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

I like the beard you’re growing. Is that a beard, or just a failure to shave?’

He looked at himself in the mirror on the chest of drawers. ‘The second, but I think I’ll keep it.’ He turned to her. ‘Can you do it? I mean, Congress?’

‘Yes, I believe I can. Daus is the cause of everything bad that’s happened to us in the last three years. I want to be her nemesis. I want to see her fucking face. I can do it. I’ll do it for Denis, for Bobby, for me.’

He sat down on the bed beside her, feeling he should tell her about the gunman the CIA had briskly disarmed outside the café. But instead he just said, ‘You know it’s going to be risky.’

She nodded.

He laid her hand on hers and held her eyes with his.

‘I’m sorry not to have told you about the baby,’ she said.

He didn’t reply but pulled her gently towards him and kissed her forehead.

He went to the other side of the bed and lay down. She let her head fall back on to the pillow, but her eyes remained open.

‘I’ll turn off the light?’ said Samson.

‘Yes, please do.’

Some ten minutes later, when Samson was nearly asleep, she reached out to take his hand and brought it to her lips and held it there. ‘I’ve missed you so badly, Samson,’ she said. She let him go and raised her head. ‘Are you asleep?’

‘Nearly.’

She was leaning over him, her hair brushing his forehead. She kissed him and drew back. ‘Well, are you going to cooperate, or not? This bed is to blame. It has so many memories for me. I need you, and that is all there is to it. Would you consider a dream fuck?’

‘What’s a dream fuck?’

‘When you more or less do it in your sleep in the middle of the night and the next day you wonder about it because it doesn’t seem real and you decide that you dreamed the whole thing.’ This was delivered in an urgent whisper to his cheek.

He smiled in the dark, turned to her and found her wrist and pushed it down, then took her other hand, interlocked fingers and pushed that down, too, so that she was pinned to the bed. He kissed her and said, ‘Like this?’

‘I wouldn’t know. I’m asleep,’ she murmured.

PART THREE

Chapter 31

Locked in

Denis’s eyes were open but he did not see. Anastasia picked up his hand and held it between both hers. It was the first time she had touched her husband since the morning of the attack. Jim Tulliver looked on from the end of the bed. The doctor who had taken over from Lazarus, Jamie Carrew, was on the other side.

‘What’s this mean?’ she asked Carrew.

‘We don’t know,’ he replied. ‘He’s made a really excellent recovery from the procedure, and his heart and breathing are much better. We’re not able to assess any neurological impairment because we can’t do that without Denis saying what he can and can’t do or feel.’

‘Can he hear us? Can he understand?’ She looked down at him, appalled. ‘Can you hear me, Denis? Will you squeeze my hand, like you did the nurse’s, and tell me that you understand?’ There was no response. She peered into his eyes. He shut them then opened them again very slowly. ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’ She waited – nothing came back. ‘Is he locked in?’

Carrew said, ‘Possibly, but there’s nothing in the literature to suggest this is a result of being exposed to a nerve agent. Perhaps we should not have this conversation in front of him.’

‘No, I think we should, because if he’s in there he’ll be working through this himself. He’ll want to know what we’re doing. He’s not a child. If it’s bad news, he’ll want to know. So I’m going to ask you – did he have a stroke during the operation?’

Carrew shook his head. ‘We checked. His brain is fine.’

‘But it isn’t, is it? Is there some kind of stimulus you can give him?’

‘Not without knowing what’s the matter.’

‘Might he be braindead?’

‘No, he doesn’t need any help breathing. And as you see, he’s opening and shutting his eyes. We’re in the process of consulting experts across the country with a video link. I hope that’s okay with you.’

She thought about that. ‘I don’t want any film getting out. Are you sure about security? It could have a devastating effect on his business and the livelihoods of a lot of people.’

It evidently hadn’t occurred to Carrew. She looked at Tulliver, exasperated. ‘Can you have our lawyers be in touch with everyone who’s seen the film of Denis as he is now and make sure it’s never shared?’

When left alone with Denis she started talking about the things that most interested him: a re-design of their garden at the Mesopotamia estate, a trip to Jordan they had planned, tennis, his library and the people who worked for him. And then she bent close to his ear and spoke about Harland’s funeral and everything that had happened in Estonia. She kept checking his eyes, but there wasn’t the slightest flicker of recognition in them; the pulse of his intelligence was absent and she began to wonder if Denis had actually disappeared.

When she spoke about the computer – the special laptop that had never been used on the internet and was reserved for the accumulation of evidence against Mila Daus – she was so close to him that her lips brushed the top of his ear. ‘We need to find that computer, and then Naji will try the code that he developed to read what’s on it. Without it we can do nothing.’ She suddenly felt hopeless and sat back. Then she noticed that his eyes had turned to her and the look of indifference had momentarily vanished. ‘You’re there!’ she said, and kissed him. ‘Hash, I know you’re there.’ But the eyes clouded and, although they remained looking in