Red Star Rising

7

“Good to speak to you after so long.”

It had to be close to five months, Charlie reckoned. “And to speak to you. How are you?”

“Fine. You?”

Did her voice sound as distant as it had when they’d last spoken? Too soon to tell. “Fine. How’s Sasha?”

“Very well,” said Natalia.

Why were important conversations, which he judged this to be, conducted in such mundane, ordinary words? He said: “I’d like to see her while I’m here. You, too, of course. I’m sorry; I didn’t put that very well, did I?”

“She’s away for a few days on a school trip.”

“Isn’t she young to be away on a trip by herself?” Alone in his hotel room, Charlie grimaced as he uttered the words, wishing he could have bitten them back. There was a strict rule between them that he never questioned Natalia about the upbringing of their daughter. “Ignore what I just said. I’m sorry.” It was the second time he’d apologized in less than five minutes: he was sounding like a stumbling idiot, not someone determined to persuade her against all her previous refusals.

“She’s at a regulated camp up in the hills, about ten kilometers outside Moscow. They’re in purpose-built barracks, four girls to a hut. There are three permanent staff, as well as security and two teachers. She can telephone me every day, which she’s doing every day, and she’ll be back in two days.”

“I said I’m. .” began Charlie, stopping short to avoid repeating himself again.

“Of course we should meet. Why not?” said Natalia, helpfully.

“My movements are uncertain.”

“Of course,” Natalia accepted, without needing to ask why. “I’m fairly flexible, although it might be more convenient if we met initially ahead of Sasha getting back.”

“Tomorrow,” demanded Charlie.

Natalia hesitated. “I’ll wait for your call.”

Following that afternoon’s meeting with Pavel and the others, there was every likelihood that some surveillance would be imposed upon him, acknowledged Charlie, relieved that so far he had not detected any telltale delay in anything Natalia had said to indicate an interception already on his hotel phone. He had to assume, though, that the hotel line was unsafe. And he knew that cell phones could just as easily be scanned. “I’ll use public phones to contact you from now on.”

“I see.”

“And you shouldn’t try to call me here again.”

“No.”

Charlie had forgotten the long-ago subterfuge he and Natalia had needed to stay safe and didn’t imagine Natalia would welcome the rigmarole again, certainly not at the risk it created for Sasha. “I hadn’t properly thought the nonsense through.”

“Neither had I.”

“We can make it work, though,” urgently insisted Charlie, worried by the difficulty, angry at himself that he hadn’t considered it earlier. But then he hadn’t expected the reception committee awaiting him in Pavel’s Petrovka office, which he’d left less than an hour ago and still had to assess. Not any sort of excuse, he criticized himself.

“We both need to think about that,” said Natalia, cautiously. “Particularly where we meet.”

She was very sensibly putting her apartment-her and Sasha’s apartment-off limits, Charlie recognized. The hotel would obviously be impossible, too. “We’ll talk about it when I phone.”

“Definitely before Sasha gets back.”

“Definitely,” agreed Charlie.

“I’ll be waiting.”

Charlie remained listening after Natalia replaced her receiver, relieved at not hearing a second intruding disconnection, reminding himself at the same time that Russian technology would have obviously improved since he’d last worked here. Harry Fish, whose knowledge Charlie respected, had described the listening devices at the embassy as state of the art.

Which was the expression Fish used again the following day, when Charlie entered the assigned inquiry room at the embassy to find the electronics expert with Paul Robertson, the London director of internal counterintelligence, whose peremptory summons had been awaiting Charlie the moment he’d arrived at the embassy.

Fish had three more pinhead devices laid out, again on a white cloth. Nodding to them, the man said: “One was in the terminal relay to the ambassador’s personal phone, the second in that of his personal assistant. The third was on Dawkins’s line. All the bafflers on every terminal, put there to defeat just such emplacements, had been removed.”

“We’ve had our differences in the past,” Robertson immediately reminded Charlie, clearly expecting to take command and control of everything. “That’s where they are, in the past. And where they’ll stay. I want this all wrapped up, which also means I want your input. Which further means I want to know everything you’ve discovered and how it’s going to help me. . ” The sallow-faced man jerked his head sideways, to the electronics expert. “Harry’s told me what he helped you do, so I don’t want any of that bullshit, which I don’t anticipate the Director-General will, either, so we won’t involve him in any discussion about it.”

Two major differences, Charlie remembered. The first had arisen when Robertson had suggested the wrong traitor in a long-ago operation which he’d overturned by identifying the correct one. On the second occasion, Robertson had wrongly accused Charlie of security negligence and been officially censured in the subsequent exonerating inquiry. Charlie had suspected then the personal accusation had been in revenge for Robertson’s initial mistake and didn’t have any doubt about the personal animosity involved this time. How much lower-and heavier-was the sky going to come down on his head? Looking to the other man, Charlie said, “Thanks, Harry, for the discretion.”

“Trying to con the Russians as you are doing is a stupid idea that isn’t going to work and I’m not going to be pulled down by it. Or by you,” returned Fish. “I’ve got friends now stacking supermarket shelves who got too closely involved with you!”

“Let’s not get petulant,” warned Robertson. “Tell me what you know!”

Fuck both of you, thought Charlie. “Is this embassy now totally clean?”

“Guaranteed,” confirmed Fish.

“Which isn’t any reassurance,” dismissed Charlie. “They scored ten out of ten, with a gold star. There had to be inside guidance for them to have hit every target like that as well as removing the counterprotection, in the limited times between Stout going back and forth between the control boxes and CCTVs to check they were working properly after they were supposedly fixed.”

“Our conclusion, too,” said Robertson. “Which gives us a mole hunt and one hell of a problem. The Director-General has told me you’re working directly to him, quite independently of what we’re trying to do. Which is why it’s only you here with Harry and me. And why Harry’s shown you what else he’s found, to give you some idea of the mess we’re in. All I want is your opinion.”

Charlie’s first thought was that what Robertson had just said was a very bad attempt to give the impression that the Director-General had sanctioned this meeting. Aubrey Smith’s edict categorically precluded his cooperation-even his taking part in this conversation-ridiculous though it seemed in the circumstances.

“Do you think the two are separate: your murder having no connection whatsoever with the planting of the listening equipment?” demanded Robertson. “Or, from what you’ve so far discovered, do you think they are linked in some way?”

“You know I’ll have to give a full account of this meeting to the Director-General?” said Charlie, determined against a bureaucratic misdemeanor suddenly biting him in the ass.

“I accept that completely,” assured Robertson. “I’ve already told Smith what I’m asking you.”

Charlie doubted he had been as specific as that. “Until now, until you showed me those three new bugs and we both reached the same conclusion about the FSB having a source embedded within the embassy, I was working on the assumption-an assumption so far without any positive proof-that the Russian electricians were FSB opportunists, not able to believe their luck at being called in by our idiot head of security with the permission of our equally idiotic diplomats. But I had a problem with that assumption; still do have a problem.” Charlie nodded to the miniscule devices on the desk between them. “State of the art, Harry calls them. That’s what the FSB electricians who installed them would have been, state-of-the-art experts at their jobs. And having installed them, they wouldn’t have left the electrics so fucked up that they continued to malfunction, for the bugs to be found when Harry and his team arrived. .” Charlie paused, caught by an unprompted thought. “Unless. .?”

“Unless what?” demanded Fish.

Charlie waited for the conjecture to get firmer in his mind and when it did, although not completely, he said: “I don’t at this moment fully see how this helps any assessment. But how about the FSB technicians not having enough time to do all they wanted at their first opportunity? So they do something to continue the problem, expecting to be called in a second time to get a lot more devices into a lot more sites?”

“But then you arrive to investigate the murder, the security idiots here know they’ve broken the rules, and they start doing things properly and call in Harry and his team?” anticipated Robertson, smiling.

“No,” rejected Charlie, refusing to be tricked into confirming the other man’s conclusion. “The way I understand it-and this can be checked-the alert to London that brought Harry here was sounded before I arrived. .” He hesitated again, unsure whether to continue but then asked, “You spoken to David Halliday yet?”

“No,” said Robertson.

“He’s told me he’s been warning London for the past six months that there’s virtually no internal security here,” said Charlie. “Check his log, to see if he knew locals were being called in before they actually arrived to look at the problem. And if it was another message from him, when the CCTV continued to malfunction afterward, that brought Harry here.”

“We’re throwing up some interesting hypotheses but you haven’t yet given me an answer to whether you believe our two investigations are linked or separate,” complained Robertson.

Throughout the discussion, Charlie had been sifting what he felt comfortable sharing with the other two men against the risk-heightened now by the suspicion of the FSB having a source inside the embassy-of either Robertson or Fish, or both of them, inadvertently saying something that would ruin his dangerously uncertain bluff. Cautiously Charlie said, “I think there is a link. Whoever killed my man needed to sabotage the CCTV systems to get in and out without being detected. What about there being someone inside the embassy-the mole-who separately carried out the initial entry sabotage?”

“Which doesn’t give me any direction in which to work,” Robertson continued to complain.

“It does!” contradicted Charlie, at once. “Until now, until Harry found the additional three bugs where he found them-and we talked it through-you didn’t suspect there was a mole in the embassy. Now you do.”

“And wish I didn’t,” said the counterintelligence director.

Charlie didn’t immediately access the London messages waiting for him in the communications room, intent upon filing without any interfering distraction his own account to the Director-General of the meeting with Robertson, needing two drafts before being satisfied. The writing and rewriting provided the opportunity for Charlie to assess the impact upon his independent investigation of a potential FSB source within the building, reassured at his eventual conclusion that it affected him very little. He’d neither used any compromised telephone connections nor taken anything out of the secure communications system in which he now sat. Looking up to Ross Perrit, the communications controller, Charlie said, “Who else has access to my Eyes Only password to London?”

“No one but you,” said Perrit, a vaguely mannered, seemingly distracted man whom Charlie knew to be anything but vague or distracted.

“What about you?”

Perrit sighed, although not offended. “I didn’t give it to you, remember? You used your London password when you logged on from here and it was from London that you got your operational code. I don’t know what it is.”

“So no one here in this embassy, not even you, can read my traffic?”

“You got something specific, something very specific, you really want to ask me?” pointedly asked the no longer vague or distracted man, abandoning whatever it was he had been doing at another computer terminal to walk over to Charlie’s station.

He had, accepted Charlie, betrayed his knowledge of a so far undisclosed double-agent situation in exactly the same way as he’d feared Harry Fish or Paul Robertson might have let slip anything he told them about the chicanery he was orchestrating. “I was just trying to resolve a question that suddenly came to me.”

“And now that you’ve got my undivided attention, why don’t you ask me the question and let me help you answer it?” challenged the man.

“You just have,” avoided Charlie.

“I know the meaning of security,” belligerently reminded Perrit. “It’s what I’m here for.”

“My misunderstanding,” retreated Charlie. “Let’s not let things get out of proportion.”

“You’re right,” said Perrit. “Let’s not!”

Charlie was neither intimidated nor embarrassed by the confrontation-rather, he was encouraged at the confirmation of remaining out of danger-and his spirits lifted further when he finally opened his personal, Eyes Only file from the London scientist. All the false enhancement and manipulation he’d asked for, particularly on the CCTV loops, was both technically possible and technically undetectable. It did, though, require the personal authority of the Director-General.

Charlie looked up at the unexpected return of Ross Perrit, who said without any explanation or preamble, apart from indicating the single strut suspended, doubly secure box within the communications room: “You’ve got Booth Two.”

“Who’s in Booth One?” asked Charlie, instinctively.

Perrit walked away, pointedly not replying.

“I’ve spoken to Robertson,” announced the Director-General, answering Charlie’s question that Perrit had just refused. “What the hell’s happening over there!”

“Too many things, all of them too quickly one after the other.”

“Meaning?” demanded Aubrey Smith. He usually had a soft, never-surprised voice, which Charlie guessed was being stretched to the extreme.

“The embassy’s being manipulated, for a reason or reasons I don’t at the moment understand,” replied Charlie, honestly.

“You in any way compromised or endangered?”

“No,” assured Charlie at once, glad of the review time.

“Do you need backup?”

“No,” said Charlie again, the refusal more professional than self-protective. “More people would mean more confusion, which might well be one of the several intentions.” He hesitated. “On the subject of backup, David Halliday, the MI6 man here, is anxious to get involved. He told me his director was approaching you directly, to talk about it.”

“I don’t like Gerald Monsford and certainly don’t respect his judgement,” said Smith. “He did approach me. I told him no.”

“Thank you,” said Charlie. “I appreciate that.”

“But with so much dependent upon your total success, I’m unsure if you can any longer operate alone.”

“I can!” insisted Charlie.

“I’m keeping open the option of sending in a team.”

“Would I be in charge of it?” asked Charlie, desperately.

“No,” refused the other man, without any hesitation. “What’s the point of all this you’ve asked the technical division to create?”

“To avoid being excluded by the Russians claiming it’s their investigation in which we have no right of participation.”

“No,” agreed the soft-voiced man at once. “We most definitely don’t want that with everything else that’s happening there.”

“Technical say it’s got to have your personal approval.”

“It’ll be authorized the moment we conclude this conversation. I don’t like so much appearing to happen beyond our control. You any idea, the faintest suspicion, who the traitor might be?”

Charlie was caught by the pedantically correct word. “Finding whoever it is isn’t my remit.”

“Neither was it the point of my question.”

“Not yet,” prevaricated Charlie, on this occasion more for self-protection than strict professionalism. “How do I deal with it, if I become suspicious?”

“The way you’re being told right now, only and directly through me. I don’t want another quiet exchange between you, Fish, and Robertson.”

Smith was invoking the most inviolable rule of double-agent penetration, Charlie recognized: slam shut every water-tight door and not answer anyone’s knock. “I understand.”

“I hope you do. I sent you there to do a job, not to become a puppet.”

The self-directed anger at allowing himself to be sidetracked physically burned through Charlie. Robertson had occupied the adjoining compartment ahead of his, Charlie acknowledged, able to get his explanation and story in first. But to whom? Charlie opened his mouth but stopped himself, knowing to attempt a defense would be a further mistake. “I’ll call, if there’s something positive from what I’m doing.”

“I’m expecting you to,” said the other man.

Charlie had subjugated his irritation at having made the cooperation mistake by the time he reached his rabbit-hutch office, more curious at the first than at the second of the two voice-mail messages awaiting him, although choosing to respond to the second.

“I’ve pressed the pathologist for more,” announced Pavel.

Liar, thought Charlie at once. Pavel was offering everything that had been originally available instead of the scraps the man had imagined he could get away with. But it was looking promising. “And?”

“He’s talking about some additional medical findings. And there’s a lot more photographs.”

“I’ll stop by the mortuary first thing tomorrow,” tempted Charlie.

“We could go together,” said Pavel, as Charlie had expected. “We might as well go through it all together.”

Once again bullshit had proved to be the magic fertilizer. “How about my meeting you there at ten?”

“Perfect timing for me,” agreed Pavel.

“What about the others who were there the first time?” pressed Charlie, wanting as much forewarning as possible.

“I’ll let them all know the arrangement,” promised Pavel. “I understand there’s been contact between Nikita Kashev and your embassy?”

“I haven’t heard,” said Charlie, honestly. And wouldn’t have confirmed it if I had, he thought. It had been an unthinking question, even from someone as anxious as the organized crime investigator.

“How about your scientific people in London?” Pavel pressed.

“I haven’t heard anything from them, either,” lied Charlie. Deciding, though, that he should make a gesture, he added, “I’ll drop by the embassy before I come to the mortuary to check if anything comes in overnight.”

“It would be good to hear something that takes the investigation forward.”

It very definitely would, thought Charlie. It would be premature to become overconfident from this very preliminary conversation, but it looked as if he’d kept himself on the inside of the investigation. But in terms of practicality, the inquiry hadn’t moved a stumbling step from the finding of the body.

“Surprised to hear from you so soon after our dinner,” opened Charlie, finally responding to the other voice mail from Bundy.

“I’d welcome talking to someone whose experience and opinions I respect,” said Bundy.

Bollocks, dismissed Charlie. “Been away too long myself to get up to speed yet.”

“You certainly hit the ground at a busy time.”

“Maybe one that talking about on an open-line telephone isn’t such a good idea, unless you’re equipped with an intercept white noise cutout at your end.”

Bundy laughed. “You’re not trying to tell me you’re calling on a phone that hasn’t been swept clean enough to shine in the dark?”

I’m not but someone else already has, decided Charlie. And it was all too easy to decide who that person was. “I’m still uncomfortable after an episode like this.”

“You wouldn’t be on top of your job, which you always have been, if you weren’t more than uncomfortable,” overflattered the American. “We talked the other night about lunch. How about it?”

Charlie’s instinctive inclination was to make an excuse, just as quickly discarded. Charlie was as much a learn-everything Russophile as Bill Bundy and wanted very much to discover the reason for Bundy’s inexplicable interest in him. He was also anxious to get off the telephone and out of the embassy to make contact with Natalia. “Lunch would be good.”

“How about tomorrow? The Pekin on the ring road?”

He now had Bundy’s direct line to cancel if the mortuary visit went on longer than he expected. “One o’clock unless I have to cry off.”

“I hope you don’t cry off,” said the American.

To make what he judged the far more important call Charlie used the same telephone kiosk farther along Smolenskaya from which he’d rearranged his dinner date with Paula-Jane, with whom he guessed he was going to have a confrontation the following day.

“How about the Botanical Gardens?” he suggested, when she answered.

He heard-or hoped he heard-her faint laugh at the venue: the gardens, with their huge cultivation greenhouses, had been one of their tryst locations when he’d first maneuverd the posting to Moscow after learning of Sasha’s existence. “How long will you need to be sure?”

“Two hours should be more than enough,” said Charlie, knowing Natalia wouldn’t require the same amount of time to ensure she wasn’t under surveillance. He also knew that she would still take every precaution.

“Eight then,” accepted Natalia. “The tropical plant greenhouse, as always.”

She’d even remembered the specific meeting spot, Charlie recognized, encouraged.