30

THEY SPOKE LITTLE on the journey. Grove drove, while Kate was absorbed in what Andrew Blake had told her on the final call the previous day.

He’d finally admitted that the cultivation of Incisor had not been the work of Jilly Peters, though she had overseen it. The approach had been masterminded by another officer, Max von Braun, who had also now left Russia and returned to SIS in London.

Von Braun was gay, single and had been a frequent visitor to a club called Central Station, which thrived despite the, at times, extreme hostility of the Russian state and many of its citizens. One night, he had met a shy man who had boldly announced he worked for the Russian Foreign Ministry, but had become notably evasive when pressed as to exactly what he did or even whether he worked in the monumental Stalinist Gothic Foreign Ministry building just by Smolenskaya.

Von Braun had not pursued the matter and certainly didn’t accept Incisor’s offer of a ride home. But he went to Central Station more often after that, with Andrew’s encouragement, and managed to fall into conversation with his new friend a second and then a third time.

On a fourth occasion, the man had been drunk – very drunk – and had grown more inebriated and incoherent in the course of their conversation. Von Braun had offered to drop him home. Incisor had at first accepted, then vehemently refused, as if he had momentarily forgotten himself. And through a largely rambling and elliptical account of why he was so beside himself with fatigue and worry, he had given von Braun the impression that there was some issue with debt, perhaps – if his body language was anything to go by – of the kind that keeps you awake at night, more because of the people it is owed to than the scale of the undertaking.

After that, Max von Braun had withdrawn, but not before telling Incisor that he was inherently sympathetic. He was a rich man, he said, who had quite often helped members of their community in trouble, particularly in Russia where ignorance and prejudice were so widespread. He asked if Incisor would like to meet somewhere in daylight hours for a sober discussion – a business talk – about how he might be able to help.

Incisor seemed both intrigued and repelled by the idea. Just as he had with the lift, Incisor accepted and then back-tracked as von Braun tried to set a time and place to meet. So in the end, he had handed over a business card with a new, off-grid, mobile that he kept for such a purpose – then left.

It was a week before a message came through. And since von Braun turned on the phone only once a day – for security reasons – and the instruction was to meet him in a section of the Sparrow Hills by Moscow State University, he had been forced to drive hard to get there on time.