Sleepers

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Leonard Geggel spent the drive to Southwold thinking about CHERRY. It had been a year since Geggel’s retirement from MI6 and he hadn’t spoken to his old agent since then. Indeed, they had not parted on the best of terms. Pyotr Ilyich Aleksandrov had always been a cantankerous man, but, as the Russian grew older and more resigned to the fact that he would never be able to return home, he had become more and more frustrated. The two of them had argued during their last meeting. Aleksandrov had said that he needed an increase in his stipend so that he could move to a different house. Upon investigation, Geggel had found that Aleksandrov and his neighbour had fallen out over the folk music that Aleksandrov liked to play late at night as he drank himself into a stupor on the Moskovskaya Osobaya vodka that he had imported from Poland. Geggel had not even taken Aleksandrov’s request up the chain; he knew that it would be rejected and agreed that rejection would have been the right response. He had told Aleksandrov that there was to be no more money, and that he should make it up with his neighbour. The suggestion had provoked a foul-mouthed tirade against him, MI6 and the British state, followed by the angry suggestion that his work was not valued and that he should never have defected in the first place.

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