Cicada

Rebecca tells Lamb what happened to Min. He was already drunk and barely able to stand when the Russians attacked him. The car was used to stage an accident, but Min survived the impact, and Chernitsky finished him off. A fourth man watched. Rebecca was paid to supply a false account, and her description of where she collected the money leads Lamb back towards Katinsky’s language school. The truth gives Lamb identifiable suspects while making the concealment of the murder look deliberate at every stage.

When Lamb goes to the school, Katinsky has anticipated the visit and calls the office from elsewhere. He admits that keeping Lamb occupied was part of an arrangement. Lamb returns to Slough House and uses Min’s watch data to follow the stops made during the bicycle pursuit. At the import-export business he asks about the parcel collected by the Russians. The records do not tell him what was inside, but the delivery connects their movements to something more substantial than an ordinary security detail.

Lamb and Shirley watch Nevsky’s heavily guarded home and notice that nobody reacts to their presence. An open door gives them access to a scene that explains the silence. The guards are dead, and Nevsky has been subjected to radioactive poisoning. A radiation detector and the state of his body make staying there dangerous. His missing thumb supplies a further ugly detail whose purpose is not yet clear. They leave knowing that Webb’s promised access to a living Russian dissident has been built around a man who is already dead.

Catherine visits the broker Victor Krymov to pursue the arrangements behind the meeting. She gets herself into the conversation through paperwork and tries to exchange personal information for something useful. His interest in her past does not make him generous with his own knowledge. Louisa takes a more confrontational route, meeting Pashkin at his hotel and preparing to force answers from him about Min. Marcus intervenes before she carries out her plan. Lamb tells her about Nevsky and orders her to continue with the scheduled meeting rather than destroy the chance to uncover the wider operation.

In Upshott, River maintains his journalist’s cover through dinner with Chernitsky and the Tropper family. He plants his service phone on the visitor and follows its signal after the meal. The trail returns to the flying club, where Chernitsky is working with Katinsky. River confronts them with a gun and assumes that Duncan is the family’s sleeper agent. Alex approaches as though she is an innocent bystander, gets close enough to use a taser and brings him down. His strongest deduction about the household was wrong, and the operation can proceed with him restrained.