“I intend to,” said Charlie.
“Never expected-or wanted-to hear from you again,” greeted Jack Smethwick, when Charlie identified himself on the telephone. “I submitted a disassociation report, like I told you I would after all that bullshit you had me set up.”
“This is much easier,” Charlie assured the forensic scientist.
“I’ll protest again if it’s not; I’m definitely not falsifying anything else.”
“I’m not asking you to,” said Charlie. “It shouldn’t take you longer than an hour.”
It didn’t. Neither did the next telephone call Charlie made.
34
“I expected you yesterday!” complained Irena, the moment Charlie entered the room.
“I sent you a message that there were some things I had to sort out,” reminded Charlie, aware how cautious he had to be. “I’m here now.”
“I don’t understand why I had to wait until tonight, either. Or why I have been brought here,” she continued, waving her hand toward the obvious recording apparatus on the table separating them. “This is a debriefing room, with the exception of that television, which I also don’t understand. I’ve told you everything I know; given you all I had.”
“You know the bureaucracy of these things,” said Charlie, soothingly, spreading out his hands in apparent helplessness. “You wanted to see me?”
“Ivan’s things; all my memories and mementos. You said you’d get them here for me but they weren’t here when I arrived. I want them with me, as I had them in Moscow.”
“I’ve got them,” promised Charlie.
Irena smiled, unexpectedly, her familiar tension lessening. “I was frightened something might have happened to them when they weren’t here.”
“They’re all safe.”
“I’m sorry I was rude, just then. But they’re all I have. . they’re my life, what life I’ve got left, I suppose. Can I have them? I’d like to set everything up, as I had it all in Moscow.”
“I first want you to see something that’s very important,” said Charlie, picking up the television control box. He estimated that he had an hour-ninety minutes tops-and the recording ran for ten minutes. Could he get it all, in that time? If he didn’t he could, quite easily, be a dead man: he’d never gambled as desperately as this in his entire life and hoped it wasn’t showing.
The room was filled with the familiar theme tune introducing ORT’s nightly news, backing a montage of Svetlana Modin’s recent exclusives before dissolving into a wide, outside broadcast shot of the anchorwoman with the British Houses of Parliament in her background, tightening down into a close-up of Svetlana’s face.
“As you can see from the buildings behind me, I am broadcasting by satellite tonight from London, England, a country so recently the subject of so much mystery, intrigue, and speculation from Moscow, following the unexplained murder in its embassy grounds there. Tonight I can solve that mystery, identify the victim, and disclose the most sensational story in the history of modern-or even premodern-Russia. It is that Stepan Grigorevich Lvov, until tonight and until this revelation so confidently predicted to become the next president of the Russian Federation, is and has for almost two decades been an agent of America’s Central Intelligence Agency. A spy against the very country he wanted to lead. .”
Irena broke away from the hypnotism of the TV screen to look at Charlie, bulging eyed, the nervous tic pulling at her open mouth, which moved but from which no words came.
“Had Lvov attained that presidency then he-and the Russian Federation-would have become puppets performing in whatever way the strings were pulled by the president of the United States of America, reducing our great country to a vassal, jump-to-order client state. .” Svetlana was saying.
The British picture dissolved into a compilation of library footage, dominated by film of Lvov at crowded rallies, at the hijacked Russian press conference giving his undertaking of openness and cooperation with America, and at the funeral of Sergei Pavel, all the time with Svetlana’s voice relayed over. She identified Ivan Oskin as a long-serving Russian intelligence agent and Afghan war hero, who discovered evidence of Lvov’s treachery in KGB and FSB records but of his having been detected and murdered by an American assassination team as he tried to reach the sanctuary of the British embassy, believing as he had that it was impossible for Lvov to be working alone but supported by a major but unidentified cabal of suborned Russian spies deep within the Lubyanka. The outside broadcast returned to Svetlana, holding up to the camera a sheet of paper she claimed to be the evidence of secret CIA cables identifying Lvov’s code name as ICON. Svetlana concluded that she was broadcasting from London because she’d feared the Lubyanka cabal would have prevented her transmitting from Moscow.
“She was right about that,” remarked Charlie, conversationally, inwardly in turmoil at twenty-five minutes having passed since his entry into the room. “That was the full transcript. What was being shown in Moscow was blacked out after about four minutes, just enough time to identify Lvov as a CIA agent and to name Oskin. But the satellite feed came from London and went out worldwide, translated and uncensored to all the TV stations who’d bought the transmission-blind, before its broadcast-on the reputation of her previous exclusives. . ”
“Do you realize. . have any conception. . the destruction. .” Irena groped, no coherent thought held in her mind.
My destruction uppermost, thought Charlie, completing the woman’s thought. “I think I do. I was close to missing it because like everyone else I missed the little things and as an actress you were phenomenal. If you hadn’t been so anxious to get your phony shrine back, so that you could destroy it, you would probably have gotten away with it. The message I got was that you wanted the things you’d given me, meaning what I shipped here for you. But then I remembered you gave me the ciphers for the transmitted CIA cables. Which wouldn’t have been in the KGB archives, so conveniently close to the cables themselves, would they? It would be unthinkable for them to be together even in an ongoing operation, precisely because it would make it all so easy to understand, as it was easy for me virtually to understand. . ”
“You’re talking in riddles. . not making sense.”
“I think I am making sense, Irena, although that isn’t your real name, is it? That phony shrine, which totally fooled me, was your only danger, wasn’t it? I’d missed your having the ciphers ready to convince me further and I really did think your shrine was genuine. . ” Come on, Charlie thought, for Christ’s sake, break! Forty minutes had already gone by.
“You’re mad. . gone mad,” accused Irena, shaking her head.
“Our forensic people thought all the memorabilia was put together brilliantly,” continued Charlie, as if she had not spoken. “Those superimposed photographs of you and Ivan together were fantastic. They really did look as if you and he were a genuine couple. Did you ever really know him? You weren’t ever in Cairo together-that camel-skin case was a clever prop, by the way-because we named everyone who was there and they were all men. An oversight but again, one that would have been easily missed.”
“Stop it!” demanded the woman.
“None of it would have amounted to a row of beans without your shrine, though. You totally convinced me it was your altar to the man you loved. But then I thought back to the picture I had to have for your passport. That wasn’t your real apartment-I realize now it was an FSB operational nest-and you wouldn’t have had any individual photographs of yourself there. But instead of promising to find one the following day, you let me cut up one supposedly of you and Ivan together, in happy times. That was your one mistake, although again I didn’t realize it at the time, only when other things didn’t knit together. Loving him as you convinced me you did, you’d never have let me destroy a picture of you and him together, but you were thinking more of how cutting it up would destroy the evidence of it having been doctored photographically to join you and him together. Which it did. It wasn’t until all the othe
r stuff was looked at scientifically that I worked it out.” When the hell was she going to crack and fill in all the missing bits!
“I want help. . someone to get me away from you.”
“We’ll send you back to Moscow, of course. We’ve got everything we can possibly get from you. There’re no more flights tonight-I’ve checked-but there’s plenty tomorrow.”
“No!” she said, her tone audibly different.
He was getting there! Shouldn’t rush. “Irena-it’s easier to go on calling you that-now it’s you who isn’t making sense. Why should we keep you here. . look after you here. . knowing what we know now?”
“They’ll think I told you, not that you worked it out; had the sense to have that fucking shrine forensically examined,” blurted the woman.
He’d got her! “Not my problem. You’ve got nothing more to give me.”
“Yes, I have. You haven’t got the half of it. I’ve got all of it.”
It took her thirty minutes, running right up to his longest time estimate, and throughout it Charlie remained coiled spring-tight, tensed for the interruption that might still have ruined everything but never came.
When she finished he got as far as, “You’ll get everything I promised you. What I-” before the door burst open and the room was suddenly crowded with men.
To Charlie, the leading arresting officer said, “We’ve got you, you bastard!”
One of Charlie’s many fears was that he’d be interrogated at the American embassy where he would probably have been denied any opportunity to speak. He wasn’t, although there was little comfort in his being taken to an anonymous hut complex at the security-restricted RAF base at Northolt, on the outskirts of London, with the obvious threat of his being put aboard an always-denied CIA rendition flight to the United States or, worse, with Islamic terror suspects to one of the torture destination flights to Romania or Albania.
But at least it appeared that Jeffrey Smale was chairing the panel of eight unidentified men confronting him. The deputy director was the only man Charlie recognized apart from the Director-General himself. Aubrey Smith was not part of the examining group but ostracized to one side, like a fellow defendant. From the way they were dressed, at least three of the men facing him were American. Charlie’s reassurance came from the operator hunched at the recording apparatus on its separate table and that in their urgency to get him before a kangaroo court, his arresting officers had not searched him to discover the video he had extracted from its debriefing-room recording machine seconds before they had swept into the room in which he’d been with Irena.
“Normal formalities are being dispensed with,” announced Smale, his usually red, blood-pressured face purple with unsuppressed fury. “You have knowingly wrecked an intelligence operation twenty years in its planning and execution, and caused incalculable harm and damage to the United States of America and to this country. Any recovery or salvation of that operation is impossible but you will provide, immediately, the names of all others with whom you are in contact for them to be detained as soon as possible. Is that clear to you?”
“Time isn’t your problem,” said Charlie. “You’ve been saved, all of you, from making the biggest intelligence mistake since the creation of the CIA and possibly in the modern history of either British security service.”
There was at least a full minute of total silence before the man next to Smale exploded in an accent confirming Charlie’s American recognition: “For Christ’s sake, what’s happening here?”
Aware of at least six of the arresting officers grouped in a semicircle behind him Charlie extended his arms fully in front of him and said, “In my right, inside jacket pocket is the recording of my debriefing of the woman known as Irena Novikov. If you will not allow me to take it out, to be played to you, I ask that someone does it for me.”
“Stay as you are!” came the command behind him and a hand was thrust roughly into his jacket. The man who’d called Charlie a bastard came into view, examining the disc. To Smale, the security officer said, “It’s a recording, not a weapon.”
“Start it as eighty-four on the use register,” Charlie told the recording technician, at Smale’s nod of agreement.
Into the room came Charlie’s voice: You’ve got nothing more to give me.
Then Irena’s: Yes I have. You haven’t got the half of it. I’ve got it all.
Charlie: That’s what it’s got to be. All of it.
Irena: It’s my only operation, ever. A lifetime’s work, all gone.
Charlie: I’m waiting.
There was no hint of the anxiousness he’d been feeling, decided Charlie, satisfied.
Irena: The Americans were wrong, as they so often are, about my not having been in Cairo. They simply didn’t identify me. Valeri Voznoy wasn’t the KGB station chief. I was. My cover was a typist. It was my idea, all of it, after Vladimir Putin left the KGB and became the Russian president. Why can’t we become president of the United States of America? I thought. That was my concept. And I chose Lvov, too. We were lovers even then. Bundy was the CIA’s Cairo station chief-a laugh-That was our first success, making Bundy into the supposed Russian expert, feeding him whatever we wanted. It was genuine stuff, of course, but low level. Everywhere Lvov went, Bundy was transferred with him: the CIA was convinced Lvov was theirs and Bundy was his Control. Lvov fed him the idea of going into politics, using Putin as an example and the stupid bastards fell over themselves: over maybe ten years they’ve paid us over $20,000,000, all of which has gone into other operations against them-another laugh-Christ, they’re so gullible and stupid.
There was a visible shift of discomfort from five of the men facing him, finally identifying the entire American contingent.
Irena: It couldn’t stay perfect, of course. Cairo was the problem, from where it all began. I didn’t bother about Oskin or Voznoy, after Cairo. It was only when everything started to go wrong, when it was too late, that I went back through their personnel files and discovered they’d been posted to Afghanistan together. We never found out who suspected anything, although it was no secret that Lvov and I were sleeping together but I suppose it must have been Voznoy: we couldn’t interrogate him, because he died in the ambush in which Oskin lost his arm. It wasn’t us who killed Oskin-although I would have done, if I’d known the blackmail he was trying to set up. He died under American interrogation and we don’t know enough of what he told them, just scraps. Like he didn’t go at first to the Americans but tried to speak to the British embassy. .
Charlie: I’ve got to stop you there. How did the British embassy come into it? Why was Oskin’s body dumped there, if he died under American interrogation?
Irena: If only we could have known it all, it wouldn’t have ended like this: it would have ended with Lvov as the president of the Russian Federation appearing to work for the CIA, as far as they believed, with the American president unquestioningly reacting in whichever way we wanted, because Lvov had supplied them with genuine, low-grade material, for so long. The American president would have been dancing to our tune! I wouldn’t have had to improvise so much, give away so much. What we do know is that before he died-of a heart attack, incidentally, not from the bullet to the back of his head that blew his face away-he said he had been to the British embassy. But not who he’d seen or what he said. .
Charlie: Oskin was already dead. Why shoot a dead man?
Irena: Probert decided on a mystery: as much confusion and disinformation as possible, according to what Bundy told Lvov.
Charlie: How? How do you know this?
There was a long silence.
Charlie: Everything, Irena. I want it all.
There was a further laugh from the woman.
Irena: I’m not holding out on you. She’s not our spy. Not anyone’s spy, not properly, I suppose. Just a little gossip who can’t keep her mouth shut.
Charlie: She?
Irena: Your colleague, Paula-Jane Venables.
Charlie: You’re losin
g me.
Irena: She’s been seduced, in every meaning of the word. It started out normally enough, like these things do: an affair-besotted on her part, according to Bundy who couldn’t stop boasting to Lvov-between her and John Probert. She’s drawn to all things American, her father having been one. She became more than a bed partner for Probert when Oskin talked of going to your embassy before trying to sell whatever he thought he knew to the Americans. She didn’t know what it was; she hadn’t seen Oskin. But Halliday might have. It was Probert’s ridiculous idea to dump the body in your embassy grounds, which was stupid and wouldn’t have happened if Bundy had already been in Moscow. But he wasn’t, not for another five days by which time it was too late. Probert thought Paula-Jane would be able to get whatever it was from Halliday if the body was dumped literally on his doorstep-don’t ask me the reasoning: I don’t think there was one, just CIA stupidity-and that it would be an investigation handled by Russian police that would get nowhere because Bundy could get it fixed through Lvov, which he could have done; still tried to. Instead of which you came and refused to have anything to do with the Venables woman and started your own disinformation, which we had no way of stopping. And Halliday didn’t have anything to tell her anyway, because it wasn’t until Probert got back to the embassy after having the body dumped that he was properly able to read the pages he’d ripped from the gatehouse log of the day he knew Oskin had gone there that Oskin hadn’t seen anybody. Neither Venables nor Halliday had been at the embassy. The log note was that Oskin had refused to give a name or a contact when he’d asked to see an intelligence officer, which is hardly surprising, but that he’d call back. Instead he went to the American embassy and told Probert what he knew, expecting to be paid off. But instead he got tortured to death.
There was renewed and even more obvious discomfited movement from the Americans confronting Charlie.
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