Dead Lions

River visits his grandfather, David Cartwright, affectionately referred to by River’s mother as the O.B.. During the journey, he thinks about the enormous responsibility his grandfather bore “to make sure that nothing ever changed” (66). They talk about Lamb’s paranoid suspicion that “there’s a KGB wet squad at large” (67). The O.B. remembers a Russian who specialized in untraceable poisons, suggesting that Lamb may not be merely paranoid. He also recalls Dickie Bow as a minor player in the intelligence field before he vanished in 1989, only to return drunk. Dickie claimed that Russian spies had snatched him and poured alcohol down his throat by “Alexander Popov himself” (70). River does not recognize the name, much to his grandfather’s astonishment. According to the legend, Popov was a fictional spymaster, invented as a distraction for Western resources. The legend makes River wish that he were alive in his grandfather’s era, rather than working in Slough House. The O.B. tries to remember Popov’s file. Allegedly, he came from a closed town in Georgia that was home to a plutonium production plant. Charles Partner, the O.B. remembers, criticized the pursuit of the potentially fictional Popov as a waste of time.