The Man Between: The gripping new spy thriller you need to read in 2018. Charles Cumming

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СКАЧАТЬ political goals. Those who consciously spread fear and hate. Those who knowingly benefit from greed and corruption. Any person who has helped to bring about the current political crisis in the United States by spreading propaganda and misinformation. Those who aid and abet the criminal regime in Moscow. Those who lied and manipulated in order to see England (sic) break from the European Union. Those who support and actively benefit from the collapse of secular Islamic states; who crush dissent and free speech and willingly erode basic human rights. Any person seeking to spread the virus of male white supremacy or deliberately to stoke anti-Semitism or to suppress women’s rights in any form. All of these people – we will begin in the United States and countries such as Russia, the Netherlands, Turkey and the United Kingdom – are legitimate targets for acts of retribution. Bankers. Journalists. Businessmen. Bloggers. Lobbyists. Politicians. Broadcasters. They are to be chosen by us – by you – on a case-by-case basis and their crimes exposed to the widest possible audience.’

      The beauty of Ivan’s idea was that it was individually targeted. This is what made it different to Antifa, to Black Lives Matter, to Occupy, to all those other groups who were only ever interested in public protest, in rioting, in civil disorder for its own sake. Those groups changed nothing in terms of people’s behaviour but instead gave various parties a chance merely to pose, to demonstrate their own virtue. There is a great difference between people of action and people of words, no? One thing you can say about Ivan Simakov, without a shadow of doubt, is that he was a man of action.

      At no point did anybody suggest that the targets for Resurrection were too broadly defined. We were all what you would call in English ‘fellow travellers’. We were all – with the exception of Mr Frattura – in our twenties or early thirties. We were angry. Very angry. We wanted to do something. We wanted to fight back. We had grown up with the illegal wars in Iraq and Syria. We had lived through the financial crisis and seen not one man nor woman imprisoned for their crimes. All of us had been touched by the manifest corruption and greed of the first two decades of the new century. We felt powerless. We felt that the world as we knew it was being taken away from us. We lived and breathed this conviction and yearned to do something about it. Ivan was a brilliant man, possessed of fanatical zeal, as well as what I always recognised as considerable vanity. But nobody could ever accuse him of lacking passion and the yearning for change.

      A policy of non-violence was immediately and enthusiastically endorsed by the group. At that stage nobody thought of themselves as the sort of people who would be involved in assassinations, in bombings, in terrorist behaviour of any kind. Everybody knew that deaths – accidental or otherwise – of innocent civilians would quickly strip the movement of popular support and allow the very people who were being targeted for retribution to accuse Resurrection of ‘fascism’, of murder, of association with nihilistic, left-wing paramilitary groups. This, of course, is exactly what happened.

      Ivan spoke about his ideas for evading capture, eluding law enforcement and intelligence services, men such as yourselves. ‘This is the only meeting of its kind between us that will ever take place,’ he said. There were silent nods of understanding. People already respected him. They had experienced at first-hand the force of his personality. Once you had met Ivan Simakov, you never forgot him. ‘We will never again communicate or speak face-to-face. Nothing may come from what we discuss today. I have a plan for our first attacks, all of which may be prevented from taking place or fail to have the desired effect on international opinion. I cannot tell you about these plans, just as I would not expect you to divulge details of your own operations as you create them. The Resurrection movement could burn out. The Resurrection movement could have a seismic effect on public attitudes to the liars and enablers of the alt-Right. Who knows? Personally, I am not interested in fame. I have no interest in notoriety or my place in the history books. I have no wish to spend the rest of my life under surveillance or in prison, to live as the guest of a foreign embassy in London, or to save my own skin by making a deal with the devils in Moscow. I wish to be invisible, as you should all wish to be invisible.’

      So much has happened since then. I have been through many lives and many cities because of my relationship with Ivan Simakov. At that moment I was proud to be at his side. He was in the prime of life. I was honoured to be his girlfriend and to be associated with Resurrection. Now, of course, the movement has moved deeper and deeper into violence, further and further away from the goals and ideals expressed on that first day in New York.

      They were so different, but when I think of Ivan, I cannot help thinking of Kit. On the boat he told me that I was like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, the faithless woman at the side of a revolutionary zealot. Kit was romantic like that, always living at the edge of what was real, as if life was a book he had written, a movie he had seen, and all of us were characters in the story. He was kinder than Ivan, in many ways also braver. I confess to you that I miss him in a way that I did not expect to. I wish you would tell me what happened to him. In his company, I felt safe. It had been a very long time since any man had made me feel that way.

MOSCOW

      The apartment was on a quiet street in the Tverskoy district of Moscow, about two kilometres from the Kremlin, a five-minute walk from Lubyanka Square. From the third floor, Curtis could hear the ripple of snow tyres on the wet winter streets. He told Simakov that for the first few days in the city he had thought that all the cars had punctures.

      ‘Sounds like they’re driving on bubble wrap,’ he said. ‘I keep wanting to tell them to put air in their tyres.’

      ‘But you don’t speak Russian,’ Simakov replied.

      ‘No,’ said Curtis. ‘I guess I don’t.’

      He was twenty-nine years old, born and raised in San Diego, the only son of a software salesman who had died when Curtis was fourteen. His mother had been working as a nurse at Scripps Mercy for the past fifteen years. He had graduated from Cal Tech, taken a job at Google, quit at twenty-seven with more than four hundred thousand dollars in the bank thanks to a smart investment in a start-up. Simakov had used Curtis in the Euclidis kidnapping. Moscow was to be his second job.

      If he was honest, the plan sounded vague. With Euclidis, every detail had been worked out in advance. Where the target was staying, what time his cab was booked to take him over to Berkeley, how to shut off the CCTV outside the hotel, where to switch the cars. The Moscow job was different. Maybe it was because Curtis didn’t know the city; maybe it was because he didn’t speak Russian. He felt out of the loop. Ivan was always leaving the apartment and going off to meet people; he said there were other Resurrection activists taking care of the details. All Curtis had been told was that Ambassador Jeffers always sat in the same spot at Café Pushkin, at the same time, on the same night of the week. Curtis was to position himself a few tables away, with the woman from St Petersburg role-playing his girlfriend, keep an eye on Jeffers and make an assessment of the security around him. Simakov would be in the van outside, watching the phones, waiting for Curtis to give the signal that Jeffers was leaving. Two other Resurrection volunteers would be working the sidewalk in the event that anybody tried to step in and help. One of them would have the Glock, the other a Ruger.

      ‘What if there’s more security than we’re expecting?’ he asked. ‘What if they have plain clothes in the restaurant I don’t know about?’

      Curtis did not want to seem distrustful or unsure, but he knew Ivan well enough to speak up when he had doubts.

      ‘What are you so worried about?’ Simakov replied. He was slim and athletic with shoulder-length black hair tied back in a ponytail. ‘Things go wrong, you walk away. All you have to do is eat your borscht, talk to the girl, let me know what time Ambassador Fuck pays his cheque.’

      ‘I know. I just don’t like all the uncertainty.’

      ‘What СКАЧАТЬ