The Old Enemy by Henry Porter (reading a book txt) 📗

looked around and sipped his brandy. His eyes came to rest on the photographs of Samson’s father and mother as newly-weds and the gap where he’d removed the little framed picture of himself and Anastasia in Venice, the one he had forwarded from the phone he found near a deserted track in Italy where she had been abducted. ‘I get it,’ said Samson, heading off Nyman’s question about the gap or his usual observations about his parents’ life in Beirut half a century before. ‘You want to use me as bait.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, but you’re the one they’re likely to come after next, and we’d like to monitor you and prevent that attack.’

Samson got up and walked to the door. ‘Peter, you can tell your people to stay away from me. I’m not bloody playing. Now please leave.’

Nyman got up regretfully, knocked back the brandy and came towards him. ‘Nevertheless, we’ll keep an eye out for you.’ He searched for Samson’s hand, but, not finding it, tapped him lightly on the chest. ‘No harm in that, is there? I’ll be downstairs in the restaurant, should you want to talk further.’

Now that Nyman had gone, he’d have that Scotch. He poured the drink and tipped his chair back. Robert Harland’s murder appalled him, not because an attempt had been made on his own life, which added weight to Nyman’s theory, but because he liked Harland and in their two meetings since Narva, once during the summer in Estonia and another in Berlin when the German government marked the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall – poorly, in Harland’s view – he had come to see that the old spy’s life added up to something heroic and steadfast, which was rare in their business. He hadn’t clung to the job beyond the end of his personal mission, or his usefulness. He didn’t need SIS, or his country. He’d found another life in another country, as well as a deep love with Ulrike. He’d become an artist, reclaimed his freedom, lived on his own terms. He wasn’t someone who told you much about his inner life, but on the Berlin trip Samson noticed how often he used the word ‘freedom’. That was what Harland fought for – his and other people’s freedom.

He held the glass up to the desk light and pondered the glow in the liquid. Out loud to the room, he said, ‘To you, Bobby. I’m so very sorry.’

Then he pulled his laptop towards him and searched for the live stream from the Congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs in Washington DC. It was the second day of hearings on America’s relations with the Kurds in northern Syria and, in particular, allegations that the Kurdish-American billionaire and Anastasia’s husband, Denis Hisami, was helping to finance military action against US forces and their Turkish allies. Hisami had been caught out by the sudden change in US policy on the Kurds. They were no longer America’s ally in the region and Hisami’s donations had become the subject of outrage in the White House and hysterical attacks on websites. Hisami maintained that the money had been donated before the administration’s abandonment of the Kurds and in any case was being used for humanitarian purposes, such as the rescue and rehabilitation of women enslaved by ISIS. Samson had watched for half an hour the day before and had glimpsed Anastasia sitting with Hisami’s aide, Jim Tulliver, behind Hisami as he was cross-examined by an aggressive congressman from the South. She was as beautiful and composed as ever, but the strain of the last few years was showing and he thought she’d lost too much weight and maybe that the humour had left her eyes.

They hadn’t seen each other in two years. They’d talked and emailed frequently after her return to the States, but then she seemed to suffer a precipitate collapse, not surprising, given what she had endured at the hands of her tormentor, the man she knew as Kirill but who was in fact a sadistic Russian brute named Nikita Bukov. She called Samson one night, distraught and quite unlike herself, and said it would be better if they didn’t speak for a while: she needed to straighten things out in her head; she couldn’t sleep or focus on her work. She told him she’d been traumatised by the events in Macedonia when she, Samson and Naji Touma were all nearly killed, but this was far worse. There were moments when she had no orientation with the real world whatsoever, like when she was imprisoned in a container on the ship, then a metal box. That confinement and the terror were always with her. She couldn’t rid her mind of them.

This exchange was extraordinarily painful for Samson. They loved each other, but there was absolutely nothing he could do, and she wasn’t strong enough to deal with being so frequently in touch yet also separated by five thousand miles. Her husband, now free of the particular round of persecution by the US authorities, had got her the professional help she needed – a new treatment, she implied – and was caring for her with all the love in the world. She said it would be for just a few weeks, but they hadn’t spoken since. The only news he had of her was when she returned to Lesbos, the Greek island where they had met and where the Aysel Hisami Foundation, under her supervision, was trying to deal with the scale of mental-health problems of the people who’d been in the camp for over five years. He had toyed with the idea of flying out to see her, but she hadn’t told him she would be there – he’d just seen her quoted in a story on the CNN news site.

His eyes went to the gap in the photographs on the wall. He’d removed the picture of them on the evening he’d agonised about going to Lesbos. Eventually he’d told himself that if Anastasia was well enough