Red Star Rising

by Brian Freemantle

  “You going to talk to her?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Shouldn’t you get clearance from London? She’s . . .” Fish paused. “Her story’s attracting a lot of attention. Maybe you should come back here.”

  Now the man was trying to warn him about the listening devices, Charlie realized. “I might, if I decide to call back. Give me the number anyway.”

  Charlie dialed from the public telephone kiosk closest to the hotel, the one near Red Square, glad it was enclosed, again with a protective wall to his back, and with a view of about twenty-five yards over which to see any suspicious approach. Svetlana answered personally. Charlie said, “I don’t want my phones blocked every fifteen minutes. It might be someone important.”

  She laughed, unoffended. “I really didn’t expect you to come back to me.”

  “What do you want?” Despite the video recording he held as insurance, he still had to very carefully weigh every word he uttered.

  “I’d say the points were about equal in the teaching-each-other-lessons league, wouldn’t you?”

  From the background sounds Charlie guessed she was talking from an open newsroom phone. “I didn’t know it was a competition.”

  “You’re making it one. I really don’t want to screw up your investigation: you know the arrangement I’m offering.”

  Based upon her success over the past few days, she had every cause for arrogance. “Which is?”

  “Why don’t we meet to talk about it?”

  Charlie thought there was an eerie familiarity about the conversation. “You won’t forget that I know where you keep your microphones hidden, will you?”

  “Are you ever going to let me?”

  “The bar, at the Metropol, in an hour,” suggested Charlie.

  “Why not your room?”

  “The bar.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  She was ahead of him, although Charlie got there early. She wore the clinging black dress in which she’d appeared on the screen earlier but now high on her left shoulder there was a jeweled clip of what Charlie was sure were genuine diamonds. She sat majestically in the very center of a banquette, champagne already poured from a bottle—French, not Georgian—resting in its cooler. His concentration, as he made his obvious way toward Svetlana, was as much upon identifying potential danger around her as it was upon the woman herself.

  “I tried to call your room but the desk told me that you weren’t staying here.”

  “Neutral territory,” said Charlie. Which she’d taken over by being first. There was a second glass already waiting but Charlie shook his head against champagne, ordering vodka. “Mikhail Guzov’s taken to dropping in, unannounced. I thought it would be better not to be interrupted, although I got the impression at the embassy that you knew him quite well?”

  “Quite well,” she agreed, cautiously.

  “If you’ve got with him the same sort of deal you’re going to put to me, he might have thought you were playing one of us off against the other.”

  “Did it occur to you he also might have thought you were my source?”

  “No,” lied Charlie.

  Svetlana touched her glass against Charlie’s when his vodka was served and said, “You stay pretty concentrated upon the job, don’t you?”

  “I got the same impression about you.”

  “Which makes us well matched.”

  “What’s your suggested deal?”

  Svetlana waited for their attentive waiter to top up her glass. “How about you and I speaking before every evening transmission. I tell you what I’m going to say. You tell me anything that might seriously impede or endanger anything you’re doing. I cut it out.”

  Surely she couldn’t be serious! If he accepted her offer it would give her a spread-open map along which to track, from what he asked her to omit, every twist and turn of the investigation. But by the same token she was offering him a map of her own, which could lead him directly to the embassy informant. Which wasn’t his investigation. But also something he wasn’t going to ignore. “Give me an example.”

  “How about the killers of your first victim, and Sergei Pavel being so worried how close you are to them that they tried to kill you on the embankment?”

  He’d got it right by agreeing to meet her, Charlie decided. “I don’t want that broadcast.”

  “It’s a good story that no one else has picked up on.”

  “I thought the idea was not to screw my investigation?”

  “As well as for me to get exclusives.”

  He had to be careful not to show his desperation. “You broadcast it, I lose the lead I’ve got,” exaggerated Charlie.

  “Are you threatening me with the video recording?”

  “Are you going to make me?”

  Svetlana regarded him expressionlessly for what seemed a long time. “If I hold off, we agree to my deal?”

  From scouring the Russian papers as intently as he had, Charlie knew she was right about no one else picking up on the connection, and his concern was as much to avoid Natalia learning about the attempt as the hoarse-voiced woman. And if Svetlana kept her promise, there could be the other opportunities to manipulate things to his benefit. “I agree to the deal.”

  Svetlana smiled, gesturing the waiter to replenish their drinks. “And I get my exclusives.”

  He couldn’t risk her having a change of heart, Charlie decided. “Since Putin got to power a lot of the freedoms achieved by Gorbachev and Yeltsin have been taken back or eroded, particularly press freedom. How long do you think you can go on like this?”

  She laughed, genuinely amused. “Think back before Gorbachev and Yeltsin, to the bad old days. How did the famous dissidents and nonconformists stay out of the gulags? By becoming—and staying—famous in the West, too well known to be moved against.”

  “That’s my point!” risked Charlie. “If you keep cutting things when I ask you, you could end up nights in a row with nothing to say.”

  “Okay, so I’ve made the first concession,” accepted Svetlana. “But I want the big ones, those that’ll make me untouchable forever! I help you, as I’ve just agreed to do, and you give me your solemn undertaking that you’ll repay me at the end. I get something that’s going to keep me on TV screens around the world. When you learn whatever the hell’s going on, you tell me. You also tell me how you finally got all the answers. I get my global exclusive, with enough to produce the supporting documentary. You get your man and I give you all the credit. How’s that sound?”

  Better than he could have hoped, conceded Charlie. Could there be some physical protection in it for him, as well? He couldn’t at that moment imagine what but it was something to keep in mind. The only obvious drawback was the one he’d already identified, that she had the same sort of arrangement with Mikhail Guzov. Not a problem, Charlie decided. He was feeding the source, not drinking from it. “It sounds like something to explore, to our mutual benefit. Let’s see how it works.”

  “I’ll make it work.”

  So would he, determined Charlie.

  Since the relocation of the monitored telephones to the compound apartment, Charlie had virtually abandoned his original assigned rabbit hutch, but on his way to the embassy the following morning he decided to check for any misdirected written messages—or anything else—that might have been misdelivered. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed but on the card table, to its left, were neatly stacked by date Halliday’s English-language publications. To its right, set out on a white sheet of A4 paper upon which was drawn a large question mark, was a polished brass bell.

  Charlie was reaching hesitantly for it when through the left-open door behind him Paula-Jane said, “If it weren’t for those raftlike shoes, which I’d recognize anywhere, I’d believe I’d caught the embassy spy himself, breaking into offices.”

  Charlie turned, leaving the bell. “How are you?”

  “Me? I couldn’t be better. Which I guess you’d very, very much prefer to be.”
She was designer-dressed as always, the interlocking C of the Chanel logo on the jacket buttons matching those on her suede loafer. For the first time Charlie acknowledged the coquettish similarity between Paula-Jane Venables and Svetlana Modin, who’d predictably ended their previous night’s encounter with the clear invitation, which he’d just as clearly declined, to share either her bed or his. He wondered where P-J hid her recording equipment, sure there wouldn’t be too much objection to his making his own discovery.

  “I assume you’re talking of the car business?” invited Charlie, wanting to get it out of the way as soon as possible.

  “Among other things,” said the woman. “You trying to convince me it really was an accident!”

  “You wanted to see me?”

  “I was sneaking in to get it back.”

  “What?” frowned Charlie.

  “The bell. I put it there as a joke when I got back last night, the lepers’ bell or for whom the bell tolls: whatever. I’d been to that American Café with Tex: his final farewell and I’d drunk too much. This morning I decided there was nothing funny about anything that’s happened to you and wanted to get it back; stop the whole stupid thing. I’m sorry.”

  She appeared contrite, which was something else he didn’t expect. “It’s not the best joke that’s ever been tried on me, but thanks for trying to lighten the burden.”

  “It should be me, thanking you, for not involving me. You’re probably well enough established to survive this other business with America, as Bill Bundy is. Or would have been if you’d let him in. I’m sure as hell not.”

  Charlie was immediately attentive. “Was Bill with you last night?”

  Paula-Jane shook her head. “There was a big crisis meeting at the embassy, apparently, after the television broadcast. Tex was only able to make it because he wasn’t any longer officially attached to the embassy; he’s flying back to the States today.”

  There’d been an inference of an affair between P-J and the American, Charlie remembered. “I’m not sure I can survive if I don’t wrap it up soon.”

  The woman looked very directly at him. “I’ve heard things about you.”

  This wasn’t P-J the coquette. “Things like what?”

  “That you don’t like to lose. Which is why you so rarely do, irrespective of the shortcuts you take.”

  “What do you want me to tell you?” demanded Charlie, trying to jar the innuendo into something more recognizable.

  “If you’re not going to trust me—which I know you don’t from what you did during Robertson’s first investigation—I can’t expect you to tell me anything, can I?”

  “I thought you were grateful not to be involved?”

  The woman smiled wanly. “Grateful doesn’t begin to describe it. I’m sad we got off to such a bad beginning and lost the colleague-to-colleague relationship, though. I could have learned a lot.”

  “Or lost a lot, if you believe the car accident wasn’t an accident.”

  The smile broadened. “How long’s it going to be, Charlie?”

  “How long’s what going to be?”

  Paula-Jane shrugged. “I suppose I should have known better. But I thought I’d worked it out; thought I’d run it by you, see what you’d say.”

  “Run what by me?” Charlie continued to question, refusing to volunteer anything.

  “London wouldn’t have knocked Washington’s offer back and you wouldn’t have been isolated for so long by yourself—my even being excluded, despite all the diplomatic bullshit—if you weren’t on the very edge of the big denouement that’s going to knock everything, and everyone, on its ass! What do you say to that?”

  Charlie’s first reaction was to say that the vocabulary of people to whom he’d spoken over the preceding twenty-four hours appeared to be remarkably similar. Instead he said, “I say that it’s very fanciful and I wish it were more realistic.”

  The woman remained silent and solemn faced for what seemed a long time. “So much for my trying to make things a little more pleasant between us! I suppose I should have expected it.” She made another vague gesture behind him. “Time to get back to the office work.”

  Charlie glanced behind him. “What office work?”

  “If you bother to look through what Dave’s left, you’ll see that the Western media have well and truly adopted Stepan Lvov as their own, even before he’s elected. The buzz phrase is ‘Russia’s New Camelot.’ Inevitably London is asking for a full profile.”

  “Halliday told me he’s already provided one.”

  “For his people. Apparently we need our own. Dave’s given me all his stuff and Tex passed on a lot more . . .” The smile was a frigid one. “Some people work quite harmoniously with others.”

  As she turned to leave Charlie said, “Don’t you want your bell?”

  She paused at the door. “You keep it, Charlie. You might want to ring for help. Let’s hope someone hears.”

  Charlie made his way slowly from the main embassy building into the residential compound, trying to decide if the previous thirty minutes really had been a genuine olive branch offer from an inexperienced operative on her initial overseas assignment. First-time appointees—certainly to a high-profile embassy like Moscow, which was rarely if ever a beginner’s posting—were rigidly vetted for any personal weaknesses and there certainly hadn’t been any weak frailty during their initial encounter. Why then the near embarrassingly inept act? Not something to be mulled over at any length but perhaps mentally filed for later reference.

  Both duty operators—one male, one female—were lounged in easy chairs, disinterestedly flicking through out-of-date newspapers, their boredom shown in the log listing only four incoming calls after the tidal wave of the previous night’s TV broadcast. One of the four was from the familiarly ranting communist zealot, two were new Japanese press calls, and the fourth was a heavy-breathing blank.

  The man said, “Harry told me to tell you he’d be along later, around eleven. He’s with Robertson, in the inquiry room, if you want him.”

  Mikhail Guzov wasn’t at his Petrovka telephone when Charlie called. He told the woman who answered that he’d courier transcripts of the overnight contacts, although there was nothing of significance, and asked that Guzov return his call, slumping into another easy chair. He managed to go through Halliday’s newspapers, relieved there was still no reference to the embankment crash, before Fish’s arrival.

  “What’s Robertson doing?” asked Charlie, expecting the mole-hunter to be in tow.

  “His job, starting the reinterviews,” retorted Fish, more belligerent than unhelpful.

  “You tell him about the hopeful call?”

  “You didn’t ask me not to.”

  “Or that you should.”

  “You’re surely not expecting her to call again, after last night? And today’s newspaper follow-ups!”

  “That’s not really the point, is it?”

  “I don’t think there’s any longer much point in anything we’re doing here,” dismissed the electronics specialist. “Did you call that anchorwoman back?”

  “That’s not a point of discussion, either,” refused Charlie, raising a three-day-old copy of the Daily Telegraph to create a physical barrier between himself and the other man. An odd, uncertain silence settled beyond Charlie’s screen. The operators found unexplained reasons to check and recheck their equipment, and Fish very obviously, close to mockery, constantly checked the time as it approached noon, once loudly calling for the two operators to synchronize their watches with his. Charlie kept checking, too, at the same time as forcing himself to read the newspaper comments and poll predictions of the landslide victory in the forthcoming presidential elections of Stepan Lvov.

  “A minute to go, if she’s going to call,” announced Fish, unnecessarily.

  Charlie finally lowered his newspaper and said “thanks,” disappointed he didn’t convey the intended sarcasm.

  All four watched 12:10 register on their individual watc
hes. A full minute later, Fish said: “You’ve lost her, as it was obvious you would.”

  The woman monitor coughed and began rummaging in her handbag.

  Fish said, “A good job you didn’t tell London.”

  “I’m pretty sure they know, aren’t you?” said Charlie.

  “How could . . . ?” started Fish, but was stopped by the telephone.

  “I couldn’t decide.”

  “I’m glad you did,” said Charlie.

  “I’m frightened.” It was more a wheeze than hoarseness.

  “I know. Don’t be. We have to meet.”

  “I need to be sure.”

  “Whatever you want. Tell me and I’ll do it . . . whatever you want.”

  “Need to be safe.”

  “I’ll make sure you’re safe. Kept safe.” It wasn’t so difficult for him to say today.

  Charlie could hear the growl of her breathing, which sounded as if it was quickening, as if the fear was building, but he held back from speaking, waiting for her, tensed against the line suddenly going dead. The other three in the room were tensed forward, too, the female operator with her cupped hands to her mouth. Charlie didn’t understand the single word the hoarse-voiced caller said, despite the magnification. Forcing the calmness, he said, “What was that?”

  “Arbat,” she repeated. “You know the Arbat?”

  “Yes, I know the Arbat.” Moscow’s tourist flea market, jammed with people, the best place for a jostled, easily escapable assassination, he thought.

  “Saturday. Go there on Saturday.”

  Natalia’s day! was Charlie’s immediate thought: the day he had to meet Natalia and Sasha—after now trebly ensuring he was free of any unwanted company—to make all the promises he intended to keep, make any concessions she demanded to persuade her to come with him to London. “What time on Saturday?”

  “Be there at ten.”

  “Where? What part? It’s a long street.”

  “Just walk. Look at the shops and the stalls.”

  “How do we meet?”

  “I’ll decide. Don’t be surprised.”

  “I need—” started Charlie but the line went dead.