to identify him, and they have come up with an ID. He is a famous gangster from Montenegro. He is named Miroslav Rajavic but goes by the name Matador, which you no doubt know also means “killer” or “assassin” in Spanish, and this fellow lives up to his name by using a long knife or even a sword – his espada, I suppose. But the interesting part, and this is where I must offer congratulations to the security services team, is that we have tied him to the attack in Congress.’

Caroline brought up more video footage. Macy and Samson, sitting next to each other, had to lean forward to see clearly. It lasted no more than a few seconds. Denis Hisami, seen from the side, was moving through a crowd in a corridor that was patchily lit by TV lights. A man stepped forward, handed him papers and immediately backed away. Hisami looked down, looked up and passed the papers to Steen on his right. The film ended but was followed by two freeze frames, which showed the man’s face.

‘Caroline, would you take over?’

Caroline was a familiar intelligence services type – late thirties, intense and with a no-nonsense attitude to clothes and make-up. She had a fringe and short, fair hair, which she nervously hooked behind each ear before looking down at an iPad. ‘This turns out to be a man named Vladan Drasko,’ she said. ‘One of our people had the idea of putting his photograph through a program that allows us to search for known associates on a database using facial recognition, and we came up with this.’ She turned the iPad and there was Drasko, with longer hair and less weight, sitting next to the Matador with a pair of Balkan beauties and a row of shot glasses.

‘This was Belgrade three years ago,’ said Caroline. ‘It comes from the Facebook page of one of the women in the photograph.’

‘Facebook is such a really terrific resource,’ said Ott. ‘The point that will not escape you, Paul, is that you and Denis Hisami were targeted on the same day by two killers who know each other. We’re now using photographs of the Ukrainian assassin, taken in hospital overnight, to see if we can match him with these two; it would be something like a royal flush if we did. In short, we’d be able to tell the FBI and CIA why this attack happened and ID the main suspect. Not bad in less than twenty-four hours.’

‘And Russia?’ said Samson.

‘No need to blame Russia – that’s the beauty of it. None of the perpetrators is Russian.’

‘But the entire plot to kidnap Anastasia two years ago was designed to suppress information about a Russian operation to wash money through the States to disrupt democracy in Europe.’

‘You say Russian operation, but that was never clearly established, was it?’ said Ott. ‘Adam Crane – aka