colourful mound in the green-blue water getting ever further behind.
The cabin tilted as the pilot banked the aircraft steeply on to its heading and Sumners’ boss put down his phone and swivelled in his chair to face Stratton, wearing what looked like the same immaculate dark suit he had worn in the Grenadier. If the suit was a different one, the cold, empty smile he wore was not.
‘Stratton. Are you well?’ he asked.
‘Fine, sir,’ Stratton replied.
Sumners turned in his seat to face Stratton wearing his own stock smile.
‘Good,’ Sumners’ boss said. ‘Fine job, young man. Fine job.’Then, as if he’d had an idea, he leaned close to Sumners to say something privately into his ear. Sumners gave him an equally private and short reply and the boss picked up a phone, punched in a number and concentrated on his call.
Stratton could only wonder what he had done so well that resulted in the boss himself requisitioning such an expensive trip to pick him and Gabriel up from the island, and so rapidly too. They must have left the UK only a few hours after his call to Sumners.
Sumners got out of his swivel chair and sat in the hammock seat beside Stratton. ‘Well,’ he said, as if he had a lot to say and did not know where to start. ‘Are you wondering why we’re here, the boss included, and at great expense to the taxpayer?’ He sounded like a children’s talk-show host.
Stratton did not want to take part in Sumners’ little panto and offered him only a smile. The man was evidently in a good mood about something and would no doubt reveal why in due course.
Sumners took Stratton’s lack of interest as his usual, cold standoffish self. If he did not want to be chummy when the opportunity was offered, then that was his loss.
‘The name Mikhail Zhilev mean anything to you?’ Sumners asked, getting down to business.
Stratton wondered why the name had a familiar ring but could not place it. He shook his head.
‘What about Vladimir Zhilev?’
An image suddenly popped into Stratton’s head. ‘The tanker engineer?’ he asked, not entirely sure.
‘Correct,’ Sumners said like a schoolteacher.
‘Mikhail Zhilev is Vladimir’s brother. Your hunch about checking the tanker was a good one.Vladimir was the only Russian on board. Latvian to be precise. I immediately put the name through to our good friends in the FSB,’ Sumners said, emphasising the words ‘good friends’ for its irony. ‘They were surprisingly forthcoming, although I must say they have been recently . . . I made my inquiry sound as if it was nothing more than a next-of-kin search, of course. They provided a profile almost immediately but it only covered his youth and the last seven years or so, which immediately suggested something else - when the FSB omit large blocks of years in an adult’s life it usually indicates those years were spent in some sort of government service.We made another more urgent request, this time suggesting Zhilev had some vague connection to terrorism, fictitious, of course, which produced a more detailed coverage showing his military postings. Judging by the department and locations Zhilev served, we could ascertain he was in a Special Forces unit or at least attached to one. The FSB did not confirm that but it’s pretty obvious Zhilev was in this special unit from the mid-seventies. As expected, our interest sparked the FSB into doing some checking of their own and they offered to share some of their information with us. It seems Zhilev recently left his home in Riga and took a trip to England, arriving the same day Gabriel was attacked in Thetford Forest. The Russian lettering Gabriel saw prompted us to look at all of the recent viewings more closely. The big question was if this mysterious person - assuming that person was Zhilev - was indeed a serious threat and in some way linked to the tanker, and that it was him who attacked Gabriel, then what was he doing in Thetford Forest and at that precise location?’
Stratton hoped Sumners was not expecting him to come up with an answer because he did not have a clue.
‘It was Chalmers who cracked that one,’ Sumners said, indicating the nerdy assistant pecking away at a computer terminal. ‘He reads everything. MI archives mostly. File after file. Packing his mental database, so he says. Has a photographic memory.There are different types of photographic memory. Most just see an image they can recall instantly as if looking