Bomb Grade

chapter 2

T he last time Charlie Muffin had felt like he did at that moment he’d been standing in front of a red-robed judge about to be sentenced. And had been, to the maximum of fourteen years, unaware what the buggers were really up to.

There wasn’t anything to work out today. The Cold War had melted into a puddle of different political bed partners and different priorities and the worst change of all affected poor bastards like him. So it was all over, lock, stock, barrel and boot. There’d already been the two seminars, addressed personally by the Director-General with all the deputies and division chiefs nodding in solemn-faced agreement to all the bullshit about fresh roles for a streamlined service. And immediately after the second conference there’d been the appointment of a relocation officer, with promises of alternative employment in other government ministries or advice on commuting pensions.

And finally this, the official memorandum that Charlie was fingering in his pocket on his way to the seventh floor. ‘The Director-General will see you at 14.00. Subject: Relocation.’ Ten words, if he included the numerals (and the worst of them all, ‘relocation’) ending the career of Charles Edward Muffin in the British intelligence community.

The only thing he couldn’t understand was being called before the Director-General himself. There were at least six deputies or division chiefs who could have performed the function, which in Charlie Muffin’s case roughly equated with shooting an old warhorse that had outlived its usefulness and needed putting out of its misery. Or someone in Personnel. It could even have been done by the newly appointed relocations officer, who might have been able to throw in the offer of a lavatory cleaner’s position or a school caretaker’s job.

Charlie’s feet began positively to ache the moment he emerged from the elevator on to the seventh floor of the new Thames-side building. Charlie Muffin’s feet invariably ached. Afflicted as they were by dropped arches and hammer toes, they were literally his Achilles heel, the weak point at which every bodily feeling or ill ultimately manifested itself. Sometimes they hurt because he walked too far or too long, a problem he’d largely overcome by rarely walking anywhere if there were alternative transport. Sometimes the discomfort came from his being generally tired. Sometimes, although again rarely, the problem was new shoes, a difficulty he handled by treating the comfortably beaten-into-submission Hush Puppies with the tweezer-tipped care Italian clerics show the Turin Shroud. And sometimes they twinged at moments of stress or tension or even suspected physical danger, the bodily focal point again for the inherent, self-defensive antenna which Charlie Muffin had tuned over the years to the sensitivity of a Star Wars early warning system. And of which Charlie always took careful heed.

Today’s discomfort was, momentarily, such that Charlie paused to flex his bunched-up toes to ease the cramp. He hadn’t expected it all to be as abrupt as this, as bad as this. But why not? Always before, when the shit’s-about-to-hit-the-fan pain had come like this, it had been in an operational situation and what he was about to face was going to be far more traumatic than anything he’d ever confronted in the field.

He was going to be dumped from the service – from which he’d briefly dumped himself when he’d run with the CIA’s half million and regretted every single waking and sleeping moment until they’d caught him, a regret quite separate from the scourging, always-present agony of losing Edith in the vengeance pursuit – and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

Although there couldn’t be the slightest doubt about the forthcoming confrontation, a lot of Charlie’s uncertainty came from his not having been able to prepare himself. Charlie had never liked going into anything totally cold. Without any conceit – because the last thing from which Charlie Muffin suffered was conceit – he knew he was a cerebral Fred Astaire when it came to responding on his feet to unexpected situations, even though he couldn’t physically match that mental agility. Despite which he’d always tried to get as much advantage as he could, in advance. Maybe he should have gone first to see the relocations officer. Charlie had spent his life talking people into admissions and revelations they’d sworn on oath never to disclose. So extracting from a form-filling, form-regimented government bureaucrat every last little detail of what they intended doing to him would have been a walk in the park, unfitting though the analogy was for someone with Charlie’s feet. The belated awareness of an overlooked opportunity further disturbed Charlie. It had been a bad mistake not to have done it and he’d lived this long relatively unscathed by not making mistakes and most certainly not bad ones, as this was. Another indication, to add to the foot pangs, of how disorientated he’d been by the single line command from on high.

The Director-General’s suite, which Charlie had never entered, was a contrast to that of the service’s old headquarters in Westminster Bridge Road, to which he had quite regularly been admitted, usually at the very beginning or the very end of a disciplinary enquiry.

The outer custodian was male – another difference from the past – a sharp-featured, flop haired man who didn’t stop writing at Charlie’s arrival, to remain distanced from ordinary mortals. The determination didn’t quite work, because Charlie caught the quick eye-flicker of identification at his entry. Henry Bates, read the nameplate proudly displayed on the desk. Charlie stood, accustomed to waiting for acknowledgment: it often took supermarket check-out operators several minutes to realize he was standing in front of them. The attention, when it finally came, was expressionless. ‘They’re waiting.’

‘They.’ So he was meeting more than just the Director-General. And they, whoever ‘they’ were, had already assembled, even though he was still ten minutes early. Insufficient straw from which to make a single brick. But, adjusting the metaphor, enough for a drowning man to clutch, before going under for the last time.

There were five men in a half circle around the conference table, but apart from Rupert Dean, the Director-General whose identity had been publicly disclosed upon his appointment, Charlie could identify only one other by name.

Gerald Williams was the department’s chief accountant who had transferred from the old headquarters and in front of whom Charlie had appeared more times than he could remember to explain particularly high reimbursement claims. Which Charlie had incontestably defended on every single occasion until it had become a challenge between the two of them, in Williams’ case amounting to a personal vendetta.

Williams, who was a fat but extremely neat man, was at the far end of the half circle. His neighbour was as contrastingly thin as Williams was fat, a stick-figured man with a beak-nosed face chiselled like the prow of an Arctic ice-breaker, bisected by heavy-framed spectacles. At the opposite end, seemingly more interested in the river traffic than in Charlie’s tentative entry, lounged a bow-tied, alopeciadomed man who compensated for his baldness by cultivating a droop-ending bush of a moustache. The man next to him was utterly nondescript, dark-haired and dark-suited and with the white, civil service regulated shirt, except for blood-pressured apple-red cheeks so bright he could have been wearing clown’s make-up.

Rupert Dean sat in the middle of the group. His appointment had, more than any other, marked the change in the role of British intelligence. For the first time in over a decade a Director-General had not entered the service either through its ranks or along diplomatic or Foreign Office routes. Until three years earlier, he had been the Professor of Modern and Political History at Oxford’s Balliol College from which, through numerous newspaper and magazine articles and three internationally acclaimed books, he had become acknowledged as the foremost sociopolitical authority in Europe.

Dean was a small man whose hair retreated in an upright wall from his forehead, as if in alarm. He, too, had glasses but he wasn’t wearing them. Instead, he was shifting the arms through his fingers, like prayer beads. At both seminars he’d appeared conservatively and unremarkably dressed – the same grey suit and unrecognized tie on both occasions – but now Charlie decided the man had been trying for an expected appearance, like Charlie would have tried if he’d had longer warning about this interview by getting the stain off his lapel and wearing an unmarked tie and fresh shirt.

The only other Director-General Charlie had known uncaringly wear the sort of bagged and pockets-full sports jacket like the one Dean was wearing had been Sir Archibald Willoughby, Charlie’s first boss, protector and mentor, and Charlie’s immediate impression was that, given the chance, he could have found a lot of fondly remembered similarities between the two men. Without needing to see, Charlie knew the trousers hidden below the conference table would lack any proper crease except for the ridges of constant wear and would more than likely be stained as well. And the shoes would be comfortable old friends, although not as ancient or as wearer-friendly as the Hush Puppies he wore.

‘Muffin, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Charlie always had the greatest difficulty showing deference to people in authority – and certainly towards anyone whose professionalism or ability he doubted – yet he had felt not the slightest hesitation in instinctively according it to the new service head. The last controller who had automatically instilled such an attitude had again been Sir Archibald.

‘Quite so, quite so. Come in, man. Sit down.’ Dean spoke quickly but with extraordinarily clear diction. There was a thick file in front of the man which Charlie guessed, nervously, to be his personal records. Dean shuffled through the topmost sheets but then abandoned whatever he was searching for, pushing the dossier away more disarranged than when he started. ‘Much to discuss,’ he announced, hurried-voiced, extending both arms sideways figuratively to embrace the men sitting on either side of him. Gerald Williams, expressionless once more, allowed no response to the introduction. The thin man immediately to Dean’s right managed a single head nod of his own at being identified as Peter Johnson, Dean’s deputy. A lot of the surprise at Dean’s appointment had been fuelled by the open secret even before the transfer from Westminster Bridge Road that Johnson, for ten years the department’s Foreign Office link, resented being passed over for the very top job in favour of a schoolmasterly outsider. The bald-headed man broke away at last from his fascination with the river to produce a brief, functional smile when Dean listed Jeremy Simpson as the department’s legal advisor. The red-faced man emerged last, as political officer Patrick Pacey.

Charlie’s mind was way beyond the Director-General’s staccato delivery. Whatever this meeting was about, it certainly had nothing to do with his dismissal or enforced early retirement. What then?

The Director-General made another ineffective foray into the pushed aside file, abandoning the search as quickly as he had begun it to rotate his spectacles. Closer, Charlie saw one of the earpieces was padded with surgical tape for comfort. Tapping them against the discarded dossier, Dean said, ‘We’re in times of change.’

‘Yes, sir’

‘You think you can change?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Into a pumpkin if I have to, Charlie thought.

‘How would you feel about living permanently abroad?’

‘Where, exactly?’

‘Moscow.’

Natalia Nikandrova Fedova rarely thought about him any more. When she’d finally accepted he was going to go on failing her it had been a positive effort to keep him out of her mind but it had become easier as the months passed. But it was unavoidable today. Natalia smiled, the sadness of the past dimming her all-absorbing love of the present, as she watched Sasha whoop and scream with the excitement of opening each new birthday gift. Maybe he didn’t know about Sasha. Natalia had convinced herself she’d found the way to tell him; made up her mind he would understand because he was so very good at the business they were both in – the best she’d ever known, far better than she could have ever been – and hated him for not suddenly arriving, unannounced, as she had sometimes fantasized he would. It shouldn’t have needed a child to bring him back if he’d loved her.

The KGB had still existed, although uncertainly, when she’d tried to reach him: if she hadn’t headed its First Chief Directorate it would have been impossible for her to have tried at all. It didn’t exist any more: not, at least, by name or with the omnipotence with which it had once operated. But his service did and there would still be regulations against his coming to Moscow. But knowing him as well as she believed she did, Natalia knew regulations would not have stopped him. So if she had reached him there was only one conclusion: he didn’t want to see her again. Ever. And wasn’t interested in his child. She’d made a mistake, like she’d made a mistake with the first man to let her down, which she’d compounded by marrying him. Not a good comparison, she told herself, as she had on many previous memory trips. Her second trusting attempt had for all the obvious impossible barriers stopped short of marriage, although that had once been another fantasy, and had most certainly not been the disaster of the first. She had Sasha around whom her life revolved and with whom she was complete, without the need for anyone or anything else.

Or was she?

As if on cue, Aleksai Popov came into the Leninskaya apartment, the brightly wrapped package high above his head for the game Sasha recognized at once, leaping and jumping around his legs in the futile attempt to reach it before he knelt, solemnly to offer it to her.

It was a battery-operated cat that waddled and emitted a purring growl and got the biggest scream so far from Sasha who, unprompted, threw her arms around the man for the thank-you kiss.

Popov disentangled himself to come up to Natalia, kissing her lightly on the cheek: they were still very careful in front of the child.

‘That was far too expensive,’ she said. It would have come from one of the Western-goods shops.

‘I love her. Think of her as mine.’

Natalia was unsure whether or not to be glad of the remark. Sasha hadn’t asked any questions yet but it wouldn’t be much longer. ‘You still shouldn’t have done it.’

Popov shrugged the protest aside. Able, from the way he was standing, to conceal the heavy seriousness between them from other parents in the room he said, simply, ‘Hello.’

‘Hello,’ said Natalia, just as serious. Should she, could she, take another chance?

Stanislav Silin knew he had them rattled, Sobelov most of all. It was a good feeling, like it had been a good feeling watching the bombast leak from the man when Sobelov realized how easily the size of the robbery would re-establish things in their proper order.

Silin had guessed, of course, about the money involved but he didn’t think it was an exaggeration to value 250 kilos of weapons-graded material, which was what he’d been promised, at $75,000,000 at least. They’d been dumbstruck by that, as he’d known they would be because he had been when the size had been put to him. Sobelov had tried to recover, questioning both the amount and the profit, but the others hadn’t doubted him. They hadn’t just believed him, they’d backed him, not even Bobin or Frolov supporting the demand that there should be a change in the system to involve all of them in the negotiations instead of leaving it to him alone, which was his agreed right as the boss of bosses. Silin had been worried at that insistence, unsure how much ground he’d lost: the fact that everyone apart from Sobelov was prepared to leave the brokering to him, like it had always been in the past, had to be the best indicator he could have wished that he could defeat Sobelov’s challenge.

But he still couldn’t afford to relax.

He’d always protected his sources but this time the secret had to be absolute, not just for their benefit but to prevent Sobelov trying to take over, which the man might attempt in his desperation. Just as secretly as he had to set things up in Berlin and for the same reasons.

And when he’d put everything in motion he could start planning how Sobelov was going to die. He was going to enjoy that.

Silin looked to the side of the room at Markov’s re-entry, for the nod of assurance that Marina’s guards had been properly briefed.

Everything was working out perfectly.