Bomb Grade

chapter 29

N ataila contacted Charlie within an hour of his getting back to Lesnaya and admitted calling several times before, the relief obvious in her voice that he was finally there. It was Natalia who wanted an immediate meeting and suggested the botanical gardens at Glavnyy Botanincheyskiy Sad, one of their favourite places when they’d been together. Charlie began to attach a significance until Natasha said it was conveniently close to the creche from which she had to collect Sasha later that afternoon.

She was already there when he arrived, on the arranged seat near one of the tropical hothouses. She’d come close, but not quite, to covering the dark half-circles under her eyes, her mouth was pinched and for once the usually kept-in-place hair was disarrayed.

‘It’s all gone terribly wrong,’ she declared, even before he lowered himself on to the bench beside her. ‘And I’m the one identified with it, no one else.’

‘How?’

Natalia had a debriefer’s cohesive recall and recounted in detail and in sequence the contemptuous interview with Shelapin and what had happened immediately afterwards with Agayans. The escorts had been suspended but were still denying any collusion: one had left Agayans to collect the key to the central prison area, which regulations insisted be held at all times in the main control room and there were two other warders supporting the story of the second of his being called to a corridor telephone to a supposed summons from her, leaving Agayans momentarily unguarded. ‘A minute, no more.’ There hadn’t yet been a public announcement of the killing but she’d told Shelapin, trying to shake him. And hadn’t. He’d actually laughed at the murder and at her and continued accusing her of attempted extortion. All the other arrested Shelapin gang members denied any knowledge of the Pizhma robbery and of the canisters either in the Mercedes or in the garage at Ulitza Volkhonka. Shelapin’s lover had named six people from the transvestite chorus line who’d been at a homosexual orgy at the time of the Pizhma theft and every one had testified Shelapin had been there. Although the Federal Prosecutor had ruled the satellite photographs inadmissible in a Russian court she’d asked the Americans for every positively identifying factor from the pictures. None of the men in custody, and certainly not Shelapin himself, matched any of the height, weight or physical details obtained by high-focus analysis. Because of the public concern the intended prosecution, based solely upon the evidence of the canisters, was to be open to the world media. Shelapin had warned his defence lawyers would publicly strip the skin off her, layer by layer ‘until I bleed to death, as Agayans did’.

‘And like it’s been stripped off at every ministerial meeting,’ Natalia added.

Charlie listened with his mind ahead of what she was saying, isolating points he considered important but not setting them out to her: he always had to keep in mind that in her permanent anxiety about the baby, Natalia might inadvertently say something to snag the fragile net he still hadn’t properly woven. Gently, consciously taking advantage of Natalia’s distraction, Charlie probed for more. There was a stir of satisfaction when Natalia identified the Up and Down club as the meeting place claimed by Yatisyna for the witnessed encounter between Agayans and the Arab and French nuclear purchasers. Natalia said they’d decided against publishing the artist’s sketches until they were surer Yatisyna wasn’t concocting the whole story: the club owners and staff denied ever having seen either man on the premises, which could have been more through fear than lack of recognition. Charlie had her go into much more detail of her interview with the Moscow Militia commander, confirming Gusev’s presence at the very earliest planning meetings and at every major arrest and qualified several points in Natalia’s account of the man’s close-to-despairing resignation at the extent of Militia corruption.

‘Which I’m now dragged into,’ reminded Natalia. ‘It was my name that was used to get the second guard away from Agayans. How’s that going to look in an open court, alongside Shelapin’s accusation that I wanted a bribe?’

Bad, in the way a clever lawyer could manipulate it, he thought. ‘What’s Popov say?’

‘That it’s not as bad as I’m making it.’

‘I don’t think it is,’ lied Charlie, trying to lift her depression. ‘These are professional Mafia. It’s ridiculous to expect them all to roll over and play dead at their first interrogation.’

The weak autumn sun was abruptly swallowed by cloud and Natalia shivered. ‘Neither he nor you are at the ministerial meetings. That’s what they do expect. I don’t want assurances, Charlie. I want advice on what to do. How to break them.’

Which Popov obviously hadn’t offered. ‘Any public trial is a long way off. That’s not an immediate problem. Does Yatisyna know Agayans has been killed?’

‘I haven’t told him. The guards may have done.’

‘Tell him. And tell him you might have to move him out of the security of solitary confinement, into a more open regime. Trade his continued protection against everything else he can tell you. Make sure he’s properly frightened.’

‘What about Shelapin?’

‘Let him stew. He knows the canisters are enough.’

It sounded more constructive than it really was but Natalia nodded, her face softening very slightly. She looked at her watch, shivering again. ‘I have to collect Sasha.’

‘I’ve got something to talk to you about, first. Let’s walk in the hothouse.’ That had been another favourite.

She got up at once and they went side by side into the artificial heat and humidity. The giant-leafed plants and technicolour flowers seemed larger and more vivid than he remembered. ‘I’ve only got a few minutes.’

‘How is she?’

He did want to see his daughter! It was ridiculous living in the same city and not being able to be with his own child! Careful, he cautioned himself, for yet another time: he’d made Natalia a promise, which he had to keep. He had no rights: no demands.

‘Perfect,’ replied Natalia. ‘She’s changed the doll’s name to Olga.’

He’d been at the airport before he’d thought of buying another present and the choice there seemed limited to more dolls, so he’d left it: he was very much an amateur father. He’d decided against buying anything for Natalia, too. ‘You believe me now about Sasha, don’t you?’

‘I suppose so.’ There was neither doubt nor acceptance in her voice.

‘It would be nice to see her again.’ She’d asked him for a meeting. And needed him. He was taking advantage of her vulnerability but not in any way to harm her. The opposite. He was doing it to protect and safeguard her and Sasha and knew he could do in better than anybody else.

Natalia sighed. ‘Not now, Charlie. I don’t want to talk about Sasha at the same time as everything else. She’s part of it all, I know, but I don’t want to think of it like that. Let me fool myself, just a little.’

If Sasha’s safety and future were part of their thinking – which they were, not part but paramount – then the child had to be part of every discussion. But it was all right for Natalia to close her mind off to it. He’d think for both of them, was thinking for both of them. Doing now, in fact, what he should have done for both of them years ago. He wanted to tell her but didn’t: she’d see it as more of a threat than a reassurance. Charlie was lifted by the thought of having someone to care for. It was a feeling with which he was unfamiliar and he liked it.

‘What is it you want to tell me?’ she asked, breaking into his thoughts.

They rounded a huge arbour to join a pathway deserted except for themselves. In contrast to the outside chill Charlie was now sweating. He spoke not looking at her but with his head bent, choosing his words. Long before he finished she reached out, bringing him around to face her. He liked the pressure of her hand on him. There was a slight sheen of perspiration on her upper lip, too.

‘You’re not seriously asking me to believe this?’

‘I suggested letting a robbery run at the very beginning, remember?’ It wasn’t an answer but it would do. ‘We might not recover any more of what was stolen at Pizhma. We can’t wait for the next robbery to happen before we do something to get inside the business.’

‘The bottle jammed in Agayans’ throat filled up like the blood was coming from a tap!’ she said, disbelievingly. ‘These people are monsters!’

‘I’ve thought about protection. Agayans wouldn’t have been killed outside, with his people around him.’

Natalia sniggered nervously, shaking her head. ‘No one will agree! They’ll laugh at you, which is what they should do. I can’t believe London even considered putting it forward!’

Neither could Charlie. He’d dismissed the easily anticipated financial objections of Gerald Williams before they even came but was astonished there hadn’t been ridicule from everyone else, led by Rupert Dean. He wouldn’t have had such an easy ride if there hadn’t been all the other diversions – with the additional bonus of another seizure right in the middle – but now it was being officially suggested, which was all he wanted. He had to play by ear everything that followed now and hope to Christ he didn’t lose both ears in the process. ‘If you get involved in any discussion about it, particularly at ministerial level, I want you to support it.’

‘No!’ Natalia refused at once. ‘It won’t be discussed because it’s too ludicrous. But if it is, I’ll oppose it’

Surely there was still some feeling, buried deep down! Or was it nothing more than simple, objective professionalism? Not the time to think about that now. Or how she might have reacted if he’d suggested what he suspected he might find out. ‘Please support it, if it comes up!’

‘No!’ she repeated.

‘Then don’t oppose it, either. Just stay out of it. But do something else.’

‘What?’

‘I want to know who goes for it and who doesn’t.’

Natalia put her head to one side. ‘Why’s that important?’

‘It is.’

‘Why?’ she insisted.

‘I want to know how genuine the supposed determination is to block this business,’ lied Charlie, smoothly.

Natalia remained frowning. ‘I don’t see the connection.’

‘I might, if there is one.’ And if there wasn’t he was going to waste an awful lot of time and an awful lot of money to load Gerald Williams’ siege guns to overflowing.

‘It’ll never arise.’

‘If it does.’

‘Aleksai found out, about your coming to Leninskaya,’ she announced, abruptly.

Charlie set off along the lonely walkway and Natalia moved with him. ‘How did you explain it?’

‘That you were trying for some sort of advantage, from the first time.’

‘You surely didn’t…!’

‘Of course I didn’t,’ she stopped him. ‘I told him I threw you out.’

‘He believed that?’

‘He was very angry at first: wanted me to complain, officially. I told him that would be giving it more importance than it deserved.’

Charlie wished it hadn’t been so easy for her to dismiss it like that. ‘Has he mentioned it since?’

‘No.’

‘Never?’ They rounded another giant display. The exit was at the far end of the corridor.

‘Never. But that’s why it’s difficult for you to see her again. She said something.’

So that was the reason for Natalia’s objection, not that she personally didn’t want him to be with the child! Or here. ‘I understand.’

‘I don’t see how it’s possible.’

He’d find a way, determined Charlie, believing a door was being unlocked if not nudged open. ‘Let’s leave it for the moment.’

Charlie re-established contact with Kestler on his first full day back, saying he had things to sort out before he could come personally to Ulitza Chaykovskovo but he guessed there was a lot to talk about. The American said he didn’t know about that. The ministerial press conference after the Shelapin and Agayans arrests had been a back-slapping affair but there hadn’t been anything since and he wondered if the shutters had been put up against him as well now. Popov wasn’t available and wasn’t returning calls. None of which mattered much in view of the edict from Washington, which none of them had yet worked out. Charlie waited for the other man to talk about the satellite voice tape but he didn’t.

Charile decided that re-entering the British embassy was like being the first of an invading force arriving at a village nervously unsure if he was going to shoot all the men and rape all the women. Those who believed, from his earlier efforts, that he was someone with special London influence were now totally convinced and either sought him out or worked hard to avoid him. It was from Thomas Bowyer, so quick to get to him the man must have had the gatehouse advise of his arrival, that Charlie learned of Nigel Saxon’s recall to London. The Chancellery head wasn’t expected to return and it was the only topic of conversation around the embassy. Bowyer talked of possible misunderstandings between them in the past and hoped there wouldn’t be any in the future. Charlie, disinterested in continuing attrition, allowed the man his escape and said he hoped so, too. He warned Bowyer of his possibly spending much less time in the embassy which the newly briefed and disciplined Scotsman accepted without question, anxiously agreeing to maintain the telephone link that Charlie said might be necessary. Bowyer said that judging from the second recovery it looked as if the remaining Pizhma material could still be somewhere in Moscow after all, instantly turning a complete and instant backward somersault when Charlie said he didn’t think that was so. Finally, unable to hold himself back, Bowyer suggested a lot seemed to have emerged from his London recall and Charlie, less generous than he had been at the beginning, said a lot had but that it was unfortunate it had happened in the first place.

Paul Smythe was one of the people who thought Charlie had God’s private telephone number and went with him to the embassy commissary and logged without comment the largest single alcohol order ever recorded against a legation staff member, which Charlie judged necessary to stock Lesnaya if he was permitted to set himself up as a crime-serving entrepreneur and more than sufficient to keep out Moscow’s winter cold if he weren’t. Charlie also withdrew from the equally eager-to-please Peter Potter?10,000 in US dollars against an inadequate receipt listing it as a Special Contingency Fund, just to keep Gerald Williams’ blood pressure bubbling.

He allowed Jurgen Balg to take him to lunch in gratitude for being told first of the Warsaw link to the Pizhma robbery and used it openly to urge that he be allowed in on the questioning if a German arrest came from it. The impudence briefly confused the German, whose halting protests that such unprecedented access was impossible abruptly stopped when Charlie announced as if it had already been agreed by the Russians his setting up as a phoney trader in Moscow. Balg changed direction entirely, agreeing that even if the Pizhma nuclear material had already been smuggled out of Russia the closest liaison was absolutely essential in the future and promising to press Bonn as strongly as he could.

Charlie hadn’t expected Hillary to be in the FBI office at the American embassy, although it was the logical place for her to be: she simply hadn’t attended any of the previous gatherings since her arrival. She winked at him as he walked in. With the Americans Charlie didn’t try to infer Russian agreement, although he insisted he was confident it would come. Each reacted differently. Kestler said holy shit; Hillary said he couldn’t possibly consider doing it; and Lyneham said forget it, it didn’t stand a hope in a hot hell of Russian acceptance. Lyneham’s remark gave Charlie the perfect lead to argue they might, in view of what was on the audio tape, and finally explained the significance of Warsaw which he claimed to have been deciphered in London. Lyneham thought the analysts in Washington were going to be pissed off at being beaten by the Brits and Charlie offered it as a bargaining reason for Kestler’s continued admission to the Russian meetings.

‘It goes against their argument that it’s still somehow in Russia,’ the man pointed out. ‘They’re not going to like the thought of losing it.’

‘It’s a fact they’ve got to know about. And you’re the person to tell them,’ said Charlie.

‘What do you think the chances are of stopping it if it’s still here?’ demanded Kestler.

‘God knows!’ admitted Charlie. ‘All the Russian borders are supposedly closed. And those of the intervening countries. There’d be a logic to cache it somewhere to let the heat die down. The Moscow recovery would help that; maybe even be designed to achieve it.’

‘So your people told the Poles?’ queried Lyneham.

‘And the Germans,’ said Charlie.

‘That stuffs been adrift long enough to get it to the Middle East by slow mule train!’ said Hillary. ‘My money is on it already being there. You know what I think? I think we could be looking at another Gulf War fought very differently than the last.’

‘No,’ warned Charlie. ‘Germany and Poland were warned days ago.’

‘I don’t hear any police sirens,’ said the girl.

‘Just strange noises from Washington,’ said Lyneham.

Lyneham said he’d make a book on the sting idea being pissed on from a great height, offering odds of fifty to one against. Kestler wagered $5 and Charlie matched it with the first expense against his special contingency fund. Hillary said, contemptuously, she didn’t think it was something to bet on. It was a long way into lunch together at the embassy canteen before she relaxed. After lunch Hillary walked him back on to Ulitza Chaykovskovo.

‘You didn’t call, you didn’t write, you didn’t send flowers!’ she chided.

‘I had a lot to sort out.’

‘And now you have.’

Charlie gestured further along the multi-lane highway. ‘The Peking’s the best Chinese restaurant in the city.’

‘Seven-thirty?’

‘Fine.’ Which it was. Hillary might have a very necessary place in his scheme of things, as well as being gorgeous.

Charlie thought the rice wine was tasteless but drank it anyway and they had duck in pancakes because that was the thing to do. Hillary insisted on doing most of the ordering and there was a sweet and sour course and chicken in cashews and steamed dumplings.

She dismissed FBI sting operations against the American Mafia as totally different – always controllable – from what he wanted to do and asked if he’d seen the torture photographs and what about that business in the club, that had frightened her shitless! She was unimpressed by his spetznaz argument.

‘I’d need your help,’ Charlie announced.

‘My help!’

‘Technically, if it ever comes to anything. To check out what I was offered to make sure it wasn’t a con.’

Hillary regarded him warily. ‘Charlie, I like the way I look! These guys don’t fuck about: I don’t want any facial remodelling.’

‘Just a check to ensure I don’t get caught out along the way with a load of crap.’

She smiled, nervously. ‘I’m with Lyneham. It isn’t going to work so it’s a waste of time talking about it.’

‘ If it works,’ he pressed.

‘If it works we’ll talk about it again.’

When he asked if she wanted to go on to a club Hillary said he had to be joking, after last time. There was no question of her not going back to Lesnaya. Charlie was worried that this time he didn’t have the aphrodisiac of fear but he needn’t have been. Afterwards she lay wetly over him, her head on his shoulder.

‘Can I ask you a question?’ she said, her voice muffled.

‘Of course.’

‘You take house guests?’

He pulled away, better to look down at her. ‘You serious?’

‘Sure.’

‘Are we talking serious relationships or escape from embassy compounds?’

‘Escape from embassy compounds. I don’t go for serious relationships.’

‘My turn for a question. What’s the score between you and Kestler? You two didn’t seem the best of friends at lunch.’ And he was still curious at her earlier dismissal.

Now it was Hillary who moved away. ‘There isn’t a score. I don’t go for guys who wave their dicks around their heads like a lariat. I like to make my own choice. Which I did. Which is why I’m here. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘You did it brilliantly, Charlie.’

‘What?’ he said, not understanding.

‘Changed the house guest subject.’

‘What would the embassy say?’

‘Who gives a damn? It’s personal, not professional.’

And professionally he would need her if the sting operation came even halfway near to being set up. ‘You want your own bedroom?’

‘Let’s keep it for friends.’

They made love once more during the night, slowly, starting when they were still half asleep and stayed entwined afterwards so the telephone rang several times before Charlie could disentangle himself. As he picked up the receiver he saw it was just before seven, although it was still dark outside.

‘We picked up five Russians at a place called Cottbus, just over the Polish border,’ announced Balg. ‘They had six canisters with them. And Bonn’s agreed to your sitting in on the interrogation.’

It was the last of several meetings, a review of everything they had discussed while Peter Johnson had been in Washington, and they ate in Fenby’s private dining room at Pennsylvania Avenue. There was no public benefit parading an unknown Briton at the Four Seasons.

‘You’ve no doubt he’d make public what a stupid son-of-a-bitch Kestler was: and me with it?’ It had been Fenby’s recurring question, at every session.

‘None,’ insisted Johnson, who blamed Fenby for a lot of his own entrapment.

‘So the bastard’s got us by the balls?’ He’d never lost control like this before, never had to be the one obeying the shots instead of calling them, and Fenby didn’t like it.

‘And can use what he’s got like you tried to do,’ agreed the deputy British Director. ‘If anything goes wrong we’re package-wrapped for sacrifice.’

‘I guess we should cool things for a while.’

‘I don’t have any alternative,’ said Johnson, anxious to separate himself from the American.

‘I’m going to find one.’

‘I don’t want to know about it.’ The southern fried chicken had been cold and Fenby hadn’t served any wine, either.