Dead Lions полностью

And up ahead lay the junction with Clerkenwell Road, and yet more lights, and the backed-up traffic included at least three black cabs. Min, now immortal, stopped pedalling, and freewheeled towards the waiting cars.

So you’ve caught up with them. Possibly. Now what?

Kyril understood every word we were saying.

Of course he did. So?

Cruising the cycle lane he pulled level with the first cab, and risked a sideways glance. Its lone passenger was on her mobile phone. The second was its mirror image; a male, holding a phone to the opposite ear. Maybe they were talking to each other. Almost at the front of the queue now, Min stopped alongside a bus, perhaps the same one he’d had the altercation with earlier; there were now just two cars between him and the remaining black cab, which was hovering impatiently under the lights. For a moment, the world shimmied. Then his vision cleared, and he was looking at the backs of their heads: Piotr and Kyril, both facing front, lacking all interest in bedraggled cyclists.

So he had caught up with them. Now what?

He had his answer almost immediately: now the lights changed, and the taxi pulled away. Min barely had time to register the first half of its plate, SLR6, before it was through the junction, and heading down Clerkenwell Road. And with it went that feeling he’d had that he could cycle forever; it drifted from him like one of those Chinese lanterns you lit and let go and watched burn into nothingness. Each breath rasped through him like a match on a sanded surface—he could taste blood, never a good sign. By the time he was through the crossroads, the black cab was gone, might be miles away … When he registered that he was being overtaken by a pedestrian, Min pulled over, gave the finger to the car behind him out of cyclist habit, and pulled his mobile from his trouser pocket. His hands shook as he used it. His bicycle fell to the pavement.

“Yes?”

“Do you have pull at the Troc?”

“I’m fine, Min, thanks for asking. How’s your morning?”

“Jesus, Catherine—”

“I don’t know about pull, but I did a comms course with one of the admin staff back in the Dark Ages. What do you want?”

“I’ve got a taxi heading west along Clerkenwell Road. Partial plate reads—”

“A taxi?”

“Just see if they’ll run it, Cath, yeah?” He half-spat the halfplate he had: SLR6.

“I’ll do my best.”

Min slid the phone back into his pocket, then leaned to one side and very neatly threw up into the gutter.

This time, Katinsky drained his glass. Glancing at his own, Lamb found that it, too, was empty. With a grunt he headed back to the bar, where a pair of old women, dressed in what looked like their entire wardrobes, huddled in furtive conversation, while a pony-tailed man in a streetsweeper’s jacket confided in a pint of lager. The drinks arrived. He’d barely delivered Katinsky’s wine before the Russian was off again.

“At the Park, I was given to understand I was old news. As if there’d been a fire-sale, and you’d already bought everything you’d ever need. Tell us something new, I was told. Tell us something new. Or we throw you back. And I don’t want to be thrown back, Jackson Lamb.” He clicked his fingers, in response to some mental trigger. “KGB agents weren’t so popular at that point in history. Actually, I’ll tell you a secret. We were never popular. It’s just that we were no longer in a position where that didn’t matter to us.”

“Guess what?” Lamb said. “Nobody likes you yet.”

Katinsky rolled over this. “But low grade information was all I had. Office gossip, interesting because the office was Moscow Centre, but nothing that hadn’t been giftwrapped a hundred times over by men who’d forgotten more than I’d ever known.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “I was a cipher clerk. But you already know that.”

“I’ve read your CV. You never set the world alight.”

The Russian shrugged. “I comfort myself with the knowledge that I’ve outlived more successful colleagues.”

“Did you bore them to death?” Lamb leaned forward. “I don’t want your life story, Nikky. All I’m interested in is anything you know about cicadas that you didn’t spill then. And in case you’ve got thoughts of stretching this out all night, that’s the last drink I’m buying. We on the same page?”

A puzzled expression crossed Nikolai Katinsky’s face, and he began to cough. Not the healthy, clearing out your lungs type cough, with which Lamb was familiar, but as if there were something inside him trying to force its way out. A lesser man might have offered to do something, like fetch water or call an ambulance, but Lamb contented himself with his drink until Katinsky got his shuddering under control.

When he thought he might receive a reply, Lamb said, “Do you get that often?”

“It’s worse in the damp,” Katinsky wheezed. “Sometimes I—”