Red Star Falling: A Thriller (7 page)

‘Does Rome have any significance to you?’ asked Timpson.

All the superciliousness had gone, Monsford recognized, satisfied: the sort of man Shakespeare called the resty sloth. Shaking his head once more, Monsford said, ‘No. But that’s why I’m pointing you towards Straughan’s file: if there’s anything, it should be there.’ And would be, Monsford knew, because he’d proposed using the FSB’s Rome double to leak Charlie Muffin’s otherwise totally secure London address as part of his original assassination distraction to cover Maxim Radtsic’s defection. Just as he also knew that in his log note Straughan, the consummate, rule-observing professional, would not have identified him as the source of the instruction.

‘If Straughan was the mole he’d hardly leave proof behind, would he?’

Monsford shrugged. ‘I’m offering all that I know in the hope of resolving this eroding uncertainty within my service. If it comes to nothing, if I’m wasting your time, then I’ll apologize. And as I do so, be glad that an officer I always regarded with the highest respect did not, after all, betray his country.’

‘We appreciate what you’ve told us,’ said Timpson, rising. ‘As of this moment it’s the focus of our investigation.’

Monsford was surprised at the call from his deputy, smiling in expectation of a grovelling apology, deciding as he lifted the receiver of their internal line that he’d pressurize her further by rejecting whatever she said.

‘There’s been another Moscow announcement,’ said Rebecca Street. ‘Denning and Beckindale, our two other officers with Briddle, were arrested during the shooting. The statement says they are co-operating fully.’

*   *   *

‘How was it last night?’ asked Barry Elliott.

‘Not as bad as I’d feared,’ said Jane. They were in bed again, finishing off the dinner wine.

‘What, exactly, did you do wrong?’

‘Lost my temper: openly challenged Monsford, which was stupid of me.’ She stretched, careless of the bedcovering falling away from her. ‘This apartment really is more convenient than mine: it took me less than ten minutes to get here tonight. And your kitchen is better equipped than mine.’

‘You going to stay over tonight?’ asked Elliott, pleased at the way the conversation was going.

‘The Watch Room would use my cell phone if there was no reply from my flat but it would mean my wearing tomorrow the same clothes as today.’

‘Why not move some of your stuff in?’

‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’ she asked, smiling sideways across the bed.

‘I think it’s a very good idea,’ encouraged Elliott. ‘Washington isn’t pleased with me, either, so I might need a shoulder to cry on.’

‘What’s their problem?’

‘Not knowing what the hell’s going on in Moscow, of course.’

There was a familiar pause. ‘We think Monsford set Charlie up for assassination.’

Elliott shifted directly to face the woman. ‘You’ve got to be joking!’

‘It started out as a considered diversion but we think that Monsford didn’t call it off.’

He had to risk it, Elliott decided. ‘Diversion from what?’

‘MI6 had a walk-in.’

‘Into the embassy?’

‘At a government reception.’

‘He still in Moscow?’

‘Here.’

‘How big?’

‘The biggest.’

‘We talking professional?’

‘Personal: very personal. If it leaks, it can only have come from you.’

Fuck,
thought Elliott. ‘What are we proving here?’

‘Each other. This is my commitment.’

5

Charlie expected the withdrawal of the catheter to be roughly performed, intentionally to hurt, but it wasn’t. It was extracted slowly, by a caressingly soft-handed, substantially busted blond nurse who frequently stopped to ask, smiling, if she was causing him discomfort. Each time Charlie assured her she wasn’t, glad that the procedure was finished and the bedcovering restored before the assembled, expectantly smiling medical team witnessed his lie. There was no pain, either, when she was helped by others to extract the cannula from the back of his hand and disassemble the metal stands supporting the two drips. While he’d lain there Charlie was sure he’d isolated the listening attachment at the mouthpiece corner of the permanently available oxygen supply: he’d always manoeuvred himself in its direction when breaking wind.

‘We’re going to look at the wound, put on a lighter dressing,’ announced the bearded, heavily moustached surgeon, coming out of the medical group. None had ever been identified.

‘Everything still feels numb,’ said Charlie. It was a pointless persistence, he accepted, but every gesture of resistance, no matter how minimal, was psychologically important. He guessed Mikhail Guzov was trying the same technique by ignoring him for an entire day to generate apprehension for what was to come.

‘So you keep telling me,’ said the physician. There was dutiful laughter among those assembled behind him.

Charlie stood unsteadily, momentarily dizzy from being upright on his usually uncomfortable feet for the first time in almost three days as well as from having only one free arm for natural balance. The team and the outside guards trailed behind when they emerged onto the corridor, giving Charlie an unobstructed view on his wheelchair journey, which he at once acknowledged to be another unsettling psychological trick. There were no obvious side corridors to general wards. Every door, its padded rubber exterior heavily studded by regimented, large-headed fixings, was closed. There were no sounds from inside any room he passed. Nor did they encounter another person in any of the half-lighted passages. The intention, Charlie knew, was for him to feel totally abandoned, which he did.

Charlie was stripped of his back-buttoned smock but retained the overly long trousers, which puddled around his ankles, making it difficult even to stumble the few steps to the examination table. He needed help to get onto it. This time the two assistants were men and far less careful, the purpose of which Charlie again recognized, staying rigid faced against the pain he was insisting he was still too numbed to feel. He tried to twist his head to his injured shoulder as the dressing was cut away but an unseen theatre nurse cupped his head and others turned him onto his uninjured side, giving the surgeon front and back access to his wounded shoulder. Charlie had to close his eyes against the blinding overhead light.

‘Although you tell me there’s no feeling we’ll still have a little local anaesthetic, shall we?’ mocked the surgeon.

Charlie counted three injections. Genuine numbness was very quick.

‘This could heal with too much external scar tissue, which we don’t need, do we?’ continued the voice, from behind. ‘Just a cosmetic snip, here and there.’

Charlie felt the pressure of an instrument, but no pain, then a different pressure, as if his shoulder was being prodded. A whispered conversation began, during which Charlie strained. He was sure he heard
heal
at least three times. Then what sounded like
flat
or maybe
flag
.
Week
was very clear. So was
infection.
The new dressing was far less mummifying, the bindings brought around his chest only to keep the bandages in place. There was far more consideration getting him off the table. Once more, briefly upright, he needed support to regain the wheelchair.

‘It’s a perfect operation: with that little tidying there’ll hardly be any scarring,’ promised the surgeon.

‘Was it really worth the effort?’ asked Charlie. They’d expect the beginning of depression at his growing realization of helplessness.

The ever-ready smile clicked on. ‘I take professional pride in everything I do. Whatever the circumstances.’

A smaller entourage took Charlie back to his room, only his ward guards and the two male nurses who’d manhandled him onto the examination table. They took another, seemingly longer route, although again through deserted, semi-lit corridors past silent, padded doors.

Mikhail Alexandrovich Guzov was already there.

*   *   *

‘The doctor tells me you’re making a remarkable recovery: that we can start today,’ greeted the immaculate Russian, dismissing the room guards with a jerk of his head. The trouser of Guzov’s crossed leg was arranged for the razor-sharp crease to run unbroken from knee to burnished boot.

The extended return had enabled a discussion with the surgeon, Charlie guessed, as his medical escorts helped him, more gently now, from the wheelchair to the bed, in which, in his absence, a back support had been fitted to put him into a virtually upright sitting position. Testing his assumption, Charlie said, ‘I’ve just undergone surgery.’

‘Surgical vanity,’ said the FSB general, confirming Charlie’s guess. ‘There’s no reason for further delay.’

‘What’s there to talk about?’

Guzov smiled, broadly. ‘I’m not in any hurry, Charlie. I want what’s going to happen between you and me to last as long as possible. My only impatience is for it to start.’

‘You told me,’ sighed Charlie, dismissively. His shoulder began to ache as the anaesthetic wore off.

‘There’s been the usual diplomatic request for consular access,’ declared Guzov.

Don’t hint eagerness,
Charlie warned himself. ‘It’s nice to know somebody cares.’

‘I don’t imagine it’s philanthropic concern, after all the problems you’ve caused.’

‘I don’t understand that.’ When would the access be, for his chance to discover what had happened to Natalia and Sasha? Charlie agonized. Guzov would enjoy—would exacerbate—the torment if he knew its significance. Or
did
he know? Was this it, the beginning of the threatened torture?
Stop!
Charlie told himself, angrily: Guzov would be winning if he inculcated eroding uncertainty.

‘They’re not going to make any real effort to help you,’ goaded Guzov. ‘Not you or Denning or Beckindale. You know Denning and Beckindale, don’t you, Charlie?’

He was achieving nothing from perpetual denial, Charlie recognized again. He had to convince Guzov and through him as many others as possible that they were achieving control and then mislead and misdirect them for as long as he could. The FSB would know from their embassy surveillance the precise arrival of all three MI6 men, just as they knew, from the same observation, that he hadn’t been anywhere near the embassy during that period. So there was no provable link between him and the two back-up MI6 survivors. ‘The names don’t mean anything to me. Do they know me?’

‘They’ve told us all there is to tell.’

A fatuous boast,
discarded Charlie. ‘That should minimize the time we need to be together, until I’m repatriated.’

‘You imagine we’re going to accept that you’re not guilty of serious offences under Russian law?’

Charlie didn’t imagine it for a moment but snatched at the indication of London’s diplomatic response to his seizure. What else was there to deduce? All the identification was of MI6 personnel. Had Ian Flood—as well as his original MI5 support—escaped? If they had, it logically followed that Natalia and Sasha had escaped as well. Too big an assumption but Charlie was encouraged. He thought … The interrupting awareness came in a rush, expanding into a physical stomach lurch at the realization of how close he’d come to missing the Russian’s weakness. ‘Finding an offence to justify all the nonsense is going to be a problem.’

Guzov failed to stop the briefest facial twitch. ‘How long are you going to persist in this stupid insistence of innocence?’

‘Until you accept it to be the truth and put me into the care of the British embassy,’ recited Charlie.

‘We have statements from Denning and Beckindale in which both identify you as a senior MI5 field operative.’

Charlie at once saw the route—a positive shortcut, in fact—to follow, although there was the one specific discovery he didn’t want to make at its end. ‘What else have these two total strangers claimed to know about me?’

On this occasion the anger was visible on Guzov’s mood-mirroring face. ‘We have all we need. As well as sufficient, court-supporting evidence for a charge of active involvement in acts of espionage against the Russian Federation.’

The Russian was bluffing, Charlie decided, surprised at the clumsiness: bluffing very badly and, even worse, inexpertly. That would have been the moment to hit him with Natalia and Sasha: to gloat that they had also been seized and watch, hopefully, for him to crumble. It was conceivable, even, that the Russians didn’t have Denning or Beckindale, either. Their association with the dead Briddle could easily have been established through their arrival documentation, providing Guzov the names with which to attempt the deception. And even if the two were detained, there was nothing in Guzov’s bluster to indicate confessional statements. Feeling a sudden sweep of tiredness, unsurprising after the minor surgery and the concentration necessary for this encounter, Charlie settled himself more comfortably against his bed support and said, ‘It all sounds fascinating.’

‘You’re playing it as I’d hoped you would, Charlie. Imagining you’re better than me: that you can beat me.’

‘Something else I don’t understand,’ dismissed Charlie.

‘How about something you will understand?’ said the Russian, the smile broadening. ‘We know about the woman.’

*   *   *

They convened at Thames House as they had the preceding day and again Aubrey Smith gave the opening to his deputy. Overnight, Jane Ambersom had organized a transcript of her conversation with Natalia, prefacing the verbatim account with what she considered the salient factors.

‘Charlie knew about Radtsic’s defection—and of Elena and Andrei’s seizure in France—before Natalia told him?’ queried the Director-General, coming up from the papers.

‘I think there should be a qualification here,’ warned Jane. ‘In the full transcript she’s adamant it was Maxim Radtsic whom Charlie knew about. I’m inclined to think he knew there was
something
else going on, but not that it was Radtsic’s extraction as such.’