Red Star Burning

13

There seemed to be no part of Charlie Muffin’s body that didn’t ache. His feet, of course, caused the worst agony. By the time he got back to London he was hobbling so badly that an airport driver returning from taking a disabled passenger to a flight offered Charlie a lift on his empty cart, which Charlie gratefully accepted, deciding that the privilege attracted far less attention than the way he was walking. Despite all of which, Charlie was happy. So far-a long way in opportunity, if not necessarily in miles-reversing the terms of engagement to his personal control was working.

He’d been lucky, Charlie accepted: bloody lucky. But there again, he’d made most of that luck himself. The biggest gamble had been the moment he’d fled the plane. He’d built in most of the contingency protection he could anticipate, pausing in the Amsterdam arrival hall to take the battery from the Russian phone to prevent his being traced by any tracker device installed in London but still leaving open his expectation of unknown escorts on the plane. That there hadn’t been added to his suspicion of a separate agenda of which he was unaware, further supported by there having been no passport questioning upon his reentry into Heathrow triggered by watchers having alerted the aircraft crew of his disappearance. Charlie estimated that had given him at least two, maybe as much as four, hours’ runaway time. He’d used some of it buying toiletries and a hold-all in which to carry them before purchasing a closing gate ticket on the last-of-the-day Dutch airline flight back to London, which he’d established to be half empty while selecting his escape seat at Heathrow three hours earlier. The hold-all provided just enough luggage for him to be accepted without question at a fifty-pound-a-night, thin-walled room in a Waterloo station hotel.

He’d still ached, although not as badly, when he woke. He no longer shuffled, just walked slowly, to get to a conveniently close internet cafe by nine fifteen. It took less than another thirty minutes of concentrated Google surfing to assemble a selection of holiday companies offering short Russian tours and even less to find one in Manchester eager enough to retain its newly acquired franchise-and full payment in cash, to which he agreed-to allocate him one of their three remaining vacancies on an eight-day block-visa trip to the Russian capital.

By eleven Charlie had emptied the Harrods safe deposit box of his David Merryweather passport and international driving license and used the accompanying American Express card in the same name to buy a suit, trousers, shirts, and underwear, as well as a suitcase additional to the hold-all to carry it all. From experience, he held back from risking new shoes, to which his awkward feet would have needed to adapt.

Charlie’s train arrived precisely on time in Manchester, enabling him to be one of the first of the tour group independently to reach the airport. Muriel, the Russian-speaking tour guide, said she was sorry the cost dictated that it had to be a basic economy night flight. “I took a chance, accepting you as I did, but we need to maintain our booking numbers.”

“What chance was that?” queried Charlie, apprehensively.

“Adding you to the block visa. We’re supposed to supply the names a week before: the embassy requires master copies.”

The apprehension lifted like mist in the sun, which Charlie, prepared to sacrifice his Merryweather identity, decided to be shining down upon him. “Here it is.”

“Malcolm Stoat?” the girl queried. “That wasn’t the name I thought you gave me on the telephone?”

“It was a very bad line. I had difficulty hearing a lot of what you said to me.”

“And you’ve already got a visa?” she said, opening the passport.

“I didn’t know anything about block visas,” lied Charlie. “I thought I had to arrange my own. It does mean you’re not taking any chances, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose I should add your name to my list?”

“Perhaps you should.”

“And I’m really sorry it’s a night flight.”

“I’ll try to sleep,” said Charlie. Which he did, dreamlessly.

By comparison, Gerald Monsford’s day had been a continuous waking nightmare.

“Your future’s hanging by a thread,” threatened the MI6 Director, the moment his demanded connection was made to Moscow. “Because of you, the entire operation’s in jeopardy. You realized that!”

If only you knew how jeopardized it really had been, thought Jacobson. “With respect, sir, you were present throughout my entire London briefing. At which it was specified that the sole purpose of my recall was thoroughly to study and memorize Charlie Muffin’s appearance, nothing more. It was also specified at that briefing that every conceivable aspect of the operation was being supervised and handled by others, from whom I was separated and with whom I under no circumstance would or should have any knowledge or contact, because of the particular function I have to perform to create the diversion at the moment of Radtsic’s extraction. From which I understood there were to be others of whom I had no knowledge carrying out in-flight surveillance and that there would be protective surveillance in place at the known stopover at Schipol.”

The meticulously prepared defense momentarily silenced Monsford, increasing the man’s fury but in turn fogging his reasoning. “You could have alerted the crew!”

Jacobson hoped he timed his answering silence to the millisecond. “I was traveling as an ordinary economy-class passenger. Why-or how-should I have been monitoring another supposedly ordinary economy-class passenger who might only have been booked to Amsterdam closely enough to spot his disappearance? Had I raised an alarm the departure would have been stopped, because security would have insisted the aircraft be searched and all hold baggage unloaded. And I, as the person who raised the alert, would have been publicly identified and even, worse, put before a televised news conference. If my diplomatic cover withstood investigation, the exposure would have been prevented by continuing with the diversion mission.”

Monsford knew his continuing frustration was suffusing his face and was glad he’d taken the call entirely alone, with neither Rebecca nor Straughan as witnesses. With determination, Monsford accepted defeat. “Tell me about Radtsic.”

“He’s falling apart,” said Jacobson, enjoying the screw-turning. “Elana changed her mind about defecting. He claims he’s persuaded her to change it back again but I’m worried.”

“What are you suggesting?” asked Monsford, anxiously.

Monsford couldn’t handle the pressure! Jacobson suddenly realized. “I’m not suggesting anything. I’m simply keeping you informed of a dangerously uncertain situation.”

“You must have formed some ideas?”

“I’m not sure if we’re not trying to achieve too much, guaranteeing the extraction of Radtsic and his family by making a distraction out of that of Charlie Muffin and his family.…” Again Jacobson tried perfectly to time the pause. “Particularly as we appear to have lost Charlie Muffin.”

How much he would have savored using Jacobson instead of Charlie as the about-to-die decoy, mused Monsford. “You seriously believe we could lose Radtsic?”

“I’d put that possibility as high as seventy-five percent if we don’t get him out soon.”

“Then we can’t change course: all our preparation is irrevocably interlinked.”

“We don’t have Charlie Muffin to interlink him!” risked Jacobson.

“He’s got to reestablish contact,” declared Monsford, clinging to the earlier insistence of James Straughan. “Once he does, everything slots back into place.”

“We won’t know what Charlie’s been doing,” Jacobson pointed out. “From what Straughan told me yesterday in London there was suspicion from Charlie’s interrogation, after his return from Jersey, that he’d been a long-embedded Russian sleeper. What if he was turned: the trip to Jersey was to meet an FSB Control to fulfill an assignment we haven’t any idea about? That would slot in even more perfectly with Natalia’s pleading telephone calls, so soon after Charlie’s Jersey return, wouldn’t it?”

“It couldn’t be,” groped Monsford, anguished: he’d done everything he could-and more-to promote himself as the architect of it all. “Did you tell Radtsic the use to which we were putting Charlie?”

He couldn’t better have managed the exchange if he’d personally scripted and rehearsed it, thought Jacobson. “I told him there was to be a diversion, without telling him what it was to be. And I didn’t mention Charlie Muffin by name.”

“You get the slightest suspicion that Radtsic knows what’s happening to Natalia?”

“None,” replied Jacobson. “But he’d have to know if Charlie’s disappearance and the sudden emergence of Natalia is part of a Russian operation?” He’d have to hold back from taking this improvisation too far: he’d completely escaped censure.

“When’s your next meeting?”

Jacobson hesitated, unsure if he needed the protection of an indeterminate answer. Deciding that he didn’t, he said, simply: “Tomorrow.”

“Don’t say anything more about a diversion,” ordered Monsford. “But listen hard to everything he says, for anything that doesn’t sound right.”

He’d risen like a Phoenix not just unsinged but smelling of roses, Jacobson decided: sweeter than roses, even.

“What?” demanded Monsford, as the operational director came into his suite for the second time that day.

From the oddly cowed way the Director was slumped behind his desk, Straughan thought Monsford looked like a bull mastiff that had lost its nerve. “The media fanfare is in full tune. It started in Amsterdam, obviously. It was picked up in Moscow-running on the news wires-and the Evening Standard has jumped on it here. Their front-page headline is: ‘Moscow-bound Briton in Airport Disappearance.’ The story covers the whole spectrum from assassination to kidnap to spy plot, in no particular order.”

“They using Charlie’s cover name?” demanded Monsford, straightening slightly from his withdrawn shell.

“Of course they are,” confirmed Straughan. “It’s my guess that Charlie intended the publicity, which will build up when there are no answers to all the questions that are being asked. Our concern has to be that it concentrates attention on Moscow.”

“Jacobson doesn’t think we can run the operation as we planned, now that we’ve lost Charlie,” said the Director.

“We can’t, not until we find him,” agreed Straughan, close to impatience at the statement of the obvious. Curious what the man’s reaction would be, he added: “There’s something else.”

“What?” repeated Monsford, slumping back into his defeatist posture.

“The son, Andrei. He’s living with another student, a French girl named Yvette Paruch: they’re on the same course.”

“What’s your point?”

“Getting him here, without Yvette screaming kidnap.”

“Telling him what’s happening: giving him the chance to prepare himself, you mean?”

“I’d prefer that to trying an unexpected snatch.”

“What if he doesn’t want to come: would he regard his father as a traitor?”

“That is my point,” said Straughan, once more close to impatience. “Too many things are going wrong. We don’t want a difficulty with Andrei becoming another one.”

“It can only come from Radtsic. Jacobson’s seeing him tomorrow.”

“Do I tell Jacobson to fix it?” pressed Straughan, determined it should be the Director’s decision.

“Give me a choice of proposals,” ordered Monsford.

As he wiped his mother’s mouth after feeding her that night Straughan said: “He’s looking for a way to avoid direct personal responsibility but I’m not going to let him. I’m not going to carry the can anymore: you mark my words,” and the old lady who didn’t any longer know how to mark or even say words stared unseeingly into a world in which only she lived.