Kings of Many Castles

25

Charlie called out for Sasha, which he always did if he got home to Lesnaya at a time she would be up, but there was no scurried response. Natalia was sitting in one of the large lounge chairs, facing the door, as if she were waiting.

Charlie said, “I hoped you’d be home.”

“Did you?”

“Where’s Sasha?”

“Sleeping over at Marina’s.”

“She’s only five.” Marina was Sasha’s closest friend at preschool.

“Five and a half. Which is old enough.”

Retreat, Charlie warned himself. “Of course it is. We could go out to dinner if you like.”

“No,”

He’d poured the ashes over his own head, Charlie reminded himself. “I’m getting a drink. Would you like one?”

“No.”

From the drinks tray he said, “London’s told me to stand away from the investigation. Leave everything to the militia and the Americans.”

“Have they?” She shouldn’t have packed the cases waiting in the bedroom because she didn’t want to do it. Now that the moment had come-now that she’d made the plans-Natalia wanted to pull back but knew she couldn’t. Or could she? It was only the cases, really. Couldn’t she hide them in a closet, stay after he’d left the following morning and unpack them?

Charlie sat on the matching couch, close enough to reach out and touch her but not doing so. From the attitude so far it was going to be a long time before he’d be touching her. “How did today go?”

Was it fair to seek his advice? There was no one else-another, finally accepted professional although now cynical reason for changingher mind-and Charlie had a bat-like protective antenna. “Not the way I expected.”

Better! seized Charlie. “Let’s go through it.”

Natalia did, hesitantly to begin with, and Charlie didn’t once interrupt hoping he’d found the first bridge. When she finally finished he said, “I think you’re right about pressure from Okulov: he’s got to do something to impress Washington to get the treaty he needs for the election. And purging the FSB-which needs purging from what you’ve told me-would be a hell of a way publicly to do it.”

“With the commission, which recommends the purge, the casualty of any battle between the communist-leaning FSB and the existing group in the Kremlin.”

Natalia was right, Charlie accepted. And at risk if the presidential shooting was left to run inconclusively into the ground. So what about his own rock and a hard place, trying to protect Natalia by not using what he knew against endangering her if he did? According to everything she’d told him it had been Natalia-provably, on secretariat tapes and in secretariat notebooks-who had been consistently critical of the FSB from the outset of the official enquiry. With Yuri Trishin, the president’s chief of staff, unpersuaded until today. Which showed Natalia-arguably (although she wasn’t) a disenchanted former KGB officer-the prime instigator of any FSB overhaul. An obvious and unavoidable target. It could also be the unproven, unproveable evidence of Yuri Trishin-never Natalia, even unwittingly-being the internal source to the conspiracy. A new mantra echoed in Charlie’s mind: unproven, unproveable. “I want to talk something through with you again.”

“I want to go on talking about this,” misunderstood Natalia, deciding at the same time that there were several closets in the unused bedrooms in which she could hide the cases until the following day.

“That’s what I am thinking about.”

“I’m sorry … I thought …” she stumbled. Shit, shit and double shit! Even Charlie’s frustration cursing was automatic for her.

Good, thought Charlie. She was on the defensive: a footplank if not a bridge. Every little helped so he’d push it as far across the gulf as he could. “Don’t try to think ahead of me. Talk with me. What reason was there for Trishin’s u-turn today?”

“Karelin stonewalling, as always.”

“As always,” echoed Charlie, snatching at the response. “He’s stonewalled at every encounter, even sent sacrifices at the beginning.”

“Yes?” Natalia accepted, questioningly.

“Do you remember our conversation about there being an inside source-a leak-for every move in the investigation to be sidetracked or misdirected?”

“Yes?” she questioned again. She couldn’t follow him, see the point towards which he was going.

“Could it have been Trishin: be Trishin?”

Natalia’s mind was in a turmoil, too many unconnected thoughts fluttering in a wind-blown paperchase. “Doing what?”

“Using you … manipulating …?”

“No!” Natalia’s mind cleared, the paperchase wind abruptly blowing away the uncertainty. “You didn’t mean using me … manipulating me. You thought it was me! Suspected me! Imagined I was part of something …!” She was forward in the chair, eyes bulged in outrage.

“No!” frantically denied Charlie, despairing of her psychologytuned intuition. “I’m frightened you’ve been used …”

“I have, haven’t I Charlie? Used for such a very long time!”

“Stop it, Natalia!” he shouted. “Stop this going wrong … getting any worse. I can help … there’s a way …”

She jerked up but having done so didn’t know what to do, thrusting forward but then coming back, to stand over him to stare down contemptuously. “Sasha is staying with Marina’s family because I asked if she could. I didn’t want her to be here tonight. To see. I’d even changed my mind. Was going to try to forget whatever you did with that woman because it could have been a mistake … something you didn’t think about. But you don’t do anything without thinking about it, do you, you bastard! You’re even ready to think I’d cheat on you: be prepared to mislead your fucking precious professionalism …”

“Stop it!” Charlie shouted again. “This is stupid … shouldn’t be happening …”

“I’m not part of anything … a conspiracy or a cover up or whateverelse it is your contorted, convoluted mind imagines. You want to know what I’m guilty of! I’m guilty of believing that you could change and love me and trust me and dear God, wasn’t that a mistake! You did it very well, Charlie. You got a posting here and you realized how useful I’d be and you managed to make it work for all this time …”

She was hysterical, beyond immediate reason. “Sit down. Please sit down and listen to me, Natalia. You’re wrong. All the way wrong. Sit down and listen to me: listen to what I have to say. What has to be said.”

“I’m leaving, Charlie,” announced Natalia, shaking her head as she walked away. “It’s over. Should never have begun.” She emerged at once from the bedroom with a case in either hand.

“I’m asking you not to leave.” Charlie was standing, his hands out.

“You should learn to trust someone sometime, Charlie. But you never will.”

“Where are you going?”

“An hotel, initially.”

“Which one?”

“Don’t become a nuisance.”

“What about Sasha?”

“What about her?”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“How about the father who didn’t want to see her for the first three years she was born had to go away again?”

“That’s not fair. Or true.”

“Let’s not get into a discussion about fairness or truth.”

“I love you!” Charlie called after her.

Natalia quietly closed the door behind herself.

Charlie waited at the British embassy entrance to authorize John Kayley’s admission. The American said: “You look rough. Bad night?”

“Kind of,” said Charlie. Wallowing in a lake of self-pity and Islay malt hadn’t been the best idea. “You mind passing on the cigars for a while?”

“Not if you tell me what I’m here for.”

“Pictures and moving lips.”

Kayley followed the video struggle between Bendall and Vladimir Sakov with the lip-read transcript before him and did the same directly afterwards with the courtroom killing but on this showing Charlie freeze-framed the tattoo comparison between the NTV cameraman and the FBI-collected photograph of Vasili Isakov. Charlie said, “Bendall and Davidov have the same tattoos in the same place. Their bodies are at the Burdenko mortuary but the hospital wants to get rid of them.”

“We need photographs.”

“London’s taken responsibility for Bendall’s body. We might be able to bluff the hospital about Davidov but at the moment the priority is with the living more than the dead, before he gets dead.”

“You’ve done good, Charlie. Damned good. You worked it out to the very end already?”

“Not yet,” Charlie admitted. “But I think I know how to.” Would Natalia ever learn what he’d done, to keep her safe? He already had the list of Moscow hotels to call later, to find out where she was. “How’s this measure for size?”

Once, as Charlie talked, Kayley’s hand strayed to his cigars but the American remembered in time, smiling apologetically. When Charlie finished Kayley said, “We swing a trick like this, I’m permanently in the Bureau’s Hall of Fame and you’re a to-die-for friend for life. But we’ll never get it to work.”

“That mean you don’t want to give it a try?”

“Sure as hell no! But we’ll only get one hit.”

“You think Washington will go for it?”

“The president’s wife was shot, for Christ’s sake! By a bullet meant for him! And you ask if they’ll go for it!”

“You going to ask them, first?”

Kayley snorted the rejection. “It doesn’t work, my tit’s in the ringer for failing. If it does work, I’ll announce it and wait for the presidential congratulations.”

“Officially I’m on watch and listen, no active participation.”

“It’s my call, anyway.”

“And there’s no jurisdiction.”

“Now you’re trying to talk me out of it!”

“Just getting the rules of engagement clear between us,” insisted Charlie. “Like you said, we only get one hit. So where?”

“The station says he’s off sick. I called without saying who I was.”

“Let’s hope he’s not too sick.”

Vladimir Petrovich Sakov didn’t sound too sick but there wasn’t the belligerence there had been in the mess room of the NTV studios. The muffled demand to identify themselves was shouted through the chipped door of the apartment in a crumbling block on Kazakova Ulitza gradually being shaken off its sand-ballasted foundations by the perpetual shuddering traffic of the inner peripherique behind and the reverberating railway line in front. When they said who they were the voice came back stronger. “Fuck off!”

“Relieved it’s us?” Kayley shouted back.

There was no reply.

“We know, Vladimir Petrovich,” said Charlie. “We’ve got all the proof we need, too. We even know about the tattoos.”

Kayley gently pushed Charlie out of the direct firing line through the door, pulling himself to the opposite side. The American said loudly, “You worried? I’d be, if I were you. I’d be shit scared.”

There was still no response from inside.

“I just realized something,” said Charlie. “This railway line is the one on which Vasili Isakov was murdered, further up at Timiryazev, isn’t it? You think they might try that again?”

“Why not?” said Kayley, responding to Charlie’s nodded invitation. “You got away with it well enough last time, didn’t you Vladimir?”

“What’s it like, knowing you’re going to die and that there’s nothing you can do about it?” asked Charlie. “You really must be shit scared.”

“You want your life saved, you open the door, Vlad old buddy,” advised the American. “We’re your only chance, so stop being an asshole.”

The shuffling was audible on the other side.

“We’re waiting,” said Charlie.

“But not for much longer,” added Kayley.

There was the grating of more than one lock being released aheadof a longer clattering sound. Vladimir Sakov put himself to one side, for a warning view of several meters along the outside corridor, head-nodding them into the room. The long sleeves of the wellpressed blue woollen shirt were buttoned, hiding the body markings, and the jeans were much cleaner than those at his meeting with Charlie at the TV station. The apartment was surprisingly neat and well furnished, in contrast to the outside neglect and there were photographs-one of instant interest was of a much slimmer, younger Sakov in army uniform-but Charlie didn’t get the impression of permanence. The impression he did get was of a very different man from the gut-rot swigging slob of the TV mess room.

Charlie turned at the repeated clattering and saw there was a cat’s cradle of chains criss-crossing the inside of the door. The dead lock and mortise looked new. A Makarov lay on a table which was totally hidden from the outside when the door was open.

Kayley gestured to the handgun and said, “You’re going to need more than that to keep you alive, once everybody knows what we know.”

“So it’s only the two of you who do, at the moment?”

This man’s training had involved more than being taught how to use a camera, Charlie thought. Pushing the pained condescension into his voice he said, “Vladimir Petrovich! Do we look as if we just drove in from the steppes in a hay cart? We said we know! And one of the things we know is that your job was to kill George Bendall, not save him. Do you think we’d come here and confront a willing killer without insurance? Come on!” Charlie hoped Sakov hadn’t seen the tension twitch through the bulged American. They’d all three been standing but now Charlie walked casually, as if he had the right, to a chair closest to the photographs. Beyond the one showing Sakov in army uniform was another of the man in swimming shorts. None showed Sakov with either male or female companions. Kayley found himself a chair and finally Sakov sat down.

Very slowly, enabling the Russian to see what he was doing, Kayley extracted the lip moving transcripts from the manila envelope he carried. “Let me read something to you. ‘You’re dead, Georgi. Done what you’re here for … down you go, like Vasili Gregorovich … no use anymore …’ Recognize those words: yourwords? And what Bendall said back? ‘No, you fucker. You’re coming with me, everyone’s coming with me.’ If you’d pushed him properly, not let him see you coming, it would have worked and he would have been over the top, head first, before that CNN lensman heard the commotion and turned his camera on you … saw everything. That was real bad luck, wasn’t it?”

“How?” said Sakov. There wasn’t the slightest belligerence in his voice any more.

“That favorite phrase of politicians,” said Charlie. “Read my lips!”

“Now you’ve got to read ours,” said Kayley. He went into the envelope again, taking out Isakov’s picture and the CNN freeze frame. “Just so you know what there is. By tonight we’ll have the match from the mortuary with Bendall and Davidov.”

So far Kayley hadn’t put a foot-or rather a word-wrong but Charlie hoped the American properly realized they were dealing with a professional. Could he risk a wrong word, taking things on as he wanted? “How’d you feel, after Bendall survived? After ‘you’re coming with me, everyone’s coming with me?’ I know he’s clever-that’s why he was moved in at once-but you were putting a hell of a lot of trust in just one very clever man to keep Bendall from talking, weren’t you? What a pity you didn’t have someone on the theater staff at the hospital. Bendall could have died under surgery and the problem would have been over, wouldn’t it? You’d have got him the second time.”

“Guerguen Semonovich could do anything he wanted with the idiot!” said the Russian, his uncertainty deepening. “He had Bendall trained like Pavlov’s dogs, responding without question to any instruction, any guidance. Isakov too, to an extent. Isakov trusted him, believed he was curing Bendall of his demons.”

Got it! thought Charlie, triumphantly. All they needed was that little extra nudge: one wrong word, he thought again. He was about to speak when Kayley began, “Even though …” but Charlie urgently talked over the American. “But Guerguen Semonovich Agayan didn’t train you: the KGB did. And you were the link between the idiots and the real planners. That’s why I don’t understand why they’ve let you live.”

“The court was the end: that closed it down.”

“But it didn’t, did it?” pressed Charlie.

Kayley came back on track, again indicating the Makarov and the chained door. “And you didn’t believe that it did yourself, did you, Vlad old buddy.”

“For fuck’s sake stop calling me Vlad old buddy!” erupted Sakov.

“You’d better believe it,” said the American. “We’re your way-your only way-to stay alive now.”

“You said that before.”

Both Charlie and Kayley recognized the half question as the beginning of the capitulation. Kayley said, “Here’s how it is, the toss of a coin. Only in your case, Vlad old buddy, heads you lose-the moment we make public what we know, with all the photographs and the lip read transcripts-and tails you lose again, because they can’t afford to let you go on living, telling all you know. So here’s what you do. You run. To me. To America. I get you out of here, on an American flight on a phony passport, like we’ve got a lot of Russian defectors out before. You testify before a Grand Jury, telling us all about the conspiracy, so that we can issue legal indictments against everyone who’s part of it, to enable Moscow to make all the arrests. Then we put you into the Witnesses’ Protection Program. New identity, new citizenship and a U.S. government pension. And you live happily ever after.”

“What guarantee have I got you’ll do all that?”

“A better guarantee than you’ve got staying alive here when we go public,” said Kayley. “But think about it. You think the president of the United States of America isn’t going to be grateful for you telling everyone who tried to kill him and so badly hurt his wife!”

“I get full amnesty?”

“That’s the deal.”

“When?” asked Sakov, his voice almost inaudible.

“How much time do you think you’ve got?”

“None,” Sakov finally conceded.

“I don’t think so either,” agreed Kayley.

“Don’t call me Vlad old buddy anymore.”

“I won’t,” promised the American.

Ruth Anandale had her good hand to her face, sobbing, and it was a mistake to reach out for the useless one because she screamed hysterically, “Dont! Stop it! Don’t touch it: it’s dead!”

“There’s progress all the time,” insisted Anandale, a worn out assurance. “The moment there’s a breakthrough, we’ll have it. I told you you’d get better and you will. I promise!”

“Stop it, Walt. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! I’m a freak, always going to be a freak. Can’t dress anymore as I want. Swim as I want and ride as I want and play tennis like I want. I can’t even cut my own fucking food anymore or drive a car anymore. Or write my name anymore. A freak, Wait! What’s it like to be married to a fucking freak!”

It had been Max Donnington’s suggestion to be discreetly in the background when Anandale told his wife that the two European brachial plexus specialists had unanimously agreed with the American surgeons that there was no treatment or surgery possible to restore any use to Ruth Anandale’s arm. The admiral came quickly forward, already prepared. “Come on, Ruth. Take these, they’ll make it easier …”

Ruth Anandale was calm when she looked up at the man. “These aren’t the pills-the tranquilizer-I need, Max. What about some pills to make it really easy?”

Anandale remained for another hour in the private quarters of the White House, waiting until his wife finally fell asleep and when he was sure she had and wouldn’t hear he said to Donnington, “You think we’ve got an additional problem?”

“Unquestionably. Trauma of some sort was inevitable. The only uncertainty was the degree.”

“Does this degree needs specialist treatment, too?”

“I think it would be wrong not to consider psychiatry. As I told you before, your wife is going to need all the help she can get.”

Anandale looked up irritably at the butler’s hesitant entry. “I told you I was off limits.”

“I think you’ll want to hear Mr. North,” said the man.

“What!” demanded Anandale, emerging into the outer dressing room.

“Kayley’s got one of the guys involved: the cameraman on thegantry with Bendall. He’s defected and agreed to go before a Grand Jury. Kayley’s on his way with him now.”

For a moment Anandale stood with his head bowed, savoring the moment. Then he looked up, smiling. “I don’t want a single rat to run. The security blackout on this is absolute. Tell Justice I want a Grand Jury empanelled at once, starting today. And I want to see Kayley the moment he hands the guy over.”

It took Charlie less than an hour to locate Natalia’s booking at the Radisson Slavjanskaya Hotel, on Berezhkavskaya naberezhnaya. Having done so he sat uncertainly in his embassy office for a further thirty minutes, finally deciding against a personal encounter, particularly in front of Sasha whom he was sure would be staying there with her.

The longest time of all was spent composing the letter because Charlie always had the greatest difficulty openly expressing personal feelings. Which was probably the root cause of all his problems with Natalia, he acknowledged. He wrote, finally, that he loved her and he loved Sasha and wanted them both back with him at Lesnaya. He was sorry how badly things had collapsed but that it wasn’t irreparable. All they needed to do was to talk: to get the misunderstandings out of the way, the compromises accepted. He was certainly ready to make compromises and hoped she was, too. There also might be another reason for them to speak very shortly. She knew the number at which he’d be waiting.

Charlie took the metro to the Kievskaya stop and was careful entering the foyer, not wanting any accidental meeting. He waited to see the receptionist put the envelope in the pigeonhole for room 46. There was no key displayed, which meant she had to be there.

He was back in the Lesnaya apartment by eight. No message had been left on the answering machine during the time he was away. The telephone didn’t ring during the rest of the night, either.