The cicada network

Definition

“Cicadas” is the word left unsent on Richard Bough’s phone, and the name the book gives to a network of Soviet sleepers planted in Britain and left dormant, supposedly answering to the spymaster Alexander Popov. The Popov legend came with a biography: the closed town ZT/53235 in Georgia, a plutonium accident, a survivor who rose from the flames. The Service spent the Cold War chasing a man who was never there.

The twist Dead Lions builds is that the fabrication covers a real thing. Popov was invented — but a network was genuinely planted, and Nikolai Katinsky, the cipher clerk who invented Popov, built the legend out of his own past in ZT/53235 and then buried himself in Upshott among the sleepers he had parked there.

Book 2 — Dead Lions

• C01 — Jackson Lamb recovers the phone and finds a single unsent word in its drafts: Cicadas.
• C03 — David Cartwright explains that Popov was a bogeyman invented to send Western services chasing a network that never existed, from a town that disappeared from the map in 1955 after an accident at its plutonium plant.
• C04 — Katinsky, posing as a debt-ridden language-school proprietor, admits he overheard the word in a Moscow lavatory before the Wall fell, spoken in the same breath as Popov — and asks whose word such a buried network would answer to now.
• C06 — Lamb tells River Cartwright that ZT/53235 was destroyed deliberately, to bury a spy who never existed, and that the dying message was keyed by the bald man rather than by Bow.
• C11 — Roderick Ho dates seventeen families into Upshott between March and June 1991; Lamb and Catherine Standish conclude the network was mothballed and its members left to live ordinary country lives.
• C12 — In Records, Lamb and Molly Doran establish that Katinsky was never a minnow: he is Popov, and what he is doing now is a new operation rather than the old plan.
• C15 — Katinsky dials the cicadas from the churchyard and nobody answers: the sleepers have become villagers. He concedes the point, then detonates the one bomb that was his own.

Why it matters

The network lets the book argue about the Cold War’s afterlife without nostalgia. The sleepers are real, but the threat has decayed into parish life; the only person still fighting the war is a dying man with a grudge and a cancer he cannot treat. It also gives the series its model of the fabricated legend that turns out to be true in exactly the wrong way — and of an institution that cannot tell the difference between a story it invented and a danger it created.

Open questions

How much of the network Moscow Centre knew about after 1991; whether any cicada is still armed and still has a target; and whether “cicadas” was a warning, a summons, or a man’s private joke at the Service’s expense.