Red Star Falling: A Thriller (12 page)

The spur road was on a bend, which the driver would have known. He braked hard instead of gradually, throwing Charlie forward against his seat belt. The pain seared through Charlie’s still-healing shoulder but he managed to bite back the groan. Everyone else had expectantly braced themselves, he saw. Just beyond what would have been visible from the main road was a gatehouse-operated barrier that wasn’t lifted until the driver’s documentation was cleared from within the checkpoint.

Although narrower, the new road was properly metalled and maintained, built in Roman-style straightness as far as Charlie could see, but the offshoot lanes were less frequently obvious, with few warning tree breaks. Which meant Charlie was again totally unprepared when, after the briefest of braking, the BMW slewed to the right. The abrupt jar from hitting an uneven rough track again burst agonizingly through Charlie, the pain this time so bad he couldn’t stop crying out.

‘Slower,’ Guzov ordered the driver. To Charlie he said, ‘You all right?’

‘That was fucking stupid,’ complained Charlie. And intentional, he knew. The turning off the public highway into the barrier-controlled road was roughly two kilometres from the beginning of the tree line and the third break to the left in those trees. The distance of this turn-off from the Roman-straight road was far less, hardly a kilometre and the fourth on its left, counting from the barrier.

‘You’re right: it was stupid,’ agreed the Russian.

Charlie tensed his dressing-shielded shoulder to detect the first warm sensation of the wound reopening. All he could feel was the heartbeat-timed throb that replaced the initial excruciating pain.

Less than a kilometre, finally estimated Charlie, as the track ballooned into a clearing in the middle of which stood, as if on display, a picture-postcard image of a Russian dacha. It was wood-built, even to its steeped, snow-discarding shingle root, and completely encircled by an open, balustraded veranda, the entire construction lifted high off the ground on stilts, again to defeat the winter snows.

Once more unaided, Charlie got from the car, relieved the unsteadiness was lessening although his shoulder still throbbed. The driver and guard remained by the car as he followed Guzov. Inside the cottage, most of the furniture was rough, country-carved wood. Guzov took one chair, waving Charlie to another fronting it.

‘You can look around later,’ Guzov decreed. ‘What we’re going to do now is understand how we’re going to work.…’ He gave an almost uncaring gesture around the dacha. ‘Well?’

Go with the flow,
Charlie reminded himself; he still had to find his rewarding level of response. ‘I am surprised. Confused, in fact.’ Which was, Charlie accepted, the entire purpose of this bizarre exercise.

‘Did you expect a rat-nested Lubyanka cell, with water running down its walls?’

‘It crossed my mind.’

‘It still could be. Or a return to where you’ve just come from for a different type of specialized treatment…’ There was another wave around the room. ‘Or there’s this, where you and I can talk.…’ There was another pause, for the face-dividing smile. ‘And before we start discussing that, let’s really understand each other. I know you are going to lie: that’s what we professionals are trained to do in the event of a seizure. I’m going to take a lot of time sifting through all your deceit to get to the eventual truth. You’ll also try to escape. Which you can’t possibly do, so don’t try. You’ll have a rotating staff, male and female, to cook and clean.…’ The arm waving went beyond the cottage. ‘This is a special complex—’

‘In which live more specially trained men whose job it is to protect the even more special people who relax and holiday around here,’ anticipated Charlie.

The grimace came and went. ‘An elite
spetsnaz
company, a kind of imperial guard. Where we are now—where you’re going to be—is where they’re permanently barracked: those they protect aren’t actually all around but they’re not that far away.’

‘An imperial guard for the rulers of a country that destroyed its imperial royal family,’ remarked Charlie. He still wasn’t getting his attitude right, he criticized himself.

‘Imagine that!’ persisted Guzov. ‘You, a British intelligence agent, so close to the relaxation hideaways of Russia’s hierarchy! You might as well be on the moon, trying to hurt them with a catapult for all the harm you can do. This is the most closely guarded, impregnable few square kilometres in the entire Russian Federation: in the world, maybe.’

He was being positively invited—challenged—to try, Charlie accepted. ‘I’m surprised you feel able to take the chance.’

‘What risk, Charlie? The only harm you can ever cause again is to yourself. Those special men you talk about have orders not to physically to harm you. But trained as the
spetsnaz
are, they might welcome a change from the norm to go bear hunting—with you as the bear.’

‘I don’t think I’d like that,’ acknowledged Charlie. Better response, he decided.

‘The choice is yours to make. And inevitably regret if it’s the wrong one.’

Certainly not a challenge he felt like taking up at that moment. But he had to try something, he supposed. His jarred shoulder still ached, matched by that from his re-incarcerated feet. Neither of which distracted his thinking. Why was Guzov going through this performance? He didn’t need a lecture like this, a performance like this, to convince him of the inevitable humiliation of an escape attempt, disguised as a kulak.

Time to re-introduce a little reality, Charlie decided. ‘You surely don’t intend the consular encounter to be here?’

There was a shrug of disinterest. ‘You’ve been out of circulation for days: you’re a long way behind developments.’

Apprehension moved through Charlie. ‘What developments?’

‘We’ve got so many of your people in custody now, although none with such accommodation as this. We scarcely know what to do with them all.’

Your people,
picked out Charlie: but still no reference to Natalia, not even Guzov’s earlier remark about their knowing of “the woman.” Charlie said, ‘In custody for what?’

‘So many different offences,’ dismissed the Russian.

‘None of which affects my right to consular access that will be applied for.’

‘As it has for all the others. That’s the point I was making: the difficulty of finding time and space to fit everybody in. You’re on the list.’

‘I have the right of consular access,’ insisted Charlie.

There was the familiar grimace. ‘I’m the person who decides what rights you do or do not have, Charlie. No-one else. We’ll eat, meet the first of your housekeepers. And after that we’ll start work.’

*   *   *

‘I was looking for you.’

‘And you found me.’

‘I learned five English words today,’ boasted Sasha. ‘There were pictures to help me.’

‘What were they?’ invited Ethel.

‘Cow, dog, goat, horse…’ The recital faltered. ‘I’ve forgotten the last one.’

‘Four out of five is very good,’ praised Ethel.

‘I can almost say the name of my teacher, too.’

‘Mrs Elphick,’ came Natalia’s voice, from farther along the corridor. ‘She wants you back in class.…’ As she came into view, Natalia continued, ‘And she’s very pleased at how hard you’re working now.’

‘Can we have cake outside again today?’

‘As a reward for working hard,’ agreed Ethel.

‘I wouldn’t have believed the transformation if I hadn’t seen it for myself,’ said Natalia, watching her daughter go back along the corridor. Turning to the other woman, she said, ‘Is there anything from Moscow?’

Ethel shook her head. ‘Jane’s staying in London to be on the spot. But we’ve spoken. She wants me to talk to you about some other developments.’ Without waiting for a response, the protection supervisor started towards the lounge, where coffee was already set out.

As she handed Natalia her cup, Ethel said, ‘The leader of your extraction team has given a detailed account of a meeting with Charlie the night before you came out.’

Natalia put her coffee untouched on a side table, waiting.

‘There are things Charlie told him that you might be able to help us understand better: by themselves they’re incomplete.’

‘What things?’

‘Did Charlie tell you about abandoning the plane bringing him to Moscow?’

Natalia finally sipped her coffee, considering her answer. ‘It was really what I told him.’

Another chink of light through a gradually opening door? wondered Ethel, who wanted to justify Jane Ambersom’s decision to let her continue the gentle questioning of Natalia. ‘What was that?’

Natalia breathed in, preparing herself. ‘I don’t know anything of what happened with Stepan Lvov, just what I inferred from what followed. I knew Charlie was involved, of course: he appeared on Russian television.’ She sipped more coffee. ‘When Charlie and I got together, personally I mean, I cleansed the records to make it look as if Charlie’s debriefing was passed on up the line to others. But my link with Charlie, sanitized though it was, had to remain in the records. I was called in for interrogation the day Lvov was assassinated. I told the questioning officer the story that Charlie and I had rehearsed and from the initial reaction I believed it had been accepted. But I was called back the following day. The first interrogation had been one-to-one. This time there was a panel of three and the questioning was far more aggressive, although more general. I kept rigidly to my initial account, without the slightest deviation. I was, after all, on my own ground: knew all the interrogation ploys and traps. The more general stuff wasn’t a problem. The interrogation, which I considered hostile, continued the following day and when it ended I was warned I might be recalled.’

Natalia drained her cup and accepted a refill from the other woman. ‘Charlie and I were very careful about our relationship, particularly after we got married. One insistence, when he came back to England, hoping I would join him, was that I always called him from public telephones, never from my home line, which could be tapped. After the third interrogation and the warning of possibly more, I guessed I hadn’t cleansed the records as thoroughly as I’d imagined: that there was something that could trap me. I called Charlie from the public phones as he insisted. He never picked up but I left messages, pleading with him to help Sasha and me. That was always my fear, having Sasha taken away from me. But then it all changed.…’ Natalia straggled to a halt, breathing heavily.

‘What changed?’ prompted Ethel, cautiously, when Natalia didn’t continue.

‘I made a terrible mistake … it’s all my fault.…’

‘Natalia, I need to understand what you’re telling me.’

‘They didn’t suspect me, not after the first interview. Those that followed, the aggressive ones, were to satisfy them I was sufficiently loyal for the job I was being transferred to do. After I started I learned that everyone else had been tested as I had.’

‘What job were you being tested for?’ coaxed Ethel.

Natalia remained silent for several moments.

‘Natalia?’ pressed Ethel, keeping the impatience from her voice.

‘I said, when I got here, that I wouldn’t co-operate until you got Charlie back, but I’ve got to, haven’t I: tell you everything that might make that possible?’

‘Yes, you have,’ said Ethel, forceful for the first time.

‘The loss of Radtsic was cataclysmic within the FSB. They started the investigation within hours of getting the confirmation from airport CCTV of his boarding the plane. By the second day they began creating the committees. That’s where I was transferred, to one of the first-level groups tooth-combing Radtsic’s complete professional background from the day he joining the KGB. They’re convinced there’s been a long-term cell operating throughout Radtsic’s entire professional career.’

‘How many committees?’ asked Ethel, sure she was concealing her excitement.

‘I don’t know, not precisely. I gave Charlie an estimate of ten at my level, the lowest. Each group was separate from the others: that’s why I can only estimate the total. Each member of each committee worked on a batch of material at a time. If we believed we’d found something deserving further examination, we had to alert the rest of the group, in case others came across the same name or discrepancy. After being annotated, to avoid whatever it was being permanently misplaced, it was forwarded up to the next examination level, where the search is, apparently, being speeded up by computer analysis.’

Now it was Ethel who lapsed into a brief silence, mentally assembling what Natalia was telling her. ‘So your mistake was telephoning Charlie?’

‘The mistake was telephoning him in the panic that I did,’ elaborated Natalia. ‘I told him at the end of his Lvov investigation that I’d finally decided to leave Russia for good, bringing Sasha here. If I’d simply told him I was coming he wouldn’t have needed to come to get us. All that business of changing planes and joining a tourist party wrecked everything.’

‘What did Charlie say?’

‘That it wasn’t wrecked: that he’d get us out. Which he did, didn’t he, by sacrificing himself?’

‘Did he say anything about your extraction being endangered by anything other than his detection by the Russian authorities?’

‘Not specifically. He made several references to there being things, situations, that he didn’t understand. It was my impression that he felt threatened but that he didn’t want to make me more nervous than I already was.’

‘What about the extraction itself? How did he prepare you for that?’

Once more there was a moment of consideration. ‘He simply told me to take Sasha to the airport and go through the formalities with the tickets and passports he’d given me the previous day. There would be escorts who’d be with me throughout the flight, first to Helsinki and then on to here. I wouldn’t know them but they’d know Sasha and me.’

‘Where did Charlie say he’d be?’

‘The FSB knew he was in Moscow, so it was obvious there’d be an airport alert for him. The arrangement was to show himself to me outside the terminal, which he did. He told me that after that I wouldn’t see him again until we were all safely on the plane.…’ There was a gulped pause. ‘He also told me that if I became aware of any commotion I wasn’t to stop but keep going. But I wasn’t aware of anything. I expected him to get on the plane but he never did.’