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 losing 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.
Charlie: I still don’t understand how you know as much as you do.
Irena: Dumping Oskin’s body in your embassy was disastrous for me. I didn’t have control anymore. But we had an open line into the American embassy, through Lvov’s constant contact with Bundy, who in turn milked the Venables woman as much as he could, because he really is her godfather, which he told her to report to your people to avoid any suspicion. But it still wasn’t enough for me.
Charlie: Who put the bugs into the embassy?
Irena: The Americans. Probert could come and go as he liked to see Venables before you arrived: that’s how he knew the embassy CCTV cameras were faulty and could dump the body after fixing the distraction for the gatehouse guards that night. Bundy told Probert to do it, with some Russian bugs they’d found in an earlier sweep of their Moscow embassy and electronically tweaked them to their receiver frequency. You found those we put in your Savoy suite, of course? You never talked as I hoped you would for me to get in front, not behind you. I guessed you’d found them and wanted to play against us.
Charlie: I never understood the different design, though. How did the bugs get into Stout’s apartment?
Irena: I told you, Probert could come and go in your embassy, whenever he liked. More accurately he could come and go in the residential compound: your embassy under Sotley’s ambassadorship and Stout’s nonexistent security was a joke. We needed to cover ourselves against there being a sweep that found the other bugs Probert planted in Stout’s apartment on his way from a sex session with the Venables girl. It was easy for Probert to get into Stout’s apartment, which she’d pointed out to him and which Stout, of course, never bothered to lock. It was Bundy who persuaded Venables to finger Stout to your spy catchers, after we had Lvov suggest it to him.
Charlie: Paula-Jane beat the polygraph.
Irena: Bundy laughed about her to Lvov that she genuinely didn’t believe she was doing anything wrong, so I suppose she didn’t have any guilt taking the polygraph, which is a flawed test anyway.
Charlie: Who killed Pavel?
Irena: We did. He was a bad choice and I was wrong in not supervising the militia enough, which was how Svetlana Modin came to be arrested later and why we had to stage Lvov’s big scene. Pavel was too ready to listen to whatever you suggested, like that ridiculous press conference of yours. Even too willing to go along with you instead of his own force and use public telephones. Our own monitoring at Petrovka fouled up and we were frightened he’d taken some calls we didn’t know about. It was easier just to get him out of the way and for Guzov to take over, although he wasn’t much better: I had to suggest that your phony blood samples be tested for DNA.
Charlie: And you decided to take me over?
Irena: Twenty years of planning was all going wrong! I had to get back in complete control. And I was, with a double bluff that would have worked if I hadn’t had to let you take that fucking shrine to avoid your becoming suspicious.
Charlie: Tell me about the car crash on the embankment.
Irena: I was getting desperate, because I wasn’t able to take you over. I thought your people would withdraw you if you didn’t actually get killed; put in someone else less awkward. The Venables woman, hopefully.
Charlie: But I stayed and you were running out of options.
Irena: The only one left was for me to get personally involved.
Charlie: With your only weakness, the shrine. Which I brought here because I knew we’d never get Oskin’s body here and wanted to leave you with something.
Irena: My last hope was that you might have packed it in your case. I arranged for it to be searched. If it had been there, the whole operation would still have worke
d. The shrine would have been seized and I, the grieving woman, couldn’t have lived here in Britain without my memories, could I?
Charlie: But it wasn’t in the case.
Irena: I still had one last fail-safe. You wouldn’t have gotten Ivan’s precious body back, even if you’d tried. I’d made sure of that. All I had to do was get that fucking shrine back, destroy it to stop your discovering it was a fake, and maintain the grieving-woman shit and demand to go back to Moscow to mourn.
Charlie: And from the Lubyanka, through Lvov, you’d have led Washington and London along whatever paths you wanted them to follow. You’d have ruled the world.
Irena: Not the entire world but America and England would have been enough.
Charlie: You’ll get everything we agreed but I’d imagine you’ll have to properly work for both Washington and London a lot more now.
Irena: I think I’d like the plastic surgery to fix the scarring.
Charlie: How were you burned?
Irena: It was Stepan with me in the restaurant that night. We were celebrating hooking Washington and looking forward to how it would all work out. We stayed lovers, all the time, right up to last week. Marina is a front to satisfy the American need for celebrity: all part of the game plan for a game that isn’t ever going to be played.
The recording clicked off. Charlie broke the following silence. “I’d like to go back to London now. I’m sure no one has any objection.”
“You can come with me,” offered the Director-General.
35
Aubrey Smith appeared far more subdued than he’d been when Charlie left him the previous night after a celebration dinner at the Director-General’s Pall Mall club that had included two bottles of vintage Margaux and four double-measure snifters of fifty-year old-brandy. Charlie knew the other man had been at Thames House by nine while he’d had an additional four hours to recover.
“It’s been a very busy morning,” said the Director-General.
“Everything resolved?”
“I don’t imagine the Americans would describe it as that but at least they haven’t suffered the public humiliation: the good people of Des Moines will still sleep soundly in their beds, believing they are protected by the best intelligence service in the world.”
“What about our good people of Barnsley?”
“I’ve never believed the people of Barnsley have the country’s intelligence services in the forefront of their mind.”
“And Jeffrey Smale?”
“He’s resigned, with immediate effect. His last official duty was to order Paula-Jane Venables’s recall from Moscow. We won’t bother with any Official Secrets Act nonsense with her: it wouldn’t suit any practical purpose. Just the wrong person in the wrong job; should never have been employed in the first place, with her father’s background and with a serving CIA officer as a godfather to boot. She was a Smale protégée, by the way. As were Fish and Robertson. They’ll both be leaving the service, of course.”
“I’ve never been involved in such an operation before but it all seems to have concluded successfully?” Charlie suggested.
“No, it hasn’t,” denied Smith. “You won’t have heard yet, of course. It’s not yet reached any of the wire services.”
“What?’
“Svetlana Modin’s car was shot up from three other vehicles on her way in from Sheremetyevo Airport this morning. She, a cameraman, and their driver all died instantly. Stepan Lvov’s limousine blew up when its ignition was turned outside his hotel in Odessa, about the same time. His wife, campaign manager, and secretary were in the car with him.”
“I gave Svetlana back the embarrassing film of her exposing herself, to thank her,” said Charlie, reflectively.
“You realize the implications?”
“I think I do.”
“Every resource is available to you. Safe house wherever you choose. Everything paid for, of course. And plastic surgery: that will be very necessary, after so much exposure.”
“I’ve never fancied a protection program. I think I’d go mad, trying to be someone else. And whatever precautions there were, I’d still be recognizable from the way I walk with these awkward bloody feet of mine.”
The other man didn’t smile. “You need to think about it. Think hard. You certainly need to go directly to a safe house from here: totally abandon your apartment. We’ll have anything you particularly want brought to you.”
“For a few days,” agreed Charlie.
“For the rest of your life,” insisted the Director-General.
Charlie didn’t expect Natalia to be at her Moscow apartment but she was, her voice lifting the moment she recognized Charlie’s voice. “I’ve already taken leave and told Sasha. She’s very excited; already colored you another picture. I’m going to buy the tickets whenever you tell me.”
“No,” said Charlie. “You can’t come, not now.”
“What’s happened?”
“You’ll realize why, when you hear the news.”
“How long, before we can come?”
Charlie couldn’t immediately reply.
“Charlie?”
“Never,” Charlie finally managed.
Red Star Rising Page 37
