Red Star Rising

31

Irena Novikov perched on the very edge of the window-fronting couch like a frightened bird about to burst into flight, both hands gripped tightly in her lap but unable to stop the fear twitching through her, a nervous tic pulling at the corner of her mouth on the unmarked side of her face. Her eyes were fixed on the folder that Charlie left very visibly on his lap. “There is a problem?”

“A big one.” Charlie was wedged on the straight-backed chair, its discomfort matching the ache from his protesting feet at the pursuit-dodging underground train ritual. He was sure he’d identified two people-a man and a woman, working separately-who’d kept up with him for four route switches before he’d managed to lose them, convincing him that the surveillance manpower had been at least doubled to defeat his evasion.

“What?”

“We can’t break the code. There’s more than one, each of which needs separate unconnected ciphers. And there’s obviously a further cipher-again, maybe even more than one-necessary to identify the participants. Without all the keys, we can’t open any doors.”

“Which proves how important it is: sensational, like Ivan said,” insisted the woman. She lighted a cigarette.

“It isn’t anything unless we can read it: understand it all.”

“What about your code-breakers? They must have decoded something!”

“Ivan must have told you more?” coaxed Charlie, avoiding her question.

She hesitated, the nerve in her cheek tugging her mouth into an unintended smirk. “He said Cairo was involved.”

“So he must also have told you a lot of the stuff was CIA traffic? That’s where a lot of it came from, the CIA station in Cairo.”

“He told me some of the early stuff was.” She lit another cigarette from the butt of that she’d almost finished, coughing.

“Told you? Or showed you?”

“Told me. . showed me some things.” Her voice was almost inaudible now.

“He also told you it was sensational?”

“Yes.”

“Why was it sensational?” pressed Charlie. “He must have told you why!”

Irena shook her head. “I told you. He said it was too dangerous for me to know.”

“Irena, I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth.” Charlie very carefully kept his voice flat, hinting no irritation or annoyance.

She sat, avoiding his eyes, for several moments before her lips moved, as if forming words, but there was no sound.

“I didn’t hear what you said, Irena?”

“People,” she managed, in a hoarse whisper.

“What about people?”

“That’s why it is sensational. Because of the people it is about.”

“Who are they, these people it is all about? What are their names?”

The woman shook her head, the first forcefulness since she’d let him into the apartment. “No! He wouldn’t tell me any names. That’s what I couldn’t know, to keep me safe. Any names.”

“You read it all, didn’t you?” Charlie openly accused. “Ivan didn’t show you some; he showed you all of it, didn’t he? And you looked at it all again, after he was murdered and you’d recognized he was the victim from the description at the press conference from which you got my number?”

The silence lasted much longer this time. At one point, Irena’s shoulders started to heave and Charlie was frightened she was going to collapse, but she didn’t, although when she looked up her eyes were red from the nearness of tears. “He showed me everything and I looked at it all again, when I knew it was Ivan who’d been killed. But I couldn’t read it because I didn’t have the ciphers to understand it!”

Charlie didn’t speak immediately, either, knowing the importance of every word in every phrase from now on. “Then there’s no way forward. We’re beaten.”

“No!” Irena protested. “Your code-breakers and analysts haven’t had it long enough! They’ve got computer systems that can do things, calculate things, in seconds. They’ll break it, in time! They’ve got to!”

“In time, maybe,” agreed Charlie, stressing the doubt.

“What have your people said in London? About me; about what I asked in return for giving you what I had?”

“Everything’s possible, once they know what they’re rewarding you for. Which brings us back to time. You know how the Russians are trying to close everything down. Officially there’s no reason for me to stay any longer in Moscow, if we publicly accept their story. And I’ve got nothing with which to challenge their nonsense. And if I’m recalled, with me goes your contact. . your only chance”-Charlie hesitated, in brief reluctance, before offering the folder across the narrow space between them-“which is why I’ve brought Ivan’s material back to you.”

For a moment Irena remained staring in astonishment. “You’re not going to do anything? But-”

“London has a copy of everything, of course. And they’ll go on trying but I don’t know for how long. . if they’ll ever break it.”

Irena hesitantly accepted the package, gazing disbelievingly down at it. “I thought your experts would work it out. . that it was the way. .”

“So did I,” said Charlie, moving to get up from the uncomfortable chair.

Irena finally burst into tears, hunched forward over the folder, rocking back and forth.

“I’m sorry,” said Charlie, moving toward the door.

“Don’t go,” she pleaded, and stood up.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Charlie demanded, when he finished reading what she had brought from the bedroom two hours earlier.

Irena shrugged. “I thought you’d just take it. I don’t want to be abandoned. I want to be helped.”

There was nothing to be achieved by scolding her. He had it now. Everything. Not everything, he immediately corrected himself. “I’ll buy you a ticket: a return, as if you’re coming back. And get you a new passport, with a visa we can attach in London. I don’t want you coming into the embassy. It’s under media siege.”

“No. I don’t think I could do that.”

“I’ll need a photograph.”

She began gnawing at her lip. “I don’t have one.”

“You must have something! We can enhance it in London if it’s not very good.”

She shook her head.

“There’s photographs of you there,” reminded Charlie, pointing to the shrine and its selection of pictures of her and Ivan together. “We’d have to cut Ivan out.”

Irena hesitated. “All right. Then what?”

“I’ll call. Give you flight numbers and tell you what to do.”

“You won’t abandon me, will you? Leave me here now that I’ve given you all I’ve got?”

“No, Irena. I promise I won’t abandon you.”

It was past midnight before Charlie finally got back to the Savoy, unencumbered any longer by the folder he had left with Irena, what little he now carried making no curious bulge inside his jacket pocket, glad in his initial moments of euphoria back at Irena’s flat that he’d resisted the impulse to alert London instantly by going directly to the embassy. There was the customary hand-holding couple in the hotel lobby and Charlie was sure others watching the embassy would have inferred from such a late return that he had something so vital it had to be reported to London at once. To prevent such an assumption, Charlie sidestepped into the bar and ordered vodka that-unusually-he didn’t want. Nothing could have improved his total exhilaration.

Which, unplanned though it was, made the bar stop a good idea: his first place and opportunity to sit and think beyond his almost unbelievable awareness. Ivan Oskin had been right-close to being terrifyingly right-in assessing as sensational what he’d found in KGB archives: could it, Charlie wondered, be too sensational? Not his question to consider. Or answer. His remit, the remit he’d insisted upon the Director-General acknowledging not that many hours earlier, was to solve the murder of Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin. Which, Charlie accepted, he hadn’t done. Nor would he ever be able to solve it. What he had discovered was the reason for the poor, overconfident, desperate man’s savage killing and doubtless prior, although unsuccessful, torture. Had Irena come close to guessing the unspeakable agonies Ivan Oskin must have endured without disclosing the whereabouts of what his captors would have been so frantically determined to recover?

Charlie resolved to make her understand: not the horror which would have been so bad that even Charlie didn’t think himself capable of fully imagining it. What he’d try to make her understand was how much Ivan must have loved her to have resisted until he’d died rather than tell them where their secret was hidden.

And where it remained hidden, with Irena, because her unknown apartment was still the most secure place until he got her safely hidden away, beyond their reach and vengeance.

Charlie wished he was more confident of doing that. He’d studied her existing Russian passport and was sure that what he had, snug in his inside pocket, was sufficient for what he immediately had to do. His uncertainty was whether Irena could hang on as long as she had to for him to get her safely away from Moscow. His greatest uncertainty was whether he could satisfy everything she wanted, even after that.

The false lovers were still in the lobby when Charlie left the bar after the second vodka. It wasn’t until he got to his suite that Charlie abruptly remembered something else that Irena would insist upon, prompted, he supposed, by their charade. His painfully arduous and increasingly dangerous train hopping wasn’t over after all. The familiar warning throb from his left instep told him that he’d overlooked something. And it was essential that he didn’t overlook anything.

“What made you go back to her?” demanded the Director-General. For the first time ever, Charlie detected a quaver in Aubrey Smith’s voice at what had taken him three hours the following morning to copy to London.

“A hunch,” said Charlie, who wished another one would come as quickly. “It occurred to me when we were speaking yesterday.”

“Why didn’t you mention it then?”

“I could have been wrong about what she’d kept back.”

“Let’s hope you’re not wrong and the deciphering experts confirm your analysis.”

“I am and they will,” predicted Charlie.

“If you are right, there won’t be any more internal problems at this end.”

“What about external? What will we do with it?”

“Not my decision. Our function begins and ends with us advising and protecting the government. Which this certainly does.”

“Irena’s desperate to get out.”

“I’m hardly surprised. You think you’ve got everything?”

“For our immediate needs,” qualified Charlie, deciding not to tell the man why he had to go back to Irena one more time. “A usable passport picture the most difficult. She always stands to hide the burn scars when she’s being photographed. Will there be a problem with the copy of a Russian passport?”

“It won’t be a copy: it’s a genuine, forensically provable document. Which our visa entry and exit stamps will obviously be, as well.”

“No problems there then?”

“You sure you don’t want to copy everything to me electronically rather than use tonight’s diplomatic bag?”

“The bag’s safer in the porous circumstances here inside the embassy. And there might be other things I want to include.”

“That’s how it will come back to you, in the diplomatic bag. You sure she’s capable of going through with it?”

“Her training was a long time ago,” warned Charlie. “And she’s very close to falling apart. The brush contact, to give her the passport, will be the most difficult part.”

“You any idea how much surveillance you’ll be under, leaving the country?”

“A hell of a lot,” accepted Charlie. “And then some. I’ve tried to cover that.”

“What are you going to tell the Russians?”

“That I’m being recalled for consultations. It would help if you could get that officially communicated through their ambassador to their Interior Ministry here.”

“No problem,” promised the Director-General. “Our forensic science people have picked up some discrepancies, particularly in the medical evidence. But I don’t think there’s enough for us to mount a serious objection: certainly not enough to get Oskin’s body back here.”

“I didn’t imagine there would be.”

“Does she suspect that?”

“No,” said Charlie, bluntly.

“You’re not to have any contact with her on the aircraft from Sheremetyevo,” ordered the Director-General. “Or at Heathrow. You’ll probably be under hostile surveillance on the plane and there’ll almost certainly be more from the Russian embassy when you arrive here. We’ll know her from the photograph you’re sending. Warn her she’ll be received by a man and two women, as if they’re relatives or close friends. She’ll be taken at once to a safe house. When it’s judged she’s really safe, she’ll get a house of her own, wherever in England she chooses to live.”

“Make sure that none of the three meeting her has any association, past or present, with anyone here at the embassy. Or with me. I don’t want any recognition to link me with them and by association with Irena.”

“Already ensured.”

“What if Irena asks about money?”

“She’ll have a tax-free income from an index-linked?500,000. Her eventual house or apartment will be paid for, as will all its services and utilities for the rest of her life. Plastic surgery-to alter her appearance, not essentially for the burn scarring, but that can be corrected if it’s medically possible-will be available if she wants it. As well, obviously, as a new, untraceable identity.”

“Apart from not having Ivan and his grave to grieve over, Irena should be happy enough with all that,” acknowledged Charlie.

“You’ve done well, Charlie. Bloody well. And not just there. Here.”

“There’s still a lot-too much-that could go wrong,” cautioned Charlie.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t.”

“Let’s,” agreed Charlie, meaning it.

During the waking moments of a fitful night Charlie had mentally arranged his priorities, paramount among them successfully smuggling Irena out of the country but with other uncertainties still to resolve.

Paula-Jane Venables was already in her section of the intelligence rezidentura, designer demure in blue, smiling up as if in expectation of his arrival.

“You certainly like early mornings,” she greeted, gesturing in invitation to the quietly hissing percolator.

“Coffee would be good,” accepted Charlie. “I needed to speak to London early.”

“Something come up?” she asked at once.

“I’m going back to London.”

“When?”

“A day or two.”

“Is it all over?”

“I’m not sure. I’m closing down the compound apartment: its use is over.” He smiled up as she brought him the coffee.

“Did anything ever come out of it?”

“It was worth a try.”

“What about the postponed Russian press briefing?”

“I’ve got to speak to the Russians about that. London doesn’t seem to think I need to be here for it, even if they reschedule it.”

“Doesn’t seem to have worked out very well for you?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. Sorry that things weren’t easier between us and sorry that it didn’t go better for you. You going to have time for me to reciprocate that lunch?”

“There’s rarely such a thing as a total success in what we do. And I’m not sure at this moment about the lunch. There might be a few more things to close down.”

“It would have helped to have got this one right, though, in the current London climate, wouldn’t it?”

“Would have helped a lot.”

“You didn’t bring your other stuff, to put in the safe?” said the woman, looking pointedly around Charlie as if she might have missed seeing the folder.

“Not quite finished with it all yet,” avoided Charlie. “When I was stationed here permanently the diplomatic bag went around four thirty: is that still the departure time?”

“Four thirty on the button: you can set your watch by it.” Paula-Jane made a vague gesture to the safe in the corner of her office. “What about your briefcase?”

“I’ll pick it up later,” said Charlie. “I’ll let you know about the lunch.”

There was an engaged sign displayed in the occupancy slot of Robertson’s inquiry room door so Charlie continued on to the compound apartment. There were only four logged calls, three from Svetlana Modin and one from Mikhail Guzov. Charlie told the two monitoring technicians that he was closing the operation down but hadn’t yet told Robertson.

“Everything wrapped up then?” suggested one of the men.

“Something like that,” replied Charlie.

Charlie chose a public telephone kiosk at random on Deneznyj pereulok, ensuring he had sufficient coin before finally going into the box. The FSB general answered at once, the condescension very evident until Charlie announced he was being recalled to discuss what London considered a combination of anomalies and discrepancies in the Russian material.

“What anomalies and discrepancies?” demanded Guzov.

“I don’t know-won’t know-until I get back.”

“I don’t. .” Guzov started, before correcting himself. “Neither my ministry nor the government expect this to become an unnecessary, possibly embarrassing dispute. As I am sure neither you nor your government wants, either.”

“I won’t know what my government wants or expects until I return to London,” Charlie parried. “I thought it courteous-part of our continuing cooperation-to advise you. It would be unfortunate, for instance, if any more public statements-certainly a reconvened conference during my absence in London-were prematurely made.”

“I had hoped you would have understood that there is not going to be a reconvened conference: that everything was going to be left to the court hearing.”

“I also hope that will not prove to be a premature decision,” matched Charlie.

“When can we speak again?”

“When I get back from London.”

“When will that be?”

“I’ll call from London, on this number, to tell you.”

“Do that,” demanded the Russian. “I fear there is a risk of some serious, even politically embarrassing, misunderstandings arising between us. Our forensic medical examiners found some inexplicable anomalies and discrepancies in some of your submitted material.”

He couldn’t have hoped for a better advantage, Charlie recognized. “Then it’s fortunate that all the assembled evidence, particularly the embassy victim, remains for further examination.”

Next he called Svetlana Modin, who also responded at once and with similar initial aggression. “We had a deal!”

“There was nothing for us to talk about.”

“How did you know? Because I couldn’t reach you we couldn’t broadcast what I wanted.”

Guzov couldn’t possibly have reached her, to prompt the questions, Charlie knew. “What was it you were going to say?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Try me.”

“That the combined murder dossier is complete, without any English input. And that the spy in your embassy has beaten you. What’s your comment on that?”

“I don’t have one.”

“That’s what I’m saying tonight!”

“What about the covert U.S. and British operation?”

“That it hasn’t yet been stood down.”

“It sounds like you have other, better, sources than me.”

“We had a deal, remember?” Svetlana said for the second time.

“The embassy incident room has been closed down.”

“Thank you,” said the woman, in the belief that she was getting the confirmation she wanted.

“I can always reach you at this number?”

“I want you to.”

“It might be difficult over the next couple of days. I’ll call when I can.”

Charlie’s luck held for the third time with Natalia’s immediate reply to his call. “I’m going back to London but only briefly. I want to see you, talk to you, before I go.” Sure now that the car crash had only been a warning, Charlie was equally sure he hadn’t put Natalia in any danger keeping their McDonald’s rendezvous, any more than he would be doing now.

“I can’t today.”

She hadn’t refused outright, he thought at once. “Tomorrow, the Botanical Gardens? One o’clock?”

“Not the Botanical Gardens,” Natalia refused. “I don’t like old memories.”

Charlie frowned at the rejection. “Where?”

“The restaurant near the gardens.”

“How’s Sasha?”

“She’s made you another picture. It’s a tiger but it doesn’t have any stripes. And it’s blue.”

“Can I buy her a present?”

“No!” refused Natalia. Seeming to realize her sharpness, she added more softly, “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

Irena was already in the apartment when Charlie got there promptly at twelve fifteen, opening the door at once to his knock. “It’s all there,” she said, nodding to the folder he’d left the previous night.

“I’ll take that, too,” said Charlie, nodding to the shrine. The Russians would never release Ivan’s body but at least he could ensure she had her visible memories.

“Why?” she asked, frowning.

“You’ll want it with you in England, won’t you?”

“Yes, but-”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to try to carry it out, do you?”

“I hadn’t thought. .” she groped, uncertainly.

“My way’s guaranteed. We don’t want anything to go wrong, do we?”

“What could go wrong? I don’t really want to part with it.”

“Luggage gets X-rayed as an antiterrorist precaution. Yours could be opened if the medals showed. Get removed. Trust me, Irena. Nothing will happen to any of it.”

Charlie got back to the embassy just after three, with ample time to examine the briefcase retrieved from Paula-Jane’s safe, together with what he’d collected from Irena, and pack it into his specifically assigned and wax-sealed and stamped container inside that night’s untouchable diplomatic shipment to London.

“You’re taking a lot of care,” commented Paula-Jane.

“I always do, just like your godfather, remember?”

When he’d examined it earlier in his rabbit-hutch room, the combination numerals on the briefcase were set as he’d arranged them before it had gone into Paula-Jane’s safe but the pages of the Russian murder file were in a different order from how he’d assembled them and two sheets he’d intentionally inserted back to front from their sequential order had been corrected. And the Savoy suite appeared to be untouched from how he’d left it but every intrusion trap he’d set had been disturbed by intruders who had conducted an otherwise very professional search.

Charlie poured himself the generous Islay single malt he thought he might need and settled himself before his television in good time for Svetlana’s evening broadcast.