The Bullet That Missed (Thursday Murder Club, #3)(24)

‘Not today, then?’ says Viktor. ‘No TV today?’

But Bake Off is on tonight. And it’s the semi-final. Viktor scans the London skyline, laid out before him through his floor-to-ceiling windows. Viktor can see out, but no one can see in, which makes an old spy very happy.

‘Not today, sir, no. If you log in to your Virgin Media app –’

‘I don’t have the app,’ says Viktor. ‘I don’t work for Virgin Media, you see. I pay you to do the work.’

‘Understood, understood,’ says the voice. ‘You can do it online too. Log in to your account, find the “Book an engineer” page and choose the next date that is convenient for you.’

‘OK, the next date convenient for me is today,’ says Viktor. He looks across his terrace. From his penthouse you can see the swimming pool suspended between two buildings. It caused quite a stir when they unveiled it. A swimming pool floating a hundred feet up in the air? Viktor doesn’t use it much. Currently the only person in the pool is a Saudi princess. She is taking a picture of herself. No one really swims, it is too cold.

‘As we’ve discussed, sir,’ says the voice, ‘today is impossible.’

‘“Impossible” is a big word,’ says Viktor, lifting his legs onto his sofa and settling in. When Viktor worked for the KGB, they had a nickname for him. ‘The Bullet’. If you wanted to question someone, the basic protocol was always to send in two operatives. ‘Good cop, bad cop,’ they called it in Great Britain. Usually they would get what they needed. Sometimes there was torture, though Viktor never approved. Torture got you nowhere. Sure, people would talk, but you had no way of knowing if it was the truth. Most people would talk to keep their teeth, their fingernails, to avoid the electrodes.

‘Well, yes, I understand that …’

But sometimes people wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t crack, whatever you did to them. However you tried to break them. And on those occasions a call would go out to Moscow. Send for the Bullet. Viktor just had a way. He had a manner about him.

‘I am an old man,’ says Viktor. ‘I live alone.’ He pours himself a brandy.

‘I can quite appreciate that, sir, but it doesn’t –’

‘And computers? I don’t understand them so much.’ Viktor was the first man in Russia to hack into the IBM mainframe computers in the Pentagon.

‘The system is simple: I can guide you through it if you have your computer there?’

Viktor’s technique would always be the same. Enter the room, sit, chat. Build a rapport, maybe clear up a bit of blood, light a cigarette and find a consensus.

‘You sound like my son, Aleksandar,’ says Viktor. Viktor never married, never had children, although the KGB encouraged it. They liked you to have a family, something they could leverage, something to keep you in Russia should you ever be tempted to stray. Many women were put in his path. Funny, brave, beautiful women. But Viktor’s life was made of lies, and love doesn’t blossom among lies. If it wasn’t to be love, then Viktor wasn’t interested. And now that he is out of the game, it is too late.

‘Are you maybe twenty-one? Twenty-two? What is your name?’

‘Umm, I’m Dale,’ says the voice. ‘I’m twenty-two. Would you like me to take you through the process?’

‘You finished university, Dale? You didn’t go, maybe?’ asks Viktor. Viktor likes people, and he wants the best for them. These days that is seen as a weakness, but, over the years, it has been his greatest strength.

‘I, I was at uni, but I dropped out,’ says Dale.

‘Loneliness?’ asks Viktor. He can hear it in the voice. ‘You found it difficult to make friends maybe?’

‘Uh, I have to finish this call in under five minutes or there’s a report,’ says Dale.

‘There’s always a report,’ says Viktor. ‘I have written many, and no one looks at them. So at uni, there were no friends? I too was very shy at twenty-two.’

‘Well, I suppose, yes,’ says Dale. ‘I didn’t really know where to start. It got to me. Are you on the website?’

Sometimes you would walk into a room, and there would be a young man slumped in his chair, blood down his shirt, eyes swollen closed, and you just had to make a connection. Any interrogation is a conversation, and there have to be two people in a conversation. If you want something, you cannot take it; you have to let somebody give it to you.

‘I was the same, this was many years ago though,’ says Viktor, as he looks out of the window. The Saudi princess is no longer in the pool. Now there is a young man eyeing the water. Viktor recognizes him: the man has a radio show, and once helped Viktor with his bags. Viktor likes him and tried to listen to his programme once. It wasn’t for him, but he couldn’t fault the young man’s enthusiasm. They gave a caller a thousand pounds for knowing the capital of France. And there were three options. ‘You think everyone around you knows some secret about how to live life. That there was a lesson you missed somewhere.’

‘Yeah,’ agrees Dale. ‘Are you on the website, I can take you through –’

‘I still feel it, Dale. These people who know how to live. They can dance, they know what clothes to wear, how to cut their hair. I am not one of them, are you?’