Kings of Many Castles cm-13

by Brian Freemantle

  “One of whom has to be an FSB plant,” declared Olga.

  “Obviously,” agreed Zenin. “I want every member of the hospital staff on that list investigated, until we find out who it is.”

  “I’ll personally organize it,” Olga promised. She hesitated, unsure whether to make the suggestion, remembering Zenin’s annoyance at what he considered his being overlooked. Their relationship allowed her to do it, she decided. “Don’t you think we should pass this on to the presidential commission?”

  “It’s negative, at the moment,” said Zenin. There was no irritation in his voice.

  “There’ll be a lot of FSB people altogether in one place at the same time, people who could be questioned to shorten the time it’ll take us to find the FSB operative at the hospital; if, indeed, we ever do find who it is.”

  “That’s a constructive point,” agreed Zenin. “We’ll pass it on, ahead of my seeing Natalia Fedova at our next group assessment.” He tapped the third folder on the table, the finally arrived and complete military medical record on George Bendall, listed however as Georgi Gugin. “There’s nothing constructive about this. Liver enlargement, through excessive drinking. A stomach ulcer, probably from the same cause …”

  “ … But no psychiatric evaluation,” broke in Olga.

  Zenin wearily shook his head. “He might have been selected as a sharpshooter but he was still only an ordinary soldier, like one of the twenty million sacrificed during the Great Patriotic War. Which is what men like George Bendall are. Sacrifices, to be offered up whenever the need arises. There’s no concern about their mental health; the less they can think-rationalize-the better.”

  “That’s exactly what George Bendall is, isn’t it!” seized Olga. “A sacrifice, selected when a need arose.”

  “He’s all we’ve probably got,” said Zenin. “My fear is that we’renot going to be able to get beyond him, to discover the rest, to understand the true story.”

  Olga was surprised at the unexpected depression. “We’re making progress.”

  “No we’re not, Olga Ivanova!” refused the man. “We’re being directed further and further into a maze. And I don’t know how to avoid our going deeper into it or how to get out, from where we are now.”

  Reluctantly-for the first time making herself face the total reality of it-Olga acknowledged that Zenin was right. “We can’t let it happen. Fail, I mean.”

  “What’s the way to stop it happening?”

  Olga didn’t have an answer.

  The Botanic Gardens on Moscow’s Glavnyy Botanicheskiy Sad, with their enormous, tunnel-shaped glassed exhibition halls, had been the secret tryst for Charlie and Natalia after he’d been sure enough of her love-which he wasn’t any longer-to admit his supposed defection to the then Soviet Union was phoney but that because of that love he was refusing to trigger his KGB-wrecking return to London until he’d guaranteed her safety from suspicion or recrimination.

  There was a twitch of recognition when he was ushered into the presence of the psychiatrist who’d analyzed the tapes and the transcripts of the George Bendall encounters. A slipper-shuffling housekeeper-or maybe even the man’s elderly and totally disinterested wife-led Charlie through an echoing mausoleum of a Hampstead house directly into a carbuncle of a glass greenhouse, abandoning him at its tropically-heated entrance. From there he found his own, sweaty way through giant fronded plants and ferns and sharp quilled, brilliantly technicolored cacti to locate, along the third path he followed, the shoulder-stooped, cardiganed professor. Arnold Nolan was in conversation with himself, narrow-spouted watering can in one hand, snipping secateurs in the other, his canopy of white hair more tangled than the foliage he was tending. His patchwork-patterned slippers matched those of the elderly woman and Charlieenvied their obvious trodden-into-comfort shapelessness.

  The man showed no surprise at Charlie’s arrival beside him, just slightly raising his voice above the earlier self-conversation. He said, “Plants have an intelligence, you know. They feel discomfort, injury.”

  “So I’ve been told,” said Charlie. Perspiration was rivering his face and forming into tributaries down his back.

  “Restful things, plants.”

  “I’ve come about the Moscow tapes.”

  “I know. See that plant there? Dionaea Muscipula. Have to feed it flies and insects. Isn’t it pretty?”

  “Do you mind if I wait outside? I find it very hot in here.”

  The man turned for the first time, fixing Charlie with pale blue eyes. “Hot? You think so?”

  “Very much so.” Nolan wasn’t sweating at all, Charlie saw. The man’s cardigan was thick, all the buttons secured.

  “If you need to. Shan’t be long.”

  Charlie returned gratefully to the outside corridor, feeling the sweat dry upon him, wondering if he’d make his second meeting with Geoffrey Robertson. When he’d telephoned the pathologist the man had said he could only give him ten minutes and insisted Charlie be on time, an hour from now.

  Charlie heard the shuffled scuff of Nolan’s approach before he saw the man. He was talking to himself when he finally appeared. Or maybe, Charlie thought, he was talking to the plants. He’d read that people did.

  “Come on,” said Nolan, as he past, and Charlie obediently followed. Over his shoulder Nolan said, “Like to meet your man. Interesting.”

  “I appreciate the difficulty of what I’m asking, your not being able to do that.”

  “Awkward but not a problem,” said the psychiatrist. “Some things are fairly obvious, others not.”

  Although he’d never actually seen one Charlie decided Nolan’s office looked like the inside of a bear’s cave after a winter’s hibernation. It was a completely shelved cavern of books which overflowed on to the floor and on to overstuffed leather chairs and acouch, interspersed with apparently discarded papers and magazines and occasionally skeletal newspapers from which articles had been clipped. The debris was so great that there were clearly delineated paths through it, the most obvious to the overwhelmed, leathertopped desk, with side alleys to the bookshelves.

  “There’s a chair …” said Nolan, waving to his right with a distracted arm, as if he’d forgotten where one might be. When the man snapped his desk light on Charlie saw his tapes and their transcripts were neatly-surprisingly-stacked next to a pocket-sized replay machine.

  “I’m only able to give you-to suggest-a general picture,” began Nolan, abruptly professional. “There are clear indications of a schizophrenia, which is too often used as a catch-all when people like myself can’t think of a more positive diagnosis. We’re not going to go all Hollywood and suggest there are strange voices telling Bendall what to do. I suspect, though, that he’s obsessional. He’d be very susceptible to being told what to do, particularly if he loved or felt particularly close to the person giving the instructions …”

  “What about more than one person? A group?” interrupted Charlie.

  Nolan pursed his lips. “Possible but there would still need to be one person in that group upon whom he would need to focus. But certainly a group could be important to him. Your notes were helpful. He’s classically dysfunctional, alienated from a splintered home. That’s why the army might have been attractive to him: somewhere in which he might have felt embraced, a family he did know or have. But I think it would have been too big, too amorphous. But a group, a brotherhood, wouldn’t have been. And let’s get a correction in here, because it’s important. All the interviews so far have been wrongly directed, the Americans most of all. Bendall needs to be encouraged-praised, admired, loved if you like, not ridiculed which has been the tone of everything I’ve listened to so far, with yours as a possible, partial exception. From what you’ve said in your notes, there’s certainly more than one person-a conspiracy-involved here but Bendall did what he did to become admired by his friends, in the same mentally disturbed way that loners have attacked-killed-famous people, to become famous themselves …”

  “Did he
-does he-know what he was doing?” broke in Charlie again.

  “Very much so. That’s part of it, a very important part. That’s your way forward, when you talk to him again?”

  “How can I get him to tell me who the others are?”

  Nolan gestured uncertainly. “From your interview, more than any of the others, I got the impression that he wants to tell someone: after all his life being discarded and down trodden he’s suddenly someone, the object of everyone’s attention. He wasn’t just being used physically, to fire a rifle. He was being used-manipulated-mentally. Those short, staccato replies to you are indicative. He believed he was playing with you: testing you out. Let him go on thinking that. Let him think he’s superior, in charge.”

  “There’s something that wasn’t in my notes, that I’ve only just discovered,” said Charlie. “Somehow-I don’t know how-Bendall was administered with an unauthorized drug, thiopentone. It could have been during the American interview when he broke down. Could that have any long term effects, combined with the other drugs with which he’s being treated: affect, in fact, how he might be in any future sessions?”

  Nolan humped his shoulders. “You know what the prescribed drugs are?”

  Charlie felt a burn of embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”

  “Now he’s well out of surgery I guess it’ll just be some type of sedative,” suggested the psychiatrist. “Thiopentone shouldn’t react against any of the barbiturates.”

  “So it wouldn’t have caused that outburst, during the American session?”

  The psychiatrist shook his head. “That was far more likely to have been caused by the way he was being talked to. He was being ridiculed, which was how he’s been treated all his life. He simply closed himself down.”

  “Why did he break all the models he made, which his mother told me he did?”

  “Models of things that moved, could have taken him away from an existence he hated, had they been real,” Noland judged. “That was his physical way of showing that hatred of his surrounding-smakinghis imagined escape and then smashing it-before he began showing the actual violence towards others.”

  “Can I send you other tapes?”

  “I’d like you to. I’ve never worked like this before: as I said, it’s interesting. And remember something else I told you. Let him think he’s superior: cleverer. You going to find that difficult?”

  “Not at all,” said Charlie. “I’ve been doing that all my life.”

  The pathologist was wearing a clean laboratory coat but it was again at least two sizes too small. Geoffrey Robertson gave the same answer as the psychiatrist when asked about thiopentone but promised to get a definitive assessment from a pharmacologist if Charlie sent back from Moscow George Bendall’s complete medication list.

  “Can’t understand the point of it being done,” said the man.

  “That is the point of it being done,” said Charlie. “For people not to be able to understand why. And it’s working brilliantly.”

  With the need-minimally productive though it turned out-for a second meeting with the pathologist Charlie had put back for an hour his appointment with the ballistics expert at the Woolwich Arsenal. But he was still late and knew at once from the man’s demeanor that Archibald Snelling had fantasized for the further delayed thirty minutes about the toothbrushed lavatory cleaning sentence he would have imposed in a much mourned earlier army career. From the man’s disapproving, top to toe and sideways examination, Charlie guessed his appearance would probably have got him denied the toothbrush and that he would have had to scour with his bare hands, if not his own toothbrush. Snelling had to be almost two meters tall and although there was a slight stomach sag in the parade ground rigidity his voice retained the come-to-attention bark. Into the man’s office, which actually did overlook a parade ground, came the occasional and distant sound of a weapon being discharged. The only chair available was straight-backed and wooden-seated and Charlie turned and sat with one arm crooked over its rear rail, just for the hell of it. Snelling was sitting to attention, shoulders squared, ramrod straight.

  “You got something more to tell me!” demanded Snelling, at once.

  “I’d hoped you’d have something to tell me,” retorted Charlie. The aggressiveness was an abrupt contrast with the attempted helpfulness of the other specialists that day but then, remembered Charlie, he had shown the man-or his colleagues-to be lacking. Charlie was more irritated than offended; he certainly wasn’t intimidated.

  “I don’t understand,” complained the man.

  “I don’t, either,” said Charlie. “It might help if you explained in more detail what the problem is.”

  “You don’t have another Dragunov? Photographs?”

  Charlie’s feet twitched, in aching unison. Slowly he said, “Why would you expect me to have another Dragunov?”

  Color began to prick out on the man’s already red face. “You’re still only considering two rifles: the one recovered from the arrested man and the unknown, different caliber Medved?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go into the workshop.”

  It was a march more than a walk along a connecting corridor and Charlie’s feet hurt with the effort of keeping up. It was a long room, with what was obviously a firing range leading off to the right, some with unmarked targets, others with bullet-recoverable butts for analyses and comparison. Deeper into the room were benches equipped with vices and calibrating machinery and enhancing cameras. Snelling led past it all to the far end, where there were the sort of backlighted viewing screens against which X-rays are normally examined. Upon the entire bank were clipped what Charlie realized, when he got closer, to be the hugely enlarged photographs of the bullets recovered from the Moscow victims. Closer still he saw each was identified against the victim’s name. Separated by a gap was what were marked to be pictures of bullets test fired from Bendall’s gun by the American ballistics team.

  “We’re not interested in the 9mm bullets, from the Medved,” dismissed Snelling, a blackboard pointer now in his hand. “This …” he tapped the third print “is the bullet recovered, according to your notes, from American Secret Serviceman Jennings. This …” the pointer went farther to the right “is from the Russian security man, Ivanov. And these …” Snelling moved over the division, to the American prints “are pictures described to me asbeing three separate test firings, from the SVD recovered from the gunman, George Bendall …?”

  “Yes?” said Charlie.

  “The SVD bullet from Ivanov is a better comparison than that from Jennings, although there’s still just enough,” said the ballistics expert. “Look at them. There’s no marking. But look at the American test firings. See it!” The pointer tapped impatiently. “There’s a groove line, on every one. You know was rifling is?”

  Charlie did but he said, “No.”

  Snelling sighed. “The barrels of rifles-particularly snipers’ rifles-are bored like the thread of a screw. It increases accuracy and velocity. There’s a fault, a snag, in the rifling of the SVD you say was used by George Bendall. Any bullet fired from it would be scored, like these three pictures of the American test firings show them to be identifiably marked.”

  “But the bullets that hit Jennings and Ivanov are not?”

  “There’s substantial impact damage,” qualified Snelling. “But they don’t appear to be from the photographs with which I’ve been provided.”

  “So they weren’t fired by George Bendall?”

  “I’ll go as far as saying that in my professional opinion it’s highly unlikely.”

  Anne Abbott was again waiting in the bar when Charlie got back, late, to the Dorchester. “What would you say if I told you the bullets that killed Ben Jennings and cost Feliks Ivanov his leg weren’t fired by George Bendall?” demanded Charlie.

  “I’d say holy shit and then I’d ask you to convince me.”

  In Moscow the American embassy incident room quieted at John Kayley’s entry. Kayley said, “The presid
ent has accepted the resignation of Paul Smith as Bureau Director.”

  “Will it be enough?” queried someone in the room.

  “As far as I know there isn’t anything else.”

  17

  Sir Rupert Dean said, “Are you telling us George Bendall didn’t shoot anybody!”

  It was the first interruption since Charlie had started to speak fifteen minutes earlier in the riverview conference room at Millbank and he was enjoying the unqualified attention. Even Jocelyn Hamilton hadn’t found anything to attack. Charlie said: “In the opinion of one ballistics expert, with fifteen years of specific forensic experience matching bullets with guns, it is highly unlikely from the photographs he’s seen that the two bullets thought to have come from Bendall’s rifle were in fact fired from it. He’s now submitted what he examined to two other specialists, for their independent assessment. He also wants to examine the physical evidence: all the recovered bullets and Bendall’s rifle. Until he’s able to do that, he says he can’t be categorical.”

  “Will the Russians release them?” demanded Hamilton, at last.

  “I won’t know that until I get back,” said Charlie. “At the moment they’re in the incident room at the American embassy. It could be that their ballistics people have come to the same opinion and carried out the tests our man wants to conduct. Reached a definitive conclusion, in fact.”

  “You had this overnight, known about it for fifteen hours!” protested Hamilton. “What’s wrong with the telephone!”

  “All sorts of things if the call’s made to the wrong place and number,” said Charlie, savoring being able to puncture the man’s attempts so easily. “I spoke to Morrison at our embassy, on a secure line, first thing this morning. Got him to check what’s been made generally available by the Americans on the incident room computers, which are supposed to hold all the evidence we have. It’s convenient our two embassies are so close. It didn’t take him long tocome back to me, again on our own secure line. There was nothing about this, as of an hour ago. So if the American have picked it up, they’re not sharing it.”