Kings of Many Castles

16

Natalia Fedova had triumphed in a jungle of human animals for a long time before Sasha’s birth and for three years afterwards and in doing so, like Charlie, had perfected a number of survival rules. One-unknowingly again like Charlie, with whom she’d never discussed it-was never to be pulled down by the mistakes and misjudgments of people who imagined they knew better than she did. Which she anticipated, without needing proof, would be the attitude of both Yuri Fedorovich Trishin and Pavl Yakovlevich Filitov and why she set out from the very beginning to impose the control inherent in her appointment. She recognized the danger of the strategy and hoped Charlie was right in his assessment of her strength.

Befitting their presidential credentials they were allocated a suite of rooms, with a five-strong secretariat, within the Kremlin itself and Natalia summoned both men to it an hour before their scheduled start supposedly to brief them upon everything that had come before the crisis committee. She did so with two of their secretaries at the prepared apparatus, determined that everything be recorded. Filitov was just slightly ahead of the chief of staff with the authority-challenging protest that he’d thoroughly assimilated all that had come before the committee, with which he’d been provided overnight but Natalia talked them both down, insisting upon her agenda that their initial concentration be upon the missing KGB dossiers, extended only to what the succeeding FSB might have taken from the Bendalls’ Hutorskaya Ulitza apartment. Because of her intimate knowledge of the former KGB structure-as well as her personal knowledge of the crisis committee discussions which might not be reflected in its written material-she intended leading the questioning but of course expected them both to contribute. It was not until Natalia said she would seek Filitov’s advice before invoking theirimprisonment provisions that she got the impression they were beginning to defer to her, although the prosecutor’s reaction at first was more one of undisguised surprise.

“I don’t think we should lose sight of the rank and importance of people with whom we’re dealing,” cautioned the lawyer.

Nor, suspected Natalia, of the clear threats Petr Tikunov had made at yesterday’s press conference. “It’s precisely because I’m aware of the rank and importance that we’re discussing the provision now.”

“An opinion surely based upon a personal experience which ended several years ago?” suggested Trishin. “I don’t believe the acting president intended the recourse to be used lightly.”

“It won’t be,” assured Natalia. “We won’t forget, though, that it exists.”

Trishin attempted to restore his prerogative by querying Natalia’s full understanding of the other terms of reference, which she’d anticipated and not only answered without hesitation but corrected two that he misquoted. Filitov remained silent until that day’s witness list was brought in by the registration clerk.

The Federal prosecutor said at once, “We were not consulted about the summoning of the FSB chairman himself!”

“Do you have a problem with it?” Natalia was glad she hadn’t discussed it.

“Of course I do.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“Yesterday you talked of premature reactions,” reminded the lawyer. “This is inappropriately premature until we’ve had the opportunity to judge the compliance.”

“Do you feel it’s inappropriately premature?” she asked Trishin.

The chief of staff looked uncertainly towards the recording bank. “I think prior discussion would have been advisable.”

Now Natalia indicated the silently turning apparatus. “Your dissent has been noted.”

“I didn’t say I dissented,” Trishin quickly insisted. “If we are to reach a combined opinion, which is in the terms of reference, we’ve got to come to combined decisions upon the conduct of the enquiry.”

Perfect politico-speak, Natalia recognized. “Combined decisions? Or majority decisions?”

Their exchanged looks answered Natalia’s question before Filitov did. The lawyer said, “Our primary term of reference is speed. Which requires majority opinions, in my judgment.” The man paused, to establish the mockery. “Dissent can always be noted.”

After politoco-speak, legal-speak, acknowledged Natalia. And each-rarely-as illuminating as the other. She hadn’t expected to benefit so much-be warned so quickly-from this pre-session encounter. She was glad she’d orchestrated it as precisely as she had. She hoped she could continue the momentum, although again she didn’t foresee the quickness with which that would come about.

There was still ten minutes to go before the official opening when their registration clerk reentered the chamber and initially bent to Natalia’s ear with his copy of the witness list.

“We all need to hear,” demanded Filitov.

“An unscheduled witness whom we’ll hear at once,” announced Natalia. “First Deputy Director Gennardi Nikolaevich Mittel.”

“I don’t understand,” protested Trishin, his frowned confusion matching the other man’s.

“It won’t take long,” promised Natalia, at Mittel came confidently into the room. The FSB deputy was a young man with an indented scar grooving the left side of an otherwise unlined face. His deeply black hair was helmeted directly back from his forehead in greased perfection and his civilian, uncreased gray suit was just as immaculate. The smile, as confident as his easy entry, showed sculptured dentistry. He took the fronting chair Natalia indicated and crossed one razor-sharp leg across the other.

“You are not on the list of witnesses whom this commission has asked to help it, Gennardi Nikolaevich?” invited Natalia. It was predictable, she supposed, but she’d thought there would have been a written protest, not a patronizing emissary.

“You summoned my chairman,” said Mittel, as if in reminder. He remained smiling.

“Viktor Ivanovich Karelin is indeed among those whom we wish to question,” agreed Natalia. Beside her she was conscious of Trishin and Filitov shifting, in belated understanding.

“Whom you will understand is an extremely busy man,” said Mittel. “I am here to represent him. I am sure I shall be able to help you with any questions you might have.”

Natalia let a silence chill the room. “Viktor Ivanovich fully understands that this is a presidential commission?”

The smile faltered. “Of course.”

“As you do?”

“Yes.”

“You have discussed it with Viktor Ivanovich?”

“He personally-officially-appointed me to represent him.”

“Tell us, for the record, what you and Viktor Ivanovich understand a commission established by the acting president to be?”

The man was no longer smiling. He unfolded his legs. “It is an enquiry into some irregularities that appear to have arisen in the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, an organization that no longer exists.”

In her former chief interrogator’s role within Special Service 11 of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, Natalia had invariably found conceit-condescension-the easiest shell to crack. She wondered if the man knew how much of the FSB’s defense he’d given away in that one reply. “That wasn’t an answer to my question. So I’ll make it easier for you. Do you-and your chairman-understand the authority of this commission?”

“Of course.” Mittel was wary now, his hands forward on tighttogether legs.

“An authority not lessened by the fact that Aleksandr Mikhailevich Okulov is at the moment acting president?”

“It is the authority of the office,” said Mittel.

“An authority and an office that your chairman is too busy to observe?”

“I can assure this commission that no disrespect was intended to it or to the acting president.”

“I think that is important to be established on the record,” said Natalia, indicating the secretariat. “Let’s see what else can be established. You have been deputed as the highest official of the FSB to help this enquiry?”

“Yes.”

“So help us.”

Mittel gazed back at her, blankly. “I’m sorry … I don’t …”

“Where are the complete files of Peter Bendall, a British physicist who defected to the Soviet Union in 1972, the corollary details that would have been maintained upon his family, after they joined him in Moscow, the information that would have been kept separately upon the son, George Bendall-also known as Georgi Gugin-and everything that was taken from the family apartment at Hutorskaya Ulitza upon Peter Bendall’s death and again upon the seizure of George Bendall, nine days ago?” Natalia wondered how long it would be before Trishin or Filitov came into the exchange. Or were they remaining gratefully quiet, leaving what was clearly an immediate and dangerous confrontation entirely to her?

Mittel remained unmoving for several moments. There was the faintest hint of the earlier smile, quickly gone. “As I pointed out a few moments ago, the KGB no longer exists as an organization. It has been largely disbanded, its functions, manpower and archives greatly reduced. What remained was absorbed by the FSB, which I represent here today on behave of its chairman. And on behalf of its chairman I have to assure this enquiry that the most rigorous search has been made, among archives that the FSB inherited, to locate the material you’ve asked for. I regret to say-regret to tell this commission-that nothing has been found.”

“Which is what we are going to be told by everyone else from the FSB whom we have called here today?”

“I am afraid so.” One leg was crossed easily over the other again.

The reforms and supposed new democracy were still fragile, the more so in the uncertainty of the rapidly growing communist strength. And the FSB remained a megalith, waiting in the wings to reemerge as an unchallenged government within a government. To protect herself there had to be provable discussion, with the other two on the panel. Even that might not be as protective as she hoped. “Would you retire, Gennardi Nikolaevich? But don’t leave the anteroom. We’ll need to call you back.”

“The intention is to reduce us-and by inference the acting president-to a laughing stock!” insisted Natalia. “The man’s actuallytold us what each and every witness we’ve called is going to say!”

“We need to consult,” said Trishin.

“We are consulting, right now!”

“I meant with the president.”

The president, noted Natalia: not Aleksandr Mikhailevich or acting president. “If we do that, we’re making a laughing stock of ourselves: proving ourselves totally inadequate for the function for which we were appointed.”

“It’s directly confrontational,” judged Filitov.

“Apparently,” cautioned Natalia. Could she bring them with her, convince them? Their knowledge that she’d once served in the KGB-a service to which Trishin had already referred-might help. Both men were looking at her, waiting. She didn’t continue.

Finally Filitov asked, “What’s that mean?”

“It’s classical textbook, whatever name or acronym or initial letter designation you want to choose. They’re elite: above reproach, question or examination,” said Natalia.

“I still don’t follow,” protested Trishin.

“Our reaction is their test of strength: the strength of Aleksandr Mikhailevich Okulov if he succeeds to the presidency against those who will oppose him.” How much of a two edged sword was it to have maintained the secretariat recording? She was committed now: not a sword carrier, more a solitary standard bearer stranded in the no-man’s-land between opposing forces.

“That’s your professional judgment, based upon your knowledge of the organization?” demanded Filitov.

“Yes,” said Natalia, at once.

“Which makes it essential to consult Aleksandr Mikhailevich before we do react,” declared Trishin, relieved at the decision being taken from them.

“No,” refused Natalia, quickly again. “That is the test. You, Yuri Fedorovich, are the president’s-the acting president’s-chief of staff, the man who reflects his thinking, speaks for him, acts for him. You, Pavl Yakovlevich, are the judiciary: for the first time in more than seventy years the supposedly independent-of-government law. I-more tentatively although more specifically-represent civilian law enforcement, one of the few functions that has really been lostto the FSB by the cosmetic disbandment of the KGB. In microcosm, who we represent is the new order in Russia.”

“Aren’t you over-stressing the symbolism?” challenged Filitov.

“I don’t think so,” said Natalia, as forcefully as she could.

“Are you inferring FSB complicity in the attack upon the presidents?”

“You know, from the crisis committee’s discussions that have been made available to you, that complicity hasn’t been excluded, although there’s no proof whatsoever to support an accusation,” reminded Natalia. “At this stage I’m suggesting nothing more than the Lubyanka moving to turn a potentially embarrassing weakness-their loss of records-into a positive strength-testing benefit. We have, now, not just to match but outmatch that strength: or, if you prefer, out-bluff them.”

“How?” demanded Trishin, forehead creased in his effort to keep up.

“If we accept the arrogance of First Chief Deputy Gennardi Mittel-and all those who are going to recite the same denials after him-then we destroy ourselves on our first day,” insisted Natalia.

“I suppose we do,” allowed Trishin, uncertainly.

Filitov nodded agreement, but didn’t speak.

“So let’s play the hand,” urged Natalia. “Let’s confront their confrontation now, only harder. Let’s face the arrogance down, at least for today. That allows you, Yuri Fedorovich, all the time you need to consult and discuss with the acting president …” She nodded to the secretariat. “ … with the advantage of every word that’s been exchanged. If we haven’t responded as we should then tomorrow we back down under the bullying of the FSB, which effectively ends any purpose in our being empanelled. The only humiliation will be ours, which it will be anyway if we collapse now under FSB pressure.”

“Not quite,” contradicted Trishin. “The humiliation will be that of acting President Okulov, as well.”

“Which it will be if we cave in now.”

Filitov said, “It’s a convincing argument.”

“I’d welcome a better one,” admitted Natalia.

“I don’t have one,” said the federal prosecutor.

“Neither do I,” said Trishin.

The spring had gone out of Gennardi Mittel’s step when he was recalled and there was no languid crossing of legs.

Natalia said, “We do not think you or your chairman fully understand the importance of what this commission is charged and authorized to inquire into. Which is unfortunate. We will not accept your deputizing for Viktor Ivanovich Karelin. You will return to the Lubyanka, with a copy of our terms of reference and with the request from us to chairman Karelin to make himself available, before this commission, tomorrow. We will continue today to examine the other FSB officials in the very sincere hope that they will not repeat the explanation that you seemed to think adequate. But as you indicated that would be their response, we would have you advise chairman Karelin that it is unacceptable and have him bring with him tomorrow people better able to answer our questions. Do you have any questions, First Chief Deputy Mittel?”

The man’s throat was working, in his astonishment, but no words came at once. When they did, they were strained in disbelief. “I would respectfully ask this commission to reconsider.”

“This commission does not believe there is anything to reconsider,” said Natalia. “We look forward to seeing chairman Karelin before us at the scheduled time tomorrow.” She’d imposed her will, Natalia accepted. But at what cost or purpose?

They used the satellite transmission installed for Walter Anandale visually to conduct the Washington cabinet meeting when he’d been in Moscow, although this time the exchange was far more restricted in numbers although not in emotion, which went through the whole gamut from implacable fury to benign unconcern. There were three, in each capital. In the specially adapted embassy room on Novinskij Bul’var James Scamell sat between John Kayley and the ambassador, Cornell Burton. In Washington the president was flanked by Wendall North and the FBI director, Paul Smith. The guilt-apportioning, one-to-one encounters had been conducted behind closed doors before the link-up but the recriminations still simmered, like summer heat off a tarred road. Paul Smith’s humiliating inclusion was a continuing part of the man’s punishment.

“We were roasted alive,” complained the secretary of state, voice still tight with the memory of their summons to the Russian Foreign Ministry. “Petrin actually used the word ‘arrogance’ and ‘cowboy’. And we didn’t have a position to come back from. How the hell did it happen!”

“A mistake that shouldn’t have occurred,” said Anandale, still gripped by the anger with which he’d flayed the FBI director, towards whom he intentionally looked sideways as he spoke. “What’s the proper story of this damned injection?”

“We categorically denied knowing anything about it, which we don’t,” quickly came in Kayley, outwardly grave-faced like the rest of them but inwardly the happiest man involved, knowing that from now on he was absolutely fireproof, double-coated in Teflon. Whatever went wrong could be squarely-irrefutably-blamed on the director’s stupid instructions even more stupidly wrongly directed, for everyone to read. “None of us touched the guy; it’s absurd imagining that we would.”

“Except for the e-mail,” said Scamell, who two hours earlier, standing in the Russian ministry being treated like a miscreant schoolboy, had finally seen disappear any publicly acknowledged diplomatic credit for almost a year’s commuting between Washington and Moscow. “We can swear on a stack of bibles a mile high that it wasn’t us and they’ll laugh in our face just like Boris Petrin laughed in my face. There’s no purpose in my staying here anymore but for the fact that by coming home I’d be inferring we did do it. We’re screwed here, Mr. President. We couldn’t be in a worse position if we tried to invent one.”

“What about the practical, on-the-ground operation?” asked Wendall North.

“There isn’t one,” dismissed Kayley. “The Russians have withdrawn from our combined incident room. Switched the timing of an exhumation that might be important, so I wasn’t able to be there. It’s the autopsy that’s important and I’ve no way now of getting that …” He hesitated, wanting to build his self-protecting barricade as strong as he could. “We were told, at the Foreign Ministry, that we wouldn’t in future be allowed any access whatsoever to Bendall. Effectively, we’ve been closed down.”

“Jesus!” said Anandale, stretching the word in his exasperation.

“We didn’t do it …” started Wendall North.

It was a rhetorical remark but Kayley’s day had begun facing Scamell’s suspicion. The dishevelled man said, “Can we get this straight, the first and last time! We-did-not-drug-the-goddamned-man!”

“Appreciate you making that so clear to us,” continued the chief of staff. “So who did?”

Kayley shook his head, discomfited by his over-reaction. “God only knows!”

“What about the British?” persisted North.

Kayley shook his head again. “Too long an interval, from the time they saw him.”

“Which only leaves the Russians,” isolated Smith, desperate to make some sort of recovery. “How about it being a set-up? Injecting the guy and pointing the finger at us, to break up the cooperation?”

“What’s the point of their going to all the effort?” demanded Scamell.

“Resentment, at our leadership,” answered Smith.

Everyone waited for someone else to make the point. It was Anandale who did. “We made a pretty good job of screwing that up for ourselves.” The president let the repeated criticism settle before he said, “OK, what can we do to restore the situation?”

“It’ll need a substantial gesture,” advised the secretary of state. “Something like getting the treaty back on track.”

“I agree,” said the ambassador. “Diplomatically we’re looking pretty bad here. I can’t remember so bad.”

“I don’t want to go that route,” rejected the president. “OK, we’ve got to play pull-back. But as it wasn’t us and it couldn’t have been the British, the Russians did it themselves and are using it to force us into treaty concessions. I’m not going to do that.”

“That’s my only idea,” said the secretary of state.

“What about my talking to Okulov direct?” suggested Anandale.

“That’s the one thing I don’t think you should do, get directly involved,” warned Scamell. “I think you’ve got to remain above the actual recrimination.”

“So do I,” said Wendall North, at once.

“I want to get the damned thing back on course. Find the son-of-a-bitch who did what he did to Ruth,” insisted Anandale.

“It’s got to be right, first time,” said Scamell. “Thought out, from every which way.”

“So let’s do just that,” agreed Anandale. “Let’s you and I think about it from every which way over the next hour or two, Jamie. Call me at four, your time. I want a recovery idea by then.”

Olga Melnick pushed herself back in her chair, waiting for Zenin’s lead. She didn’t feel dependent; inadequate. The feeling was of being comfortable, able for the first time to rely on someone. She wasn’t ready yet to start thinking of love, because she wasn’t sure she knew how to recognize the emotion, but it was something she had to confront soon.

The militia commandant said, “There’s just no way of telling how big this conspiracy is, is there?”

“It doesn’t look like it,” she agreed. She picked up the autopsy report on the exhumed remains of Vasili Isakov. “For this much pentobarbitone still to be tissue traceable in the body he would at least have been too deeply unconscious to have felt anything when the train hit him.”

“I read the opinion,” reminded Zenin. “He couldn’t have been forced to take it all orally. It would have been injected. Probably mixed with alcohol, too.”

“And that couldn’t have been the Americans!” said Olga.

“So we’re back to the FSB.” Now Zenin took up and let drop the official security log of everyone admitted to George Bendall’s ward. It lay among the other reports on the table between them in Zenin’s top floor Moscow Militia headquarter office, a starkly functional, bakelite-tiled Brezhnev era memorial to personal, bribebolstering aggrandisement and boxed awfulness. There were already cracks fissuring from the dried-out, water-and-dust glued bricks of the outer rooms into the man’s inner suite in one corner of which the floor was already too uneven to support anything heavier than a triangular stand for Zenin’s exchanged mementoes-mostly unhung plaques-of foreign police visits. “So how did they do it! Not Isakov, on the level crossing. They could have managed that a dozendifferent ways, particularly if he had been drinking the night it happened and was already incapably drunk. I mean at Burdenko. I’ve personally questioned every squad leader: each one is adamant no one who isn’t recorded on that log entered Bendall’s room. And apart from the British, us and the Americans, it’s just doctors and nurses.”

“One of whom has to be an FSB plant,” declared Olga.

“Obviously,” agreed Zenin. “I want every member of the hospital staff on that list investigated, until we find out who it is.”

“I’ll personally organize it,” Olga promised. She hesitated, unsure whether to make the suggestion, remembering Zenin’s annoyance at what he considered his being overlooked. Their relationship allowed her to do it, she decided. “Don’t you think we should pass this on to the presidential commission?”

“It’s negative, at the moment,” said Zenin. There was no irritation in his voice.

“There’ll be a lot of FSB people altogether in one place at the same time, people who could be questioned to shorten the time it’ll take us to find the FSB operative at the hospital; if, indeed, we ever do find who it is.”

“That’s a constructive point,” agreed Zenin. “We’ll pass it on, ahead of my seeing Natalia Fedova at our next group assessment.” He tapped the third folder on the table, the finally arrived and complete military medical record on George Bendall, listed however as Georgi Gugin. “There’s nothing constructive about this. Liver enlargement, through excessive drinking. A stomach ulcer, probably from the same cause …”

“ … But no psychiatric evaluation,” broke in Olga.

Zenin wearily shook his head. “He might have been selected as a sharpshooter but he was still only an ordinary soldier, like one of the twenty million sacrificed during the Great Patriotic War. Which is what men like George Bendall are. Sacrifices, to be offered up whenever the need arises. There’s no concern about their mental health; the less they can think-rationalize-the better.”

“That’s exactly what George Bendall is, isn’t it!” seized Olga. “A sacrifice, selected when a need arose.”

“He’s all we’ve probably got,” said Zenin. “My fear is that we’renot going to be able to get beyond him, to discover the rest, to understand the true story.”

Olga was surprised at the unexpected depression. “We’re making progress.”

“No we’re not, Olga Ivanova!” refused the man. “We’re being directed further and further into a maze. And I don’t know how to avoid our going deeper into it or how to get out, from where we are now.”

Reluctantly-for the first time making herself face the total reality of it-Olga acknowledged that Zenin was right. “We can’t let it happen. Fail, I mean.”

“What’s the way to stop it happening?”

Olga didn’t have an answer.

The Botanic Gardens on Moscow’s Glavnyy Botanicheskiy Sad, with their enormous, tunnel-shaped glassed exhibition halls, had been the secret tryst for Charlie and Natalia after he’d been sure enough of her love-which he wasn’t any longer-to admit his supposed defection to the then Soviet Union was phoney but that because of that love he was refusing to trigger his KGB-wrecking return to London until he’d guaranteed her safety from suspicion or recrimination.

There was a twitch of recognition when he was ushered into the presence of the psychiatrist who’d analyzed the tapes and the transcripts of the George Bendall encounters. A slipper-shuffling housekeeper-or maybe even the man’s elderly and totally disinterested wife-led Charlie through an echoing mausoleum of a Hampstead house directly into a carbuncle of a glass greenhouse, abandoning him at its tropically-heated entrance. From there he found his own, sweaty way through giant fronded plants and ferns and sharp quilled, brilliantly technicolored cacti to locate, along the third path he followed, the shoulder-stooped, cardiganed professor. Arnold Nolan was in conversation with himself, narrow-spouted watering can in one hand, snipping secateurs in the other, his canopy of white hair more tangled than the foliage he was tending. His patchwork-patterned slippers matched those of the elderly woman and Charlieenvied their obvious trodden-into-comfort shapelessness.

The man showed no surprise at Charlie’s arrival beside him, just slightly raising his voice above the earlier self-conversation. He said, “Plants have an intelligence, you know. They feel discomfort, injury.”

“So I’ve been told,” said Charlie. Perspiration was rivering his face and forming into tributaries down his back.

“Restful things, plants.”

“I’ve come about the Moscow tapes.”

“I know. See that plant there? Dionaea Muscipula. Have to feed it flies and insects. Isn’t it pretty?”

“Do you mind if I wait outside? I find it very hot in here.”

The man turned for the first time, fixing Charlie with pale blue eyes. “Hot? You think so?”

“Very much so.” Nolan wasn’t sweating at all, Charlie saw. The man’s cardigan was thick, all the buttons secured.

“If you need to. Shan’t be long.”

Charlie returned gratefully to the outside corridor, feeling the sweat dry upon him, wondering if he’d make his second meeting with Geoffrey Robertson. When he’d telephoned the pathologist the man had said he could only give him ten minutes and insisted Charlie be on time, an hour from now.

Charlie heard the shuffled scuff of Nolan’s approach before he saw the man. He was talking to himself when he finally appeared. Or maybe, Charlie thought, he was talking to the plants. He’d read that people did.

“Come on,” said Nolan, as he past, and Charlie obediently followed. Over his shoulder Nolan said, “Like to meet your man. Interesting.”

“I appreciate the difficulty of what I’m asking, your not being able to do that.”

“Awkward but not a problem,” said the psychiatrist. “Some things are fairly obvious, others not.”

Although he’d never actually seen one Charlie decided Nolan’s office looked like the inside of a bear’s cave after a winter’s hibernation. It was a completely shelved cavern of books which overflowed on to the floor and on to overstuffed leather chairs and acouch, interspersed with apparently discarded papers and magazines and occasionally skeletal newspapers from which articles had been clipped. The debris was so great that there were clearly delineated paths through it, the most obvious to the overwhelmed, leathertopped desk, with side alleys to the bookshelves.

“There’s a chair …” said Nolan, waving to his right with a distracted arm, as if he’d forgotten where one might be. When the man snapped his desk light on Charlie saw his tapes and their transcripts were neatly-surprisingly-stacked next to a pocket-sized replay machine.

“I’m only able to give you-to suggest-a general picture,” began Nolan, abruptly professional. “There are clear indications of a schizophrenia, which is too often used as a catch-all when people like myself can’t think of a more positive diagnosis. We’re not going to go all Hollywood and suggest there are strange voices telling Bendall what to do. I suspect, though, that he’s obsessional. He’d be very susceptible to being told what to do, particularly if he loved or felt particularly close to the person giving the instructions …”

“What about more than one person? A group?” interrupted Charlie.

Nolan pursed his lips. “Possible but there would still need to be one person in that group upon whom he would need to focus. But certainly a group could be important to him. Your notes were helpful. He’s classically dysfunctional, alienated from a splintered home. That’s why the army might have been attractive to him: somewhere in which he might have felt embraced, a family he did know or have. But I think it would have been too big, too amorphous. But a group, a brotherhood, wouldn’t have been. And let’s get a correction in here, because it’s important. All the interviews so far have been wrongly directed, the Americans most of all. Bendall needs to be encouraged-praised, admired, loved if you like, not ridiculed which has been the tone of everything I’ve listened to so far, with yours as a possible, partial exception. From what you’ve said in your notes, there’s certainly more than one person-a conspiracy-involved here but Bendall did what he did to become admired by his friends, in the same mentally disturbed way that loners have attacked-killed-famous people, to become famous themselves …”

“Did he-does he-know what he was doing?” broke in Charlie again.

“Very much so. That’s part of it, a very important part. That’s your way forward, when you talk to him again?”

“How can I get him to tell me who the others are?”

Nolan gestured uncertainly. “From your interview, more than any of the others, I got the impression that he wants to tell someone: after all his life being discarded and down trodden he’s suddenly someone, the object of everyone’s attention. He wasn’t just being used physically, to fire a rifle. He was being used-manipulated-mentally. Those short, staccato replies to you are indicative. He believed he was playing with you: testing you out. Let him go on thinking that. Let him think he’s superior, in charge.”

“There’s something that wasn’t in my notes, that I’ve only just discovered,” said Charlie. “Somehow-I don’t know how-Bendall was administered with an unauthorized drug, thiopentone. It could have been during the American interview when he broke down. Could that have any long term effects, combined with the other drugs with which he’s being treated: affect, in fact, how he might be in any future sessions?”

Nolan humped his shoulders. “You know what the prescribed drugs are?”

Charlie felt a burn of embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”

“Now he’s well out of surgery I guess it’ll just be some type of sedative,” suggested the psychiatrist. “Thiopentone shouldn’t react against any of the barbiturates.”

“So it wouldn’t have caused that outburst, during the American session?”

The psychiatrist shook his head. “That was far more likely to have been caused by the way he was being talked to. He was being ridiculed, which was how he’s been treated all his life. He simply closed himself down.”

“Why did he break all the models he made, which his mother told me he did?”

“Models of things that moved, could have taken him away from an existence he hated, had they been real,” Noland judged. “That was his physical way of showing that hatred of his surrounding-smakinghis imagined escape and then smashing it-before he began showing the actual violence towards others.”

“Can I send you other tapes?”

“I’d like you to. I’ve never worked like this before: as I said, it’s interesting. And remember something else I told you. Let him think he’s superior: cleverer. You going to find that difficult?”

“Not at all,” said Charlie. “I’ve been doing that all my life.”

The pathologist was wearing a clean laboratory coat but it was again at least two sizes too small. Geoffrey Robertson gave the same answer as the psychiatrist when asked about thiopentone but promised to get a definitive assessment from a pharmacologist if Charlie sent back from Moscow George Bendall’s complete medication list.

“Can’t understand the point of it being done,” said the man.

“That is the point of it being done,” said Charlie. “For people not to be able to understand why. And it’s working brilliantly.”

With the need-minimally productive though it turned out-for a second meeting with the pathologist Charlie had put back for an hour his appointment with the ballistics expert at the Woolwich Arsenal. But he was still late and knew at once from the man’s demeanor that Archibald Snelling had fantasized for the further delayed thirty minutes about the toothbrushed lavatory cleaning sentence he would have imposed in a much mourned earlier army career. From the man’s disapproving, top to toe and sideways examination, Charlie guessed his appearance would probably have got him denied the toothbrush and that he would have had to scour with his bare hands, if not his own toothbrush. Snelling had to be almost two meters tall and although there was a slight stomach sag in the parade ground rigidity his voice retained the come-to-attention bark. Into the man’s office, which actually did overlook a parade ground, came the occasional and distant sound of a weapon being discharged. The only chair available was straight-backed and wooden-seated and Charlie turned and sat with one arm crooked over its rear rail, just for the hell of it. Snelling was sitting to attention, shoulders squared, ramrod straight.

“You got something more to tell me!” demanded Snelling, at once.

“I’d hoped you’d have something to tell me,” retorted Charlie. The aggressiveness was an abrupt contrast with the attempted helpfulness of the other specialists that day but then, remembered Charlie, he had shown the man-or his colleagues-to be lacking. Charlie was more irritated than offended; he certainly wasn’t intimidated.

“I don’t understand,” complained the man.

“I don’t, either,” said Charlie. “It might help if you explained in more detail what the problem is.”

“You don’t have another Dragunov? Photographs?”

Charlie’s feet twitched, in aching unison. Slowly he said, “Why would you expect me to have another Dragunov?”

Color began to prick out on the man’s already red face. “You’re still only considering two rifles: the one recovered from the arrested man and the unknown, different caliber Medved?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go into the workshop.”

It was a march more than a walk along a connecting corridor and Charlie’s feet hurt with the effort of keeping up. It was a long room, with what was obviously a firing range leading off to the right, some with unmarked targets, others with bullet-recoverable butts for analyses and comparison. Deeper into the room were benches equipped with vices and calibrating machinery and enhancing cameras. Snelling led past it all to the far end, where there were the sort of backlighted viewing screens against which X-rays are normally examined. Upon the entire bank were clipped what Charlie realized, when he got closer, to be the hugely enlarged photographs of the bullets recovered from the Moscow victims. Closer still he saw each was identified against the victim’s name. Separated by a gap was what were marked to be pictures of bullets test fired from Bendall’s gun by the American ballistics team.

“We’re not interested in the 9mm bullets, from the Medved,” dismissed Snelling, a blackboard pointer now in his hand. “This …” he tapped the third print “is the bullet recovered, according to your notes, from American Secret Serviceman Jennings. This …” the pointer went farther to the right “is from the Russian security man, Ivanov. And these …” Snelling moved over the division, to the American prints “are pictures described to me asbeing three separate test firings, from the SVD recovered from the gunman, George Bendall …?”

“Yes?” said Charlie.

“The SVD bullet from Ivanov is a better comparison than that from Jennings, although there’s still just enough,” said the ballistics expert. “Look at them. There’s no marking. But look at the American test firings. See it!” The pointer tapped impatiently. “There’s a groove line, on every one. You know was rifling is?”

Charlie did but he said, “No.”

Snelling sighed. “The barrels of rifles-particularly snipers’ rifles-are bored like the thread of a screw. It increases accuracy and velocity. There’s a fault, a snag, in the rifling of the SVD you say was used by George Bendall. Any bullet fired from it would be scored, like these three pictures of the American test firings show them to be identifiably marked.”

“But the bullets that hit Jennings and Ivanov are not?”

“There’s substantial impact damage,” qualified Snelling. “But they don’t appear to be from the photographs with which I’ve been provided.”

“So they weren’t fired by George Bendall?”

“I’ll go as far as saying that in my professional opinion it’s highly unlikely.”

Anne Abbott was again waiting in the bar when Charlie got back, late, to the Dorchester. “What would you say if I told you the bullets that killed Ben Jennings and cost Feliks Ivanov his leg weren’t fired by George Bendall?” demanded Charlie.

“I’d say holy shit and then I’d ask you to convince me.”

In Moscow the American embassy incident room quieted at John Kayley’s entry. Kayley said, “The president has accepted the resignation of Paul Smith as Bureau Director.”

“Will it be enough?” queried someone in the room.

“As far as I know there isn’t anything else.”