Red Star Burning

26

In the cold dawn after overnight reflection Charlie acknowledged the reaction to his reemergence would be so unpredictable that he needed not just Janus but a virtual army of two-way-facing protectors to watch his back. And all he had was David Halliday, who unquestionably qualified as two-faced but for that reason was very definitely not a protective friend. Halliday did, however, sound more in control when he answered Charlie’s arranged contact. There’d been no overnight traffic from London, Halliday said, but from online surfing of the news wires he’d established the French seizures had achieved widespread international coverage. There was no named identification but increasing speculation that the alleged kidnap had been part of a major but now-foiled espionage operation. There was further speculation that an explanation was being demanded by the French government from London, from which there had so far been no response. Neither had there been any public reaction from the Kremlin.

“I’ve got it all ready, every regulation and agreement there is for an internal inquiry if they come at me,” declared Halliday.

“Good for you,” encouraged Charlie. “What’s happening with my support team?”

“Probably nothing more than professional curiosity,” said Halliday. “But I’ve already had two separate visits from your guys, asking me what’s going on.”

The first glint of light, gauged Charlie. “What did you tell them?”

“That I didn’t know: I told you I’d been ordered against sharing with them.”

Could he trick Halliday unsuspectingly into the answer he wanted? wondered Charlie. “Not even now it’s all over with Radtsic safely away? They’re your guys, not officially mine.”

“Briddle was my second unexpected visitor. The first was your man, Wilkinson. He was waiting when I got here this morning.”

Why would two men supposedly working together make separate approaches? The most obvious answer, confirming Charlie’s double-cross suspicion, was that they weren’t working together. He said: “They appear worried, anything like that?”

“Difficult to say,” hedged Halliday. “Probably wondering if it might be something more interesting than sitting around on their asses.”

Had London made Wilkinson supervisor of the MI5 backup team during the time he’d been out of contact? Charlie said: “What else is happening at the embassy?”

“A lot, indicated by its total, ostracizing silence,” said Halliday. “As always, when something goes wrong at our end, we cease to exist, remember?”

Charlie decided he probably didn’t need Halliday to tell him anything more, but it was important to retain the man as a potential source, which required avoiding frightening the man away. “I’m thinking of making a move.”

“Doing what?” demanded Halliday, instantly alarmed.

“At the moment it’s you I’m considering,” lied Charlie. “It was wise of you to stick to London’s edict with Wilkinson. Keep doing that, if you hear anything involving me. I don’t want your being linked to me: no hint we might have been in contact.”

“Neither do I!” said Halliday, sincerity obvious in his voice for the first time.

“Just listen to everything,” urged Charlie.

“You’ll tell me what’s going on, though, won’t you?”

“That’s our deal, isn’t it: mutual self-protection?”

Wilkinson’s cell phone was answered on its fourth ring without any identifying acknowledgment, and from the total silence beyond and the response delay Charlie guessed Wilkinson had quieted those around him. Charlie said: “You know who this is, Patrick. Don’t let the others waste their time trying to isolate where I am. It’s a public kiosk. You’ve probably discovered our technicians fitted trackers into the ones issued to us in London.”

“It’s good to hear from you at last.” Wilkinson’s voice sounded more computer generated than human.

Despite the pointlessness they’d still attempt to locate him, Charlie knew. “The reason for your being here hasn’t changed but I’m only working with you, Warren, and Preston. Tell London that. Tell them also that the four of us were part of a setup, me most of all. I want you to make sure that gets through to the Director-General.”

“I need-”

“The need is for the two of us to meet.”

“That’s what I want.”

It was going to be foot aching and tiresome, Charlie accepted, but there was no other way. “Are you familiar with the Moscow Metro system?”

“No.”

“It has a circle line, just like London. Here it’s called Kol’cevaja. Ride it, tomorrow, between ten and noon.”

“What else?”

“Just that.”

“Where will we meet?”

“Where-and when-I decide,” said Charlie.

“I don’t follow what you’re saying.….”

“The scanners haven’t picked up where I’m speaking from, have they?”

“I don’t follow that, either.”

“Everyone around you have been scanning ever since we started talking, trying to locate me, haven’t they?”

“We’re not all together.”

“What you’ve got to understand is that none of you will be able to find me now and none of you will be able to pick me up tomorrow, irrespective of how closely they stay with you. I’m telling you-and I want you to tell the Director-General this as well-that we were decoys and that I know Monsford’s operation has gone bad.”

“You expect me to go around and around in circles, until you decide to make contact?” demanded Wilkinson.

“That’s precisely what I expect. I also expect all of the others to go around and around with you, although pretending not to be with you. I’ll find you but neither you nor anyone with you will be able to locate me. I’ll only approach you when I’m completely satisfied you’re alone.”

“What about the reason for our being here.”

“It’s still active but without MI6. Make that very clear to London, And tell the Director-General that the other extraction has hugely increased the value of ours.”

“Thanks for meeting me,” said Jane Ambersom.

“What meeting?” said James Straughan, pointedly. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed being able to talk to her.

She smiled. “There isn’t one. You know you can trust me as I know I can trust you.”

“We committed ourselves when you called last night and by my being here,” said Straughan. She’d concealed her car among a line of other anonymous vehicles close to the Oval underground station at which she’d been waiting for him, fifteen minutes earlier.

“Smith told me all that happened at the Foreign Office yesterday.”

“Told only you?”

“Passmore was with me.”

“I’m not sure whether what I was told is the truth.”

“It probably was not.”

Straughan didn’t answer as spontaneously as Jane had hoped, staring directly ahead at the empty cars. At last he said: “More than probably not.”

It was a chance she had to take, Jane decided. “Monsford set us up, didn’t he, with Charlie and his family?”

“He intended to sabotage it.”

“Is he still trying?”

“I don’t know. It’s a repeat of what happened to you, Monsford protecting himself.”

“Is Charlie in physical danger?”

Straughan didn’t reply.

“James?”

“He should be careful.”

Jane felt nothing, neither surprise nor anger. “Aubrey Smith thinks Monsford could still get away with it, bringing us down in the process.”

Straughan frowned across the car. “The French have so far refused to see anyone from the Paris embassy, not until we respond to their demand for an explanation. They’re seeing the Russian chef du protocol, though. Radtsic’s refusing cooperation until we get Elana and the boy here. Jacobson’s having an emergency meeting with Monsford right now. Monsford told Rebecca there’s no reason for either her or me to be there with him: that’s how I was able to get away.” He looked instinctively at his watch. “I can’t be much longer.”

“Where are you supposed to be?”

“With a dementia specialist: discussing getting my mother into care.”

“You think Monsford’s making his escape arrangement?” risked Jane, openly.

“We know he’s making his escape arrangement,” said Straughan.

“We?” isolated Jane, instantly.

“Rebecca is determined she won’t go the same way you did.”

“You going to tell her about this?”

“No.”

“So she’s making her own escape arrangements.”

“She imagines she is.”

“What about you?”

“I have but it’s difficult.”

“We committed ourselves the moment you got into this car,” reminded Jane.

Straughan smiled. “Haven’t lost your touch, have you?”

“I lost it the last time. I’m not going to let the motherfucker beat me again. What’s your difficulty?”

“He’s had his own sound system installed in the office. But he’s using it selectively.”

Jane answered his earlier smile. “So you’ve installed yours?”

“After we discovered what he was doing. He’s always very careful to avoid anything incriminating.”

“How much have you got?”

“All of it.”

“Including how Charlie was to be used?”

“All of it,” repeated Straughan. “The difficulty is how to avoid suicidal self-destruction getting it to those who’ll sit in judgment. It contravenes every internal security regulation as well as the entire Official Secrets Act.”

“I agree you couldn’t personally make it available,” said Jane, the excitement stirring through her.

“You couldn’t, either,” insisted the man. “You’d be even more culpable after all that Charlie did. And what Monsford did to you.”

“There could be a way: maybe even more than one.”

“It’s better you don’t tell me,” Straughan said, hurriedly.

He was backing off, Jane recognized. “Would you make all you’ve got available to me?”

Straughan hesitated. “I didn’t imagine I’d find a problem answering that.”

“I didn’t believe Monsford was capable of sacrificing me.”

“If it hadn’t been you it would have been me: he gave himself two choices. By accepting the sideways transfer you saved me.”

“I know,” said Jane, tensed.

“So it’s payback time?”

Right on the button, Jane thought. She said: “I’d appreciate that.”

“A source investigation could only lead to me.”

“It’s not inevitable,” argued the woman. “I’m assuming Rebecca’s escape is her own copy?”

“It’s the original: mine’s the copy.”

“Could yours be forensically proven to be a copy?”

“No.”

“Then there’s a way to prevent your ever being discovered.”

“I made a mistake, coming here like this. I wish I hadn’t,” declared Straughan.

“We haven’t met, remember?”

“I should get back.”

“Are you seriously considering putting your mother into care?”

“I’ll do everything I can not to.”

“Then you’ve got to save yourself, as Rebecca is determined to save herself.”

“Shit!”

“Rebecca’s double protection is that she got her recordings from you and did her duty bringing them to Bland or Palmer not just to expose Monsford but to protect the service from your ever making it public,” bullied Jane, devoid of hypocrisy. “And that would put you before a security-closed court who’d jail you for a very long time. You wouldn’t be able to go on caring for your mother from a prison cell, would you, James? Without a job you wouldn’t even be able to get her anything but the minimum of care.”

“We work and live in a sewer, don’t we?”

“We do. Your poor mother doesn’t. I’m offering the way to keep her out of it.”

“I’ve got to get back.”

“We can beat Monsford. You know we can.”

“I need to think.”

“Do that, James. Go and think long and hard when you’re caring for her tonight.”

Gerald Monsford didn’t like the continuing impression of so much thin ice creaking dangerously underfoot. Maxim Mikhailovich Radtsic remained the job-for-life prize upon whom, if the pendulum swung the wrong way, his very survival depended. And with whom, therefore, it was imperative the man’s wife and son were reunited. He’d done the right thing sending Jacobson ahead of him back to the Hertfordshire safe house but so far, his own time-to-think journey there almost completed, Monsford hadn’t come close to a guaranteed way of bringing that about. At least getting postponed that day’s Foreign Office session gave time for a resolve to emerge elsewhere, but he wasn’t encouraged by Sir Archibald Bland’s warning during their rescheduling that France’s current presidency of the energy-dependent European Union held it hostage to Moscow’s blackmail to cut off its natural-gas supplies.

There was, too, the until-now-relegated alert from Paris of Andrei’s reluctance to defect in the first place, from which the suspicion naturally followed that the boy was responsible for the French interception. Even if he wasn’t, Andrei might change his uncertain mind after the first failed attempt. To each and all of which had to be added Jacobson’s insistence at their meeting earlier that morning that Radtsic’s cooperation hinged entirely upon their being together in exile.

As his car bypassed Letchworth, Monsford saw through the separating glass that the driver was triggering the automatic signal of their approach and took his own security-cleared telephone from its rear-seat armrest for an update of what he was approaching.

“He’s not physically unwell,” reported Jacobson. “He’s taken his morning exercise but told me he’s not going out this afternoon. The only thing he’s said otherwise is to ask when Elana and Andrei are getting here. When I told him that wasn’t yet known, he demanded the time of your arrival.”

“What’s he done in between?”

“Stayed in his room with a bottle of vodka, watching television. We’re monitoring him on CCTV. He’s flicking between news channels, obviously searching for announcements: as far as I know there haven’t been any updates from France. The vodka bottle’s half empty and he’s already chosen a bottle of burgundy for lunch.”

“We should be with you in less than thirty minutes.”

“Should I tell him that?”

“No.”

“Anything?” Monsford asked when Straughan answered his next call.

“The Novosti news agency is saying our ambassador is again being summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry, without giving a time or date,” relayed the operations director. “Associated Press is reporting under a Washington dateline but without accreditation that there is an impending Russian political development connected with the French arrests. There’s a Press Association sidebar that the Russian and French ambassadors have been summoned to our Foreign Office for clarification. Agence France-Presse are saying our embassy in Paris have delivered a second Note seeking access to our detained nationals.”

“Anything direct from the Foreign Office?”

“Nothing routed to me. Rebecca’s heard nothing, either.”

“Call me at once if there’s anything, anything at all.”

“You told me that before you left,” reminded Straughan.

“Now I’m telling you again. Tell Rebecca the same.”

Jacobson was waiting at the door for Monsford. “He’s still in his room: probably seen you arrive. I’ve set things up in the drawing room.”

Monsford shrugged, discomfited at not having control over the automatic audio and film equipment throughout the house. “I’m to be interrupted if there’s any contact. And you were wrong about no news updates. There’ve been several.”

“I told you I wasn’t checking the coverage,” reminded Jacobson. “Do you want me to sit in with you?”

“Why should I: he’s got good English, hasn’t he?”

“I’m the person Radtsic knows: is most familiar with. I thought it might help.”

“I’ll see him alone.” It would still be recorded.

“Will you eat with him?”

“Let’s get on with it, for Christ’s sake!” demanded Monsford, impatiently.

The drawing room was at the back of the house, overlooking an expansive, terrace-stepped grassland sporadically hedged between stands of well-established, tightly cultivated trees. At the very bottom of the terrace was a swimming pool that ran its entire width, and far beyond that, over the tops of still more trees, there was the hazed outline of Letchworth. In the interior of the room, over couches and enveloping easy chairs were pleated and tasseled loose covering chintzes, an inner circle grouped casually around a fireplace fronting a low but large table upon which a vacuum coffeepot and cups were already set. Filling the dead fireplace was a huge flower display of what Monsford guessed to be from the outside garden.

Forewarned by the sound of its opening, Monsford, hand outstretched in readiness, was directly behind the door when Maxim Radtsic started to enter. The Russian abruptly halted, visibly pulling both arms back in refusal. “In Russia it is not done to shake hands on a threshold. It signifies it will be the only meeting.” He intruded a pause. “Perhaps it is indeed an omen.”

Monsford backed away, changing the offered hand into an indication toward the flower-dominated space and its encompassing couches and chair. “I’m sure it isn’t.”

Radtsic followed the gesture but didn’t sit. “What time are my wife and son arriving?”

“Please sit,” encouraged Monsford, doing so himself, glad the door was closing behind Jacobson, although always conscious of the cameras. “There’s coffee.”

Radtsic perched himself awkwardly on the very edge of an easy chair. “I do not want coffee. I want vodka. And a reply to my question.”

Monsford pressed a summons bell bordering the fireplace. “It is through no mistake or fault of ours that this problem has arisen. I’m aware you’ve been told in the greatest possible detail all we’ve been able to discover. From that you know your wife and son were being escorted by my officers to an aircraft waiting to bring them safely here.”

“They’re not safely here, are they!” rejected Radtsic, irritably. “They’re very unsafely in France, where they will have been fully identified.”

The eavesdropping Jacobson entered already carrying a tray upon which were a full, freezer-frosted vodka bottle, an ice bucket, and two glasses. He almost filled both, adding more when Radtsic shook his head against ice. At Monsford’s refusing head shake, Radtsic said: “You’re not prepared to drink with me!”

“Like you, I did not want ice,” Monsford tried to recover, hot at the awareness of his second filmed mistake. Monsford raised his unwanted glass and said: “Here’s to your new life, here in the West.”

“Only a new life if it’s with my family,” corrected the other man, “About whom you still have not properly answered my question.”

Having until now seen the facial resemblance only from photographs, Monsford was struck by Radtsic’s similarity to Stalin. “They are still in France, where they have accused my officers of kidnap, escalating what could have been negotiated away as a misunderstanding into a criminal matter.”

“Are you accusing them of being responsible for what’s happened!” flared Radtsic, outraged.

“Of course I’m not,” denied Monsford, his disappointment at the antagonism slightly eased by the first wisp of the so-far-eluded idea. “I was, though, worried when my officer in Paris told me that Andrei initially refused to come.”

“You are accusing them!”

“What I am doing, Maxim Mikhailovich, is being subjective. We do not yet know how the French interception was instigated. Which shouldn’t, though, be our immediate focus. That has to be getting them released and safely here.” Monsford was surprised at what little effect the already consumed vodka had upon the Russian, watching him refill his glass.

Radtsic frowned. “That’s what I’m waiting for you to tell me, how and when they’re getting here!”

“They’re not, not today,” declared Monsford, positively. “Our problem is the kidnap allegation. And the association of my officers in that allegation. Because of that the British government are being refused access: any contact whatsoever…”

“What the hell’s your point!” demanded Radtsic, seizing the intentionally allowed pause.

“You, the husband and father,” said Monsford, simply, the concept complete in his mind. “There can be no legal prevention against your being allowed contact. Nor does your being here contravene French law. I’ve obviously held back from publicly announcing your being here, because of what’s happened to Elana and Andrei. Now I want to announce it, publicize it. And at the same time connect you by a visual TV conference link not just to Elana and Andrei but simultaneously to French officials. If you can persuade Elana or Andrei to withdraw the allegation they’ll have to be released, to continue here to join you.”

For several moments Radtsic remained unspeaking, all truculence gone. “Is it technically possible?”

“Yes,” insisted Monsford. “I can have technicians here in hours, setting it up, as well as French-speaking lawyers to argue the law on your behalf.”

Once more Radtsic considered the idea, topping up what little could be added to Monsford’s scarcely touched glass and refilling his, which he held out to Monsford. “I have not behaved as I should. I apologize.”

“It is totally understandable,” accepted Monsford, as their glasses touched. “I drink to your reunion.”

Shakespeare had been right, as he always was, thought Monsford: sweet are the uses of adversity. And from where better could the sentiment come than As You Like It, which he did like, very much indeed.

“You are sure?” insisted Aubrey Smith.

“Absolutely positive,” said Jane Ambersom.

“And you can get hold of it?”

“Yes,” she risked.

“There’s still the self-incriminating problem,” accepted Smith.

“I think there’s a way around that,” said Jane.

“Does it tie in with what Wilkinson’s relayed from Moscow about Charlie’s refusal to work with MI6?” asked John Passmore, joining the review.

“I haven’t the slightest idea what Charlie’s uncovered,” said Smith. “But Jane’s story seems to support what Charlie’s demanding.” He smiled, humorlessly. “I can hardly wait for Palmer and Bland’s reaction.”

“From what little we think we know, Charlie and our three aren’t just confronting the Russians to get Natalia and Sasha out. They’re opposed by Monsford and three of his people already in Moscow and completely briefed on the intended extraction,” cautioned Passmore.

“Go back to Straughan,” the Director-General told Jane. “Promise him every protection, whatever he wants, to get whatever he’s got. Tell him I’ll meet him personally if it’ll help.”

“He’s terrified,” warned Jane.

“So am I,” said Smith.