Dead Lions

Nikolai Katinsky is the primary antagonist in Dead Lions. Suitably, however, he is introduced to the audience in greatly reduced circumstances. Lamb finds Katinsky in a cluttered office. The Russian is living in this office, eating poorly, and operating a fake school which amounts to little more than a (fairly unprofitable) scam. Furthermore, medicine found in the office suggests that Katinsky is dying of cancer. The unimpressive, terminally ill, slovenly fraudster seems insignificant, but this insignificance is what makes him such a formidable foe. The Katinsky identity has been meticulously crafted over many decades, from before the collapse of the Soviet Union, as a potential escape route. Katinsky is so dedicated to his cover story that he accepts his living conditions. He performs the role of a slovenly fraudster for decades, convincing everyone around him that he is harmless and pathetic. Furthermore, Katinsky is not the only identity that he has created. He is also responsible for the myth of Popov which has haunted British intelligence for so long. He is responsible for the rumor of the cicadas in Britain, allowing this information to reach his enemies in such a way that they can never quite be sure what is real and what is fake. Katinsky’s power lies in his ability to operate in the spaces between truth and lie. He spends so long as Katinsky that he is, to all intents and purposes, just living this life. Everything, however, is a scheme. Everything is a performance in service of his ultimate goal.

Katinsky wants revenge. He comes from a small town in Russia that was destroyed by the Soviet authorities because British intelligence planted a false rumor that they had a spy inside the town. Katinsky was only young, but he remembers the town being destroyed and he blames Britain. He is not working toward anything as crass or grandiose as enrichment or ideology. He has no interest in relitigating the Cold War or avenging the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead, he simply wants to hurt Britain as he was hurt. This is why he picks Upshott as a base of operations. The quaint English town is a symbol of a certain vision of Englishness. To destroy this town is to strike back at this quaint nationalism. This may be a symbolic victory, but Katinsky hopes to show how powerless Britain has become. The decaying state of Great Britain, he suggests, has been subsumed into the global American order. Just as the town of Upshott has fallen into nothingness following the closure of the American Army base, there is nothing remarkable about post-Cold War Britain. Katinsky targets Upshott to demonstrate his belief that Britain has won a pyrrhic victory in the Cold War. While they may have outlived the Soviet Union, Britain survived to become little more than a vassal state of America. His revenge will not only destroy a town but demonstrate the powerlessness of Great Britain.

Katinsky’s plan fails. Though he has cultivated an entire community of Russian sleeper agents, they betray his plan. They do not rig the explosives he has given to them and the town is not destroyed. Unlike Katinsky, the cicadas have built functioning lives for themselves. They are comfortable middle-class retirees, while he has been living inside an office for 20 years. They lack his dedication and his operational purity, having embraced their new identities and abandoned their past. The cicadas are more concerned about finding good schools for their children and visiting their flying club than acting on behalf of a state that no longer exists. Katinsky, in his final moments, is faced with the failure of a plan decades in the making. He detonates his own personal bomb and blows himself up, collapsing the tower of the local church on top of himself. At this moment, Katinsky accepts the outcome. He has played the game and lost, so he ends his life on his terms. In a symbolic sense, he is buried beneath the collapsing church tower. This symbol of rural Englishness buries him and buries his secrets, exactly as the betrayal of the cicadas buried his plans. They embraced the same Englishness that the tower represents. Katinsky and the old order that he represents are buried beneath a quaint—though collapsing—English ideal.

As he first appeared in Slow Horses, Jackson Lamb is an offensive, repellant figure who prides himself on driving people away through his comments, his actions, and his various bodily functions. Lamb never misses a chance to appall someone, from his boss to his underlings. He is racist, misogynistic, and rarely considerate of anyone’s feelings but his own. This is the version of Jackson Lamb that Lamb presents to the world, yet it is as meticulously crafted a façade as Katinsky’s own deep cover operation. In public Lamb plays a version of himself. He pretends to be a disgusting oaf while preying on people’s low expectations to get ahead of them. His favored spot on the bench by the canal is evidence of this. To any watching spy, the spot seems a terrible choice. It provides nothing in the way of security, allowing Lamb to be watched at all times. Yet Lamb chooses it precisely for this reason. He wants people to believe that he does not care about anything while taking this opportunity to reverse the surveillance on anyone who might want to watch him. Similarly, the only time he seems repentant over one of his comments is when Catherine points out that he has been accidentally racist to Ho. Lamb did not mean to be offensive; the remark was not part of his carefully crafted identity, so it served no purpose. Lamb regrets the comment not because it was offensive, but because it served no purpose. Lamb might present himself as a useless and offensive relic of the past, but this carefully crafted version of Lamb masks a much more insightful, intelligent, and active mind.

The slow reveal of Lamb’s past work in the world of espionage helps to explain why he is so dedicated to his cover story. By playing an exaggerated version of himself in public, Lamb is hearkening back to his time in Berlin during the Cold War. He has worked countless dangerous missions and earned the respect of men like David Cartwright, River’s grandfather. The public persona of Jackson Lamb is part of his tradecraft, an assumed identity that allows him to move through the world unchallenged and unseen. As so many people overlooked Katinsky when he was pretending to be a nobody, few people are interested in what the slovenly Jackson Lamb is up to. Lamb’s experience has taught him to be wary. He has killed and seen people killed. He has lost colleagues, which is why he is so committed to investigating the death of Dickie Bow. Jackson Lamb has values, no matter how hard he tries to hide them. He protects his fellow soldiers, from Dickie to Min to River, even if he speaks disparagingly about them often. The real Jackson Lamb—the experienced spymaster who works hard to keep his team protected—slips out occasionally but is often quickly covered up by the deployment of bodily functions. Lamb uses his repulsive behavior to mask his true intentions, an ironic inversion of the stereotypical James Bond-like image of spies.