The Moscow Sleepers

He’s talking about hacking, thought Harry. That’s what this is about. Cyber attacks. Perhaps this young man really did have a special talent – he was obviously very clever – or perhaps Petersen just wanted to make him think he was special, so he could control him. That was half the battle in suborning someone like this innocent kid; if he was told he had a special gift for something, he would be much more inclined to go along with any instructions to use that talent...

It was nine thirty in the morning. Chief Constable Pearson was sitting at his desk in Bury St Edmunds trying to write a speech he was to deliver at the Chief Constables’ conference the following week. It wasn’t going well. His subject was the police role in the prevention of illegal immigration but he didn’t feel he had a good story to tell. In his view, far too little resource was being devoted to the problem. The press would be in the audience, all too ready to catch him out with their questions – the left alert to anything that could be construed as an abuse of human rights, the right anxious to expose anything that indicated the police were ‘soft’ on immigration. His task was to craft something that avoided both those pitfalls, and any others, and he was finding the task almost impossible.