Red Star Falling

6

‘Hello.’

Sasha squinted up against the cloud-broken sun. ‘Hello.’

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Home.’ Sasha was carrying a doll lopsidedly by its arm, with its clothes in a half-zipped bag in her other hand. She wore open sandals and a summer dress.

‘You can’t walk home from here. It’s too far,’ said Ethel Jackson.

‘You’re speaking Russian,’ insisted the child.

‘But we’re not in Russia. Hasn’t Mummy told you where you are?’

‘I can’t remember where she said.’

‘We’re in England.’

‘I don’t like it in England. I want to go home.’

‘Have you told your mother where you’re going?’

Sasha pulled her bottom lip uncertainly back and forth between her teeth. ‘I’m going to.’

‘It’s always best to tell people where you’re going,’ said Ethel, aware of Natalia bursting through the open patio doors behind the child. Seeing Sasha with the protection supervisor, Natalia slowed but only slightly. ‘Here she is now.’

Sasha turned and stood with her head bowed over the doll. Ethel put her hand lightly on the child’s shoulder to pull her comfortingly closer. Sasha came without protest. Ethel felt the tremble in the child’s shoulders. As Natalia came within hearing, Ethel said, ‘Sasha and I are going to have cakes on the patio with … You haven’t told me your baby’s name, Sasha?’

‘Ludmilla … Luda,’ mumbled the girl.

‘With Luda,’ finished Ethel. ‘Why don’t we all have cakes together?’

Natalia looked at how Ethel was reassuring her daughter, then more directly up to the other woman. ‘That would be nice.’ She was short of breath from hurrying.

They were met at the patio by another protection officer, who nodded to the cake order: Natalia agreed to Sasha’s having Coca-Cola as a treat. The child very studiously ignored the two women, fussily positioning the doll on the fourth chair, arranging and re-arranging its clothes. As she did so, Sasha said, ‘We’re going home, aren’t we, Luda? Don’t like it here, do we, Luda?’ and more quietly mumbled on unintelligibly, a conversation entirely with her doll.

Natalia moved to speak but before she could, Ethel said, ‘I told you it’s too far to walk, Sasha. And look, you forgot the pram we got for Luda. Why don’t you take her for a short walk in the garden until your Coke arrives?’

Looking properly to her mother for the first time, Sasha said, ‘Can I take Luda into the garden?’

‘Not too far. I want to be able to see you.’

Unspeaking for several moments, the two women watched Sasha, still heavily in conversation with her doll, trundle its pram out into the garden. Ethel said, ‘You know she couldn’t have gone anywhere.’

‘I wasn’t worried about her getting out. I was terrified about someone getting in.’

‘That can’t happen either. You’re both safe.’

‘Nothing’s supposed to happen,’ heavily qualified Natalia. ‘You’re in the business. You know the search is on: always will be. They don’t give up. It won’t matter that Sasha’s a child.’

‘Stop it, Natalia!’ demanded Ethel, sharply. ‘You’re in a protection programme precisely to stop your ever being found, which you won’t ever be.’

Natalia was silent for several minutes. ‘Have you heard anything new?’

Ethel hesitated. ‘There’s been another arrest. An MI5 man.’

‘Linked to Charlie?’

‘One of his original back-up.’

‘How?’

‘At the airport, trying to get home.’

‘They won’t let anyone go,’ insisted the Russian. ‘They’ll pick them all off, one after the other. The more they get, the more they have to match the loss of Maxim Mikhailovich.’

The tea, Coke, and cakes arrived. Looking out into the garden, Natalia said, ‘We’ll let Sasha come back when she’s ready.’

Ethel said, ‘Numbers can’t balance their loss of Maxim Mikhailovich.’

‘The more people they have, the more confusing they can make their retaliation.’

Ethel poured the tea. Neither bothered with cake. Ethel said, ‘What retaliation would you expect?’

‘The obvious, if they find him and Elena here: just as they’d eliminate Sasha and me. The KGB punishment rules haven’t changed, even though the title has. The orders to hunt down and eliminate us will have been automatic. In the interim, they’ll probably claim Maxim Mikhailovich and Elena were kidnapped, as they claimed with Elena in France; Andrei’s refusal gives them a lot of ground in which to manoeuvre that sort of story.’

‘What about you?’

Natalia shrugged. ‘They won’t bother about me, not publicly; the elimination order will have been promulgated, though. Why do you think I was terrified when I couldn’t find Sasha? They’ll ask for access to me, of course. I meant to talk to Jane about that. I don’t want anyone getting to me from the embassy. I’ve got to agree to a meeting, haven’t I?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Ethel.

‘I positively refuse to meet anyone from anywhere. Will you tell Jane that: tell her today?’

‘I’ll tell her,’ promised Ethel. After a momentary pause, she said, ‘Have you thought of anything else since you talked to Jane: something that could help Charlie?’

Natalia shook her head. ‘You saw the film recording of me and Jane?’

‘Yes.’

‘Charlie’s source must have been inside the embassy,’ insisted Natalia. ‘And if Charlie wasn’t talking to his own people in the lost week, it must have been MI6, mustn’t it?’

‘Charlie didn’t go anywhere near the embassy during the lost week,’ reminded Ethel, disappointed at the repetition of Natalia’s conversation with the deputy director. ‘And after all the bugging discovered in the embassy, Charlie wouldn’t have risked landlines.’

Natalia regarded the other woman curiously, as if she’d misunderstood. ‘He didn’t trust landlines, not at all. Nor the Russian cell phone you issued him here. He guessed you’d fit it with a tracker to know where he was all the time. He only used the phone issued here once, because it worked underground when he finally made contact and then more to confuse the MI6 hunting him. At all other times he used pay-as-you-go Russian cell phones, throwing them away after a single use: he gave me four and had even more himself. That’s how he and I communicated after I was appointed to the committee investigating Maxim Mikhailovich’s background to find the identity of whoever turned him.’

Ethel’s wicker chair creaked when she moved, needing physical movement at the satisfaction that moved through her. ‘Cell phones can be intercepted by scanners. The FSB would have ring-fenced the embassy with them.’

‘Pay-as-you-go are one-off numbers, doubly more difficult to scan at random and that difficulty quadruples if they’re discarded after a single use,’ lectured Natalia, waving to Sasha, who waved back but didn’t move towards them.

Ethel wasn’t sure of the importance of what she’d learned but believed it was enough. She wasn’t sure, either, whether openly to discuss it with Natalia: they were supposed to be working to a common aim and Ethel didn’t want to destroy the bridge building by knocking away its fragile foundations. Say nothing until she got better guidance, Ethel decided. Following Natalia’s waves to Sasha, Ethel said, ‘It isn’t unusual in ordinary circumstances for someone of Sasha’s age to announce they’re leaving home.’

‘I know,’ accepted the Russian. ‘What’s unusual — and makes it different — is what’s happened to her in the last week. With which I haven’t been helping, only thinking of Charlie.’

‘But now it’s happened you can help.’

‘Can we?’ asked Natalia, pointedly.

‘If you’d like me to,’ immediately responded Ethel. ‘If you wouldn’t consider it interfering.’

‘I’d think of it as you helping me. You have children?’

‘They’re with their father. What I do — have done — isn’t best suited to motherhood. It makes me pretty expert on how it goes wrong, though.’

‘You worked in the field, before?’

‘Yes.’

Natalia made as if to speak but didn’t. After several moments she said, ‘Thank you, for being kind. It’s difficult for me, doing what I’ve done, not to despise myself as a traitor. That was always at the back of my mind when I was debriefing people who’d come across.’

‘Maxim Mikhailovich fits the traitor profile,’ disputed Ethel. ‘I don’t believe you do. There’s a lot of difference.’

Once more Natalia appeared to be about to speak but again stopped herself.

‘What?’ encouraged Ethel.

‘Nothing,’ avoided Natalia, twisting in her equally creaking wicker seat at Sasha’s return. ‘We saved the cakes until you got back.’

No-one — maybe not even Gerald Monsford himself — knew how close he had been to collapse by the end of that day’s regular session. Mentally he strained for the concentration to follow the concluding period but too many of the voices around him seemed disembodied and difficult to connect with their speakers, all of it distracted even more by his inner difficulty deciding which survival move to make next.

He was pulled towards the bombshell discovery of James Straughan’s bugging, convinced that copies were what Rebecca considered her political strength. But did she actually have copies or only knowledge of their existence? According to Timpson, specialized versions were minuscule, measurable in millimetres: the type, Monsford knew, that Straughan, the ultimate specialist, would have used. But where the hell were they? Did Rebecca actually have them: some at least? Or had Straughan been the storekeeper as well as the recordist? And if he’d kept them, where had he stashed them? He had to be the first to find and destroy everything, Monsford acknowledged.

But the forensic team, the scientific experts, hadn’t found anything yet. So wherever they were, his destruction wasn’t guaranteed. It was more important, more immediately urgent, to get to Harry Jacobson before anyone else and he had to do that personally, not by telephone, technically secure from eavesdropping though they were supposed to be: under the current investigative scrutiny, Monsford wasn’t sure if communications weren’t now automatically being officially tapped.

He did, however, alert Jacobson by telephone that he was coming, relief surging through him that there’d been no official approach from the committee, concluding the call with the strict instruction that the man was to talk to no-one, not even Radtsic, until he got to the Hertfordshire safe house.

Rebecca responded at once to Monsford’s summons. He let her settle in her customary chair, with his own audio apparatus visible to ensure she saw him activate it.

‘What do you think about Straughan?’ Monsford demanded, the question intentionally wide.

He knew, Rebecca accepted: hardly the deduction of the century, even for someone of Monsford’s bovine speed of thought. But he didn’t have any proof and until he did she couldn’t be accused of anything. She had to fight back, find a way to get ahead again. ‘Surprised, obviously. Shocked.’

‘You had no idea what he was doing?’

The goading bastard was playing with her, like a sadistic child pulling the wings off butterflies. ‘No. None.’

‘I’m so glad,’ said Monsford, unctuously. ‘Irrespective of anything else that might be uncovered, what Straughan’s done is a blatant breach of the Official Secrets Act, clear proof of hostile espionage. Anyone working with him, complicit in any way, would be equally guilty. That’s a lock-the-cell-door-and-throw-away-the-key sort of punishment.’

‘Nothing’s been found?’ questioned Rebecca, forcing a recovery. Monsford was staging the performance of his mentally uncertain life, she decided, reminding herself of her earlier committee-room conclusion. In whatever reality remained in that twisted mind, Monsford would be shitting himself at what the scientific investigators might find. But then, confronting her own reality, Rebecca accepted that she was, too, although unless a medical examination was forced upon her — which there couldn’t be, because that would be criminal assault — no digitalized recordings would be found.

‘No,’ said Monsford, convinced he knew what she was thinking. ‘And don’t bother getting back to the local police investigating the suicide. Timpson’s already taken that over, lock, stock and barrel. As Shakespeare put it, “with as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio.”’

More applicable to himself than to her, whoever Cassio was, thought Rebecca. But the bastard was closing every avenue against her. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Get all you can from the embassy about Denning and Beckindale. Their man, Preston, too, if you can. As far as the embassy is concerned it remains a joint operation. Get into official contact with whoever’s organizing the diplomatic access to get one of our people aboard.…’ He smiled what was supposed to be a just-between-ourselves smile. ‘Wait for me to get back from Hertfordshire. We’ve both worked far too hard these last few days. Let’s go out to dinner: enjoy ourselves.’

She’d have to endure it that night and for as long as it took afterwards until she found her way out. But when she did, Rebecca vowed, the final time she fucked Monsford wouldn’t be physical and she’d enjoy it far more than he would. At least for tonight — and for those that necessarily had to follow — she could amuse herself at the thought that he’d never know what she had hidden in the tampon she’d have so carefully to withdraw and, even more carefully, and quickly, reinsert while he lay gasping and groaning.

‘I didn’t mean to get you out of a meeting,’ apologized Ethel, the moment Jane came on the line. While she’d waited for the connection Ethel had watched Natalia and Sasha on the drawing-room monitor, curled foetal-like together in an encompassing easy chair.

‘The message said it could be important,’ said Jane.

‘I hope it is,’ said Ethel. ‘I think I’m getting Natalia to trust me. It began with something small involving Sasha. Natalia’s actually asked me to help her with the child.’

‘Brilliant!’ enthused the other woman.

‘Did we know Natalia was part of an investigation into Radtsic’s background: that the Russians believe he was part of a long-term spying operation they’ve got to uncover?’

‘Not precisely. There was a message from Charlie about a committee-type scrutiny and that it had something to do with Radtsic: that it was important.’ Jane paused. ‘My understanding with her was that we wouldn’t talk about it yet, only about whatever might affect Charlie.’

‘It happened naturally, almost without my initially becoming aware of it,’ said Ethel. ‘I certainly didn’t set out to move things forward and at this moment I haven’t. I’m analyzing her reactions, without knowing their significance. I’m sure there’s something about Radtsic. I thought, for a moment, that she was actually going to tell me. But at the last moment she drew back.’

‘You think you could take her that close again?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ethel answered, honestly. ‘I could try.’

‘Try,’ urged Jane.

‘The thing with Sasha: she’d packed her baby’s things and told me she was going home. Natalia’s agreed to my helping Sasha adjust.’

‘You have become friends,’ congratulated Jane.

‘Too early to say yet but it could be,’ cautioned Ethel. ‘But before we go any further I want some guidance. Do I do things overtly or covertly?’

There was no instant response from the other end of the line. Ethel waited. On the monitor, Natalia and Sasha were still intricately entwined. Finally Jane said, ‘It’s a difficult call. If she thinks we’re cheating, we’ll have lost her.’

‘That’s why I asked the question,’ said Ethel, faintly impatient.

‘We’ll go on as we are, at least for another few days,’ decided Jane. ‘The moment you become unsure, you back off: it’s important you’re the first to withdraw to prevent Natalia closing the door against us.’

Why was there a moment of disappointment at the professional practicality? wondered Ethel. Nothing could ever be personal, came the immediate answer. ‘There’s something more and it’s my instinct, nothing more. Over the lost week, Natalia and Charlie communicated through pay-as-you-go Russian cell phones, discarding them after single use. She’s suggesting he used the same channel with his embassy source, which she still insists has to be MI6. I’m just floating a former-field-operative thought here. Could it be that whoever that inside source was, he or she might not have discarded their phone: that somewhere lying about inside the MI6 rezidentura there might still be a throwaway phone with things on it that we could find very useful?’

‘You’ve done well,’ congratulated Jane. ‘You’ve gotten a damned sight closer than I came within a million miles of achieving.’

‘It’s not difficult to be Natalia’s friend.…’

‘You’re not thinking of…?’

‘No,’ halted Ethel. ‘I’m not thinking of late-night confessions over brandy snifters about my knowing Charlie. And I haven’t finished. She’s terrified, like they’re all terrified in the early stages, of being found by the FSB. I’m to tell you, as positively as I’m able, that she will not see a diplomatic representation from the Russian embassy.’

‘Moscow could use that refusal to block our access to any of our people,’ recognized Jane, at once.

‘That’s what she’s insisting: wants you to know,’ said Ethel, glad to have moved the decision on.

Harry Jacobson was obediently waiting at Monsford’s designated spot, virtually out of sight of the main Hertfordshire house, close to the garage complex. It would have been equally difficult for Monsford to be seen from the house getting from his car, which pulled in even closer to the buildings. Monsford led the way through the concealing stand of trees deeper into the wooded area, not speaking until he reached it.

‘Just ground sensors here? No audio equipment?’

‘Not until about another four metres,’ assured Jacobson.

‘You missed Radtsic’s reference to a diversion,’ accused the Director, at once.

‘Yesterday was my rest day.’ Where was the usual irrational anger at any mistake? wondered Jacobson.

‘Who was monitoring?’

‘Bullen?’

‘You replaced him?’

‘Of course,’ said Jacobson, glad he’d anticipated the dismissal demand, even though it had created an atmosphere with the rest of the protection squad.

‘What did you tell Radtsic in Moscow?’

‘Exactly what he told Elena on film. At one of our meetings, before any plan had been formulated, I told him we might introduce a diversion into his extraction.…’ Jacobson hesitated, believing he was beginning to understand, a swell of hopeful satisfaction moving through him. The assassination instructions would have been transferred to Stephan Briddle, he guessed. And Stephan Briddle was dead. ‘… Then the idea got dropped. I never discussed it in any way whatsoever with Radtsic … or with anyone else.’ Come on, thought Jacobson, enjoying himself: nibble at the bait for me to be sure.

‘The committee are attaching importance to the remark, after what happened at Vnukovo.’

Getting there, thought Jacobson. He had to be careful, though. He needed to gain every benefit while remaining as distanced as possible from this unnaturally subdued bully. ‘I can understand that, after what happened.’

‘You’re to appear before them, to explain the remark.’

Savouring how perfect the analogy fitted the huge man, Jacobson recognized this to be the moment the subjugated bull was on its knees, the sword upraised for the killing thrust. ‘There’s surely nothing more for them to hear or understand beyond what they’ve already seen and heard on film.’

‘They’ll want to know what the intended diversion was to be.’

Jacobson hesitated, wanting the words to be right. Monsford even had his head lowered, as if in readiness for the kill. ‘I actually find it difficult to remember the details of our conversation.’

Monsford’s head came up, restoring his full bull-like stature, smiling briefly. ‘I’m glad we’ve had this conversation.’

Oh no you don’t, Jacobson thought at once. Could he take the chance: risk everything with just a few misplaced words? But it wasn’t his risk, he reminded himself. ‘We haven’t talked of my next posting, now I quite obviously can’t return to Moscow.’

‘That has to be resolved,’ allowed Monsford, tightly.

‘I did put forward some preferences.’

‘Washington, wasn’t it?’

‘And Paris.’ The ballet wouldn’t be as good as it had been in Moscow but on balance it would be better than America. And Covent Garden had been a total disappointment the night before.

‘Yes, Paris,’ accepted Monsford, reflectively.

‘As head of station,’ pressed Jacobson, knowing it all had to be finalized at this moment, with nothing left as a vague promise.

‘Which do you want?’

‘Paris.’

‘It’s yours.’

‘As head of station.’

‘As head of station,’ echoed Monsford. His face was mask-like.

‘And potentially deputy director after that.’

‘That’ll be yours, too, when the time comes.’ Which it never would, determined Monsford, furious at the humiliation.

‘When do you want me in London for the committee hearing?’

‘Be on standby from tomorrow. Anything I need to know before seeing Radtsic?’ That would be an easy encounter, Monsford knew, his survival-enhancing approach already determined.

‘There’s been a reconciliation of sorts with Elena: they’re eating together, spending most of their day together, mostly watching television for anything more from Moscow. But she’s still not sleeping with him.’

‘What about the drinking.’

Jacobson looked unnecessarily at his watch. ‘There’ll be less than a quarter of a bottle left by now.’

It took almost four hours for Ian Flood to go minutely through the Vnukovo Airport shooting in preparation for MI5’s enquiry presentation.

At the finish, Aubrey Smith said, ‘I want to establish a movement pattern. The MI6 back-up split the moment they enter the terminal: Denning and Beckindale stay to one side, Briddle goes at once, on his own, towards Charlie, who’s in the Cyprus flight check-in line, unaware of their arrival?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Flood, an athletically bodied, controlled man.

‘How long before Halliday entered?’

‘A minute, no longer than two.’

‘Was Halliday with the others?’ came in Passmore. ‘Did you get the impression all four arrived together, in the same car? Or might Halliday have followed separately?’

Flood nodded at the significance. ‘I was only suspicious of one car following us from Natalia’s apartment and assumed they were all in the same vehicle. Halliday could have travelled separately but it would have needed to be directly behind, in which case I think I would have isolated the second pursuit, too.’

‘How long did it take Halliday to orientate himself?’ picked up Smith.

‘Again, minutes. He seemed immediately to see Briddle and simultaneously to locate Charlie from the direction in which Briddle was moving.’

‘Or could he have expected Charlie to be in that particular check-in line?’ asked Jane.

The question, again significant, briefly silenced the Director-General’s Thames House suite. Flood said, ‘Meeting there separately, by agreement, you mean? It would have been a hell of a coincidence for them to have been meeting by prior arrangement at the same time as a separate MI6 discovery of Charlie, wouldn’t?’

‘What did Denning and Beckindale do?’ asked Jane.

‘Nothing,’ said Flood, shortly. ‘I had them in my eyeline the entire time. They had Briddle, one of their own, as a marker. But they didn’t appear to see Halliday. Or, if they did, they’d been ordered against intrusion.’

‘If indeed it was an MI6 operation that had gone wrong,’ qualified Smith.

‘That’s what you identified it to be, an operation?’ followed up Jane.

Once more Flood paused, for thought. ‘Charlie met me the previous night at the Savoy. That’s when he gave me the very specific order against interfering if anything endangered Natalia and Sasha’s extraction.’

‘That previous night,’ seized Jane. ‘Tell us everything about that, in as much detail as you can!’

‘He didn’t give me any details of the Lvov assignment, but he said he’d appeared publicly on Russian television during it and that there’d been a security alert out for him: that he risked being picked up on official CCTV.…’ Flood hesitated, shaking his head.

‘What is it?’ pressed Jane, curious at the man’s gesture.

‘Something I’d forgotten, until this moment. I don’t know if it contributes anything—’

‘Everything and anything contributes,’ persisted the woman.

‘That night, in the hotel bar, when he was talking of being identified, he said it would have been all right if he hadn’t made the Amsterdam switch and got the Manchester people arrested. That none of it had been necessary.’

‘What does that mean?’ questioned Passmore.

‘He didn’t explain. The inference was that it would have been all right if he’d stayed on the original flight. That he’d created his own risk of identification.’

‘He said that! That he staged that diversion because he thought he was going to be picked up the moment he arrived!’ came in Smith.

Flood looked uncertainly at Jane before saying, ‘His exact words were, “I fucked it up all by myself but it was fucked up before it ever started to get where we are now. Which has got to be done right.”’

There was a digesting silence.

‘Okay,’ resumed Jane, cautiously. ‘He’d created his own identification problem but the operation was fucked up before it started out from here. Did he explain that?’

‘He said it had never been to extract Natalia, which everyone here thought. He’d suspected it wasn’t right but couldn’t work out why until he learned that Radtsic had defected. But that it was ongoing—’

‘What was ongoing?’ said Smith.

‘MI6’s determination to screw Natalia’s extraction, even though they’d got Radtsic safely away. I said that didn’t make sense. Charlie said he thought it went right back to the Lvov investigation but he didn’t understand how or why.’

‘We’ve gotten away from the movement pattern,’ complained the Director-General. ‘How were Halliday and Briddle moving towards Charlie — quietly, calmly, together or separately?’

Flood toyed with his long-empty coffee cup. ‘Moving quickly, but they weren’t together. Again, it’s an impression but at first I didn’t think Briddle was aware of Halliday behind him, trying to catch up.’

‘That’s what you believe Halliday was trying to do, catch up with Briddle?’ asked Passmore.

‘I’m not sure,’ replied the man, awkwardly. ‘That was my initial thought. I saw Halliday shout, although he was too far away for me to hear what he said. I thought it was to attract Briddle’s attention but Charlie turned as well.’

‘Distances,’ demanded Jane. ‘How far apart were they at this stage: Charlie’s in the queue, then comes Briddle and after him Halliday. How far apart were they?’

Again Flood paused, considering. ‘Charlie just stood there. At Halliday’s shout, Briddle was about eighteen metres away. Halliday was about two metres behind him. It was then that Briddle turned and saw Halliday.’

‘What did Briddle do, after looking around?’ seized Passmore.

‘Started to run towards Charlie,’ replied Flood, again understanding the significance of the question. ‘It was at this point that I heard the first shot. No-one else reacted. Both Briddle and Halliday were running by now—’

‘Was it Briddle’s shot?’ demanded Smith.

There was no hesitation this time. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see a gun. Briddle was running peculiarly, arms around himself, hugging his jacket around his body. At last people became aware two men were running across the concourse … moved to let them through. Then I did see Briddle with a gun in his hand, a Makarov … saw him fire—’

‘Stop!’ insisted Smith. ‘This is pivotal: at whom did Briddle shoot?’

‘At Charlie,’ replied Flood, again without hesitation. ‘Charlie Muffin was unquestionably Briddle’s target. Everything erupted then: it was pandemonium, gunfire, screaming, people running everywhere. I saw Charlie go down and decided it was time to get out.’

‘And I think it’s time for us to stop and analyze what we’ve got,’ decided the Director-General.

Gerald Monsford strode determinedly through the safe house, more confident than he’d been for days, actually bemused at how perfectly the pieces were fitting together, knowing before he started how perfectly he could slot Maxim Radtsic into his survival frame. Both Radtsic and Elena were in the favoured conservatory, the television turned to the permanent BBC news channel as Jacobson had predicted. The vodka bottle was still a quarter full.

‘At last!’ greeted the Russian, rising at Monsford’s entry. ‘What news of Andrei?’

Monsford pulled a seat closer to the two Russians and said, ‘We’ve got other things to talk about today, Maxim Mikhailovich: important things.’

‘There’s only one thing of importance for us to discuss,’ persisted Radtsic, frowning.

‘Tell me about your penetration of MI6, my organization,’ demanded Monsford. The lie circumstantial … the lie direct, came appropriately to Monsford’s mind: he’d always liked Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, although this confrontation was hardly likely to be a comedy.

Radtsic stared blankly across the intervening space, saying nothing.

‘We know we’ve been penetrated: found the evidence,’ bulldozed Monsford, shifting minimally towards the ever-running camera. ‘I’ve also seen the film of you and Elena watching what happened at Vnukovo: heard you wondering at the connection with your defection. So let’s stop all this posturing about refusing to cooperate until Andrei gets here. I’ve told you what we’re doing to achieve that and now I want — I insist — on your telling me everything about the cell you created within MI6. It’s over now, finished. Straughan’s dead: you actually saw Halliday gunned down in the airport shooting.’

Radtsic remained blank faced, shaking his head. ‘What are you talking about…? I don’t understand a word you’re saying.…’

‘I can’t play games with you, Maxim Mikhailovich: won’t play games,’ hectored Monsford. ‘Discovering your penetration of my organization changes things between us. I want it all: every name, precisely — to the actual date — how long you’ve run it, for us to calculate how much you’ve received, all the embassy Controls here in London, contact details, dead letter drops, codes you used. Everything! You understand that, Maxim Mikhailovich: everything!’

Radtsic partially reached out towards Elena, as if for physical support, then dropped his outstretched hand. ‘This is a riddle: madness. I have not penetrated your organization. There is no cell. Stop it: you must stop this. It’s nonsense.’

‘I want an answer and I want it now!’ persisted Monsford. ‘If I don’t get an answer, we’re going to have completely to reconsider our situation. You’re going to co-operate.’

Which was precisely what Charlie Muffin was being told, almost two thousand miles away in Moscow.

‘We had a guy once, long time ago now, who was a legend within the CIA,’ reminisced Edwin Birkitt. ‘His name was James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA internal security. His legend, getting people to tell him things they wouldn’t even tell their own mothers, was the problem: no-one realized he was going mad because he’d always been so eccentric no-one ever questioned him.…’

Irena sighed, slumped back in her chair, fingering the edge of her skirt, wondering how many cameras in total were focused upon her.

‘We had this Russian defector, genuine guy with lots of stuff to tell us, but Angleton thought we were being jerked about. You wouldn’t guess what Angleton did.’

‘I know what he did.’ Irena sighed again. ‘He kept him in solitary confinement for six or seven years and no-one had the balls to challenge his authority for doing it. And if I’m supposed to be frightened by that as an analogy, I’m not. Langley put safeguards into the system after that, didn’t they?’

‘That’s the point,’ stressed Birkitt. ‘You’ve been here a long time now, long enough to have that facial correction we promised, and you’re not showing the gratitude Langley expects. There’s still a lot of people in the Company who think Angleton got a rough deal in the end and wouldn’t think it wrong to go back to the old days to find out what they want to know.’

‘Am I supposed to be frightened?’ repeated Irena.

‘I think you should be.’ Birkitt smiled.