Bomb Grade

by Brian Freemantle

  She nodded. ‘That. And a lot more. How are things otherwise?‘

  ‘Otherwise?’ said Charlie, playing the game. It wasn’t much but it was better than sobbing into their drinks like everyone else.

  ‘You happy?’

  ‘Happy enough.’

  ‘With anyone?’

  ‘On and off.’

  ‘Nothing permanent then?’

  ‘Nothing permanent.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  Why couldn’t it have been like this when he’d tried to know her better? ‘That won’t last, someone as pretty as you,’ he said, gallantly. She didn’t try to refasten the top button of her shirt that suddenly gave way under the strain.

  ‘Do you want to stay here much longer?’ she invited.

  ‘I wasn’t going to, anyway,’ said Charlie. ‘Got something fixed up.’ It had been a depressing mistake to come at all.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, crushed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ apologized Charlie, still gallant. ‘I didn’t know you’d be here. Can’t cancel it now.’

  ‘Some other time maybe,’ she suggested, without offering a telephone number.

  ‘Sure,’ agreed Charlie, without asking for one.

  There was another wet embrace and the insistence they keep in touch from Billy Baker and a shrill giggle from the Chinese girl and a lot of damp handshakes as he made his way out of the room and down the tilting stairs into Westminster Bridge Road. The death of the dinosaurs, he thought, breathing deeply in the darkness: or rather, their funeral. He looked sideways towards the old headquarters building, expecting it to be in darkness, but it wasn’t. It was bright with the permanent office lights of whatever ministerial department had taken it over. Gerald Williams would shit himself at the thought of the electricity bill, thought Charlie.

  ‘Seems you’ve covered all that’s necessary,’ encouraged the Director-General.

  ‘There’s a scientific and military mission in Moscow at the moment. I’ve asked them to give him the technical briefing before they leave.’

  ‘That’s a good idea.’

  ‘Williams is complaining we’ve made too many financial concessions.’

  ‘He’s memoed me direct, covering his back against any Treasury enquiry.’ Dean was unaccustomed to bureaucratic politics. He’d started out finding it amusing, but not any more. If half his students had behaved in the back-biting, self-serving way of virtually all the people he worked with now, he’d have suspended them from their courses until they grew up. He wished he felt more comfortable with Johnson.

  The deputy Director smiled. ‘Muffin’s certainly pushed it to the very edge.’

  Dean made a vague gesture over his desk, somewhere in the disorder of which Johnson presumed Charlie Muffin’s file was buried. ‘He’s always pushed everything to the edge.’

  ‘I can monitor that closely enough.’

  ‘It seems to have been difficult in the past.’

  ‘I wasn’t the person controlling him in the past.’

  ‘Are you now? I thought the committee had been established to do that?’ The other man’s arrogance was irritating.

  Johnson bristled. ‘I meant on a day-to-day basis.’

  ‘There’s been a Director to Director note, from Fenby: he’s making a personal visit to London to meet me,’ disclosed Dean.

  ‘You’ll like him,’ predicted Johnson, who already knew of the visit but wanted to remind the other man of his longer experience of the department. ‘He sees the grand picture: the sort of man who knows that politics is the art of the possible.’

  At the beginning of their relationship Dean had suspected Johnson’s frequent invocation of Bismarck aphorisms to be a mockery of his previous academic career but he’d learned since that the German genuinely was Johnson’s hero, which was perhaps understandable in view of Johnson’s Foreign Office association. Dean twirled his spectacles prayer-bead fashion and said, ‘I hope Muffin really understands just how much politics is involved.’

  ‘I can monitor that, too,’ insisted Johnson.

  John Fenby thought being the Director of FBI was like being the maker of the best Swiss clock whose wheels and cogs meshed together without ever going wrong by a single second. It seemed to Fenby that virtually every FBI Director since Hoover quit or retired complaining at the impossibility of working with the President or the Congress or the Attorney General or of being the victim of staff incompetence, their only ambition from their moment of appointment to get away from Pennsylvania Avenue as fast as possible.

  John Fenby didn’t want to get away from Pennsylvania Avenue. If he had his way – which he was determined always to do – Fenby was going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming from Hoover’s original seventh-floor suite from which, under two successive Presidents, he had moulded the Bureau into a personal fiefdom unmatched since the Bureau’s creator.

  Fenby, who was a small, rotund man not unlike Hoover in both looks and stature, coveted the Director’s role for exactly the same reasons as its founder. He adored the Bureau jet. And the chauffeured stretch limousine. And being part of an inner circle at the White House and up on the Hill. And of personally controlling an empire of thousands spread around the globe, anxious to respond to every command he uttered. Had Fenby not been, primarily for public awareness rather than religious conviction, a twice-on-Sunday churchgoer he would have believed himself God. He contented himself with Boss, which was a Hoover word. It was, in fact, a secret regret that he couldn’t go out on arrests and be photographed with a Tommy Gun cradled in his arms, like Hoover had been. But that had been in another age. He couldn’t have everything. What he had was good enough. And what he had most of all was an awareness of how things operated in the capital of the world.

  Like today.

  The corner table at the Four Seasons was reserved permanently for him, whether he used it or not, the other tables moved out of hearing. Although he was the favour-purveyor, Fenby was also today’s host and therefore solicitously early, already seated when the Speaker arrived. Fenby enjoyed being included in the frisson of recognition that went through the restaurant as Milton Fitzjohn strode across the room, the political glad-hand outstretched. The required my-you’re-looking-fine-and-so-are-you recital concluded with Fitzjohn ordering bourbon. The abstemious Fenby, who never risked alcohol during working hours, already had his mineral water.

  ‘So how’s my boy doing, sir?’ Fitzjohn, whose iron-fist control and manipulation of Congress exceeded even that of Lyndon Johnson, occupied an original colonial mansion in South Carolina and assiduously cultivated a Southern gentleman mien to go with it. He didn’t consider anyone, certainly not any White House incumbent from whom he was only two heart beats away, his superior, but ‘sir’ was one of several insincere courtesies.

  ‘A rising star,’ assured the FBI Director. ‘Someone of whom you can be rightfully proud.’

  ‘I am, sir, I am. Mrs Fitzjohn will be particularly gratified to hear it.’ Referring to his wife in the third person and never in public by her christian name was another affectation. ‘Natural that she should be worried, though.’

  ‘Quite natural,’ agreed Fenby. He’d had reservations posting Kestler to somewhere like Moscow and certainly with the specific nuclear brief, but Fitzjohn had insisted his wife’s nephew get a high-profile assignment.

  Fitzjohn demanded a T-bone bleeding from exposure. Fenby ordered his customary salad and a second bottle of water.

  ‘Mrs Fitzjohn is a little worried, I have to say, about some of the things she’s hearing about Moscow. Lot of crime there: people getting killed.’

  Only someone with Fenby’s committed dedication to remaining in power could have greeted that statement with a straight face. ‘I think you can tell Mrs Fitzjohn that I am taking every precaution to ensure James’s safety. Not only that: to ensure his career in the Bureau, too.’ The British approach had been very fortuitous, although Fenby knew very few directors, perhaps only Hoover himself, would have realized ever
y advantage as quickly as he had.

  ‘I’m extremely grateful to hear that, sir. Extremely grateful.’

  Which is what Fenby wanted everyone in positions of power or influence in Washington to be, extremely grateful to him. Like the CIA would be grateful to him if he had to sacrifice the Englishman who had caused them so much embarrassment, all those years ago.

  That afternoon he memoed the Bureau’s Scientific Division at Quantico to ensure they had a sufficiently qualified nuclear physicist, if the need for one arose. He didn’t expect there to be, but John Fenby left nothing to chance. Which was why he called Peter Johnson, in London, too.

  ‘How were lessons?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘What did you learn?’

  ‘Numbers.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘You’re supposed to remember.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You go to school to make you clever.’

  ‘Are you clever?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Why not all the time?’

  ‘People make mistakes.’

  ‘Do you make mistakes?’

  ‘I try not to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s important not to make mistakes.’

  ‘Do people get angry?’

  ‘If I make bad mistakes, yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it upsets them.’

  ‘Do you get angry if people make mistakes?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘I’ll try not to make mistakes.’

  ‘So will I,’ said Natalia, a promise to herself as much as to Sasha.

  chapter 5

  The nuclear weaponry leakage from Russia and its former satellites worried Barry Lyneham far more than it worried most other people involved in its attempted prevention and for entirely different reasons.

  Lyneham had had a good and fortunate career, virtually unblemished by any serious errors and certainly none he hadn’t been able to disguise or dump on someone else, and he’d seen his Moscow appointment as the FBI section head as the smooth glide to contented, well-pensioned retirement for which the Florida condo with the boat slip at the back had already been bought, with the game-rigged cruiser ready for delivery when he gave the word.

  He’d worked out way ahead of anyone else that Moscow was a snip, the best thing that could have happened to him. All right, it was a shitty, bad-weather, nothing-works place to live, somewhere he wouldn’t have even settled his mother-in-law, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that in the eyes and ears and opinion of Washington, Moscow was still the Cold War, high-profile posting that carried with it an automatic Grade 18 – with the fancy title of senior executive officer – with none of the Cold War embarrassment risks now there wasn’t a Cold War any more.

  Until the organized crime motherfuckers emerged from the woodwork, that is. And realized the profit trading nuclear shit to every Middle East towel head with ambitions to replace Gary Cooper with a mushroom cloud in their remake of High Noon. Then it had become a whole new ball game altogether, top of the agenda, Director-to-President breakfast-table stuff and there wasn’t anything higher profile than that.

  James Kestler’s appointment was another worry for Lyneham, which would have surprised a lot of people if he’d admitted it, which of course he didn’t. On the face of it, the specific, named assignment removed the personal career danger to Lyneham from any foul-up.

  Or would have done, if Kestler hadn’t had the pull of being related to the wife of one of the most powerful men, maybe even the most powerful man, in Washington. Which was a bigger bastard than nuclear smuggling as far as Lyneham was concerned. There’d been the predictable crap from Fenby that Kestler was just another FBI agent, like everybody else, and shouldn’t get any special favours. But Lyneham didn’t believe that any more than he believed in virgin birth or that there was good in every man.

  And Kestler was just the sort of prematurely promoted smart-assed son-of-a-bitch to screw up. He was only thirty years old, five years out of the academy, and rode so gung-ho into every situation it was inevitable he was going to shoot himself in not just one but both feet. And sooner rather than later, thought Lyneham, only half-listening to the younger man so full of pent-up energy he strode about the office when he talked. Lyneham would have thought the five miles the silly bastard jogged every morning, beside that part of the inner Moscow peripherique close to the US embassy, would have been enough.

  ‘Sit down, for Christ’s sake. My neck aches following you about’ Being the Speaker’s relation didn’t spare Kestler from being bawled out: Lyneham sometimes got relief from it.

  Kestler sat, reluctantly. His left leg kept jigging up and down, as if he were keeping in time with something. ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘I think the Brits decided it was serious and important enough to appoint their own man, like we did.’

  ‘But this guy!’ exclaimed Kestler, who glowed with the health he strove so hard to achieve, pink faced and hard bodied. He kept his fair hair in a tight crew cut and wore jeans in the office, like he was doing now, which Lyneham allowed although he knew Edgar J. Hoover, in whose reign he’d joined the Bureau, would have gone apoplectic at the thought. But then Hoover had his own strange way of dressing out of office hours.

  Lyneham glanced at the FBI file on Charlie Muffin faxed from Washington that morning. ‘Quite a track record.’

  ‘Track record! How the hell has he ever survived?’

  That was a question that intrigued Lyneham far more than the litany of Charlie’s misdemeanours, what he’d done to the CIA Director heading the list. Any guy who’d hung on – lived, even – through all that had to have a very special respect for his own ass and if he was going to work with Kestler he could be a very useful brake on the idiot’s over-the-top-and-at-’em enthusiasm. Against which clashed the unarguable logic that the guy had to be one hell of an ornery bastard to have taken all the risks he had in the first place. On balance, Lyneham decided the arrival of Charlie Muffin was an additional cause for concern. ‘I guess he’s good.’

  ‘How close am I going to have to work with him?’

  Lyneham gestured to what had come from Washington. ‘In the same sack is what they want.’

  ‘How do you feel about that? You’re chief here.’

  Lyneham shifted uncomfortably at the reminder of ultimate responsibility. ‘We’re talking doomsday and Armageddon, son. If Washington want you joined at the hip, I’ll do the stitching myself.’

  ‘Who’ll be in charge, if we’re a team?’

  It was a necessary operational question. And not one upon which he was going to commit himself, anxious to spread the accountability. ‘I’ll message Washington.’

  Kestler thrust up, unable to remain still any longer, nodding to the other material on Lyneham’s desk. ‘Why don’t we make him an arrival present of those?’

  ‘Those’ were the photographs of the mutilated man in the skiff on the Berlin lake. From his fingerprints the German Bundeskrimina-lamt had identified him as Gottfried Braun, a small-time hustler and con man upon whom their most recent intelligence was of his boasting close contacts with various Russian Mafia groups with available nuclear material.

  ‘You know what they show?’ demanded Lyneham.

  ‘A guy with his balls in his mouth.’

  Lyneham sighed, unamused. ‘They show that no one in the nuclear business fucks about: that you’ve got to treat it all very seriously and not take any chances and think before you make any move. They don’t take prisoners and they don’t give a fuck about who or what the FBI is or about any other organization trying to stop them.’

  ‘I do treat it seriously,’ insisted the corrected Kestler, solemnly. Then he said, ‘So shall I send the photographs to the British embassy? Show how keen we are to work together?’

  ‘Why not?’ agreed Lyneham.

  Aleksai Semenovich Popov was the operati
onal director against Russian nuclear smuggling, so it was to him that the advice of Charlie Muffin’s politically agreed appointment was channelled from the Foreign Ministry. Popov brought to his position the forethought, planning and the minute attention to every detail that, had he not chosen an alternative career, would have gained him chess Grand Master ranking at international level. Such attention to detail made it automatic for him to check old KGB records and the discovery startled him. He read the file several times at the Interior Ministry building less than a mile away from where the two Americans had the same day had their discussion about Charlie Muffin. Finally he rose and went further along the corridor to the deputy Director’s office.

  ‘I think you should see this,’ Popov said to Natalia. ‘It seems you know this man.’

  Charlie Muffin had not expected to be met at Sheremet’yevo by Thomas Bowyer and said so, when he thanked the man.

  ‘Traditional courtesy to a newcomer,’ said the station chief. The Scots accent was quite pronounced and Charlie supposed the suit could have been described as a Highland tweed. Bowyer was ruddy cheeked and stray haired and would, Charlie decided, have looked more at home on a moor than forcing his way through a crowd of taxi-touting Russians to the embassy Ford. As they got in Bowyer said, ‘Been to Moscow before?’

  So London had not sent his complete file. ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘Funny place. Didn’t know it in the old days but people who did tell me it’s changed a lot. Dangerous as hell now …’ He nodded back towards the retreating airport. ‘A lot of those taxi guys only take you halfway into town before mugging you, stealing your luggage and dumping you in the road.’

  ‘I’ve heard.’ The state of the roads didn’t seem to have changed, thought Charlie, as the car thumped into a bone-jarring pothole.

  Bowyer chanced a look across the car. ‘What’s it like, back home?’

  Charlie understood the question and the gossip-eager reason for his being met in. ‘Pretty bad. Blood all over the floor.’