Red Star Burning (7 page)

“What was the purpose of your false defection?”

He’d already covered that, although not in detail: she was running out of impetus. “In 1988 a Russian agent only ever identified by the name Edwin Sampson was jailed for forty years. He was considered one of the most damaging spies ever to be uncovered in this country but we didn’t know the full extent of what he’d done, apart from the barest evidence we’d managed to get together to convict him: he never confessed or admitted anything. I was put in Wormwood Scrubs, supposedly jailed for fourteen years, also for spying. It was fixed that we’d share the same cell, in which over the course of time I’d gain his trust and get some indication of what else he’d done. It wasn’t anticipated the KGB would try to free him, as they did with George Blake and which indicated the importance they attached to him. But when it emerged that they intended to do just that, it was decided I should appear to defect with him in the hope of learning what made him so important. Which I did. The idea—”

“Was that after a period of time, with the help of our people in the British embassy, you’d pretend to be disillusioned with Russia and flee back to this country,” broke in Jane.

“Yes,” agreed Charlie. “With the added benefit of all I’d learned at the spy school.”

“With such a history no one was going to doubt your loyalty, were they?” persisted Jane.

“No one has, until now. And you’re wrong.”

“But there’s good reason to doubt you now, suddenly presented as we are with a wife who’s a serving officer in Russia’s external intelligence,” challenged Jane. “Is that all she is, your wife? Or could she also be your Control through whom you’re supposed to liaise with Moscow after she joins you here, which you’ve told us has consistently been the plan?”

“What I told you is that it’s consistently been my
hope
that she would join me here, but that she has always refused, held as she is by that near-mystical bond Russians have for their country,” corrected Charlie, maintaining control but letting his argument come out in a rush. “If I’d been turned and married Natalia for the reason you’ve suggested, she would have been
ordered
to return with me in the first place, wouldn’t she? And I wouldn’t have told you that she was a member of the FSB. There’d be an unbreakable cover legend, giving her a background as far as possible from any connection with espionage. And would I, as a KGB-cum-FSB double, have destroyed a KGB/FSB operation eighteen years in creation to put Moscow literally in the Oval Office?”

Before Jane Ambersom could respond, the Director-General said: “There is an alternative way to judge this. You could be telling the truth. The FSB could have discovered your relationship with Natalia Fedova and be forcing her to make the approaches to trap you into going back to Russia. Where you, as the person who wrecked that eighteen-year-long operation, would face punishment it’s hard to conceive, judged against the ways they’ve killed the people they’ve eliminated so far…”

“… Unless they made you watch whatever they wanted to do to Natalia and the child before killing you as bestially as possible,” completed Monsford.

“That’s what I believe they want to do,” admitted Charlie, almost inaudibly.

“You think we’re going to let you go back to Russia to stop it happening, don’t you?” taunted the woman.

“Irrespective of whether it’s agreed I go back, they’ll do whatever they want to them both,” pleaded Charlie. “That can’t be allowed to happen. They’ve got to be got out!”

“There’s no way they can be,” said Jane.

*   *   *

“All I had to do was sit and listen to Jane Ambersom stumble about like a bull in a china shop,” gloated the MI6 director. “Christ, we’re lucky being rid of her.”

“Cow,” corrected James Straughan, who always sought to lighten his encounters with someone as unpredictable as Gerald Monsford, particularly when they were alone, which they were now. “It would be a cow in a china shop, not a bull.”

“Cow is certainly more apposite,” agreed Monsford, who’d enjoyed his manipulation of that day’s meeting as he had those that preceded it. “Charlie’s on his knees, pleading for his wife and child to be rescued. Jane came close to orgasm telling him it couldn’t be done.”

“You broached our idea with Smith yet?”

The other man shook his head. “I need exactly the right moment. Smith believes it’s his option to make and his operation to initiate, so that’s how I’ve got to make it seem.”

“Everything’s virtually in place,” assured Straughan, although cautiously. He knew better than to make promises that weren’t guaranteed.

“No more calls from Moscow?”

“Smith hasn’t mentioned any more and I’m sure he would if there’d been more. I don’t think he feels very secure. What about Jacobson?”

“Anxious to get the stuff I’m assembling. The passports for Radtsic and his wife are in the diplomatic pouch tonight.”

“That should reassure Radtsic.”

“Something’s got to, according to Jacobson. He thinks Radtsic is getting critical.”

“Tell Jacobson to give Radtsic whatever assurances the man needs. I don’t want the frightened old bastard collapsing on us,” ordered Monsford. “What about Paris?”

“All in hand.”

“I want something else,” announced the Director.

“What?”

“My own recording system, here in this office. Getting Radtsic safely here is going to be the coup of our lives. I don’t want any foul-ups through faulty memories, which came close with the Lvov business.”

The only memory at fault with the Lvov business is yours, thought Straughan: and if there’d been a proper record you wouldn’t be overflowing the chair you’re sitting in. Aloud he said: “I’ll organize it.”

“And I want personal, manual control. We mustn’t overlook the Official Secrets Act and necessary security clearances.”

“No,” agreed Straughan. “We shouldn’t overlook that.”

*   *   *

Charlie Muffin for the first time felt engulfed in paralyzing, impotent helplessness. He’d faced seemingly impossible, about-to-die crises before but always been able to escape, sometimes badly bruised, sometimes badly burned—often physically, too often metaphysically—always survived. Because every time it had only ever been
he
who’d had to survive, no one else to worry about or to consider. Now it wasn’t only he. It was Natalia—probably bewildered, doubtless confused, with only the vaguest indication of what had happened—and innocent, vulnerable Sasha, whom he’d always pledged to care for and protect.

He wouldn’t fail them, Charlie determined. He was enduring this animal-farm charade because the finance and facilities of the combined agencies were his best chance of rescuing Natalia and Sasha. None of which, from Jane Ambersom’s almost sadistic dismissal earlier that day, were going to be made available to him. So it had to be just he, alone. Better, far better. He’d never liked—never trusted—other people with him or acting on his behalf: not so much from doubts of their loyalty but from doing things differently, less effectively, than he could.

Doing it by himself wasn’t going to be easy, Charlie realistically acknowledged. Although he’d always insisted on working alone, there’d usually been an embassy upon which he could call for falsely named passports and air or road escape and cyberspace communications, if the ultimate shit hit the ever-spinning fan. And money: unlimited operational finance, safe openingly available whenever he needed it, which he always had, the more so since his marriage to Natalia. He’d date-staged the transfers from Jersey, so there’d still be some left there, once he’d got away from here. That wouldn’t be as easy as slipping his leash the first time. But this was different. This, quite literally, was life or death: Natalia and Sasha’s life or death. Nothing was going to prevent his keeping them alive: alive and eventually with him. At last.

*   *   *

James Straughan, who was an asexual bachelor, lived in Berkhamsted, almost sixty miles south of Charlie’s Buckinghamshire interrogation lodge, with an almost totally disoriented mother whose evening meal he had just finished feeding her when his telephone rang.

“We’ve got a match,” declared the duty officer at the Vauxhall headquarters of MI6.

“No doubt?” demanded Straughan, continuing with generalities because his was an insecure line, although the London call was being patched through a router.

“None. What do you want me to do?”

“Keep everything until I get there tomorrow.” If he told Gerald Monsford tonight, the awkward bastard would probably have him immediately return to London personally to courier the stuff to the man’s Cheyne Walk flat. Straughan considered cleaning, bathing, and getting his mother ready for bed a far more important duty.

*   *   *

Maxim Mikhailovich Radtsic patiently stood on the other side of the bed, watching Elana set aside her assortment of things, knowing from every neatly stacked item, predominantly photographs, that it was a selection she’d made and unmade several times before and hated her having to do it yet again.

“That’s everything,” she said triumphantly, looking up.

“No,” he refused, bluntly. Watched by Elana, it had taken Radtsic two hours of fruitless searching for listening devices but he still insisted on loud radio music to defeat any monitoring installation.

“I’ve kept everything to the absolute minimum!” she protested, her voice wavering. “That’s all our memories.”

“I haven’t been told yet how they’re going to get us out but it’ll almost certainly be by air. Luggage, even luggage going into the hold, is photographed. This amount—and these pictures—would be opened and trap us.”

“I can’t go with nothing!”

“You have to go with nothing. Everything is going to be new: our lives, our names, house, everything. All new. No history.” It was madness talking, even softly, like this!

“I can’t,” she pleaded. “That’ll be … that’ll be dying.”

“Staying here will be dying. Literally.” This was asking too much of her.

“I don’t care! I don’t want to go. Won’t go!”

“It wouldn’t just be us. It would be Andrei, too.”

“That’s not fair.”

“That’s reality.”

“Help me, Maxim! Please do something to help me!”

“I will. I promise I’ll do something.” What? he wondered, scrubbing the perspiration from his face with the back of his hand. Until this moment he’d never considered—had no conception—what field agents had to endure.

7

Straughan did compromise by leaving a note for his mother’s caregiver instead of waiting for the woman’s arrival, which he normally did. He set off on the seven
A.M.
train and was at Vauxhall Cross by eight thirty and had personally reconfirmed the identification, determined from previous experience of Monsford’s irrational impatience against any oversight reassuring himself that he topped the man’s morning appointment book.

As he wasn’t summoned until past eleven, Straughan knew Monsford had seen someone else before him and was doubly glad he hadn’t bothered with an instant alert the night before. Playing out the melodrama to test the Director’s reaction, Straughan unspeakingly placed the three enhanced infrared photographs on Monsford’s desk and stood back, waiting.

“Who is he?” asked Monsford, not looking up from the prints.

“Boris Kuibyshev,” identified Straughan. “Third secretary in the finance division of the Russian embassy here. These were taken last night outside Charlie Muffin’s flat.”

Monsford smiled up. “So my idea of leaking Charlie Muffin’s address worked!”

You self-serving fuckpig, Straughan thought. He said: “Yes.”

“Is he on the known list?”

Straughan shook his head. “We’ve had the flat under twenty-four-hour watch for the last two days, comparing every photograph against every print of the entire Russian legation and Russian trade and bank organizations. Kuibyshev wasn’t flagged until now.”

“So Smith’s people won’t have picked him up?”

“Not unless they’ve mounted the same watch and done the same face-by-face comparison,” said Straughan. “And my team haven’t seen anyone they recognize or suspect to be from across the river.” He hesitated, intent upon squeezing a recorded accolade from the Director, who’d very positively activated his newly installed audio system. “This gives you unarguable proof that we’re better qualified than MI5 to run things, doesn’t it?”

Monsford grimaced rather than smiled. “Precisely what I wanted to achieve!”

“And there’s something else: something that could be connected although there’s no peg to hang it on at the moment,” continued Straughan. “There was an overnight cable from David Halliday of rumors of something happening within the FSB.”

“I don’t trust Halliday,” declared Monsford. “He was close to Muffin in Moscow during the Lvov business but didn’t give us any indication to get us involved.”

“He told us Charlie didn’t confide in him,” reminded Straughan, defensively.

“He must have known something. What’s Halliday’s source?”

“Cocktail-party gossip from a German embassy reception.”

“Tell him to harden it up, beyond gossip. But tell Jacobson to stay away from Halliday. I don’t want him involved in anything to do with Radtsic.”

“And I’ll maintain the watch on the flat: see if we can pick up any more new faces.”

“Let’s have what Shakespeare called the observed of all observers,” quoted Monsford.

Straughan exaggerated his sigh. “Did Smith’s people sanitize the flat?”

Monsford’s face clouded at a question to which he didn’t have an answer. “Why?”

“If I were controlling the Russian surveillance, I’d tell them to break in if the place continues to appear empty. By continuing to doorstep it, they must believe he’s coming back.”

“Good point,” allowed Monsford. “I’ll try to get an indication. Smith needs all the help and advice he can get.”

“What do you think about Charlie Muffin?” persisted the operations director. “From the personnel and assignment files, do you think he’s clean?”