Breaking Cover

31

Liz had no difficulty in recognising her tour group at Stansted airport. The fluorescent orange baggage tags bearing a logo and the words ‘Uni Tours’ could clearly be seen even across the crowded concourse. The group looked much as she expected – mainly middle-aged, middle-class, more women than men. She was the youngest by far, except for the leader, Professor Anthony Curtis, who was standing in the centre of the group, holding a clipboard.

‘Ah, Miss Ryder,’ he said when Liz introduced herself under her cover name. ‘Welcome.’ He ticked the list on his clipboard. ‘You’re our last member so we can all check in now.’ He herded the group towards the desk for the Easy Jet flight to Tallinn.

Professor Curtis, who held the Chair of Baltic History and Politics at Cambridge, looked to be not much older than Liz – in his early forties perhaps. He was a short man with cropped blond hair and a small pointed goatee beard. His teeth gleamed white in his tanned face and when he smiled he looked startlingly like the smaller, younger brother of Richard Branson.

He shepherded his flock through check-in, and assisted a couple of elderly Scottish ladies, the Misses Finlaison, to lift their hand baggage onto the X-ray machine. One of them had put her sponge bag in her hand baggage and was unwilling to abandon some of the larger items. It wasn’t until Liz, who was next to her in the queue, promised to go with her to the chemist’s in the departure lounge to replace them that she could be persuaded to move on, by which time a queue of grumbling passengers had built up behind them.

As the only single traveller, Liz found herself sitting next to Curtis on the plane. ‘Thanks for your help with Miss Finlaison,’ he said, with a flash of his gleaming teeth. ‘I thought we were in for trouble there.’

‘Happy to help. They’re both very sweet,’ said Liz.

‘I noticed you only booked to come last week. Was it a sudden impulse?’

‘Well, yes. It was really,’ replied Liz, moving into cover mode. ‘My mother died three weeks ago.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ murmured Curtis.

‘It wasn’t unexpected. In fact it was something of a relief. She’d been ill for over a year. I’ve been looking after her and, when it finally happened, I felt utterly exhausted. The doctor said that after everything was sorted, I should take a holiday. But I don’t like sitting on the beach, so I looked for something more interesting and I came across this tour. It still had a vacancy and I decided to come. I’ve never been to any of the Baltic states before and I thought Tallinn looked lovely. And obviously it has a fascinating history too.’ She paused, waiting to see how this went down with the Professor.

‘I’m so glad you were able to join us. It is nice to have someone more my own age,’ he replied with a grin. ‘These tours can tend towards the geriatric. I have to be careful not to overdo the walking, but there will be time for wandering around. I don’t pack too much in or people start to flag.’

That’s good, thought Liz. I should be able to get away without being noticed.

They chatted on and off for the rest of the flight. Liz found out that his father, now dead, had been a banker in Gothenburg, and his mother was from Sweden. He’d spent a lot of his childhood there. When his father retired the family had moved to Cambridge and he now lived with his mother in the old family home. He was unmarried.

In return for all this information, she fed in a bit more of her cover story: she had been a primary school teacher in Norfolk until her mother had fallen ill, and had given up work to look after her mother at home in Wiltshire. Norfolk turned out to be a bit of a cover mistake as Curtis knew the county well and wanted to know where she had lived and which school she had taught at.

‘I lived in Swaffham,’ she said, mentally thanking Peggy for her thorough brief, ‘and I taught at a school in a nearby village, but it’s closed now.’ Thankfully he turned out not to know Swaffham, so she was spared deploying her detailed knowledge of the Market Place and surrounding pubs.

By the time they’d arrived in Tallinn and checked into the hotel, it was five in the afternoon local time. Nothing was in the programme until a pre-dinner orientation talk by the Professor at seven, so Liz took the opportunity to go off by herself and reconnoitre the town – and locate where she was due to meet Mischa in two days’ time.

The hotel was in the centre of the old town in what had formerly been a merchant’s house. Liz stood in the street outside for a moment, looking at it and thinking how charming it was with its white-painted walls, gables and steeply sloping red-tiled roofs. Like an illustration in a copy of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, she thought.

The town was busy, full of tourists of various nationalities. As she strolled around she was alert for surveillance but could discern no sign of anyone taking a particular interest in her. She returned to the hotel in time for the talk, confident that her real purpose for being there remained undetected – or as confident, she thought, as you could be in an ex-Soviet republic.

She listened with interest to what Anthony Curtis had to say about the troubled recent history of Estonia – how it had been often overrun, first by the Danes and the Swedes and, more recently, in turn by the Russians, the Germans, and the Russians again. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Estonia had flourished commercially. It had become known for its entrepreneurial ventures in IT, with dozens of start-up companies forming a Baltic version of Silicon Valley. But it was a precarious prosperity. The ethnic mix of the country made it vulnerable to the sort of destabilisation that had taken place in Ukraine.

Liz thought of Mischa who, if the Americans were right, was there to assess what weapons would be needed if the Russians did decide to act; she thought too of the covert CIA Station that Andy Bokus was so anxious to protect. It was clear to her that meddling was already going on here in a big way.

By dinnertime the whole party seemed to know that Liz Ryder had just lost her mother, and everyone was being so sympathetic that she began to feel rather guilty about killing off her remaining parent. The Misses Finlaison showed signs of wanting to mother her themselves, enquiring solicitously where she was going to live and what she would do next. She managed to avoid sitting next to them at dinner and chose a seat next to Major Sanderson, whose wife had temporarily deserted him to join a group of ladies. Anthony Curtis sat on Liz’s other side.

She soon discovered why the Major’s wife had chosen to sit somewhere else. Like most of his generation of middle-class Englishmen, the Major had superficially good manners but a penchant for talking exclusively about himself. Liz relaxed and let her mind wander as, for the better part of two courses, the Major described in detail his long career, which stretched from Aden to Antrim. It was only as he paused to spear his last piece of pork, cooked with potatoes in a briny sour cream sauce, that Anthony Curtis was able to weigh in from Liz’s other side.

By this time she had let her guard drop to the point that when he suggested they go to the bar to try one of the Estonian liqueurs, she agreed. This turned out to be a mistake: by the second glass of something fiery with an unpronounceable name, Professor Curtis was showing unmistakably amorous intentions. ‘It is so good to have someone young here for a change,’ he said dreamily, moving closer to her on the sofa.

‘It’s lovely to be here,’ said Liz, with a mournful smile. ‘But I feel sad about my poor mother. She suffered a lot, you know. It was cancer of the pancreas. Very nasty and painful and nothing could be done for her. They say it’s the silent killer; you can have it and not know until it’s too late.’

When Professor Curtis recoiled slightly, Liz stood up and said tearfully, ‘I think I had better go to bed now. Thank you for such an interesting day.’ And with that she walked mournfully out of the bar, leaving Curtis to finish his drink alone.