Nikolai Katinsky

Who they are

A Moscow Centre cipher clerk of twenty-two years’ standing who was noted once, in a staff rota of December 1974, and then never again — because he buried himself in the records as a nobody and stayed buried. In Britain he is Tommy Moult, a small man in a red cap who sells seeds outside the shop in Upshott and is not on any list of the village’s seventeen sleepers. He is also the author of Alexander Popov, the phantom spymaster the Service chased for decades, and of the cicada network that Popov was invented to explain.

The contradiction is the point of him. He was never the great officer the legend needed; he was a clerk who understood that a man nobody writes about cannot be found, and the network he built has since gone native — his sleepers have become villagers who no longer answer. He is dying of liver cancer, dosing himself with a worthless internet cure, and his last operation is run by a ghost against an audience that has stopped listening.

What they want

In 1991: to park a network in an English village and let it sleep. Now: to tidy up, to prove the cicadas still matter, and to be read about one last time. He says as much in the churchyard, and means it as an epitaph.

Book 2 — Dead Lions

• C04 — Is woken above a stationer’s off High Holborn by Lamb posing as a debt collector, sees through the cover at once, and talks anyway — over wine, about a word overheard in a Moscow lavatory.
• C11 — As Tommy Moult he finds River in the ruined farm buildings, walks him up out of the dip, and leads him to the flying club.
• C12 — Wheels a bound River across the Upshott grounds and leaves him in the ruin; Lamb finds his rooms lived in, and the pills.
• C15 — In the churchyard names himself, explains that he and Pashkin used Chernitsky to abduct Dickie Bow and seed the Popov legend, and admits the cancer.
• C15 — Dials the sleepers and gets no answer; concedes they have become villagers, then detonates his own bomb and brings the church wall and bell tower down on himself.

Tells

The red cap and the seeds; the roll-up cigarettes; a cough that matches Lamb’s own. The diary with no appointments, the camp bed behind the office, the abandoned love letter — a life stripped to what can be carried. He is pedantic about other people’s words and vague about his own.

Open questions

Whether he was Popov or only the man who invented him — Lamb decides the first, Katinsky says the second. Who the love letter was for. Whether the sleepers’ bombs were ever armed, or whether the threat was the last thing he had left to bargain with.