Red Star Rising

5

The postal system of Moscow is as haphazard as its swirling winter blizzards, even in the topsy-turvy summer in which the city was now embalmed. In little more than a twenty-four-hour period it would have been impossible for Natalia to have given a written response to Charlie’s note. Despite which, in the unlikely event of her having received it and decided instead to telephone the Savoy, Charlie still waited until long after any delivery before at last calling the number Sergei Pavel had given him for the organized crime bureau at Ulitsa Petrovka. Charlie had forgotten the Russian system of individually assigned numbers, expecting a general switchboard, and was momentarily surprised when the militia colonel personally answered.

“I’d expected contact before now,” said the man, when Charlie identified himself. The voice was bland, practically monotone, without any criticism at the delay.

“There’ve been some unforeseen developments at the embassy.”

There was the hesitation that Charlie hoped to engender and the tone of Pavel’s voice changed. “What unforeseen developments?”

“Things we need to talk about,” generalized Charlie. “Thought I’d give a couple of days, too, for all the other things we discussed at the mortuary to come together. . fuller pathology details, photographs of the scene, further forensic findings, stuff like that.”

“There are a few things, not all,” begrudged the Russian, cautiously.

“I’d hoped we could get together some time today, take it all forward?”

“We’re certain that the murder wasn’t committed anywhere near where the body was found, which makes it a Russian investigation,” declared Pavel, as if he were reading from a prompt card.

Altogether too soon, too quick, judged Charlie: he could afford to bluff more. “That’s intriguing.”

“Why?’ demanded Pavel, the curiosity very evident in the no longer neutral voice.

“It’s not quite either the indication or the impression I’ve been getting from those who’ve come across from London to go through everything at the embassy,” lured Charlie, knowing the arrival of Harry Fish and his team-and their digging expedition the previous afternoon-would have been recorded by the diligent FSB gardener informers, even if Pavel himself was at the moment unaware. “We really do need to meet. Exactly how many of the reports have you managed to assemble?”

“Some photographs. . the preliminary medical report,” stumbled the other man, confronted with something different from what he’d expected.

Charlie doubted that whatever Pavel was minimally offering was actually assembled yet. To give the Russian time to go through the pretense of collation-and doubtless speak to others about the unexpected approach-he said, “Why don’t I come around this afternoon, for us to get started? Three o’clock’s good for me.”

There was another hesitation. “I should have everything together by then, although I can’t guarantee it.”

If the Russian wasn’t sure he could get his own bullshit together in five hours, nothing at all had yet been assembled. Not believing that possible, Charlie said, “It’ll be a start.”

Which wasn’t any way the object of Charlie’s exercise. It was to bluff Pavel, and through him the inevitable monitoring FSB and Foreign Ministry, that there was a lot they’d missed in their comparatively short forensic examination at the scene inside the British embassy grounds. The FSB bugging of the embassy electronics worked more to his benefit than theirs in taking advantage of the security stupidity presented to them on a shiny silver platter. They’d believe him because he would be telling them what they already knew. Or imagined they knew. He was going to have a dream hand for his poker game. The expertise was going to come in his not overplaying it.

The scurrying activity at the embassy reminded Charlie of an anthill. There were at least a dozen photographers and journalists grouped outside the firmly closed gates and there was uniformed security forming an admission cordon around the pedestrian entrance adjoining the gatehouse. Inside the gatehouse, the now properly working CCTV cameras displayed in sharp panoramic detail the entire front of the building. Charlie endured the ritual of ID checks and descended into the communications room. Waiting there for him was a warning from the head of the technical and scientific services division that, until the arrival of the discarded CCTV loops, they could not guarantee his detailed overnight request was possible-their more normal function was to detect counterfeit and deceiving enhancement, not create it-but that what Charlie wanted was certainly scientifically and technically feasible: It might help, after they’d received the recording material, for Charlie to talk directly by telephone, as well as in more detailed messages answering their specific questions. Charlie detected a note of tetchy irritation in the assurance that they had samples of 9mm Makarov ammunition. There was also a personal acknowledgement from Director-General Aubrey Smith, insisting that Charlie continue working not just totally independently from everyone at the embassy-especially those most likely to have been compromised-but also from the incoming internal inquiry team. All communication had to be personal, between the two of them, which left Charlie undecided between the advantages compared to the disadvantages of such close contact with the man who for several months had appeared the loser in the power struggle with his deputy. Smith was a university professor of Middle Eastern studies and an acknowledged expert on the revolutionary movements of the region, who had been pitchforked from academia into intelligence in a knee-jerk reaction to Islamic fanaticism. Smith’s way was ingrained from that academic background to consider and judge events from every perspective. It had seemed to chime with Charlie’s independent way of working and he enjoyed having Smith’s confidence, which in matching measure had alienated him from Jeffrey Smale. And, survival savvy as he was, Charlie was well aware that his job security depended upon Smith emerging the victor in the current department power struggle.

For once Paula-Jane Venables and David Halliday were in their offices, both doors closed with NOT TO BE DISTURBED signs in their occupancy slots, which Charlie ignored, still with time to fill before his appointment with the embassy lawyer. The woman jerked up irritably at his unannounced entry, relaxing when she saw who it was.

“This is proving to be an absolute fucking nightmare!” she announced, unasked.

“How bad could it be, bottom line?” asked Charlie. His being forbidden to share anything upon which he was engaged was no obstacle to his learning as much as he could about everything else in the embassy.

“God only knows. I’m going to have to admit gaps in the telephone log I’m supposed to have kept but haven’t.”

“Don’t admit anything,” advised Charlie, the survival expert. “Wait until you’re asked, answer one question at a time, and don’t volunteer anything.”

“At the moment, I’m guessing the bastards could have listened to something in the region of a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty, incoming and outgoing calls.”

“What about written stuff?”

“Luckier there. I do have a full log of the sensitive e-mail material and it’s all gone through the communications room, which your friend Harry Fish tells me isn’t compromised.”

“You’re not supposed to rely upon luck,” reminded Charlie.

“You’ve been seconded to the internal inquiry team as well!” she challenged.

“No,” said Charlie, mildly. “But if I were, that would have been the wrong response. You didn’t open the doors to let the bad guys in. As far as I am aware, it was Reg Stout, under Dawkins’s authority, condoned by an ineffectual ambassador. You haven’t got any reason to be defensive. All you’ve got to do is warn the guys who are coming from London of anything the FSB might have learned.”

“I just told you, my telephone logs-the logs they are going to want to examine and question me about-aren’t complete.”

“How much-how many-can you remember of what you haven’t logged?”

“Most of it, I’m pretty sure.”

“So verbally include from memory whatever’s missing from the log when you’re questioned in detail about your telephone records.”

“Considering the way I greeted you when you arrived, you’re being very kind,” said Paula-Jane, smiling.

“Who told you I was anything otherwise?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said the woman, her initial uptightness easing. “I want to make amends!”

“I’m not sure you’ve got any amends to make,” coaxed Charlie, curious to know who’d been digging the mantraps ahead of him.

“I am,” she insisted. “I’ve been invited to a dinner party tonight by the current CIA guy at the American embassy. And I don’t have a partner. Would you have a problem filling the vacancy?”

Charlie found an immediate response difficult, the uncertainty of Natalia’s reaction to his letter in the forefront of his mind. If she missed him on her first call, she’d phone again, came the quick reassurance. It was unlikely there’d be any professional benefit socializing with the Americans, but there was always the possibility of the unexpected. Which was all Charlie ever asked for, a simple possibility. “That could be fun.”

“Let’s try to make sure it is.”

“Don’t tell me it’s a nightmare: I’ve been told that already.”

Halliday gestured Charlie farther into the unexpectedly littered MI6 rezidentura, files, dossiers, and newspapers-English language as well as Russian-overflowing from benches and side desks onto a floor shadowed by unclosed cabinets and open desk drawers. Halliday said, “Not as bad as it looks.”

“Which looks bad enough,” commiserated Charlie, needing to move some of the records to take the offered seat. The headline in that day’s unfiled Moscow News on top of the heap read: MYSTERY DEEPENS IN BRITISH EMBASSY MURDER.

Halliday shook his head, smiling. “On open, possibly intercepted transmission, little more than embarrassment. A lot of analyses about Stepan Lvov’s presidential chances, which is occupying every Western embassy in Moscow and shouldn’t surprise anyone in the FSB. My judgement is that Lvov’s a shoo-in, so if I’m right, it’s not even embarrassing that we’ve been monitoring him. If he loses, I’m a bad analyst they don’t have to worry about keeping too close an eye on.”

“Very pragmatic,” complimented Charlie. “I’ve never seen so many worried people running around so many corridors. Or quite so many journalists, cameramen, and TV crews outside this embassy.”

“The inquisitors are due any time, thumbscrews and all.

There’s bound to be a lot of other transgressions swept up in the spring cleaning. And Reg Stout, who’s rightly shitting himself, says he’s called the militia to clear the media away.”

“He told me he hardly speaks Russian.”

Halliday shrugged. “He’s always talking through the hole in his ass.”

“How worried are you about the internal inquiry?”

Halliday smiled again. “I certainly didn’t let the FSB bug-masters in.”

“You must have recognized how fucked up the security was here, before the shit hit the fan?”

Halliday patted the closest folder to him on his desk. “I did, long before the shit hit any fan. And here’s the log, with attached copies of every warning message I’ve sent to London over the last six months. London’s going to have a lot of self-explaining to do, as well as the idiots here. .” The man patted his special folder again. “With this already on my record, I’m going to come out of this inquiry smelling like a rose.”

“Always better than smelling of shit,” agreed Charlie.

“I told Monsford, my director, you’d declined my offer of help, by the way. He said he might take it up with your boss. Thought you should know in advance.”

“I appreciate your telling me that,” said Charlie, deciding at that moment that although admiring Halliday’s apparent professionalism, he didn’t personally like the man. But then, Charlie asked himself, when had liking someone have anything to do with anything?

Charlie had wondered if in five years the official interior design preponderance of desk and countertop Bakelite with matching linoleum floor covering would have disappeared but, of course, it hadn’t-it just became more scratched and scuffed. The insolent, blank-faced disinterest of the counter clerk at Ulitsa Petrovka was the same as Charlie remembered, too: Charlie’s guess at four minutes before the man would bother to look up from the curled-edged, unturned page of what he was reading was short by an additional full minute.

“Important to keep up to date with all the regulations,” sympathized Charlie, sure the man was looking at the latest office-circulating porn magazine: the clerk was two pages short of the photographic offerings.

There was grunted surprise at Charlie’s mockery being in Russian. “You the Englishman to see Sergei Romanovich Pavel?”

“That’s me,” agreed Charlie, equally surprised at the expectation.

“It’s the top floor, second door on the right when you get there,” dismissed the man, nodding toward the linoleum-clad stairs as he went back to his magazine.

Charlie took his time and was glad he did. The top floor was six flights up, and by the time he got there his feet were burning and he was panting, even though he’d paced himself. He’d passed seven people on the way up two of them women, and been ignored by them all, despite being an unauthorized, foreign stranger. It wasn’t casual security, Charlie decided, but stage management to indicate his unimportance. Charlie waited until he’d fully recovered his breath before knocking on the identified door. He had to knock twice more before there was an unintelligible shout beyond, which he took to be an invitation to enter. The outside office was empty, but Pavel was visible through the open door of the next room, behind a cluttered desk. The man’s jacket was looped around the back of his chair, crushed by his leaning back against it. Pavel’s tie was loosened and his shirt collar open. The shirt and tie, as well as the suit, were what the man had worn at the mortuary: at least, Charlie thought, he’d changed his own shirt. And socks. It reminded him he needed to get some laundry done at the hotel. He supposed he’d have to change again, into the better of his two suits, for that evening’s dinner with Paula-Jane’s American friends.

“At last!” greeted Pavel.

“There’s been time for things to develop.”

“I’m looking forward to hearing what they are,” encouraged Pavel.

“As I am from you,” parried Charlie, anxious to get the exchange on his terms.

Pavel pushed two folders through an already cleared space on his desk. “The photographs and the pathology findings of Dr. Ivanov.”

The meeting was obviously being recorded, Charlie accepted, disbelieving the apparent casualness with which he had been allowed to walk unescorted around the building. He couldn’t isolate a lens but he had to assume the encounter was being filmed, too, so he had to be careful even with facial reactions. There were twelve images in the album, which Charlie instantly decided were inadequate without needing any closer examination. The only two pictures of the flower-bed hole, dug to retrieve blood samples and perhaps the bullet, gave no indication of its depth from which to assess the amount of soil removed. Charlie merely flicked through the pathologist’s report, without trying to read anything, judging it equally inadequate simply from its thinness, allowing the frown for the benefit of the undetected camera. He said; “This is only a preliminary medical report, of course? And I’m disappointed there aren’t more photographs.”

“I understood from Dr. Ivanov that it was complete,” equivocated Pavel, giving himself an escape from the challenge.

“It’ll obviously be necessary to talk it all through with the pathologist after I’ve read it in detail,” said Charlie. “Might have to send it to London, to be checked through there.”

“You said there had been developments?” pressed the Russian.

“Most of which I don’t fully understand and others of which are very awkward,” said Charlie. “I’m particularly concerned that our working relations and arrangements could be affected.”

“I need you to explain precisely what you’re telling me,” protested Pavel. There was no longer any bland condescension.

“I’ll set out everything as clearly as I can,” said Charlie, without the slightest intention of doing anything of the sort. “On the phone, you said you were certain that the man wasn’t murdered in the embassy grounds?”

Pavel shifted at the onus being put upon him. “We recovered a lot of earth, where the shattered head lay. There was remarkably little blood residue, scarcely more than a liter. Very little bone or skin debris, either. And most certainly no bullet, which there obviously would have been if he’d been shot where and how he was found.”

Far, far too complacent and far too obviously rehearsed, recognized Charlie: if it hadn’t been so overwhelmingly to his own benefit he might even have been offended at the contemptuous dismissal. “If he had been already lying face down,” agreed Charlie. “Not if he’d been standing up. .” He let the pause in, enjoying his own performance. “Or kneeling, to be executed, which is what our forensic pathologist believes to have been the position in which he was shot and which there is some evidence to support. There’s a substantial grooved mark close to the base of the wall of the conference hall, and a lot of blood and possibly debris at least half a yard from where the body fell and was found.”

“I didn’t see anything like that,” broke in Pavel, forward in his chair now, no longer lounged back, creasing his jacket.

“From what I’ve been told everything was rushed, confused,” said Charlie. “We’ve obviously collected a lot of the other blood-soaked earth quite a way away from where you dug. . ” He lifted what the Russians had bothered to include in the photographic selection. “Very much more than your scientist appears to have done. It’s being sifted as well as electronically searched, to find the bullet. The forensic scientist calculated the most likely trajectory from the mark on the wall.”

“Where is it, all this other forensic material?” demanded the Russian.

Charlie hesitated, as if discomfited by a too difficult question. “In London. It’s all been shipped back for further and more detailed examination.” He knew the size of the untouchable diplomatic shipment, including everything Harry Fish had helped him assemble, would have been logged by the FSB staff at Sheremetyevo Airport as a matter of course.

“There are more than adequate forensic facilities here,” said Pavel, tightly.

Charlie remained silent for several moments, looking down as if either in contemplation or unwillingness even to look directly at Sergei Pavel. Eventually he said, “There is a problem. I know-accept-that it is not of your creation: that you don’t know anything about it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what you and I have been assigned to do, but it has obviously affected the thinking in London.”

The bewilderment was mirrored on Pavel’s face. “Something else I don’t understand?”

“What I am going to tell you, I do as an indication of how much I value our further and continued cooperation,” said Charlie. “I ask you, at the same time, to treat it in the strictest confidence. I do not yet know what my government intends publicly to do about it but I certainly don’t wish either of us to be accused of initiating a diplomatic incident.”

“What’s going on? What’s happened?”

Charlie’s assessment of Pavel’s reaction was that the Russian had no knowledge of the embassy bugging. “I have your assurance that what I am going to tell you remains strictly between the two of us?”

“Upon the honor of my mother,” pledged the man.

Who must have been a 50-kopeck whore if Pavel were to be believed, gauged Charlie. “The embassy sought the help of local electricians-recommended by your Foreign Ministry-to rectify some faults in its security system, particularly the CCTV cameras. Some spying apparatus was installed while Russian electricians were within the embassy.”

Pavel shook his head. “I did not know. .”

“I am not accusing you. I’ve given you my confidence for you to understand the attitude of people to whom I am responsible: why they ordered whatever their forensic people retrieved to be examined and tested in London, instead of here, by your people.”

“How can we be expected to continue with such a barrier between us?” Pavel asked, desperately. “It’s been made impossible.”

Charlie hadn’t anticipated that capitulation and the alarm swept through him. “It’s only impossible if we allow it to become so. We have to cut ourselves off from it, entirely. But if we are going to continue with total openness between each other, there is something further I must tell you, because it affects our investigation.”

“What more can there be?”

“The CCTV cameras kept failing, intermittently, finally failing altogether. But there are some images upon them: images of what could be our murder victim and those who killed him.”

The Russian’s complete silence, the man’s inability momentarily even to speak, further convinced Charlie of Pavel’s ignorance of the spying intrusion. At last, Pavel haltingly managed: “The films, the recordings, whatever they are? Where are they?”

“Back in London, being enhanced, with all the other recovered material.”

“Is it possible that you will get identifiable pictures?”

“That is what our scientists are trying to achieve.”

Sergei Pavel personally escorted Charlie down to the ground-floor reception area, animatedly assuring daily contact.

Charlie felt a satisfying warmth at how Pavel’s attitude-from dismissal to reliance-had changed. Charlie’s estimate of how long it would take Sergei Pavel to contact the FSB’s Mikhail Guzov at the Lubyanka coincided with his reaching a pavement newsstand, at which he was brought to a halt by the Moscow News billboard. There was no other story on its front page apart from the bugging of the British embassy, with a sidebar speculation of it plunging diplomatic relations between Russia and Britain back to the frostbitten era of the Cold War. His revelation to Pavel was far too recent for the Russian detective to be the source. So which of the others at yesterday’s confrontation in Sir Thomas Sotley’s suite hadn’t been able to keep their undertaking of secrecy?