The Man Between

by Charles Cumming

  ‘You deflect very well, Mr Carradine,’ Simakov exclaimed. ‘You avoid the questions you do not wish to answer. You ask me the questions which perhaps your masters have told you to ask. Perhaps you have been trained after all!’

  ‘Only media training, Ivan,’ he said and regretted it immediately. He knew that Simakov’s vanity would be offended by the fact that he did not seem to be afraid. The Russian duly exploded with laughter, the noise carrying outside into the farmyard and beyond to whoever was protecting him, to whoever knew that the supposed icon of non-violent resistance was in fact a murderous thug still in the employ of Russian intelligence.

  ‘You are funny!’ he said, then suddenly swept his right arm across Carradine’s face. The back of Simakov’s hand connected with his jaw, sending him crashing to the ground. Carradine had been hit before, with greater force and skill, but never with such unexpectedness. The side of his face screamed in pain. He could feel a warm, alkaline pooling of blood in his mouth as he tried to stand up. ‘You should know when is the correct time to make jokes.’

  Carradine’s mind was spinning in loops, from fear to determination, from despair to hope. He stood up and faced Simakov. He steadied himself. With the awful clarity of a man waking up to a truth long withheld from him, Carradine realised that, all along, Resurrection had been a Kremlin-approved operation to bring chaos to the West. The movement had been funded and organised with the express purpose of bringing chaos to the streets of New York and Washington and Los Angeles, to the neighbourhoods of Berlin and Madrid and Paris. Bartok had been duped, Somerville and Hulse as well. There had been so few attacks in Russia not because the friends and relatives of Resurrection activists were being assassinated, but because there were no active Resurrection cells in Russia. There was no other explanation for the ease with which Simakov had been able to fake his own death, to continue to organise Resurrection strikes and to live, like some latter-day bin Laden, on a farm in the middle of the English countryside.

  ‘Who owns this place?’ he asked, wanting to swing a punch of his own but knowing that any number of Russian heavies were doubtless on the other side of the door waiting to burst in and defend their boss.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ Simakov replied. It pleased Carradine to see that he was rubbing his fist. He hoped that his jaw had smashed a bone in the back of the Russian’s hand.

  ‘You’re meant to be dead. Anybody sees you, you’re finished. Who’s protecting you? Who’s paying your bills? A man like you should be cowering in a hut in the backwoods of Montana, living under a pseudonym in Ecuador, shuffling from bedsit to bedsit in the north of England, looking for recruits to your shabby cause. But you’re not. You’re here, living like a superannuated rock star in a Cotswolds farmhouse. Why is that?’

  ‘I am a lucky man,’ Simakov replied. ‘I have friends in high places.’

  ‘Yeah. I bet you do.’ Carradine was gripped by a fatalistic courage, certain that he would never make it out of the house alive, but determined to go out on his own terms. He wanted to express to Simakov the depth of his contempt for what he had done, his conviction that the Russians had picked the wrong strategy, that they would lose in the end, but knew that to do so would be to waste his breath. Instead he continued to puncture Simakov’s story.

  ‘I was sorry to hear about your parents.’

  ‘Thank you.’ It was the first time Carradine had seen evidence in his expression of an authentic emotional response.

  ‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The car crash. An accident?’

  He wondered if the Great Martyred Leader would bother denying it. He wondered if Simakov would hit him again. Instead, he brought his face so close to Carradine’s that he could smell the coffee on his breath as he spoke.

  ‘I hated my parents. I hadn’t seen them since I was nineteen years old. Why would I mourn the deaths of two people who had done so little for me?’ He paused. ‘Yes, to answer your question, the crash was an accident.’

  ‘And what am I?’ said Carradine. ‘Another Otis Euclidis? You’ll keep me here in captivity until everyone assumes I’m dead?’

  Simakov looked surprised. ‘Oh, you heard about that?’ he said.

  ‘Heard about what?’

  ‘Dear little Otis has been found in a basement in Indiana. The Brazilian whore who used to rent the house for us tipped off the police that he’d been left there to die. There wasn’t much of him left apparently. I imagine the stench was appalling.’

  Carradine shook his head in disgust.

  ‘Speaking of cars,’ Simakov continued. ‘Do you see that vehicle outside?’

  Carradine turned and looked out of the window. A large Transit van was parked in front of the house.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. His throat was bone dry. He could barely voice the word.

  ‘We found the contents of your cellphone very interesting.’ Simakov was staring at him, his head tilted to one side. ‘You and I are going to be getting into that van, Kit. We’re going to set out on a journey.’

  49

  Carradine was taken downstairs and served food in a large kitchen by a woman who did not speak to him. Simakov came into the room. He was carrying a small bottle of water and a phone. He sat opposite Carradine at a wooden table and told the woman to leave. She took his plate to the sink and went out into the farmyard.

  ‘I want to know what you think about Lara,’ he said.

  Carradine’s jaw was still aching. He had been hungry but had found it difficult to eat.

  ‘Why is that important?’ he replied.

  ‘Did you fuck her?’

  Carradine had a choice. To lie and to protect himself from further harm, or to make Simakov suffer by telling him the truth. He opted for a sophistry which would achieve both aims.

  ‘What happened between us is private,’ he said. ‘My feelings for Lara are my own business, just as her feelings for me are hers.’

  ‘Did you fuck her?’

  ‘Grow up, Ivan.’

  Simakov pulled out a handgun. For a split second Carradine thought that he was going to fire, but he placed the gun on the table – just out of Carradine’s reach – and looked him in the eye.

  ‘What did she say about me?’

  Carradine looked at him with pity. ‘That you were the best, Ivan.’ He laid on the sarcasm, having intuited the extent to which Simakov needed to be praised and reassured. ‘She said you were unforgettable. One in a million. She’s never got over you. What woman would?’

  Simakov exploded with rage.

  ‘WHAT DID SHE SAY ABOUT ME?’

  Suddenly Carradine understood why the Russians had wanted so desperately to find Lara. Had they discovered that she had been a Service asset and had proof of Simakov’s survival? She had left New York because she no longer loved Simakov and had lost faith in the movement; Moscow mistakenly believed that she knew the truth both about Ivan and Resurrection. That would explain why she needed to be silenced.

  ‘Strangely enough, we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about you. We were too busy trying not to get killed.’

  Simakov picked up the gun. His face was flushed with anger.

  ‘Your cellphone,’ he said. ‘You’ve been to Chapel Street. You know that Hulse is there.’

  ‘Hulse?’

  It was obvious that Simakov knew of their connection. There was no point in lying. Carradine heard the sound of movement in a room close by. He wondered if his father was being brought to see him.

  ‘Sebastian Hulse has become a thorn in my side.’ Simakov touched the butt of the gun. ‘He knows too much. He is going to be eliminated.’

  ‘Eliminated.’ The ease with which Simakov spoke of death made Carradine feel nauseous. ‘Just like that.’

  ‘Yes. Just like that.’

  Carradine looked down at the gun. He knew what Simakov was going to ask him to do. He felt that he was caught in a trap from which there would be no escape. He wondered when he
would be shown the photographs of his father in captivity. He could not think of any way to get a message to Somerville or Hulse to tell them what had happened. He prayed that whoever had been sent to the pub to meet him would realise that he had been kidnapped. Would the Service bother to come looking for him – or leave him to his fate?

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what it is that you want me to do?’ he said.

  Simakov stood up. There was an apple in a bowl on the table. He polished it on the side of his trousers and took a bite, staring at Carradine as he chewed.

  ‘I had Mr Hulse followed from his hotel.’

  ‘Your Russian friends again?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘They followed him? The same friends who stole my hard drive? They’re the ones who analysed my phone? That’s how you know I read your obituaries, your life story. Moscow does your dirty work.’

  Carradine saw that Simakov had no intention of answering him.

  ‘What should we find,’ he continued, ‘but that Hulse is visiting the same address in Chapel Street that you showed such an interest in.’ Simakov took another bite of the apple. ‘So I had the basement watched. And who should we see coming out but a certain Mr Julian Somerville. Who is this, please?’

  ‘You know who he is,’ Carradine replied. ‘He’s the man who recruited Lara.’

  Simakov threw the apple across the table and landed it perfectly in a wastepaper basket on the opposite side of the kitchen.

  ‘Precisely!’

  ‘What’s your point, Ivan?’

  In a sudden, swift movement, Simakov stepped forward and pressed the gun against Carradine’s forehead. The steel was cold, the contact terrifying.

  ‘My point is that you’re going to take me to them. You’re going to get me into that basement. Lara is inside. I want to see her. I want to ask her about you and I want to finish what I started. She knows too much. You all do. So let’s get on with it.’

  50

  Carradine sat in the back of the van beside Simakov. A Russian-speaking driver and a woman were in the front. The woman was slight and wiry and looked Eastern European. She stared outside as they drove south along the M40, occasionally eating a boiled sweet and throwing the wrapper out of the window. Only Simakov had spoken to Carradine since they had left the house. There was an atmosphere of practised expertise, as though each of them had conducted raids of this kind many times before. They were not afraid. The clock on the dashboard showed it was late afternoon. Carradine had no idea what day it was or how long it had been since they had taken him.

  At no point had he been left alone. He had wanted to try to get a message to Somerville using the number he had memorised from the restaurant but had seen neither a mobile phone nor landline in the house. He had thought about scribbling a note on a piece of paper and trying to drop it out of the van at a set of traffic lights, but there had been no pen in his bedroom or the kitchen nor any opportunity to search for one. When he had gone into the bathroom, the Russian-speaking driver had stood outside, the door wide open, giving Carradine no chance to attempt an escape.

  ‘I want to speak to my father,’ he said. They were a few miles south of High Wycombe. Simakov was sipping from a bottle of water.

  ‘Don’t worry about your father,’ he said. ‘Why would we hurt an innocent old man?’ He checked himself. ‘Perhaps “innocent” is the wrong word in this context. Can a man who once worked against Soviet interests as a British spy ever be described as “innocent”?’

  ‘Where are you keeping him?’

  ‘Somewhere he’ll be very comfortable.’

  ‘Just let me talk to him.’ Carradine detested the feeling of powerlessness. ‘Let me reassure him that he’s going to be fine.’

  ‘No,’ Simakov replied.

  The plan for their attack was straightforward. Carradine was to walk down to the basement in Chapel Street and to knock on the door of the safe house. Simakov knew that Bartok was being held there because she had been allowed out in the morning and had taken a walk around Belgrave Square. A plain-clothes surveillance officer from the Russian Embassy had watched her come out and followed her on foot. A man matching Somerville’s description had been with her at all times. There was no security at the flat, not even a CCTV camera showing movement down to the basement. The door had a fish-eye lens. Carradine was to announce himself to whoever answered. Simakov was certain that Hulse and Somerville would let him in. At that point, the Russian driver and the woman would force their way in behind him. They would be armed. Bartok would be escorted outside to the van and driven away. Simakov had told Carradine that he would be allowed to remain at the safe house once Bartok was secured. Carradine knew that it was his intention to kill them all.

  ‘What do you want from her?’ he said.

  ‘From Lara?’ Simakov screwed the lid back onto the bottle. ‘Answers.’

  ‘Answers about what?’

  ‘Why she left me. Why she disappeared with no explanation. Did she suspect the truth about me, about Resurrection? If not, I want to know why she was so cruel. Why she chose to be with a man like you when she could have stayed with Ivan Simakov.’

  The sexual jealousy, the bitterness, the self-righteousness: each were as disturbing to Carradine as they were pitiful. He had already seen enough of Simakov to know that he was deranged with power and hate. He remembered everything that Bartok had told him about the breakdown of their relationship and realised that she had been soft-pedalling her reasons for leaving. It wasn’t just Simakov’s lust for violence that had so appalled her; it was his mania and rage.

  ‘What’s going to happen to her?’ he asked.

  ‘That is my business.’

  Carradine thought again of his father. Was it possible that Simakov was lying? William Carradine was a sociable man. He had a girlfriend – or, at least, a companion with whom he spent a great deal of time. He played backgammon twice a week in his local pub with a friend who lived nearby. He regularly helped out at a nearby hospice, reading stories to the patients. In short, his absence would be noted. The girlfriend would call round. The backgammon player would wonder why Bill hadn’t turned up at the pub. Before long, the police would be involved, then the Service. They would make the link to Carradine and realise that something was wrong. And where could the Russians hold him? Simakov must have known about his father’s ill health. Would he risk kidnapping a recovering stroke victim, an elderly man who might, at any point, require hospital attention? It was a horrifying risk, but if Carradine was going to save Bartok, to avert a bloodbath at the safe house, he was going to have to work on the basis that his father was perfectly safe. Simakov was bluffing.

  ‘Can you at least have a photo taken of my dad, a video, just something to reassure me that he’s OK?’

  The tiny hesitation in Simakov’s response convinced Carradine that his hunch was correct. He knew when a man was being forced to summon a lie; he had done it himself many times in the previous weeks.

  ‘Why are you so worried about him?’

  ‘Because he’s my father, you fuck. He’s sick.’

  Carradine searched Simakov’s face for another tell. There was nothing.

  ‘A photo,’ he said again. ‘A video. Can you ask for something to be sent?’

  ‘Afterwards,’ Simakov replied.

  With that, Carradine made up his mind: he would work on the assumption that his father was safe. He had come up with a simple plan. He had one chance to warn Bartok, a single opportunity to alert Hulse and Somerville to the danger. The Service surely knew that he had been kidnapped. With luck there would be a weapon inside the flat: an armed officer from Special Branch, a handgun in a drawer. If Bartok understood what Carradine was trying to tell her, she could prepare them for what was coming. If she was nowhere near the window when he knocked, there was very little chance of success.

  They reached the outskirts of London. So many times, Carradine had driven along this stretch of road yet now it felt as though he was seeing the
city for the first time. His eyes were not his own, his memories were the memories of a different man. He was numb to the point of confusion, as if he had been cast in a role for which he had not learned his lines nor been directed how to act. He looked at Simakov, who seemed as calm and disinterested as a plumber on his way to a routine job. The Russian driver had his elbow poking out of the window and was smoking a cigarette. The woman was humming along to a song on the radio, sucking on another boiled sweet. The banality of evil.

  They turned off the Westway at Paddington, heading south towards Mayfair. A news bulletin reported that a bomb had gone off at the offices of a right-wing newspaper in Paris, killing four people. Simakov appeared silently to celebrate the news, though he said nothing and merely shrugged when Carradine asked if the device had been planted by Resurrection. The van passed a few hundred metres from Sussex Gardens and came within half a mile of Carradine’s flat in Lancaster Gate. He felt like a condemned man en route to the gallows being afforded a last glimpse of his home town. He could not think of any way of changing what was about to happen other than to try to overpower Simakov, to grab his gun and to kill him. He had no experience of firing a weapon, nor did he fancy his chances of overcoming a man of Simakov’s training and experience in the cramped rear seats of a Transit van. In the time it took him to do so, the driver or the woman could shoot him dead. He had no choice but to do what he was being ordered to do.

  They pulled up in almost exactly the same spot that the taxi driver had parked in a few days earlier. Simakov gave his final instructions in Russian. Carradine guessed that he was making arrangements for his execution and that it was merely a question of which one of them was going to pull the trigger.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea for me to know some names? For us to speak to one another in English?’

  Simakov took out two black balaclavas and handed them to the Russians.