Bomb Grade

chapter 25

C harlie was back at Lesnaya in time to see the CNN transmission of the statement from both the Prime Minister and the American President, as well as the cable network’s round-up of the rest of the Western reaction. The British was by far the most reserved, the concentration upon the amount of material still missing rather than upon that recovered, a fact that was seized upon by the Russian television commentary, which Charlie considered the biggest bonus of all.

He considered calling Kestler, wanting to know anything additional to what he’d already seen and heard on Russian television that Hillary Jamieson might have found at Ulitza Volkhonka, but decided it could wait until the following morning when he talked to the American about the satellite voice pick-up at the same time as announcing his London return. It would probably have been difficult to locate either of them anyway: even this early in the evening Kestler would probably be working hard to add Hillary’s pubic scalp to his collection. He thought of packing for the following day but dismissed it as unnecessary preparation and instead poured a glass of Macallan, raised it to himself in lonely congratulation and said, ‘Well done, Charlie. Keep it up.’ He looked at his watch a lot, which was how he knew it was exactly seven-fifteen when Natalia finally rang.

‘Yetisyna broke, like a baby: the easiest ever,’ Natalia declared, needing to boast.

Nothing about his being closed out, thought Charlie: her speed, her priorities. ‘Totally?’

‘Enough. Classic bully persona, collapsing under the slightest pressure.’ Natalia used her account to Charlie as a rehearsal for the presentation the following day. She was glad now she hadn’t been able to contact Aleksai. She wanted him to hear it first with all the others: most of all to hear the repeated praise and congratulation from higher authority. Aleksai had been accorded his: now it was her turn.

When she finished Charlie said objectively; ‘How much do you believe?’

‘Most of it. He’s exaggerating, not actually lying.’

‘Who knows?’

‘Minister level. Fomin has promised a named reference to the President.’

‘Very good,’ acknowledged Charlie. ‘No one else?’

‘It’s going to be announced at a full meeting tomorrow.’

Not so good, thought Charlie, although he didn’t say so. ‘To which I am no longer admitted,’ he prompted.

‘I didn’t know it was going to happen,’ Natalia said at once, anxiously apologetic.

Charlie frowned, curiously. ‘Kestler thought it was a committee decision. I assumed you would have been present.’

‘I didn’t know in sufficient time to tell you,’ Natalia clarified. ‘I had to appoint interrogators to question the people arrested with the canisters: I was going to do it myself but then I had the message from Yatisyna that he wanted to see me, so everything had to be rescheduled. Everyone was assembled by the time I got there. Aleksai told me they thought it had been made public by the British and it had already been decided to withdraw all cooperation.’

‘By the British,’ pressed Charlie. ‘Not by me personally?’

‘No. You weren’t mentioned by name.’

‘And it was Popov who told you?’

‘Yes.’

Which was who it logically should have been, acknowledged Charlie. It was time he made his contribution. ‘The leak came from Moscow.’

‘How do you know?’ demanded the woman.

‘According to the Western count, twenty-two canisters were stolen, not nineteen, which was what the Reuter story said. It also identified Murom as the train’s destination: Kestler and I always assumed it was Gorkiy. We’d never heard of Murom. And what was taken has never been positively identified to us as plutonium 239. But it was in what Reuter put out.’

‘What are you going to do?’

Charlie didn’t want to cheat her but he had to lie: what she didn’t know she couldn’t inadvertently impede and what Natalia had just told him from her side increased the danger. So in ignorance she – and Sasha – would remain safe; he strained for any sound of his daughter in the background but couldn’t hear her. He had to move Natalia onwards and away with a scalpel-like finesse to prevent any experienced suspicion. ‘I have to go back.’

‘Back where?’ she asked, confused.

A good start, Charlie decided. ‘London.’

‘Ordered?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long for?’

Charlie detected no hesitation or voice change. ‘Re-evaluation, I guess. I don’t know.’ Did he have to be this brutal, after everything else he’d done to her? Cruel eventually to be kind, he tried to convince himself. And wasn’t convinced.

This time Natalia did hesitate. ‘Could it be permanent?’

Enough, Charlie determined. ‘No.’

‘Can you be sure?’

‘Permanently pulled out from something as big as this? You’ve got to be joking!’

‘There aren’t any jokes here, Charlie.’

And didn’t he know it! Risking that she’d been sufficiently deflected, he said, ‘I’ve got to leave tomorrow. So I need to know about the recovery now!’

It came disjointedly, a hurried, second-hand account of the Agayans and Shelapin Family purges to get to the interrogations in which she was personally involving herself. But Charlie refused to be hurried, breaking in to bring Natalia specifically back to everything she knew about what had happened at Ulitza Volkhonka. Which wasn’t much. It had been one of several addresses checked of known members of the Shelapin Family. It was a rabbit warren of apartment complexes, so a surprise approach had been impossible. By the time the Militia and Special Forces had closed around the identified address, it was barred against them: the demand that the door be opened had been answered by a scatter of Kaleshnikov fire that injured two Militia officers. The door had been blown in by a grenade. The first Militia man across the threshold had been killed instantly and it was in the resulting fire-fight three gang members had died. It was only later, after all the arrests, that the canisters were found in the basement garage of one of the dead men, who had been named as Anatoli Dudin, an acknowledged Shelapin gang member who had a criminal record stretching back almost twenty years. The canisters had been intact and concealed only by a tarpaulin thrown over them. Every arrested Shelapin man denied any knowledge of the canisters or of the Pizhma robbery: their lawyers were already demanding their release.

‘You still haven’t got Agayans or Shelapin themselves?’

‘No.’

‘Agayans is important, after what you got from Yatisyna.’

‘Charlie!’

‘Sorry,’ he apologized. ‘What about forensic, at Volkhona?’ It had been a mistake not trying to speak to Hillary Jamieson. ‘Have the canisters been checked for Dudin’s fingerprints? Anyone’s fingerprints?’

‘It’s hardly relevant, is it? The man’s dead. And they were on his property. Petr Tukhonovich didn’t say anything about forensic examination.’

‘Petr Tukhonovich?’ queried Charlie.

‘Gusev,’ completed Natalia and Charlie remembered the Moscow Militia commander who’d announced the finding of the lorries in the Arbat.

Charlie was disappointed Natalia didn’t see the point of a forensic examination. ‘Provable fingerprints, even of a dead man, would show that the Shelapin people were lying, wouldn’t it? Like any prints could have led you to people with records for whom you haven’t issued warrants yet.’

‘My mistake,’ admitted Natalia.

‘Not your mistake. The mistake of the investigating scene-of-crime officer.’

‘I think the containers have been moved to Murom.’

Handled by everyone and his dog by now, guessed Charlie. ‘Nothing that can be done about it. Who’s convinced everything else is still in Moscow?’

There was a pause. ‘It just seems to be the general consensus,’ offered Natalia, at last.

‘Aleksai led the chorus the other day?’

‘He’s one of them,’ she agreed. ‘Gusev, too. Fomin and Badim seem to have accepted it, as well. Yatisyna’s information was about Kirs, not Pizhma.’

‘I believe some of it, maybe all of it, is being shipped through Warsaw. Probably even gone through Warsaw,’ announced Charlie, flatly.

Charlie waited patiently for Natalia to recover and when she did she matched the professionalism of Balg, earlier, in not demanding proof or sources. ‘It’s already being acted upon?’

‘Of course.’

‘You sure of an arrest? A recovery?’

‘No.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Nothing, practically,’ cautioned Charlie. ‘But use it, carefully. Go on as you did today, with people like Fomin and Badim. At that level – but not the operational group – argue as strongly as you can that Russia can’t operate in isolation; that you need Western involvement and cooperation.’ What he was hoping to achieve would need more than Natalia’s lone voice, although she would have impressed people who mattered by what appeared to be the result of her interrogation of the Kirov gang leader.

There was another brief pause. ‘That excludes Aleksai.’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Charlie, reluctantly. ‘Of course I expect you to talk about it to him.’

‘He’ll oppose it, privately as well as publicly. You particularly. He thinks you’ve picked arguments at the meetings.’

For once Charlie was uncomfortable with pillow talk because of whose pillow the talk came from. ‘You know that’s not true.’

‘ I do,’ Natalia accepted, pointedly. Then she said, ‘I feel I should do more, something practical! I just can’t leave it, like that!’

‘You haven’t got a choice,’ said Charlie, objectively.

‘I don’t feel I’m doing enough!’ Natalia protested.

He hadn’t felt that about himself, until the last two days: maybe even less. And he still had a lot to prove to himself, before he even considered trying to convince others. ‘That’s ridiculous! If half of what you got from Yatisyna is true you’ve taken the investigation a long way forward, with further to go when you get Agayans. You’re being brought to the attention of the President, for Christ’s sake!’

She didn’t appear convinced. ‘I’m not comfortable with this.’

‘You could find the key to everything!’ he insisted.

‘I didn’t mean the questioning. I meant this: you and I. Doing this… I feel I’m deceiving Aleksai. Which I am.’

A flurry of responses came to Charlie’s mind. He didn’t want to lose her: lose this link. And it wasn’t just personal, not any more. He needed this back channel. Without it, now that official cooperation was denied him, he couldn’t gauge the moves to make. ‘We’re not deceiving Aleksai: not in any proper meaning of the word. We’re protecting you. And Sasha. And doing everything we can – more than anyone else with whom you’re working – to solve a robbery that could cause a catastrophe. Where’s the deceit, real deceit, in that?’

‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘You know I’m right. Think about it.’

‘Any idea how long you’ll be away?’

‘Just a few days.’ There was an intake of breath from the other end of the line and he expected her to say something. When she didn’t he added; ‘I’ll have to call you, when I get back. It won’t be difficult for you to let me know if it’s inconvenient.’

‘All right,’ she agreed.

‘We haven’t talked about Sasha.’

‘No.’

She was still uncertain, Charlie recognized. ‘She all right?’

‘Fine.’

‘Good.’

‘Learning numbers,’ Natalia volunteered, at last. ‘Not very well,’ she added.

‘She’s only…’

‘… I know how old she is, Charlie.’

‘I…’ he started and then stopped abruptly, before saying he’d like to see her again. Natalia had to trust him a lot more before that would be an easy request. Instead he said, ‘When I get back maybe we should meet: not rely always on telephoning like this?’

‘Why?’

He didn’t like the immediate sharpness. ‘I’d like to.’ Not like: want to. He should have said something better; far better.

‘This is professional.’

‘I know that’

‘So this way is good enough.’

Was it that she was frightened of meeting him alone, not trusting herself? Careful, he told himself. ‘So Sasha’s all right?’

‘I already told you.’

‘There’s nothing wrong in talking about her, is there?’

‘I’m sorry, I…’

‘… This is getting confused,’ he stopped, although he didn’t want to cut her off. ‘I’ll call you when I get back from London.’ And persuade her somehow, some way to meet him again. But not with Sasha. By themselves. He had to take away her apprehension about the baby. He could lie, about London: invent something that sounded professional to get her to agree. He’d cheated her far worse in the past and this wasn’t cheating. Was there any point, he asked himself. He didn’t need to reationalize it, not yet, not now. Just not give up.

‘Do that,’ said Natalia and was the first to hang up.

Charlie was pouring the second scotch, no longer in quite the celebratory mood as before, when the telephone rang again. Hillary Jamieson said, ‘What’s a gal do for fun around here!’

‘Go up and down,’ said Charlie.

‘That sounds interesting.’

‘It’s the name of the best club in town.’ And if everything worked out in the coming weeks, one in which he hoped to spend a lot of time. So tonight was as good a time to start as any. But what was this call about from Hillary Jamieson? More confusion to add to that he already felt.

Hillary Jamieson entered the bar looking sensational in a mid-thigh sheath dress that didn’t waste a single silk thread and a contrasting blue matador jacket, completed by just a single strand gold choker: several glasses stalled between table and lip as she eased towards him. Charlie couldn’t remember seeing anyone move like her and didn’t want the distraction of trying. Eased didn’t describe it: poured was better but still lacking. He was at the bar because all the tables had been occupied when he arrived and poured still fitted the way she got on to the stool. She asked for vodka and said, ‘When in Rome,’ clinked glasses and then said, ‘Here’s to a new day,’ and Charlie decided it was certainly going to be very different from a lot he’d known for a long time.

‘What’s left of this one’s looking good enough.’ Charlie was totally bemused and happy to be so. He still needed to know about Ulitza Volkhonka so he even had the excuse that this was work, not pleasure. There weren’t, he told himself, any limits to which he wouldn’t go for the job.

‘Let’s hope,’ she smiled.

‘So how are you scoring Moscow, out of ten?’

‘Embassy compound accommodation nil. Socially, three and only then when the sun shines. Workwise, ten.’

He hadn’t tried to rush anything, but it was all right with him if she wanted to get work out of the way. ‘The canisters were OK?’

‘Perfectly safe.’ Then, at once, ‘But I was right.’

‘Right?’

‘About their being held in racks, in the lorries. The outside of every one was scored at exactly the same height, where they’d shifted slightly during the drive from Pizhma.’

‘So how was Volkhonka itself?’

‘Charlie, you wouldn’t believe it!’

He thought he probably would. ‘Try me.’

‘Even though I’m classified a scientist I’ve gone through the courses at Quantico, right? Done the basics. This wasn’t even Keystone Kops. By the time I got to the garage there were at least eight guys, all standing around looking at each other doing fuck all but hoping to get into the television pictures that were being set up; their scientific guys – the same ones that were at the Arbat, I think although I’m not sure – had come and gone. It might have been them who’d put one of the canisters on its side but I’m not sure about that, either. There was a Militia man actually sitting on it, smoking a cigarette: if there’d been a leak he’d have been frying the balls he was trying to prove he had!’ She needed a breath, after the outrage. ‘And don’t worry. I left before the cameras started shooting and I wasn’t wearing FBI cover-alls anyway.’

Although he already had the lead from Natalia he still wanted to hear it from Hillary. ‘What about forensic?’

She snorted a laugh. ‘Nothing. And I mean just that: nothing. No dusting, no fibre checks, no positional diagrams, no ground casts, no scene-of-crime measurements, no nothing. Is there such a word as evidence in the Russian language?’

Charlie wished he had been at Ulitza Volkhonka, to have overheard the conversations among the posing policemen: he was surprised a Russian-speaking old timer like Lyneham hadn’t hung around with Hillary. There was a crowd building around them, with Hillary the attraction, so Charlie pushed their way through the linking corridor to the Savoy restaurant, confident he wouldn’t lose the momentum. The more he thought about it, and he was thinking about nothing else now, the more he realized how important Hillary Jamieson was and could be to him. Charlie didn’t hurry with the comparison he wanted with what he’d been told on his first day at the British embassy. He went along with the predictable enthusiasm for the baroque decor and translated the menu and agreed it would be interesting to have the beluga before the sturgeon and took care over the imported Montrachet. Only then did he say, intentionally obtuse, ‘I’m not really sure what we’re up against here.’

Hillary looked at him blankly. ‘You want to help me with that?’

‘I don’t mean the chaos and the inefficiency. What’s plutonium and all the rest of it do? Where’s the danger?’

Hillary smiled, nodding her head in a gesture Charlie didn’t immediately understand. ‘It’s what makes the atom go bang: what splits it. By itself it emits rays you can’t see – the radiation like X-rays – which burn and cause several kinds of cancer. It destroys bones literally within the body. And mutates unborn foetuses.’

‘I wouldn’t sit on it,’ agreed Charlie.

‘It’s best not to.’

‘How many weapons could be made from what’s missing?’

She smiled again. ‘Everybody’s question: it was one of the first that Fenby wanted answering. I can’t give one, specifically. Depends what sort of tactical weapon you want. If you’re talking Hiroshima, Nagasaki size and we’ve still got more than 200 kilos missing, then a minimum of forty.’

‘Minimum! You mean there could be more?’ queried Charlie, who’d thought the lower figure was inconceivable.

‘Nuclear technology has come a long way in half a century, Charlie!’

‘How endangered are the men who breached the canisters at Pizhma? And the soldiers who cordoned it off, later?’

‘The thieves, hardly at all. I’ve gone through our picture sequences: their exposure was very brief, less than ten minutes and that wasn’t concentrated. The soldiers would have been stationary for a much longer time, just standing around being subjected to the contamination. They’ll need a lot of monitoring: it could already be in their thyroids. They’ll all be on iodine treatment. Or should be.’

This could all be academic, acknowledged Charlie. But if he succeeded in what he intended to propose the following day, it could literally be the difference between life and death: maybe his life and death. ‘Could the Russians have hosed the contamination away from where the train was stopped? And the train itself, like they said they had?’

‘They should have been able to, although I hope to Christ their nuclear people are better at what they do than their police are.’

‘How long’s the danger last if they aren’t?’

She made her curious head-nodding movement again. ‘We’re talking plutonium 239 here, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So here’s your question, for the kewpie doll on the back row. What’s the life span of plutonium 239? You get one clue: give it your longest shot.’

‘A hundred years,’ guessed Charlie.

She laughed at him over the iced vodka he’d ordered with the caviare. ‘Two hundred and forty thousand years. Not even Methuselah would have been safe; he only made it to 969.’

‘You saying that’s how long Chernobyl’s going to be dangerous!’

‘And a lot of that time lethal. Some nuclear scientists reckon the final death toll is going to be 500,000. But let’s not stop at Chernobyl. After exploding their first atom bomb in 1949 the Russians concentrated a lot of their nuclear research around Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk. And used the Techa river as their radioactive disposal sewer. The current casualty figure is 100,000…’ She gave a resigned shrug. ‘But it’s not only Russia that deserves the finger. There’s been more fuck-ups, cover-ups and outright murderous criminality in every country in the world developing nuclear technology than any other supposed science. In America we contaminated hundreds of people and hundreds of acres around Hanford, in Washington State; babies were bom deformed. In Oregon Penitentiary American doctors paid lifers five bucks a month to let them do what that stupid bastard could have been risking at Volkhonka this afternoon, subjecting their testicles to radiation exposure to see what happened. Your people did fuck all to clear the aborigines out of your Australian test sites…’

‘Whoa!’ stopped Charlie, abruptly aware of the growing vehemence. ‘Are we getting a statement here?’

She flushed, which surprised him. ‘There are mistakes with every new discovery: they can’t be helped. We developed nuclear fission fifty years ago. The mistakes should have stopped by now. And the nuclear power lobby shouldn’t have been allowed to grow so strong or remain unchallenged, like they’re too strong to be challenged now.’

‘That why you’re not part of it?’

She flushed again. ‘Shouldn’t I have a bright light shining into my face, with you hitting me with a rubber truncheon?’

‘That isn’t an answer.’

‘Maybe,’ she finally conceded. ‘Now my question for you.’

‘OK.’

‘Have I passed?’

It took Charlie a moment to reply. ‘You think I was testing you?’

‘Weren’t you?’

‘No!’ At last he understood the head nodding.

She regarded him doubtfully. ‘I thought you thought I was a dumb-assed bimbo.’

‘I don’t think the FBI would include a dumb-assed bimbo in an investigation into a nuclear robbery of this size.’

‘Sometimes people get the wrong impression.’ It was an observation, not a defence.

‘I haven’t formed one yet.’ Which wasn’t true. Charlie had already decided she was anything but dumb-assed and wanted her to be very much part of what he had in mind, although he hadn’t worked out how or what. In addition to which, he was enjoying the closeness of a woman, which was something he hadn’t known for a long time. The continued envy of the other men in the restaurant, like that of others in the bar, wasn’t hurting his ego, either.

‘So far this hasn’t been what I expected.’

‘Me neither.’

‘Didn’t you say something about up and down?’

‘It’s a place, not an activity,’ reminded Charlie.

Despite the designer-dressed, diamond-shined, coiffure-controlled competition, the reaction to Hillary’s arrival at the Up and Down club matched that earlier at the Savoy bar, which Charlie decided was precisely because the competition was designer-dressed, diamond-shined and had every hair concreted in place. They had to try. Hillary didn’t. She flowed alongside him utterly self-confident but seemingly unaware of the head-turning and for once Charlie welcomed the envious attention from the equally detail-perfect men. This was very much work and this the workplace. Which, he supposed, qualified as a tool the Roederer Crystal he ordered in preference to Dom Perignon with the anecdote to Hillary that it was the favourite champagne of the Romanov family to whom it was delivered in crystal bottles.

‘These real life Mafia?’ It was an objective although detached question from a person neither overly awed nor overly frightened.

‘Real life and real death,’ said Charlie. The two seemed to be a recurrent reflection.

‘Lot of influence from Central Casting.’

‘This is show-time.’

‘Every night?’

‘There’s a circuit. Thought you might have gone around it with Kestler.’

‘He suggested it.’ The dismissiveness came down like a shutter.

Nervous of the downstairs dance area, the very definitely non-dancing Charlie remained on the upper level. The stripper was a different girl from Charlie’s other visits but just as good and Hillary watched without any discomfort.

‘There’s a girl who knows what she’s got.’

‘Now I know it, too,’ said Charlie.

She looked directly at him. ‘That do anything for you?’

Charlie didn’t reply at once. He had formed an impression, betore tonight. And been wrong. He didn’t any longer think Hillary Jamieson was a prick teaser. Taking his judgment beyond her cleverness, Charlie decided she was someone totally sure of herself and of how and what she wanted to be: so sure – arrogant about it, even, although not offensively so – that she genuinely didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of her. Which made her, in fact, totally honest. She knew she had a spectacular body, as spectacular as the performer on stage, and saw no reason to be embarrassed about it and she said ‘fuck’ not for effect but because it suited what she wanted to say. There hadn’t been any apology in her misunderstanding about his testing her. She’d gone along with it because it amused her. If it hadn’t she would have closed him off like she appeared to have closed Kestler off, which was something else he had to find out about. Keeping her believed honesty in mind, Charlie finally said, ‘Yes, it does something for me. She’s exciting.’

‘Isn’t she demeaning herself – her sex – doing that?’

Another statement? wondered Charlie, surprised by the familiarity of the question. ‘She might be exploited: if the Mafia control is like it’s supposed to be she probably is. But she looks very professional to me: she wasn’t snatched off the street yesterday. I think she’s stripping because she wants to, not because she’s being forced to.’

‘So that’s all right?’ Hillary demanded.

She had him on the back foot, Charlie realized, demanding attitudes and prejudices. ‘Yeah, I think that’s all right. It’s her body and her decision how to use it. This way’s more preferable, I would have thought, than doing it on her back. That’s what she’s got, beauty: her asset.’

As if assessing his replies she said, slowly; ‘OK.’

‘Have I passed?’

Hillary smiled. ‘The marks are looking good.’

They both looked up at the arrival of a waiter at their table. Ignoring Charlie, the waiter said to Hillary, ‘The gentleman at the table second from the bar wants you to join him.’

To Charlie, Hillary said, ‘What did he say?’

Charlie had already identified the table. There were two men and one girl, all looking in their direction. A thick-set, very heavy man was smiling, expectantly. As Charlie looked, the smiling man said something to the girl, who smiled too. Tightly behind them and obviously part of the same group were two unsmiling men. Most of the suits had a sheen. Shit! Charlie thought.

‘What did he say?’ repeated Hillary.

‘The man in the grey suit, two tables from the bar, has invited you for a drink. Actually, it was more than an invitation. The word was that he wants you to join him.’

‘Oh,’ she said. Then, ‘You think you could help me out of this?’ There wasn’t any nervousness in the question.

‘If I sit down with them, you sit. It won’t be friendly. Very quickly tell me you’ve got to go to the bathroom so I can tell them what you said if they don’t speak English. Then leave. If the girl comes with you, get away from her as best you can: let her go into a cubicle while you only do your hair of something. Anything. Just get away from her. And then get out of the club and back to the compound as quickly as you can: there’s always cabs outside.’

‘And leave you with them?’

‘Do what I say, don’t examine it. Smile when we go to their table.’ Charlie wasn’t frightened, not yet, although he knew he would be. At that moment he was angry, at not anticipating what could happen, because this could screw up everything.

It was when he stood that Charlie remembered the photographs of the body on the Berlin lake and what the bodies of Nikolai Oskin and his family had looked like, in the Militia pictures taken in their supposedly safe Moscow flat and the sick feeling lumped in his stomach. He began to smile some way away and hoped Hillary was doing the same: to have checked would have made him look nervous. The grey-suited man kept smiling but tilted his chair to say something to the minder directly behind him. Both protectors came slightly forward in their chairs. The smiling man looked only at Hillary, pushing out just one chair. Charlie took its back, to lean on, hoping they didn’t realize how much he needed its support. Nodding to Hillary, Charlie said, ‘She doesn’t have any Russian, but thanks for the invitation. We’d like to accept it but we’ve got to keep a prearranged meeting with a business associate: if Yevgennie Agayans couldn’t get here he’s coming to the apartment.’ Charlie smiled. ‘It seems he can’t guarantee his movements.’ Christ it sounded thin: transparent. The only thing he was sure about was that the head of the Agayans Family hadn’t been picked up yet, because Natalia had told him so. The arrest warrants had been reported in some of the Moscow newspapers but whoever these people were might not have read it, which left him dangling from the underworld grapevine. The size of the Pizhma robbery should have ensured the gossip but there was no guarantee here, either, that they would had heard it. He wasn’t definite, even, that they were underworld. If they weren’t, all he faced was an ugly row with a man who needed two bodyguards, which was scarcely reassuring. He was turning, to cup Hillary’s elbow to lead her away, when the grey-suited man said, ‘You know Yevgennie Arkentevich?’ Close up he was even larger than he looked across the room, a bear of a man with very thick dark hair and with no break in his eyebrows, which made a black line across his forehead, and there was hair matted over the back of his hands, as well.

Charlie stopped, turning back. ‘I intend to. That’s the purpose of tonight’s meeting. Arranged by mutual friends.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘England.’ Time to move, Charlie knew: to get out. He took Hillary’s arm.

‘What business are you in?’

Before Charlie could reply another shiny suit came up from behind and whispered to the man, who nodded without looking away from Charlie.

‘Import. Export. All commodities.’ Charlie started to move and said, ‘We will be here again. We like it. Maybe we can drink next time.’ He walked with forced slowness, tensed for another halting remark, leaning sideways to Hillary. ‘I’m supposed to be saying what an interesting chance meeting that was so nod and smile back at me and for fuck’s sake don’t hesitate,’ and she responded brilliantly, even turning back with a half-wave at the door, which Charlie thought was going almost too far. There was the usual motor show of Mercedes and Porsches and BMWs and Charlie ostentatiously gave the doorman $20 and said he wanted a Mercedes taxi, which he got at once. Inside he warningly squeezed her thigh before she could speak and when she did she said, ‘That wasn’t you making a pass, was it?’ And Charlie said it wasn’t. He used the movement of putting his arm around her to check through the rear window but there was too much activity around the club entrance and the street outside to establish if they were being followed. Charlie said, ‘This isn’t a pass, either.’ At Lesnaya Charlie added another $20 tip and settled the fare in the taxi to avoid any delay getting into the apartment, although there was no obvious vehicle behind.

Hillary didn’t speak until they got inside. Then, erupting, she said, ‘JESUS!’ and the tension drained from Charlie so quickly he felt as if his strings had been cut.

‘What the fuck happened back there?’ she demanded.

Charlie emptied the Macallan bottle between them before recounting the nightclub exchange. Hillary listened with her drink untouched, elbows on her knees. ‘Jesus!’ she said again, although much quieter, when he finished.

‘I don’t think they followed but I obviously couldn’t take you back to the embassy.’

‘I’m not shouting kidnap.’ For the first time she looked positively around the apartment. ‘Which room’s the Tsar got?’

‘It’s not the usual embassy apartment,’ agreed Charlie.

‘You any idea what embassy compound accommodation is like?’

‘That’s why I live here.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘There are two bedrooms.’

Hillary looked steadily at him, head to one side. ‘Don’t be stupid, Charlie!’

He’d never before had the practical experience of the aphrodisiac of fear but Charlie was surprised how long and effective it lasted. Afterwards Hillary murmured: ‘Don’t ever risk sitting on a plutonium container, will you?’

‘Never,’ promised Charlie.

Peter Johnson’s request for a meeting came at the very end of the day, when Dean was on the point of summoning his deputy to resolve their dispute ahead of the following day’s meeting with Charlie Muffin.

‘I think there has been a gross misunderstanding,’ said Johnson.

‘On whose part?’ demand Dean, refusing the man an escape. The fury he’d felt during his conversation with the FBI Director hadn’t diminished, still so strong that he’d changed his mind about the inconvenience of internal disruption. If Johnson wanted to stay it would only be on his terms and the bloody man would know and have to accept it.

Bastard, thought Johnson. ‘Mine. And I must apologize.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Dean. ‘You must.’

‘It was never my intention to be disloyal. At all times I had the best interests of the department and its new functions in mind.’ The deputy Director had to force the words out.

‘It’s obvious how our exclusion has come about, wouldn’t you agree?’ Dean had checked the telephone log and knew there had been no incoming calls from Washington since he’d spoken to the FBI Director.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you have any knowledge, in advance, what Fenby was doing? Or might do?’

‘No!’ denied Johnson, who hadn’t. ‘That’s unthinkable! I would have been undermining my own organization!’

Dean allowed his scepticism to show in the immediate silence. Then he said, ‘I asked you to make a decision about your future.’

At that moment Johnson actually considered resigning rather than grovel as low as Dean was demanding. But then he thought of the conversations he’d had with the Bureau Director and of their conviction that Dean couldn’t last in a job the man himself had indicated he didn’t regard as permanent. And of their equal conviction that he was the natural and only possible successor to the directorship. ‘I would like to remain with the department.’

‘And I would like acknowledgment of that in writing.’

The disordered office and its disordered incumbent blurred in front of Johnson’s eyes and he had to squeeze them tightly several times to refocus. No! he thought; dear God, no! No matter how ambiguous the wording, an official acknowledgment of a resignation consideration on his personnel record would make him a permanent hostage to the other man. ‘I have apologized.’

‘Verbally.’

‘I consider you are asking too much.’

‘I am asking for the support and loyalty which I don’t believe I have so far had.’

‘I give you my solemn undertaking of that.’

All or nothing, decided Dean. ‘I want from you a memorandum telling me that having considered your position, you have decided to stay as deputy Director. I will consider that sufficient. Alternatively I will write my own memoranda of this and our earlier meeting.’

‘I understand,’ totally capitulated the deputy.

Johnson had shown himself to be a weak man by not telling him to go to hell, Dean decided.

‘NO!’

No torture had torn such a scream from Silin, the anguish bursting from the crushed and mutilated man as Marina came into the cellar between two men, with Sobelov following and she turned at his cracked voice, seeing him for the first time and she screamed the same word, over and over and just as desperately.

Sobelov came around her, putting himself between Silin and his wife. ‘It’s your choice. Tell me what I want to know and nothing will happen to her. If you don’t, you can watch.’

‘Don’t tell him!’ Marina’s voice was abruptly calm, without any fear. ‘They’ll kill us anyway. They’ve got to. So don’t tell him…’

Sobelov slapped her back-handed across the face, stopping the outburst, all the time looking at Silin. ‘Your choice,’ he said again.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ Silin managed.

‘No. I’ll fuck your wife instead.’

Marina kept her eyes shut while they undressed her and while Sobelov raped her and didn’t open them when Markov and then another man raped her, too.

After the third rape Sobelov came very close to the bulging-eyed, bulging-cheeked Silin and said, ‘That was just the start. You want to stop what’s going to happen to her now?’

Silin spat at the man, an explosion of blood and flesh hitting Sobelov in the face and chest. The man staggered back, gagging.

Markov went to Silin, jerking his head back. He turned to Sobelov and said, ‘He can’t tell us anything now. He’s chewed his tongue off.’

‘Hurt him!’ ordered Sobelov. ‘Hurt them both. As much as you can.’