the road. Two men wave us down, examine us, then nod us through. No guns visible. Karlovy Vary’s Russians are law-abiding citizens. Guns are kept out of sight. We drive as far as a pair of Jugendstil stone gateposts from Imperial Habsburg times. Intruder lights go on, cameras peer down at us as two other men appear from a gatehouse, shine needless torches on us and again wave us through.
‘You’re well protected,’ I remark to Dimitri.
‘Unfortunately, this is also necessary,’ he replies. ‘My father loves peace, but such love is not always returned.’
To left and right high wire fencing is threaded into the trees. A dazzled deer blocks our way. Dimitri hoots and it leaps into the darkness. Ahead of us looms a turreted villa, part hunting lodge, part Bavarian railway station. In its uncurtained ground-floor windows, stately people come and go. But Dimitri is not driving towards the villa. He has turned down a forest track. We pass labourers’ cottages and enter a cobbled farmyard with stables one side and a windowless barn of blackened weatherboard on the other. He pulls up, reaches across me and shoves open my door.
‘Enjoy your game, Mr Halliday.’
He drives away. I stand alone in the centre of the farmyard. A half-moon appears above the treetops. By its shine I make out two men standing in front of the closed doorway to the barn. The door opens from inside. A powerful beam of torchlight leaves me momentarily sightless as the soft-spoken Russian voice with its Georgian intonation calls to me from the darkness:
‘Are you going to come in and play or do I have to beat the shit out of you out there?’
I step forward. The two men smile courteously and part to let me through. The door closes behind me. I am alone in a white passageway. Ahead of me a second door, open, leads to an AstroTurfed badminton court. Facing me stands the dapper, compact figure of my sixty-year-old former agent Arkady, codename WOODPECKER, in a tracksuit. Small feet placed carefully apart, arms half raised for combat. The slight forward lean of the seaman or the fighter. Close-cropped grizzled hair, just less of it. The same unbelieving gaze and clamped jaw, the pain lines deeper. The same taut smile, no more readable than on the night years ago when I strolled up to him at a consular cocktail party in Trieste and challenged him to a game of badminton.
He beckons to me with one jerk of his head then turns his back on me and sets off at a martial pace. I follow him across the court and up an open-tread wooden staircase leading to a viewers’ balcony. When we reach the balcony, he unlocks a door, beckons me through, relocks it. We climb a second wooden staircase to a long attic room at the end of which a glazed door is set into the gable. He unlocks it and we step on to a balcony overhung with vine. He relocks the door and speaks one Russian word curtly into a smartphone: ‘dismiss’.
Two wooden chairs, a table, a bottle of vodka, glasses, a plate of black bread, a half-moon for light. The turreted villa rising above the trees. On its floodlit lawns, men in suits walk singly. Fountains play on a pond presided over by stone nymphs. In precise movements Arkady pours two shots of vodka, briskly hands me a glass, gestures to the bread. We sit.
‘Have you been sent by Interpol?’ he demands in his rapid Georgian Russian.
‘No.’
‘Have you come here to blackmail me? To tell me you will hand me over to Putin unless I resume collaboration with London?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? The situation is favourable to you. Half the people I employ report on me to Putin’s court.’
‘I’m afraid London wouldn’t trust your information any more.’
Only then does he lift his glass to me in a silent toast. I do the same, reflecting that amid all our ups and downs I have never known him so angry.
‘So it’s not your beloved Russia after all,’ I suggest lightly. ‘I thought you always dreamed of that simple dacha among the Russian birch trees. Or going back to Georgia, why not? What went wrong?’
‘Nothing went wrong. I have houses in Petersburg and Tbilisi. However, as an internationalist I love best my Karlovy Vary. We have an Orthodox cathedral. Pious Russian crooks worship in it once a week. When I am dead I shall join them. I have a trophy wife, very young. All my