Red Star Rising

19

Charlie Muffin was again swept by a feeling of deja vu, the comparisons everywhere: the same mortuary in which he’d first seen the body of the one-armed man, facing across his dissecting table the same pathologist, with Mikhail Guzov hovering at the man’s shoulder, as he’d hovered then.

And Sergei Romanovich Pavel had been killed the same way as the first victim, by a single shot to the back of the head, although this time the bullet had not been hollow-nosed or had dum-dum crosses carved into its tip, so the face, apart from the absurdly neat exit wound to the forehead, remained comparatively intact, although the man’s nose was broken and his left cheek lacerated from the force with which the impact had smashed him into the wall of the telephone kiosk. Charlie wasn’t sure if the death-mask grimace had also been caused by that impact or if Pavel had felt a brief second of agony.

Mikhail Guzov said, “He’d been searched, pockets pulled inside out but he wasn’t robbed. Some coin was lying around the body, as well as his wallet with some rubles still in it. Twenty dollars in American money, too.”

“What about his militia identification?”

“Still in his jacket pocket. And his gun was in its holster.”

“He was most likely killed by a Makarov, too,” offered Vladimir Ivanov. “I’ll confirm that when I complete the autopsy: forensic will positively identify the compressed remains of the bullet they dug out of the kiosk frame.”

“Where was it, the kiosk?” asked Charlie, the questions more instinctive than formulated to a pattern, the greater part of his concentration on why Guzov had so quickly included him, particularly after the previous TV entrapment at Petrovka. By the time Guzov arrived personally at the embassy, an hour earlier, Charlie had already been alerted to Pavel’s murder by the obediently returning Svetlana Modin, with the tape of the anonymous tip of Stout’s detention. She’d still been there when Guzov arrived at the embassy, recognized the man at once, and just as quickly addressed him familiarly by his patronymic, which was another memorized-for-later curiosity. As was Guzov’s apparent willingness to confirm to the woman that Pavel’s murder was unquestionably linked to that of the one-armed man, which had provided her with another exclusive to mitigate Charlie’s earlier outmaneuvering.

“At the junction of Bogoslovskij and Palashevsky,” identified the Russian intelligence agent, without hesitation.

“Two busy, inner-city roads in broad daylight!” exclaimed Charlie, knowing the location.

Guzov shook his head. “Bogoslovskij is closed off, for roadwork. There’s a lot of drilling, which would have covered the sound of a shot. We haven’t been able to find any witnesses: no one who heard anything.”

“Wouldn’t the roadwork and the drilling have still made it a bad choice?” persisted Charlie, hoping to encourage the Russian further. Was it a good idea to have brought Pavel’s murder tape with him?

“There’s no indication that he had made a call. The telephone was still on its rest when his body was found by one of the workmen farther along the street: if it hadn’t been it might have given us a lead. It’s possible he was lured there.”

Charlie briefly hesitated before taking from his pocket the CD Harry Fish had copied from the master tape of Pavel’s call. Offering it to the Russian, Charlie said, “He did make a call, to me. He manages three words-Charlie. I’ve got-before the sound of the shot. There’s no disconnection sound but there’s noise in the background, which I now guess was the roadwork.”

“ ‘Charlie, I’ve got. .’ ” echoed Guzov. “What the hell had Sergei Romanovich got?”

“I doubt we’ll ever know,” accepted Charlie. “If he’d written it down it would have been found by whoever went through his pockets: maybe why he was searched.”

“Why replace the telephone?” persisted Guzov.

“To prevent the call being traced,” said Charlie. “I didn’t get the impression of anyone listening, trying to discover if he’d made a connection. There was a noise, which until now I couldn’t identify. Then silence.”

“I’ve been put in charge of the investigation into Pavel’s murder,” disclosed Guzov, straightening at his side of the dissection slab as if expecting a confrontation.

“Which you told Svetlana Modin was connected to the first murder. Why’d you do that?”

“Hopefully it’ll make the killers think we know more than we do: that Pavel told others what he was doing.”

Charlie didn’t completely follow the other man’s reasoning but decided against questioning it. “Let’s hope you’re right and they make a mistake we can follow.”

“My being put in charge of the Russian side of the investigation means we’ll be working together, sharing everything,” said the Russian, staring very directly at Charlie across the corpse.

Which the FSB had been determined to achieve from the outset, recalled Charlie. And which probably explained Guzov’s quick arrival at the embassy, the obvious preparedness to include him in the most preliminary of medical examinations. Surely not! Charlie thought, as his reflection lengthened into a possible conclusion: surely the FSB wouldn’t have taken their determination to the extreme of sacrificing a militia colonel who’d openly opposed them, as Sergei Romanovich Pavel had done! Why wouldn’t they? Charlie at once asked himself. Pavel had even suspected he was being set up as a sacrifice, although not literally. There was an unarguable logic in Guzov taking over Pavel’s role, the switch from militia to FSB cosmetically easy to adjust by stressing Guzov’s prior participation.

“I look forward to that.”

“If the head of your embassy security is responsible for planting the listening devices he’ll break under interrogation?” suggested the other man.

“I would expect him eventually to make a confession,” mildly qualified Charlie.

“When he does you’ll have to finally concede that no agency of the Russian Federation is in any way involved in a security breach within your embassy, nor in the death of the still unidentified man,” said Guzov. “When that is accepted we’ll be able to make progress in solving both crimes instead of constantly wasting time.”

Charlie Muffin knew all his faults and failings, but hypocrisy was not on his self-criticizing list. Neither was it a factor in the unsettling uncertainty that he began to feel as the day progressed.

Which was, inconceivably, that Russian intelligence might not be implicated in the bugging of the British embassy and genuinely sought not just to resolve the murder of the one-armed man but now that of militia colonel Sergei Romanovich Pavel.

From the mortuary he drove with the Russian directly to Petrovka where he was presented with sheaf after sheaf of transcripts of telephone responses to the press conference and with a minimal selection of actual tape recordings. The overwhelming majority of the printed log contained exactly the same-deja vu again-press approaches with a similar sprinkling of crank and confidence trickster demands for money in advance of information. There were six separate sheets, each with its relevant tape segment, that were selected as possibly informative, although none was sufficiently complete to be acted upon. Three had been traced to public telephones and Guzov anticipated Charlie by saying that none was that of the kiosk in which Pavel had been shot.

Charlie was impressed by the infrastructure assembled to monitor the inflow, the assigned telephones all in a large room Charlie guessed normally to be a conference facility but manned now by a staff of predominantly male operators on one side, divided from its other by a pool of mostly female typists maintaining a simultaneously transcripted record of the tapes’ contents. Six people-three men and three women-were in the center of the room, pointed out by Guzov as trained interrogators ready instantly to take a call from the initially alerted telephone operator who judged it sufficiently important to intercept and hopefully extend before any nervous disconnection. None was summoned during the time Charlie was in the room: all were in civilian clothes, as further confirmation that all were FSB.

After the practical demonstration, Guzov led the way back to Pavel’s office, which he’d clearly commandeered. It appeared much tidier than when Pavel occupied it, even during the ministerial-attended conferences. On the desk was a wooden frame, its back to Charlie. Intercepting Charlie’s look, Guzov turned it to show Pavel in the center of a family group and said, “He had three daughters. The youngest will be six next month.”

The month of Sasha’s birthday, too, Charlie recognized. He was a day late with his promised call to Natalia. He said, “That looks an impressive setup,” speaking of the telephone room.

Which Charlie didn’t imagine Pavel having either the resources or the authority to have established. Nor did he believe that Guzov and the FSB would have been able to create it in the short time-a matter of hours-since Pavel’s murder. Was that what Pavel had been so anxious to tell him-warn him-that the FSB were, quite literally, in total control of the Russian investigation, irrespective of Pavel’s attempted independence: reducing that effort to irrelevance, in fact? It was an unavoidable speculation that at the same time did nothing to undermine Charlie’s nagging thought that Guzov’s denials might be genuine.

Guzov said, “Does what you saw help to convince you?”

“Of what?” stalled Charlie.

“That we are as anxious as you are-as your country is-to bring this investigation to its proper and hopefully quick conclusion,” said Guzov. “As I believe is the case in your country, there is always a greater, more personal commitment to solve a murder in which a law officer is the victim. Shouldn’t we stop dancing around a situation and stop distrusting each other until there is a real and positive reason for that distrust. .?” The Russian smiled. “Which we both know and expect to happen before it’s all over.”

“I think perhaps we should,” allowed Charlie.

“The tip about Stout was definitely made through a synthesizer,” confirmed Harry Fish. “I’ve already had it transcribed in full. It’s pretty much as Svetlana Modin paraphrased.”

“What about the sex of the caller?” asked Charlie, accepting the transcript.

The electronic expert shook his head. “It’s not the usual sort of synthesizer: there seems to be an additional distorting device that jumbles the tonal range.”

“You telling me you can’t decide whether the voice is male or female!”

“It renders what’s recorded to be virtually androgynous.”

“And you’re also going to tell me you’ve never confronted anything like it before,” said Charlie, sighing.

“Right,” confirmed Fish, hefting in his hand the Russian recordings. “What do you want me to do with these?”

In an uninterrupted rush of impatience, Charlie said, “Run every check to establish if they’ve been tampered with, whether they’re genuine-particularly if the callers were indigenous Russian or from any of the other republics or outside foreigners-whether the calls were from public telephones or private lines, anything identifiable in the background that can’t ordinarily be heard without enhancement to suggest a location, and whatever else you think might help.”

“You going to work with Guzov?” demanded Fish.

Charlie was surprised there hadn’t been any response by now from the Director-General to everything he’d filed to London after his return from Petrovka: surprised, too, that it had taken Fish so long to start asking the recorded question to be relayed back to Thames House on channels to which he had no access. “With Pavel lying dead in the mortuary, Guzov is now my only link to the Russian investigation.”

“Don’t you find it curious that Pavel had U.S. dollars in his wallet?”

“What’s your point?”

“Just that.”

“There’s nothing whatsoever to be curious about,” insisted Charlie. “U.S. dollars are the currency of Russia, Moscow particularly. It has been since 1991: before that, even.” He pulled out a bundle of mixed notes from his own pocket. “I’ve probably got fifty dollars or so myself.” It was the currency he provided Natalia, in cash and by post, and at irregular dates and amounts to avoid creating a pattern, judging a regular electronic transfer from an English to Moscow bank too liable to arouse suspicion over time. So far, surprisingly, nothing had been lost.

Fish shrugged, no longer interested. “Surely you don’t think Guzov’s given you these to prove the Russians are genuinely going to work with you?”

“It would be stupid to turn my back on anything without seeing what’s in it for me.” Which was, Charlie accepted, the central core of his rigidly followed survival credo.

“I really wouldn’t. .”

“. . like to do my job,” Charlie wearily finished for the other man. “You told me. Now tell me something else. The leak of Stout’s arrest came from inside the embassy. So who, in this embassy, has the need for or access to a voice-distorting synthesizer?”

Fish considered the question. “Paula-Jane Venables and David Halliday. But as far as I know-and it’s my job to know-the synthesizers that we and MI6 supply to its officers do not include the gender distortion facility.”

“We both also know Reg Stout couldn’t have been ORT’s source: he was already incommunicado, with Robertson’s heavies at either elbow. There’s another source within this fucking embassy!”

“I’m going around in so many tight circles I’m expecting to disappear up my own ass!” protested Fish, just as exasperated. “You survive this-and I don’t think you’ve got a chance in hell of surviving-and I’m told I’ve got to work with you on something else, I’ll do whatever I can, up to and including killing myself, to avoid it! You contaminate and bring down everyone and everything with whom you come into contact!”

Charlie let some silence into the cavernous room, intrigued at the unexpected outburst. “You got something more you want to tell me, Harry?”

“Point out to you,” qualified the other man, quiet-voice now, seemingly embarrassed. “Don’t you think you might be next on the murder list after Sergei Pavel?”

“I certainly believe it’s a possibility I might be expected to think.”

“Let’s hope some poor innocents don’t get caught up in the crossfire.”

Some poor innocents like Natalia and Sasha, thought Charlie. And wished he hadn’t.