Red Star Rising

by Brian Freemantle

  “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, interm
ittently, 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?

  6

  The media posse had grown by the time Charlie returned to pick up Paula-Jane Venables from her embassy compound apartment. Some uniformed Russian militia officers had arrived to supplement the British security cordon, keeping the pedestrian door clear. They weren’t doing anything, though, to prevent the television cameramen and photographers from taking pictures, and Charlie told his taxi driver to continue on to a telephone kiosk farther along the embankment and wait while he made a call.

  “Ashamed to be seen with me?” Paula-Jane asked, flirtingly, when Charlie warned of the likely ambush.

  “You don’t need to be identified with me by the FSB and I don’t want to be linked with you by them.”

  “Don’t you think they already know who we’re from: you’ll be on file, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Why advertise it?”

  “There’s caution for you!” she mocked.

  “Pity there hadn’t been a lot more of it in the last few weeks,” said Charlie, heavily.

  “You had a bad day?”

  “Not at all,” denied Charlie, hoping he wasn’t showing his disappointment at not finding a telephone message from Natalia when he’d gone back to the hotel to change. “I’ve got a cab. I’ll pick you up at the Kalininskaya Bridge, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, her lightness gone.

  It took her twenty minutes, arriving uncomfortably on elevated high heels, the shoes coordinating with the clasp bag. The cleavage was so deep, the single rope of pearls looked like a suspension bridge between two peaks. Settling gratefully into the back of the cab, she said, “Television didn’t really show the extent of the scrum. I guess you were right.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Charlie, as the cab moved off.

  “Where else but the American Café, just off the ring road?” She gave the driver the address in Russian.

  “You seen the papers?” asked Charlie.

  “Heard it on television, when I was trying to estimate the crowd outside. Your friend Harry’s gone ape-shit, along with the entire inquiry team that came in this afternoon. I actually didn’t think I was going to be able to get away tonight after all: they’ve got Sotley in with them now, with Dawkins on standby.”

  Charlie was intent upon the cab driver’s reflection in the rearview mirror, relieved from the disinterest on the man’s face that he really didn’t understand English. “Who’d you think couldn’t keep their mouth shut?”

  “If we take you, me, and Halliday out of the frame you’ve got a fairly short list of suspects. My money’s on Reg Stout.”

  Stout was certainly the most obvious, accepted Charlie. They were on the multilaned freeway now, swept along by the tide of vehicles all around them. Recognizing the landmark of Pushkin’s house, Charlie looked to the right where Natalia’s apartment was, little more than a hundred yards off the main highway.

  “Familiar places from when you were here before?” asked Paula-Jane.

  “No,” denied Charlie, honestly. The apartment he’d occupied with Natalia and Sasha, an entire floor of a minor, prerevolutionary palace, was on the far side of the city. Wanting to move on from the unwelcomed reminder, he said, “Tell me about the people we’re going to be with tonight.”

  “Tex Probert is from the Company,” she said, using spook-speak to identify the CIA. “His wife, Sarah, is over on a visit. Bill Bundy’s his intended replacement, overlapping to settle himself in. Shirley Jenkins, who’s partnering Bundy, is in their legal department. Nice guys, although it takes a lot for Shirley to unbend. . . .” She smiled, the remark prepared. “Although she does quite a lot of unbending in certain circumstances, according to the stories I’ve heard.”

  Charlie ignored the innuendo. Instead, he said, “Sarah’s over on a visit?”

  “From what’s officially described as relocation leave,” explained Paula-Jane. “Tex is due to go back permanently any time now. He’s been assigned a CIA headquarter’s posting at Langley so she’s house-hunting around Washington and finding colleges for the two kids, who’ve been at school there. Bill’s the eventual replacement, like I said: third-term assignment, the Company’s acknowledged Russian guru.”

  “I know,” said Charlie.

  “You know?”

  “He was on station here the same time as me.”

  “How about that!” exclaimed Paula-Jane.

  How about that indeed? thought Charlie, easing his finger inside his left shoe to massage the discomfort.

  Charlie had never understood why nostalgic, back-home theme restaurants and bars in foreign cities never properly replicated back home at all. The American Café, which hadn’t existed when he’d lived in Moscow, was designed to represent a 1940s diner that, as far as Charlie was aware, didn’t exist anywhere in the United States. This one was complete with blown-up photographs of Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, and a cigarette advertising poster of a young, Chesterfield-smoking Ronald Reagan. There was even a bulbous, multilighted although silent jukebox. All the tables were covered in red checked cloths, each topped with a totem ketchup bottle.

  “Cute, eh?” enthused Paula-Jane.

  “Fascinating,” allowed an unimpressed Charlie.

  The American party was already there, around a centrally placed circular table. Charlie instantly recognized Bill Bundy in the middle of the group, guessing from Paula-Jane’s rehearsal that the serious faced, dark-haired girl to the man’s right to be the lawyer Shirley Jenkins. Which made the man next to her Tex Probert, with blond wife Sarah completing the group. Both men stood to shake hands at their introduction and Bundy said, “Good to see you after all this time, Charlie.”

  “And you,” said Charlie, who couldn’t isolate a single apparent difference in the man’s appearance from when they’d last met. The preppy, short haircut didn’t look out of place on a man who had to be at least fifty. Nor did the regulation Ivy League suit, complete with metal-pin collared shirt clamping the club tie in place.

  “You two guys already know each other?” exclaimed the angular-featured Probert, whose accent explained the nickname: the formal introduction had been John.

  “From way back,” confirmed Bundy. “We two can actually remember what the Cold War was like.”

  “And dinosaurs,” said Charlie, to the laughing appreciation of the three women, giving him the necessary moment to think. Bundy’s posting quite clearly had nothing whatsoever to do with what he’d been sent from London to investigate but Charlie had never before heard of a third-time overseas assignment—certainly not one that involved moving such an
acknowledged Russophile at a time of impending political change. His professional curiosity was piqued.

  The arrival of the waiter stopped the conversation. The women agreed to share a bottle of white wine while they decided the menu. Probert chose beer and Charlie stuck with vodka in preference to doctored scotch, knowing the restaurant definitely wouldn’t have a bottle with the correct label, let alone genuine Islay malt, which reminded him to collect his commissary order the following day. Bundy, whom Charlie belatedly remembered never chanced losing control, stayed with mineral water, insisting on breaking the bottle-cap seal himself. The American food order was uniformly T-bone steaks upon Probert’s insistence that they were definitely flown in from Texas. Paula-Jane wanted trout, ordering from prior knowledge of the menu without needing to consult it, and when Charlie asked for borscht Bundy said, “Staying native, Charlie?”

  “When in Rome,” Charlie answered, using the cliché. He started putting people in their pigeonholes. There was very definitely a frisson between Probert and Paula-Jane, which he guessed Probert’s wife was as conscious of as he was. Probert also appeared overly deferential to Bundy, even making allowances for the Bundy legend within the CIA. Deciding to use that reputation to goad the man in return, Charlie said, “How about you, Bill? What brings the head of the CIA’s Russian desk back to Moscow?”

  “Interesting times, politically, don’t you think?” said the man.

  “I always thought ambassadors and diplomats assessed things politically and that people like you and me were expected to make other sorts of contributions.”

  “My philosophy has always been that you can’t do one without studying the other. You here simply because of your murder?”

  “Who said I was here for that?” demanded Charlie, aware of the others shifting uncomfortably at the sudden seriousness between him and the American.

  Bundy looked around the table, as if aware of it, too. “Now here’s a lesson for all of us, the danger of assuming too much. Charlie’s on a mission he obviously can’t tell us about.”