The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [44]
Us? Who else was here? Somers had never felt more isolated in his life, but Grek was talking as if their conversation was being monitored by a dozen members of the FSB. ‘What do you mean “us”? Look, I haven’t been speaking to anybody, OK? Charlotte got the story off her own back. She came to me because somebody had told her I was working at St Mary’s that night. Maybe that person was you.’
‘This is unlikely.’ Grek was looking at his cigarette, turning it in his fingers, speaking calmly. Somers knew that he had tried a feeble tactic and wished that Grek would just come out and call him a liar to his face. He couldn’t bear the faux politeness, the sense of fair play. He heard a dog barking in the distance and hoped that somebody – a walker, a jogger – would come past and interrupt what was happening.
‘Why is it unlikely?’ he asked, moving away from Grek and again heading towards the field. Still the Russian did not follow him and, once again, Somers was obliged to turn and to walk back along the path.
‘You must stop your act,’ Grek told him. ‘It deteriorates you in my eyes. I have come today to warn you that if you speak again to any member of the media or to any individual in any capacity whatsoever about Edward Crane, there will be grave consequences in terms of our arrangement.’ Grek saw that Somers was about to speak but raised his hand to silence him. ‘Enough,’ he said, screwing the cigarette into the path with the toe of his shoe. ‘Next time, the gentlemen who visit you will be considerably less polite than I am. Next time, for example, they may ask you to return the twenty thousand pounds which we paid for your silence. Your silence, Calvin. Do I make myself understood?’
‘You do,’ said Somers. All of his bravado had fallen away in the intense relief of knowing that he was forgiven and would soon be free to return home. ‘Of course you do.’
‘Good.’
‘And can I just say that I didn’t mean to cause any trouble—’
But Alexander Grek had already turned and was walking back towards his Mercedes, leaving Calvin Somers talking to the space where he had been standing, a space which now buzzed with insects in a back-lit haze of seeds and pollen. The nurse felt a bubble of relief rise in his stomach and almost jogged to the edge of the field, sweat on his vest cooling in the evening air so that he was obliged to put on the fleece to keep warm.
The field was a great expanse of dusty, harvestable corn which opened up his mood and gave him the time and the confidence to think more clearly. He was free. He had been caught, but the Russians had given him a second chance. He walked along the perimeter of the field, emboldened by this thought and was very soon imagining the glass of Wolf Blass Chardonnay he was going to pour himself, perhaps even the packet of cigarettes – ten, not twenty – that he would buy at the garage near his flat. He craved a cigarette. Something to batten down the last of his nerves.
Ten minutes earlier, the two FSB officers who had driven to the Mount Vernon Hospital with Alexander Grek had waited until their boss was out of sight before locking the Mercedes and crossing the main road. The first man, whose name was Karl Stieleke, had walked three hundred metres west before entering the woods and circling back towards the path where Grek and Somers had been talking. The second man, whose name was Nicolai Doronin, had walked in an easterly direction from the car park until he had found himself at the end of a dusty farm track which circled the Heath. Stieleke had waited beneath a chestnut tree, listening to Grek’s interrogation. He now tracked Calvin Somers in the last of the evening light as the nurse walked along the edge of the cornfield, heading towards his home in Harefield.
Somers became aware that he was being followed when he reached the perimeter of a large wood, about half a mile from the hospital. It was necessary to go through the wood in order to reach his house; there was no short-cut, no other way around. He turned and saw a man in his late twenties wearing a pair of jeans