The Innocence of Trust Read online

  ‘A good number of pixels and a decent hard drive.’ That was the call from her instructor at Fort Monkton as he tapped his head with a finger. As an analyst – and even as a ‘case-officer’ (the title was a surprise to Sam; she’d expected to be called an agent), you needed an eye for detail equivalent to a top-of-the-range camera. And a memory the size of a supercomputer. Training had helped hone these skills. But mostly, she thought, this was something you were born with.

  So, today’s route wasn’t a surprise. She’d be turning right in 250 metres. Immediately after a red-brick four-storey building with five lower-floor windows. And a bottom-floor entrance that had white pillars, and a blue double-door. It was the offices of a law firm: Mayokoskaya. It was 17A; the number was on the left-hand door below a semi-circular window. In brass.

  First – here it comes – she had to cross a small cul-de-sac where the houses were set back slightly from the pavement, and their very short front yards defined by black railings. With arrowheads on top.

  Gotcha!

  She was always looking out for the unexpected. Not necessarily things that shouldn’t be there. Instead, things that should be there, but weren’t. It was the key to unlocking images, data and real-time intel: photos, videos, routes, scenes, websites, computer programmes. And people. An empty street on a busy day. A woman wearing a jumper when it’s hot. A man with no shades – when it’s brilliantly sunny.

  No tears at a funeral.

  People are animate. Calculating. They did most things for a reason. And when they didn’t, Sam had an ability to spot the gap. No matter how inconsequential, or casual. She could read people as well as she could read an air photograph. She didn’t have to try very hard. It was innate.

  So, whatever she was doing – she was looking for the gaps. It didn’t always make for the most interesting of lives, and it often bored her. And she knew she was dull company to go for a drink with. But she had a knack. And so far, it had served her well.

  Sam got to the end of the red-brick building and hovered for a split second. She looked right, down the side road, and spotted The Karsotty. It was 50 metres down the road, on the left-hand side. Cars were parked on both sides. The lowering sun caught a second-floor window of the house to the right of the cafe, glinting as it did. She was momentarily distracted.

  She was about to take off when she spotted a man in a blue suit on the opposite side of the road; he was walking quickly toward the junction. He looked like any normal businessman heading home after a hard day at the office. He wore a pink shirt and a blue spotted tie. Very Savile Row. But there was one thing that made Sam’s mind pause. He wasn’t carrying anything. There was no briefcase or laptop bag. No man bag, not even an umbrella. He was rushing home for a bus or a train, but had left the office without any accoutrements. It was going to pour down soon and he would get very wet (maybe that’s why he was moving quickly?).

  Make sense?

  She dismissed the thought and carried on walking toward The Karsotty.

  Then somebody messed with her day.

  All explosions follow the same pattern. Combustible material is instantaneously converted into hot gases. This conversion creates light and heat. It’s the light you see first – blinding light, just like looking into the sun. Next, travelling supersonically, is the blast wave of highly compressed air. The molecules at the front of the wave are so tightly squeezed together, they’re like a solid object travelling through space. Depending on the size of the explosion and where you’re standing, this will take the wind out of your lungs, or knock you off your feet. Or kill you. Next is the fireball, burning at up to 3,000 degrees. Caught up in all of this, and more often than not unwitting passengers in the process, is shrapnel: the debris of terror. The fire loses its energy quickly, transferring it to nearby objects, burning savagely. The shrapnel, travelling close to the speed of sound, falls where it lands. Or where it’s stopped.

  A piece of shrapnel, later identified as glass, caught Sam just below her right eye. She was lucky. Even though her brain had registered the blinding light and had started the reflex process of closing her eyelids, the object hit her well before the body’s emergency procedure had finished its job. A centimetre higher and she would have lost the sight in one eye.

  In fact, she was lucky in many ways. When the bomb tore through The Karsotty and everyone in it, she was still 40 metres from the centre of the explosion. And there was a red Lada Samara between her and the seat of the blast. The car had rocked, its wheels closest to the cafe lifting. At this distance it survived being blown over, unlike many of the cars closer to the cafe. Luckily for Sam it had also taken the brunt of the heat – the paintwork on the front left wing peeling. Most of the shrapnel heading in Sam’s direction slammed into the car, piercing panels and smashing glass.

  Sam was still blown off her feet. And she was still peppered with debris – and she had a chunk of glass in her face that would forever leave a scar. Her face would take a couple of days to recover from the burn inflicted by the heat. Her ears, overpressured from the shockwave, rang like an annoying car alarm. And the wind had been taken out of her lungs.

  She lay on the floor, struggling to find her breath.

  But none of this stopped her mind from working. From spinning. She knew that Alexei was dead. He couldn’t have survived the blast if he were in the cafe. And their liaison meant that the blast was almost certainly designed for him. Wasn’t it?

  And for me? Shit!

  What should she do now?

  Come on!

  As the shower of explosive flotsam continued to fall to the ground in a percussion of noise, and the roar of the fire became intermingled with human screams, Sam lifted her head from the pavement and glanced over her left shoulder through a gap in the cars. She could make out the spot where, momentarily before, strode the man in the blue suit. With the spotted tie. And no bags.

  Moving quickly away from the scene?

  She had caught sight of his face. OK, so it was only side-on. But she had seen him. And, as a result, she would remember him. Perfectly. That’s what she did. She could get Cynthia’s excellent photofit program to make an exact likeness. If he were part of all this, they would know what he looked like.

  Yes, that’s what I should do now…

  Arbat Village, Eastern Urals, Russia

  Sabine Roux was desperately tired. It had been another 12-hour day. She had just closed the clinic and now needed to make sense of her notes. At the same time, she’d use the incredibly slow internet connection, which had been provided by the local administration, to upload her notes to the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) account in the Cloud. She needed to do this before her head hit the pillow. And at some point, she really should eat.

  She sat in front of her dusty laptop, pressed the start button, and imagined all the little people inside working the steam engines to boot it into life. It had seen better days. But money was always tight in any charity and she was at the end of a very long supply chain. She’d probably get hers updated when everyone else had moved onto a brand-new form of the technology. That didn’t bother her at the moment. She was more concerned about falling asleep where she sat.

  Her fingers hovered above the keyboard, waiting for the machine to stop whirring. She looked at her fingernails. Even though they were reasonably short, half were broken or chipped. As a doctor, she didn’t keep them long – plastic gloves et al. But at the rate she was working and with little useful help (that wasn’t fair – Dimitri was a chéri, and was honing his nursing skills nicely; he was also a decent interpreter), she didn’t have time to keep them pristine. I must give them a trim.

  That reminded her. She must also take some of her own blood and get it into the centrifuge and under the microscope. The day before yesterday, as she was lancing a lesion on a sweet three-year-old girl’s arm, mixed fluid had somehow or other bypassed her protective glasses and splashed into her eye. There were all sorts of diseases she’d need to look out for.

 
Her screen settled down. Using a temperamental mouse, she double-clicked on the MSF icon. Her laptop, the ancient router, the telephone system, and some magical contraption in the Cloud, all began their merry dance. If the last three days were anything to go by, making the connection would take a while. Thankfully, when she eventually got the document open, it hardly ever crashed.

  Sabine had a number of cases to update, and three new ones to generate. The latest three were all from the village. In fact, all her cases were from the village. That was what was so extraordinary. Her current patient list was 64. Sixty-four ‘unexplained’ illnesses and infections, from a population of just 350. She had heard that the next-door village (next door being over 50 kilometres away) also had a good number of unusual ailments; she had already cleared with her boss in Moscow that she would move there as soon as she could.

  Her three new patients were typical. There was a 68-year-old man who had severe abdominal pain and internal bleeding – his stools were jet black. She’d taken blood and, during her short lunch break, found he had aplastic anaemia – a big drop in blood cells; white ones in particular. As a result, his body was wide open to infection. She couldn’t do anything about the internal bleeding without an ultrasound (which she didn’t have), and so she had referred him to the hospital in Kushva. The second and third patients were young children. Both had patches of red skin on their arms and torsos, and they were listless and vomiting. She prescribed and administered an anti-inflammatory cream for the skin, and had taken blood and stool samples to establish what was causing the nausea. The stools would go to the hospital and she would do what she could with the blood using the limited equipment she had. In the meantime, the children’s mothers had been instructed to restrict their diet. They had left with a few days’ worth of small-dose Hyoscine for the nausea.

  So far there was no pattern. There were plenty of symptoms, many were similar, but a chunk were irregular. Very few patients came to the clinic with exactly the same set of ailments.

  And that’s why she had been sent here.

  Find the pattern.

  The village had a visiting doctor and the local hospital was 80 kilometres away, along some of the worst roads in Russia. The spate of undiagnosed illnesses in this very confined area had been brought to the attention of the chairman of the local Chelyabinsk district. As he was a cousin of a senior politician in Moscow, MSF had been asked to send someone to see if they could establish what was going on.

  It’s not ‘what you know’…

  Sabine had arrived four days ago; it was just her, her trusty Toyota Hilux and a boot full of medical equipment. The journey from Moscow had taken two days. The first day was a slog across the Steppes. It had been a combination of a straight road, fields of wheat and corn, a distant horizon, and a huge, blue sky decorated with fluffy white clouds. The second was more spectacular: all ravines and peaks. The roads up and over the Ural Mountains; at one point the map said they were as high as 1,500 metres. She could best describe their condition as ‘passable’. As such, the drive was entertaining. After five years of MSF field work in Asia and Africa, difficult driving conditions rarely fazed her. The trip over the Urals had been a breeze.

  Sabine had been surprised at how well organised things had been at Chelyabinsk. Arriving late afternoon, she’d been met by the chairman at the town hall and he’d led her straight to the village. She’d followed his tatty Lada Riva, which dealt with the rough pebble and sand roads equally as well as her Toyota – at times she had struggled to keep up. After about an hour, and then in darkness, they pulled into the village. It was not much more than a hamlet at the base of a rocky escarpment (from what she could make out in the dark). Sabine thought she picked out a Russian Orthodox church beyond the square where they stopped, its gold-painted, onion-shaped dome glinting in the moonlight. The chairman led her to what looked like an old school house – it was an off-white, single-storey building with large windows and a rusty bike rack by the front door. In a small front garden there was an old climbing frame, which needed several coats of paint.

  Inside there were four rooms. One was classroom-sized, furnished with 20 infant chairs and no desks. She immediately designated this ‘the waiting room’. She used a second, smaller room as her surgery. There was a bed in the third, and she put all her medical equipment in the fourth. There was a bath and a loo, the former supplied with rusty warm water from a heating system that clanked loudly when it was operating. But no heating. That was fine. She didn’t need that. Yet.

  That was then. It seemed like an age ago. Now, 64 patients later, she was no further forward in establishing a link between the symptoms. MSF had given her two weeks and then she’d have to return to Moscow. The charity had only a handful of doctors in the country. Sabine thought they had 12 in Chechnya providing clinics in the conflict area, and five in Moscow, supporting the burgeoning homeless population. She was needed elsewhere. Time was always of the essence.

  The spreadsheet opened on the screen.

  Voila! Allons-y!

  Her English was very good, but she wasn’t yet fluent enough to think and dream in the language.

  Sabine looked across at her notes and started to type. She pressed ‘Ctrl-S’ regularly to ensure that the spreadsheet saved what she had inputted.

  She was halfway through the update when her concentration was broken. There was commotion outside. Sabine pressed ‘Ctrl-S’, took a deep breath and breathed out through her nose.

  Dimitri burst into the surgery looking like he had run a marathon. In between breaths, he said something which resembled ‘Rapidement médecin!’ His French was poor and his Russian accent didn’t aid communication.

  ‘English, Dimitri! Pas Français.’ Whilst French was the dominant language in MSF, English was often first choice. ‘Slow down. Tell me what’s happening?’ Sabine was already on her feet and reaching for her coat.

  ‘The child. From this morning. Peter. His mother thinks he is dying! You must come at once.’

  Sabine grabbed her medical bag and picked up a high-powered torch. Very few of the houses had guaranteed electricity.

  ‘OK Dimitri.’ She motioned with her hand. ‘Apres-vous.’

  Flat 17, 3125, Prechistenskiy Road, Moscow

  Tears ran down Sam’s face as her right hand worked in a circular motion, wiping up the rainwater that had made it through the gaps between her apartment’s kitchen window and its frame. The wind was still howling outside and the tissue she had just stuck in the biggest hole was already soaked. It was an endless task. She was glad she had her PADI open water scuba qualification; she might have need of it soon. Humour in the face of despair. It was an old army trick.

  She stopped wiping. Another tear fell and landed on her hand. She stared at it, watching the small drop follow the contours of her skin, before slipping between a gap in her fingers and joining the puddle that she was meant to be mopping up. The small dressing covering the gash in her face was acting as a dam against the reservoir of tears seeping from her right eye. It wouldn’t hold out much longer. Later she’d have to re-dress the wound herself. She had some plasters in the bathroom.

  What a shit day.

  It had been, without doubt, her worst day in Moscow so far. And that was saying some.

  She hadn’t enjoyed the move to Russia. At first, being selected by her outgoing boss’s boss, David, for case-officer training, had been such a boost. Especially after the trials of the German affair. At that point she had been down, possibly as low as she had ever been. The loss of her last living relative, Uncle Pete, and the mayhem that followed as she chased around Europe clutching at conspiratorial straws, had all taken its toll. Things didn’t get any better when she realised, soon afterward, that some of the people responsible for the terror were still at large. She wasn’t a coward, but knowing that Ralph Bell, the ex-CIA operative and all-round monster, was not behind bars, played on her mind. She couldn’t look at a can of Diet Coke, his consistent tipple, without shivering inwardly. On
the plus side, since the crash of the Air France plane there had been no more air disasters. That was a positive.

  Field training had gone well and she’d really enjoyed it. She hadn’t come out top of the class; her final report said something along the lines of, ‘Sam Green will make a sound case-officer. At times slightly maverick, she will need the usual level of supervision.’ But she had passed. She guessed a posting to Moscow was a sensible choice – she wouldn’t be operating on her own much, and with a large team around her, there’d be plenty of people to ‘keep an eye’.

  Before the move, SIS had planned two years of Russian language training: an initial year at Warwick University; and then a second year with a Russian-speaking family in Vilnius, Lithuania. Sam had really fretted about that bit of the jigsaw – she spoke French (badly) and had picked up some phrases of German as she was gallivanting around the country with Wolfgang. She wasn’t a natural linguist. Am I? But she needn’t have worried. Her tutor at Warwick gave her the green light after just six months. And five months of Lithuanian submersion later, she was fluent – the Embassy’s language expert in Vilnius had said that she couldn’t tell Sam apart from a local.