Cold Read Free

about the desolation that would follow the meeting. He might never see his children and grandchildren again. Instead, he quoted his favourite passage from Lermontov, which earned a rebuke from Mary-Lou.
    ‘Hush your mumbling, Grandpa.’
    He rolled the phrase over in his mind, first in Russian, then in English:
     
Restless, he begs for storms,
As though in storms there is rest.
     
    It summed up his decades of service with the CIA. His mind wound back to the late 1970s and his very first mission, in Katanga Province in Congo. He’d been as green as a lime, only just arrived in Lubumbashi in the heart of the copper belt, a centre of resistance to President Mobutu, whom Uncle Sam had backed for reasons Zeke never understood then nor got to understand since. He was in the consulate, still acclimatising to the easy-goingness of the locals and the prickliness of the heat, when he got a flash message to go to the main police station. They’d caught a Soviet agent and they needed a Russian speaker, pretty damn fast.
    To say Zeke had a gift for languages was like suggesting that Isaac Newton was not bad at maths. A Mormon from the hicks, he could speak gulag slang as if he’d got out of Kolyma the day before yesterday. That was because of a deep friendship he’d struck up with an old Russian fisherman who’d spent two decades as a prisoner – a zek – in Stalin’s prison camps. Zeke had met the fisherman while serving his two years as a Mormon missionary with the Ainu people in the Kuril Islands, where Japan peters out and the Soviet Union began. The fisherman had said precious little about his past life to Zeke for a whole year – listening, but saying nothing.
    One Orthodox Christmas, when the memory of the home he could never return to seized him, he opened up. Arrested for nothing, sentenced to twenty years because his father, long dead, had been an Orthodox priest, the old fisherman told of how the criminals in the gulag used to slit the throats of the newly arrived politicals for their fur-lined boots; how the zeks had to wait until the spring thaw in April before they could dig mass graves to bury the dead, who’d been stacked together outside like so much dead wood; how he and a friend had trekked out of Siberia and eventually, after crossing the Sea of Okhotsk in a rusty tub they’d stolen, made landfall on a Japanese-held island. When they came across an apple orchard on the island, they’d eaten so many apples they fell ill. His friend’s stomach burst wide open and he died; the fisherman had only just survived.
    ‘I think of Josef Stalin and all those lives, blunted, snuffed out for no good reason,’ said the fisherman into his vodka. ‘People cried when the old bastard died. Well, not me, not me.’ Zeke had never forgotten it.
    Thanks to his Mormon posting, Zeke had been the only recruit in the CIA who, on joining the Agency, already spoke Japanese with a Russian accent and Russian with a zek accent, and Ainu, which hardly anyone spoke at all.
    In Congo, the consular car left Zeke at the front door of the police station and it took a while before he was pointed down some steps to a dank basement. The smell of shit and blood was all but unbearable. From somewhere he couldn’t quite make out came the sound of clocks chiming, so loud it dinned into his ears. The basement was dark, apart from a bulb illuminating a naked man lying belly up on a table, his arms and legs pinioned by straps, his head clamped in a vice. A soiled white towel was stuffed in his mouth.
    Jed Crone, the Kinshasa station chief, a Harvard man but a Mississippi boy, shifted his heft and picked up a length of hose. A stocky man, he had a thick head of brown hair and was wearing a once-white suit that had gone the colour of cat’s teeth. Crone signalled to an African policeman, who turned a tap. Water surged from the hose as he placed it on the towel, directly over the mouth of the naked man. He squirmed, legs and arms twisting and