Red Star Falling: A Thriller

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘At last!’ greeted the Russian, rising at Monsford’s entry. ‘What news of Andrei?’

  Monsford pulled a seat closer to the two Russians and said, ‘We’ve got other things to talk about today, Maxim Mikhailovich: important things.’

  ‘There’s only one thing of importance for us to discuss,’ persisted Radtsic, frowning.

  ‘Tell me about your penetration of MI6, my organization,’ demanded Monsford. The lie circumstantial … the lie direct, came appropriately to Monsford’s mind: he’d always liked Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, although this confrontation was hardly likely to be a comedy.

  Radtsic stared blankly across the intervening space, saying nothing.

  ‘We know we’ve been penetrated: found the evidence,’ bulldozed Monsford, shifting minimally towards the ever-running camera. ‘I’ve also seen the film of you and Elena watching what happened at Vnukovo: heard you wondering at the connection with your defection. So let’s stop all this posturing about refusing to cooperate until Andrei gets here. I’ve told you what we’re doing to achieve that and now I want—I insist—on your telling me everything about the cell you created within MI6. It’s over now, finished. Straughan’s dead: you actually saw Halliday gunned down in the airport shooting.’

  Radtsic remained blank faced, shaking his head. ‘What are you talking about…? I don’t understand a word you’re saying.…’

  ‘I can’t play games with you, Maxim Mikhailovich: won’t play games,’ hectored Monsford. ‘Discovering your penetration of my organization changes things between us. I want it all: every name, precisely—to the actual date—how long you’ve run it, for us to calculate how much you’ve received, all the embassy Controls here in London, contact details, dead letter drops, codes you used. Everything! You understand that, Maxim Mikhailovich: everything!’

  Radtsic partially reached out towards Elena, as if for physical support, then dropped his outstretched hand. ‘This is a riddle: madness. I have not penetrated your organization. There is no cell. Stop it: you must stop this. It’s nonsense.’

  ‘I want an answer and I want it now!’ persisted Monsford. ‘If I don’t get an answer, we’re going to have completely to reconsider our situation. You’re going to co-operate.’

  Which was precisely what Charlie Muffin was being told, almost two thousand miles away in Moscow.

  * * *

  ‘We had a guy once, long time ago now, who was a legend within the CIA,’ reminisced Edwin Birkitt. ‘His name was James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA internal security. His legend, getting people to tell him things they wouldn’t even tell their own mothers, was the problem: no-one realized he was going mad because he’d always been so eccentric no-one ever questioned him.…’

  Irena sighed, slumped back in her chair, fingering the edge of her skirt, wondering how many cameras in total were focused upon her.

  ‘We had this Russian defector, genuine guy with lots of stuff to tell us, but Angleton thought we were being jerked about. You wouldn’t guess what Angleton did.’

  ‘I know what he did.’ Irena sighed again. ‘He kept him in solitary confinement for six or seven years and no-one had the balls to challenge his authority for doing it. And if I’m supposed to be frightened by that as an analogy, I’m not. Langley put safeguards into the system after that, didn’t they?’

  ‘That’s the point,’ stressed Birkitt. ‘You’ve been here a long time now, long enough to have that facial correction we promised, and you’re not showing the gratitude Langley expects. There’s still a lot of people in the Company who think Angleton got a rough deal in the end and wouldn’t think it wrong to go back to the old days to find out what they want to know.’

  ‘Am I supposed to be frightened?’ repeated Irena.

  ‘I think you should be.’ Birkitt smiled.

  7

  Charlie was discomfited at his swaying unsteadiness, standing without a supporting hand for the first time in almost five days, and after such inactivity his normally awkward feet began to hurt, too.

  ‘You need help?’ asked Guzov, from the far side of the room. He didn’t move to provide it. Neither did the two ward guards beside the man.

  ‘I’m fine,’ refused Charlie, wedging his thigh against the bed edge to keep himself upright.

  ‘Hope you like your new clothes.’ Guzov grimaced. ‘Your old ones were only good enough to get your size. We managed to salvage your shoes, though.’ The Russian held the Hush Puppies aloft like battlefield trophies: fittingly, they were blood spotted.

  ‘I’m sure they’ll be fine,’ said Charlie. Laid out beside the bed were a rough work shirt, thick-cord trousers, and a traditional kulak-style smock rarely seen outside isolated farm communities on the Steppes. Charlie turned, grateful for the additional stability when he perched on the bed, but almost toppled forward struggling into his fortunately original although stiffly laundered underwear.

  ‘You sure you’re okay?’ goaded the Russian, still not moving.

  ‘Quite sure.’ Charlie got into the trousers more easily, leaning backwards over the bed. The apparent clumsiness of putting on the shirt was intentional, scrubbing it back and forth in a back-drying motion to scratch the persistent irritation from his healing shoulder. The Hush Puppies were sufficiently stretched for Charlie to slip his feet into without bending. The smock was too large, like the belt to go around it, and he saw the two guards were smiling along with Guzov.

  ‘We got the size wrong after all,’ said the Russian, in mock apology.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere special.’

  ‘You’d be surprised where you’re going, Charlie,’ promised Guzov.

  Sure that he’d fall, stumble at least, Charlie refused the pace Guzov set along the deserted corridor, forcing Guzov to wait at the elevator. In the foyer they were totally ignored by three blue-uniformed receptionists at a central desk beyond which, through a glass screen, an open-plan office was visible. There were no ringing telephones or flickering computer screens: the silence was practically sepulchral.

  Outside it was raining, that persistent, cloud-leaking drizzle that Charlie remembered sometimes fell day after day, painting Moscow a monochrome, suicide-tempting grey. There was as little evidence outside the building—no ambulances or canopied emergency bays or bustling, white-coated doctors or nurses—as there had been inside, of it being a medical facility. None of the entering or leaving staff wore hospital uniforms that would identify them outside the building. From the second storey upwards, all the windows were barred. From the elevator descent, Charlie knew he’d been on the fourth level.

  There was a plainclothes guard beside the driver, also in a suit, of the waiting, dark-windowed BMW. Guzov left Charlie to get unaided into the car. The ward escorts stood back under the overhanging building to keep out of the rain. No-one spoke when Charlie finally, awkwardly, got into the vehicle or helped him secure his seat belt. There were no identifying hospital signs at the end of the drive and Charlie finally concluded it was the sort of psychiatric institution he’d initially suspected. As the car swept out into unfamiliar streets Charlie wondered if they actually were in Moscow: he’d been unconscious from the time he was shot until he’d awakened in the restraint-strapped bed, after the operation to remove the bullet. It was at least five minutes before Charlie recognized the ring-road approach and calculated he’d been held in the northwest, an area of Moscow with which he was unfamiliar. From the directional indicators on the slip road to the multi-lane highway, Charlie knew they were continuing north.

  At last Guzov turned to him. ‘You realize by now where we’re going, of course?’

  ‘I know the direction in which we’re going,’ qualified Charlie, not willing to volunteer his familiarity with the city.

  ‘I promised you’d be surprised.’

  He had to step back from positive confrontation, Charlie knew: the attitude he’d adopted since his seizure wasn’t returning anything he could utilize. ‘What puzzles me is our leaving Moscow before
there’s been consular access.’

  ‘We’re not leaving Moscow,’ threw back Guzov, ignoring Charlie’s response. ‘We’re going to the hills.’

  That did surprise Charlie, although he didn’t show it. Should he acknowledge his awareness of the cliché, showing his familiarity with the city after all, or fall back upon supposed ignorance? Every savvy Muscovite knew ‘the hills’ referred to a particular area of the high ground overlooking the city. In its exclusiveness, since the time of Stalin, lay the weekend and holiday retreats of the nation’s ruling elite, up to and including the premier and the president. ‘I’ve heard of the dachas but not of the prison facility. The gulags are surely a long way further east?’

  Guzov smiled his gargoyle smile across the car. ‘It’ll be a very long time before you end up in a gulag.’ The facial expression widened. ‘If you’re sensible, which I hope eventually you’ll be, you could avoid going to one altogether.’

  In his new mindset against confrontation, Charlie decided against the ritual challenge of legality and criminal charges. They were out of the city now, in the scrublands before the gentle upwards climb. The drizzle was heavier, scudding down in bursts: it had driven people and vehicles off the highway and everything looked as forbiddingly desolate as the psychiatric building he’d just left. The tree line was abrupt, almost barbered, empty no man’s land one moment, straight-edged forest, mostly firs, the next. So densely cultivated and maintained was the forest for the favoured few that it almost at once became half-light, occasionally interspersed by the sudden brightness of an opening into an unmarked road to a hidden property.

  The spur road was on a bend, which the driver would have known. He braked hard instead of gradually, throwing Charlie forward against his seat belt. The pain seared through Charlie’s still-healing shoulder but he managed to bite back the groan. Everyone else had expectantly braced themselves, he saw. Just beyond what would have been visible from the main road was a gatehouse-operated barrier that wasn’t lifted until the driver’s documentation was cleared from within the checkpoint.

  Although narrower, the new road was properly metalled and maintained, built in Roman-style straightness as far as Charlie could see, but the offshoot lanes were less frequently obvious, with few warning tree breaks. Which meant Charlie was again totally unprepared when, after the briefest of braking, the BMW slewed to the right. The abrupt jar from hitting an uneven rough track again burst agonizingly through Charlie, the pain this time so bad he couldn’t stop crying out.

  ‘Slower,’ Guzov ordered the driver. To Charlie he said, ‘You all right?’

  ‘That was fucking stupid,’ complained Charlie. And intentional, he knew. The turning off the public highway into the barrier-controlled road was roughly two kilometres from the beginning of the tree line and the third break to the left in those trees. The distance of this turn-off from the Roman-straight road was far less, hardly a kilometre and the fourth on its left, counting from the barrier.

  ‘You’re right: it was stupid,’ agreed the Russian.

  Charlie tensed his dressing-shielded shoulder to detect the first warm sensation of the wound reopening. All he could feel was the heartbeat-timed throb that replaced the initial excruciating pain.

  Less than a kilometre, finally estimated Charlie, as the track ballooned into a clearing in the middle of which stood, as if on display, a picture-postcard image of a Russian dacha. It was wood-built, even to its steeped, snow-discarding shingle root, and completely encircled by an open, balustraded veranda, the entire construction lifted high off the ground on stilts, again to defeat the winter snows.

  Once more unaided, Charlie got from the car, relieved the unsteadiness was lessening although his shoulder still throbbed. The driver and guard remained by the car as he followed Guzov. Inside the cottage, most of the furniture was rough, country-carved wood. Guzov took one chair, waving Charlie to another fronting it.

  ‘You can look around later,’ Guzov decreed. ‘What we’re going to do now is understand how we’re going to work.…’ He gave an almost uncaring gesture around the dacha. ‘Well?’

  Go with the flow, Charlie reminded himself; he still had to find his rewarding level of response. ‘I am surprised. Confused, in fact.’ Which was, Charlie accepted, the entire purpose of this bizarre exercise.

  ‘Did you expect a rat-nested Lubyanka cell, with water running down its walls?’

  ‘It crossed my mind.’

  ‘It still could be. Or a return to where you’ve just come from for a different type of specialized treatment…’ There was another wave around the room. ‘Or there’s this, where you and I can talk.…’ There was another pause, for the face-dividing smile. ‘And before we start discussing that, let’s really understand each other. I know you are going to lie: that’s what we professionals are trained to do in the event of a seizure. I’m going to take a lot of time sifting through all your deceit to get to the eventual truth. You’ll also try to escape. Which you can’t possibly do, so don’t try. You’ll have a rotating staff, male and female, to cook and clean.…’ The arm waving went beyond the cottage. ‘This is a special complex—’

  ‘In which live more specially trained men whose job it is to protect the even more special people who relax and holiday around here,’ anticipated Charlie.

  The grimace came and went. ‘An elite spetsnaz company, a kind of imperial guard. Where we are now—where you’re going to be—is where they’re permanently barracked: those they protect aren’t actually all around but they’re not that far away.’

  ‘An imperial guard for the rulers of a country that destroyed its imperial royal family,’ remarked Charlie. He still wasn’t getting his attitude right, he criticized himself.

  ‘Imagine that!’ persisted Guzov. ‘You, a British intelligence agent, so close to the relaxation hideaways of Russia’s hierarchy! You might as well be on the moon, trying to hurt them with a catapult for all the harm you can do. This is the most closely guarded, impregnable few square kilometres in the entire Russian Federation: in the world, maybe.’

  He was being positively invited—challenged—to try, Charlie accepted. ‘I’m surprised you feel able to take the chance.’

  ‘What risk, Charlie? The only harm you can ever cause again is to yourself. Those special men you talk about have orders not to physically to harm you. But trained as the spetsnaz are, they might welcome a change from the norm to go bear hunting—with you as the bear.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d like that,’ acknowledged Charlie. Better response, he decided.

  ‘The choice is yours to make. And inevitably regret if it’s the wrong one.’

  Certainly not a challenge he felt like taking up at that moment. But he had to try something, he supposed. His jarred shoulder still ached, matched by that from his re-incarcerated feet. Neither of which distracted his thinking. Why was Guzov going through this performance? He didn’t need a lecture like this, a performance like this, to convince him of the inevitable humiliation of an escape attempt, disguised as a kulak.

  Time to re-introduce a little reality, Charlie decided. ‘You surely don’t intend the consular encounter to be here?’

  There was a shrug of disinterest. ‘You’ve been out of circulation for days: you’re a long way behind developments.’

  Apprehension moved through Charlie. ‘What developments?’

  ‘We’ve got so many of your people in custody now, although none with such accommodation as this. We scarcely know what to do with them all.’

  Your people, picked out Charlie: but still no reference to Natalia, not even Guzov’s earlier remark about their knowing of “the woman.” Charlie said, ‘In custody for what?’

  ‘So many different offences,’ dismissed the Russian.

  ‘None of which affects my right to consular access that will be applied for.’

  ‘As it has for all the others. That’s the point I was making: the difficulty of finding time and space to fit everybody in. You’re on the list.’ />
  ‘I have the right of consular access,’ insisted Charlie.

  There was the familiar grimace. ‘I’m the person who decides what rights you do or do not have, Charlie. No-one else. We’ll eat, meet the first of your housekeepers. And after that we’ll start work.’

  * * *

  ‘I was looking for you.’

  ‘And you found me.’

  ‘I learned five English words today,’ boasted Sasha. ‘There were pictures to help me.’

  ‘What were they?’ invited Ethel.

  ‘Cow, dog, goat, horse…’ The recital faltered. ‘I’ve forgotten the last one.’

  ‘Four out of five is very good,’ praised Ethel.

  ‘I can almost say the name of my teacher, too.’

  ‘Mrs Elphick,’ came Natalia’s voice, from farther along the corridor. ‘She wants you back in class.…’ As she came into view, Natalia continued, ‘And she’s very pleased at how hard you’re working now.’

  ‘Can we have cake outside again today?’

  ‘As a reward for working hard,’ agreed Ethel.

  ‘I wouldn’t have believed the transformation if I hadn’t seen it for myself,’ said Natalia, watching her daughter go back along the corridor. Turning to the other woman, she said, ‘Is there anything from Moscow?’

  Ethel shook her head. ‘Jane’s staying in London to be on the spot. But we’ve spoken. She wants me to talk to you about some other developments.’ Without waiting for a response, the protection supervisor started towards the lounge, where coffee was already set out.

  As she handed Natalia her cup, Ethel said, ‘The leader of your extraction team has given a detailed account of a meeting with Charlie the night before you came out.’

  Natalia put her coffee untouched on a side table, waiting.

  ‘There are things Charlie told him that you might be able to help us understand better: by themselves they’re incomplete.’