Red Star Rising

by Brian Freemantle

  Charlie was already inside the restaurant, his chosen table so secluded in the corner farthest from the entrance that Natalia didn’t immediately see him when she entered, fifteen minutes late.

  “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming,” said Charlie, as she sat.

  “I stopped at the gardens, for old times’ sake.”

  “So did I.”

  She shook her head against an aperitif but Charlie held the waitress to get the ordering out of the way. Natalia appeared as disinterested in the food as Charlie, saying she’d have the same as him.

  When the waitress left Natalia took a folded sheet of paper from her handbag and said, “Here’s Sasha’s tiger.”

  “You didn’t tell me it had red ears.” Sasha had strayed over the body outline again.

  “They were an afterthought.”

  “Did you tell her we were meeting today?”

  Natalia shook her head. “She wanted to give it to you herself if we bumped into you again.”

  Charlie held Natalia’s eyes. “Does that mean we’re not going to?”

  “No, it doesn’t mean that.”

  “What then?”

  “A compromise.”

  “What compromise?”

  “It said on television last night that you’re being recalled. The inference was that you were in some kind of trouble.” She raised her hand, a halting gesture, as Charlie moved to speak. “I don’t want any details!”

  The same fear as Irena of danger by association, thought Charlie. “I’m not in trouble. I expect to be back here in a few days.”

  “I’m glad . . . that you’re okay.”

  They stopped talking at the arrival of borsch and the red wine.

  Charlie said, “It’s complicated, though.”

  “Things that we do always seem to be.”

  “You still haven’t told me what you mean by compromise.”

  “How long’s it going to be, before everything you’re here for to be wrapped up?”

  “I don’t know. A few weeks, say three. A month at the most.”

  “There’s not the difficulty there used to be, moving in and out of Russia,” said Natalia. “I’m due leave and Sasha’s school is breaking up for their summer recess. It would work perfectly if you’d completed everything in a month. Sasha and I could come to London for a vacation.”

  “Only for a vacation?”

  “I’m not going to rush anything, Charlie. I want to see how I feel when I get there and I want to see how Sasha feels. We won’t stay with you but we’ll see you a lot and I want to be absolutely sure that it’ll work before I make the final decision. If you don’t think that’s a good idea . . . that I’m not being fair and that it’s not going to give me or you enough time, then I’ll understand.”

  “I think—” tried Charlie, but Natalia cut him off.

  “I’ve always been honest with you, but you haven’t always been honest with me. So here’s my honesty. I do love you, despite all the things that have happened in the past. But we’re not starry-eyed teenagers. Love isn’t enough. I’m thinking mostly about Sasha, the adjustments she’s going to have to make. And we would have to make a lot of adjustments, too, both of us. That’s my compromise: how I want us to go forward. As I hope we can.”

  “That’s how I want us to go forward, too,” accepted Charlie, at once.

  Natalia sipped her wine, at last. “I’m glad that’s over.”

  “So am I,” said Charlie, meaning it.

  “You’re really not in trouble, are you, Charlie? That’s what I’m really worried about: something happening that would ruin it all.” She hesitated. “This is our last chance.”

  “It’s complicated, as I told you.” There wasn’t a complication he couldn’t overcome after this: literally everything was falling into place exactly as he wanted.

  Which it continued to do, with minor exceptions, throughout the rest of the day.

  Charlie was anxious to limit the time he spent that afternoon at the embassy. He sent a courtesy memo to Peter Maidment advising the acting ambassador of his return to London, carefully omitting departure and return dates and was glad that Paula-Jane Venables’s absence from the rezidentura spared her assuming he was leaving the following day from his vagueness about her outstanding luncheon invitation. David Halliday wasn’t in his section, either, but the newspapers were: Svetlana Modin’s broadcast the previous night was yet again the basis for most of the print media coverage. His return to London—all using the word “recall”—confirmed an increasingly deepening disagreement between London and Moscow over the murder investigation. All reported the refusal of the Russian Interior Ministry to make any comment. Charlie didn’t encounter Paul Robertson, either, and didn’t try to locate the man.

  Irena Novikov’s passport arrived as promised in the diplomatic bag but separately from the preliminary forensic report Charlie had asked to be conducted on the briefcase and the Russian murder dossier it had contained. On both the dossier and the briefcase there were five different and fresh sets of fingerprints. There was also sufficient surviving residual finger sweat hopefully to provide DNA traces. One of the five sets was identified as Charlie’s, from their being recorded on his personnel records. The other provable prints were Paula-Jane’s.

  On his way back to the Savoy, Charlie weighed the potential advantages against disadvantages of making contact with Svetlana Modin, and decided not to bother. There wasn’t anything, either half true or totally invented, that might benefit him and he was determined not to risk anything that might further disorientate or unsettle Irena Novikov.

  Would it take a month to conclude it all, as he’d told Natalia? Not everything, he accepted. To conclude everything, he’d have to identify Ivan Oskin’s killers and he’d already acknowledged he’d never be able to do that. So it could even be as little as two weeks. He’d take leave directly afterward. He wanted to be free of any distraction or intrusion when Natalia and Sasha were in London. He’d have to get the right hotel: a suite, not a room, but not overwhelm them, as Natalia so often complained he did. Maybe not an hotel at all. Perhaps she’d prefer a short-term sublet apartment in which they could live more as they did in Moscow, and Natalia could get a better experience of what living in London would be like. They didn’t necessarily have to live in London, not if Natalia didn’t want to. That was another possible idea! Rent a car and drive around England, showing them the countryside and the beaches as well as the London tourist sites. They most certainly would never see the graffiti-daubed Vauxhall council isolation flat in which he lived during assignments.

  David Halliday was already in the bar when Charlie entered, on the stool next to Charlie’s accustomed corner seat, turning in greeting when he saw Charlie approaching in the bar’s back-plate mirror.

  “I was going to give you another ten minutes before calling up,” said the MI6 officer, nodding to the waiting vodka. “Ordered for you when they told me at reception that you were here.”

  “Appreciate the forethought,” thanked Charlie, as he sat.

  “Thought I’d come to say good-bye. We didn’t actually get together very much, did we? Pity. Moscow really has changed a lot since the last time you were here.”

  “There hasn’t actually been much time for socializing,” said Charlie. “Maybe when I get back.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Nothing’s fixed.”

  “I might not be here, which is why I came tonight,” said Halliday. “Lvov’s off on a triumphal tour before the inevitable: St. Petersburg, Odessa, south as far as the Black Sea. London’s told me to tag along.”

  “Isn’t that getting a little too close?” Charlie frowned.

  “That’s what I thought—and said—when I got the brief. Theory is that the media entourage will be so large we’ll all be lost in the crowd. There’s a rumor that the FSB have tried to bug the Lvov campaign headquarters after the conference hijack and that funeral business, and that they might try to derail t
he tour with staged agitators everywhere Lvov goes.”

  “We’ll?” questioned Charlie.

  “P-J’s coming along as well and for the same reason. I’m to tell you good-bye and sorry about the lunch: maybe some other time and place.”

  “How’d she know I called by? I didn’t go into her outer office to get picked up on her CCTV.”

  Halliday shrugged, unknowing. “You sure you’re coming back?”

  “That’s the intention. Why shouldn’t I be coming back?”

  “You must have something a damned sight better than anomalies and discrepancies to face down Guzov!” insisted Halliday.

  “We’ll see,” evaded Charlie.

  “I’d hate to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said the MI6 officer.

  “Are you asking me something?” queried Charlie.

  “Just a nod in the right direction,” suggested Halliday. “Russia’s a hell of a big place: takes days to get from one part to another. You think there’s any reason for me to stay in Moscow instead of traipsing all over the country on a political ego trip?”

  “No reason whatsoever,” said Charlie.

  “I appreciate the guidance,” said Halliday. “And here’s my offering, in return. I’m grateful for what you did but Gerald Monsford’s as mad as hell you guys kept us out. He’s making little wax effigies of you: you ever end up in the same room together, get out as fast as you can. He’s a bastard.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  Halliday checked his watch. “I need to go; got a six A.M. start tomorrow. If we do overlap when we get back I’ll definitely say thank you in a more tangible way. And Charlie . . .”

  “What?”

  “I’m sure as hell glad the embankment business was a coincidence, although I’m obviously sorry about Jack Hopkins.”

  “Thanks.”

  Svetlana made no mention whatsoever of the embassy murder on that night’s program, which was entirely devoted to the possibility of staged FSB disruptions to the countrywide tour of the Federation by Stepan Lvov, indicating the present government’s panic at Lvov’s inevitable election.

  The following morning Charlie walked the short distance from the hotel to use the telephone kiosk in Red Square.

  “Ten o’clock,” he told Irena, when she answered.

  “I’ll be there. I’m all right.”

  Charlie didn’t think she was, from the tone of her voice.

  33

  But she was there.

  Charlie saw Irena the moment his taxi joined the last ten vehicles in the final stop-start line to the departure terminal, and was as relieved as he was encouraged. Irena wasn’t standing too obviously expectant or searching but fumbling with a baggage trolley, arranging and repositioning her single scuffed, camel-skin suitcase. Her handbag, which he’d examined and agreed perfect for their brush contact drop when he’d picked up the shrine objects, was exactly where he’d rehearsed her to put it, too, on the right of the trolley handle but at that moment with the top-opening zip only half undone.

  Charlie abruptly ordered his cab to stop about five yards from where she had put herself, the sudden braking getting the horn blast he wanted. To give her further time to locate him, Charlie twice queried the charge, knowing that she had seen him and was walking in his direction when he turned toward the terminal with his single case in his right hand, his left hand inside his raincoat pocket, clutching the passport and her ticket in readiness for what he had to transfer to her. He let Irena pass and followed to within ten yards of the terminal entrance before closing the gap between them, able to see that she’d fully unzipped the handbag to gape open as he got level, shouldering into the bottlenecked crush directly outside the door. She showed no reaction to the slight tug she would have felt as he put the passport and ticket he’d bought the previous day into the bag, and in the brief seconds the drop took, he was physically aware there was no nervous shaking. Charlie continued straight on, hoping she’d remember to hold back the moment he entered to a possible ambush.

  Which was exactly what he did.

  The media frenzy was far more concentrated than he’d feared, a mob surging toward and around him, squawking an incomprehensible babble of questions. He recognized Svetlana Modin moments before the strobe and camera lights burst blindingly into his face, distinguishing her voice through the hubbub, although not what she was saying. Charlie forced his way on toward the check-in desk, shaking his head and repeating “nothing to say” and “no comment” before being brought up short by the check-in line he had to join. Blinking in the whitening lights, his lips opening and closing with his nothing-to-say mantra, Charlie guessed he’d look like a rare fish species landed from the deepest depths.

  It would have been, he later decided, her recognition as the news-breaking leader that finally got Svetlana propelled into the demanding forefront of the media pack, which quietened in expectation of her informed questioning. To do so, she wedged herself directly in front of Charlie, physically cutting him off from the shuffling line. Despite the melee in which he was trapped Charlie conceded—and admired—the expertise with which she adjusted her questions for his “no comment” or “nothing to say” replies virtually to confirm what she was asking. Just as he did by remaining tight-lipped, head shaking, and mute, which was his initial reaction, as well as compounding the landed-fish impression. With which he had to live, Charlie accepted. The sole consideration had been to create a smokescreen into which Irena could safely and completely disappear, and Charlie was sure he’d done that.

  His flight was actually being called when Charlie finally reached the check-in desk, breathing in like a drowning man coming up for air at the sudden release from the crush. Two plain-clothesmen stood beside the counter clerk, the elder completely bald, the other bespectacled and clearly subordinate. Both scrutinized Charlie’s ticket and passport before passing each to the clerk. When Charlie lifted his suitcase toward the loading chute, the younger man gestured to a narrow gate beside the desk and said, “Come through here with it, please.”

  There would be no problem if he missed the flight, Charlie knew, meekly obeying. By now Irena had to be in the embarkation lounge if not actually aboard the plane, and there were people to receive her at Heathrow. There certainly wasn’t anything to be gained from protesting. There was a burst of light from behind, from television cameras recording the latest episode of his personal soap opera. On the other side of the desk, he again followed the gestures of the younger man into an awkwardly cluttered side office. The main obstruction was a temporary bench, behind which the two men positioned themselves, leaving Charlie on the other side.

  “A departure search is usual?” suggested Charlie, feeling that some innocuous question would be expected.

  “Security check,” claimed the bald man. “Have you anything to declare?”

  “I’m not an Islamic terrorist but I’m glad you’re taking the risk seriously.”

  The men were meticulous, individually taking out and examining every item—separating each sock from its partner and handkerchief from its layer—before feeling for anything a seam or trouser turnup or lining might conceal. Each item was placed beside the emptied case for it to be carried to another temporary but smaller bench to be X-rayed, after which the younger man repacked Charlie’s suitcase with the meticulous care with which he’d unpacked it.

  “I hope I haven’t missed my plane,” said Charlie.

  “You haven’t,” assured the older man.

  Which was true. Everyone else was on board when Charlie entered the plane, the door closing immediately behind him. To further separate them on the flight Charlie had booked himself in business class and as he turned toward it, Charlie saw Irena in an aisle seat, halfway along the economy section. Charlie refused any food and limited himself to two whiskies, because it wasn’t Islay single malt and he expected to be taken at once to see the Director-General.

  Charlie hadn’t anticipated a repeat of the euphoria at his finally unde
rstanding the significance of Oskin’s material but he’d at least hoped for a feeling of satisfaction at getting Irena safely away. So why didn’t he?

  “There’s a lot of traffic we’re missing—a lot the Russians clearly failed to intercept—but enough for us to be sure that you got it right,” congratulated the Director-General, the previous day’s irritation gone. “It’s definitely Stepan Grigorevich Lvov . . .”

  “Who’s going to become the next Russian president,” Charlie broke in.

  “Responding to whatever, whenever, and however Washington dictates,” completed an interrupting Aubrey Smith. “It’s the CIA coup of the century.”

  When he’d originally been admitted into this rarefied, top-floor sanctuary, the cream and green MI6 headquarters on the opposite side of the Thames at Vauxhall hadn’t even been built, remembered Charlie. That visit had been to receive his first commendation: the one he had been promised today would bring his total up to eleven. “No doubt at all?”

  “Absolutely none: Washington’s confirmed it. And from our own archives we discovered that Oskin was in Cairo at the same time as Lvov. That must be how he picked up on the transmission: he would have known the ciphers of their CIA opposition there. There were three KGB officers on station in the Egyptian capital. The station chief was Valeri Voznoy. A Valeri Voznoy, officially listed as an army general, was killed in the same Afghan ambush in which Oskin lost his arm.”

  “Bill Bundy, who’s been reassigned to Moscow, served in Cairo,” said Charlie, recalling their Chinese lunch.

  “I didn’t know that. But everything fits, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” refused Charlie. “Washington is aware that we know what’s going on?”