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

It was plain that he had become a substitute for Naji’s father, for whom the boy still grieved. ‘You okay?’ Samson asked after a long silence.

‘I am very sad. Mr Harland was a good man to me. A very, very nice man. A very clever man.’

‘Yes.’

‘I will attend his funeral.’

‘Err, yes, so will I. It’s going to be next week, we think. But I just wanted to stress something that you and I should both be aware of, Naj. There’s a theory that all of us involved in getting Anastasia off that bridge are being targeted by the Russians and, of course, you were crucial to the operation. In fact, we wouldn’t have pulled it off without you. Bobby was shot, Denis Hisami was poisoned, and Naj, I have to tell you that someone attacked me in the street on the same day, so the revenge theory could be right, and you need to be extra careful.’

‘You are okay, Samson?’

‘Yes, but I was lucky and I don’t want you exposed to the same risk.’

Naji absorbed this. ‘No one knows I was at Narva.’

‘That’s true, unless there was a leak from the Estonian intelligence service, which is highly unlikely.’

‘I will be okay, Samson.’

‘Well, just be careful. Do you want to meet up?’

‘I cannot. I am busy with my project.’ He stopped. Samson could hear him fidgeting. ‘How is Anastasia?’ Naji asked.

‘She wasn’t hurt in Washington but she must have been very shocked by what happened. Denis is still in a coma.’ He was playing it straight, though he knew exactly what Naji was asking – had he talked to her?

‘She will be at Mr Harland’s funeral?’

‘I can’t say. I guess she’ll stay in Washington to look after Denis.’

‘I must go now. Goodbye, Samson. I will meet you at the funeral.’

‘Yes. Naji. Stay safe.’

Samson looked across Piccadilly to the line of exhibition posters on the Royal Academy railings, thinking about Naji. A memory of his time with Anastasia came to him. A late Saturday breakfast before going to the show of American art at the academy, where they stood for twenty minutes in awe of an enormous painting of a glacier. It seemed a long time ago: the scrawny Syrian kid had grown into a man in those years. He was now over six feet and good-looking with it, but he could be remote and also a little eccentric, jumping wildly from subject to subject in his increasingly impressive English. Even taking into account Naji’s idiosyncrasies and his obvious sadness at Harland’s death, the conversation had definitely been off. It was as though he didn’t want to connect at all.

Chapter 8

Anastasia

Anastasia was allowed no physical contact with her husband, who lay isolated in a room on the hospital’s top floor, surrounded by more medical equipment than she had ever seen concentrated around one person. She peered through an observation window and saw his chest rise and fall and watched the heart and blood pressure monitors. A nurse in protective clothing and wearing a mask and fume hood sat beside him, checking the drips and monitors. Sometimes she held his hand and nodded to Anastasia, as though she were her proxy. He showed no signs of coming out of his coma, which his doctors suggested was maybe a good thing, because he was being saved the pain and distress of incontinence, vomiting and mental disorientation. Denis was fastidious and he would have found it all mortifying.

Unlike the lawyer Stewart Steen, he’d survived the onslaught of the nerve agent, and that was due to relatively low exposure, rapid diagnosis and the speedy application of a drug called atropine, used to counter the sudden decline in the heart rate, the restriction of muscles in the chest and the production of a lot of watery sputum. He was over the worst. She hoped one day to be able to tell him that he had quickly exhausted the hospital’s stocks of atropine and was only saved by a trainee nurse who thought of phoning her brother in a veterinarian clinic, where the drug was routinely used in operations on large dogs, and arranged for all the practice’s supplies of the drug to be biked across DC. They arrived just in time.

The FBI was a constant presence in the hospital, as were the TV vans outside. When it was clear that Tulliver and she had not been contaminated and were showing no signs of sickness, they were interviewed about all aspects of Denis Hisami’s controversial – their word – career. A lot of ground was covered – his past as a commander in the PUK, the business in Macedonia when a squad of IS terrorists was wiped out, the affair that led to her kidnap and the death of two Russians on the border between Estonia and Russia at Narva, to say nothing of the enemies he’d made in business and politics. Special Agent Edward Reiner observed that he would be hard pressed to find another American citizen whose back story included so many people with the means, motive and malice to kill him. The FBI team were as considerate as they could be, but the interviews added to her sense of a siege. Reiner was smart and patient, and his sidekick, Agent Paula Berg, sat like a watchful member of the crow family.

Late in the afternoon of the second day, when she was alone in the room with them and assumed Tulliver was being given the third degree by another team down the hall, Reiner began to tell her the details of the attack. He again showed her the film from the Rayburn Building of a burly man with short black hair and dressed in a dark suit who thrust some papers into Denis’s hands then quickly backed away. An enlargement of a still revealed he had been wearing surgical gloves. ‘This individual’s name was Vladan Drasko,’ he said. ‘He was a thirty-eight-year-old Serbian national from the district of Novi Grad in Belgrade. You’ve already said that