Red Star Rising

15

By the time Charlie reached the embassy the following morning, just after nine, there had been 138 press conference applications, 26 of them from television companies, which included every Russian channel, all American, British, and satellite majors, and every leading European national and commercial outlet. There were three television requests among the nine Japanese submissions. A minor conference room within the main embassy building had to be made available for Robertson and his team, two of whom were additionally assigned permanently to the basement communications room transmitting accreditation photographs, names, and identification documentation of every Russian journalist, photographer, cameraman, and technician to London for vetting by MI6, which called in exchange cooperation from CIA record duplication. That second check duplication, under similar cooperation agreements, was extended to the external intelligence agencies of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan.

So widespread was the attempted trawl that media leaks were inevitable. The first came from Paris, quickly followed by a longer and more detailed account in The New York Times and Washington Post. Liberation, in Paris, wrongly reported that two agents from the external KGB successor, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, had been discovered among the applications, which London refused to confirm or deny. Because of the varying time differences throughout the world, Moscow’s positive denial was the initial lead item in more than fifty European, American, and Asian daytime radio and television news bulletins.

Associated Press was the first international news agency to create a composite file of the global reaction, which Halliday brought into the embassy hall in which Charlie stood with Robertson, watching the applications in the process of being sorted into their security level checks.

Robertson said, “I wasn’t told London was going to go into this degree of duplication, and I don’t believe anyone anticipated this sort of result. This could turn the conference itself into an anticlimax if you don’t have enough to say.”

Charlie’s concern had already gone way beyond that awareness, to the fear that it might diminish the all important public response. “It wasn’t properly thought through.”

“How many times have I heard those precise words at the beginning of a disaster assessment?” said Halliday, whose in-house MI6 embassy records were the first to be consulted for application comparison, before their onward submission to London.

“It’s a fuck-up before it even gets started,” judged Robertson.

“Only if I allow it to be,” said Charlie.

“There are two logical interpretations from all this,” speculated Robertson. “One is that the Russians gained something of enormous importance from the embassy bugging. The other is that it’s the dead man who’s important. You going to be able to answer either of those questions?”

Those weren’t the priorities in Charlie’s mind at that moment. In little more than an hour, he had to confront Guzov and God knew who else and whatever demands they might make. One uncertainty prompted another. Surely he wasn’t being set up in some way! He couldn’t see how but then he wouldn’t-shouldn’t-be able to. It was on London’s orders that everything had been so abruptly turned on its head with the involvement of Robertson and Fish, and he hadn’t expected that, either. Where was Fish? came another question. “I think I can do enough to ensure it won’t turn into a disaster assessment.”

“Which I’m glad I’m not going to be part of if you’re wrong,” said the MI6 rezident.

“I won’t be,” insisted Charlie, thinking that Halliday was the sort of man he’d always want to have in front rather than behind him.

“At least it’ll ensure you come out on top of the local viewing figures, which I never imagined you would,” said Halliday.

“What’s that mean?” demanded Robertson, his voice indicating the annoyance at the man.

“Your timing’s head to head against Stepan Lvov’s major-live-election address to his party conference,” said Halliday. “Didn’t you realize that?”

“No,” admitted Charlie.

“Who the hell’s Stepan Lvov?” asked Robertson.

“The guaranteed new Russian president, who’s going to turn the world into a better place,” identified Halliday.

“Does that include not having his people bug our embassy?” asked Robertson.

“Top of his list, along with a cure for cancer and the common cold,” persisted Halliday.

Reminded by Robertson’s remark of the initial reason for the man and his team being there, Charlie said, “Where’s Harry Fish?”

“Isolating the embassy’s conference hall from any electronic intrusion into the main building,” said Robertson. “He’s apparently got some gizmos that’ll shatter the eardrums of anyone trying to tap into any embassy system.”

And others that detect a lot more electronic intrusion, suddenly thought Charlie, reminded of his bugging concern when Natalia had been in his suite the previous evening. “You think all the accreditation checks will be completed by Wednesday?” he asked the man.

“We’ll probably manage the clearances, providing we don’t get more than another fifty to sixty applications,” undertook Robertson. “The problem already looks like equipment accommodation. Even with handheld cameras and minimal sound booms, it’s going to be a crush getting all the television crews in. And then there’s the radio station gear.”

“There’ll have to be pool agreements, two or three stations using one group of technicians and equipment,” decided Charlie.

“They don’t like doing that,” Robertson pointed out.

“And if you impose that restriction on any Russian station, there’ll be the automatic assumption-and accusation-that the excluded technicians are suspected of being intelligence agents,” added Halliday.

“Let there be,” dismissed Charlie, most of his concentration still upon Harry Fish. “This isn’t a friend-winning exercise.”

“I’m still not sure what sort of exercise it is,” complained Robertson.

“Winning precisely the right sort of friend,” provided Charlie.

Which he wasn’t going to do at Petrovka, Charlie guessed, hunched in the back of the now readily available embassy car, which was blocked for more than ten minutes getting through the media siege directly outside the embassy gates that spilled over onto the gridlocked embankment road. That delay, compounded by the time-consuming detour to locate Harry Fish, meant he was going to be late getting to the headquarters of the organized crime bureau, but Charlie was encouraged by the necessary conversation with the electronics expert.

An impatiently waiting Sergei Pavel was actually at the point of going back inside the police building when Charlie arrived, only just managing to bring Pavel back by shouting as he got out of the car, which on impulse Charlie asked to wait.

Pavel said at once, “What in the name of God is happening?”

“London miscalculated.”

“They’re planning something inside. I don’t know what but a colonel from the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki arrived with Guzov, so you’re facing both intelligence agencies. And someone from the Kremlin itself.”

“What about forensics?” risked Charlie, a DNA challenge at that moment his main concern.

Pavel frowned. “None. Why?”

“It’s not important,” hurried on a relieved Charlie. “Whatever happens inside now I will personally get you into the conference, freeing you from Guzov’s control and satisfying a Russian presence, which is his argument. But I don’t want to announce it to him or anyone else today. How would it affect you, personally and professionally? Would it be a problem, at either level?”

“From what’s already happened today I don’t know-can’t know-until we meet the others. I’ll call, afterward. It’s chaos up there.”

The group gathering in Pavel’s office numbered the same as those of Charlie’s original confrontation there, but the three he didn’t recognize replaced the earlier forensic scientist. Charlie said, “I apologize for my lateness.” It was a full fifty minutes, he calculated.

To Charlie’s surprise, it was not the baleful Guzov who opened the expected attack but the Foreign Ministry’s Nikita Kashev. “Everything’s been escalated, beyond any common sense,” complained the man, at once. “We have done everything possible to maintain an amicable working relationship. The United Kingdom has done everything to sabotage it with false and unfounded accusations.”

“And I for my part have done everything to make clear to you, to everyone, that I am in no way responsible, nor can I in any way influence or change London’s response to what the British embassy here in Moscow has been subjected to,” argued Charlie.

“I am attached to the legal department of the president’s secretariat,” identified the youngest of the three strangers. “My name is Semon Ivanovich Yudkin. I am authorized to ask you to communicate both to your acting ambassador and to your Foreign Office in London the opinion of our president and our government that the current difficulties are being intentionally exacerbated and manipulated to influence the forthcoming elections in this country. That opinion-and protest-was officially communicated an hour ago to your ambassador here and to your Foreign Office to London.”

“This. . what you have said. . is nothing I can. . to do.” Charlie stopped, forcing some cohesive control. “This is nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with me; nothing, as I have tried to make clear, that I can control or influence. I am here to investigate a crime, nothing else.”

“We know your accredited function,” dismissed Kashev. “You are the only person who has been made vocally available: communication to the ambassador and your Foreign Office has degenerated to the point of formally exchanging unanswered Notes. You plead that you are little more than a messenger boy, which is what we consider you to be. In addition to what we’ve already told London, there will be no further cooperation or communication whatsoever in the murder investigation in which you are supposedly involved. And further, that every detail of British obstruction and inconsistency will be made publicly available to counter whatever diplomatic difficulty is currently being cultivated by London.”

It would be his name publicly attached to the Russian complaints, Charlie immediately realized. “I have made it abundantly clear to your representatives attached to the murder investigation that I will make available each and every response the embassy conference generates. It is an undertaking I repeat now.”

“This meeting is over,” declared Kashev. “And you,” completed the man contemptuously, “can leave now to deliver your messages!”

With the fortunately retained embassy car waiting outside Petrovka, Charlie was back at Smolenskaya long before Harry Fish left for their earlier arranged sweep of his hotel suite.

“We got another problem?” asked Fish.

“I don’t know what the hell we have,” admitted Charlie, continuing on to the basement. Unsure what the Russians intended to announce, Charlie included in his warning to London every accusation, threat and challenge he’d faced at the Petrovka confrontation, as much as possible-which was a lot-verbatim. He was near the end of his second revision when the hammered summons came at his cubicle door and when he opened it Ross Perritt said: “Get up to your rezidentura, now!”

Paula-Jane, Halliday, Robertson, and Fish were already there when Charlie arrived, grouped unspeaking around the widescreen television. P-J needed both hands to gesture him in at the same time as warning against his saying anything to overlay the program-interrupting news announcement. Charlie at once recognized the bespectacled, solemn-faced anchor of the main Rossia news channel.

“. . can only be interpreted as an intentional and provocative determination to interfere in the internal democratic activities of the Russian Federation,” Charlie picked up. “Concerted and genuine attempts by members of the Russian Federation to understand the escalation of the intrusion by the United Kingdom have either been rebuffed or ignored, imposing upon the two countries the severest strain over recent years. That strain culminated earlier today in a recorded confrontation between a representative of the British government and officials of the Russian Federation, up to and including the president’s office, in a final attempt to rectify a deteriorating situation. .”

The picture switch to Pavel’s Petrovka office of four hours earlier, dominated by Charlie isolated against the Russian phalanx he’d faced, was so abrupt that both Paula-Jane and Halliday audibly gasped.

Harry Fish exclaimed: “Jesus!”

Charlie said: “Fuck!”

It was a montage but Charlie at once acknowledged that the editing was so brilliant-photographically as well as verbally-that only he and the Russians who’d been there would have recognized it as such. Apart from an opening shot of the assembled Russians, the camera concentration was entirely upon Charlie and he cringed inwardly at the variety of facial expressions he had been totally unaware of making. There was the wide-eyed surprise of his entry into the room, despite Pavel’s warning, but by far the worst was his brief, blank-minded reaction to the statement from presidential lawyer Semon Yudkin, which had been retained in full. Charlie judged to be the most devastating of all the editing of his initial response to Nikita Kashev’s opening attack, which had been cut to just I am in no way responsible, nor can I in any way influence or change London’s response.

When the transmission reverted to the studio commentator, Charlie was identified by name and portrayed as an ineffectual dupe who could be recognized as such by his contribution to what was referred to as a high-level government meeting. The segment ended with a separately recorded statement by Yudkin declaring that the strongest possible protest Note had been delivered by the London ambassador to the British Foreign Office and repeating the suspension of all cooperation between the two countries until a full explanation, accompanied by an apology, was made.

An aching, embarrassed silence, disturbed only by more embarrassed foot shuffling, descended on the room the moment the news break faded. Charlie broke it. He said: “I have just been sucked up and blown out in bubbles.”

“That doesn’t even come close to describing it,” said the resentful Paula-Jane. “That’s going to become an idiot’s guide training film for every intelligence agency for at least the next hundred years.”

“Didn’t you guess you’d be filmed and recorded?” asked Harry Fish, more professionally.

“I didn’t need to guess: I knew,” Charlie flagellated himself. “I fucked up, big-time.” Except for transmitting his account of the meeting before responding to the summons here, he thought hopefully.

“We’re on the third floor,” persisted the woman. “With luck you’d probably kill yourself outright if you jumped. We won’t stand in your way.”

“They’ve been incredibly clever, generalizing every accusation and even making it sound as if the presidential elections were in some way involved!” assessed Halliday, reflectively. “Years, the commentator claimed. That covers them for whatever they want-the murder and the bugging and any other embarrassment since the end of communism-and a London denial will simply be laughed at, just as you’re being personally laughed at right now.”

The MI6 officer was right, conceded Charlie, running the realities through his mind until he came to one that stopped him. Would Natalia have seen him wriggling like a worm on a hook? It was too forlorn to hope that she wouldn’t.

“You’ll obviously have to cancel your precious conference,” insisted Paula-Jane. “What the Russian have just done turns it into a farce.”

“Does it?” challenged Charlie, back in control. “Or is that precisely what they expect to happen: why they staged what they just did, because they weren’t going to be part of it and wanted to stop whatever I might have said, in answer to something I was asked?”

“You surely don’t expect London will allow it to happen now!” demanded the woman. “You’ll be eaten alive.”

“I just have been,” admitted Charlie, again. “If the conference is canceled, they win. And I might as well jump, as you suggest.”

“I think she’s right,” came in Robertson, speaking for the first time. “London’s only thought now will be containment.”

“Containment of what!” refused Charlie. “That’s the Russians’ strategy.”

“I think you should talk to London,” suggested Robertson.

“So do I,” agreed Charlie, fervently wishing that he could have avoided doing so.

But yet again he was surprised, to the point of bewilderment, when he did. Having by now come to know the Director-General’s emotional-controlling demeanor, Charlie didn’t expect a shouted tirade but he hadn’t anticipated Aubrey Smith hearing him out as patiently as the man did, thinking again as he anxiously explained his side of the debacle how lucky it had been to send his recollected account of Petrovka ahead of his televised humiliation.

When Charlie finally finished the other man said, “You’ve still been made to look absolutely stupid: a naive, stumbling idiot.”

“I know,” accepted Charlie. “But I won’t continue to appear that way if you let me go ahead.”

“I know the basis upon which you’ve planned everything. You can’t possibly guarantee any sort of exoneration!”

“They’re gambling that we’ll cancel,” insisted Charlie. “If we do they will have won; beaten us.” Not beaten us, beaten me, he thought.

“By elevating everything as they have, talking about affecting Russia’s supposed internal democracy, they’ve taken any decision totally away from me, personally: it’s government to government now.”

“You could argue the point. And the impression that will be created if we back off,” risked Charlie.

“And I will argue it,” promised the man. “But that argument, logical and realistic though it is, won’t necessarily prevail with politicians who think and act in sound bites.”

“Then what the hell can I do?” asked Charlie, hating the sound of his own inadequacy.

“Pray,” replied Smith, unhelpfully.

“To whose God?”

“The One who’s best at miracles,” said Smith, which helped even less.

Bill Bundy was the only one of his three listed callers to have identified himself with a message, and the American answered his phone the moment Charlie returned it.

“You managing to stay sane?” greeted the American.

“I’m not sure.”

“You going to go ahead with the press conference?”

“It’s not been decided yet.” Why was Bundy interested, wondered Charlie.

“I’d like to be there if you do.”

He had to ruffle his feathers, start acting professionally, Charlie decided. “I’ll let you know if it’s decided we go ahead.”

“So you might not?” persisted Bundy.

“I said it hasn’t been decided.”

“You’ll fix my admission, if it does?”

“Yes,” promised Charlie. To try to work out your reason for being so anxious to be there, he thought.

“I can’t imagine how it might help, but my offer to pitch in still stands.”

“I appreciate it,” said Charlie, emptily. He really could have sold tickets, he thought.

“What are you going to do-is London going to do-if you don’t go ahead?”

“We haven’t decided about whether or not to go ahead,” wearily reminded Charlie.

“You want a break, someone to relax with, you’ve got my number, okay?”

“I appreciate that, too,” Charlie lied again.

“Look forward to your call, whatever’s decided.”

Charlie pressed back in his inadequate chair in his inadequate office, deciding the dedicated number and its answering facility should be transferred to the comfort of the compound flat in which the hopeful response lines were being installed. He was about to concentrate upon the American’s approach when the telephone rang once more, the traffic noise obvious the moment Charlie lifted the receiver.

“I didn’t know what they were going to do,” apologized Sergei Pavel at once, from his untapped phone from the street kiosk. “I realize now that telling me to wait outside for you was to get me out of the way while they set everything up-in my own fucking office!”

“You did warn me they were planning something,” said Charlie, as confused at the Russian’s approach as he had been by that of Bundy’s, just minutes earlier. “There’s nothing you could have done if you had known.”

“Except given you a better warning,” said Pavel. “I didn’t want you to think I was part of it: tricking you like that.”

“I wasn’t thinking that,” replied Charlie, honestly.

“You said I could get into the conference with you?”

It took Charlie several moments to reply. He’d believed the man up to now but couldn’t any longer. Pavel had to be a plant, to discover what the British response to the television broadcast was going to be. Which meant, Charlie realized at once, that he couldn’t indicate any uncertainty about the conference. “How can you hope to be there, beside me, after what Kashev and Yudkin said?”

“I’m not part of anything they said or did, or the trap they set. I told you before, none of them wants the investigation to continue. And if it doesn’t, I’ll be held ultimately responsible for its failure.”

“You can’t confront both intelligence agencies and the office of the president itself!”

“Things aren’t that bad, not like they were in the old days.”

“They’re not that much better, either!” argued Charlie.

“I want to be there!”

“Then you shall be,” decided Charlie. Having Pavel publicly at his side would make the Russian televised denunciation of non-cooperation almost as ridiculous as its portrayal of his stumbling inadequacy: almost, he qualified, but not quite.

“How?”

“Call on this number, this way.” Unless a London-ordered cancellation were announced in advance there would not be enough time for any further sabotage to be mounted, even if Pavel were a provocateur.

“Thank you,” said Pavel.

“Let’s wait to see if you’ve got anything to thank me for.”

The car had the now familiar difficulty getting through the thronged embassy gates and it hadn’t gone more than 100 yards along the embankment road when Charlie’s now regular driver said, “It could be two cars following us: one certainly, a BMW again.”

Harry Fish swiveled to stare out of the rear window. Charlie didn’t bother. The electronics expert said, “You actually think the FSB are tailing you!”

“It would be pretty standard practice, after everything that’s happened: we’d do it if it were London.”

“I most certainly wouldn’t. .”

“. . like to do my job,” Charlie finished for the other man.

“At the moment I don’t like doing it, either.” He hoped the intended hotel-room sweep wouldn’t take too long. He had a lot to think about and work out. And the urge to call Natalia was becoming stronger, despite his undertaking not to attempt contact so soon.

“It’s definitely two,” reported the driver. “The BMW and what looks like an old Skoda.”

“What do you want to do, if I do find something?” asked Fish.

“Nothing,” said Charlie, frowning toward the man to indicate his discomfort at the driver being able to hear the conversation, even though he probably wouldn’t understand it. “Just show me where.” If the suite were bugged, he’d have a genuine and essential reason to speak to Natalia.

Fish nodded in understanding, and said nothing more until they were crossing the hotel foyer. “Sorry about that. Stupid of me.”

“No harm done,” said Charlie, standing back for Fish to enter the elevator ahead of him, glad they were alone. “If you find anything I want to use it to my advantage, which is why I want it left. Is there any way they can detect your searching for it?”

“Only if we speak, if and when I do find something. I’ll indicate it and mark it. We can talk later, out of the room.”

The briefcase-sized bag that Fish opened was sectioned to hold and clamp various instruments-including a doctorlike stethoscope-and yards. It was a yard with an elongated attachment, like an elephant’s trunk, that Fish extracted and looped around his neck by a thin strap. There was a regimentation in the way the man operated, with virtually immediate results when he put the nose of the attachment to the telephone, turning to Charlie and nodding. In thirty minutes, he detected six emplacements, three in the living room and three in the bedroom. Having sticker-marked the location of each, Fish unscrewed the first detected telephone handset, pointed into the diaphragm to the sort of pinhead device Charlie recognized from the embassy search, and examined it, in situ and from several angles through an intensity-enhanced magnifying glass before looking up, both frowning and shaking his head. After a further, even more concentrated examination, Fish handed the glass for Charlie to look in detail for himself. Charlie was able under the enlargement to see that the device was not completely cylindrical, which he’d imagined it to be, but had an extension, like a finger, from its left side. Several times, unnecessarily gesturing Charlie against any utterance, Fish painstakingly opened every identified location and subjected each bug to the same intensive scrutiny, finishing every one with the same frowned head shaking.

There were people in the outside corridor and again in the descending elevator so it wasn’t until they were in the familiar bar, Charlie in his back-protective corner seat and the drinks ordered, that Charlie was able to say, “What’s all the head shaking about?”

“They’re not the same,” declared Fish, with another appropriate head movement.

“What’s not the same?”

“The listening devices,” said Fish, patiently. “Remember I told you those in the embassy were state of the art, which I thought they were because I’d never seen anything like them before? These are even better! They’re fantastic and I’d sell my soul as well as my body to get hold of one to dismantle and reverse engineer.”

“What are you telling me?” persisted Charlie, feeling another sink of unwanted bewilderment.

“These are state of the art: I’ve never seen anything so sophisticated, even without taking them apart. Why weren’t those the same in the embassy, potentially a far bigger and more important target?”

“You tell me,” invited Charlie.

“I can’t,” admitted Fish. “But I’d like to be able to.”

So would he, Charlie decided, adding it to his list.