Red Star Burning (23 page)

Unwittingly connecting to Charlie’s thoughts, Halliday held up the vodka that Charlie handed him and said: “It’s not cat’s piss. It’s horse piss.”

“It’ll have more body,” promised Charlie.

Halliday touched glasses. “Death to our enemies.”

“Whomever and wherever they may be,” responded Charlie, matching the other man’s overly posturing toast.

“I know who they are,” said Halliday, his face clearing in accepting surprise at his drink. “Gerald fucking Monsford and the rest of the conniving bastards in Vauxhall fucking Cross.”

In espionage parlance, a benefit or a human source—usually embedded within an opposition—is known as an asset. And while the Russian FSB was his most obvious opposition there remained in Charlie’s mind those unresolved uncertainties that still nagged from his Buckinghamshire interrogation, the FSB’s knowledge of his London apartment paramount among them. Was it at all possible that while David Halliday did not totally qualify as an asset—and continuing the vodka analogy—he could be looking a gift horse in the mouth? “Sounds like you’ve got an in-house problem?”

“I’m out in the cold, Charlie. And being left there to freeze to death.”

“You want to talk about it?” coaxed Charlie, tentatively.

“I’m offering you the same invitation.”

Shit! thought Charlie. “You’ll have to explain that.”

“So you’re part of the freeze, too!”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” rebuked Charlie, sure he knew enough to lead. “I’m never part of anything. I’m not at the embassy to
be
part of anything.”

Halliday used the time it took to buy more drinks to consider Charlie’s response. “There’s a big team come in from London—a combined job, both services. I’m totally excluded. And—”

“There’s nothing sinister in that: I was officially told not to include you in the Lvov business,” broke in Charlie. There’d been sufficient embassy gossip for the man to infer that his distancing had, in fact, been self-motivated by Halliday’s own, pension-protecting choosing and that some rapport remained between them.

“You didn’t completely blank me, not like I’m being blanked now,” conceded Halliday, to Charlie’s satisfaction.

“You’re surely not the only one?” tempted Charlie.

“That’s just it,” complained Halliday, petulantly. “Jacobson’s pissing about, too. My own fucking station chief won’t tell me what’s going on! Twenty-five years’ service, unblemished track record, and I’m being treated like the fucking office boy.”

“Jacobson?” queried Charlie, wanting every possible nugget.…

“Harry Jacobson. I just told you he’s MI6 station chief.”

“He wasn’t on station six months ago, when I was here?”

“Monsford went ape shit over the Lvov things, first at not being included from the beginning and then in his desperation not to be linked by all his efforts to be part of it when it all went wrong. I was the only one to survive. By rights I should have been appointed head of station but the bastard sent in Jacobson.”

“I don’t see how that means Jacobson is pissing about.”

“I didn’t mean Jacobson’s appointment,” said Halliday, exasperated. “I meant how Jacobson’s treating me, closing me out from what he’s doing.”

Charlie gestured for more drinks without looking away from the other man. Well aware that it was not the case, he said: “Jacobson’s the Control of this big team that’s been sent in from London?”

“No!” said Halliday, his exasperation worsening. “It’s something quite separate: just MI6 and with Monsford personally involved, which has got to mean it’s big. Which I know it is because everything’s classified Eyes Only, nothing on general traffic, and Jacobson—who’s keeping the entire file in his personal safe—is refusing to talk about it.”

“David!” Charlie smiled, touching his glass to the other man’s to emphasize the I-know-what-you’ve-done mockery. “Are you seriously asking me to believe that having retained that unblemished record for twenty-five years, you haven’t got the slightest clue what’s going on!”

It took a moment for Halliday to smile in return, the exasperation slipping away. “I don’t know what the big team’s here for. Or what that was all about back there at the Rossiya.”

Charlie paused, presented with two ways to go. Choosing to stay on track, he said: “We weren’t talking about the big team or what happened outside the hotel. We were talking about your being closed out of what Jacobson’s doing.”

“I’m sure it’s an extraction,” announced Halliday.

Despite the abrupt chill and as always untroubled by his own hypocrisy, Charlie kept the mocking smile. “David! You’ve asked me to help you and if I’m going to do that you’ve got to be honest. You don’t
think
. You
know
. You’ve got your hands on the file, haven’t you?”

Halliday held his smile, too. “Not all of it. Jacobson got suspicious and changed his safe combination. And most of what I saw was encrypted.”

“But you understood what you did read, didn’t you, David?”

“It’s a multiple extraction.”

“How multiple?”

“A man and a woman. And a third, but I couldn’t understand how he fitted in.”

“He,”
seized Charlie. “The third person’s male?”

“That’s how it seemed. And I did get the code designation. It’s Janus.”

The physical chill suffusing Charlie began to freeze. “The god with two faces, able to look two ways at the same time.”

“Appropriate for a defector, which it obviously is,” confirmed Halliday. “Monsford’s personal choice, from what I managed to see.”

The code designation for Natalia’s extraction had been Monsford’s personal choice at the Buckinghamshire hunting lodge, remembered Charlie: remembering, too, Monsford’s insistence on subject gender in the code titles along with his then-inexplicable choice of Camese, the wife of Janus. Hopefully Charlie said: “Nothing more?”

Halliday frowned. “I told you it was encrypted.”

“On a scale of ten, extractions score around fifteen for potential disasters. I’m surprised you’re pissed off at being excluded.”

“Being kept out of one is acceptable. Being kept out of both is ominous. Now it’s your turn. What the fuck’s going on?”

“It’s your round,” reminded Charlie, offering his empty glass to gain thinking time. Throughout Halliday’s diatribe Charlie had been calculating how to escape from the man, his mind shifting with each and every unexpected revelation. Now he didn’t want to escape, just free himself from the Sinbad burden of having Halliday on his back.

“I’m waiting,” prompted Halliday, handing Charlie his refill.

“Looks as if you and I are cast adrift in the same boat,” opened Charlie. “I know a team was sent ahead of me. But I wasn’t told the reason. My orders were to come in separately, stay away from the embassy, and wait to be contacted. The only thing missing was the tattoo on my forehead reading ‘Fall Guy.’ I jumped ship in Amsterdam and—”

“It was you!”

Charlie nodded. “I got back to England that same night and latched on to a tourist group from Manchester.…” He gestured vaguely back in the direction from which they’d fled and, sticking to the golden rule of telling as few lies as possible, he said: “They were the group picked up outside the Rossiya.”

“That’s why you were there, waiting to see what happened?”

The alarm bell rang at his oversight. “Why were you there if you’re excluded?”

“I followed Preston from the embassy. He didn’t pick me up.”

It was simple enough to be true, conceded Charlie. But only just. “I saw Preston’s surveillance.”

“So would an FSB trainee, hanging about as Preston did instead of moving around. And the FSB all around the Rossiya were very definitely not trainees.”

“How many did you mark?”

“Three, positively. You?”

“Four,” lied Charlie, who hadn’t searched beyond Preston. As well as failing to locate Halliday from his hideaway corner.

“You think you were sent here to be the fall guy?” demanded Halliday. Self-protective as always, he nervously added: “Me too, possibly?”

“Why’d you think I got off the plane in Amsterdam?”

“But then came here anyway?” challenged Halliday.

Charlie hesitated, annoyed at another slip. “I couldn’t go straight back, could I? I needed to find out if I was right or not. Which was why I was watching the hotel: my trap for them.”

“They’re bastards!” exclaimed Halliday, his voice too loud, slurred by the vodka.

“That shouldn’t surprise you, either.”

“What are we going to do, Charlie?” It was more a plea than a question, the man’s mind as well as his speech rusting in alcohol.

“Beat them,” said Charlie, making a promise to himself.

“How!” It was still a whimpered plea.

“By you and I working together. Okay, you’re being excluded but you’re still on the inside, within the embassy. I’m on the outside not on their intended leash, so they can’t initiate whatever they intend. We’re beating them so far.”

“You want another drink?”

“No. I don’t think you do, either.”

“What can we do?”

“You stay as you are, trying to find out what’s happening inside. Get Jacobson’s new safe combination. I’ll stay on the outside, watching like today.”

Halliday nodded, in befuddled agreement. “I need to know where you are.”

“No, you don’t,” refused Charlie, who’d anticipated the demand. “Have you got a cell phone?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll call you, twice every day, ten in the morning, six at night.” It had to be four hours, closer to five, since he’d tried the botanical gardens’ number.

“You don’t trust me.”

“I’m not expecting you to trust me.”

“Which I don’t!” declared Halliday, with slurred belligerence.

“Why not?”

“You couldn’t have just walked off the Amsterdam plane.”

“Why not?”

“Jacobson was on it. The flight details to and from London were on the general file.”

“Blond-haired guy, very neat and together apart from the big mustache?”

“You know him,” accused Halliday, still belligerent.

“Does he have a gray-checked suit?” persisted Charlie.

“You
do
know him!”

“Not until now,” said Charlie. “I remember him from the plane. And saw him yesterday, watching the hotel. But I’m not involved in whatever he’s doing.”

But he was going to be, Charlie knew.

*   *   *

“My mother’s making a surprise visit.”

“When?” asked Yvette.

“She’s arriving tomorrow,” said Andrei.

“Why with so little warning?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does she know about me? That we’re together?”

“I told them in my last letter that I’d met you but not that you’d moved in.”

“Do you want me to leave while she’s here? I could, if it would be better.”

“There’s another bedroom. Why should you?”

“Maybe it would be better if I weren’t here when she actually arrives: give you space to tell her.”

“I don’t understand why she didn’t warn me she was coming.”

“You’ll be able to ask her that, too, while I’m not here.”

18

Conflicting impressions and confusions swirled through Charlie’s mind like leaves in an autumn gale, constantly blown out of any order in which he tried to prioritize them, his uncertainties compounded by the distracting but essentially physical need to rid himself of David Halliday’s pursuit, which the man solemnly promised not to attempt but which Charlie knew he would. That focus eventually brought Halliday into the forefront of Charlie’s immediate reflection as he watched, from the concealment of a Metro station pillar, the MI6 officer carried away in the opposite direction from Charlie’s botanical gardens’ destination after thirty minutes of foot-aching, bite-chafing hopscotch between subway trains. Halliday’s vodka-clouded chase went beyond Charlie’s expectation: it was a warning, which again he scarcely needed, that he couldn’t trust Halliday further than an outstretched arm if the man thought there were better personal advantages from cheating him than keeping to their agreed arrangement. Which once more neither disconcerted nor angered Charlie, who would have abandoned Halliday with even less compunction if a better opportunity had presented itself.

But at that precise moment Charlie believed Halliday to be his asset, because he was the best—the only—self-preserving asset Halliday had in return. Just as he believed that, allowing a necessary margin of exaggeration, Halliday had filled in a third of the far too empty mosaic for him to get a clearer idea of the eventual picture.

The fury that had engulfed Charlie earlier at the unavoidable inference that Natalia and Sasha were included in his clearly intended sacrifice came again and now he didn’t suppress it: rather he let it burn and build, savoring the anticipation of as-yet-undecided but overwhelmingly fitting retribution. What could be sufficiently overwhelming to punish those who intentionally set out to destroy the two people central to his very existence? A question at the moment impossible to answer. But he would, Charlie determined, however long it took.

Outwardly conscious of the passing curiosity of Metro users at his standing as he was, Charlie boarded a linking train to connect to Mira station. Whom would he punish? he asked himself again, as he gratefully sat to ease his throbbing legs. They all, in some way, had to be complicit. He guessed Gerald Monsford to have been the primary instigator, too easily identifiable from his preposterous code designation. Monsford’s cow-uddered milkmaid Rebecca Street would have known, too, along with their lickspittle operations director, James Straughan. What about Aubrey Smith? Charlie Muffin was too familiar with the amoral practicability of espionage—that there was absolutely no morality, successful practicability its only goal—to despair at any debt-discarding betrayal by a man whose MI5 career he’d so recently salvaged. But there was still a blip of disappointment that evaporated as quickly as it came. The man’s obvious acquiescence made him as culpable and as deserving of reprisal as the others. The Janus-sexed Jane Ambersom would have looked in whatever self-serving direction the others took, and having been disabled from his army career the order-indoctrinated John Passmore would have obeyed his superiors’ rules of engagement.