Time of the Octopus: Based on the True Story of Whistleblower Edward Snowden

07:21 P.M._

If any of the journalists had paid attention to this person, the real Babel in the transit area would have begun. The fact is that the owner of the leather briefcase was none other than the Lawyer, who fortune had made the intermediary between the Russian authorities and Joshua Kold, and who would thus gain international fame through no efforts of his own, a fame very rare for representatives of the Russian legal profession.

As it happens, the Lawyer was rather blessed by luck. From the very beginning of his law career, his mandators – for some reason this is what he called his clients – had been celebrities engaged in improbable adventures. There was the successful media magnate caught trying to walk out of a government residence with a box containing one million dollars taken from under the copying machine. There was the former Minister of Justice whose photos in a sauna in the company of naked girls once filled the Russian tabloids. There was the wife of the opposition leader – a deputy of the Russian parliament – who accidentally, according to investigators, shot her husband on the eve of his carefully planned military coup. There were enough plots in his mandators’ list for ten thrillers. And though the possibility of writing them up had sometimes crossed the Lawyer’s mind, he’d never had the time to get round to it.

The Lawyer had already met Kold – and nearly all the world media had reported it. Just exactly what these two very different people talked about remained secret, of course, but the international public learned that the Lawyer had given Kold as a gift a Russian abc-book, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, a small volume of stories by Anton Chekhov, the ‘History of the Russian State’ by court historian Karamzin, and, in a makeweight, several words of encouragement transmitted by the Lawyer from the highest Kremlin offices.

Meanwhile, the nervous tension among the representatives of the second most ancient profession reached its apogee. The correspondent of one of the alternative internet portals, a gloomy young man with a bony face – there is a saying about such people: ‘not strong, but nervous’ – bleated provocatively:

“He’s probably under the wing of intelligence agencies in Lubyanka. There ‘gutting’ gets extreme.”

“Well, maybe not ‘gutting’,” the robust guy from Gazety.ru pompously responded, “It’s not ’37 now. Now it’s called ‘debriefing’. But on the intelligence agencies you are bang on, colleague.”

The Lawyer grinned to himself because he, unlike these knights of quill and keypad, knew that the one they were waiting for in hope of snapping in a photo, getting a quick quote from, or even a sensational interview, wasn’t in Lubyanka. And there was certainly no notorious ‘gutting’ – the stakes were too high.

“And in the USA, there are no transit areas at all,” the grey-haired gentleman from Reuters declared.

“Yes, that’s so right!” the gloomy young man added. “There they have such a highly developed transportation system that all eventualities are considered in advance!

“Well – it’s the most free country in the world,” the blonde girl said, tapping her shoulder.

The photographer smiled sadly, but decided not risk pursuing this unpromising discussion.